Mitt Romney's Soul Searching with McKay Coppins

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • McKay Coppins on Romney’s Political Soul Searching

  • Jane Ferguson for the Pantsuit Politics Premium Book Club

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EPISODE RESOURCES

ROMNEY: A RECKONING

JANE FERGUSON FOR THE PREMIUM BOOK CLUB

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TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:09] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:10] And this is Beth Silvers. Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude 

[00:00:34] Hi, it's Beth, and I am so glad you're here with us today. I am thrilled to be sharing a conversation with McKay Coppins with you. McKay is a staff writer at The Atlantic and The New York Times bestselling author of Romney: A Reckoning. You know that I have been obsessed with this book since I read it back in October, and I loved this conversation. Before we jump into it, let me remind you that if you're still working on your holiday gifting, we can help. We have lots of fun Pantsuit Politics merchandise on our website. You can grab something for yourself or the friend that you always text with about the episodes. You can get some Best Holiday Available To You wrapping paper to ensure the whole holiday has a little Pantsuit Politics flair to it. If you use the wrapping paper, please tag us on social media and show us we would love to see it. It'd be a present to us. Okay. McKay Coppins book has been everywhere this Fall, and it has been on my mind for a ton of reasons. Mostly, I think, because it's a book about soul searching. The longer Sarah and I make Pantsuit Politics, the more I would describe it as a podcast about political soul searching. Sarah and I are trying to practice all week, every week, how can we test our beliefs? How can we challenge our assumptions? How can we ask what we've rationalized in the past and how we feel about that rationalization? Can we try to see more clearly what we might be rationalizing today? But that process is different for every person, and the stakes are different for every person.  

[00:01:56] So Mitt Romney's soul searching process has taken place in a very high stakes way for him, for his family, for the country. I wanted to talk with McKay about Mitt Romney, not because I think he's a hero or a villain. I love this book because it showed the senator for all of his success and notoriety and wealth as just a person, a person who holds grudges, watches TV, puts salmon on hamburger buns with ketchup, loves his wife, worries about what people think of him. He is also a person who's recently engaged in a deep examination of what has motivated his decisions. At poignant moments, Mitt Romney has asked, "Are my actions consistent with others expectations of me or with my expectations for myself?" He's passed and failed his own assessments in varying degrees. I think any of us engaged in an honest reckoning about ourselves would come to that conclusion. And I think this reckoning has been informative, but not necessarily transformative for Mitt Romney. Just this week, he's tweeted about clueless Dems. He said he doesn't attach great importance to everything Donald Trump has said in response to questions about Trump's comments that he would be a dictator on day one of his presidency, but not after. I find all of that kind of relatable that Mitt Romney has this deep disappointment in his party. He's personally hurt. He's professionally incredulous that he is in so many ways the same man who was the Republican nominee for president not too long ago. I like Mitt Romney. I do not idolize him. And that's why I think McKay's book provides such a compelling case study in personal stocktaking. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.  

[00:03:34] Music Interlude  

[00:03:52] McKay Coppins, thank you so much for coming to Pantsuit Politics.  

McKay Coppins [00:03:56] Thanks for having me on.  

Beth [00:03:57] You wrote my favorite book of the year by far.  

McKay Coppins [00:04:00] That's so nice. Thank you.  

Beth [00:04:02] I think it really met me where I am in a lot of ways because I was a registered Republican until 2019. I just changed my registration to be Republican again so that I could vote against Donald Trump in the upcoming primary. I just have this ongoing struggle with where I fit in today's political scene. I also recognize a lot of the less flattering parts of myself in Mitt Romney. So I loved this book. I know that you've talked about it a lot. Since we're talking near the end of the year when a lot of us are doing stock takes anyway, I wanted to go through what I saw as the themes of the book that allowed Mitt Romney to do this therapeutic process with you that he went through. So I wondered if we could talk about what we can all learn from those themes. It seems to start to me with a precipitating event. And I keep asking myself if January 6th was that for Mitt Romney or if that is a little too simplistic?  

McKay Coppins [00:04:57] No, I think that's fair. I think that he might have already been doing some reflection kind of privately. But I think that January 6th and everything that happened to him personally, himself kind of narrowly escaping this mob that had broken into the Capitol and what he felt it meant about the country and the fragile state of democracy in America, all of that led him to be willing to be vulnerable in public or at least to start in front of me as a biographer. It's interesting because I approached him about doing this book right after January 6th. I think it was the first text message I sent about it. It was literally a couple of days later and then a few weeks later was our first conversation. I remember there were still barbed wire fencing around the Capitol when we had our first meeting about it. And it really did seem like something had sort of shaken loose in him after January 6th. And I think it does sometimes take like a really dramatic, almost traumatic event to cause us to take stock. And he was very clearly, to me, asking himself difficult questions about the state of his party, the state of the country. And he was ready in an interesting way to look back on his own life and career and take stock of where he had made mistakes and where he had compromised on his principles and in the name of ambition or career or partisan tribalism. And as a writer, that made him such an interesting subject because it is very rare. I can say this as somebody who's profiled a lot of politicians for magazines, and it is very rare to have them in that kind of vulnerable place. So I do think January 6th was sort of a catalyzing moment for him.  

