YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Carney

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2018-03-01

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2018-03-01

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1. “But he's managed to with relatively few tools in his toolbox to exert a tremendous amount of influence over Europe and especially what they call the near abroad, those countries closer to Russia in the east, and obviously to have an impact here in the United States and elsewhere.”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Assumption you come from that place with the Russians where you feel like the rest of the world's out to get you and the West is conspiring to surround you. I think they were wrong about the West's motivation and wrong about the United States, but you can see how that must have felt, which is not to justify any movie made. What I am surprised about with Putin is how successful he's been because he's not playing with a great hand. He never has. The population's been declining. Their economy's not diversified. Highly dependent on natural resources, the prices of which have not always been kind to him and have been particularly low for the last five or six years.”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I think it seemed like obviously the right thing to do. I think now in the modern Europe you look at what's happening in Hungary and other places and you wonder whether we move too quickly and that that also for those reasons but also that it if you have that”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Know it's hard to second yes. I think clearly the way we handled it didn't work, right? It didn't work in the now could we, the West, the United States, have taken a different approach that would have been more helpful. I mean, the reality is we weren't in the 90s, we didn't have the financial capacity to launch a Marshall Plan all throughout the former Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc. And in some ways, you could argue that we overestist it and that there was an expansion.”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I'm not surprised because he so successfully built his career and his consolidation of power in Russia around the resentment and anger that Russians felt about falling from the stature that the Soviet Union had as a great superpower to this sort of neglected and underappreciated country. And they had been through a lot and a lot of it not very good through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economy. You think we mishandle.”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Well, my wife, Claire, because she also had a very similar career path, studied Russian at the right time, ended up over there for CNN. So she and I still speak not very impressive Russian, but we do when we don't want our kids to know what we're saying, which annoys them immensely. And we just say, well, go study Russian, but they're not going to do it.”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Former KGB colonel was going where the winds were sending him and where the power centers were. And at that time there was strength in the pro-democracy movements and the pro-Western movements and he was there.”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “No, I didn't personally, but what was strange about the Putin story is that he was an advisor to the first ever Democratically elected mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Subchak, who was a academic. And he and the mayor of Moscow at the time, Gabriel Papov, were sort of the leading lights of, or among the leading lights, together with Yelton and others of this sort of pro-democracy movement. And so I'm pretty sure he was in a room once when I was with Subchak, like just in the background, and I might have been introduced to him. But later, a few years later, when he emerged as a potential or likely successor to Yeltsin, I made the mistake of at least presuming that because he had been allied with Anatoly Subchak, that he was pro-West, pro-democracy. Of course, it didn't take him long to disabuse me or others of that. And what he was obviously all about having been a”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And they don't do it for the money. Once I had kids, You know, really rethought whether I would ever do that once I had kids. And, you know, there was at a certain, maybe that's why publications hire young people to go to war zones, take more risks. There was some times in Lithuania there was a time. My most scary situation was in Nagorno-Karabakh, that disputed region between Azerbaijan and Armenia when there was a full-on assault on the capital, Stepani Kera, when I was there and bullets flying and things. And it was unbelievably terrifying. And you think about the reporters who do that all the time in just terrible situations just so they can bring us the story. That's a huge gift that we have in democracies where journalism matters.”

