YouSaid · the spoken record

Wendy Sherman

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87

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2017-03-23

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2017-03-23

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1

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1. “Knowing some things, and my husband was a journalist and wrote about international trade and economics, so we talked about it a lot. But I said, if you want someone who knows Washington and politics in the hill, maybe I'm the right person. So I ended up becoming the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, and at that point in time, that job required you to do every markup on every piece of foreign policy legislation. You had to learn everything. And it was extraordinary. I did that for three years. I left for one year because I was exhausted. Came back, though, when Madeline Albright became Secretary of State. She was a good friend and became her counselor, and I have done national security and foreign policy now for Many, many years”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And so Tom said, weren't Christopher would like to meet you? And I said, Really? And he said, yeah. And the next day was Martin Luther King's birthday, so I went and saw Warren Christopher, and he said several people have recommended you, and if the president agrees, would you consider being the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs? And I said, Always believing you should be forthright and erect If you want someone who knows everything there is to know about national security and foreign policy, I'm not the person. I know enough because you can't do campaigns in this world without them.”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Great guy. He was going to be, and I'd known him since he was deleg counter for Walter Mondale. So Called me at home, and he was going to become Warren Christopher's chief of staff when Chris became Secretary of State. They didn't really know each other, but they were each partners in the O'Melvany law firm, one on the west coast, one on the east coast. And people had told Christopher, you should make Tom Donnell and your chief of staff, because he knows everything about this town, which was true.”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Very strange. I actually working with Bob Schrum and David Doak, partner in their firm, had made television ads for Bob Carey, who was running against Clinton. So I was not Bill Clinton's supporter, but I was at home one night and I got a phone call from Tom Donnellin, who ultimately went on to become President Obama's National Security Advisor.”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Also, he was a fabulous partner, wasn't sort of competitive with her, but wanted her to find her own place and her own way to shine. And she did, and she always made the personal her politics. Her dad got Alzheimer's, which is a pretty devastating disease, as we all know too well now And she realized that Women all over were going poor, trying to Take care of their aging or ill spouses, and so she created a piece of legislation which became an amendment, a spouse and impoverishment allowing people to keep some of their assets so they didn't have to become poor while they cared for an elderly spouse. So everything for her came out of her day-to-day life or the day-to-day life of her constituents”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “He was very receptive. She did have at one point a very interesting conversation with him about would he be comfortable if she wore pants, slacks, a pants suit on the floor that had never happened before. He did relent to allowing her to do that, which made all of the women's staff in the Senate ecstatic. Because they had long wanted to get out of their dresses, particularly in cold weather and wear pantsuits. So she, I think, worked very hard and made people understand she was going to do her homework. She understood history. She understood traditions. And she became very effective. She had a great senior senator Paul Sarbanes.”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Senator Mikulski. And so she decided when she went to the Senate, she would start by really learning her way, and she went first to see Bob Bird, who was the majority leader and was chair of the Appropriations Committee, and she sort of sat at his feet and let him school her, help her decide what committee assignment she should take. So she took a very studious approach, knowing that she was an unusual person.”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Well, I think she thought very carefully about how she should conduct herself and remember as women showed up in Congress, I think people most remembered in many ways Bella Abzug, who, you know, sort of came on brash and loud. And she knew she had a reputation of being brash and if not loud, certainly a spark plug. So”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “National Committee. So I ended up getting engaged in presidential politics even more than I did for Mondale Ferraro and ultimately, as you had pointed out earlier, worked for David Dokken, Bob Truman.”

