Ron and Ed welcomed Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution's show Uncommon Knowledge. This show (Uncommon Knowledge) is among Ron and Ed's top listens, but it is Peter's own work about which they talked. Most famously, Peter authored the speech given by Ronald Reagan where he implored, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Ron’s Questions: Segment One
Welcome to The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy, sponsored by sage, transforming the way people think and work so that organizations can thrive. I'm Ron Baker, along with my good friend and VeraSage Institute colleague, Ed Kless. On today's show, folks, we are talking to living history. We have President Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, Peter Robinson, with us. Hey, Ed, how's it going?
Ed Kless
Ron, I am so excited about this. I have been looking forward to this day since we booked Peter about a month ago. And even though my monitor broke today, my computer monitor, I am still happy guy. That's how good this is going to be.
Ron Baker
I've been really excited about this since we were able to book him, but let me just read his bio. Peter Robinson is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and hosts Hoover's video series program and podcast on Uncommon Knowledge. In 1979, he graduated from Dartmouth College, where he majored in English. Then he went on to study politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University, from which he graduated in 1982. He's also got a Stanford MBA, which we'll talk to him about. He served six years in the White House from 1982 to 1988, for both Vice President George Bush and President Ronald Reagan. He's the author of three books, two of which we'll probably focus on today. Peter Robinson, welcome to The Soul of Enterprise.
Peter Robinson
Thank you. My pleasure. My pleasure. So far, so far.
Ron Baker
Okay. Well, we'll see if you feel that way at the end of the hour, but we are just thrilled to have you on. I've been dying to be able to chat with you. You were born in 1957.
Peter Robinson
Oh, stop. I know, I know. All that buttering me up. And now the knife, all right.
Ron Baker
At 25 years old, you're in the White House. How does a kid from Vestal, New York, get to the White House at age 25?
Peter Robinson
On a fluke, of course. Let me see if I can compress, there's a certain amount of background you need to have to make sense of it. But I'll compress it as best I can. Graduate from high school, go to Dartmouth College, which you mentioned. And then I studied at Oxford. And then the bit that you left out, which I left out—you were reading a bio which I composed—but you've asked, so I'll tell you. After I finished my work at Oxford, I stayed there for a year to write a novel. And the novel turned out to be so bad that even I couldn't read it. So I was broke. I mean, I was really broke. I hadn't paid my final bills at Oxford. And, what was his name, the steward was Colonel somebody, I started getting very nasty letters from Colonel whatever his name was. And I was staying in a 500 year old cottage, the plumbing was 500 years old at least, I'm sure. And that cost me five pounds a week and I could barely afford that. Alright, so I wrote letters to people who I thought might be able to give me leads on a job. And the only person as I recall, certainly most people didn't reply, but Bill Buckley replied, and I can't claim to have known him well. But he always paid attention to student journalism. And I'd written a few pieces in the Dartmouth newspaper that had caught Mr. Buckley's attention as he was to me then, but he eventually became Bill. He wrote to me and said, You like politics, you like writing, go to Washington—this is 1982—and see my son, Christopher Buckley, who was then a writer for George HW Bush, the Vice President. Christopher may be able to find you a job in the still new Reagan Administration. All right. I flew back to Washington. I did present myself to Christopher. And what I didn't know, and Bill I don't think knew when he wrote the letter, Christopher announced to me that he was leaving the job in two weeks, and that his replacement had just fallen through. And he said while you're in the building, go downstairs. This is the old Executive Office Building. Go downstairs and see Tony Dolan. Tony Dolan was then the chief speechwriter to the President. And while I was talking to Tony, the campaign manager for Lou Lehrman, who was running for Governor of New York against Mario Cuomo, called to ask Tony if he could recommend a speech writer. So Tony and Christopher, good friends, conspired, and effectively what they did was put together a kind of fraternity prank. Christopher told the Bush people that he'd found the perfect replacement, me, but that they better move fast because the Lehrman campaign wanted me, and Tony told the Lehrman campaign they had to move fast, because the Vice President's office was going to hire me. Two weeks followed. The Lehrman campaign flew me to New York three times, I was in and out of the White House for interviews with the Bush staff. I got offers from both. I thought Lou Lehrman might lose in November, which was only a few months away. But George Bush at least is safe until 1984. That's two years. So for reasons of job security, I took the job with the Vice President. Did anybody ask for a writing sample? No. Did anybody ask if I had ever even written a speech? No. Both sides assumed that the other had performed the due diligence. And that was really lucky because I had never written a speech in my life. And that is how I ended up in the White House at the age of 25. And may I say? I ordinarily would wish you a large listening audience. But I'm hoping not too many people are listening right now.