   2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “But there was the moment, there were a few people killed in this terrible event, not far from both the Russian White House and the U.S. Embassy, where Some innocent bystanders were killed. I think there were three or four people in the end who were killed in Moscow during that coup, and it was totally unnecessary and unfortunate. Didn't need to happen because in the end, it was not the coup plotters because of their ineptitude and their unwillingness, fortunately, to go all the way with this. There wasn't bloodshed and there wasn't violence. But you always, we thought it was coming. We assumed they were going to storm the White House. We assumed the worst. And so it was scary. I should just say a word.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Sadly, it was on the other side of the building when he physically stood on the tank. The same of the Russian White House. My now wife, who was working for CNN, saw it happen. And we didn't know each other then, oddly. We had met, but we didn't really know each other, and she saw it. But I saw Yeltsin at different times during those days. And it was, you know, he was a hero, ironically, given what came of him. But there was no guarantee that this thing was going to end in a positive way. In fact, you would have to expect the worst.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “And I talked to some soldiers who had no idea why they were there. These are all 18 year old conscripts, and they thought they were on a training exercise. But instead, it was, you know, it's the...”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “And within, I remember getting everybody settled in the bureau and talking to the bureau chief who was on vacation, I think, in Vienna or something, and he was going to try to come back, which he ended up being able to do that night. And I drove downtown. And I remember when I was driving in, which was all further out from the center when I came into the bureau, there were tanks and APCs on this main boulevard. And I was scared and excited. And then driving in, I went all the way down to Red Square. And by the time I got to Red Square, there weren't soldiers or tanks there yet. And I remember going out onto the Red Square and there were tourists, mostly Russian tourists, you know, or Soviet tourists, and none of them had any idea what was happening. And I remember trying to do the man on the street interview and telling them, and they're like, what? What are you talking about? No, that's crazy. And then suddenly troops started piling in to the big squares, Maniez Square next to Red Square and the Red Square. And, you know, and they took the telephone and telegraph building. It felt sort of like the 1920s.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And so I took all back then we were just a weekly. There was no online. There was no, so and it was a Monday kind of perfect timing for the Time magazine. So we had on the normal deadlines we had five days. So I took all the petty cash out of our bureau cash box and gave it to him so he could try to get his daughter out of the country, which he successfully did because the coup plotters were so lame they didn't close the airports, thank God.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “August 19th, I think that was the day, right? 18th or 19th, that Monday. And to a phone call from a Russian friend who was kind of a prankster, and he said, you know, Gorbachev has been arrested, there's a state of emergency committee. And I was like, go to hell. Hung up the phone. I thought he was joking. And it was because Gorbachev had gone on vacation, which meant my bureau chief, that was the number two in the bureau, had gone on vacation too. And so I was running the place. And he called right back and said, I'm not kidding. And it was that incredibly terrifying and exciting moment which I holy, you know, holy cow, this is it. This is like this incredible story. And I remember hopping in my crummy jigly, which is a Soviet station wagon and driving from my apartment down to the bureau where the Russian staff was going crazy, like freaking out. They didn't know what it meant for them. We had one Russian whose daughter was supposed to go for an exchange program in a week or 10 days to the U.S.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “It all was, I mean, to Gorbachev's everlasting credit, he didn't use violence to try to keep the Soviet Union together. And there's a lot of resentment now among the old guard and the new old guard in Russia about that. And when there was violence in the Baltics, in Latvia and Lithuania, it was clearly not with his authorization or certainly in keeping with his plan. So they overthrew him. I mean, they tried to take him out in the most ridiculously bungled coup of all time.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “In any place it is, but there, especially as the every day when we were there, when I was there during that period was especially leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, new things that had never happened before were happening and everybody was testing the limit. So journalists like, can we go there without getting hauled in and arrested with foreign ministry? Can we interview this person without him or her getting arrested? Can we, like, what's next? And is this a demonstration where the crackdown happens or is this going to be the beginning of a flowering of democracy? Everything seemed possible. And there was a lot of...”