Richard F. "Dick" Celeste part 4

CW: Do you want me to ask a question?

RC: Why don't you ask a question to gets us back on track.

CW: All right. So after the Savings and Loan Crisis were you worried about getting reelected.

RC: Well we didn't know how the steps we took were going to play out. I had shut you know 60, virtually 60 Savings and Loans half a million people couldn't get to their deposits. And so there was a lot of frustration. And it wasn't clear that we would be able to reopen them all. It wasn't clear that everybody was going to have their money protected. And so there was a period of time probably 00:01:00three or four months when I think my re-election probably was questionable. But I think the that the fact that we fashioned a bipartisan approach nobody could really attack what we were trying to do other than Marvin Warner who was very upset with what happened to him. And I think it worked out as it worked out better than anyone had anticipated really in terms of the ability to protect to reopen the institutions they reopened faster than people thought. And all of the depositors had their money safe and sound. The only depositor who lost money was Marvin Warner he lost 20 or 30 million dollars. So it became an asset to me I 00:02:00think in a re-election campaign that we had faced this kind of crisis and we had handled it. The question well I think there was a question for a period of time there were a series of investigations you know did had our savings and loan division completely miss something. Well they had but it was partly because Home State had misrepresented their situation. Had the Celeste administration been somehow and in the hands of Marvin Warner? Well there was a whole investigation in Cincinnati that reviewed that and decided, absolutely not. At one point the court ordered me to turn over my daily my daytimers the daytimers. Now in the 00:03:00here at the Ohio Historical Center for examination to try to determine how often did I meet with Marvin Warner and what was involved. And I think the savings and loan crisis was an incredible challenge but one that ended up being you know in a way it made me feel like I was where I should be when I should be. And I never had to look back on it. It did not become a factor. If anything it became an asset going into the re-election campaign because I could talk about you know 00:04:00protecting Ohioans in a time of crisis.

CW: Right, a successful governor.

RC: Yeah.

CW: So were you worried about the re-election in general?

RC: Well I was not. You know once Jim Rhodes was the nominee I was I really was relishing that contest because you know if I had a nemesis in a way it was Jim Rhodes he had defeated Jack Gilligan when I expected Jack Gilligan to get re-elected. Then there I was the lieutenant governor without a sympathetic governor. And then you know he had defeated me in 1978. So a rematch from my standpoint was welcome. And the truth was he was beyond his sell by date you 00:05:00know. He loved Ohio. He loved politics but he didn't know how to get any traction in the mid 80s. And in a funny sort of way I had to sympathize with him because I could see him floundering you know trying to land a punch and not being able to land it. So I you know for me it was a, well every campaign is hard work if you take it seriously and I took it seriously. So I ran hard I put together I think by that time had the most experienced political organization in the state. And the Democratic Party that was strong and sympathetic and 00:06:00financial supporters and others who knew me and who were prepared to support my re-election campaign. So I think it was in a way it was a most welcome campaign that I could run. And when you're in a term limited situation you know this is it right. Okay I have one more crack at this. And the perhaps the most ironic aspect was Jim Rhodes and I became really good friends after that. And he and I used to have boxes next to each other at the Ohio State stadium to watch Ohio State football and either he would come into my box and kibbutz or I would go into his box and kibbutz and we would talk about old times he would tell me 00:07:00great stories about his experience with Woody. And it was kind of an interesting unusual campaign.

CW: This was his fifth run for governor at this point.

RC: Yeah.

CW: So was there any question about, was there an element of not being taken seriously at this point after you know?

RC: I think I would never have not taken Jim Rhodes seriously. Part of what was a challenge for him after his fourth term when I was running in 1982. He actually preferred me to Clarence Brown and I think he always held himself apart. I mean he was an independent Republican. He had his own mind. He had his own in a way with kind of ramshackle organization that was devoted to Jim Rhodes 00:08:00more than the Ohio Republican Party. And so he I think on the quiet sent some of his supporters my way in the 1982 election. So in 1986 rolled around and he's running again some of these folks are saying Jim wait a minute. You know I'll give you an example. Howard Collier who was his right hand man on budgets had worked very closely with my budget director when I came in in 1982 after I was elected and going into 83 to put together a budget that was. You know the state was in trouble. We had a half a billion dollar deficit. We had. He'd made promises that Honda motor company and others that we didn't have the money for really and so Howard Collier helped us work on a budget. When we included tax 00:09:00increases Howard Collier supported those tax increases. So it became really hard for Jim Rhodes in 1986 to criticize Dick Celeste on his tax increases when his own budget director was a supporter of the steps that we took right. And so I think that he was always a canny politician and he knew where votes were tucked away in a way that the old squirrel knows where the nuts really are. Right. And so you had to take Jim Rhodes seriously. But it was clear that he just he wasn't the mid 80s in a fifth race weren't going to be his right. So he was he 00:10:00criticized my wife because she was Austrian and something bad was going on in Austria at that time. I mean he it was hard for him to find to get a grip on me the way he did on Governor Moonbeam after Jack Gilligan's gaffe on the budget.

CW: How is it different running for governor as an incumbent rather than coming in fresh?

RC: Well my view is that incumbents should never lose a re-election campaign. Because with incumbency you have enormous tools at your command that you don't have when you're challenging an incumbent or when you're in an open race but you don't hold the seat. As an example I had made a major push in highway construction during that first term. We had been able to increase the gasoline 00:11:00tax a bit generate more federal money. So there were a lot of orange barrels around the state. We put together television commercials that were specific to a region. So OK we completed this Steubenville bypass we could do an ad that featured specifically that. And of course the irony was it had been promised by Jim Rhodes but it was built by Dick Celeste. The Jackson bypass was promised by Jim Rhodes his home county but it was built by Dick Celeste. And so as an incumbent you can cite concrete accomplishments particularly if they're consistent with the positions you took going into your first campaign. I had promised that I was going to fire the Public Utilities Commission. Well I accepted the resignation of all three PUCO members and reconstituted PUCO and I 00:12:00could talk about the things we'd accomplished in the utility field. And then the Edison programs and the job development efforts were very specific and had us in Polymer Center in Akron or the Edison Welding Center in Cleveland where concrete examples of things that we had done. So incumbency I think any incumbent who's done the job reasonably well should win re-election. The downside of incumbency of course is that you have to be able to defend your record and you know the main attack that was a little less directed at me actually directed at the 00:13:00senators who supported the first budget that had the taxes in. It was that Celeste raised taxes 90 percent and it was outrageous right. And that was that was a problem I created for myself because I hadn't figured out how to articulate the tax increase in a in a more thoughtful and strategic way. I just it was a bad communication on my part. Senator you didn't know how to defend themselves paid a price.

CW: So coming in originally it's more the idea of what kind of governor you'd be. But once you've been governor as an incumbent it's like if you don't win it's a real criticism on your record then.

RC: Well yeah if I don't know whether it's necessarily a criticism on your record it is a criticism of the way in which you tell your story to the citizens 00:14:00of Ohio. You know I have great admiration for Jack Gilligan and I think he was a bold leader and a visionary leader for Ohio. But you know Jack should never have lost to Jim Rhodes. I concluded from that election a rule about politics you can't always win an election but you can always lose an election. And Jack Gilligan lost. It wasn't that Jim Rhodes won. Well maybe he did win but it was the momentum was Gilligan not making his case effectively. And I think that you know I think that's a rule I would apply across the country I don't think it's a unique Ohio rule. I think and especially incumbents have an advantage until. And 00:15:00Jim Rhodes understood that he used in 1978 he was able to use the incumbent advantage against me very effectively.

CW: So coming into your second term and like you mentioned term limited. So how do your goals change when you're thinking about your second term as opposed to your first?

RC: I wanted to finish unfinished business. I mean a major example there was the mental health reform legislation that we had legislation was aimed at creating a Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services. And so I had a set of how do 00:16:00I finish the business that I started and do it right I think. And then there are always issues that arise along the way. We were trying to we were trying to deal with things like can we privatize or get out of the business of issuing license tags and the rest. Could we reform the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and how we decide how we handle that business? Created kind of a deep relatively deep politicized almost franchised arrangement for that. You know I persuaded David Warren who was the president of Ohio Wesleyan to come in and work on that issue 00:17:00for me. It was, and we had a lot of work in the economic development field to continue. We had a whole second round with Honda that came up and they decided they were considering putting in a second assembly plant and they approached me. And this is probably in nineteen eighty seven or eighty eight. But they came in and a week before Labor Day and the CEO of Honda of America said I have to go back to Japan and report to the chairman and the board on our plans for a second assembly plant and we've got a very good offer from Indiana but we if we could 00:18:00acquire the Ohio transportation center for 15 million dollars. You know we would do a second plant in Ohio. I said well yeah we might be willing to sell that property to you but not for 15 million dollars. So we need to negotiate, but I have to go back to Japan in 10 days. So David Baker who at that point was my director of commerce met with them intensively. I think we ended up at a 30 or 35 million dollar price tag. And we committed that the amount of money over 15 million dollars would be devoted to an endowment for engineering students at Ohio State University. So they benefited. We benefited. They went back to Japan got a green light. And by the end of my second term we had probably almost 10,000 Honda jobs in Ohio between the two assembly plants and the engine plant 00:19:00and a transmission plant. So we were constantly that effort to address the economic circumstances in Ohio was a sustained one. There was a one of the in the final year Chrysler had announced that they were considering abandoning the Jeep production in Toledo. And they took a position with the mayor of Toledo that they would only put a new line of jeeps into that plant if we would waive any environmental penalties they might be subject to. And I was not about to 00:20:00compromise our environmental protection but I didn't want to lose that jeep plant. So I sent Peri Sabety who was my economic development adviser in the during the second administration she had succeeded. Paul Reiter in the governor's office and Peri who later became my partner in business. Peri was a smart tough you know Bryn Mawr trained CPA tenacious person. And I said OK Peri here's your job. We want the mayor of Toledo to be the good guy with Chrysler. You're gonna go up there and you're going to be the bad guy and you're gonna say the governor will never ever let you do this. You know we will provide incentives to you but we will never let a city waive its environment. We can't 00:21:00put people into that danger. So Peri went up there and they had protracted negotiations. I felt that Chrysler really didn't want to leave the most historic plant in there in their Jeep line but it was an old that was an old plant that needed work. So we ended up committing probably 15 or 20 million dollars to job training to retrain that whole workforce on a new technology that Chrysler would put in. But we never waived the never waived environmental requirements and about four months before I was to leave office I was invited to Toledo for a press conference to announce that Chrysler was going to put its new line into this plant. They were gonna make a major investment in modernization and we were 00:22:00there with the mayor for a press conference and as the mayor stood up to speak the Chrysler guy was sitting next to me he leaned over and he said you are a real son of a bitch. And I said what you mean he said that woman you sent up to to deal with us. I've never faced a tougher negotiator. I want her to come work for Chrysler. I said she can't do that. What do you mean she can't do that. I said she and I are gonna be business partners when I leave the governor's office. He just he howled he said man that is really something he said she was really special, but you know we hadn't. If you'd asked me at the beginning of my second term are you going to be negotiating with Chrysler over an investment in Toledo. I couldn't have said sure but that was the sort of thing that was very much on the radar screen because you know when I took office Ohio is dead last 00:23:00in job creation. And by 1990 we were fifth in the nation in job creation that became a steady part of the work that we were doing.

CW: You also dealt with national troops being sent to Honduras.

RC: Oh yeah. This. I did. I did. You know I was always I suppose describe it in that day as a peacenik. And we had the Ohio Peace Education Network. We did a lot of work on in the kind of domestic context and conflict resolution in schoolyard behavior and how do you help youngsters figure out how to deal with conflict. We worked with Tom Moyer in the courts on the issue of conflict 00:24:00resolution. And he was at that point the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court. But the issues arose in then late 80s was the action the federal government took to federalize the state National Guard troops and send them down to Guatemala, Honduras in on quote road building exercises. Really as an effort to intimidate folks in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Kind of to play with Central American politics. And so Rudy Perpich who was the Governor of Minnesota and I said no we're not going to let our National Guard be sent down to Central America. And of course there was a court case that arose from that. And 00:25:00eventually we lost. But in the course of this John Kasich who was a friend had been we got to know each other said Governor I'll tell you what I want to go down and take a look at how this what's going on down there and you come along and we'll see if we can't persuade you that this is something we need to do. So he arranged for the Department of Defense to fly me and him and a couple other people down to take a look at what was going on there. And what was evident is that we were building roads to nowhere. I mean these these folks were there just kind of maintain a presence. And it was more political and strategic. But John saw enough to satisfy himself. I saw enough to satisfy myself. I think we both 00:26:00concluded we were right. But the courts held it. I didn't. I couldn't. If the President determined that that Ohio Guard was needed the Ohio Guard was needed. And so I got got steamrolled in that.

CW: Did you try to butt heads with Reagan about it?

RC: Not really hard. I mean you know my feeling was and I was doing this with the governor Perpich uh that you know we we wanted to send a message that we didn't think this was the right thing to do. And to the extent that we had the authority to prevent it from happening, we would prevent it from happening. But there was value in raising this as an issue even if we weren't able to keep our young men and women from being sent down there for three months stints. the

CW: I don't think they ever actually engaged in any.

RC: No, No the work that they were doing there was essentially engineering work and road building work and things of that kind. But there was you know it was hard to see. You went there and said well what's the, why are we building this road here is there a strategic purpose. Well you know the people need this road for to get from A to B. Okay commuter road to get from A to B. I mean it's in some respects it was a public works project for the host country but we were supporting military basically military dictatorships.

CW: The Contras.Yeah

RC: Yeah yeah.

CW: A lot of problems there.

RC: Yeah.

CW: You mentioned John Kasich. About this time. I believe my wife told me a 00:28:00story that he had told yesterday. About his parents passing away about this time.