Ron Baker
That's an awesome story. And then in the first year, you write over 150 speeches?
Peter Robinson
Well, yes, but they were, let's put, let's put it this way. The volume was such that I typed most of those speeches.
Ron Baker
Well, in your book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, which came out 2003. You say the book is not a memoir, it's a primer. You document ten life lessons you learned from Reagan. I don't want to go through them all, because I want people to read the book. But his idea on the Cold War, Peter, I've heard the story a lot, that his idea was “We win, and they lose.” He had that way of taking a complex issue and making it simple. But you analyze this in a way I've never heard before. You said, “actors get used to the idea of alternative endings.” And I just thought that was brilliant.
Peter Robinson
Well, it was Reagan who was brilliant. The premise of the book, it's not a speechwriters memoir of the White House. I was so young when I got there. And this huge figure of Ronald Reagan, I was young, and there were all kinds of ways in which I took his impression. And, I was still figuring out how you did it, how you made a career, so I studied him, I really did study him. And so it was a very, very important part of his own formation, that he was a movie actor Early on in the industry. He moved to Los Angeles and got a contract as an actor in the 1930s. And in his first three years, this is in the book, I can't recall the number now, but was something like in the first three years, he made over 20 pictures. This is long before television, and they were turning out pictures. The President, I heard him say several times, “They didn't want them good. They wanted them Thursday.” He was under deadline. And it was often the case in those days, that the writers who were often a bungalow on their own working on the script, would get behind the shooting. And you get the actors and the crew on the set. And it's expensive, the clock is running. And if you don't have a script, and some of the actors were able to improvise, and Reagan had developed a reputation for being able to imagine the next, having the shot up from the script the day before. And he would he could imagine the dialogue that would come next, the action that would come next. And they could begin shooting with Reagan improvising. Alright. So and of course, when you're in that profession, in that business, you might test a movie in those days, they weren't testing all of them, but you might test a movie and the executives would say now the ending is too much of a downer, give it a new ending. And the ability just to think this, my conclusion was that Reagan developed partly because of his movie acting, he developed a really deep understanding of the sheer open-endedness of life. And so, he becomes a conservative in the 1960s, he becomes President in the 80s and throughout this period, thinking about the Cold War is calcifying, and the intellectuals have concluded—it’s a strange thing when you think about it, but nobody did think about it—the intellectuals had concluded the Kissinger/Nixon point of view that the American position was growing weaker. And that the best we could do, we were playing from a weaker and weaker hand, we'd have to make concessions. The bold stroke of the opening to China from Nixon’s and Kissinger’s point of view, we needed China. We couldn't handle the Soviets on our own anymore. And even conservatives, Jean-Francois Revel published a book in the 80s called How Democracies Perish. Whittaker Chambers, this great glowing, luminous figure among conservatives, who wrote the magnificent book Witness, he writes himself in that book, that when he left the Communist Party, to become—not to join another political party—but to become an anti-communist, he did so with the consciousness that he was leaving the winning side to join the losing side. And so, what's so strange about this is that nobody can tell you when they get up in the morning exactly what's going to happen in the course of the day. But intellectuals, even on the right, had decided they knew how the century was going to end that, that the history was moving on this. And Ronald Reagan comes along and says, “No, no, I don't see why stories can have different endings. Life is open ended. History is open ended.” I also think, I couldn't prove this, but I also suspect, when he was a kid, a high school kid, he was a lifeguard on a river there, they roped off a portion of the river, the Rock River as I recall. And over the course of several summers, he pulled, and he was proud of it, he knew the number, it was 77 people he pulled out of the water. So he prevented some 77 drownings. Well, there's something about that, you pull a floundering swimmer out of the water, and at that moment, you've changed history, you've changed that life, that person's history. And you do that 77 times, and you get the idea you can make a happy ending, you can intervene in history, you can intervene in events, and they can come out differently from the way that the currents of the river, left untouched, might take a drowning swimmer down, the currents of history that the intellectuals thought they understood. And Reagan just comes along with this Midwestern common sense. You know, I think we can handle this attitude. So that's the long answer to a very simple question. But there was something really deep in him that understood the contingency of life, the open-endedness of individual lives, but also of history itself. It's not pre-determined.