Beth [00:06:54] Did that catalyzing moment have to come back around in your conversations? It felt as a reader like you got several versions of Mitt Romney as you spent time with him over the years. Because none of us are consistent. And I wonder if there were times when you felt him pulling back a little and you had to sort of remind him of why you were doing this.  

McKay Coppins [00:07:14] I do think that part of my role as his biographer and as a journalist was to sort of remind him of that feeling he had in the days and weeks and months after January 6th. In one of our very first conversations after we started working on the book, and this was still just a few months after January 6th, he showed me this map on the wall of his office, and I kind of opened the book with it. It's called The Histomap. And the idea of this map is that it charts the rise and fall of the most powerful civilizations throughout human history. So you look at it and it shows as it goes along a timeline, the Greeks and the Romans and the Assyrians and the Egyptians. And he showed me this map and he said, "The thing that sticks out to me now looking at this map, is how rare it is for democracies to thrive. Throughout human history, most of the most powerful civilizations were autocracies of some kind." And it's kings and emperors and Kaisers and rulers. And and it's very rare for a thriving civilization to be based on the idea of self-government and self-rule. And again, this is just after January 6th, he told me, "I genuinely wonder if we are taking for granted America's commitment to democracy." He actually told me a very large portion of my party really doesn't believe in the Constitution. And that was his revelation after January 6th. But as you mentioned, I spent two years interviewing him for this book and we would meet all the time. It was 45 interviews by the end. And there were times months, years later into this process where it felt like he was sort of maybe losing sight of that key revelation he had because he still had a day job as a senator. And he would get pulled back into the morass of daily partisan politics and legislating and the back and forth between Democrats and Republicans and some unfair story that was written about him in the press. And these things would become distractions. And there were times where I felt like I had to kind of be like, remember the map on the wall? Remember that feeling you had. Do you still worry about that? In fact, I remember one time it was near Christmas, I think 2021, so this is now about a year after January 6th.  

[00:09:36] I was in his Senate office late at night. Most of his staff had gone home or gone to Christmas parties. And I was kind of pressing him on this question because he had decided he wasn't going to join Democrats in voting for a voting rights bill. And he had some objections to it, some specific policy objections that I thought were reasonable. But I actually read him a snippet from an Atlantic essay that one of my colleagues had written recently where he kind of critiqued Mitt Romney and said Romney has moral courage, is capable of moral courage. But after the immediate crisis of Trump's presidency passed, Romney returned to the narrow thinking of a party man. And I kind of read that to him in part to get a rise out of him a little bit and to needle him, but also in part to to sort of remind him you have recognized the potentially fatal weaknesses in American democracy at this moment and in your own party. And and I'm wondering if you've lost sight of it or if you've changed your mind or if you've evolved. And he actually did, to his credit. When I would do that , he was humble enough to sit back and take stock and reevaluate. Sometimes he would start off defensive. I wasn't trying to convince him of anything. I didn't feel like that was my role as a writer. I just wanted to see if his mind had changed or his thinking had evolved. And often in the course of that conversation, he would go back to taking stock and say, "That might be right. Let me think about it this way." And so he was remarkably vulnerable for a sitting politician. He would become defensive or maybe get a little angry or we'd have kind of confrontational conversations, but then he would circle back and start again. And I thought that again made him a really compelling subject, but also kind of I think there was something admirable in that.  

Beth [00:11:31] That segues really nicely to what I saw as the next ingredient of his reckoning, which is like a sense of duty. That to me speaks to the histomap as a reminder of some of the standards that he feels obligated to uphold as an elected official. Also, though, throughout the book, the references to his dad felt like they created a sense of duty and also just his talents, like the way he loves to fix a disaster. I wonder how much you saw his sense of obligation pushing him in this process?  

McKay Coppins [00:12:04] There's no question. I mean, the story he tells himself about his family and his heritage and his own identity is built around this term that he uses called the Romney obligation. And he talks a lot about it and his dad. His dad was the liberal governor of Michigan. He was an auto executive, ran for president as a liberal Republican in the 1960s. And he said that my dad always had this tendency to never be comfortable to rest on his laurels. He had made a fortune running an auto company in Detroit. And he said, "My dad could have just enjoyed his fortune and retired, but he always had this obligation to be anxiously engaged in a good cause. He wanted to be fixing problems and giving of himself in a kind of public spirited way." And Mitt felt that he inherited that. He made his own much larger fortune as a businessman and management consulting and then private equity. But when the Olympics called and the Salt Lake City Olympics were in trouble and [inaudible] was approached about taking them over to turn it around, it was actually his wife, Ann, who said, "Your life should be about more than making money.".  

