William Locke explains why he’ll never give up his two biggest vices. Then Max talks with Congressman Jim Clyburn about how the balance between optimism and pragmatism has guided his political career and how he's maintained that balance without the help of his confidant, main advisor and late wife, Emily.
Know someone who should be on 70 Over 70? We’re looking for all types of stories and people to feature at the top of the show. To nominate yourself or someone else, email 70over70@pineapple.fm or call 302-659-7070 and tell us your name, age, where you’re from and what you want to talk about.
transcription
[PRE-ROLL]
{OPENING MONTAGE]
Madeleine Albright: I know this program is 70 Over 70, but I really wish I were younger. I wish I was 70 … but, I am ready!
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William: I’m 72 years old.
Paula: I’m 75, miraculously enough.
Sandy: I am 83 years old.
Betty: I am 88 years old.
James: You know, I’m here at 92.
Lucia: I’ll be 94 in May.
Donalda: I’m 101 years old.
William Locke: My name is William Locke, I'm 73 years old, and I live in Oakland, California.
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William: I don't have a lot of secrets…
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William: But there's a lot my friends don't realize about the real me.
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William: People who know me are well familiar with my oversized fondness for ice cream and marijuana, but they don't begin to know how bad it is. They don't know how I will tiptoe down into the kitchen late at night or sidle over in the middle of the day and chip away, spoon by spoon, at whatever tub of creamy sugary goodness we have in the freezer. And they don't begin to realize when I sneak upstairs in the middle of an evening and have a hit of weed to try to ease my troubled mind or to smooth away the rough edges of social interaction. It’s bad. It’s really bad.
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William: I have made efforts to do better and it's not that I'm a complete stranger to self-discipline. I spent more than 30 years as a public defender. Many's the time I stayed up all night working on a trial. But put me near a quart of salted caramel ice cream and I can’t help myself. And it’s all the worse because the more I smoke, the less able I am to keep away from the ice cream. So I know it’s an addiction.
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William: But I've learned to accept my weaknesses. I’ve learned to accept who I am. And it’s too late to change.
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Max Linsky: That was William Locke, and from Pineapple Street Studios, this is 70 Over 70, a show about making the most of the time we have left. I’m Max Linsky.
My guest today is James Clyburn, Congressman from South Carolina.
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Max: Jim has served in congress for the last 27 years. When you’re in that job for that long, you start to understand some things about how power really works. How to find your own balance between pragmatism and optimism. And you learn how to make the most of a moment.
That's what Jim did last year just before the South Carolina presidential primary, when he endorsed Joe Biden. The Biden campaign was struggling at the time, but Jim's endorsement led to a win in South Carolina, which led to wins in several more states, and then the nomination.
But just a few months earlier…
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Max: His wife, confidant, and main advisor of 58 years, Emily, passed away. And I wanted to understand what this last year has been like for him. To watch the world change in large part because of a decision he made...and to do so without her.
Jim Clyburn is 80 years old.
INTERVIEW
Max: Congressman Clyburn, thank you so much for coming on the show, I really appreciate it.
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Congressman James Clyburn: Well, thanks for having me.
Max: I was wondering if we could start by you helping me understand how you think about the balance between optimism and pragmatism. One of the ways that you describe yourself is as a pragmatist. And how do you stay hopeful and optimistic, but also get things done. Are those things in tension with each other?
Clyburn: Oh, yeah. They're always in tension with each other. It's like the pursuit, uh, of what I often call, especially in the government process, the pursuit of efficiency as opposed to effectiveness. If you are wanting to be totally efficient about everything, uh, you have to adhere to one person rule. That is the most efficient, doesn't mean there's going to be effective. And in order to be effective, you've got to bring more backgrounds and experiences into the process in order to make good--good decisions. But that always tears away at efficiency. And I think, uh, the same holds true with optimism and hope. When I was a 20-something year old, I was not just hopeful, but I was very optimistic. I had faith and confidence in the Supreme Court of the United States making the kinds of decisions that would favor my pursuit of life, and liberty, and happiness. You've got to be pragmatic about where we are today. We don't have a Supreme Court that my children and grandchildren can be hopeful about. So you have to ask, how long will we be in this current state before going back towards a Supreme Court that will engender the faith and confidence of my children?
Max: Does thinking about that timeline for your grandchildren, like that timeline we're staring down with the court, allow you to wake up every morning and keep doing your work, or is it deflating for you?
Clyburn: Well it's not deflating by any means. It's challenging. And I feel that I've got to maintain some degree of sobriety about it in order to be effective. I was raised in a parsonage and so I believe very strongly in scripture. And one of my favorite scriptures happens to be the, um, Hebrews 11:1--faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. And so I keep faith that there's substance for me to hope for. Though I may not see it, the evidence will unfold in the proper direction. So that's pretty much the way I pursue things. Hopefully the scripture will be fulfilled.
Max: Is that pursuit consistent? Like, do you always have the same energy or does it dip for you? Does it go up and down, your ability to-to meet that challenge?
Clyburn: It goes up and down, usually downtimes is when I'm home alone. I would always be engaged with a lot of people and therefore not much downtime 'cause you're always up and always on your toes when you're around people.
Max: Do you think that part of the reason the times when it dips are when you're alone is because you don't have much experience being alone?
Clyburn: Well, that's part of the reason. I, um, I think about that often, that I never spent much time alone. I guess I've spent more alone time in the last eight or nine months than I ever have. But I think part of the reason is because that's when I allow realism to flow into my thought process.
Max: Have you learned anything about yourself being alone so much more?
Clyburn: Well, there's not much about me that I don't-- have not known for a long time.
Max: Yeah.