   2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Oh, you didn't go with her. That's right. Yes, I can see this. You did a series of video. I had decided that I didn't want to go to the Senate, that I wanted to spend more time with my family, but quite frankly, that didn't last long either. I went back to state government in child welfare, and I learned a really important lesson. Sometimes you can't go backwards. You can only go forwards if you've been in the big pond of Washington, it's hard to return entirely to what you once did. And so I got a call would I help Michael Dukakis in his effort to become president, and so I ended up not only running Maryland for him and what was District of Columbian looking after Virginia, but opening the Washington office for Dukakis because the main campaign headquarters was in Boston, and I ultimately ran campaign eighty eight, the general election campaign at the Democratic”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yeah, running through a market. And Bob Shrum was actually doing that one and just filming her as she walked through Verite, Toto Verite, and this very, this guy and woman, you know. Certainly a little on the heavy side themselves stopped to chat with her. And she said just out of her own mouth Countin' my calories, I'm counting my blessings, and I'm counting my votes.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Right today, but at that time. In the first quarter of a Senate campaign in Maryland, that was a lot of money. I think at the end we only spent, you probably find this horrifying now, three million dollars on this campaign, which at the time was a staggering amount for her to raise. But that made people pay attention to her.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Because it makes the dough rise, and a lot of women had not been successful because they couldn't compete financially with guys who used the old boys club to raise money. And so Emily's list had tried with Harriet Woods, who had run for her Senate from Missouri, but they didn't quite Get it together. They were brand new. But by the time Mikulski ran, Emily's list knew they had a candidate that might be able to do the job. And so they went to work, and when the first federal elections campaign report came out, she was competitive. I think at the time it was something like $360,000, which sounds like nothing. Yes, that's quaint.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “He was a legend, very moderate Republic So she ran in the primary against Harry Hughes, the sitting governor, and Michael Barnes, a very popular congressman from Montgomery County, which was the wealthiest county in the state of Maryland. And here was Barbara McCulsky, and as she said, because you know she has a biting wit. Yeah. She said, I know people don't think that Toga's come in a size 14 petite. But I can do this. And so one of the things that made a significant difference besides her extraordinary talent and capability and understanding of people days day to day needs is that Emily's list was had just been created. Emily's list is a political action committee that raises money to try to help Democratic pro-choice women get elected and they bundle that money together because Emily stands for early money is like yeast.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Matthias was there? Matthias had been the senator. He decided not to run again. And I don't think she would have run if he'd run it. Yeah”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “To bring people together. But I started out, I had no money, no staff, and a Senate campaign to run. I had an incredibly gifted candidate.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “One of the things that I realized is that she might want to become a co-chair of the Mondale Ferraro campaign because it would allow her to travel the country and get to know big donors. So that was part of the plan, that she would need to go to other parts of the state besides Baltimore and come to know the state and take on speaking engagement. So I put a plan together of what she needed to do prepare if she wanted to do this. And then because I was a wife, Barbara's chief of staff and a brand new mother, I decided I couldn't do all of this. And so after three years as her chief of staff, I left, but before the year I was gone was over she was back at me to come and run her campaign. So I did it. I've always been a good manager and able again. It's another kind of a community organization.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Now I was the general, I was the campaign manager. One of the things I had done for Barbara, though, when she was a congresswoman is I had written a memo for her about what she would need to do if she wanted to run for Senate because she would be running to be the first Democratic woman ever elected in her own right. In the past all other Democratic women who had become senators had been widows and so forth.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “My only campaign experience had been a volunteer for McCarthy and a volunteer for McGovern and organizing as a volunteer campaign events, but no real understanding.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Not necessarily anybody else's. In government, if you really want to legislate, if you want to accomplish goals, you've got to figure out how to bring people together and get that done. And those are similar skills. And I think what I've done in all of my life, I've always remained a community organizer and a social worker. My caseload has just changed. So I went from a community organizing and mental health to Director of Child Welfare for the state to politics for the state of Maryland and then worked in presidential politics. And then I got fortunate enough. I'm jumping ahead here. So you may not be ready to get there. We've got an hour here. Don't raise your hand.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Right, that's true, except I think, you know, one of the reasons that Barbara and I understood each other so well is we were both trained as organizers. And we understood that if you want to get something done, sometimes you speak past institutions directly to people and that you can look at what you need to do to collect the support you need to get something done. So even though being in government is different, certainly than being outside of government and being a rabble rouser and being able to really push your”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Now, I came from a rather middle class Jewish community background. We moved to Baltimore County not long after I started elementary school. So I lived a suburban life for most of my years.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Which was quite white, quite Catholic. Some people thought racist, but the folks were looking to put a six lane highway through her neighborhood. And so South Baltimore and East and West Baltimore came together, the African American community and the white community to stop that six lane highway, and she became a rock star for creating a community organization to stop the road and then went on to the city council and then ultimately when Pulsarbane decided he would run for the Senate, it opened up a seat in the House and Senator Sarbane's decision was the greatest day of her life. It set her on a road that made her the longest serving woman in Congress ever.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “I remember that period I wasn't all that old at the time that Nancy's dad was mayor, but they were trying to create changes but in a very deliberative way and Baltimore was really busting out at that point. You know, miscegenation, that is marriage between different races was still not law, I think, changed law in nineteen fifty six, so it was quite a bit of time after the World War when African Americans and Caucasians marched together to try to put down Hitler. So it was very much neighborhood politics. It was very much hand to mouth kind of politics. And the reason that Barbara Mikulski became the star she was, she came from South Baltimore, southeast Baltimore.