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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
J. Carter Brown: Oh, I was hopeless. I was very unathletic, and when I was in school I was two years younger than everybody in my class, so I got beaten up all the time, and I got laughed at for being interested in studying and doing stupid things like that. And, it's been so rewarding. I'm going to my 50th anniversary of my high school, and so rewarding that now they feel I'm the guy that sort of "made it" in the class, having been the Class Joke. Never completely "joke," because I was president of the Dramatic Society, and I did manage to graduate first in my class, but that wasn't the value system of that particular group of boys. They had an undefeated football season. They were really good at athletics, and the atmosphere at school was pretty anti-intellectual in those days.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
Talking of ocean racing, one of the best lessons I learned was the concept of the rhumb line, R-H-U-M-B. You lay down a course from Newport to Bermuda, and that's your rhumb line. And then for some reason, you get blown off course. And, a lot of people make the mistake of saying, "Oh, we've got to get back to the rhumb line." There's a new rhumb line. It's from where you are to where you're going. And, it's so important to be able to pick up and forget all that and say, "Okay, play it where it lays." This is the new situation.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
I've gone on, stayed on under my other hat as Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission. And boy, did we get it at the time of the Vietnam Memorial! I mean, I had Ross Perot in my office pounding the table! I knew that he'd sent in operatives to Iran. I didn't know what was going to happen to me. He wanted it his way. And, there was great brouhaha about that. Now, we have brouhaha about the World War II memorial. And, as of just a couple of days ago, that's all been ripped open again, and we've got to go to through more of these hearings where a small dissident group has ginned up a lot of complaint. And basically, it's a resistance to change. There's a nostalgia about the way things were, everybody thinks they were always that way. They forget that the Mall is a 20th century concept, and the Jefferson Memorial also had people lying down in front of bulldozers. But, it was built in 1941, and we have added and changed the Mall continuously, and this is only going to enhance the great design of the vista between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. And yet people just want to keep everything the way it is. And fine, sometimes it's better the way it is. But, we feel that this little Fine Arts Commission -- which are chosen to have some kind of credentials in the visual world -- has a lot of experience in visualizing what something's going to be. And, we think it's going to be okay.
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Willie Brown
Former Mayor of San Francisco
The thing that I marvel about in my situation is that by all rights I should really hate white people for the kind of treatment that I received. But there, at this stage of my life, and probably for the last 40 years, I can't even conjure up how horrible it really was. So there's no way for me really to describe it. And I carry no residual displeasures towards any race of people. I think the experience that I had there made me a more tolerant person than I ordinarily would have been.
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Willie Brown
Former Mayor of San Francisco
It got so bad that I wouldn't read the Sunday paper, because there was always a front page story about Willie Brown, with a box showing how he voted 30 years ago, etc., etc., etc. And some of that stuff should stick to you, but I had determined at the outset of my campaign that I was going to shake the hands of every voter in San Francisco. That I was going to look every voter in the eye in San Francisco. And that I was going to market Willie Brown directly to the voter, thereby shielding any definition that anyone else would attempt to impose upon me. And I did that, it stood me in great stead. And I still don't read the Sunday paper.
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George H.W. Bush
41st President of the United States
You have to have a really thick skin, you've got to turn the other cheek. You've got to try to do what your little kids in high schools do, make friends, and go the extra mile to see that the critic knows where you're coming from. But it can be ugly. There's a pack mentality today. And one hound gets out in front and the rest of the pack are baying at the heels of whoever it is that's being pursued. That's not a good thing. And so, what do you do when you're under fire? Try to tell the truth. Try to give it your best shot. Don't take it too personally, and get on with your life.
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George H.W. Bush
41st President of the United States
I'll give you a personal example. It was alleged that I was out of touch. "Bush is a President that's out of touch. He came from a privileged background, doesn't understand the hurt around this country." I went down to see a technology show and one of the items in the show was a brand new technology for check-out counters. It showed a machine that had never been invented before and, if my recollection is correct, wasn't even on the market at this point. The guy brought in a crumpled milk carton and ran it across this scanner and it did something that no other scanner could possibly do. I made some comment. "Amazing, this is a wonderful thing." And the people that produced this were saying, "This is the state-of-the-art, and we've got more to come." It was wonderful. A lazy little journalist with a famous name working for The New York Times, the son of a decent and honorable father, but a lazy little journalist, was sitting in another room. He didn't see this. He wrote that, "Here is Bush, he's out of touch. He saw a scanner. He didn't even know that at supermarkets you can scan something." It played right into the hands of the press that wanted to show I was out of touch and it was picked up. We pointed out to the press afterwards that, one, the guy wasn't there; two, this was brand new technology. CBS, not my favorite, came and defended me. Another one of the wire service reporters said that I got a bum rap, but the people don't remember that. What they remember is that I was out of touch, that I didn't even know what a grocery scanner was. You can't fight back against that kind of thing. You can do a better job in communicating. I plead guilty to not being the world's greatest communicator. But that was a myth, that was a lie, that was bad for me. And yet it lives on, people remember it. The fact that Bush was out of touch, he didn't even know there was a grocery counter scanner. Now, what's the equity, what's the fairness in that kind of reporting, that kind of cynical attack? But the answer is, you can't let them get you down, you've got to keep on trying to do your best.
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