YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Donilon

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75
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2018-06-11
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2018-06-11
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1
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  1. “That's what an Irish young Irish Catholic person growing from a place like Province, Rhode Island, did if they wanted to get a graduate degree. He became a doctor, you became a lawyer. And this, of course, was a great dream.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Because it was the profession that I knew most about growing up in Providence, Rhode Island. And during the Carter years, though, a number of things happened. I wanted to point out, I met another great mentor during the Carter administration, who was Warren Christopher, who was the Deputy Secretary of State and ended up being my law partner and then Secretary of State when I was his chief of staff. And I met a tremendous number of terrific, terrific people as I was a young person, lucky enough to do that during the car. Administration. But I went to law school at the University of Virginia, which is another institution that I love because that was what a...”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, it was. It was a great experience. It calls into question the judgment of the people it would hire a 24-year-old who would want it and run it, but it worked out okay.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Because you learned that inside an event like that, anything could happen, that you could see momentum change very quickly, right? You know, back and forth. It was really a tremendous experience for me. And we ultimately kind of extraordinary.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Literally fist fight It was one of the most intense fights again the Democrats have had in its modern history. And it had a lot of elements to it, David. It had challenging an incumbent president. But President Carter was caught at the edge of a lot of trends in history. It really was kind of the moving away from the New Deal coalition, but with a strong challenge to pull it back, right? He in many ways kind of foretold the rise of Bill Clinton in terms of his ideological and policy approach, but it was a very difficult kind of caught on a number of vortexes, including an economic challenges, right? Real interest rates were 15 or 16%. And of course, we had dramatic foreign policy challenges with the hostages having been taken to Iran. The very difficult fight. And again, I think people define themselves for a long time after that fight as to whether they work hard or person or a Kennedy person. And the atmosphere on the floor of that convention, it really was incredible experience for me.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It did For the Great Convention floor fights with over unbinding the delegates. Which is a floor fight that I led as a young person”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I was firmly, you know, he had become, president had become someone I deeply admired. And I knew this. And it turned out to be, I think, true, is that there was kind of a rule that the longer it took you to get the nomination, the less likely you were to become elected in the general election. And I could see the damage that was going to be done to the car president.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And by October or so of 1979, he was well ahead of the incumbent president. He had a big upholding lead, President Carter, as we headed into the primaries and caucuses. And I was charged with the delegate, with the delegate selection and the convention. But it really was one of the great and defining political races in the modern history of the Democratic Party. It really was that it had resonance for a long time, David, as you know, about whether you were a Carter person or a Kennedy person.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Ask you to do that? He did. He hired me on to do that, and I went over and went over and opened up the headquarters with this real estate agent for the reelection campaign in March of 1979. And of course, it was supposed to be a good experience and something that a young, hungry political operative could take on. And it turned out to be one of the great nomination battles in the modern history of the Democratic Party, where Senator Kennedy going on into the summer of 1979 indicated that he was going to challenge the incumbent president.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, well, I remember it well. You know, this turned out, this is a long time ago for me, and well, kind of a different life, but I was 24, 25 years old and running the delegate operation for incumbent president. Did Hamilton Jordan?”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's a kind of a true story. The truth is good enough. It's a podcast. What the hell? It was a long time ago. No, but I was asked to the president was having a meeting at Camp David with the cabinet and wanted research done on what various cabinet officers had done, what their priorities had been, how responsive they had been to White House requests and priorities. I think ran into Hamilton Jordan, who was then the White House chief of staff of her president Carter and another really dear friend and mentor of mine. And I was asked to work that weekend in the files, putting together the research that the president wanted to have the conversation with the cabinet. And I did that. And it was really my first big project for”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The chores I had on the chores you would expect a 22 year old to have in the White House, which is I answered mail from members of Congress before the age of the personal computer, before the age of the cell phone where you would take a letter, type out a response, bring it to a correspondence pool. It would be typed up. You would proofread it, and he would send it back to the member of Congress. So I did that for a couple of years. And then in 1978, I was asked to take on working on overseeing the 1978 midterm election effort by the White House. And then in 1979, I went over to the campaign to do the delegate operation, ended up running the delegate operation, which was supposed to be a good learning experience for a young person. It turned out to be a much more complicated experience with the Kennedy Challenge.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I had some professors, Michael Robinson and Normstein, who heard that the car administration was looking for a young person to come in and work in the Congressional Relations Office. And I was lucky enough to get that job.