Ron Baker
It's a wonderful explanation, and I never have heard it like that before. And of course, he went on, as Margaret Thatcher said, “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.” You trace that victory in the Cold War to four speeches. I'm just setting up Ed here because we're almost at our breakpoint, but…
Peter Robinson
One answer per segment…I’ll shorten up my answers…
Ron Baker
No, no, we'll just hold you over for our bonus episode. You give the British Parliament speech that he delivered in 1982 where he said, basically, Marxism was on the ash heap of history. And you say that's where he announced his strategy. And the Evil Empire speech in March of 83, where he made the moral case for pursuing the strategy. And then the Berlin Wall speech in 87, which of course you are responsible for writing, which pressed his advantage, and then of course, the Moscow State University speech written, I think, by your best friend, Joshua Gilder [George Gilder’s cousin], and of course that was his victory speech.
Peter Robinson
Yeah.
Ron Baker
Now, we want to hear the story—I know you're probably sick of telling it—but I'm sure Ed is going to ask you about the story of the Berlin Wall speech, which I think is great. So, I just set you up for that in the next segment. But unfortunately, we're up against our first break.
Ed’s Questions: Segment Two
And we are back on The Soul of Enterprise with Peter Robinson, author of the “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall” speech. And Peter, I grew up during that time, I had graduated high school in 1984, and was in college when that speech was made. And I just have to ask you, tell us the story of how that speech came about.
Peter Robinson
I'm happy to. Spring of 1987, April 1987, we speech writers were told that an event had been added to the President's calendar. He was already scheduled in June to visit Italy, he’s going to go to Rome to see the Pope and see the President of Italy. Then there was a Venice Economic Summit, which was going to take several days. And at the request of the West German government, the staff added a stop in West Berlin to the trip. So after Venice, he'd fly to West Berlin, as we called it in those days, West Berlin for about half a day and then fly back to Washington. Berlin was celebrating its 700th anniversary. It was celebrating its centennial anniversary. And the Queen of England had already visited. Gorbachev was going to visit and that was the point. The West German government, if the leader of the Soviet Union was going to visit East Berlin, which Gorbachev was going to do, then the [Helmut] Kohl government wanted the President of the United States to visit West Berlin. Okay. So I was told where the President would stand, that the speech would last about half an hour, and that he'd have an audience of in the range of 10,000 to 40,000 people. And given the setting, he should talk about foreign policy. Period. That was the direction I got. I flew with the American advanced team, people who are going to be making press arrangements, coordinating matters of security with the West Germans and so forth. I flew with that team to West Berlin, saw the site where the President would speak, paid a visit on the ranking American diplomat in West Berlin, got a helicopter ride over the Berlin Wall. And then that evening, broke away from the American party and got in a cab and went out to a suburb of West Berlin. Where some West Germans put on a dinner party, 15 or so people, for me. The host and hostess, and I had never met, but Dieter Elts was his name. He just died last year. Dieter just finished a career at the World Bank in Washington and retired back to Germany. We had friends in common and our Washington friend, our common friend, got in touch and said could you host Robinson so he can meet some Berliners. My problem was that when I saw the site where the President would speak, I just couldn't imagine coming up with material that would be equal to the Wall, equal to the weight of history. I stood on an observation platform in those days and looked over the Wall into East Berlin, where the buildings were decrepit, the colors seem to be leached out of the scene. Gray concrete, you could still see a great deal of World War II damage, shell marks on buildings, soldiers marching back and forth, dog runs. I just thought what, what can I write? And the ranking American diplomat reminded me that West Berlin was a left leaning city, a couple of major universities there, you know how far to the left universities are. Since West Berlin is entirely surrounded by East Germany, they're very sensitive to the subtlety and nuance required in East-West relations and so forth. So at the dinner party that evening when I was with West Berliners, I told them