YouSaid · the spoken record

John Dickerson

lines on the record: 85
first: 2016-08-01
most recent: 2016-08-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, great storytellers, yeah. And there were stories to tell. I mean, it's, I don't know, well, I mean, I'm sure there are those stories now, but they feel a little more locked up, or maybe I was just in the right place at the right time. But there were all kinds of people who came through the house as a kid we were put at the front door and we used to open the door and greet guests in my parents' parties. So I met probably, I mean, I've met all kinds of people that I don't really remember meeting because I was so young. So that was a, so it's emotionally to have became closer to my mother than she died. And that was 20 years ago.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, my parents had a very social life, which is part of what I resisted. But so I was, I met all kinds of interesting people. Some of the favorites were ones that there was a guy named Charlie Bartlett, who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who was also in Jack Kennedy's wedding, who was just this, I don't know. He just was such a earthy and rich and interesting character. And Jack Valendi, I knew, aide to Lyndon Johnson as a kid, also was a kind of character with a lot going on. And these were just my parents' friends. So their names in the history books, but they were also just friends as well. And then lots of people.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As they often are. And once I shed that and started to have encounters with the real world and the occasional complexities of life, and it wasn't also black and white the way it is when you're 14, we started to become friends. And then through, you know, when you've got to write a lead to a story, when she would say, well, here's the way Edward R. Murrow used to say, write a lead. So your first line should be, Jesus Christ, listen to this, then write your second line. So that's pretty cool when you can have that kind of a conversation. Did you, by the way?”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's just from, we'll start with the personal emotional part of it. So I had this really rocky relationship with my mother, which was quite bad for a very long time.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Ted Coop, and the reason I had such a blockage is because in the show, they have remotes. And one of them is this guy, Jeff Kadu, who is in Missouri. And he calls to him in the remote location. This is big stuff in television, like he's on the moon. So he says, come in, Jeff Kadoo, come in, Jeep Kadoo. And so that first show for me is all associated with come in Jeep Kadoo.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That didn't go very well. That didn't go very well. But I remember her, at least not having me dismissed from the room. But yeah, so then covering campaigns and then the Bush White House and now this exciting new adventure for the last year at Face the Nation.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, of course, nobody wanted to talk about history. They wanted to talk about what was going on at the moment. And I remember asking in my most earnest kind of, I remember saying, you know, you said that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. So on the question of Monica Winsky, why not just be fully transparent about everything that's going on about what the relationship was, because there were still a lot of questions. Anyway, how bad?”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I didn't really get a sense of the Clintons. I did go to one small briefing with Hillary Clinton during the Mona Klinsky early days of the revelations about Monica Lewinsky. And Hillary Clinton had a group of reporters in to talk about it. A historian they were bringing to the White House, and Richard Hofsteder, who's a fantastic.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know Very well because I didn't have that much interaction the way time worked, you were siloed. So going into the White House Except to have meetings with Gene Sperling or Laura Tyson, the chairman of the, or she was counsel, she was the chairman.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. But so you had, then you had impeachment. You had the collapse of the Republican leadership. So it was a great time to be covering Congress.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Well, so we have the other great thing about covering just the Congress during the Gingrich years is that there was always something going on. You grab a member, you ask him, what's going on? And you talk to them. And that's the best beat in Washington. And then you had...”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Congress is running Exactly, and especially in the Republican Party, too, where they think that Ryan and McConnell sold them out, which is why they were getting such tepid responses from the audience”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And his vision included Donald Trump not as a whole human being, but merely as a hand that would be there to sign legislation that Paul Ryan brought him. And Trump returned the favor, mentioning Congress not once. This is supposed to be a unity event, and he doesn't mention working with the Republicans in Congress, which would just be a rhetorical cliche normally. I mean, you have to almost work in politics to not talk about at a convention, how you're going to work with all the Republicans everywhere. I mean, it's just what you're supposed to do. He didn't mention them once.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when your majority leader of the Senate who delivered the Senate to the Republicans gets booed when he comes on stage, when the previous vice presidential nominee is now the Speaker of the House mentions that he was the vice presidential nominee in 2012, and almost no one claps, yeah. Well, that was interesting.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer need the good graces of the majority leader. In fact, It's not too bad to be in a fight with the majority leader, and that to me feels like, because Gingerich was saying, we're going to have a revolution and then we're going to do a bunch of stuff. Ted Cruz is not saying, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. It's mostly let me stop. Now, of course, he's got a president against whom he was pushing. Right.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that's right. I mean, what Gingrich was able to do was take backbench complaint and turn it into a political movement. He wasn't just a bomb thrower. He actually made it something that could transform. So I think that's essentially right. And then you have the rise of, I guess the other thing I'm thinking about in terms of what's made it difficult is you have the rise of Ted Cruz, the rise of somebody who can come in and not have to worry about seniority, can create their own base of support outside of the power structure in the Senate, and basically do as they please until the Republican Convention where he may have gone one step too far. But I think that's another contributing factor, which is you can now no longer need a committee chairmanship the way you used to. You no longer need to have actually produced legislation.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny because Nud ul ultimately gets run out by what he created. I mean, he called the conservatives who were running him out cannibals. Which is really not that different from what John Boehner said when he said that the false prophets of the right had created this sense in the grassroots that they were capitulating all the time on their core principles and therefore he should be thrown out”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then by the time Dole is ascended Majority leader of the Senate wanting to run for president in 1996 worried about Phil Graham running from within the Senate as a more conservative Republican. And then by the time Dole is on his rise, Gingrich has become such a problem that Clinton is running ads with the two of them in the same frame.