YouSaid · the spoken record

Roberta Jacobson

lines on the record
78
first
2018-09-27
most recent
2018-09-27
sittings or episodes
1
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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. “This was just as Fujimori was sort of collapsing, his administration, when the videos that his spy master had made were beginning to be revealed, revealing bribes and corruption up and down the Peruvian political elite, roiling the waters, resulting ultimately in Montesinos, the spy master fleeing to Venezuela briefly, and ultimately Fujimore fleeing to Japan, to his home country, knowing that Japan did not extradite its nationals and he had dual citizenship.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “With my husband who was telecommuting from EPA and 11 month old, a three-year-old and two months later the Foreign Service Grievance Board said you have to leave.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I was a civil service at state because my husband's work was domestic and I chose to be a civil service. But I was asked to be the DCM in Peru by one of my bosses who became the ambassador, and my response was, yes, as I have so many other times when people have asked me to do something. And the department in its personnel system said we can do this. This is within the scope of our collective bargaining agreement with the American Foreign Service Association. AFSA or the American Foreign Service Association did not see it the same way. And the argument they made, which I understood, was, look, we wouldn't care if you were going to be an ambassador. Lots of non-foreign service people become ambassadors, but DCM, Deputy Chief of Mission, is often the highest position we can aspire to, and it should not be available to civil servants. And so I arrived in Peru because the Director General and others at the State Department said, you're approved.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The first time we had that, most of them not with a parent, right? And so this was an interesting hybrid because it was both NSC and folks from the Homeland Security part of the White House. And we at one point were meeting every other day, which gave you very little time to complete assignments between classes. But it was because it was so hard and it was important that we really thrash out and there were some real thrashings some of the ideas that had come up. And the ideas that ended up carrying the day were better for it.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And that's what the process is designed to elicit. I went through that in the summer of twenty fourteen with the unaccompanied children crisis, by which time I was assistant secretary and we had the”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And I think that's a hardy perennial nature of that too. There's a healthy tension between the agencies and the NSC. But I think when you step over that line where White House or NSC staff are issuing instructions to ambassadors or going outside the Secretary of State in the chain or the Secretary of Defense for that matter, then you're running a real danger, not because those may not be good people or qualified people at times, but it was not set up to do that. It's a small staff, even though it's grown in over the years. And the checks on crazy are designed to go through the deliberative process that the agencies have with the NSC to be thoroughly vetted for the, oh, what about this angle? And I think that's what gets lost when that small body becomes operational. Checks on crazy.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The officer at the NSC who was although there were jokes about it, there was an edge to those jokes in the sense that everybody that I worked with was cognizant, that that had put the NSC way over its mandate into regardless of whether or not you thought in Olli North's words or the president's word that it was a neat idea, which I did not and many didn't. The NSC is not supposed to be an operational body. It's a deliberative body, it's a coordinating body. This is something that still bothers me both about that time and the lessons we learned, but also subsequently when it's kind of creeped back into that operational role that I don't think it was meant to have.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Especially Well, there weren't, I didn't sense as many. It was fairly obviously junior G-Man at the time. But I do remember that where we were operating, the few of us that were doing some intelligence analysis for the situation room, we were physically operating in the office that Oli North had had, and people would show you to your office and say, look, this is where all the documents were shredded. And I think...”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Time because you were No, I went back to state. That was part of a rotation of a program that I came into state under, which is now called the Presidential Management Fellowship out of grad school. And so I did rotations at the NSC, in part because Dick Clark, Richard Clark, who has served many presidents, was my boss at state and had done something like this and felt that I should. I did a stint in the policy bureau. I was in intelligence and research. I was an analyst. did a stint in the policy bureau in Latin America and a stint overseas at the embassy in Argentina where I had studied previously.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Right, there's contributions to their own defense budget of the 2% or the OAS, the Organization of American States, which we helped create where we pay two-thirds that maybe that's not the way it should be. But that's a debate that's worth having. Not a complaint or a justification for leaving or upending the system.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Other countries to pay their full share of the dues to the UN or to look at the formulas to NATO or the OAS and repay $66 to NATO.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Most heavily on the United States. Exactly. And we have to remember that having an all-volunteer army since Vietnam, it falls disproportionately on those who have less in the United States. But I also think that when you're talking about burden sharing and responsibility of other countries to step up and be part of those institutions, I think that's a fair point. I think we've been arguing on that point at the UN for a long time through democratic and Republican administrations. The difference now, I think, is that edge that says, A, we're being taken advantage of because that has an air of being aggrieved in ways that I don't think we are. I think we're stronger than that. But second of all, there are ways to ask demand, exhort your”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “World War II, the United States has played a major role in organizing the international order. Which has served not incidentally for our benefit? There are many who would criticize that international order because they think it worked to our benefit, but the fact is that it has been good for us, for peace and stability and prosperity in the world and for the United States.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You know, I think the whole idea that patriotism or sovereignty of nation states and engagement in the world or global conceptions are antithetical is just absurd. I think you can take almost any employee or ambassador who's working at the United Nations and they will tell you they are proud citizens of whatever country they're from. And that doesn't diminish their commitment to seeing us even as we organize politically as nation states try and make the world as a whole a better place, a role that the United States has played for decades, if not centuries.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Said, you know, so let the UN leave. We'll be waving from the dock. So when we think that currently we may be in this sort of anti-UN or anti-international organization period, you know, we've had others. And to be an American working in the secretariat when that was the policy was fairly hostile towards the UN was an interesting experience and very useful in some way.