YouSaid · the spoken record

Tony Blinken

lines on the record: 76
first: 2020-12-24
most recent: 2020-12-24
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

“You know, I had a great experience on that campaign because I worked for a guy who was Dukakis' chief fundraiser, a guy named Bob Farmer. Bob was incredibly successful. In fact, the campaign, the one place where that campaign.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was at a big law firm, a terrific place in New York, but I concluded that this really wasn't for me and went off. There was a brief interregnum in between law school and starting at this law firm, I worked on the Dukakis campaign. Which some of you may remember.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I practice law for one year, ten months, two weeks, three days, and five hours. But who's counting? But who's counting? Yeah.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I kind of felt the need to go back and continue to get a little bit more education. So I thought grad school was a good idea. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to stick with journalism. And as you said, as so many people do, when you're not quite sure what you want to do, but you need another degree, you think you need another degree, law school is what's out there. And I did have lawyers in my family, my grandfather, my stepfather. And I thought, well, this is probably the way to do it. And so I did.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent time on the school newspaper and loved it, and probably learned as much if not more there, from the people I was working with than from anything else I did in school. And then I actually went off to try to be a journalist briefly. I was in Washington working at the New Republic magazine. And it was actually an extraordinary time to be there. This is 1984, 85. And of course, President Reagan was in office. The Democrats were in disarray. And to some extent, the New Republic was the place where a lot of the ideas about the future of the party We're being written about, debated, discussed. So it was a great time to be there.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I just spent virtually all of my time in college. Yes, that was a magazine that the Crimsons published, a weekly magazine. Yeah.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He ran to the tank. The hatch opened up. An African American GI looked down at him. He got down on his knees, he said the only three words in English that he knew that his mother had taught him God bless America. The GI lifted him into the tank, into freedom, into the United States. That's the country I know. That's the country you know. And if we lose that, we've lost a lot. We've lost everything.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After going through all these concentration camps for four years, he was on a death march out of one of the camps. He made a run for it. He made it into the Bavarian forest. He hit out for a couple of days. And then he heard this rumbling sound, and he looked out from where he was hiding, and instead of seeing the dreaded swastika, he saw a five pointed white star in a tank”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was a refugee from Hungary fleeing the communists literally at the dead of night getting on a train with her mom, her mom was in a sham marriage to be able to get out of the country. She too welcomed into the United States, built a productive life, contributed. And then my stepfather, who we were talking about earlier, as I said, the only survivor, right, of his town, 900 kids in his school, the very end of the war.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know Not only appreciating the choir, I think you've put the finger on, to me, what is one of the biggest challenges we face, which is how do we hold on to these values in this time of profound change where there's such a sense of chaos and confusion and vulnerability, but that one in particular, remaining open, is the one that motivates me more than anything else. And again, we were saying a few moments ago that we're so influenced by our own stories, our own family histories. And like you, I have parents, grandparents, all of whom were immigrants or even refugees and very similar stories. My father's father fled pogroms in Russia, came to the United States, was welcomed into the United States, built a great life, sent three sons to Ivy League schools. They all contributed and did good things for this country. My stepmother.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These pendulum swings are incredibly intense, and we see that playing out every day. Look, I think one of the president's great strengths, President Obama's great strengths, was to not be reactive in the immediate to these huge forces of pressure, of public opinion, to try to see a way through to something that made sense and that held up over time. But that pressure every single day was intense.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you had left the White House by that point, but I remember I was still there. And we were flooded with emails, telephone calls, you name it, saying, let them all in, bring every Syrian here. It's outrageous that we've got the ceiling on these Syrian refugees. We should let them all in. Three weeks later, San Bernardino, the terrorist attack, and the emails, the phone calls, everything in exactly the opposite direction. No, no. Keep everyone out.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a constant constant strain in our politics and in our foreign policy. And we get pulled between different Look. During the refugee crisis that we've been living through as well, you'll remember there was this image that went around the world of this young Syrian child who had drowned and was being carried onto the beach by Trigger Soldier.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does this not draw us deeper in? Or if it doesn't Then what's going to result? But Syria, I think anyone who is involved, no matter what you're advocating, has to live with the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Look, there's plenty of blame to go around, starting with the Syrians themselves, going to all of the neighboring countries, whether it's the Arab countries, whether it's the Russians and the Iranians who've kept fueling the fire, the Turks and others. But as the one country on earth that more than any other has some capacity to mobilize, to bring people together to deal with these kinds of atrocities, sure, there are moments that I wish we could have done more. But I can't sit here today and say, had we done certain things that we didn't do?”