RC: 1987, You know it's just before Christmas 1987 his folks. Well he I have to as a step back. He grew up in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. My dad grew up in Monessen. So I mean I had relatives and McKees Rocks. And so we had this kind of I would call it very casual friendship that back then you could have as Democrats and Republicans. Even though you disagreed on stuff you know we're in the same business really. Bob Strine who headed up my highway patrol security folks came to see me probably 10 or 10 days or so before Christmas and said they 00:29:00just heard that Congressman Kasich's parents had been killed by a drunk driver as they were leaving a restaurant. They'd gone to an early dinner and this guy just blew into them and killed both them instantly. And I knew John was an only child and so I called him and said Congressman I'm, I know that you're devastated. We're saddened and want to send you our condolences. But the important thing is this you're gonna have to go to Pittsburgh and take care of some business there. But then you come to the governor's residence and spend the holidays with us. I don't want you to spend the holidays alone. And so he came and spent five or six days with us over that Christmas holiday. And as a consequence we you know we've been friends ever since. If I have occasion to call him and I do from time to time I call him on a cell phone. He'll get back to me in 10 or 15 minutes. You know we in 2016 when he was running for President 00:30:00my wife and I were in Hilton Head because at that time we had a little place in Hilton Head. And we were out on our bicycle in swimsuits and T-shirts for a long bike ride and I said to her as we were riding along. Guess who's in town. And she said who? I said John Kasich. Oh really, what's he doing in town. I said well he's coming to speak to the Republican women of Sea Pines, South Carolina. You should call him. So we get off our bikes and I just call him on the phone and he obviously didn't answer I left a message teasing him about being in Hilton Head. Ten minutes later as we were riding along. PHONE RINGS. It's John what are you doing here. I said John we have a place here. Question is What are you doing here. Half the people in Hilton Head are from Ohio. You, this is not a 00:31:00place that you need to be campaigning. He laughed. He said let's have lunch together and we're on our bicycles and swimsuits we're sweaty. Don't worry about it. We have half an hour. Come over and meet us at Sally's Seafood Shack. So we ended up running our bikes over and smelly in our T-shirts and everything we sat with John and his twin daughters and had a delightful conversation for half an hour. So it's it is you know it's the kind of relationship that I think occurs in politics probably occurred more in the 80s than it does today. I think it's harder. People draw harder lines today.

CW: Would you have, did you think of yourself at all as a mentor or more just 00:32:00like a friend?

RC: I see myself as a kind of you know Dutch uncle for him. I mean in the period after his unsuccessful presidential campaign. I've had occasion to sit down with him fairly frequently to talk about you know things that I think he should be mindful of. Particularly about the relationship between himself and in the President. Based on my own experience and you know I'll be there. He's, I'll be introducing him at the City Club of Cleveland. Yet in twenty eighteen while he's still Governor in his last few days as Governor.

CW: 1988 was a presidential year as well. And it's not unusual for a governor 00:33:00like Kasich to run for President were you thinking about a presidential run in 1988.

RC: Oh yeah. I thought about it I thought about starting in about 1987 not long after he got reelected. I probably had thought about it previously. And my father had always you know reminded me that when his social studies teacher in high school it's Frankie Celeste can't run for president because he wasn't born here. He said But my son can and so there was always a little bit parental expectation I think. I went to Iowa and had a wonderful time here. I went to New Hampshire I'd gone to New Hampshire to campaign for John Glenn and knock on 00:34:00doors for John and I went back and spoke at a Labor meeting there and I spoke to some national organizations. My older sons Eric and Christopher did quite a bit of sort of research around what is required and various members of that sort of the Celeste team. Jerry Austin or Bill Flaherty or David Millenthau or um Paul Ryder. People in the office wrote memos as they thought about you know the possibilities that I might run. I think yeah I was a I was torn between 00:35:00confidence that I would be an excellent candidate and that I would be a very good President. And deeply weighty concern about how my personal life might play out in a way that would be hard extremely hard for my wife and for my kids. And I never resolved that I got sort of what would I say. Kind of sideswiped by Mary Anne Sharkey at a press conference on another matter whether I had a Gary Hart problem I answered it poorly. And It was a, It was like getting at hardball 00:36:00aimed at your head if you're in the batter's box right. All of a sudden you realize wait a minute. I'm gonna stick my head out there again right. And I just decided I didn't. There were two things that I was concerned about. One I didn't really like asking for money anymore. I'd done a lot of it. I'd gotten pretty good at it but going from raising six million dollars let's say for a race for governor of Ohio at that time I probably would've had to look at 500 million or 600 million dollars for a presidential race. I didn't really have much of an appetite for that in that I that was publicly what I probably said to people. But I really didn't want to go through the personal kind of exposure and pain 00:37:00that would have caused for my family and probably for me. I mean I don't think I had an appetite for it. So you know like I kind of took a pass and it was an interesting time and we had that summer we had an after summer of 88. Michael Dukakis was our nominee and was a fellow governor and we had the National Governors Association meeting in Cincinnati and and President Reagan came to that NGA meeting. So it was kind of an interesting moment you know where Reagan 00:38:00was reflective as he was getting ready to leave office. He had just come back from a meeting with with Gorbachev. And so what he wanted to talk about was Gorbachev and Russia. And he was fascinating about that I liked Reagan a lot. He was just a charming guy. And he is easy to underestimate. He was a smart public official. Dukakis was there and you know we had. How do we deal with helping him. And two presidential campaigns me I mean 84. You know we had a lot of fun 00:39:00with them because they campaigned actively in Ohio and we did events with them and it was fun to have Gerry Ferraro as a candidate I was. That was exciting. Mondale, Fritz Mondale okay. So 88, Dukakis was was the nominee. And you know a lot of people thought it was gonna be Gary Hart's year but he got sidelined. And that may have been his difficulties may have also played into my thinking in ways that I wasn't altogether aware of. But I, there were those who came back at 00:40:00me in 1992 and said you should run right, or you should gear up. I wasn't going to have it.

CW: Do you think you would have been stronger, assuming you didn't have issues. Do you think you would have been a stronger candidate than Dukakis?

RC: Yeah yeah. I mean I think you know we all have issues and that was part of. I just I couldn't. I think the answer that I should have given Mary Anne Sharkey and the answer to my problems was. Look my personal life is not relevant to my ability to perform as a public official. And I wanted to demonstrate I've 00:41:00demonstrated what I can do as a public official and I continue to and will continue to do that. My personal life is not going to be something that's going to interfere with that. I'm not sure that would have sold. I'm not sure I could have been convincing about that but I do believe that in virtually every other way I would have been a stronger candidate than Michael Dukakis. You know Ohio is a terrific testing ground for anyone. This is one of John's (Kasich) advantages. Its one of Sherrod Brown's advantages. It was a Dick Celeste advantage that we campaign in a state where it is everything; it's manufacturing, it's agriculture, it's north, it's south, it's east, it's west, it's prairies and and well we call them mountains they're not really mountains but hills. You know once you live in Colorado they call it mountains but. And 00:42:00and I loved to campaign, I loved to campaign and one of the problems with Mike which was a little bit Jack Gilligan's problem was they got tired of it you know. Okay I have to do this but they were kind of more cerebral. And I just I got put me out there 14, 15, 16 hours a day with people and I would get stronger as the day went on and I could wear any journalist out in any twenty four hour period. Just keep up with me see what it's like I would say. I'll say wait a minute, no. At the end of the day they would just have a different appreciation. And I think that as a candidate one of the advantages I would have had was that 00:43:00I had not only domestic experience but I had quite a bit of international experience. I run the Peace Corps. I had lived in India for four years and worked for an ambassador. I spent time in England. I you know I had a kind of fuller palette of experience than Governor Dukakis or than Governor Clinton. But you know you don't have a chance unless you get in the ring. There are a lot of what ifs. And I've never I you know I never felt regret that I didn't do it. That's, I've had so many blessings in life and so many opportunities to serve in 00:44:00life that I don't feel like oh my goodness gracious I didn't get a chance to do that.

CW: No president ever campaigns alone. Do you think your family would have been able to make you feel confident in you liked campaigning you'd be able to do it, but do you think your family would've been able to do it?

RC: Well it's interesting I mean I have letters from my kids during that period of time. They also were advising me right. And I think my family would have been totally up for it. They, maybe not every one of them, but most of them would have been. I mean the you know I had three in college age and four or five I 00:45:00guess were college age or beyond college. So they knew kind of what they were and if they had been involved in campaigns and the rest. I think they would have done it then certainly Dagmar would have done it. I mean she would have. She was a bruiser when it came to that.

CW: So in 1988 your father also passes away. That had to be.

RC: Yeah. He died. He died right. Right after the election in 1980. Ironically we were doing a capital for a day in Lakewood, Ohio. It was scheduled for that week after the election. He had gone into Cleveland Clinic for surgery. My father hated doctors and my father resisted going to a doctor and when he told me ten days or so before he went into the hospital I was up in Lakewood and we 00:46:00were having a family dinner. I think maybe Jane Allen and Deb Phillips were with me but my folks were at a bowling alley called MaHall's where we would go on a Friday night for dinner and he said he was going in to see the doc. He thought he needed some surgery and was totally unlike him. Wait a minute. And so he went in for a colon operation and his colon had colon cancer. And the doctor came out of the room and said, my brother and I were there, and said you know we've taken out the colon cancer but it's metastasized and it's throughout his gut he 00:47:00probably has three or four months to live. Yeah. What I would recommend is that you take him home and that he enjoys the last bit of time that he has and left it to us to tell him this. So the day after his surgery my brother sat down with him he was he seemed to be recovering pretty well and he said well what did the doctor tell you. And you know I had to say listen doctor said they got the cancer in your colon but it spread throughout your all of your gut and he thinks maybe three or four months is what you have. And my father's face fell. I mean I 00:48:00almost never saw my father. I could see him angry but usually always happy, right. Never saw him look defeated and I mean even when he lost elections he wasn't defeated and this was like I'd hit him with a 2 by 4. And he's you know he was OK being in the hospital for a couple of days and then apparently my buddy Marty Hughes the head of the communication workers who is a friend of my father's had gone to see him at the hospital and they had a conversation and my day with Marty left. My dad got up and went into the bathroom and collapsed and never recovered he was comatose for a couple of days. And so as we were getting 00:49:00ready for the capital for a day in Lakewood we let go of him. And question was you do capital for a day. I said absolutely I mean the last thing he would have wanted is not doing that. So that was that was probably the most unusual, challenging, emotional, week or so you can imagine.

CW: How does being the governor and being in the public eye and having all those responsibilities affect your ability to deal with things like the Maryanne Sharkey the Plains Dealer article and your father's death. Things that are very personally painful and hard to deal with. Do they. How does that? Does it affect 00:50:00your ability to mourn affect your ability to deal.

RC: Well no. I mean I think look you may be Governor but you're just you are who you are. Right? So I always felt that that Maryanne Sharkey had a bias with respect me and I think the fact that when she left the Plain Dealer and went to work for the Republican Party it was kind of clear that there was at least some bias there. And at one point I got to have a strong supporter a lawyer a tough lawyer from Cincinnati named Stan Chesley to talk to the Plain Dealer about libel. But you know Chesley persuaded me to forget about it. You know you just have to tough it out and which was good advice. And I think the notion of a 00:51:00scandal ridden Celeste administration was partly self-inflicted that I had people who well in the first place I set a very high bar. And so people had expectations for me and for my conduct and the conduct of those around me that was higher than say the normal. And you know you have to be careful what you wish for when you want to wish, you wish people will look up to you and that you're setting a high standard. Great they're going to judge you by that standard. And when a Jim Rogers is a member of your cabinet commits a crime it's something that's gonna be on you. And when something bad occurs somewhere in 00:52:00your administration people will pick up on it. Now part of it also was the fact that there were you know politics is a tough business. And And so there were people in Washington who wanted to make sure that Dick Celeste wasn't a national factor, right. I mean so the U.S. attorneys would go after things that turned out to be well my father would call goat feathers, right. The most glaring case was a case involving Maude and Baxter Hill. There were two, Baxter was this sort of storefront preacher from Cleveland and he and his wife were working in Cleveland. And I asked him to come down because I wanted Baxter to run a 00:53:00outreach program for recovery services in black communities across the state. And he was a charismatic very good guy and Maude was a wonderful I think she's still with us and a wonderful person. And it turns out that when the I didn't realize they didn't have the money to come to Columbus so they cashed in their Social Security. They took it in cash and came down to work for the state of Ohio and then they got another Social Security card, new Social Security cards and so the U.S. attorney from Southern District went after them. Celeste aides commit social security fraud. Was the charge well they hadn't taken any money 00:54:00that wasn't theirs and they actually hadn't collected anything that they weren't. They were they weren't. I mean they were contributing again to Social Security. They've broken a regulation this is making a federal case out of something that wasn't really a federal case. And eventually the Republican federal judge in Columbus, Ohio judge Kanares chewed out the attorney from the Southern District and threw the case out. But it took a year and a quarter. It cost Baxter you know and Maude their livelihood and the rest. So some of the quote scandals were the result of politics and some were the result of self-inflicted wounds. But to blame a particular reporter. I just I sensed that 00:55:00she was she had a kind of ax to grind with me and I ground back which I should not have done. I just, later when I was working with Hillary Clinton after her husband had asked her to take on the health care campaign and David Wilhelm had asked me to come down and work on it. We say it was my first conversation with her and she was complaining about all of the attacks they were getting from the press. And I said you know Hillary coming from Little Rock you probably weren't exposed to the kind of press criticism that you're going to get here. You should have been in Ohio and felt the real brunt of a critical press because they're going to hold you to the highest standard you've set and you shouldn't feel like 00:56:00they're picking on you, but it does feel like they're picking on you. So you know that was. Can you mourn was the other part of your question and I think you can. And I think you do. And I think in some respects when you're when you hold a public trust you and you're empathetic your heart learns to be bigger because you end up having to mourn for a community that gets hit by a tornado or you end up having to mourn for a state troopers who is killed in some kind of terrible accident. And that sort of enhances the muscles or the emotional tools that help 00:57:00you be in touch with what you feel and so you know. When my dad died that was hard. And I probably you know I probably resented the fact that he hadn't. He said I'm sick. He hadn't taken good care of himself. He collapsed into a coma without being able without a chance to say goodbye. And you know that was tough. My mother's death several years later was very different. And she learned from my father's death as well. There are things she didn't want things that she 00:58:00wanted about how she was going to die and she did it her way.

CW: You created that state inspector general is that what that was kind of supposed to do keep that high standard?

RC: Yes. Yes. Well one of the part of it was you know I needed and I wish I'd figured it out right at the beginning that we the state needed someone to examine how we were doing. I guess the bottom line is the old line is good people can do bad things right. Sometimes they get into trouble or sometimes they make a bad judgment. Or sometimes people around them take advantage of their goodness. Which is what happened to Roberta Steinbacher the Bureau of Employment Services. But you need someone who's gonna dig in and find out what 00:59:00are the facts. We heard a rumor that Jim Rogers that there was something going on with Jim Rogers. Larry McCartney who was my personnel guy in the governor's office. I think hired a private detective to try to determine if there was something going on. Never never figured out came back and said no it seems to be just rumor. So we had tried to take a look at that. If we'd had an inspector general on the tools and an inspector general had we might have been able to identify the misconduct that was going on with Jim Rogers and address it ourselves more quickly and more forcefully than what we did when it came out sort of through the backdoor or in ways that we didn't have our hands on. And so 01:00:00it but it took me a while to figure that out. And so the establishment of the Inspector General's Office I think was important. I'm not sure that, I don't know how well it's been done. I think I look at the federal government and the inspector generals in various departments and agencies they're very good, very professiona,l very strong, and the rest. I don't know that we have the same tradition developed here, right. We wanted to do that.

CW: Thinking about your final days as governor. What were some of the important things that you wanted to accomplish at the very end? Kind of in that stepping out kind of way.

RC: Well again. What were the things that I. I wanted to sort of tie the eight 01:01:00years up into a nice package that I could share with the people of Ohio and say here's here's where we started eight years ago and I think here's where we are eight years later. And we put together an accomplishments book that we were going to publish with reports on each department of state government and so on. It was probably a little too fluffy. I think if we'd come at it a little differently we might have had somebody an outsider do that kind of work or even take that work and tear it apart and put it back together. But it was something that you know the next administration dumped so it never got done. That was a modest piece or immodest piece of what we wanted to do. There were things that I 01:02:00wanted to address that. The biggest and most visible ones were in the criminal justice field. Dagmar had visited with two sociologists from Ohio State who'd done a study at Marysville of the women who were in the prison at Marysville basically to try to determine how many of them had suffered abuse in their childhood as background to the sort of criminal experiences that they'd gotten into. And in the course of their conversations they said that they were surprised by the number of women who had killed someone who had been severely 01:03:00abused but had never talked about it. And so Dagmar said you know why don't we do something about that. And so I asked these women to go back to the person the social worker at Marysville they'd work with and encourage her to set up a process by which the women who had killed someone were able to talk about abuse, document abuse if in fact they'd been abused. Because none of them had been able in the course of their criminal defense. None of them had been able to present what was called the battered women's syndrome. What happens when you're battered and when you blame yourself and when you take it on yourself and in fact you deny that the battering and the assault is going on. And so I said have them 01:04:00document their stories, have them go through a group therapy, do group therapy work at the prison, have them presenter cases if they they and you believe they're worthy send them to the adult parole authority, and then the adult parole authority to present them to me. So Thanksgiving a year before so it would be Thanksgiving of 89. I sat at home with probably one hundred and a little over 100 files of these women reading the stories that they presented these are case files so there was police evidence and trial material and so on. And it was the most difficult reading I probably have ever done in my life. 01:05:00There wasn't a single story, I mean I need to give you some examples so you'll understand what it was like. There was a woman who is in her 40s who lives in Cincinnati. She's a kind of suburban housewife. She has two children a son who's seven or eight years old and a baby daughter who's two. Her husband is beating her regularly. He has a drinking problem and he beats her. And one day she came home from work and found him beating her 7 year old son. And she was infuriated and she grabbed the boy got back into the car and started backing out of her 01:06:00driveway to see her husband on the second floor of the House dangling their 2 year old daughter by her ankle and saying if you leave I will drop her so she drove back in got out of the car went back in the house. She was beaten. After her husband went to sleep she got his gun and shot him, right. You know okay I can kind of understand that right. A 17 year old girl was living with her grandfather and her younger sister. Her grandfather sexually assaulted her since she was twelve. She comes home from school finds her grandfather assaulting her 13 year old sister. That night she nails her grandfather's door shut. While he's 01:07:00sleeping pours gasoline outside the door takes her little sister lights the fire and runs. You know these are, those are the nice stories. Some of the other ones I mean you can't begin to tell. Twenty, in twenty six I get maybe eventually twenty nine of these cases I could establish there were there were hospital records there was sufficient evidence to demonstrate the the physical assaults and so on. Some cases there were was also corroborating testimony from a friend or somebody who had been confided in or a family member, but never offered as a defense in the trial. Normally what happened is that these women would say 01:08:00somehow it's their fault. Most of them had grown up abused before they married an abuser or gotten involved with an abuser. And so I my criteria was if I was convinced that they'd done that they had been battered and that it was demonstrable evidence of it. If they'd served at least three years because they'd done a serious crime I would commute their sentence to the time served or three years and 250 hours of community service with battered women. There were another 30 or so files that I thought they probably were qualified but I they needed to go back and do more work to try to gather evidence and I recommended it that my successor do that. I don't think it happened. But the interesting 01:09:00thing is I think that only one of the 29 women whose sentences were commuted ever went back to prison and that was for a drug charge. Was never another physical assault. So that was a piece of work that got done in that period of time.I felt good about it the legislature while I was working on this the legislature adopted we passed a law that made battered the battered women syndrome a recognized as a consideration to be taken into account in cases of this sort. And then the the public defender came to me and said we want you to consider commuting all the sentences on death row and I said I don't I'm not 01:10:00going to do that. I just I don't feel like I can do that which in retrospect I regret. But I said I here's what I would ask you to do. Pick the top, pick the 20 cases that are most likely to come forward to face the death penalty in the next couple of years. And let me take a look at those and I ended up commuting the sentences of eight people four women. There were four women on death row in Ohio. There was a quarter of all the women on death row in the country were in our state, and four men. Not because I thought necessarily they were innocent. I really wasn't trying to judge innocence but rather that the circumstances one 01:11:00way or another justified something other than the death penalty. So in most cases it was life without parole I think in two cases I just said life. Two women who were could come up for parole hearing. I don't know what that happen. And that lead to a controversy with my friend the former attorney general Lee Fisher others. But the court you know I don't know why I think Lee was running for office so that's why he took it up.

CW: Why do you regret not looking at all of them?

RC: My feeling is that the death penalty is. It is, to call it a blunt 01:12:00instrument is grossly inaccurate. If you look at death row you will find a tremendous number of people who have severe mental or emotional issues. You will find dramatic geographic difference. In some counties the death penalty is relatively easily secured and others it is not. And you will find extreme racial disparities. And most of all you know extreme poverty. And anyone who can afford a decent defense will almost certainly not get the death penalty. And there are cases where somebody who has one of the cases for example involved a somebody 01:13:00who is probably mentally retarded was asked by a buddy to come help him hold up a bank. And the buddy gave him a gun and said, here you stand by the door and if anybody comes you shoot him and I'll go get the money. And police came and there was exchange of gunfire. The buddy with the gun was hit by a bullet and paralyzed for the rest of his life. The guy who instigated the crime took a plea deal for life the retarded guy did not take a plea deal. He may have been hit in police crossfire there's a dispute forensic evidence but that wasn't they didn't 01:14:00take the plea deal. He gets a death sentence. Car, guy drives a car for somebody who committed murder. The guy who committed murder gets a plea deal the guy drives a car it doesn't take a plea deal and gets sentenced to death these disparities are severe. And my feeling is you know life. Life in prison without parole is a hugely severe penalty. In fact one of the four people whose sentence I commuted challenged my commutation because he wanted the death penalty he said I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail.

CW: This kind of all kind of came out of Dagmar bringing some of this at least with the women. Did Dagmar often kind of bring things to you like that or was this?

RC: No, she had interests they were hers but a lot of I mean you know for example when we when I first took office one of her things was we need daycare for her state employees and which I totally agreed with. I let her run with that and she and Gail Channing worked on that to establish the day like daycare center for state employees. The peace education network which she took a very active role in was probably the first conversation we had when we met was about my involvement in anti-nuclear demonstrations in London. We were both at Oxford. She had particular interest in mental health and addiction matters partly because of her own experience with a mental health issue and because she had 01:16:00studied and gotten a degree from a Methodist theological seminary in addiction counseling. And so she had kind of a professional as well as a personal interest in that arena. And so that was another area where I encouraged her to kind of take the lead. But she also listened to people she got around she took a particular interest in what was going on at Marysville. And they helped set up a little chapel there. OShe was interested in program whether they were religious. It was a religious support for them for the women who were in there. Things of that kind. And she was outspoken.

CW: As you're as you're leaving office what do you imagine is coming next? How 01:17:00do you figure out what you do after you are a governor?

RC: Well this is a, that's a challenge. I really wanted to run something big and I went really in the private sector I was hopeful that I could find some something substantial to take on. I described I sat with John Pepper who was the chairman CEO of Procter and Gamble at the time. I said you know John, I run I run an enterprise that I think is bigger and more complicated than Procter and Gamble. And he said a really and I said yeah. I mean I have 54,000 employees, I 01:18:00have the largest legal gambling operation in the state, I have the largest single line insurance company in the state and worker's comp. I basically have a hospitality industry for about 40,000 people but they're all locked in at night you know either in prisons or mental institutions or whatever. I said you know when you look at what state government does it's a big and diverse enterprise. And I've learned a lot in the process of doing this. And I think I would be very good at being a senior executive in some large enterprise. He said you should talk to you should talk to some of the headhunting organizations so I sat down with the head of Heidrick and Struggles and Russell Reynolds and some of the big headhunting organizations. This is two or three months before I left office and 01:19:00you know said look here's my interest. And they said well don't you want to do government affairs. Don't you want to do. I mean that's really what you're cut out for. No I don't want to do government affairs you know. I don't want to go to Washington and work on K Street as a lobbyist. And so out of that I you know Peri Sabety and I were talking about the experiences we had in Ohio and the success we'd had in identifying strategic growth opportunities in communities that had suffered the loss of a big factory or some kind of economic dislocation. And it was that kind of thinking that informed setting up this small consulting business. You know it was a big adjustment to go from from. And 01:20:00you know it's like commanding an aircraft carrier and then getting put in a canoe, right. The aircraft carrier you get people all around you to help and you get an idea you can say let's pursue this course of action and somebody will study that course of action and come back and say no captain that's wrong let's go this way. In a canoe it's just the two of you paddling and you're paddling as hard as you can to keep up. And so I think that's you know you write a book or you go to the Kennedy School and teach but you really basic you're telling stories and pontificating, right. So.

CW: What kind of work did you do with you and Peri work on?

RC: We did very interesting work. I mean we had one of the things that I did 01:21:00that also grew out of the sort of the peace thing was a part of the last year in office. We held a conference and what we called defense conversion. What happens if a big base closes or what happens if you decide to downsize the defense budget. Well what we realized through careful research is that there were probably 200 small and medium sized businesses in Ohio who were suppliers to a Boeing or to General Dynamics or to one of the big defense contractors. And so we had actually a lot of interest in what was going on in defense budgets. So we put this conference together we had that done then Soviet ambassador come out 01:22:00and stay at the residence and speak and it was interesting to a three day event. Part of the notions about defense conversion were also relevant to what happens when a big factory closes. So we had probably the two most significant clients we had were the state of California which was undertaking something they called Project California. They wanted to take a look at what were going to be the growth industries of the future in California in the event that they saw substantial defense downsizing because that was something that particularly in Southern California would be a problem. And we actually, Chris Coburn who worked for the state of Ohio went over to Battelle. Chris called this to our attention. We went out and competed with the McKenzie's and Arthur Andersen's and other 01:23:00consultants. We made it. It was fascinating. They had a they had a group of business leaders say the 12 largest businesses in California led by PG&E Pacific Gas and Electric and Arco the big gasoline company. But the top twelve had put together one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to do this study and we went out to compete the first conversation that the chair of the two companies PG&E and Arco were interviewing folks and I was there with Chris Coburn from Battelle and 01:24:00myself and you know they they told us what they were going to do and they wanted to know about us. Here's what we're doing we'd be part of a team we would have ourselves. We would have someone from Battelle involved. We would have somebody from there we'd put together a team to do this work. And we do an analysis and the rest. But let me tell you something candidly not as a consultant seeking the business, but as governor of Ohio. You cannot for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars you will get nothing, nothing. If you want a serious study done of your economy. You know you're going to have to spend at least a million and a half dollars and instead of three months you're going to have to take a year and you're gonna have to do it right. So they're taken aback by this. We came back to Columbus I had a set of conversations and Chris Coburn knew a guy named Tom 01:25:00Suddes is a Notre Dame graduate now deceased Tom lived here in Columbus. He was a fund raiser and he went out for business organizations usually for Chambers of Commerce to raise money for them. And we told him about this he said Dick it's crazy. You know here's what you should do. Go back and when you pitch this say you're gonna pitch this deal. But if they want you're going to cost one hundred and fifty or you're going to cost a million and a half but you will raise as part of the deal you will raise the money for them and I'll become part of your team and we'll do this. So we went out there and again you know Arthur Anderson they got these folks are making their presentations for one hundred and fifty thousand dollar deal. We want to say here's what we propose we will do this job for you. We will do it right. We won't do it in three months we'll do it in a year. It will cost me a half dollars and we will as part of our work raise the 01:26:00million and a half dollars. And we got the business and then we went back to each of the Twelve companies and said OK you put ten thousand in for this deal. You've got to put a hundred thousand in because that's what it's going to take. And within about a month Tom had raised a million in two from the twelve companies because they all realized that they really should put, 10,000 wasn't it was an ante it wasn't the pot, right. And so we raised the money and we identified two industries for California that were gonna be their future. One was advanced transportation and the other was alternative energy, solar and the 01:27:00rest. And it's fascinating the business guys knew the governor of California right. He was a big Republican. So we made a presentation to hit him and his staff and he was you know Pete was just named Pete Wilson that Pete Wilson was and no that was the senator from there. Anyway the governor was not he didn't engage very much and it didn't it wasn't as curious about questions addressed. So we finished the governor I said to these business guys OK. Part of this is this was another part of our pitch that not only will we give them an analysis we will give them an action agenda that they needed to undertake and that included the governor and the legislative leaders. So that the head of the real power house and legislature was was Willie Brown. And so we said we've got to 01:28:00present to Willie Brown. Well I didn't know Willie Brown and they thought he was like an alien. You know I could get a hold of Willie Brown and I said I want to bring these big business guys to you we've got, we're working on a project and he said fine. And we went in and was like you know I could have been briefing the legislative leaders in Columbus, Ohio. It just happened I was in Sacramento. So these two business guys sat there in Willie Brown as I knew him to be was curious, engaged, smart, ask good questions. He said I get it I get it. This is this is great. You know I you tell me what we've got to do we will do it, right. And we walk out of the office we're literally going down the steps of the state capitol. The two business guys are looking at each other like holy cow you know he's really interested. And his staff aide came running down after us and I 01:29:00thought somebody had left something in the office, in Willie's office and he said governor, governor these two guys the speaker just wanted me to come and tell you he really means it. He wants to see this. So you know we had a great time with them and that was a good exercise we did. The other big client was in Long Island the was going to shut down and that was lots of jobs. And so the Long Island, there was a Long Island development organization that invited us to come in and work with them and we brought together the Brookhaven lab and some of the universities that were on Long Island and others and identified a road 01:30:00map for them to go forward. Wasn't quite as exciting or as remunerative as California. But that was good. We did. You know ironically we were invited out to Aurora, Colorado because Denver just decided to build a big airport there. They didn't know what to do with an airport being built in their backyard. So we gave them some ideas that's the airport I'll fly back to whenever I go back to Ohio, to Colorado from Ohio. And our advice didn't always get taken. I mean one of the things about being a consultant is you can offer what you think is good advice but the client makes the decision. Am I going to take it or not. I was very active on corporate boards and I was one of the things that I began to do 01:31:00when I was governor was asked by Frank Press who is the head of the National Academy of Sciences to join up for a panel there called the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable which is a group of about 30. The representatives of every federal agency that put out research money so there's transportation, agriculture, EPA the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, all of the all the federal funding agencies, the department of energy, which is one of the biggest. A group of about seven or eight either CEOs or vice presidents for technology or research at various companies and university presidents and Frank Press decided they needed a state official. So I went on the panel and served for a couple of years. And then when 01:32:00I was leaving the governor's office I called them and they said look I'm leaving so I assume you're going to want somebody else to come on. He said no actually I want you to come to become chair of the panel now that you have more time. So from 1990 to 1997 I chaired the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable and that was sort of a refinement of my interest in the Thomas Edison Programs and the eminent scholar programs at our universities and work of that sort.

CW: I have a question. As a governor you know you're in state politics you're at the top of state politics.

RC: Right.

CW: You can't stay in state politics then. You can't go back to being a state rep is there?

RC: Well you could. I mean you know.

CW: Theoretically.

RC: Theoretically or you do what Jim Rhodes did. I mean you know Jim Rhodes sat out four years and he came back. Right. I don't know what I tell you a. So let's say three years I've been out for three years George Voinovich has been governor. I'm in my box at an Ohio State game and Jim Rhodes is in his box next door and I go over to see him. And this is toward you know Jim is getting older now and he said well what are you going to do. You're going to do it? You're going to do it? I said what do you mean am I going to do it? You're going to run again? And I said no. He said, come on you got to run again. Well I did it. You could. Come on you got to run again you're young you can. Voinovich. That Voinovich. I'll tell you what I'll support you if you run against that Voinovich.

CW: So even Rhodes is trying to get you to tun.

RC: He was trying to get me to run. We ended up. I liked him a lot. He you know the thing we had in common is we just loved this state. There wasn't a part of the state that we didn't love. And you know there are a lot of politicians who love a part of this state right but they haven't really engaged all over the state. I think the thing about my campaign style and the way I governed that appealed to Jim Rhodes was I would go everywhere and I you know I just I I enjoyed my time in Hocking County or I enjoyed my time in Monroe County or I enjoyed my time in Washington County, I enjoyed my time in Jackson County. I enjoyed my time in Cincinnati or in Dayton or wherever it was. And Jim was that way. He you know and so I think he felt a kinship that was you know we had fun.

CW: You never got, you never felt the draw to go back?

RC: No. I mean there were times I felt I could do better. Whoever was fill in the blank right or I wouldn't have done that. But by and large people don't you know. They don't seek advice or you know you. And one of the reasons for me one of the reasons why being you know getting an opportunity to go to Colorado and do something there was healthy which I wouldn't get pulled into politics in a way that wasn't that where I couldn't use my talent and my experience and my skill.

CW: Going somewhere where you're not the ex-governor.

RC: Well yeah you know where you have to overcome your barely. Because people don't. Although my interview for president of Colorado College. After I'd gone through the process and I was being presented to the board. And the board at the college is thirty-two men and women almost all very Republican. And as chairman of the search committee his name is Vance Skilling who's lived 12 years in Ohio and whose wife had run for state rep when I was running for governor and I campaigned against her. But he still wanted me to be president of Colorado College. I'm introduced to the board and a board member named Bob Manning, a 01:37:00business exact from Denver. Says let me ask you a question Governor Celeste. Do I call you governor or ambassadors, well anyway. Let me ask you a question. Let's say we make you president now and you know it's 2002 and in 2004 your friend Bill Bradley runs for president and wins and he calls you up and says I want you to be my secretary of education are you going to leave us? Nice question. So I said well you know what Mr. Manning I think you want me to give you a truthful answer don't you. And he said yes. I said well okay here's my feeling. If the president the United States calls you and says that he wants you 01:38:00to do something for the country you have to give it very serious consideration. So I have a question for you would it be a bad thing for Colorado College if the headline was Colorado College president to become secretary of education for President Bradley. He started laughing. He said OK you really were a good diplomat. I had not answered his question. Yeah. You don't completely outrun it wherever it is. And of course in Colorado there was a young man living in Denver who got moved there year before I had moved to Colorado Springs whose father Doug Bennet had been my best friend in India. Whose diapers I had changed when 01:39:00he was born. His name was Michael Bennet who when he graduated from Wesleyan had come to Ohio and worked for me for a year or a year and a half as a staff aide and kind of cutting his eye teeth in politics. And you know today he's the senior senator from Colorado.

CW: So you mention if the president calls you have to consider it. Is that how you got brought back to India?

RC: Well that's, It was not quite the same way a Bill Clinton would constantly say to his people he'd been his fellow governors. What do you want to do. Just tell me what you want to do and to the extent that he can make it happen he'd make it happen. So there were there probably seven or eight of his fellow 01:40:00governors who Democrats and Republicans. I mean he he wanted to appoint a Bill Weld to be ambassador to Mexico. But ambassadors, cabinet members, Jim Blanchard was ambassador to Canada had wanted to be director of transportation. You know every time he saw me he would ask that question and I. Often Jacqueline was present, I would, My answer was there's nothing I really want to do. I'm not a fan of Washington D.C.. I commuted from Cleveland to Washington when I was Peace Corps director because I just I didn't you know. Washington is fund a visit for me but I resent it especially when I was governor. I resented going to Washington and seeing all these cranes and buildings being built and all this money being spent in Washington and meanwhile back in Ohio we had serious unemployment issues and things like that. So I was I always have had a little 01:41:00bit of, I think I've expressed it before frustration with D.C. So I would say there is nothing I want to do and right after he was is reelected I was invited to an event in the White House where Colin Powell was was agreeing to head up something called America's Promise or whatever and it was a big national service pitch. As former Peace Corps director I was invited and Jacqueline couldn't go she was pregnant with Sam so she said you know my best friend AnnMaura would love to meet President Clinton. So take, would you take AnnMaura? So I took AnnMaura Connolly and we go to the ceremony in the East Wing and after the ceremony there's a receiving line I took her through to introduce her to the president she's just Gaga right. And then he says to me hey Dick come on come on 01:42:00it's my second term now. There's not a whole lot of time left. What do you want to do and I said Mr. President there's nothing really nothing I want to do. When I got home to Cleveland Jacqueline wouldn't let me in the door. She said her first words out of her mouth what do you mean there's nothing you want to do. And I said there's nothing I want to do and she said yes there is and I said what do you mean. She said you'd like to be ambassador to India. And I was gonna say no you know I wanted to say no and then I said you know what. You're right. She said well you ought to tell him that. So I wrote him a letter. It was early February of 1997. I wrote him a letter saying you asked me this question and I've always said no. But I realized that there is one thing I would like to do which is to serve as ambassador to India. What I said to Jacqueline is wait a 01:43:00minute. We have an ambassador to India. She said No I just read that when the ambassador, when a president is elected or re-elected. All ambassadors submit their resignations. So you know it's not. I said I'd like to be ambassador to India. And I explained why. You know I served there in the 60s I thought I knew something about India. I'd stayed in touch with India. I took the first state trade delegation to India in 88. And I had continued to have friends there and I thought I could do that job very well. The one thing I'd like to do. So, I suppose I sent that letter off. And you know you write a letter to the president and you figure chances of the president seeing it are like this right. I'm in 01:44:00Chicago and it is it's right at the beginning of April of 97 and I'm therefore meeting I'm on the board of Navistar and I come back from the board meeting and the message lights blinking in the hotel room. This is thee White House operator President Clinton would like to speak with you. Please call back blah, blah, blah. Whoa that's pretty something so I call back in the White House switchboard is wonderful right. Wait for a few moments and there's these Navy guys who do all this com stuff and a couple of minutes later Bill Clinton is on the phone. Hey Dick how are you? You going to be in Washington anytime soon? I said as a matter of fact I'm going to be there on Wednesday. This is a Monday and I'd be there on Wednesday. He said while I'm doing rehab for my knee in the morning why don't you come by the White House. I'll have some time come by at eleven o'clock 01:45:00and we can talk. So meanwhile it turns out that they also called Navistar and so everybody at the board knew oh the President called you. What does the President want? Yeah. So I went to see the president on that Wednesday morning. The woman who the secretary had been one of my secretaries when I was at the Peace Corps and Betty says Oh he's waiting for you go on in. So I go in and sit down and he's you know he hurt his knee falling in Greg Norman's house remember and he had. So he's doing some kind of exercise with his knee and he says well it's unanimous. I said what do you mean. Al thinks it's a good idea. Hillary thinks it's a good idea. And I think it's a good idea. I want to appoint you ambassador to India. I'm honored Mr. President he said but I have a question for you. He 01:46:00said I've been having trouble with my nominations Lani Guinier, Zoe Baird we've been you know the Senate has been giving me a hard time. And I just I wonder is Dagmar gonna be all right with this, because by this time Dagmar and I are divorced. He said because I you know I don't want something to embarrass you or something that would embarrass me to happen. And I said well I honestly don't know how she'd respond Mr. President but I'll ask her. And so you know we talked a bit more about it and he said just you know just get back to John Podesta and we'll take care of it. So I got back to the hotel from the White House and I called Dagmar immediately said hey I have an important question for you. She 01:47:00said what's that. And I said well I was just at the White House I was with Bill Clinton and he said he's he must nominate me to be ambassador to India. Is this something that you know makes sense to you and would you be supportive. And there is a long pause I mean probably 90 seconds of silence. And then she said Well I don't think he could appoint a better person to be ambassador to India. My only disappointment would be that I'm not going there with you. And I said well I appreciate that. And so I called back and I said the coast is clear. So a nomination was sent up in June. Sam was born in July. I was confirmed by the Senate November 7th or 8th. I was sworn in on November 10th and I was on a plane 01:48:00to India. On my birthday on November 11th. I went fast because Madeleine Albright was going to be coming to India on a visit five or six days later so they wanted to get me out there to be present.

CW: That's got to be a little bit like deja vu because you were. Sam wasn't born there but Eric was.

RC: No Eric wasn't born there Eric was born. Eric was born in Washington.

CW: Oh that's right.

RC: It was absolutely. They were both about one hundred and twenty days old when they got there because Jacqueline didn't come with me. She came a week or ten days later it wasn't right away.

CW: Very, very similar.

RC: Yeah, in fact they're two stories about the beginning of that era. First you know when you're appointed ambassador that appointment means you're ambassador as far as Americans are concerned but you're not an ambassador in your host country until you present your credentials to the head of government or the head of state actually. And so that's the President of India. So when I arrived in New Delhi I was ambassador for everybody who's at the embassy and Madeleine was going to come before I had a chance to appoint my credentials. So I had the Indian government had to kind of figure out wiggle room to allow me to be at the in this meeting with Madeleine Albright and the Prime Minister of India. I 01:50:00arrive at the embassy and American Foreign Service officers tend to serve three year terms. They do a three year tour and then they move on to their next tour. So there are very few Americans. There were no American officers at the embassy in 1997 who were there when I left in 1967 but two thirds of the workforce of the American embassy in New Delhi. Our Indian employees who are basically career employees of our State Department are called local nationals and they're hired in every sort of position from secretaries to political officers and economic officers and the rest who work in the embassy. And so there were a couple of Indian employees who were basically kids as I was a kid 30 years earlier who 01:51:00were still working at the American Embassy when I came back. That's very unusual. And so you know I say hi Connie to Connie who worked in the social secretary's office when I was there and she's now working in science office and helping our science attache right or whatever. So I said to this gathered crowd you know I spent four years working in this embassy from 1963 to 1967. I sat in a desk right outside the ambassador's office. Now I'm returning in 1997 to move to a desk inside the ambassador's office in thirty years I will have moved 30 feet. I said so my career ladder has got very clear dimensions it's one foot a year and you get a roar of laughter. And it had a really good team that I was 01:52:00going to work with. So Secretary Albright arrives five or six days after I got to town and her trip was supposed to be a three day visit but Bosnia was heating up. She needed to get back to meet with Sergey Lavrov or some Soviet diplomat, Russian diplomat at that point. And so she was only going to be able to be in Delhi for like four hours, five hours max on the ground. So it was a meeting at the Prime Minister's residence followed by a lunch at the Prime Minister's residence back to the airport at the meeting they arranged for me to sit where an ambassador would sit if I had presented my credentials to pretend I was the 01:53:00ambassador. My number two the career officer who was deputy chief of mission at the embassy was charg d'affaires. He was formerly the head of the mission and he was in the room. He had to be in the room or I couldn't do this, but there is the Prime Minister, Madeleine Albright, I'm sitting here, across from me as the Indian foreign secretary. Prime Minister is I.K. Gujral. I had known I.K. Gujral. I'd met him because I bought a painting from his brother in 1964. And his brother introduced me to I.K. came because I.K. was the politician. His brother was just an artist. We all became fast friends. And he'd come to visit me a couple of times on the way to see his sons who were at Stanford. Stayed at 01:54:00the governor's residence. I hadn't told Madeleine. I had told anybody this because I didn't know how he'd want to treat me as ambassador coming to India. So the meeting began and Gujral welcomed Secretary Albright was very polite and then Secretary Albright got right into it and said you know we. Mr. Prime Minister you know President Clinton is very eager to see India become a signer of the nuclear test ban treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And we really need your leadership in this. Made her pitch in and I.K. Gujral said well Madam Secretary I understand the concerns that you have. As you probably know I opposed the Indian acquisition of nuclear weapons, but we have them and we live in a dangerous neighborhood. I have a neighbor to my northwest with whom we've 01:55:00had several wars who have nuclear weapons and I have a neighbor to my Northeast with whom we had a war who has a substantial number of nuclear weapons. I have to consider what is in the interests of people in my nation and so they went back and forth a couple of times. And finally the Prime Minister reaches across Madeleine Albright lap pats me on my knee. Don't worry Dick and I will work on this. And as he said this I try to keep my face. I hope I didn't betray my surprise. I could see the look of astonishment on her face and there was a gasp literally a gasp. I mean there were probably 20 people in the room who were various levels of our foreign service in their foreign ministry. It's kind of a gasp in the room. Dick and I will do all right. So then it's his turn and they 01:56:00talk about the Security Council and how it's really wrong to have a Security Council that's made up of the so-called great powers of the world. And 20 percent of the population of the planet is not does not have a permanent seat on the Security Council. And India should. And so they went back and forth on this and after 8 or 10 minutes I.K. Gujral reaches across pats me on the knee. Don't worry Dick and I will work on this. And so for an hour and forty five minutes there are these exchanges that go on punctuated by this comment that Dick and I will work on this right. So we have lunch. We get into the car to go to the airport. Madeleine Albright turns to me and says All right. What is this Dick 01:57:00and I will work on this. And I explain the background that he'd been a friend. I didn't know whether he would be comfortable acknowledging that we were personal friends but she said Well I don't think there's another country in the world where we have an ambassador who is on a first name relationship with the head of state. I mean the head of government. And I said I don't know how long it's going to last madame secretary Gujral's coalition is pretty tenuous. That was 16th or 17th, 18th of November. The 28th of November I presented my credentials to the president of India. That afternoon I.K. Gujral presented a resignation letter. His government had lost a vote of confidence. So the day that I officially became ambassador my friend I.K. Gujral resigned as prime minister. 01:58:00That's something else. But you know you talk about deja vu. How things come around. I mean I think that you know Bowles had prepared me for this well and that time served me well.

CW: Obviously you came in with expectations. How were the reality of India that you came into as ambassador different from what you expected?

RC: Well wasn't a whole lot different because I'd been back from time to time. The biggest, I mean the biggest difference for me things had changed hugely in 30 years. I mean the country went from 350 million to a billion. The Congress Party that it dominated politics had really fractured and no longer was a 01:59:00dominant force. State governments had assumed a lot more power that power had diffused from the center down to the states in a way that hadn't been the case before. So there were differences. I was aware of those differences what happened when Gujral government fell and new government came in led by the BJP party which was kind of a nationalist, more Hindu oriented party. And they were in for a while and then they lost the vote of confidence. So there was another election and they won that election with a bigger mandate and after that mandate by May of that year they tested nuclear weapons. And that, those nuclear weapons 02:00:00tests shattered the fragile growing warmth of a relationship between the U.S. and India. Once the Soviet Union fell in 1990 and India pursued a modernization and liberalisation of its economy in an effort to reduce the very heavy hand of government, heavy hand of taxation and regulation that it carried on. It was a move toward a much warmer relationship between the U.S. and India that previously had always been a little bit irritable. Right. This became a big issue. And the Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbott who is a friend of mine 02:01:00was outraged by this and took it upon himself with the support of Clinton. He was very close to Bill Clinton they were Rhodes Scholars together and very close to Madeleine took it upon himself to kind of lead India out of this darkness back into the light of a nuclear nonproliferation agreement and so on. And so a visit by Bill Clinton that was another reason why they wanted me out there early. Bill Clinton was supposed to visit India in May, in March of 1998. But when the Gujral government fell that visit was postponed until sometime in the fall of 98. And then a nuclear weapons test just took it off the boards. And so what started after the tests was a dialogue between the US and India on the 02:02:00whole nuclear issue that was led by Strobe Talbott on the US side and by Jaswant Singh who was the foreign minister of India in the BJP government. Jaswant who was a very good friend of mine and we became much closer friends during that period of time. Probably seven or eight meetings over the course of two, two and half years didn't really go very far. I mean they you know Strobe became a good friend of Jaswant. Jaswant like strobe a lot. They they crafted interesting statements after their meetings that that professed progress but we never got 02:03:00the Indians ready to sign te treaties that we wanted them to sign. And we were reluctant to lift some of the sanctions that we put on after the test some of which were mandated by law. We, Strobe and the administration were so incensed that they went beyond what the law required. Some of that was relief. And the sort of the latter part of this is they would not let Clinton come to India because they called it rewarding bad behavior if he came without a nuclear agreement. It was rewarding bad behavior. And by probably the fall of 1999. 02:04:00Maybe the late late summer early fall it was clear to me that the only way that this visit was gonna take place was if Clinton insisted and one of the things that happened between the time I was nominated in the time I was sworn in as ambassador was Jacqueline and I were doing Jimmy Carter Work projects every year for Habitat for Humanity. And we were at a Jimmy Carter Work Project in Kentucky in 1997, summer of 97 and Hillary Clinton came there on a women's build day that Rosalynn Carter was leading. And so we found ourselves at lunch during the work 02:05:00project and I went over and thanked her for her support of my nomination. And she grabbed me by the arm and she said you, Jacqueline was standing right there, she said you have to promise me one thing. You will get my husband out to India for a visit. And then she pulled me over to President Carter who was talking to some other people she said. President Carter tell Dick why it's important to get Bill out to India. You were the last president to visit India and that was almost 20 years ago. Jimmy Carter turned around and said Hillary you're right. You know Bill I had ought to go out to India it's an important place and we should be there. So I had that little admonition you know. Okay, I had to honor Hillary's demand that I get him up. So I wrote him a letter saying basically 02:06:00that you know we had been hopeful that he would come for a visit for some time that these talks had not been as as fruitful as we anticipated. But if he didn't plan a visit right now and get to India by the early part of 2000 a visit anytime after that would be a slap in the face because he would be such a lame duck. He really needed to come before the campaign heated up for his succession. And I may have been a little longer than that but I put this letter in an envelope and I sent the letter to my old secretary Betty in another envelope. And I didn't want to send it through the State Department channels because I knew that Strobe would deep-six it and I wasn't sure that Sandy Berger at the 02:07:00NSC would do it. So I sent it to Betty and I said Betty look here's a copy of the letter you see you know what's inside it. I want you to put this in the president's inbox. And then after you're sure he's read it I want you to give this copy to Sandy Berger. So he has it right. And within two weeks the planning for the trip was on March of 2000. The president came for five days to India and it just hit the ball out of the ballpark. He was, it was fabulous. It was the first time in 22 years a President had come to visit. So, yeah, it was kind of the bookends of my ambassadorship were coming there. My friend Dick and I will take care of this. To a different government a different set of circumstances. But

CW: Did you find other friends from your time there that you found in kind of 02:08:00surprising places? I mean you'd kept contact but were there people you ran into?

RC: Yeah, I you know when I was in India in the 60s most of my time was spent internally in the embassy and I did not form a lot of relationships with people outside the Bim Bissell. Bim Nando when I met her and been Bissell and her family were really the most important bond that I had I think in a continuum with India. And her husband died while I was there and her mother died while I was there. And in fact I lit the funeral pyre for her mother because her mother considered me her son. There were people in the business community that we'd interacted with on a trade mission. There were people in the academic community that we had worked with. My brother was on the board of the Ohio State 02:09:00University and he cooked something up with the folks at the school of agriculture who wanted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their work with Punjab Agricultural University. So there were times when we would, when we would reconnect in a way experiences from the 60s to the 90s and not too often.

CW: So you had mentioned the ambassador's palace or building itself where he had been staying and how you had been moved around. Was it a lot different physically. I mean where you ended up.

RC: Well when you go as ambassador it's like the pick of the litter right. The 02:10:00American embassy is in a compound. And part of the compound is the ambassador's residence both designed by Edward Durell Stone and they inspired the Kennedy Center so if you think of the Kennedy Center and its architecture the overhang and the gold columns. People would come to the residence and say this looks like the Kennedy Center. I said no Kennedy Center it looks like this because this came first. And they're surprised by that. We lived in that beautiful beautiful place. I could walk to work from the back door of my residence through a little gate into the embassy compound. The setting had changed dramatically because of security issues. So in the 60s there was never a wall or fence or anything 02:11:00around the embassy and the embassy was open to all visitors during the day. So when I went back there was a wall that got thicker and taller while I was there because the embassy bombings in East Africa . I'm not sure that that any of that would protect against a real attack if it were to occur. But that's the way it was. It was always a different kind of life where you see people had to have invitations shown at the gates and so on. We we were a little more open in the 90s than it is today. I would say 20 years later it's much tougher but the house 02:12:00was the house was similar. When I left office I had some campaign funds that I had not spent and so I gave half of that money to Habitat for Humanity and I gave half of that money to the Ohio Arts Council. Was like fifty thousand dollars that went to the Ohio arts council. So when we get out there we had this big house these tall main entryway was a hallway that went the. Hallways is not the right thing it was a main reception area that was 20 feet wide, 25 feet wide and 50 feet 60 feet long, it was huge and 30 foot ceiling in that space. The walls needed something. And so I persuaded the Ohio Arts Council to put together an exhibit of Ohio Art. And in fact they brought a delegation out. Barbara 02:13:00Robinson from Cleveland was I think Chair of the Arts Council then. Wayne Lawson was the head of the Ohio Arts Council then. And Bill Blair was sort of a member of the board of the concil and its favorite lobbyist as a governor he was the one who was always coming down to me and asking for more money for the Arts. And you know that was that was part of the fun of having that house. And there was a pool in the back. Jacqueline started water aerobics with a group of women from other embassies and Indian friends. We had you know we had about 250 House guests who stayed with us during the four years that we were there. We had a 02:14:00thousand guests a week through for events, receptions, and dinners and things of that kind. Had Mike Bloomberg to a dinner had J. Peterman of the J. Peterman catalog to a dinner. Which is, that was very funny. It is, have I told you this story. I doubt it. You get congressional mail they'll forward to you. And there was a request from senator a young senator from Kentucky named Mitch McConnell who said that he had a constituent named John Peterman who is going to be coming through India with a television crew or film crew. And he wanted to have dinner with the ambassador would I be able to arrange that. And my staff all the Americans said no you don't want to have some guy who's got a clothing catalog 02:15:00at your place. I said no, when a senator asks for something we should do it. But I don't want to have a film crew filming us eating dinner. So I did a little research and there was an article on J. Peterman which among other things he said he really didn't like bleeding heart liberals, right. That was one of bte noires, right. So I decided as a good bleeding-heart liberal. I would have only bleeding-heart liberals to dinner for this guy. Well I responded to the request that yes we would be pleased to host a dinner. That we would welcome the film crew could film him arriving and being greeted at the door of the residence. But they could not film the dinner we would feed them separately in the kitchen but they couldn't film the dinner. They agreed to that wasn't a problem. Then I got 02:16:00a note an urgent cable from his staff in Kentucky. What is the dress code for dinner. So I wrote I don't know the J Peterman catalog, I wrote this response that said Who is this man who arrives for dinner at the ambassador's residence in his Savile Row blazer and his military cut trousers. You know just like a J. Peterman thing, right. He loved it. And so he arrived and he was in a really good mood and after a couple of scotches he was in a very good mood and Jacqueline charmed him and all of the bleeding-heart liberals charmed him. He told us his whole story to Jacqueline which was fascinating because by this time of course J. Peterman was a character on Seinfeld and what had happened. We 02:17:00learned that night he had been on the West Coast for a business and he flew back and when he got back home people were asking about seeing him on Seinfeld and he was all upset. So he called his lawyer and said how can we sue Seinfeld to get rid of this J. Peterman character because people somehow think that I'm on Seinfeld. His lawyers said John it is the number one rated show you're getting more publicity. And the reason he had the film crew with him was that they learned through their surveys that people really believe that J Peterman was only a character on Seinfeld and didn't realize that there was a real Peterman and Peterman catalog. So they were going to try to develop a film that told the story of the real J. Peterman right. Anyway the rest of that story is by the 02:18:00way. He started to try to open stores. Went bankrupt trying to open stores. The catalog goes dormant and four years ago. So the that was in probably 2003 let's say or 2004. 2014 John Peterman gets a call from the guy who played J. Peterman on the Seinfeld show saying I want to resurrect the catalog will you be my partner. And so there is a J. Peterman catalog today owned jointly by the original J. Peterman and the guy who played him on Seinfeld. Isn't that funny? Crazy. So what we had. Bianca Jagger came through and she was we had fun with her. She came with our secretary of agriculture and his wife. They were a food 02:19:00and something or other visit, right. We'd become friends. But it was it was an interesting time I spent, I went, when I arrived I decided I would use my experience as governor to engage with the leaders of state government in India because you know a state in India could be a hundred million people 200 million people. I mean these are big enterprises. And more and more activity was going on at the state level. So I visited every state capital and I sat with the chief minister who was the elected head of the state similar to our governors. And we 02:20:00would talk about the experience of what their challenges were at that time in West Bengal or in Maharashtra, Punjab or whatever the state was. I was sitting in Kerala or in the state government where the government was a communist an Indian style communist government. They had been in power ever since independence and the chief minister had his equivalent of Al Dietz or David Baker their development guy there and he was bemoaning there what was happening in Kerala. Kerala is a state that has sent tens of thousands of highly educated young people to the Middle East to work in the oil patches engineers and 02:21:00accountants and in every sort of work. And so they were getting tens of millions of dollars of probably hundreds of millions of dollars of remissions from folks overseas coming back into the state. The state the centre in India is the taxing authority. And then it puts money back into the states and the states decide how to spend the money. Many states were spending their money on schemes that were of only interest to the to the elite in the state the political elite in the state capital. But in Kerala they really wanted this money to be used effectively so they were putting the money back into the panchayats into the 02:22:00community organizations but they were dismayed to find that most of the money was being spent on highways. And they had so they done some intensive study to say why or why is all this money being spent on highways. What they discovered is money from the remissions coming back into Kerala was being invested in land. If you bought a plot of land its value would increase dramatically if it had a nice road going past it. So everybody in Kerala wanted good roads to be built not health centers, not schools, good roads were the things that enhance the value of their of their property. So here's this government struggling with how to deal with it. I said Well I'll tell you what I would do if I were chief minister or yeah he's very interested I said here's what I would do. I continue put the money back in the hands of the panchayats. But I say no more than 25 02:23:00percent can be spent on any one of the following eight sectors. Then you define what the sectors are health care education infrastructure you name it. Give, that's what I would do the guys the development director scribbling away. I got back to Delhi in about two weeks later I got a note from the chief minister saying oh Mr. Ambassador I want thank you very much for the suggestion you made were implementing it. I asked my counsel down in South India. I said please advise the chief minister I want no credit for what they're doing because I didn't want them saying that this communist chief minister is taking the advice of the American ambassador who is telling them how to spend their money in Kerala.

CW: Interesting problems that you face.

RC: Well it was you know it's a big and it's a diverse state. There's a state 02:24:00called Bihar which is one of the poorest states. And the the political leader in Bihar was a guy named Lalu Prasad and Lalu was a showman and a snake oil salesman. He in his first campaign he trained parakeets to say Lalu, Lalu, Lalu. And he released flocks of these birds that would go around saying Lalu, Lalu. He was like he was kind of like a Jim Rhodes I mean people loved him, right. He was down home and but he got in trouble and he was sent to jail. So his wife became chief minister. So when I went there on my visit I had Christopher with me. And 02:25:00she didn't speak English and I don't speak the local language. I mean I didn't speak Hindi. So we were speaking through interpreters that we arrive in and you know I said how glad I was to be here. And I introduced Christopher my son Christopher is one of our seven children. He was born in India. Her response was Oh you have seven I have eight. So the headline in the big newspaper in Patna, Bihar the next day was the name, her name eight Celeste seven. It's like a score for a game. There you go.

CW: So you didn't have to deal with any defecting Soviet?

RC: Not. Not in this round but we've been the biggest the biggest the biggest and most serious problem we faced was war in Kargil. There were a couple of things that happened that were really the hard side of international relations. The Pakistanis decided to infiltrate some of their frontier force across the invisible boundary between Pakistan controlled Kashmir and Indian controlled Kashmir. So into what the Indians consider the state of Kashmir in an area that is very high. These were positions that Indian troops would hold during the good 02:27:00weather but then in the winter it was so cold that they would pull out and then they would go back and retake that that these outposts that covered it along the line of patrol in a place called Kargil overlooking a very key supply road up into Ladakh tha the upper part of Kashmir that borders China . The Indians sent a patrol up to take to retake the post. This is usual reoccupied that space that they usually had and didn't hear from them. Sent another patrol up and discovered that the post had been occupied by these Pakistani soldiers. Pakistanis claimed that they were civilians that these were you know rebels who were had done this but Indian intelligence and our intelligence was clear that 02:28:00these were Pakistani troops. And this caused a really bloody and harsh conflict. It was sensitive because of this position was in a place where it was extremely difficult to get to without going around to behind them which would have been in Pakistan occupied Kashmir. And the Pakistanis were supplying them across that line. We made it clear to the government of Pakistan that they should try to withdraw the troops. They were, they kept saying they weren't they had no control over these people. The Pakistani high commissioner who is a friend of mine a wonderful man named Ashraf Qazi came to see me during this period and said you know will you help us persuade the Indians that there you know. And I 02:29:00said Ashraf I know you can tell me what your government wants you to tell me so you can report to them that you've told me that. But I have to tell you we know these are Pakistani military and they have to be withdrawn there was bloody conflict going on the Indians we're trying to find ways to retake this post without. Our position was to the Indians don't cross the line of control respect that line of control. We will support you and we will do everything we can to get the Pakistanis to withdraw . The Indians intercepted intelligence between the Musharraf who was the Army chief of staff at the time went on to become their prime minister who is in Beijing back to his number two talking about what was going on. They were, there was no way they could pretend that this wasn't 02:30:00their operation. And on the 4th of July Nawaz Sharif who was the prime minister of Pakistan flew to Washington to try to persuade Bill Clinton. Over Bill Clinton's protestations that he really didn't want to see him on the Fourth of July. When he insisted you've got to you've got to help me here. And Clinton to his credit and for the first time in Indo U.S. Pakistan history clearly sided with India on this. And there were no ambivalence said until you withdraw your troops. There's nothing we can do and sent Nawaz Sharif home empty handed. And Bill Clinton called the Prime Minister of India woke him up at 2:00 in the morning to tell him the results of that conversation. In that experience of the 02:31:00Kargil war was probably the single most important turning point in how the US and India related in kind of geopolitical terms and then when Clinton came out he spent five days in India and he spent four hours in Pakistan. And that contrast in his message in Pakistan which the Indians all heard was a clear affirmation that you know our relationship is first and foremost with India. We're concerned about Pakistan. We have to care about Pakistan because they're deeply involved in good and bad things. With respect to stability in South Asia and terror and global terrorism. So in the Kargil war was I was probably at the 02:32:00Foreign Minister's talking to Jaswant Singh every day during that period of time. And India's discipline and there military success which really impressed our military people because we didn't believe you could actually successfully drive them out without enlarging the war. Both impressed at the US. The other important thing that happened that was more akin to the cloak and dagger. The the Svetlana-Stalin stuff was Christmas of 1999 the Indian Airlines flight that 02:33:00was from Katmandu to Delhi was hijacked and they had one hundred and hundred and twenty eight passengers something like that on the plane and it was flown first to to place in Pakistan landed briefly there but then took off again and went to Dubai. And in Dubai they needed to be refueled and the kidnappers were demanding the release of thirty five terrorists who'd been imprisoned in India and in Dubai they they opened the plane doors and they throughout the body of a young man. He and his new bride were on this plane. They had slit this guy's throat with a box cutter and tossed them onto the tarmac and they started refueling and 02:34:00they moved the plane twice while they were fueling it so that they couldn't be stormed. They then took off for Kandahar later the Indian Airlines pilot described what happened and said that these hijackers knew more about the performance of his plane and he did. That when they were ready to take off they in Dubai they gave him instructions for how fast to climb. He said the plane can't handle that and they said no the plane can. And here's where we're going to go and we're going to land in Kandahar. I can't land in Kandahar they don't have lights or anything you know. You can, you're going to be able to land at Kandahar. They knew more about the plane and we did. In the end the plane landed 02:35:00in Kandahar and sat in for 48 hours there were negotiations between Afghan government representatives and the hijackers. These people on the plane and the government of India in India in the government of India agreed to free three, the three highest priority people they had in captivity. One of these three was a known bomb maker, one of tham was a guy who's started his own terrorist organization in Pakistan, and one of them who previously kidnapped an American tourist was the guy who was captured and charged in Pakistan with the in the 02:36:00murder of Daniel Pearl. The Wall Street journalist. I'm convinced that this was the rehearsal for 9/11. And I'm convinced that whoever trained these people you know and worked with them was part of that circle that Bin Laden funded and led that had its base in Pakistan. The three kidnappers are the four people who were involved in doing the hijacking disappeared and you know probably were back in Pakistan within 24 hours and the three terrorists. The Indians flew these 02:37:00terrorists to Kandahar on a major jet, picked up the passengers, and brought them back only later brought the plane back. So you know we had one of the results of the Clinton visit was that the government of India signed off on establishing an FBI office in Delhi. And because prior to that time when FBI agents wanted to investigate anything related to terror or the rest. They had to get their visas and come through. And so by 2000 we were able to establish an FBI office. The FBI attache in Delhi to work on these things . That was the, and we had credible threats against consulates while we were there in the embassy but.

CW: You made it through.

RC: Yeah. I mean I. They we you know you drove around in a heavily armored vehicle. The Indian government insisted on putting a guy they called them black cats they're equivalent of Secret Service guys who are very highly trained and I had one who rode around with me in that process. But you know I never, the truth is I never felt exposed in India while I was there. And we go back regularly we take people back now and don't feel.

CW: Do you feel like it was the same positive environment for Sam that was for your (older) kids?

RC: Oh yeah. Sam loved it. And he you know he can't wait to go back. He's, it's 02:39:00interesting I mean the time you spend there I don't know when you're very young. I don't know how it kind of seeps into you but everything from the food and the smells and the excitement of it it's there.

CW: So you went from being governor and you figured out what to do after that is it the same process after your ambassador or is it more just like coming back?

RC: Well you know the thing about being an ambassador is you know you've got a finite period of time you're gonna do this. I submitted my resignation letter and then Colin Powell asked me to stay on for a bit and it was ironic. I said I would do it for two or three months I didn't want to do it for too long. But in 02:40:00February of 2001 the US invited Jaswant Singh to come meet with the secretary of state and national security adviser and so on and so I was accompanying Jaswant to the US once again for a meeting with now a new secretary of state a new national security advisor and so on. And yeah, as I was leaving Bill Clinton was arriving as a private citizen for a visit to India. They were starting the this American India Foundation that he was going to be part of and so on and so he was coming as a private citizen so I greeted him. He came in from the airport he was having dinner at the ambassador's residence as I left to get on a plane to fly to Washington for Jaswant Singh's visit. And that was really interesting. I 02:41:00mean we sat I sat in his meetings with Colin Powell with Condoleezza Rice. We were with Condoleezza Rice in the White House and a dozen people or so in the Cabinet Room. And I knew that there was a plan for President Bush to step out of the oval and come over to the cabinet room and greet the foreign minister. And so you know. Door opens and President Bush walks in and he's very cordial and he starts going around. Greets Jaswant and says a few words and he goes around to 02:42:00say hello and everybody comes to me. I'm the last one around cause I'm on this side of the table. Dick, how are you? Do I call you Ambassador or do I call you governor? And I said well I don't know do I call you President or do I call you Governor. I said I guess I'll call you Ambassador. I said I'll call you President and then he turns to Jaswant Singh and he says have you ever seen the Rose Garden. Now this is totally off script Jaswant of courses says no I haven't. Well come on you know takes his arm walks right back into the Oval Office. I say to Lalit Mansingh who's the Indian Foreign Secretary. Come on. He's the Indian ambassador in Washington now. Come on Lalit we can't let these guys go alone. So the two of us walk in and Condoleezza Rice comes in behind us. We get in the Oval Office and Jaswant and President are standing out in the Rose Garden. The President's pointing to stuff right. And then they come back in and 02:43:00President Bush says do you have some time? Jaswant Singh say Mr. President whatever. Yeah sure I have time. Well sit down the President sit down put Jaswant next to him. I'm on one side Lalit Mansingh is on the other side. Condoleezza Rice is at the far end. You seen that little way in which they sit in the Oval Office. And George Bush says look at Condi she's totally dismayed because she hasn't given me any cards for talking points for this. And she's shaking her head like Mr. President please don't do this mister. And I'm thinking to myself I don't know how he's going to handle this. And President Bush proceeded to give like a five or six minute and it went something like this 02:44:00you know I think that the relationship between the United States and India is of utmost importance. I just, to me it is. We should be the closest of allies . You know India represents a major portion of population in this world and a counterweight to China. I mean this is anything in Asia that if there's going to be stability in Asia it begins with India. Then we have to we have to focused on that. In your country that liberalisation that you undertook in 1991 and the dynamics of your economy are striking I mean I think that the opportunities for 02:45:00trade and investment in both directions are really substantial he said. And in the Indian American community is a remarkable community. We benefit from all of these folks who live and work and contribute in our country. He said in Texas some of my best friends were Indian Americans who were part of our technology community. Some of the best political supporters too you know. And I'm thinking to myself I couldn't have written a better thing, you know. Condoleezza Rice breathes a sigh of relief and Jaswant sort of responds Mr. President the United States is the superpower in the world. The world looks to you for leadership and 02:46:00certainly we in India value our relationship with you. And Bush picks up on the idea you know superpowers mean envy and there are a lot of places that envy us and that isn't always healthy. In somehow they started talking about nuclear. His idea that we need a nuclear umbrella of some kind. We need nuclear a strategic defense system that can deal with nuclear threats and he was pretty articulate about that. And Jaswant Singh said you know Mr. President just before I left it's ironic that you mentioned this because just before I left I drafted a note for our cabinet about the need for working toward some kind of a nuclear strategic nuclear deterrent that we could develop that would provide a defense 02:47:00system on nuclear weapons. And I'm thinking to myself you know this is a three minute pull aside and all of a sudden I'm sitting in on a 30 minute unscripted exchange between two pretty thoughtful leaders in their countries. It was fascinating. That was fascinating. And you know the Bush administration continued to build on the success of the Clinton trip and the direction of that partnership and it's only gotten closer over the course of the last 20 years, so.

CW: Was that, well that would have been towards the end.

RC: That was April. That was February of 2001. So I was just six weeks away from 02:48:00mustering out as Ambassador. We have a tradition at the embassy Edward Durell Stone's design of the embassy is modeled on the old, the way in which country homes were built by the moguls. So you had four walls very open on the sides and a pond in the middle and any breeze would cool the place off that way. So there was a in the U.S. embassy there is a pond in the middle and it's open to the air and there's a kind of architectural webbing on the top. Ironwork on the top. So when it rains it would rain right into when the monsoon rains fall right into the pond and the rest it was amazing. We had in the 60s we had ducks flying 02:49:00around in the pond. the tradition for departing foreign service officers is you walk the pond. Some family gets at one end of the pond and walks this pond all the way to the other end. The problem is that the pond gets slippery over time. And so I'm walking with Jacqueline and Sam and I'm the old man holding up his kid who is now four years old. And that pond has little islands in it with trees and lights and so on. And there are tubes along the floor that handle the wiring out to these different islands. And so as I'm going along I trip on one of these things and I fall into the pond, pull Sam in with me. So we are dripping wet as 02:50:00we emerge from the pond and we go out. And then on the front steps everybody comes out and we have a picture of the ambassador and his family flanked by 300 people or 400 people who witnessed my slip and fall. A great departure. How do you leave. How do you leave. Well you didn't go off stage really gracefully, but what the heck.

CW: Years and years from now somebody will be looking back all these photos and be like who's the ambassador...

RC: Oh yeah, no we have video. We have it on video. It is, you may have video but I'm not sure. I'll have to check You tube. No, I mean I may have shared a video with the Historical Connection. I started to think just as when I was 02:51:00leaving the governor's office I thought about you know what would come next. And I kind of canvassed the headhunting firms. About three months before I was leaving India I got a call from Heidrick and Struggles asking if I was interested in the university presidency. And I said Yeah I would consider it when I was leaving the governor's office. My sons Eric and Christopher had sat me down and said Dad we think you should become a university president. I'm not ready for that. There are other things for me to do. So they kind of had that they were actually better headhunters or better advisors than the people I 02:52:00talked to. In any event, you know that was in 1990 so it's now 2000 it's ten years later and so I said I would be interested when I get back I'd take a look at it and this was in Ohio. And so I came back Jacqueline and I found a house in Cleveland Heights and I decided I was gonna take some time before we made a decision. And this actually was turned out I didn't know what the university had in mind when they raised it, but when I got back I found out it was Cleveland State. And so I said to the fellow handling the search for Heidrick in Cleveland 02:53:00look I would be interested in a university presidency but I don't want to get involved in a state university if it's gonna be a problem with the governor. Because I think the governor should you know you don't want a politician to come in and be in your backyard and be a problem and I don't think I could do my job if the governor wasn't comfortable with it. So you gonna talk to Governor Taft and you know I got a call after two or three months that said you know that we think the coast is clear you could you could do this. And I was invited by the chair of the board to come to a Saturday meeting at what he called the search committee. And when I got there it was one of the most bizarre interviews I've ever had. He didn't introduce anybody around the table. I mean I knew who he was 02:54:00and I knew one of the other people there who was a board member of Cleveland State, but there's also a board member who'd been a board member of one of the companies Republic Engineered Steel that I had been on their board. So we had a little discussion about the university and about me and about one thing or another. Whether it was bizarre in several ways because not only did they not introduce themselves. Nobody took a note and I thought what kind of interview and nobody takes note. At the end of this conversation I ask a couple of questions one of them was about the financial situation of the university and I didn't feel like I got a very straight answer. But at the end of it the chair said you know this is we just hope that you'll keep this confidential. We don't 02:55:00you know this is we're still in the process and the rest. I said look I'm totally comfortable with confidential. I have no desire. And that was a Saturday morning. Monday, Plain Dealer the story is on the front page that Celeste had sought an appointment as president of Cleveland State and that the board said no. So much for that. I had actually called the search guy when I left the interview to tell him that I thought that this was not the right thing for me. And so take my name out of consideration. So any event. Oh it's just one more. You know Jacqueline was all upset and I said look if you're a politician these things happen right. They're gonna slant it their way. That's for them to do. But the interesting thing because this story appeared in the newspaper other 02:56:00headhunters started to think about me as a candidate. So I would get a call. Are you interested in University of Vermont. You're interested in Trinity Hartford. Are you interested in that the University Massachusetts, System. Now Jacqueline would say, no look at the weather. No not. And then there was a story in the newspaper mid summer that the president of Case Western Reserve had announced that he was stepping down. Well that was really interesting to me. And so I called the search firm Isaacson Miller who Arnie Miller had been the head of the White House Office of Personnel when I was a Peace Corps director. So I knew 02:57:00Arnie, called Arnie, said Arnie I'm interested in this. What do you think? He said well my partner John Isaacson's handling it so talk to John so I called John. And he said well we shared with them a list of 260 potential candidates. And your name was on the list and nobody sort of said hey so that's a good idea. So I don't know whether they would have an interest. And I said Well would you mind if I talked to the chairman of the board? The chairman of board was Charlie Bolton who had been a one term state senator and gotten to know him and I'd sort of helped him around when he was a state senator. So we got together for lunch in maybe the beginning of September, no late September of probably of 2001. And 02:58:00I told him you know I just want you to know I'm interested in the possibility of being president of Case Western. He said Really. And he said yeah let me let me just tell you kind of why I think I would be good, you know. My father is Case law, my mother is Case social worker, my sister is a Case social worker. I did Summers at Case, I've done a visiting fellowship at Case. I know Case Western Reserve reasonably well. I spent a lot of time focused on higher education and there are a number of programs at Case Western Reserve that grew out of the Thomas Edison program that I'm familiar with. I was chairman in the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable for seven years and I work with every single federal agency that puts out research money for schools like 02:59:00Case Western Reserve. And I think I could probably help substantially increase the funding Case realizes from federal research grants. And I know the city of Cleveland very well and I think one of the challenges for Case Western Reserve is engage more energetically and effectively with the city of Cleveland. And I think I could, I think I can be a pretty good president for Case Western Reserve. He got all excited, right. I want to talk to people about this you know. So I got a call right after the first of the year from John Isaacson. And John said, Well I have good news and bad news. And I said OK. He said good news is I think you'll be a finalist for Case Western. You're a finalist on our list. And frankly I think you'd be the best choice. I said well that's encouraging. He 03:00:00said, but the bad news is I don't think they'll choose you. I think that when all is said and done they're going to look at you and they're going to say you know we make Celeste president of Case two years from now or four years from now he's going to be running for governor again or running for the Senate. He's going to be doing one of those things you know we aren't gonna be able to keep him for very long. He said I think in the end they're going to go with a safer choice. So you know I'm not interested in getting back into politics. I mean that's behind me now. I mean I'm serious about university president. And he said no I get that he said from my stand point of view if they were to say we want Celeste we'll do it right now I'd say fine. You don't have to bring in other candidates I think that would work. So you probably want to think about this a bit. He said here's the reason why I'm raising it with you. He said my contract is to give them three viable candidates. And if they if they're going to not be 03:01:00able to get their mind around you then basically I'm giving them two now I'm willing to do that because I think you're a viable candidate. But I want you, you know it'll be public the final list will be public and I want you to decide whether you want to go through this with a strong likelihood that you will not be the choice. He said you probably want some time to think about this. And I said no I think you're right. I mean I knew the board of Case Western Reserve pretty well. My dear friend Milt Wolfe had been on the board it was Peter Lewis had been on the board. It was a very big board and a very unruly board it was hard to make it work. And so I said nah I think you're probably right. He said now what? And he said What about Colorado College. And I said well I don't know 03:02:00anything about Colorado College. Tell me something about it. He said it's in Colorado. And I said don't be a smartass tell me something. He said well here's the way I would describe it to you. Take Oberlin put it at the foot of Pikes Peak and give it this unique curriculum where they teach one course at a time. And he said I think that would be the right way to think about Colorado College. And I said why do you think they, why do you think it would be different than Case Western? Well I'm not an academic. He said well I think they're looking for someone who's a non-traditional candidate. And I think they would be interested in you. So that's how. So I went from ambassador to.

CW: President.

RC: College president fulfilling the fulfilling the ambitions of my sons. Eight years later I'd been at Colorado College it's now 2010 so I've been there for eight years starting my ninth year I get a call from Eric my oldest son. Who says dad I'm just calling to warn you. What do you want to warn me about Eric. He said you're sailing into uncharted waters. Uncharted waters what do you mean? He said you have never held a job for more than eight years in your life.

CW: You only stayed there until 2011.

RC: Yes right that right. As soon as I got that call I called the chairman of the board and I said I think this is my last year. I think this is a good run.

CW: Just wanted to beat your record, right?

RC: I did that and I enjoyed all of it.

CW: Did you find any of it. I mean compared to governor, ambassador was any of it challenging?

RC: You know it was challenging in different ways. One of the things that I did when I got to the embassy in Delhi was to challenge the mission to write a mission statement. Why do we need a mission. We represent the United States government to India. Well what does that mean? Give us. So we wrote it like a two sentence mission statement about what we, why we were there and I had it 03:05:00printed on plastic cards for every member of the mission. Part of the challenges is people only see pieces of the mission so if you're working in the library of Congress for example, which is part of the mission collecting books for library. What's your sense of this? So if you're working in the information agency what's your sense of this? If you're working in defense intelligence what's your sense of mission. AID what's your sense? So we have one mission statement and we used it. That was very interesting because it was the prelude to an exercise that was underway when I arrived to write a mission performance plan which was required of every embassy everywhere in the world every year. And it was what you were going to do for the next year. And my deputy who was a wonderful man named Ashley Wells called it a mission P P. He thought it made no sense. He said we 03:06:00write these things we send them to Washington nobody ever pays any attention to them. And I said Ashley I'm going to prove you wrong. He said how? I said I'm going to, I'll bet you a dinner at the best restaurant in Washington that I can get a response from Washington for a mission performance plan. So we started writing our mission performance plan we began with a mission statement and then we wrote out a mission performance plan. But I said it was due on, it was due like April 10th or something like that. So I said I want this on my desk by March 25th. We got it on March 25th and went through it. We refined it a little bit and we sent it off on March 30th. He said why are you sending this off on March 30th. It's not due until April 10th. I said because I want it to get there 03:07:00early. Well sure enough we, you know shortly after the 10th of April we got questions about our mission performance plan because it was the only one they had gotten and they could study it and make it pay attention to it. Ashley was totally flummoxed by this but the wonderful thing is a year later the State Department asked him to come to Washington to run a training session for people in the development of mission performance plans because he'd done such a good job with our plan. You know he was treated as the lead author on this I just had to sign off on it. When I came to Colorado College the first thing I did was to say you know do we have a mission statement. They say yeah we do. Nobody knew quite what it was. So I did a senior staff retreat with my eight or nine direct 03:08:00reports and the first thing I did was to put up the so-called mission statement for the college, which was absolutely generic liberal arts language. It could belong to anyone. And so I put this up no attribution and then I put down the names of ten liberal arts colleges and three columns for votes. You know had Wesleyan and I had Swarthmore it had Carlton and it had Grinnell and it had you know Colorado College and I said OK each of you has three votes. I want to know whose mission statement this is. Of these ten institutions it was our mission 03:09:00statement got four out of three columns of votes nine guys voting three times as twenty seven votes it got four votes. I said if we can't recognize our own mission statement we are in deep trouble. So we set about writing a mission statement and developing a strategic plan. Carolyn Lukensmeyer had been my chief of staff when I was governor came out and helped us facilitate the work on the strategic plan. And our mission statemen it was interesting the mission statement was hard to rewrite. And I had to get the faculty to approve it right. The faculty didn't like the language initially so they turned it over to our professor of poetry and he refined it and it's still being used. It's in fact the public radio station which is based at the college you can hear that mission 03:10:00statement every so often as if it were an ad. But the first the first challenge we faced, the Colorado College was a challenge that echoed what I'd learned as a legislator and governor. The political. This is 2002, the political science department had organized a symposium called 9/11: One Year Later. And it invited as a keynote speaker a woman named Hanan Ashrawi a Palestinian as the keynote speaker. Now this was not a memorial for 9/11 that was going to happen separately in the college chapel but, it elicited a furious response by the Jewish community in Denver and Colorado Springs. That we would bring in a 03:11:00Palestinian to talk about anything that reflected relationship with 9/11. They consider her a terrorist although she really wasn't, Ph.D from the University of Virginia. Interesting woman. So all of a sudden these academics were confronted with a real world firestorm demanding that we disinvite her and so on. The first question Celeste our new president you're going to disinvite this woman? I said no we're Citadel of free speech there's no way we're going to disinvite this woman. So you know if you want to do something to try to mitigate the damage that's been caused in the Jewish community with Hanan Ashrawi why don't you invite them to find somebody or invite the Israeli uh embassy to send somebody 03:12:00to you know be a counterweight to this conversation that goes on. They end up sending a bringing a political scientist the head of the political science association in Israel. A guy named Gideon Doron to speak and it was a two day symposium. So we just added another speaker, but up the agitation went on and there were gonna be demonstrations going on and there were going to you know it's going to be an anti-Ashrawi demonstration. It's fine if you're going to have demonstrators they can demonstrate on the quad but I'll give you one piece of advice get porta potties. Why do you want porta potties. I said because any anyone who's ever been in a demonstration knows that the one thing you need is a place to relieve yourself every so often. So you'll make your demonstrators happy if you have porta potties on the quad. Oh OK. So you know then we're going to be a demonstration, a pro-Ashrawi demonstration so we're going to have 03:13:00conflicting demonstrators, and then the students decided they wanted to set up a free speech corner that's between the two demonstrations. And so you know every day that one of these flustered political science professors comes with another problem and finally Lief Carter the lead guy on the symposium came to me about three days before it was to begin and said Colorado Spring Police Department wants to know where to put the snipers. And I said are you kidding me. No, they want to put snipers on the roof of the buildings so they have coverage of the quad in case there's an incident. And I said Lief I've had some experience with things like this. I don't want anyone with a gun close to this campus I don't 03:14:00care what police or not. You can tell them keep the SWAT team down at that police headquarters if we have a problem we can call and they can be here in five minutes, you know. the last thing I want is somebody with a gun sitting on top of an academic building waiting to shoot. So SWAT team didn't come, porta potties did, Hanan Ashtawi speaks. That night we have a dinner for the speakers an Hanan Ashrawi and Gideon Doron both come to the dinner. They're both chain smokers like everybody chain smokers like everybody in the Middle East and we don't let people smoke in the house so they sit on our veranda for the whole evening smoking together, eating together, talking together and the next morning when Gideon Doron stands up to speak he said you know last night I had dinner with Hanan Ashrawi who spoke yesterday. Now she and I don't agree on everything. 03:15:00In fact there are a lot of things we don't agree on, but I will tell you one thing we agree on. If you would give us two weeks together to solve the problems of our two countries we could get it done. It's the end of the, you know. So you know my days as a demonstrator helped me. My experience dealing with the aftermath of Kent State and all of that helped me and it made it real easy to be a college president and deal with that stuff. Now my provost and the faculty were stunned because they were frightened of every aspect of this. They were frightened about what are we going to do about the Jewish community who don't like us. Well, I went up to Denver I sat with Jewish leaders and said you know here's where we are here's what we're doing. Well you know we became friends and 03:16:00all of the threats to withdraw support and the rest went away. The big, we had a couple of tenure fights. And there was agony on all sides and I said you know look go read the files of battered women and tell me that a tenure fight is bad. Someone who kills themselves to get out of a terrible situation life is going to go on after denial of tenure or granting of tenure one way or the other different it gives you a perspective, right. You know we had a financial crisis in 2007, 2008 when everybody was taking a hit and we had to cut eight or nine 03:17:00million dollars out of a 100 million dollar budget. One of the things we did was to end football cut Colorado College it was a terrible brouhaha around that. It was not something I wanted to do but we were the only division 3 school in our time zone, which meant every time our football team was going to play a game they had to get on an airplane and fly. And it meant that if you were dressing in a reasonable team of let's say 60 or 70 players you were spending a million dollars a year on air travel. That Williams and Amherst with endowments four times our size didn't have to spend because they could get on buses and drive around New England and play their games. And so even though we were the first that we were the venue for the first college football game west of the 03:18:00Mississippi we ended football. Not something I was proud of but something we had to do. And you know there's life after those decisions. One more, I fired a tenured faculty member. You want to talk about it. That is like what would it be like in the political arena. You know I mean it is well it's like closing the savings and loans you know. It's whoa what are you doing. You're gonna. You can't do that right. How can you do that? We're sorry Governor we don't think you have the authority we told you you had. Go ahead and write the executive order. So we had a guy, a professor in their romance language department who was a bully and and who also wasn't a very demanding teacher. And he intimidated 03:19:00people, he frightened people, he'd been banned from youth hockey games because he so severely threatened referees at his kids hockey games. And shortly after I got there the provosts one night sent me provost, he was the dean of the faculty sent me a note about this guy's behavior and how one of his colleagues she wouldn't be in the same room with him and the rest. And I said is this guy a candidate for the broom. We had to sweep him out. And the dean told me you know that for years he's been a thorn in people's side., but you know here nobody really want to do anything. And I said yeah, but I mean this is not somebody we 03:20:00want to have around if he's not performing. So I said I was gonna fire him and he came in and threatened me. Here in the office he's a big guy you know. You can't do this to me academic freedom and blah blah blah and I'll see you in court and I'll sue you for everything you've got, right. And we went through a process. Before I could actually terminate him there was a faculty committee to review that process and they said they felt even though they were all sympathetic to this. They felt that we hadn't fully done everything by the book. So he was gonna be put on probation for a year. And I ask him to agree to terms of probation. He wouldn't have a conversation about it. So the day before the academic year was the new academic year was to begin I sent him a letter. I said here the 12 things that you have to do to achieve success during probation and 03:21:00there's gonna be a committee that oversees this and the rest and you have to sign this. One of the conditions was that you run a program that we had in Oaxaca, Mexico and be co-director of that. He crossed out co-director and wrote in director and and then signed this letter. And then later, halfway through the year, said they weren't going to do the Oaxaca program because it wasn't up to academic standards. I said fine if you don't want to do that program you're fired and this time he was fired. So he sued us for twelve million dollars and we went to court. We went to a jury trial and we won on every single bit of it. And the insurance company had made us offer this guy. It is outrageous made us offer this guy seven hundred thousand dollars which was like four years of salary. I mean it was an outrageous offer and he refused it. And so under 03:22:00Colorado law because he had refused that final offer before we went to trial he, it was his responsibility to pay for all of the expert witnesses. And the day after the trial he declared bankruptcy. So I had a bit of a reputation on campus as somebody who you don't mess with Celeste because.

CW: You were cleaning house.

RC: I just there was only one. You only had to do it once and then people got a message, right. But every time people say Oh the trouble with academia is that there's tenure. Tenure doesn't mean you have lifetime employment. Tenure means there's got to be a cause for getting rid of you. And the cause it can't be that you said something that the president didn't like. You got to fail to do your job.

CW: So you enjoyed that position for nine years beating out your previous record 03:23:00of eight.

RC: Beating out my previous record of eight. It was delightful the young people you know I enjoyed the faculty any I interviewed all of our. Whenever I was on campus and able to I would interview our candidates for new hires and had a chance to engage with the younger members of the profession as they came in and I enjoyed that, but I really enjoyed the students. I spent a lot of time with the students and I still interact with a number of the kids who graduated during my tenure as president.

CW: So I know you're not going to retire at that point. So what is what is your idea to keep yourself busy?

RC: Well the big thing, when I arrived in Colorado Springs I discovered that we 03:24:00were the home of the U.S. Olympic Committee and the largest Olympic training center. And I was stunned to find that we didn't have an Olympic Museum and Hall of Fame. And having gone through the process of the Rock and Roll Museum the Hall of Fame in Cleveland. And having really been involved and getting it you know getting it going in and committed and choosing architects and all of that other stuff. I went to a newly elected mayor. This is now 2011 going on 2012, and he just won the election in 2011. And I said I've got some ideas for you and one of my ideas was an Olympic Museum. He said I like that idea why don't you take charge of it for me. So I brought in a team that worked on the Rock Hall. Dennis Barry from Cleveland and others and we did a feasibility study and we 03:25:00decided here's here's what it would take to do it. And we organized a 501c3, which I chaired until six months ago. And we chose architects and contractors and exhibit designers and fabricators and content people. And we now have a building which is probably 50 percent complete and we have to work on exhibits and content and artifacts and all of those exciting things going forward gangbusters. And raised seventy five million gonna raise another twenty, twenty five million. And it will be an outstanding museum experience. So that, I've been, that's been my single biggest activity. But working on a book. I still have work to do on that. This oral history is kind of.

CW: Helping?

RC: Well it's helping, but you see how I digress. So I have to figure out what to edit out of the book or how to focus it, frame it so it's got some spunk to it.

CW: Did you ever think about coming back to Ohio?

RC: Well I. Yeah I mean I don't feel like I've left Ohio. I mean I living in Colorado but I have so much family here and I'm in Ohio, I'm in Ohio at least every other month. So you know my time now, I figure when you when you enter your 80s you ought to devote as much time as possible to family and friends. So I'm going to try to build my life around more time with my children and 03:27:00grandchildren and now great-grandchildren and more time with friends, you know. The friend, the number of friends the number of contemporary friends diminishes. But if you're blessed with good health and the ability to get around there are younger friends that I can see in some cases mentor. A lot of the young people who graduated from the college are people now who I would who I advise from time to time when they think that I might have something to offer.

CW: When you when you give advice to people who may be interested in politics today what's kind of advice do you give them? What kind of advice you would have liked someone to have given you?

RC: Yeah, I mean, the only way that you can really do politics is to get into 03:28:00it. I remember of wonderful Warren Bennis who is a man and I greatly admired, a student of leadership and really one of its. His books on leadership are great. I remember he wrote an op ed piece I'd forgotten even who was the president but was in the early days of someone's presidency and the president was making some mistakes, right. And Warren Bennis said what you need to understand about public office is when you go into a public office for the first time it's like playing the violin in public. It's like practicing the violin in public. You can't 03:29:00rehearse for it. There's no, there's no rehearsal for what you're going to do. You can work your way up to something you can be a city councilman and become a state legislator. You can become a state legislator and you can become a congressmen. But the first days in any of those jobs are not something that you can practice in advance. So to me you know the key is are you willing to take the risk that goes with an elected office with running for office and winning or losing because unlike almost any other endeavor where there's shades of, you know. Is my business successful this month is it successful this quarter is it successful this year? I can have more success, less success in politics it's win 03:30:00or lose, right. If it's like I suppose it's why we think of it as a game because it's win or lose or a race it's win or lose. There's no way in between and so you have to have a high tolerance of risk. You have to have, I believe you have to have a love of people. If you don't enjoy people and not just people like you but that the idiosyncrasies that make everybody distinct. Me different from you, any of the other people who are in the building today, people I meet at lunch, people on the airplane. You have to be willing to really engage with them to be successful. And I think you have to have a vision of where you're going. I mean, if it's Chester Bowles called the traffic light, you know. If you haven't 03:31:00thought about what you'd be willing to lose over. Is there, what is an issue where you're not going to cross that line. You probably don't belong in the business. Now you may go into it you may get some place but you're not my kind of politician. if that's the case. And I, you know, I think that the best people in public life try very hard to understand what's on the other side of the mountain. In other words not just what we can see today but what we should be thinking about for tomorrow and next year and beyond and that's not easy. And the world is making it more challenging because things change faster, things 03:32:00move more quickly and trying to figure out where we will be at some point down the line. I mean that is it, that is a very big challenge for folks. But I think it's being able to have that kind of vision and articulate it and engage people. Take a risk enjoy the. Give you an example, a classic example from this moment in time. Beto O'Rourke in Texas who's somebody who lost an election but everybody feels like he won, right. He, his enthusiasm, his how comfortable he is in his own skin, the way he is, you know I can drive into Whataburger right after debate and order my whatever with everything and be air guitaring to some 03:33:00song I love. To me that's what politics is about. It's the, in in Colorado five women who were each other's bridesmaids who got so upset after the 2016 election they said we're going to run for office. All five of them won and their victories changed the partisan makeup of the legislature in Colorado. That's good politics. If you have to, I mean, what I told I think Ted Strickland when he was thinking about at one point running for governor. I asked him how much you want it. Are you prepared to eat that chair. He said what do you mean? Well you gotta want it so badly that you got that appetite, right.

CW: Do you think the political landscape has changed from when you started.

RC: Oh yeah. I mean it has. I think term limits have been for term limits for legislators are a terrible idea because it takes their eye off experience and relationships and it puts it on. What am I gonna do next. And so you look at term limited whether those are self-imposed when legislators do it yo themselves and say I'm only going to serve for so long or where it's mandated by law. I think it changes people's perspective from a longer term. Well I'm going to be 03:35:00here for a while and you know I'm going to need this person for the next time. I think they've been pernicious. I think that gerrymandering has you know we've used technology now to kind of create an art out of gerrymandering and the result is to empower the political extremes at the expense of political moderation and consensus building. I think that the fragmentation of our media and communications has put a premium on. I don't want to be unfair to Jerry Springer but I'm sort of the Jerry Springer-ization of of the media. That loud, coarse, harsh communications have replaced a more genteel. I mean, try to 03:36:00imagine Walter Cronkite in our age and how he would respond to someone shouting at a President during a state of the Union message. Or some of the things that are said by politicians today is you know it is it is different. And how does it always have to be this way. No, and I think that the changing demographics of our country and the reflection of those changing demographics in our political institutions is gonna be a plus. You know for the time being watching those 03:37:00ancient members of the Judiciary Committee trying to figure out how they were gonna handle a Kavanaugh thing was to me it was kind of pathetic, you know. Because they are that old generation but they've lost their moorings, right, from that old generation. That old generation, they would have been more like John McCain. They would have been more principled. They would have never tolerated Kavanaugh's outburst when they had him back in front of their Senate. That would have been enough for them just right there to say no sorry pal. But we have had to live through this and then get to another place and that place is going to be challenging for all involved.

CW: Do you think if you were a young man today you'd still be interested in politics like you were back then?

RC: I hope so. I think so. I mean it's certainly one of the reasons I did want to write this book is because I want people to know that there's that you can have joy in politics and you can make a difference in politics. And yeah you can also have hard times in politics and you can also fail or not make a difference or look at it as a selfish enterprise. But to me the real, I don't know, the moments when you know that what you're doing is what you were called to be doing is when you are able to make a real difference for people. And sometimes that's 03:39:00an individual, sometimes that's a group of people, sometimes it's a whole state.

CW: What would you like your? What would you like your governor's legacy to be when people think of you as the governor?

RC: Well I think, you know, we we took a state that was bankrupt and out of work and we put it back to work with a with a sound budget underpinning. And when strong action was needed like the savings and loan case we took it. You know. I 03:40:00think, I don't think Ohio has to be where it is right now economically. I'm saddened by the fact that I think that Governor Kasich has worked very hard on that front. I think more could be done. And I think the fact that his own partisan his own legislature has made it difficult for him. They get some good things done.

CW: What do you see for Ohio next?

RC: Well I think, I mean, I think Ohio has a great future and I'm you know my view is Ohio is the nation. John Glenn used to say that if you would take the United States and squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it what 03:41:00you'd be left with at the center when you couldn't squeeze it any more is the state of Ohio. And Mark Twain said Ohio was the furthest west of the East, the furthest east the West, the furthest north of the South, and the furthest south of the North. So whatever problems the country's having we're having. Whatever opportunities the country faces we face. Challenges for us are to understand that perhaps the most important natural resource for the rest of human existence on this planet is water. And that water will be more precious than gold or oil or any of those things. It will define the ability of communities and states and nations to survive. And if I were trying to plan a 50 year plan for Ohio I would 03:42:00say pick the places around the world that are starting to feel the shortage of water. By the way including Colorado or places in the United States. But pick those places and you know go to the companies headquartered in Bangalore, India and say look I will offer you fresh water in abundance on a beautiful coast and Sandusky, Ohio or on a beautiful river in Claremont County. And you can build a headquarters can last 200 years here. You can't do that almost anyplace else on 03:43:00the planet. And we're right at the heart of it.