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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
Starting as a three year-old on a dairy farm, a thousand-acre dairy farm, nature became my world. Even as a three year-old I could go out in the forest and, at seven, eight o'clock at night, dark, and I was totally at home in the fields, the woods, the rivers from the earliest age, that became my world. Lying in a damp, cool, freshly plowed field, just after a sunset and looking out into the heavens, that became my world.
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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
Space takes almost a new language. It's a new place. We created and evolved here on earth. We're earth-based creatures, and the magic of what goes on when you take humanity out there, it's going to take a new language to do it. And poetry has some tools in it which will, as music does, directly do you. You don't have to intellectualize music. You listen to music and it works on you and you get it. So it's a direct communication. And so, I think, a way of bringing space to people, that poetry will work.
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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
Story Musgrave: For me, life is 99 percent a spiritual quest. And it started in childhood with myself and nature, and the universe. And finding truth, finding serenity, finding myself by being immersed and embracing the whole thing that is part of us, that has created us, evolved us, that we are part of. Space flight has allowed me to extend that into unbelievable kinds of realms in which you see a third of the earth, in which you see entire continents, and you see patterns. And you come over the Near East and you see, framed in the space ship window, all of the civilizations, the old civilizations. And you see nature at work, and great, huge lines of volcanoes, from the tip of South America, all the way up through the Aleutians and Alaska.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
Ralph Nader: I grew up thinking one person can change things. Where did I get that idea? First from my parents, and second from reading American history. So many of the major steps forward in our society's progress started with just a handful of people. The abolitionist movement against slavery, the women's right to vote movement started with six women in an upstate New York farm house where they met in 1846. The Civil Rights movement. Environmental rights. Worker rights. The whole labor movement. If you grow up in a mass society and think that nothing can be done unless you have masses of people who all agree all at once to start doing something, then you are not going to count yourself as very significant. You are not going to think that you can begin a thoughtful strategy to change things for the better.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
So, I am seeing more and more institutionalized lawlessness, where about the only bounds on government behavior is public relations. The more they think they can fool the people and get away with it, even those boundaries are limited. And, if the press is concentrated in a few media conglomerates, and there is not much diversity and they have a cushy relationship with their government officials because the government officials will give them stories from time to time, then another boundary against government lawlessness deteriorates. We have got a great future if we wake up to it in this country. And, anybody who starts out in this country who thinks that they can't be a leader ought to think again. There has never been a greater demand for leadership, in all areas: media, education, churches, government, business, you name it. There is no long waiting list to be a leader in this country.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
My father was a professor of French literature and languages and was a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago, a most distinguished faculty. But, I watched what they were able to do during World War I and they were ineffective. No one really listened to them. And, it seemed to me that the things that were going on in the world were dangerous, weren't being handled right, and I would like to be involved in trying to do better than my father and his friends were able to do. And, I thought one needed to go into something different than academia in order to be effective in world affairs.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
We were in pretty good economic shape, very good economic shape. The problem was that one country after another was going bankrupt because they were spending their gold and dollar reserves, and wanted to buy things from the United States. So we were running a persistent balance and payment surplus with the rest of the world of some $5 to $8 billion per year. And, you could see that over a few years, why the gold and dollar reserves of all the rest of the world would go down to close to zero and trade would stop. And therefore, something had to be done, and had to be done by us in order to limit this drain upon the rest of the world. And, I guess I was the first one to prepare a piece of paper arguing this point and saying we needed to have a plan which would pump something of the order of $5 billion per year into the world economy, over and above what it would earn through sales to the United States.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Paul Nitze: For the last forty years (1950-1990), the backbone of U.S. foreign and defense policy has been containment of the Soviet Union, containment of Soviet expansionism, while building a better world amongst the free nations. And, those two were intimately linked. You had to construct the positive end of our policy was constructing a world order of some kind for those who wanted to participate in it. While doing that, you had to defend it against those who were trying to destroy it, particularly the Communists and their allies. That we have done, and the surprising thing is the persistence with which the American people have backed that policy over 40 years. Nobody thought they could do it and that the American people would have that degree of persistence. Certainly neither George Kennan nor I anticipated that it would take that long. George thought it might take ten to 15 years, I thought it would take one to two generations for containment to bring the Soviets to a realization that they ought to change the focus of what they were about. And, it took twice that long, at least. But, now that they have changed their focus, what does that do? What is the substitute for containment as the backbone of our foreign policy? We should have such a new line of foreign policy. I believe that it ought to be the promotion of both diversity and order. Diversity within an order established by the organs of the UN, the regional organizations. We ought to back them on the order part of it, and we ought to promote greater diversity amongst the various parts that don't threaten the structure as a whole.
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