[00:13:20] And that really kind of struck a nerve with him because he knew his dad had been that way. His dad's life was about more than making money. In fact, his dad had died not long after Mitt Romney's first failed Senate bid in Massachusetts. And when he went to the funeral, the thing that stood out to him was that most of the people who were there to mourn him were not talking about his successful business career or his ability to exceed quarterly profit expectations. They were there to pay tribute to a public servant. And Mitt felt this compulsion always throughout his life to be bigger, to follow his dad's example to use his talents to do something. And I write in the book that his defining trait is a meld of moral obligation and personal hubris. And I think that is true, that sometimes it could manifest in sort of hubristic ways. He really believes that he can solve almost any problem if he's kind of given the ability to. But it also can manifest in really good and admirable ways. And he is somebody who I think part of the reckoning that happened is a product of his desire to leave a positive legacy behind.  

Beth [00:14:42] That specific flavor of arrogance is something that I see in myself as well. It was a little hard to read, but helpful.  

McKay Coppins [00:14:51] Well, can I ask you about that before you move on?  

Beth [00:14:54] Yes, for sure.  

McKay Coppins [00:14:54] Because, well, I'm just curious. So I don't know if it's a bad thing. It's funny because I was talking to somebody else about this book and he said the thing that comes through reading this book is that Mitt Romney has a lot of moral vanity. He thinks of himself as a good person, an important person, and that's very important to his conception of himself. But the argument that this friend was making was, like, I actually don't know that we are suffering from a surplus of moral vanity in our politics right now. If anything, we might have too much a morality, too much nihilism in our politics. And maybe it's good for us to kind of see ourselves as good people and then hold ourselves to those standards. Do you feel like it's a bad thing that you have that brand of arrogance?  

Beth [00:15:41] I think it's both. It just depends on how I deploy it. But I love that you brought this up because Sarah and I were having a conversation about this book and how it is probably the most widely read book in Congress right now-- at least I hope it is. And then you see all of these people running for the exits. Just today we're learning Patrick McHenry, Kevin McCarthy aren't coming back. And I said to her, I hope that what people are taking from this book is not don't try to serve. I don't think that's the lesson of Mitt Romney's life at all.  

McKay Coppins [00:16:10] Not at all. And I had this fear actually, because in a couple of the early interviews I did about the book, actually, before it was even published, I kind of prerecorded a couple of interviews and several people told me reading this book was really demoralizing. Seeing how craven and cynical and hypocritical people are behind the scenes was really dispiriting. And on one hand, I wanted to reveal that. And I felt like an important part of this book was kind of exposing the depths of cynicism and hypocrisy behind the scenes. But the message was not walk away from politics altogether, like we should all throw our hands up. I think that the messiness of Mitt Romney's political career where he had major defeats and major triumphs, where he was sometimes the best version of himself and sometimes the worst, like that is just the reality of human based politics. As long as humans are the ones who are running for office and making decisions, it's going to be messy. But what made Mitt Romney to the extent that he can be looked at as a positive model for politics, it's that he never walked away. He was constantly going back into the fray. After 2012, when he lost his second presidential campaign, he was ready to essentially retire from public life. And he tried. But when Donald Trump ran for president and then won the primary and then especially after he won the presidency, Romney just felt this compulsion to kind of get back in the game.  

[00:17:44] He wanted to steer the Republican Party away from Trumpism and he wanted to act as a check on what he considered Trump's more kind of authoritarian impulses. And he wanted to be there to help solve the big issues of the day. He easily could have enjoyed his retirement. He's a very wealthy man. He has a great relationship with his wife and kids and grandkids. But he felt this duty to serve. And I think that what I hope people take away from the book is that it is really important to stay in the mix, but that also we should expect our politicians to be good people, right? One of my hobby horses is that we have all internalized way too much cynicism about politics in the last 10 years, to the point where I think it's very common for people on both the left and the right to say, "All politicians are bad, they're all snakes. We shouldn't expect them to be good people and we should just vote our interests." And I just think that's wrong. I think that's fundamentally wrong. I think the story of Mitt Romney is one of a guy who is constantly wrestling with his conscience, and sometimes he did the right thing and sometimes he did the wrong thing. But he had a functioning conscience and he was trying to do what was right. And I think we should expect that from all of our politicians. We should not just throw our hands up and kind of give up on politics altogether.  