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Yeah, no, I know you don't know about that in Chicago. Very peculiar thing. And she married that with her roots in San Francisco and not just the liberalism of San Francisco, but the multiculturalism of San Francisco. Nancy came to understand the world because San Francisco was becoming an Asian melting pot, as well as a liberal bastion, as we think of it. It was also becoming a tech haven. And she's really blended all of those pieces together to keep a rather raucous caucus together.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Families of Baltimore. Absolutely. She comes from the Dallessandro family, and her dad was mayor. Her brother was mayor. They ruled little Italy. The Italian Catholic section of Baltimore. So she learned, particularly in a large family, her mom was one tough cookie as well, how to do bare knuckles politics. And I've always been a great admirer because she has married the bare knuckle politics of Baltimore, which are very ethnic politics, very tribal politics, quite frankly, and very much in the street. You know, Baltimore had a tradition for years of walking around money. How you”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “No, that was not my pitch. I knew some things, but not as much as I should have, quite frankly. But art was very good friends with a congresswoman named Barbara Mikulski. And Barbara was trying to create shelters for battered women and looking for ways to finance that. And Art knew I had some ideas because I was looking at how to create self-help opportunities for people. And so he introduced us. We were both from Baltimore. We'd both gone to the University of Maryland School of Social Work. Barb was a little older than I am. We didn't know each other, but we knew of each other. And we became very good friends, went to movies together. And at one point, she was looking for a new chief of staff, and I knew I always wanted to go to Washington at some point, so we decide, well, why not?”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “That was also sort of strange. I was working for after I got a master's in social work, I ultimately went to work through an odd circumstance for a guy named Art Napperstack, who was dean of the Washington Public Affairs Center for USC in Washington, DC, working on some community mental health grants that he was the principal for. And I also taught undergraduates public policy, which was strange, because what did I know, quite frankly.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “I got out of my silo. I did, you know, this was very much the time of the women's movement. And the other reason I had gone to Boston, I never finished that thought, was because it was activism against the Vietnam War in Smith College was very quiet, and I want to march every week, which I certainly was able to do in Boston. So in Savannah I started a consciousness raising group with some other expats, which is what we called ourselves because we felt like we were in another country, as well as some locals. And it was very revealing and very helpful because the women who were local were leading a very different life, but we found we had common bounds and common human experience, and that was really important to learn and understand.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Waltham, Massachusetts, we moved to Georgia, where my then husband went and worked as a lawyer for Georgia Legal Services, and I helped run a community mental health service hotline and do outreach in rural Georgia. My partner for that rural outreach was an African American guy, and you can imagine in the 70s showing up in Egypt, Georgia, or Springfield, Georgia, a white Jewish married woman with a single black guy wasn't exactly welcomed by everyone. But it was a real learning experience that people lived very different lives than I had been used to, even though Baltimore was sort of a southern town, it wasn't Savannah, George, it wasn't Egypt, Georgia. And I think that was a really important lesson for me to understand I tell people if they want to understand Savannah, there was no obituary of a 95-year-old woman.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “From one to another. What was for two reasons after my sophomore year in college, I actually got married, not to my current husband, but to a guy I was in love with then. So he was starting Boston College Law School. And in those days you followed. And so I wanted to transfer and I decided to go to Boston University because at that point I was going to work part-time and I sort of went to classes. I didn't even go to graduation when I graduated. But worked actually organizing in a community housing project in Boston and working with teenagers and knew I wanted to eventually become a community organizer, go to social work school, took a little bit of a detour, but a useful one after my husband graduated and I worked as a social worker at middle sex county hospital in Wales.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “And her moment of excitement was to find a penny under her plate that she would have to spend any way she wanted in a days when you could actually buy something with a penny, and she took not an academic but a secretarial track in high school because she had to go to work. And she was introduced on a blind date to a guy named Mal Sherman who was going into the Marine Corps. He had gone to the University of North Carolina for a year and a half but decided to enlist. He came from a rather wealthy Philadelphia family. His father had committed suicide when my father was five years old, and my dad had been sent off to boarding school with his sister in Switzerland from the age of five to the age of ten, so his life couldn't have been more different than my mother's. Couldn't have been more different.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Their families are quite different. My mother was raised in a very poor family. Her father died when she was sixteen of a heart attack. She came home.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “What can I do? And Libren said, Well, you can advertise open housing. And my father said, Well, if I do that, my business will go down the tubes. He said, Well, you asked me what You could do, that's what you can do. Indeed, indeed. So he talked to my mom, and that is what he did. He ended up finding Frank Robinson a great baseball player, first African American in the Baltimore Orioles, a house, and went on to do many things and indeed his business did suffer, and we got bomb threats on our house and on our lives, but it taught me that you have to have courage to fight for what you want, no matter what the risks.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “This was at the end of World War II and are getting to the end of World War II. And so he helped organize what became the American Veterans Committee. And my mother and father were at the founding of the UN in 1945 in San Francisco. And it really was emblematic of the rest of their lives. They were activists when one Russiana holiday, my family is Jewish. My dad went to hear a young new rabbi, Mars Lieberman, who gave a sermon talking about how important the civil rights movement was he was trying to sit in with other clergy in restaurants because Baltimore was still a very segregated city to make sure that African Americans could go into any restaurant they wanted. And he talked about how this was a different kind of Holocaust, actually. He went to see Mars Lieberman afterwards, and he said, well,”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “This was in Baltimore, but my dad was a Marine. He was a Guadacanal. He got injured and came back to the west coast, was married to my mother who had graduated high school. I think that in another era she would have gone on to college and done great things for herself. But my dad was still an active duty marine, but he thought there should never be war again, nor did my mother. And so he stood understood.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Well, you know, I gave some commencement addresses last year, and the theme of it was that I wished all those young people an unexpected life. I've never had a five-year plan. I've been really privileged and fortunate to have great opportunities come along. And, you know, I really started out with parents who were quite activists.”

    2017-03-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 132 - Wendy Sherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source