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Yeah, I got there. I spent summer of'89, I spent filling in for somebody then I moved there in the spring of 90. So I turned 25 and 90, I guess. And yeah, and so I was 24, 25. And only there, you know, with still very short professional career in journalism, but Time magazine, like a lot of Western news organizations was trying to beef up its presence there. And they would throw people who were of dubious having a limited experience journalistically, but had Russian. There was sort of the old guard of Moscow correspondents who were there because it was a place you went. Interesting story, but you tended to just work with translators. And there were young folks who were only there because they happened to speak Russian. That's really advent.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Exactly. Exactly. So one of the rare times both then, certainly during the Soviet era, when somebody getting great information from like, I forget who it was, somebody in the department there at the Soviet embassy who was giving us the real story. One colleague of mine and I. And then there was a brief period. And when I was years later based in Moscow, when there was some of that transparency, and then, of course, not anymore. Sad footnote to that is, of course, after Gorbachev left the island, all of those people were arrested, and some of them were in jail for a decade or more who had come out, hopeful that Castro would adopt that reform mantle, and instead he got worse, got worse for them.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “That one night might have been the first night, all of these human rights activists and others who were loved Gorbachev and wanted change in Cuba were allowed to have this press conference on top of a rooftop. And I remember we all, like a number of journalists, we went and there were sort of, you know, you could see thugs like circling the building secret police and stuff. And we went up and they had this very cathartic press conference and talking about the changes they wanted to see happen. And during that trip too, I remember going to the Soviet embassy because that was the best place to get information. Because what in fact was happening is Gorbachev was cutting Cuba off. He said, we can't afford you anymore. We've been propping you up for years. We're broke, by the way. And, you know, I'm done. We're done. Good luck.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Went to Cuba. Got yeah, you know a lot. So that was an amazing, that was at the height of sort of Gorby Mania. He was the biggest thing in the world. He made a trip to Cuba. And when Castro was obviously still in power and Fidel, that is. And what was fascinating about it was that Cuban activists, human rights activists, pro-democracy activists were super excited because they thought Gorbachev was going to bring to Cuba what he was trying to make happen in what was then the Soviet Union reform and glossnose and Pyrrhstroika. And I remember this was one of the few times that the Castro regime let American reporters in and we all came in and”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “So, yeah, and I was in Miami. So I started off the Miami Herald, but I was the whole time I was there as great as that experience was. I was desperate to get to Moscow because of everything that was changing and trying to sell my Russian and time hired me. After I'd only been at the Herald for a little over a year, but they needed somebody in the near term in Miami. So the Miami Bureau chief back when they had those things when I was 23 or 24. When we invaded Panama, the Department of Defense was taking a plane of journalists leaving from Miami. So I got on that plane and ended up in Panama spending Christmas for that little adventure. I remember we were in the hotel that was right next to a holiday inn that was overlooking the Vatican embassy, which is where Noyga was hiding out and they were blasting all that music. And it was a strange, strange way to spend Christmas.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Exactly. Well, that's what I tell people. They want to be an aspiring journalist, and they're like, I want to get to Washington. It's like, go somewhere else. Go somewhere that nobody wants to go because it's a terrible place, a shithole, or something like that, so to speak, and go find a great story because there'll be a lot less competition than there is in DC to tell that story.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Right. And they were wondering if this sort of reform talk was real. It was before it was early days. But Walter had told me, go get newspaper experience. And I was like, okay, so I went and went to the Miami Herald after college.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “And we were talking, and he said, Oh, you should come right for me. And just for that reason, I ended up writing as little short little pieces in the weekly magazine for Walter. And he was my first professional editor, real editor, and really helped me a lot. That summer I got to do something with my Russian, do like an SA piece for Time magazine about this peace cruise down the Mississippi River, which was fascinating. And, you know, because that was the summer of 86. And people were wondering, was Gorbachev?”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “I went to Miami because I had had an internship at Time magazine between my junior and senior year. I was won this internship program. And this is all serendipity, right? That summer I went and the first day was an intern lunch and I sat down at this table at the Time Life building, what was then the Time Life building near Rockefeller Center and 20 years old, I guess. And I sat down to this guy who I thought might have been a fellow intern but turned out to be the editor of the nation section, Walter Isaacson.