Beth [00:19:05] Yeah. What I took from the book in terms of public service is that if you are going this route and you really feel called to do it, you need a lot of anchors in your life. That was and is essential. That his children were and are essential. I was having a conversation about our Republican secretary of state in Kentucky, Michael Adams, who has been exceptional. He has been such a good public servant, such a good partner to our Democratic governor, even as they don't always agree. And I was talking about his political future with someone. And I found myself thinking, as they were saying he might run for governor, he might run for Senate, I hope that doesn't ruin him. And what a sad instinct on my part. And so I guess I just am trying to look at this book and think what do people need to not be ruined by this process? Because the answer can't be no good people in public service. There has to be more of them just surrounded by more support, and I guess a public that is willing to give them a little bit more grace than we tend to.  

McKay Coppins [00:20:08] I do think we as voters, as constituents, should maybe have slightly more realistic expectations of our political leaders. But I want to talk about the other thing you said, this idea of having anchors in your life. So I write in the epilogue of the book about this kind of really interesting body of research, and I only kind of glance at it, but it's something I want to look at more and hopefully write about more in the future. But there's this interesting body of research that shows that the effect of power on the brain, and what it shows basically is that when people are feeling powerful, they become less empathetic, more impulsive, less able to mimic other people's experiences. And you can imagine when people are powerful for a very long time. Most of these studies are done with something called power priming, where they basically average people and get them to think about times when they had power in their lives and then these impulses start to flare up. But now apply that idea to people who are wealthy and powerful for years or even decades. What happens is something like brain damage. It's very hard to remain a grounded, normal person, an empathetic person when you have a lot of power. But what experts say, and this shows up a lot in the lives of great leaders we see, is that the more toeholds you have in your life, the more people in your life who can call you out and keep you grounded and correct you and who have known you for a long time from before you were powerful, the better off you are.  

[00:21:47] And Mitt Romney has in a lot of ways built a life around toe-holders. He's still married to his high school sweetheart. They have a very mutually respectful relationship. It's kind of amazing when you read the book how often Anne pops up at crucial moments in his career to give him advice and end up steering him in the direction he would end up going. But he also has relationships with his sons and his daughters in law and his grandkids. I spent a day up at his family compound in New Hampshire in Lake Winnipesaukee one summer during their family reunion, and you can just tell that he has put in the time to maintain these relationships. And I think that really matters because again I mentioned I've spent a lot of time interviewing, profiling powerful people throughout my career. And a lot of people get to the point that Mitt Romney is at, they're in their 70s and they've made a lot of money and they've had phenomenally successful careers and they're powerful and famous. And then they look around and they realize that their family life is kind of a disaster. A lot of them are divorced or estranged from their kids or they don't have great marriages. And I think one of the keys to Mitt Romney's success in life, but also his ability to kind of reckon with his mistakes, is that he has these relationships. He's put the time and care into nurturing these relationships with people who can be frank with him and be honest with him about where he's erring or where he's kind of getting away from himself.  

Beth [00:23:21] I wonder if that on its own is enough to lead someone down this path of self-reflection or if a foil is also necessary? Could Mitt Romney have gotten here without Donald Trump?  

McKay Coppins [00:23:33] Yeah, it's a great point. You're actually I think the first one who's asked me that question in exactly that way. This whole conversation has been unique, but I think that is an interesting insight. I think that in some ways it would be hard to find two people who are more different from each other than Donald Trump and Mitt Romney. And it's weird because they're both Republican politicians who are wealthy white men. So you would say, well, there are a lot of people who are very different, but everything about their value systems, their approaches to the world, what they consider important and what they consider are not important, are very different. And I think that part of what kind of woke Mitt Romney up and compelled him to rush towards this crisis was his personal kind of revulsion at Donald Trump's character. And this came up again and again in our conversations. On one level, he actually kind of considered it an analytical failure on his part, that he had such a hard time understanding why people like Donald Trump.  

[00:24:42] He would tell me, "I understand why people would vote for Donald Trump in a two party system. You're making trade offs. And I understand that there are a lot of voters who feel left behind by the political class. And I get all that." And he's like, "I just can't understand people who like the way Donald Trump is. The vulgarity and the mistreatment of women and the kind of way that he almost dares people in this like subversive way to abandon him, and then the subversive thrill that supporters feel and not abandoning him." He just doesn't understand that on kind of a visceral level. But I do think that having him as a foil probably gave him a certain amount of energy and vigor in this fight. Because I think otherwise Mitt Romney probably wouldn't have gotten to the point where he was asking himself quite as many difficult questions about his own career and the far right elements of his party and where he had made compromises because he didn't see the worst manifestation of that far right ethos that he had sometimes indulged. And to him, Donald Trump was the kind of worst case scenario manifestation of a toxic form of politics that had always existed in his party.  