this. And I said, when I flew over the Wall, I can't see how you could get used to it. The ranking diplomat here [told me], “Don't make a big deal out of the Wall because they've all gotten used to it by now.” And there was silence. And I thought I committed a gaffe, just to kind of gaffe that the diplomat wanted the President to avoid. And then one man raised his arm and pointed. And he said, “My sister lives just a few kilometers in that direction. And I haven't seen her in more than 20 years. How do you think we feel about this Wall?” And then they went around the room. And every person told a story about the Wall. They hadn't gotten used to it, they'd stopped talking about it. But if you asked, they would tell you. And our hostess, Ingeborg Elts, a lovely woman, she died three or four years ago. But she became quite angry, and she said, “If this man Gorbachev is serious with this talk, Glasnost, Perestroika, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that Wall.” And I put that in my notebook. And I knew immediately, instantly, that if the President had heard that comment, if he'd been there, he would have responded to that. The simplicity, the decency, the power of it. And, of course, I also lunged at the line, the remark, because I was a 30 year old speechwriter in a lot of trouble. I just couldn't figure out what material, but when she said that I thought, “That's it. That's it. That's it.” So I went back to Washington and drafted a speech around this line, this idea. And Khatami, Griscom was the Director of Communications. He liked the speech. And Tony Dolan, the chief speechwriter, Tony Dolan, Tommy Griscom, and I, pulled a fast one, and persuaded the staff secretary to give the speech to the President on a Friday so he could review it that weekend at Camp David, on the ground that the President had a lot of speeches coming up, and he ought to be given a chance to get his reading in early. The invariable rule in the Reagan White House was that speeches went out to staffing before they went to the President. And we got this speech to the President first. And on the following Monday we had a meeting in the Oval Office, and we're talking about a number of speeches, Josh Gilder wrote a speech for the President to deliver to the Pope. And the President was alive. He had quite a lot of comments on that, more material he wanted to add. Then we got to my speech. And he said, “Well, that was a good draft. That's a fine speech.” I wanted more from him, we always wanted more from him. And so I said, “Mr. President, I learned when I was in West Berlin that they'll hear you on the other side of the Wall by radio, maybe even as far east, depending on weather conditions, as Moscow. Is there anything you'd like to say to the people on the Communist side of the Wall? And the President, this is one of those, I can still play this one in my mind. The President thought for a moment and he said, “Well, there's that passage about tearing down the Wall. That's what I want to say to them. That Wall has to come down.” And I was disappointed because we hadn't gotten fresh material. But that just shows what a fool I was. The speech went out to staffing. From the day it went out to staffing until the President delivered, which was about three weeks, the State Department opposed it, The National Security Council opposed it, the diplomat in Berlin opposed it. They submit draft after draft, as I recall, seven alternative drafts, different pretexts, but from each the line “tear down this Wall” was missing. Then the traveling party left for Italy, I was not part of the traveling party. So this piece, what I've told you so far is firsthand. Now I'm telling you what I heard by Tony Dolan told me the story and Ken Duberstein, the Deputy Chief of Staff. The State Department continues to object. Now they're in Italy. And Ken Duberstein decides he has no choice but to take the decision—it’s bad staffing if you have to make your principal make the same decision twice, right—so you try to resist that, that's a waste. The most precious resource in the federal government is the time of the President of the United States. But Ken decided he really had no choice. So he sat the President down in some Italian garden, he tells me, and described that the State Department said the speech was naive, it would raise false expectations, it would put Gorbachev in a tight position in the Politburo, and so forth. And he had the President reread the central passage, and then they talked about it for a while. And Ken said, and this moment came where the President got that—you guys are too young to remember this—twinkle in his eye.
And the President said, “Now, Ken I'm the President, aren't I?”
“Yes, sir. We're clear about that much.”
“So I get to decide if that line stays in?”
