YouSaid · the spoken record

Lawrence O'Donnell

lines on the record

79

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2018-02-19

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2018-02-19

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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

1. “And so I just assume, you know, my father's going to challenge her. The prosecutor's and the other lawyers defending the cops are very, very happy that her husband's a police officer. So I'm waiting for the challenge. The challenge doesn't happen. You're in the courtroom? I'm in the courtroom. I'm in the front row in the spectator section. My brother Michael is his co-counsel up at the table. And I know Michael's expecting the challenge too. And he doesn't challenge.”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “You know, street smart approach to it and a cop like approach to it. And it was always being these kinds of things were always being handled by people who didn't understand cops. And so... You know, he was the guy to do it. I can do a really fast story about this because it's so counterintuitive. He was in jury selection for this case, which of course was an all-white jury. It's in Boston. It's an all-white jury. And so you're trying to figure out where the racism is in the jury pool and the presumption is it's 80% racist minimum in Boston. So this is going to be difficult. But one woman tells the judge that her husband is a cop and he's a revere police officer. Revere is the next town from Boston, smaller town beside Boston.”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Dults said that in front of kids. I'd heard older guys on the street saying it, but I actually didn't know that adults use that. I thought it was just something that wise guys and wise guy kids that I knew used. And I was just stunned by it. And at the same moment, I realized, ah, that word's never been said in my house. Is it being said in all the other houses and the parents can not only hear it, they say it? I mean, that's how I think isolated our little bubble was, you know, in our house on that. And that was created by my parents without me even knowing they did. But yeah, I was very proud of him for doing it. And I knew he was the guy to do it. I knew that one of the reasons these kinds of cases could never be successful in the past, and he was successful with it, is that you needed a kind of”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I was hugely admiring of it right away. And I was all for it. He'd always been very aware of the poison of the racism that we were surrounded by and always did everything he could to lean against it. And I remember being in a friend's kitchen when I was a little kid and his father was a Boston cop. And I heard him very casually use the N-word over there on the other side of the room just describing to his wife an arrest he made the night before, just very casually describing to his wife. And it was as if I had heard him say the F word or the most extreme profanity. Like, I didn't know that a”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Time Ted Kennedy, he could not travel in most areas of Boston at the time. And if he did, his car would get stoned. Because he supported the integration of the schools. They were throwing eggs at his car everywhere he went. So when people kind of look back at the Teddy Kennedy Senate career and pretend that it was some kind of love fest with the Massachusetts voter and the Boston voter, they're missing decades of incredible stress that he went through because of the positions he held.”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Yeah, look, Boston was a completely racist place at the time. Just, you know, it was as racist as Alabama. And the language that I grew up hearing was exactly the same language that you would have heard in segregated Alabama. And Boston was flawlessly segregated in the 1960s when I was a kid. I mean, residentially it was flawlessly segregated. There wasn't a single crack in those walls. The educational system was flawlessly segregated. The public schools were completely segregated and they ultimately ended up getting a federal court desegregation order which then really exposed the feelings of Boston because you saw black kids being bust into my kind of neighborhood and their buses were getting stoned and eggs thrown at their car. And oh, by the way, you know, the incumbent senior senator at the”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Approval of cops, and there was also a generational thing. The guys involved in this were the younger cops. They were younger and kind of wilder cops, the older cops of my father's generation, many of whom were still on the force when he was doing this, all thought that those younger guys were crazy. And they all were glad to see somebody coming in and pushing them around and straightening.”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “He was admired by these people who he was now whose institution he was now taking on. There's another dimension of this, especially among the urban Irish, which is there are many things they can hate you for, there are many things they can admire you for, but there's almost nothing they admire you for more than going after their boss than saying, you know, than really taking it to the boss because they all think they're smarter than their boss. They all think their boss is doing a bad job. And so the truth of it is the Boston police commissioner was through, for most cops during most of those times a figure of ridicule to them anyway in their locker rooms. And so when you're kind of taking on that structure, it's not, you don't get the unanimous decision.”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I'm glad you asked that question because these neighborhoods in these cultures are always multidimensional and more complex than they look from the outside. And so it looks like a police neighborhood where, you know, there's a lot of cops who lived in my neighborhood. And of course, they're all going to resent that Larry O'Donnell, my father, is doing this. But before he does this, he has spent many years defending Boston cops in legal trouble for all sorts of stuff. There was a time when he defended in a criminal investigation an entire police department in Massachusetts, a small department that was being investigated for corruption. And so he, up to this point, had always been somebody that that world admired. And he was actually one of that world's success stories. That guy I used to work with him. I used to be on a beat with him and look at him now. He's a lawyer.”