Beth [00:26:03] It's funny because it seems like two things are true. That he both had that revulsion and an attraction to Trump. You write about how he found him very entertaining for some period of time.  

McKay Coppins [00:26:15] He did. He knew Trump all the way back in the 90s. I write about his first surreal visit to Mar-a-Lago. And it's not that I don't think he ever would have been like good buddies with Donald Trump. But for a long time in the 90s and the early 2000, he would have these run ins with Trump and kind of be like, oh, man, what a crazy guy. His reaction to Trump was this guy is an outrageous celebrity, like a loud mouthed celebrity. So when you think of somebody that way, there's something almost kind of dehumanizing about it. I don't think Romney was spending a lot of time thinking about Donald Trump's character or his morality. He just kind of store him as like a TV character almost, that he would sometimes run into at Patriots games or at fundraisers or whatever. And they would have conversations where Trump would just say outrageous things. And Romney found him funny. He actually wrote in his journal. Romney handed over all his journals, and I found one entry buried in the 2012 journals where he talks about a phone call he had had with Trump.  

[00:27:25] And he said, "They just don't make them like Donald Trump anymore. The guy is the real deal. No veneers. Says whatever he thinks." And when I read that to Romney, you can imagine he was like kind of chagrined by it. But what he said was it kind of shows the seductive quality Donald Trump has as a personality. He has a lot of charisma. He has a larger than life persona. And when you're one on one with him and if you're not thinking too hard about him as a person and certainly not as a politician, you can be kind of seduced by it. What changed for Romney was once he started seeing Donald Trump as a serious political figure who was the leader of his party, that's where the revulsion really kicked in, because he had never in a million years thought of Donald Trump as somebody who would be qualified to run for office, let alone be in possession of the nuclear launch codes. And I think that kind of changed his personal visceral reaction to Trump and also his calculation in terms of how dangerous he was.  

Beth [00:28:30] It makes me think about the two of them. It's like magnetic poles. That they're opposite but there is that attraction. And maybe that's why Trump was such a good foil for him.  

McKay Coppins [00:28:40] I think that's true.  

[00:28:40] Music Interlude  

Beth [00:28:57] Mitt Romney expressed a lot of his disgust with people to you in the book. And he's such an aristocrat that some of the dishyness of the book really struck me. He has to know how petty it sounds. I wonder if that is venting or confession or some combination of those things? And how necessary is it to put those ugly parts of yourself on the table when you're going through a process like this?  

McKay Coppins [00:29:24] It's funny because when the book came out, some of the first things to get attention were these round ups like The New York Times and Politico did these stories that were like "Mitt Romney's Burn Book." And it was just like all the meanest things he had said about various prominent Republican politicians in my book. And I think a lot of the context was lost, obviously, in the way that coverage happened. For one thing, some of these were things that he told me over the course of our two years of interviews. A lot of them were things that he had written in his journal, which going back 10 years or more, that I don't know he ever thought would be fully public. And he later let it be known that when he gave me his journals, he had not taken the time to reread them. And there was a lot in there that I don't think he quite realized was in there. And he kind of joked like "If you had asked me, I might have said maybe you reread them before you give them to a journalist." But I do think that level of disclosure is probably necessary for a true reckoning. I haven't spent a lot of time in therapy, but it does seem, from what I've read about it, that it is pretty important to be fully honest with yourself and about yourself. And I think that that's part of what was happening, is his willingness to hand over all of his journals hand over his emails-- like he sent me hundreds and hundreds of emails with various politicians, some of which made him look good and some of which made him look less good.  

[00:30:57] A lot of the stuff in his book and in his emails, it was a mixed bag in terms of how Mitt Romney came out looking. But I think it speaks to just how ready he was to be vulnerable with me, that he was willing to kind of give all this stuff up. And you're right. Some of it makes him look petty. I think that the way I put it is that I think it reflects how heartbroken he is by what his party has become, because a lot of the comments that he's made about these Republican leaders are in the context of watching these people who he once had a lot of respect for, in his view, sell out their ideals and their principles to get re-elected and to stay on the right side of Donald Trump. And for him, he's devoted his adult life to this party. And seeing that happen has just been really kind of devastating for him, and so a lot of it is venting. But I do think you're right that he was willing to show himself every side of himself, warts and all, in a way that ultimately-- and I made this case to him and more to the people around him sometimes who are really nervous about how much he was giving me. I think it creates a more human portrait of him. I think that you come away reading this book feeling like you have a sense of this guy who is definitely not perfect. He's applied human. But it makes you kind of more endeared to him because he's willing to be so vulnerable. Whereas, if he had held back those parts of himself, I think that he wouldn't have come off looking as real. But also I don't think he would have been able to really embark on this kind of reflection without it.  