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “New York Times. And it was just fun to write these stories and cobble together a magazine. And then I thought, okay, so I don't really have any skills and I don't really want to go to law school. What do I do? Journalism seems good. And then the Russian stuff and then what was happening in Moscow and it all seemed obvious, but nobody wanted to send me right out of college”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “People with Rayla soul searching and blowing of deadlines. You know, the daily news is a lot of work. People who did that, I mean, a lot of them went on to law school and stuff. I mean, it was kind of a hard charging thing. And a lot of the folks who went to the new journal went into journalism. In fact, the year behind me was James Bennett. And he was the editor of the new journal the year after.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “And there's some great today actually I ran into Robin Pogerman, who was a classmate and was at the Daily News. And she's the New York Times and writing about art. So she was writing about the portraits of the Obamas. I was sort of thought of myself as a longer form writer, more, you know, I was a writer. And also it's just seems a little bit.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yeah. And then I remember the spring of'85, being on spring break, the first time I'd ever been west of the Appalachian Mountains, really. A friend of mine from college who had grown up in the Bay Area in California, we went out to his home outside of Berkeley where his dad was a professor. And I remember looking at a bus stop, looking at the newspaper box, and it said, you know, Gorbachev selected as next leader of the next Soviet leader. And I thought, I remember thinking that's interesting. And by the time I graduated a couple years later, he was, of course, this phenomenon and things were changing. And I really wanted to go. To the Soviet Union, what was then the Soviet Union as a reporter? And I was doing some journalism in college. I got this fixation.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “College, I went and spent bus tables in New York and took an intensive first year class at Columbia. So I could take a year of college Russian and like eight weeks. And so I could come back in the beginning of my sophomore year take the intensive second and third year in one academic year, which meant that I was the worst student in that little class. But because I don't really know why. I decided I was interested and wanted to become a Russian studies major, which I ended up being. And if you go back to that time, when I started studying Russian, I think either Andropov or Chenyenko was the head of the Communist Party and the leader of the country.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “At Yale, but I but I worked hard and I learned how to love learning and I fell into serendipitously studying Russian, which I'm older, you know, and take this was back in the, I think I got to New Haven the fall of'83. I had a friend who was studying Russian. I had a friend from growing up here who was studying it at another university. And then I kind of loved Russian literature and thought of myself, you know, once I read crime and punishment, I was like, yes, Dostoevsky. So it was more literary, but also an interest in sort of like the Cold War and the enemy. And I was sort of intrigued and I started studying Russian actually the summer after my freshman year.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Well, you did okay, Axe. That was a great experience. And for me, it was because it was the first place I wanted to, not first place, but I really wanted to be there and I loved every minute of it. And, you know, I wasn't the world's greatest student there.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “We're getting personal, but I also kind of knew in the back of my mind even then that I was kind of Making my way haphazardly through young adulthood or teenagehood and was kind of screwing up a bit and that if I hadn't gone away, I wouldn't have gotten the education that I got and I wouldn't have, you know, a lot of the things that flow in the way life unfolds wouldn't have happened. So even then I probably knew it was a good thing, but I didn't tell my dad that, of course.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “I did. My parents split up, and my sister was a year older, and I got shipped out, which turned out to be a good thing because I was.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “He did a lot. He went into business consulting in a weird business, but he did stuff for schools. He did stuff for, he tells told me stories about helping out Columbia when they were having protests over the Vietnam War and talking to the protesters and talking to the administration. And then he ended up doing a lot of, over the years, doing a lot of USAID work in Africa and other places. He's retired now, but he's sometimes now when I get to go to those places or when I was traveling with the president, he would always tell me stories about what it was like back when he was doing it.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Carneys are Virginians from way back from that area, that tidewater area. And he's got, he's still out there. I've got two aunts. His sister is still live in Virginia. We've got some families still down in Norfolk, but just distant and some in North Carolina on that side of the family. My mother grew up in Manhattan as a New Yorker, so it was a real Yankee meet southerner kind of thing.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Well, we're in Washington, DC as we record this, and I was actually born in D.C., not very common, because my father was a foreign service officer and he happened to have been stationed after a stint in Germany, in Bremen, Germany. He came to D.C. And I was born here. Not that many years afterwards. That was in 65. He quit the State Department, retired from the Foreign Service, and ended up saying in the area. He's from Southern Virginia, from Norfolk, Virginia, so he's stayed in northern Virginia.”

    2018-03-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 221 - Jay Carney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source