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Daniel Goldin
Space Exploration
My first boss, Bill Mickelson -- a little short fellow, crew cut, wore a fresh bow tie every day -- and he saw that I was insecure. He saw that I understood how to do the work, but I needed to become more of a complete person. So, he asked me to talk, do public speaking, every single week. He wanted me to talk to a tour group coming through NASA. And this is the '60s; people were fascinated with the space program. And I said, "I can't do that." He said, "Oh yes you are." I mean it was tough love. And, I got in front of my first groups. I got tongue tied and humiliated. And he'd send me back and I'd have problems. I said, "Bill, I can't do this anymore." He'd send me back. I said, "Bill, I can't." "Go back." I did this for two years.
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Daniel Goldin
Space Exploration
We fixed the Hubble Space Telescope. It was nearsighted just like me. It needed a contact lens. And, there was terrible depression at NASA because we launched it and it didn't work. Bad people didn't do that. The space frontier is fraught with problems. But we put a team together and good people fixed it. The same people that designed it, fixed it. We launched a probe to Mars and it blew up when it got to Mars. Within 24 hours, we conceived that we're going to put a lander on Mars and do it in three years for a quarter of the cost, and we did it.
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Alberto Gonzales
Former Attorney General of the United States
My father had a terrible drinking problem. He was an alcoholic, and there were many nights when I remember him coming home and, you know, severe arguments with my mother and throwing the pillow over my head and just trying to not listen to all of that. I mean, unfortunately, those happened way too often. But one story I do like to tell about my father is, no matter how much he drank on a particular night, if it was a work day the next morning, he was always up and he was always gone to provide for his family, so I learned that lesson very early on. But, you know, in that respect, I mean there were some difficult times in my family.
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Alberto Gonzales
Former Attorney General of the United States
The (Air Force) Academy was tough for me because there's such a concentration on engineering and physics and chemistry, and my strengths lie in English and history and political science and law and government. And so I did well in terms of being on the dean's list every semester, but I struggled. It was hard. I had to work very, very hard. I was the freshman class council president, and so I assumed responsibility early while I was at the Academy. Because I did as well as I did, I was able to participate in a gliding program during one summer, so I learned how to fly gliders. I mean it was a great experience.
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Jane Goodall
The Great Conservationist
My mother was amazing, and she kept camp. I think she played two really important roles. One, she boosted my morale, because in those early days the chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me. They'd never seen a white ape before. They're very conservative. They would vanish. And she would say, in the evening when I was a bit despondent, "But think what you are learning. What they're feeding on. The kind of sized groups they travel in. How they make beds at night, bending down the branches " all the things I'd seen through my binoculars. And so she boosted my morale. And then, secondly, she started a little clinic. She wasn't a doctor or a nurse, but my whole family was very medical. Her brother had given her masses of simple aspirins and bandages and things like that. So she would treat the fishermen who had camped along the lake shore. And because she would spend hours with them, doing a saline drip on the tropical ulcer, she became known as a white witch doctor. And she established, for me and all my students, this great relationship with all the local people.
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Jane Goodall
The Great Conservationist
My mother flew out to join me and we drove from Nairobi all the way to Kigoma in a short wheel base Land Rover, horribly overloaded, driven by the botanist from the museum in Nairobi. It was an amazing kind of a journey. It took three days. And when we arrived in Kigoma, it was to find that the Congo had erupted and all the refugees were coming over the lake from what was then the Belgian Congo. Then it became Zaire. Now it's the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC. But anyway, they were coming over Lake Tanganyika and everything was in chaos. I wasn't allowed to go straight off to the Gombe National Park. Instead, we were stuck in Kigoma helping to feed refugees, and finally we got the permission to go.
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