Beth [00:32:34] Well, McKay, I have spent a lot of time in therapy, and I feel like it's hard to be this vulnerable in that process. I spent a lot of time trying to get an A-plus in therapy. And as I read this book, I kept thinking, like, what an extraordinary container for reflection to be able to hand to someone all of your email, to be able to hand them your journals. I wonder for those of us who are not going to have a biographer, how we get that sort of container that you created for Mitt Romney for self-reflection?  

McKay Coppins [00:33:02] Man, it's a great question. I have to say that I often found myself wondering, like, would I be willing to just give all of my emails and journals to anybody? Let alone a journalist who is going to publish them, but even just anyone. I think that the human impulse to hide parts of yourself is incredibly strong and I mean probably healthy at some point. I don't think we need to reveal everything about ourselves to everyone. But my wife has often joked while I was working on the book that I know Mitt Romney better than I know her. And she'd be like, you haven't read all my journals. You don't know every inner thought that I've had, but you apparently do with Mitt Romney. I do think that, I'll just speak for myself, part of the joy of working on this book was in how I was able to kind of turn the questions that I asked him on myself. Because one of the themes of the book is self rationalization. And Mitt has talked to me a lot about moments in his career where he found himself rationalizing things that were in his self-interest and kind of convincing himself that these were the right things to do. And because I was thinking so much about it in the writing of this book and talking to him about it all the time, talking to the people in his inner circle and family about it, I inevitably I ended up asking myself a lot about when am I rationalizing things that are in my self interest? When am I engaging in this kind of self-justification? And I can't claim to have reached peak enlightenment there, but I do think just the process and act of asking myself that question when I'm confronted with some kind of ethical dilemma or even just kind of making decisions about my life and career, I think acting like [inaudible] am I actually doing what's right here or am I just doing what's easy and convenient? I think that is better than nothing. At least that is helping me keep my conscience engaged. If that makes sense.  

Beth [00:35:10] It does. And it feels so hard to me because I think so much of how we rationalize depends on our time frame. I wonder if Mitt Romney could have done this ten years ago. His age seems to be a big component of it. His release of the idea that he's ever going to be the president. Also his obsession with his own mortality. I was in a fatal car crash in high school. And so when I read that he had that experience, I had to stick with those couple of pages for a few minutes and think about it. But that all feels essential to being able to do the true hard look at your career that he was trying to do here.  

McKay Coppins [00:35:50] There's no question. I actually asked him at one point, would you have been able to take this same like, lonely, principled stand to vote to convict Trump in that first impeachment when he was the only Republican if you had been in this position 30 years ago? And he was honest with me and he said, "I don't know if I can answer that." And he said, "I think I recognize now my capacity for self rationalization that I didn't recognize 30 years ago." And this question of how to look at the big picture when we're in the grind of our daily lives is really hard. This is another thing that I wrestled with a lot because Romney now is in the twilight of his career. He's in his mid 70s. He, like you said, is already predisposed to think about his death. And he's kind of been stalked by premonitions of death throughout his life, probably pegged to that early experience he had, that car crash. But because of that, he's able to kind of look at his life in longer term. And he thinks a lot about his legacy and both his public legacy, but even more importantly, what his kids and grandkids and great grandkids are going to remember about him. What were the stories that people are going to tell about him to them? Part of this also is religious for him. His Mormon beliefs are really intertwined with this idea of owing something to your ancestors and your progeny.  

[00:37:24]  He believes that his family relationships are the most important things in his life, both in this life and eternally. And so because of that, he really does want them to remember him well. The trick, though, (and this is I think what you were getting at) is that it's really hard to think in those terms when you're in your 30s or 40s and you feel like you've still got so much life left to live and you're just trying to advance in your career or pay your mortgage or get through your day with the kids and spouse or whatever. And when he and I would talk about what are the lessons of his life and career, one of them was the trick to getting our politicians to follow their conscience, to do what's right, is I think getting them to think about their legacies and what their obituaries are going to say when they're younger. Think more about what your obituary is going to say than what the next day's newspaper article is going to say. And that is much easier said than done. But I do think that's one of the secrets to incentivizing moral ethical behavior in our political leaders.  

Beth [00:38:43] And that makes me wonder, can a group go through this process? You read the whole book and think the entirety of the Republican Party could use this moment, probably the Democratic Party too, probably a lot of community organizations and schools and churches. Do you think a group can do this or is it necessarily an individual pursuit?  