“Yes, sir. It is your decision.”
“Well, then it stays in.”
As Air Force One left Venice to fly to Berlin, the fax machine clicked into action and the State Department sent in another alternative draft. And Ken said, Ken was in the limousine on the way to the Wall in West Berlin with the President, who leaned over and slapped Ken on the knee and said, “The boys at State are going to kill me for this. But it's the right thing to do.” So, that's the story of that speech. You gave me credit for the speech, which in some superficial, narrow sense, I'm grateful. And thank you. It's true, but not deeply true. The deep truth is that that speech belonged to Ronald Reagan. I'd been formed by his thinking, by his speaking style. I was in Berlin to listen for material that would appeal to him. I wrote that speech for him. I worked for Vice President George HW Bush, I knew him well, he was a magnificent man. But I would never have written that for George Bush, and George Bush would never have delivered it. When I wrote speeches for him, when he was Vice President, you'd hand him a speech on foreign policy, he'd take it and say thank you. And then look at you without even looking at the speech, he’d look at you and say, “Now you've cleared this with State, right?” And Ronald Reagan didn't actually care too much what State had to say if he disagreed. So I would never have written it for anybody else. And nobody else would have delivered that speech. That speech belongs to Ronald Reagan.
Ed Kless
Well, thank you for that. It's a fantastic, marvelous story. And it is really the iconic line of Reagan's presidency, which is obviously pretty intense.
Peter Robinson
Now, see, I just gave Reagan credit, as is true. At the same time, Oh, if only I got royalties.
Ed Kless
I mean, the T-shirts alone. We’re a little bit over but I do want to ask you this question. Do you think that had the Berlin Wall not come down 2.5 years or so after [the speech], would it still have its place?
Peter Robinson
What, the speech?
Ed Kless
Yeah, that line.
Peter Robinson
Not a chance. Not a chance. When he gave that speech, it had a certain amount of impact. The Berlin press paid attention to it. It was interesting, because it was the kind of division that we've gotten used to during four years of Donald Trump. The highbrow press hated it. And the lowbrow populist press loved it. In Germany, as in this country, incidentally, The New York Times of course, huffed and puffed and denounced it. And the New York Post, as I recall, there were the more populist press in this country liked it, but it was, it was a big speech, but it was just a big speech. It disappeared after a couple of weeks. It was when the Wall came down, that the speech—I don't know how else to put it, it seemed retrospectively prophetic, if you see what I mean. That speech gets remembered because Ronald Reagan was right. He was right. You can't ease up on communism. You can't go part way, you have to take this Wall down. That's the interior dynamic of freedom. All right, so no, I don't think we would remember it at all if that Wall hadn't come down.
Ed Kless
All right, well, we are up against our next break.
Ron’s Questions: Segment Three
Well, welcome back, everybody. We're here with Peter Robinson. And Peter, what a great story. Wow, that was chilling. Just because, like we said, it's living history. I just want to ask you really quick, you went back to Berlin for the 15th anniversary of that speech and did a Fox documentary, I believe, with Tony Snow. And then they recreated that dinner party that you had? What was it like to see East Berlin at that point?
Peter Robinson
Of course it was good to see the people who had helped me, and in particular, Ingeborg Elts, we went back to their house, it was very good to see them. Tony Snow, the late Tony Snow, what a sweet man, and a good journalist, I do miss him, too. Tony said, “Come on. Let's go.” We finished shooting at one point, and he had been back several times. I had never been back. So what you had in my mind was this vivid image, it's still vivid. To me this is a problem. Even young Germans don't, it's almost impossible to explain what it felt like to be in West Berlin, a modern city, lights, traffic, action, people well dressed, with a wall all the way around. You could forget about it for a moment and then you'd be walking down the street, you turn and at the end of that alley, there would be a wall. All right. So Tony, and Tony had been there before. And we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, which 15 years before had been walled off. It had been on the other side of the wall. And we walked up Unter den Linden, “under the linden trees,” which you can think of it as a German version of the Champs Elysées, or the Mall in London. It was the central historic thoroughfare of Berlin, with great historic buildings, which now had been restored. It was so thrilling. I'd seen them only from a distance and they were crumbling. Now they've been restored. And Tony, Tony knew his Berlin history. And we went to, as I recall, it was the headquarters, it was either the old Soviet embassy—the Soviet Union no longer existed—or it was the headquarters of the East German Communist Party, it was some commie building. And we got there, and it was a Rolls Royce dealership. I thought that was almost too much of a triumph for capitalism, but it was just so thrilling to be in this place that had been walled off and dark. And honestly, this sounds so, I don't know, corny or hokey, but when I was there in 1987, when I looked at, stood on the observation deck, and looked into East Berlin, the only thing I can compare it to, with regard to what it may feel like was, it was as if I were Frodo getting my first glimpse into Mordor. It just felt dark. It almost felt as if there was a kind of malign presence there. It was an evil empire, to coin a term, it really did feel that way. And it was gone. It was gone.