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I went to the United Nations in between college and grad school, which is where I went my husband working in the secretariat, and then went back to grad school up in Boston.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “But for me, I was at college from, and I'll convey my age here, from 78 to 82. And when I looked around the world at where things were happening, and I spoke a little bit of Spanish, so I thought that, you know, I would continue with that. But Latin American countries were just emerging from military authoritarianism as... Laboratories for political science and democracy Peru first in nineteen eighty then others after, it seemed to me just a fascinating place and the rhythm and the music of the place didn't hurt, of the region, didn't hurt as a dancer either.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Part of it was knowing that I was never going to be good enough to do it as a profession, and I think part of it was knowing that I like to eat.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah. Well, that was a different story because my mom and dad are both tall. My mother knew her children were going to be tall. Her daughters. And my mom said, well, I'm very clutzy and I walk into furniture and I want my daughters to be more graceful than I am. So she put both my sister and I into ballet. I started at age four, took it for about ten years till I broke to her vertebrae in my back. And then I went back to it as a high school student in modern dance. And when I went to college, I was looking for schools that had strong political science and international relations departments and good dance and theater departments because I didn't know which I wanted. And to my mother's enormous relief, I chose the political science international relations one.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And yes, they did, but others in the family didn't earlier. And, you know, I think the benefits that they were able to accrue through education, which was really drummed into me, that education is your social mobility. That's the way you move up. You get educated, but you will give back. It was really important to my family, my brother sat on a board of education in his town for 15 years. My sister has also done immense amounts of volunteer work. I raised my kids going to pack boxes of food at homeless shelters, and I see it less and less among communities like me, but it's the way I was brought up.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And refugees in all sorts of categories. The other thing is, you know, when we found the manifest of my grandfather's trip here, he's the only one that was born somewhere else and we have his birth certificate and know his original name. But the manifest of the boat to Ellis Island has three people listed. One is clearly his mother, one is him. And there's a 14-year-old girl. Now he didn't have a 14-year-old sister. She was most likely the child of relatives or a neighbor. People did that all the time. So he was lucky enough to come in legally, but indeed they were, if you will, smuggling in someone not related to them. Who wouldn't have perhaps gotten in otherwise? So that question of they came legally, I think, is a fluid one.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think it does I think part of what Makes me feel as strongly as I do about immigration in this country is the fact that Had family that came here during periods when there were lots of signs on places that said no Germans, no Irish, no Jews who felt their own forms of discrimination, although many of them did extremely well. Who were able to make that progression from the lower Eastside to Brooklyn to the suburbs of New York? And see that classic social mobility of the United States that immigrants found.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Did both in Battle of the Bulge subsequently, but also in Normandy. He never made it to the beach in Normandy. He was knocked out by getting off the landing craft, which is probably good because the engineers were among the first onto the beach and they took heavy casualties. But after he had severe frostbite in the Battle of the Bulge, his father said to him, okay, enough. We're going to get you doing something else. And he started doing work on aerial photographic interpretation for, it was Army Air Corps and then work that eventually became part of the OSS. And that beginning of the intelligence community. They both really believe deeply that they had been very lucky, they were grateful for what the country gave to them. Well, let me ask you.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And so, you know, they were from families that felt families of the Depression, families who felt committed to public service. My mom went to Smith College first in her family to go to college. My grandfather and my grandmother left school in high school to go to work. My father came from a more educated family, if you will, higher education. He started out at MIT as a young man and then enlisted in the Second World War and shunning the help of his family, including an uncle who was Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's chief of staff. He was an engineer in Patton's Army and had three purple hearts and was wounded.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So, for a Jewish woman to get her PhD in economics, this was a very distinguished family. And so my mom's family felt a little intimidated by those folks. My grandfather was Fat Swaller's lawyer during many of his.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Well, they did the classic Eastern European Jewish migration family that came some through Ellis Island, including my grandfather, who was my mother's father who was born in Romania and came here when he was two, and we found the manifest for when he and his mother arrived. My dad's family came through Boston and Connecticut down to New York, and they had, they were from Belarus originally. My mom's family from Romania. And they were much more assimilated. Both families ended up in Brooklyn, in Flatbush. And my dad's parents were both lawyers. His mother was the first woman admitted to the bar in Brooklyn. His aunt, my great aunt, was the Commissioner of Human Resources, which was essentially the welfare commissioner under Mayor Cotch, have in New York having gotten her PhD in economics from Columbia in 1938.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, and Angle and Cliffs, where I grew up. And my dad was head of the voluntary, all of these were voluntary civic groups. My dad was head of what was called the Board of Adjustment, which was essentially the zoning board in the town. And we were a town that runs right along the palisades overlooking the Hudson River, just north of The GW Bridge, and I also tell people that since my dad worked in Jersey City, my trip home with him when I worked with him one summer was the opening credits of the Soprano, all the way up the New Jersey turnpike to the north. But for them it was really important.”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Well, you know, I tell a lot of people that there was a point in our lives when all three of us, my siblings, I have a twin brother and an older sister, and we were all in the public sector. I was at the State Department. My brother was a public defender in New Jersey, and my sister worked for the New York State Department of Developmental Disabilities in the deinstitutionalization of Willowbrook. People literally in the town I grew up would offer my father condolences. Here you had these incredibly expensive college educations, and all your kids were in the public sector not making money. But for my parents, it was an absolute point of pride. They were thrilled with that. I grew up with parents who were the antithesis of bowling alone. They were joiners and leaders. My mom was a former teacher in Bedstey in Brooklyn. And she became...”

    2018-09-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 272 — Roberta Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source