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and had to reassert his primacy in the constitutional system. Remember when he said, you know, the president is still relevant So, right, and then you have the deal on welfare that's taking place. Meanwhile, while you have Gingrich's ascendant, you have Bob Dole trying to run, Dole being arguably the kind of Republican Gingrich is running against.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was great because so much was going on. I mean, we think about it covering Congress now. There's just not much happening. This was both, there was pushing legislation with 100 days. This was about transformation. This is Gingrich at his most rhetorically expansive, but also stuff was happening. He just won this big election, so you had to take him seriously.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And then they sent me down actually to Washington in 95 to cover economics, which I had covered Wall Street for time in New York just because I was the youngest person they would put me on anything that was happening and the market was jumping up and down. So one day one week I'd cover the baseball strike. The next week the World Trade Center bombing, the first one. And then I did a lot of Wall Street stuff. So they thought, okay, well, we'll send you to cover economics. The class that I got the lowest grade in in college was economics. But I had to cover that for two years, which meant basically the hill and covering the budget, you know, ways and means in the budget committee. And then also the Clinton White House, which is where I got to know Gene Sperling, which is when, so that was a great but brutal period.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brought him down exactly. And so that's how I snuck my way into the magazine was basically I was the only one who could do all this stuff and included we had a, there was a terrorist who was a who had been a source for the book, who came to New York. It was also being investigated by the New York District Attorney, so I got to hang out with them. So I was hanging out with a lot of great and interesting people, terrorist cops, people in the DA's office in that early period. And that was how I got to get into time. Great preparation.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so just to fill in the gap in between, because it was such a great period of my life, is that there was a bank called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which was a Pakistani bank, which was a part of drug running, funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which you could argue was funding the beginning of al-Qaeda. There was weapons dealing, and the two investigative reporters at time wrote about it and then went to write a book, and I became their researcher. So I got the keys to the file cabinet, which was a great, and then time needed somebody to cover the story, and nobody could understand the story because it was so complicated and included Clark Clifford, the counselor to presidents.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Secretary Gates talks about that with respect to President Obama. He wasn't sure a guy who had not come from an executive background was going to be able to make decisions. And in talking to him several different times about the president's decision making, he said he was surprised and affirmed that he has no problem making decisions. We obviously know the alternative case where you had presidents who kept holding rolling conversations about decisions and they never got made because they were always seeking for that next piece of information that would finally make the decision easier. None of the decisions are easy.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Washington correspondent. Exactly, wrote the presidency for Life magazine. Get enough information. You'll always be taking information, but at the end, you just have to leap. Encapsulating in that notion of decision making what President Obama talks about when he says one decision may have a 60% chance of going wrong and the other will have a 50% chance of going wrong and you have to pick between the two it's always a it's never a dead certainty with a president”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this was the 92 race. I went in 91, but it was in preparation for the 92 race. And through a quirk, I got involved in a little video they used to give away with subscriptions to Time magazine. It was on the election of'92. And as a part of that, there was an interview series with Hugh Side.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I didn't know whether I wanted to go to law school or be an English professor, but I needed a job. So my girlfriend now, wife, was moving to New York, and I thought, well, I need a job. And so I became a secretary at Time Inc. just because there was an election and I thought I might be able to do something having to do with the election. Once I saw the way they wrote stories at time, which was a little bit more literary than in other kinds of news, I just kind of fell in love with it.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm not sure what the end game was for me. I had no conception of how it would end, really. And the other horse I was riding at the time was a love of English literature. So that was part of what I liked about politics too, was the narrative arc of things, you know, the rise and fall of complicated men in most of our history. And so then I went swerved way off into English and spent all my time studying English literature and really invested a lot of energy in that. And then suddenly I was graduated and had to get a job.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, because I think It's a good question. So, I like the idea of legislation and the romance of when things used to get done in Washington, of presidents proposing something and then Congress fighting back. And I must have gotten that from my mom and just growing up and hearing her tell stories and learning about also reading the Federalist papers was and just the foundational ideas of the country for me was. Something I just love”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I went to college. I went to the University of Virginia. I wanted to study government, politics. I loved it. And then I had a student.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is my hope for you There's only one host really, and that's Bob Schieffer. So, you know, it'll come to me, but we'll be in the middle of another conversation. I will blurt it out.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was complicated. That first show is a great antique of television, by the way, just the kind of low quality, and yet it's basically the same show, just questioning politicians.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did. And he calls it the Senate inquiry into him a lynch bee, which is an expression we don't use anymore. But basically he had a thread of relationship with his fellow senators and that just cut it. I mean, that was it when he said it was a lynching.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something on Face the Nation. Yes, she was, I guess they called it associate in production in the kind of antique title on the very first program. And she helped book Senator Joe McCarthy. She was from Wisconsin and had, so she, you know, like Bobby Kennedy, who had worked for McCarthy, she had complicated feelings about Joe McCarthy. Obviously, it was not, at that point, McCarthy was a mess on the show he actually went and insulted his fellow senators in a way that, you know, you thought he'd already insulted them enough. He took it to a new level. But anyway, she got the booking. So because of this relationship she had with him because she was from Wisconsin.”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She must have, although, as you say, and she resist, you know, I strongly resisted it and her for a period of time. I mean, when my parents divorced, I moved out and lived with my dad, basically from age 13, and that was it. Then I went to college and that was the end of it. So if you had told me at age 13 or 14 that I would end up being a journalist, I would have laughed in your face. I would have gone on at length about how that was. There was no way that was going to happen. If you told me I was then going to work on the show that she had started on at”
2016-08-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 71 - John Dickerson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source