Ron Baker
It reminds me of what Nixon said about communism. He said, “The color of communism is not red, it's gray.” Speaking of the Rolls Royce dealership, there's a communist Museum in Prague. And it tells the whole story, and it's above a McDonald's. So beautiful blending of capitalism and communism.
Peter Robinson
Oh, and there was a moment, this has got to be available online someplace. But there's a moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the fall of the Soviet Union. I think it was the back page of some expensive advertising site. I think it was the whole back page of Vanity Fair. And there's Gorbachev in the back of a limousine with a fancy suitcase or briefcase and it's an ad for Louis Vuitton. The last General Secretary of the Soviet Union with a Louis Vuitton briefcase.
Ron Baker
Didn't he sell his birthmark to a vodka distributor? It cracked me up. On Gorbachev, I wanted to ask you this, because in the book you cite an interview that he did. And he said, he was speaking of Ronald Reagan: “He was an authentic person and a great person. If someone else had been in this place, I don't know if what happened would have happened.” Did Reagan win the Cold War? I mean, Gorbachev gets a lot of credit from the left. Where do you come down.
Peter Robinson
Here's where I come down. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, the contingency of history. Had someone other than Reagan, or just click through the people who might have been President in place of Reagan. Suppose Jimmy Carter had won. Suppose Bob Dole, or Howard Baker, or George HW Bush been President, had defeated Reagan in the Republican primary. I can't project from what we know about any of those men, that they would have stood up to the Soviets, and taken the heat for increasing the defense budget, cutting taxes to revive this economy, putting the Pershing missiles in place in 1983, delivering speech after speech after speech that sounded like trumpet blasts. Would any of them have done that? I can't believe it. I don't think they would have. Did Reagan win the Cold War by himself? You cannot describe the end of the Cold War without [Pope] John Paul II, or Margaret Thatcher, or indeed Mikhail Gorbachev. I think I might also add Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. But I do think you can say there were ten people without whom things would have been different. No Margaret Thatcher fracturing of the NATO coalition. No Ronald Reagan continuation of detente. No John Paul II, no demonstration of the illegitimacy of communism in Eastern Europe, even three decades after imposing communist regimes. No Gorbachev, it might not have ended peacefully. I wonder, I keep going back and forth, not that anybody cares about it at this stage, But how much credit does Gorbachev deserve? When really what everybody hails him for doing is behaving like a decent human being. And not calling the troops, the Red Army out of the barracks in Eastern Europe. Now, they did call out the Red Army in 1956 and put down the Hungarian uprising, they did it again, the tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. And Gorbachev could have done it. The Red Army had a massive presence throughout Eastern Europe, he could have crushed the revolutions of 1989. And he didn't. Well, alright, we should be grateful to him for that, I suppose. But what he did do is behave like a decent human being. He behaved like someone other than a communist, other than a doctrinaire communist. In any event, without Gorbachev it's hard…if Andropov had not died when he did, if Chernenko or Brezhnev were still alive, this would not have ended peacefully.
Ron Baker
And of course, Gorbachev wanted to save communism. I mean, he was a diehard believer.
Peter Robinson
Correct. He was. The way I think of it is that Gorbachev was the last true believer, he was the last real communist. And in some ways, he was a bit of a throwback. Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov, they all understood the need for the iron fist. Gorbachev was kind of strangely naive, he believed that communism itself was so appealing, that people would choose communism, even if you remove the iron fist. And of course that's nonsense. Nonsense.