McKay Coppins [00:39:04]  It's a good question. No, I mean, I don't know. It has to be fully individual. And in fact, in this case, it wasn't fully individual, right? He was having these conversations with his wife and with his kids and then with me. So in part, I actually do think he needed the process of an interlocutor, somebody who came over to his house once a week-- And I don't think he is in therapy. But in a way, two years of interviews were therapeutic and cathartic in nature. But he had a person who came into his house to ask him these difficult questions. And maybe that can be replicated at the community level. All of us kind of asking ourselves difficult questions. But part of the trick-- and this is just my approach as a journalist; I think other journalists have different approaches. But I try when I am sitting down with this subject to not be hyper adversarial right off the bat. Like you need to create a rapport and some amount of trust to get anything approaching like honesty or candor, especially from a political leader. But I think this is true of anyone. And so I tried to show that I was really listening to him. And so I think that there are lessons there that could be replicated at community levels in churches or schools or at the political level. The key is that nobody ever feels like they're being listened to, especially at this political moment. No one feels heard. And Amanda Ripley is a journalist who wrote a book called High Conflict about how to engage in healthy conflict. And she talks about how one of the keys to having any kind of productive conflict or conversations about difficult issues is that we have to show to each other that we're hearing what they're saying. And that involves repeating back what they're saying in our own language to kind of prove that we're listening to them. I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that, and not nearly enough of it is happening in our politics right now.  

Beth [00:41:15] I'm glad that you mentioned your process as a biographer. We always end with something on our minds Outside of Politics, and I wanted to know what forces have really shaped you as a writer. There were several sentences in this book that just kind of took my breath away. I thought, I wish I could write a sentence that well. So tell me how you have developed your craft.  

McKay Coppins [00:41:32] And that's very nice of you to say. How I developed my craft? I am one of these weird kids who knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was like 11 years old. And I would write little short stories and try to sell them to my parents for like $0.25. I produced a family newspaper with my siblings. So I've always been interested in writing and reading. But when people ask me about what is the secret to learning how to write, first of all, I always answer that I will let you know when I learn how to write. I feel like I'm incredibly hard on myself like most writers that I know. But I think the answer is you just have to do it a lot. You have to write a lot and read a lot. And I think in terms of what's shaped my perspective as a writer, I think a lot of growing up in Massachusetts as a Mormon kid made me kind of an outsider in some ways that I think have actually been really useful as a journalist. And I think that I've had a lot of life experiences that have taught me how to be a good listener and observe little details about human interactions that have shown up in my pieces. But in terms of just the craft of writing, there really is no shortcut beyond practicing all the time and then reading the best writers that you can.  

Beth [00:43:01] It is this really interesting mix going back to our specific flavor of arrogance? I feel like being a good writer has to be this combination of really believing that you have something to say or a way of saying it that people can hear while also being willing to get out of the way. And I feel like that's a lifetime of practice trying to develop the balance of those two things.  

McKay Coppins [00:43:26] Well, and I would also say I know I've gotten to know a lot of writers, obviously, in my career and we all have our own coping mechanisms for how to feel like we can finally show something that we're writing to another person, because writing inherently is like incredibly solitary and incredibly vulnerable. Regardless of whether you're writing about yourself or your own life or not, showing something that you've written to somebody else is just like an act of enormous vulnerability. And the way that I end up doing it when my editor is demanding that I show her a draft of a feature that I've been writing or an essay or something, is that I literally take like half an hour before I send it to her to type out all of my caveats and apologies. Where I'll say like, "Okay, I'm sending this to you, but I know that the beginning of it is a mess and I know the middle part needs this and this and this, and I'm not sure if this theme is really coming through." And I literally will write out all of my insecurities about the piece. And because I have a good relationship with this editor, I trust her to not use it against me or to laugh at me. Although she does sometimes laugh at me. I also know writers who go the opposite way where they have to perform this huge amount of confidence when they turn a piece in that I don't know if they really feel or not, but they'll be like, "I feel great about this one. Here you go." I personally can't relate to that at all, but I think it's their way of convincing themselves to just turn something in. But we all have ways to grapple with the vulnerabilities and insecurities of writing, because I do think it's like-- I try not to be too precious about this because writing ultimately is like if you look at the entire menu of potential jobs you could have as a human, writing is a pretty privileged one. I'm not digging holes for a living. But it takes a lot of vulnerability to write things for other people to read. And so we all have our own ways of dealing with that I think.  

Beth [00:45:37] I think that sense of listing all the insecurities and caveats is why the universe gifted me with the podcast and why podcasting is like meme-able as an exercise in confidence because you just have to do it.  

McKay Coppins [00:45:48] Yeah.  

Beth [00:45:49] And doing it with someone else means that you are releasing control over what the final product is going to be. And so we just constantly tell ourselves, "Well, you know what? We're going to make another one." There will always be another one.  

McKay Coppins [00:46:01] This is maybe why podcasters are inherently just more mentally healthy than writers. That's my working premise. That's a very emotionally healthy approach to creating content for the world.  

