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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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Antonia Novello
Former Surgeon General of the United States
I always remembered coming down a stairway once when I got an "A" in Spanish 12 by a teacher who never had given an "A" to anyone. And, as I came down through the steps running to tell my peers, which were five, they were talking without them knowing that I was listening, and they said, "I bet you that Tonia is going to have an 'A' because (her mother) Miss Flores talked to Mr. Hernandez." That really put it into the perspective. That was junior year. It only motivated me to be better. So, what I did is I studied so hard from there on that I took the entry examination to college in my junior year rather than my senior year, with the hope that, if I failed, I still had one year to catch up. And, to my surprise, I was the highest grade in the school.
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Antonia Novello
Former Surgeon General of the United States
When the call came, I said, "But I am not interested. I'm not looking for a job." He said, "Well, the Secretary of Health will call you, and you have an appointment on Monday." Grudgingly, I went and I thought I knew the agency, so I took the budget, the people who work in it, the mission, and I read it over the weekend because, I was going to tell him no. But the thing that I learned, too -- even when you say no, be prepared for them to want you because you're good.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
Later on, when I was trying to justify having an academic education, and wanting to apply the performance gift, whatever it was -- then I did study. I did think very carefully about the role of the director. I read a great deal of director's memoirs. I read a book by Tyrone Guthrie that hugely influenced me, inspired me. And, I have done ever since because I really enjoy discovering how other people deal with the contradictions. The thing is, there is very little formal training for being a theatre director. There's a little bit more for being a movie director. There are film schools. Most theatre studies places don't actually accommodate directors or have a program for them. Certainly not in England they don't. In a way, I sympathize with that because there is something unteachable about it. Really, what you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to anything. It's to do with listening. It's to do with humility and a sense of yourself.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
The first theater that I went to was a vaudeville house, and the great experience was hearing the band striking up. I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera. I've never wanted to categorize them, or to feel that they should be done by different people, different specialists. I've never believed in that. So, when I was at university, I suppose this was expressed through the fact that there were two famous societies at Cambridge. One of them was called the Marlowe Society that did all the classical plays. And the other was called the Footlights, and they did the musicals and the revues. And in my last term at Cambridge I did both productions. I did the Marlowe Society and the Footlights. I directed both of them.
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