   2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And beaten by police officers. The fact that he took this case on some of the police, some of the cops who were involved in the killing were trying to scare him off the case. And so they kind of came after me one night and beat me up a little bit and arrested me for disorderly conduct thinking that would scare them off. And of course it only made him go after them much harder. No, you see.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “The police file all the police reports. And it's about 45 pages of police reports. And I just sat at a table and turned the pages of these police reports sequentially. And it was the most dramatic possible story you could ever read in this dry and in many ways fraudulent language of these police reports. And it was all sitting there in front of me. And I thought, yeah, I'll write a book about this, which was nutty because I didn't know how to write and I was afraid of writing and I was afraid of taking courses in college that required writing papers and all that. But I did sit down and do it and seven years later there was a book and suddenly I was a writer and then there's been a series of accidents since then.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “A black man in Roxbury in the black neighborhood of Boston, where my father is from, he's from that neighborhood back when it was an Irish neighborhood. And here he was pioneering a civil rights lawsuit against his old police department, the Boston Police Department, for killing this man and for covering up the killing of this man the way they did it. And he said, you know, you should come in the office and take a look at this. You should write a book about it. Now, this is a very odd thing because there's nothing about me that is a writer. It's such an odd suggestion. It had that kind of rhetorical sound of someone should write a book about it, you know, which I understand. And I had nothing to do. And I went in the office the next day and my brother Michael, who was working there as his partner, handed me.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Me, you know, you really should take a look at this case I have in the office now. It was a civil rights case. It was the first time he ever had a civil rights case. And it was the story of two Boston police officers who shot and killed.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “You know, I find I must say I find it very risky and I flirted with utter bankruptcy many times. And so I don't recommend it. I recommend dental school. You know, I really don't recommend gamble. I'm sure you would have been much happier if you'd done that. But I did become a substitute teacher in the Boston Public School system, which was a fantastic experience. And that was my income. And I moved around through all the different schools, elementary, high school, middle school, everything. And then I got assigned to one of the better. So it's a great phrase. I was a permanent substitute at Latin Academy, which is the, I guess you could call it, the second best high school public high school in Boston, one of the oldest ones. And that was a really great few years of doing that. In the meantime, my father comes along one night and says,”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Yeah, I had no idea what I was going to do. This is why I am utterly useless at career advice because first of all, I didn't go to graduate school. So right away, you don't know what, you know, you're not planning your career very well, right? And so everything that's happened in my so-called career is a complete accident, including growing out of the first thing I did. But what I did to kind of...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Try to make them understand that I had not left their universe, but they were as right about that perception as I had wished they were wrong because it really is another universe.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “The first question, the question was basically what are you going to do on high school graduation? Because it included maybe go in the army, maybe get a job with the phone company, maybe go to college. And so once you said something about college, then they'd say, where are you going to go to college? And for the first time in the history of our neighborhood, the answer was Havid. And I felt like I was on another planet. And I could see it. I could see it in that second. I could see this thing happen in your eye where Dick Daly no longer, who's a good friend of mine, my elementary school classmate of mine, could no longer look at me the same way because in his mind I had somehow left. There really is their understanding of the universe. And I knew I was going to have to make an effort to...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “It is what's most the part you really feel is that it completely changes everyone around you in your neighborhood. I was completely and instantaneously accepted by all my friends and roommates at Harvard, some of whom went to very fancy private schools and boarding schools. Most of my friends at Harvard went to public schools. Two-thirds of the kids at Harvard are from public schools and are on financial aid. So most of the kids there are people who I identified with. But in the neighborhood. But in the neighborhood, it changed everything. It was so strange. It was as if I had like I'd become an astronaut. It was the strangest thing that I could possibly say. For the kids I knew, the question was not, where are you going to college?”