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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
So, I went back and talked this over with Teller, and he said, "Well, you ought to talk to Dr. Lawrence of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory because he's the one who's really done more work with young scientists in this field than anybody else3. So he'll tell you all about what makes those fellows work, how this business runs." So, I got hold of Lawrence and he came over, flew to Washington and saw me. He said, "One thing I will guarantee you and that is the - Oppenheimer's point - that because of the practice of the American scientists to publish, that this will make a difference." He said, "Nobody in this field today is worth a damn who's older than 27. Most of the people who are producing the new ideas in the field of nuclear reactions are 19, 20, 21, up to 27. But, I don't know of any new and brilliant person older than that in this field. All these people that are working for me and others, they're all working on classified projects. They can't publish in any case. What makes them tick? What makes them tick is the thrill of feeling that you are breaking through the frontiers of knowledge. The satisfaction of working on new things where you are really at the front end of exploration, and they do value the respect of your peers. But, you don't need to publish for your peers to know what you're doing. The same is undoubtedly true in the Soviet Union. Their scientist, just like our scientists don't publish. They are not permitted to publish. But, they don't need that. They work in the same way our scientists are."
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
When I started to work for him (Reagan), I came to the conclusion this was really a man who deeply felt the things that he believed in and that he really deeply believed in the superiority of a liberal democratic system to a totalitarian system and that this was an unmovable and unshakable belief which he could radiate. After the last summit meeting that we had in Moscow, he then went on to the Pilgrim Society in London and delivered himself a speech about the superiority of the liberal system to the totalitarian system, which was a brilliant job. He had a good speech writer. A fellow by the name of Tony Doyle wrote that for him. But in any case, he delivered it well and all the sentiments were right, and Tony Doyle, sure, had written the speech, but he'd followed the instructions from the President. And he won that intellectual battle, that battle for the mind of the world, as to which system really was the system of the future. That of the liberal democracies or that of the totalitarian Marxist-Leninism, and he won that battle hands down. So, any man who is that effective at winning the major battle, the battle of ideology -- more than ideology. He won that hands down, and therefore I ended up with great admiration for President Reagan.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
Sir Trevor Nunn: I think I was seven-years-old. I was taken to a place called the Ipswich Hippodrome. "Hippodrome" is a word that means a stadium where horses are going to be on view, but lots of vaudeville theaters were called hippodromes. I was very excited that at last I was being taken to a theater. I had no idea what the inside of a theater would look like. Even in this area - it was just a kind of vaudeville house - there was this feeling of red velvet cushions. Probably it wasn't velvet; I don't know what the material was, but some feeling of plushness that I found very exciting. As we sat there, I heard an orchestra tuning up for the first time. I say an orchestra -- it was probably six musicians, eight musicians, I don't know -- but I heard violins -- an E being struck, and a clarinet being played. And then, the overture, and I have never forgotten that completely visceral excitement. That -- butterflies in the stomach and a show is about to begin. I can't remember much else about the show, except that there was a woman in it who had a very shiny black skirt and it was split right up to the waist. That image remains. I would imagine, therefore, that I was being taken to a show that was pretty inappropriate for a seven year-old. Heaven knows what kind of blue jokes were coming down from that stage! But, it was an indelible thrill.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
The conditions of theater, particularly of classical theater, should be improved to the point where it's the seat price that can be lowered, where the working conditions are such that the standards are higher, and therefore it lets you down less often. Because when it works, when it really works, then it can change your life for good and all. There are things that can happen to you in a theater, things which can be to do with performance, to do with understanding elements of the human condition, which can be to do with ideas, can be to do with uncomfortable ideas, abrasive ideas, revolutionary ideas. But, there are things that can change you more extremely and stay with you longer because of that live visceral contact. I worry that we are possibly, towards the end of something. Rather than still flourishing right in the middle of something. I sense that we needn't be near the end of something. I sense that there's a wonderful ecological balance to be achieved between live things and mechanical things, between the indelible visceral things and the library of things that you can go back to and check out many times over. There's a balance that will ultimately be the best thing for the species. Just this morning we were cheering to Nobel Prize winning chemists who had warned us all about what we were doing to the environment, what we were doing to the ozone layer. When we get too rarefied with scientific advance, when we rely upon scientific advance that takes us further and further away from our basic human condition and we get it wrong, we have to keep coming back to our basic human condition. The basic condition of the theater actually requires no technology. All it requires is that fire last night and those costumes and the human voice and people gathered together. That's all that's required for something to happen that is life changing. Of course, there are countless sophistications of it. Keeping the two things is what's going to make entertainment, and expression, and communication so much more rich in the next century, in the next millennium.
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