Beth [00:46:14] I attribute it completely to my partner. That's another thing. I'm glad I don't have a solo pursuit. Well, it has been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for the book and for spending time with me.  

McKay Coppins [00:46:25] Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on.  

[00:46:27] Music Interlude  

Beth [00:46:37] Thank you so much to McKay for this conversation that I'll be thinking about for a long time. And I want to share a bit of another conversation I keep returning to before we go. We host a book club for our premium members, and this fall we included Jane Ferguson's No Ordinary Assignment. Jane is an award winning foreign correspondent for PBS NewsHour, contributor to The New Yorker, and McGraw Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. I had the pleasure of speaking with Jane about her book and a conversation that I found moving and insightful and delightful. We wanted to share a few minutes of it with all of you.  

[00:47:10] Music Interlude  

[00:47:14] Well, we're talking to a group of people, many of whom will have read the book by the time they hear this conversation. And I know that they're going to have lots of questions about your writing process. So I wanted to start there if we could. As I was reading the book, I have two daughters. They both were very interested in what I was reading because you have such an arresting cover. And my older daughter Jane has been talking to me about what's in the book and what should she understand about it. And I said, "This is one that I would really love for you to read." And it made me wonder, as I'm telling my seventh grader you should read this book, who you wrote this book for? Who was the audience that you had in mind as you were working on the book?  

Jane Ferguson [00:47:56] Thank you for asking that question because I love that question. I wrote the book for anybody, really. I very much so didn't want to write just for foreign correspondents to read or as journalists read each other's books. I wanted predominantly, though, to really write this book for young people. I was increasingly concerned by how much the more successful I was becoming professionally, the more I was doing these events where I would talk to young people, young journalists or students, and I could see them looking at me and starting to ask questions that told me they thought I had all of it figured out. That I had had this incredibly successful, straight trajectory, upward ascent in my career. And it mattered to me to tell those young people that was absolutely not the case, that I have failed. I have fallen on my face. I have massively doubted myself. I've struggled. And that's normal. And that's totally fine. And it mattered to me that young people didn't let things stop them. And there were so many moments in my career where I could have just given up. And I wanted young people to see what it really is like, warts and all, so they wouldn't feel as though they were failing, no matter what career they're in: something competitive, something highly ambitious, something people tell you not to bother even trying with. I wanted them to see what the real underbelly of actually making your dreams come true looks like, so that they wouldn't give up.  

Beth [00:49:33] And in your case, what that looks like took so much resourcefulness. Yeah, I was doing the math. So I'm a few years older than you. I think about the time that you were learning Arabic in Yemen. And I was starting my career in a law firm, and I was so frustrated as a new lawyer at the fact that I was showing up every day waiting for someone to give me work to do. Because I thought, you're you're paying me, I would like to work. And I didn't really understand how long it takes to build a pipeline of work. And I felt so bratty reading your book and thinking about the fact that you're out there doing the work and saying, "Well, someone please pay me for this incredibly valuable, risky, dangerous thing I'm attempting to give you." So tell me about where you think you got that inner resolve. Like, I am just going to do the work and trust that it will pay off at some point.  

Jane Ferguson [00:50:28] I think a big part of it was the fact that I didn't really want to do anything else. I had this calling since I was a little girl. This is kind of all that I wanted to do. And the reality is I didn't really have a plan B. I decided I'd rather be broke doing what I love and struggling and trying to do that than give up. And on top of that, I also just had to have a blind faith that it would somehow work out. I look back at that young girl now and I smile at her optimism. It's great that I was so naive because if I'd been more wily and worldly, I probably might have quit. So I think that I had to believe it was going to work out for me. Also, there are career struggles, but in between all of those career fears, trying to make ends meet, trying to pay the bills, struggling and failing to pay the bills, there are also these moments where you recognize that you absolutely love the work. I had such incredible moments on the road. I felt so connected to the storytelling and to the people that it really buoyed me and kept me moving forward. I had to believe that something I loved so much and that I was slowly, slowly figuring out how to do well, would eventually work out for me.  

Beth [00:51:49] You can hear my full discussion with Jane on our premium show More to Say, and you can use the information in our shownotes to learn more about our premium community, where the first book boxes for our 2024 book club reads will go on sale next week. We partnered with Lisa, a listener, and her independent bookstore for these boxes, which make fantastic gifts for you or others. Jane Ferguson and McKay Coppins in one episode is like a dream for me. Thanks to both of them and to all of you for supporting our work. We'll be back with you on Tuesday for a new episode. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.  

[00:52:20] Music Interlude 

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. 

Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement. 

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima. 

Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. Christina Quartararo. Shannon Frawley. The Lebo Family. The Adair Family. 

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