Ron Baker
Awesome. Well, Peter, I've only got about a minute with you, but you wrote a book called Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA about your time at Stanford, published in 1994. As a CPA, I get a lot of questions about “Should I get a CPA or an MBA?” First thing I do is say, go get this book. I've recommended this book to so many people, I think we've both prevented a lot of MBAs as a result. You write at the end of that book: “The reader will have to check in with me again in twenty or so years to learn how my classmates and I stand.” It's been 26 years. Do you regret going to Stanford to get an MBA? Or was it a worthwhile experience?
Peter Robinson
I have by last count, I have five classmates who are billionaires. And what I regret is not having gotten to know them much, much better as undergraduates. My business degree didn't really take, and yet at the same time, do I regret it? Actually, I don't regret it. You know, it's impossible to undo bits of your life. And here I made good friends. I made friends who are still my friends during that crazy MBA experience. An MBA is only useful for particular kinds of people. And I'm not sure I was one of those kinds of people. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure I wasn't.
Ron Baker
Is that what landed you at Hoover Institution? That you were out there and made connections?
Peter Robinson
Yes, Ronald Reagan said to me, when I was leaving the White House, in my little farewell meeting, he said, “Now, where are you going?” And I told him, “Stanford Business School.” And he said, “Well, the faculty out there is a little left-leaning. But you get in touch with my friend, Milton Friedman. And so I show up at Stanford Business School, Milton Friedman was across the street at the Hoover Institution, and I thought, how many times am I going to get an introduction from a President to a Nobel Prize winner? So I did present myself to Milton Friedman, who—I don't know if you ever knew him—he was a delight. He could be quite rough on you if he thought you were mistaken intellectually. But he was a delightful, warm, generous, wonderful man. And he kind of introduced me around Hoover. So later, I was invited to return to Hoover. I suppose that's the advantage of my MBA, that I happen to run into people across the street. I got to know people across the street at Hoover.
Ron Baker
I met MIlton and his wife, Rose, once at a speech they gave, and we've had his son on, David Friedman, he was a delight. But unfortunately, Peter, I'm out of time and if I go anymore, Ed's going to kill me.
Ed’s Questions: Segment Four
And we are back on The Soul of Enterprise with Peter Robinson. And Peter, it's not often that I get chills doing this show. It has happened on a couple of occasions. But your story is certainly one of them. But one of the times when I've got chills listening to one of your shows on Uncommon Knowledge was your more recent interview with Jimmy Lai. Our listeners have heard Ron and I talk about Jimmy and his experiences, and coming to Hong Kong when he was a boy and getting a bar of chocolate and it changing his life completely. What are your thoughts on the situation, both with Jimmy specifically, but also with what's going on with Hong Kong? And what maybe the US should do about it?