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I did know I went in as an employee. Oh, I see. I started at the White House on June 20th of 1977 as an employee in the car administration working in the Congressional Relations Office.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Was he then? Yes. There's been no change in his level of energy. And his love of people. And his love of politics. And we were very lucky. We had great teachers like Normstein, who kind of imbued in us kind of a love of politics. Norm actually also was responsible for my first foreign policy experience. In my senior year, I took an independent study course where I worked at the State Department as an intern working on a publication called The Farm Relations of the United States. And if you spend a lot of time in libraries working on diplomatic history, you'd recognize these maroon volumes, which is a complex. It's a documentary history, kind of a document history of American foreign policy. So it's a compilation of the key documents that were important to each Aaron Foreign Policy. So the cables, the memos, the memorandums of the files, right? And that was my first experience at the State Department in office I ended up over.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I wanted to be in Washington and I thought I might become a priest, but was very attracted, obviously, by politics. And I found great mentors at Catholic University. The first class I had on Monday morning, 9 a.m. Politics 101 was taught by a young professor named Normstein, who has gone on, obviously, to become a quite prominent political scientist and writer and commentator. But he and another professor named Michael Robinson were mentors of mine, almost from day one, a Catholic university on the political side.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And he was the pollster for the campaign. Yeah. He was the president of Pat Cadell's polling firm for a while, which is a name from the past and democratic politics. But, you know, we grew up in this environment, as I described, post-emigrant environment, where education was the primary goal of our parents to see that we succeeded in education, that we could exceed what they were able to accomplish. And it was a time of tremendous social mobility in the United States. Even growing up in a place which was not very wealthy, obviously, Tad grew up in a housing project, but not a very wealthy place, but we never, you never had any sense that your possibilities were limited. And that era of social mobility was very important part. I think really one of the great periods in American history and one that we needed to focus back on that.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, and we came into and we worked together closely in the Cara campaign where I asked Tad to come in to be part of the delegate team in the Cara campaign in 1980, which is I want to ask you about that. But the other person, of course, who was deeply involved in national politics today is someone else who grew up on the same street with me, who was my brother Michael”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “No, no, with an iconic family in Rhode Island. Rhode Island, by the way, is still obviously one of the most democratic states in the country, which is the legacy of a number of these things. It's ironic, of course, that by 1980 I was managing a convention where I was leading the incumbent president's defense and fight against Senator Ted Kennedy at Madison Square Garden.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “My father was on the school board, and my mother was a union organizer and was the president of the province school department secretaries and janitors union, which was an AFSME union in Providence. So I have memories of really almost every dinner conversation having something to do with politics. And my parents were always going through a meeting. There were a lot of meetings in urban politics. You always had a meeting that night. And they were both quite active. And again, my mother was active in the union really until her death.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And of course, that wasn't always the case in the United States. That became the case during the late 19th century and the 20th century, where there was a lot of Irish participation in big city, in big city politics. It was no different in Providence. The Providence was... Really divided pretty evenly between Irish sons and daughters of immigrants and Italian sons and daughters, daughters of immigrants and a large Portuguese population as well in Rhode Island and southeast New England generally. Your point about politics being kind of at the center of activity and conversation is exactly right. My parents were very politically active in father was in a school.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Much, and I think that you make a good point if you met someone at a high school dance or something and you asked them where they were from, they would say they were from ex-parish, and you would basically have a pretty good demographic summary of who they were and what they were about just by naming the parish. So you're exactly right. And this is a way the city was divided up.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Wasn't in the immigrant experience, but the social system, the infrastructure there was very much in place as a mechanism to support Catholic immigrants into the United States.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “My mother's family came over in the 1920s to New England, and my father's family came earlier into Canada and then to Vermont and down into Providence. But it was a very traditional upbringing there. And again, it was a social system, a social support system that had been set up by the Catholic Church to support immigrants as they came into the United States. So you were born in the Catholic Hospital. I was born in St. Joseph Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. You went to the Catholic school, St. Michael's school. participated in sports in the CYO Sports Leagues and your social life was in the Catholic Church and I went to a very large Catholic high school, St. LaSalle Academy, which was run by the Christian Brothers, which had 1,600 urban Catholic kids in it. So I was very much part of that experience. It really was kind of...”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I grew up, as you said, David, I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. In St. Michael's parish at the time was one of the largest parishes, I think, in New England. It was a very traditional place, actually more in 1950s, I think, than 1960s, if you will, a product of the immigrant experience in New England.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source