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As someone who also went through the experience of the Iraq war working in the Senate and seeing how that played out, I'm very sympathetic to the proposition that the president often brought to this, which is what next question. What's the limiting principle? How does this end?”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was. And, you know, at the time, I was. And I think. My own sense is that President Obama went there against his own better instincts and judgments, and maybe he was right because we've seen, unfortunately, what's resulted in Olivia. And that is that while we were able to prevent a brutal dictator from massacring his own people, we have seen a very chaotic environment emerge afterward. And into that environment, we see the Islamic State terrorism.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David did, and look, we're all the product of our own stories and our own families and our backgrounds, and that influences a lot of what we become and how we think about these problems. And so when it came to Syria or when it came to Libya before that, yeah, that certainly influenced me. But of course, you tried. I'm advocating.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An autobiography called A Blood and Hope that relayed his experiences during the war and everything that came after and tried to tie together what he had seen in a world falling apart in the 1930s and some of the things that he was seeing then in the present. And it's a very powerful book, but the stories are beyond anything one can even imagine. It's the stuff of the movies. But he did talk about it, but he had something that he called concentration camp humor. So he would tell jokes as a way of illuminating some of these things. And that was a way to make it more digestible to a kid.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, for a while, it's not something he talked about. And then I think he came to the conclusion that he needed to talk about it, that he needed to bear witness, that he owed that. Both to the generation that was lost, but he also owed it to the future. And so he started to talk about it at home, and then ultimately he started to write about it. And he finally wrote”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's exactly right. And for those of us who believe that we need to remain open and connected, if we can't find an answer to this problem, that is if we can't find ways to make sure that those who feel left out and left behind actually are part of the deal and brought along, then the legitimacy of the open connected enterprise is gone. It will collapse. And so I think there's a big project, again, on both sides of the Atlantic, not just in defending the infamous liberal international order and everything it represents, but also amending it to make sure it's working for more people. Macron's challenge now is to do exactly that. If he's going to succeed, that's what he has to do.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he was very forceful, not just in not running away from remaining open and connected, but actually embracing it supported.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think what we're seeing, David on both sides of the Atlantic, is very powerful, and it really is this new dividing line. And it's a dividing line not between left and right, Republican, Democrat, Liberal Conservative, but a dividing line between those who confronted with these incredible forces of change that we're all dealing with believe that the best answer is to protect themselves, to kind of get down into a defensive crouch and to ward these forces off. And those who believe that our best bet actually is remaining open, remaining connected, and trying to shape these forces as best we can to our advantage or at least not to our detriment. So it's this division between those who believe the best answer to change is to build a wall and those who think we should continue to build bridges. And we're seeing that powerfully on both sides of the Atlantic. Macron is an interesting element.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was indeed. And then she went on to run something called the American Center in Paris, which brought together some of the most remarkable artists, Americans brought them to France, connected our countries and our cultures in that way. So I was just given a tremendous benefit of this experience living abroad, seeing my country through different eyes. And this was the early 1970s. We were still in Vietnam. You'd find yourself even at a very young age in debates in school with your classmates. And you were often put in the position of defending your country. for good or bad, getting into these conversations, getting into these arguments. And it kind of turns you into a gender diplomat. And I think that's one of the reasons ultimately I became really a senior.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my stepdad had a law practice in France, and my mom, as you said, was very involved in the arts. She had been in New York, the head of the music program of the Brooklyn Academy of Music way back in the day in the 1960s, ran a modern dance company, Merce Cunningham.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of detente between the Soviet Union and the United States wrote a book that was really at the heart of that thesis. So he had an extraordinary life. But as you said, one of the divorces not usually a good thing It's disruptive in so many ways. Because my parents handled it so well, and because it gave me an opportunity as a result of my mother remarrying to live and spend formative years in France. It gave me a whole new perspective on my own country. Anyone who has the opportunity, especially at a young age, to be able to see their own country through a different set of eyes, by living somewhere else. That's an extraordinary benefit.”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he was, and he passed away recently, but he was an extraordinary man. He was born in Bialistock, Poland, and was in a school with 900 kids, and he's the only one to have survived because this was just before World War II. And he was a Jew in Poland. And so he spent the war in Auschwitz, Dachau, Meidanek, you know, the greatest hits of concentration camps and labor camps was his only immediate family member to survive. But then he went on to build an extraordinary career, wound up after the war, first in France, then in Australia where he had relatives who found him and brought him there, made his way to Harvard Law School, finished at the top of his class, and had an extraordinary career as an international lawyer, but also a writer of some prominence in Europe and in the United States, and was one of the earliest”
2020-12-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Best of the Axe Files: Tony Blinken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source