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “It wasn't something I was terribly conscious of. It's something when I look back on it. I understand it better. I'll tell you, it is one of those things that, and you can't say this about a lot of Hollywood movies, but it is very accurately captured in Goodwill hunting. And that is my neighborhood. That's the story of a kid from my neighborhood going to Harvard College. And it is...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “I did my homework. I had a trouble in high school. I was a wise guy in high school and I got kicked out of a couple of high schools. But I ended up finally for the last two and a half years at a high school where I promised my father I would really get serious. And I did get serious. And so that's it. I mean, I basically did my homework and I did okay on the SATs and stuff.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “From where you were, it's the other end of the subway line for us, and it was nothing but the punchline of a joke. A friend of mine, Tom Broderick used to say, my father works at Harvard station, which was absolutely true. His father made change for tokens at Harvard Station in Cambridge. And my mother's from Cambridge, but it's North Cambridge. It's way beyond the Harvard campus. And so I'd never actually seen the Harvard campus until I went there as a freshman. We used to take the subway into, it's going to be Boston.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “They'll name the parish that they're from. I could not have told you what the congressional district was or I could not have told you anything about it, what ward it was. I didn't know that parish. I'm from St. Brennan's. Where are you from? I'm from St. Agatha's.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “That part of our politics began evolving into where it is now. And it's kind of the heart and soul of where these so-called culture wars take place.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Number of people who were just very strongly on the side of Daly's response to what went on in Chicago and another section of the community that was much more sympathetic to the protesters, that sort of thing. And that's 1968 is when that”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Well, there's a very similar feel here in what we're then just virtually completely Irish Catholic working class neighborhoods. All the fathers had jobs and they were in the police department and the fire department. My father started off as a cop. And then he went to law school, college, and law school nights because he hadn't gone to college and ended up as a lawyer. But that was very unusual in that neighborhood. There were no doctors. There were no executives of any kind. It was that kind of place. And it was a place where, you know, guys like Mayor Daly in the 1960s would have been very comfortable, would have identified immediately everybody there would have loved him and actually had a very good feeling for him up until watching the 1968 convention. And then that's the kind of neighborhood that just split. You know, there was a certain”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yeah, me too. And the most dramatic. And really, you know, coming off drama writing for seven years at the West Wing for NBC, when I was thinking about a book, I began simply by looking for the most dramatic story that I would know how to tell. So there may be more dramatic stories in American politics, but in terms of my own experience, I have experienced and witnessed nothing more dramatic than what we watched in the 1968, including all my years of working in Washington in the real thing. It was never as dramatic as what I saw.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Which, by the way, was totally legal then. Yes. People talk about all the good old days. The good old days before campaign finance, when literally it was bags of cash. Yeah.”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Probably don't remember. And were you watching that convention unfold on TV the way I was? I was a kid in high school sitting on the floor of our living room watching all these events. And so when I was writing it as a so-called history, a lot of it is eyewitness stuff. I remember Mayor Daly yelling at Abekoff. I remember it with my own memory. Now you should know that the...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “It's very intimidating for me to be here. Oh, yeah. Because I've written a book where if you were doing the movie of it, the location you would use the most is Chicago. Yes. Okay. So I'm desperately afraid that someone's going to tell me, you got the street wrong where Dick Gregory was arrested or something like that. And so if I can survive 24 hours in Chicago without being corrected too many times. Well, the good news for you is...”

    2018-02-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 218 - Lawrence O'Donnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source