Peter Robinson
Yeah. You guys can put a link up to the show, perhaps the most recent interview I did with him. So Jimmy Lai is a great figure. He is. I had to have had the feeling when I was talking to him, that in one way or another, he's the kind of man that George Washington must have been. I'm talking about a Chinese man, of course, who speaks heavily accented English. I don't mean that he had the bearing of Washington. I mean he had the courage of Washington, or St. Thomas Moore, a similar kind of person. So Jimmy Lai, a billionaire, and he has British citizenship. And he won't leave Hong Kong. He just said, “This city means everything to me, it gave me the life that I have. I'm not leaving.” When all his, I shouldn't say all his friends, but I know many of his American friends, and they're just desperate for him to get out of there. Which would be easy for him to do. He's one of these rich Chinese who has houses in other places. He will not leave. And so in the last interview, which I did this past summer, I said, “Well, Jimmy, what? They've detained you a couple of times already, this is not going well.” And he said, and he referred to his faith—he’s a convert to Catholicism, so he's a Christian—and he said, “Well, it could be that this is what is. This is what I need for the good of my soul. Maybe I need to go to prison. Maybe I need to suffer for the good of my soul.” Unbelievable for a man to say that. And now of course they've carted him off. He is in prison. What do I think about Hong Kong? I don't know what kind of trades or sanctions might be useful. I was persuaded by Jimmy, whom I interviewed maybe a year ago, and then I interviewed him again this past summer. But a year ago, he made the argument that the mainland Chinese, the communist Chinese, were going to leave Hong Kong alone because they needed it too badly. Something like 60% of foreign investment flowing into China flows through Hong Kong, because investors from Europe and this country want to be able to understand that they've got the rule of law on their side, they'll be able to remove their profits, and so forth. And so the Chinese need Hong Kong, and they'll be very careful, any moves will be incremental. And that was just wrong. I don't believe the analysis was incorrect. As far as I can tell, the Chinese are going to damage themselves. But the horrible power dynamic that seems to power communism, and it seems to be driving them, they can't take dissent. They can't handle that. They can't handle the truth. They can't permit the truth. So I just remember that I did an interview with Nathan Sharansky, who was a refusenik in the Soviet Union. And why did the Soviets, that he said he tried until he was 20, or 21, to be a good Soviet citizen. And here's what it meant. It meant that you said what you knew they wanted to hear. You read the books that they permitted you to read, you lead your life the way you knew they wanted you to lead your life. And at the same time, you knew that it was all a lie. So the question is, why do they insist on this? And the answer is because they need a humiliated, broken population. And the Chinese seem to have fallen into the same, so this to me, one thing that we're finding out here—you might want at some point, you might want to invite Stephen Kotkin on the show, Stephen Kotkin is the Princeton historian. He's working on the third and final volume of what will surely be the definitive biography of Stalin. Stephen came out here to Berkeley, and he began visiting the Hoover Institution as a young graduate student. So we're talking about a man who's 60ish now. So for four decades Stephen has been poring over the archives of the Soviet Union and communist documents, at Hoover and other places, it started at Hoover. He probably knows more, and has read more archives, meetings, notes on meetings from the Politburo and and so forth, than any person alive, including Russians. And I once said to him, “Stephen, what's the central finding? What's the one thing that you learn from poring over those archives?” and Steven replied immediately, “That they were communists. They were communists, they really believed it. And even when they had nothing to prove to each other, even when they were in private conversation with each other, the members of the Politburo talk like communists, they used Marxist-Leninist terms, they use that kind of analysis.” And as far as I can tell, for some years now, we in the United States have permitted ourselves to believe that the people running China aren't really communists, they don't really believe that stuff. What they believe in is markets and economic growth. And what that means is that eventually they'll move in our direction politically as well. They'll permit greater political freedoms. They're communists, that's what we're finding out now. They really are communists.
Ed Kless
One minute left, and a totally unfair question to wrap it up. What would Reagan do?
Peter Robinson
Tell the truth. He would tell the truth. I think that's what I'm struck by every speech you give. Someone said, well, did the Berlin Wall speech make any difference? The answer is, I don't know. It's really hard to say. But think of a speech that we know is a great speech. Take the Gettysburg Address. Did it make any difference? Beats me, you can't prove it, right? You can't say GDP ticked up, you can't prove it. Every speech, even big speeches, it's a message in a bottle. You give a speech, and you hope that human beings hear it and respond in some way. And so what I learned from Ronald Reagan is that even when you're President of the United States, and you seem to command the attention of all the media, giving a speech is an act of faith. It's an act of hope. And in dealing with the Soviets in those days, you just didn't. But he did it all the same he, and John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher, you tell the truth. Why? Because it's the truth. And so that's what Reagan would do. He would tell the Chinese what they were like, he would tell them what they were.
Ed Kless
Peter Robinson, thank you so much for appearing on The Soul of Enterprise. We hope you come back. I got through like only a short portion of the questions that I wanted to ask you. Thanks so much.
Bonus Content is Available As Well
Did you know that each week after our live show, Ron and Ed take to the microphone for a bonus show? Typically, this bonus show is an extension of the live show topic (sometimes even with the same guest) and a few other pieces of news, current events, or things that have caught our attention.
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This week was Bonus episode 320 - “Post-Peter, ACO Merch, and Fascism”. Here are some of the links we discussed:
