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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
I am better now, as an astronaut in my 60s, than in my 40s because it's a very complex business in which experience and perspective play a lot. You tend to scope out. You tend to know ahead of time what you're going to have to learn to get that job done. It's not a stick and rudder, it is not an instinctually reflective thing. You don't just jump on things, you've got to study them. And it's a very complex business in which experience counts. I create a lot of hope for people because they see, in fact, that not only am I better in my 60s, but I'm having more fun. They see a richer life. And so, I'm even amazed myself. I'm even amazed, too, that life is so much better in my 60s than my 20s.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
Ralph Nader: Yes. Citizenship requires skills like any other occupation or profession, and it's good to learn on the job. You can read about citizen movements, the farmer, Populist, Progressive movements at the turn of the century, and the Civil Rights movement. But, it's good to learn it by doing. And, you get better every year you get better. You know how to develop strategies and coalitions and how to get the attention of the media and how to use the levers of action, and how to be perfectly willing to generate controversy which gets people thinking.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Ambassador Dobrynin, who was the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, had gone off to India to meet with the new Indian prime minister. And in the course of his discussions there, he had said, "This meeting in Reykjavik is going to be a much more important meeting than the world has realized today. When Mr. Gorbachev arrives there, he is going to make really very substantial concessions to the American side, and the Americans will overestimate those concessions and they will demand more, and then we will turn the tables on them. We will then hold them up to public scorn around the world for having blocked the chances for real progress." When we heard this report of what Dobrynin had told the Indians, then the question was, well what should we do? Should we call the meeting off? Because earlier, the Soviets had told us this was going to be a very pro forma meeting, not going to discuss anything much, it was only going to talk about INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) and about nothing else. So this meeting should be called off, or should we go forward with it? My recommendation, we should go forward with it. We should await Mr. Gorbachev's marvelous concessions. We should then say we take all those concessions, but we shouldn't give anything more. Therefore we should come out winning without cost out of these negotiations.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
When I was a senior at college I became ill with infectious jaundice and was very ill and couldn't go to graduate school. The fact that I went straight into business and learned something about accounting and running an office early in life, when you can really absorb it fast, turned out to be very fortunate indeed. I've never regretted not having gone straight to graduate school, thereafter. Having entered Wall Street just days before the Great Depression, I lost my shirt right away of course, as far as assets in hand. Boy, that was great experience, to live through all of the disasters that can befall one in the economic world, and see it happen to others. How do you weave through those kinds of economic difficulties? Learned there is an invaluable lesson in learning how to deal with complicated financial problems. So, those of us who had jobs during the Great Depression, I think we learned more and learned it faster than one could have learned otherwise. So that generation of Wall Street fellows, we all ended up knowing something about not just economics in practice, but world finance as well.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Paul Nitze: Mr. Clarence Dillon, who was my first real boss on Wall Street, was the most brilliant man I've ever worked with or for. I think he had an extremely intelligent mind, and I learned a great deal about analyzing situations. Well, the main lesson that I learned from him was that there was a contrast between analyzing a situation, and then doing something about it. Those were two different worlds. When you are analyzing something, you want to be coldly objective. You want to try to find the facts, find everybody's advice about it. Look at it without prior bias of any kind. But, then once you'd made up your mind, what needed to be done, then you wanted to change your personality. You didn't want to be disturbed by re-thinking it, you wanted to act. And, you want to act decisively, and produce the intended result without deviation, and only if you got way off, if it turned out that you were way wrong, did you want to reconsider what you had made your decision on.
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