Clyburn: I think that being home alone gives me a little more time, not to just reflect, but also to plan and spend a little time, every now and then, write.
Max: What kind of stuff do you write? What kind of writing do you do?
Clyburn: Well, uh, I tend to write based upon situations that may develop during the day and how they remind me of something may have happened 50 years ago or 25 years ago.
Max: So you write sort of to make sense of your day and also to see where those connections lie?
Clyburn: Yeah, because I think, uh, history to me should be instructive. And in order to be instructed by history, you got to spend a little time equating things. Uh, like last night--watched a little bit of some of the foolishness that took place on the Senate floor yesterday in the reaction to Boulder.
Max: Yeah.
Clyburn: You know, we seem to have learned nothing from Sandy Hook. These things keep happening.
Max: Well, maybe we can use guns in this country as a way to think about that optimism versus pragmatism. You've been in Congress for years and years through this gun debate, which from the outside doesn't even feel like much of a debate. How do you keep fighting that fight? Like how do you keep finding the energy to do that when it's been so unsuccessful?
Clyburn: Well, once again, I-I guess if I had been raised differently, I might have a much more pessimistic attitude. My dad used to say to me all the time, ' the darkest time of the night is that moment just before dawn,' and, um, I view that. I-I hold on to that as a--as a way to approach everything, however dark it may seem in the very next moment, we may see the dawn. Not just of a new day, but a new way.
Max: That makes sense to me, holding on to that faith that it can happen, but do you think it will happen?
Clyburn: Well, you never know, but because you don't know, means you can't give up on the pursuit. Will we ever have a perfect union? I don't think so. But should we not pursue perfection because we may not get there?
Max: Mhmm.
Clyburn: I used to run an agency down in Charleston that, um, I recruited VISTA volunteers. And I remember a VISTA volunteer that I had one time-- was a rather elderly African-American woman---I think about her often, don't even remember her name, but I remember her and, um, she was always so hopeful that things were going to get better. You know, my parents were hopeful that things will get better. And none of them ever saw things get better, so, um, I don't know. I just kind of live with those experiences, those interactions, as an incentive.
Max: So this is a time in your life when you had run for office three times, you lost every time, and after the last loss, the governor of South Carolina at the time, John West, he gave you a call and offered you a job and really that job was your start.
Clyburn: Right. In that 1970 race with the state legislature, I won the primary. [Mhmm] And I was the Democratic nominee and I lost in the general. I won the election, but I lost the election, you know. [both laugh]
Max: Right. Right. Yeah. You got a taste of winning. Just not the final one.
Clyburn: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I-I knew earlier what it was like to win.
Max: Right.
Clyburn: But, you know, none of those losses were, um, discouraging to me when I lost a general in 1970, a reporter asked me what happened. And I said I didn't get enough votes and I was pressed by the reporter, who I still remember, Barbara Williams, and she says, 'Ah, Clyburn you know what everybody is saying. What you think really happened?, And I says, 'I just didn't get enough votes,' and that's all I would say.
Max: Mm hmm.
Clyburn: A lot of people asked me why I said that and it was probably grounded in something my wife said to me after that primary victory. When everybody was rejoicing at the victory party that night, she didn't participate. She stayed off sort of to the side. And I took note of the fact that she was not--
Max: She just had a sense you think?
Clyburn: Yeah, well I ask her on the way home and asked, was something wrong? And she told me, no, nothing was wrong. Well, being 29 years old at the time, I wondered whether or not I had done or said something or, [both laugh] may have uh-- she had noticed something she did quite want to notice, so I wasn't pressing anymore. I was a little bit afraid of what she might say. But the next morning when I got up, she had a little stickum on the mirror in my bathroom. And the stickum, 'when you win, brag gently. when you lose, weep softly,'. That was it. And it's kind of funny, but when I read it. I left it there. And so in November, in the general, when I got counted out [yeah], found out at 3:30 in the morning, I went into that bathroom, that little stickum was still there. And, um, I wept softly. It's always been instructive to me. So this was a Tuesday. The election was on Tuesday, I got a phone call on Thursday from John West, who had just got elected governor. And he said to me that, uh, ‘we will not leave our wounded on the battlefield,’ and then the rest is history.
Max: Right, that phone call changed your life.
Clyburn: Yeah.
Max: Congressman, I need to say I'm so struck by the way that you hold on to these moments, whether it's that stickum on the mirror or this person whose name you don't remember but who you think of often...
Clyburn: Right.
Max: That practice of letting those moments come to you, of letting them stick with you, of letting them shape you-- I'm interested in how that works with something you said earlier, which is that you've known who you are for a long time. That there's not a lot left to learn. Do you still have moments where someone says something to you that you think ‘I haven’t thought about that before and that’s--and that’s true’?
Clyburn: Oh, yeah, I still have those moments. And those are some of the things I write down sometimes. I could be sitting in a restaurant or in a lounge or sitting around like I did last night watching the basketball game and something could be said or some situation would develop...
Max: Mm hmm.
Clyburn: When I get home, I jot it down. I used to do this all the time and put them in a 'lil folder and sometimes I go back and revisit the folder. I don't do that as much as I used to.
Max: Why do you think that is? Why do you think you do it less now?
Clyburn: Well I get less time to live. [both laugh] I don't have as much time as I used to have, uh, to go back and reflect on those things.
Max: Is that because you're so busy now or because you have arrived at the place where you wanted to be?
Clyburn: Well, I think it's a little bit of both. I am fortunate enough to be doing in life what I've always wanted to do. In fact, my nickname when I was in college, it was Senator. [Max laughs] Everybody on the campus called me that. Everything is just a building block. [Mm hmm]
Clyburn: And at some point, um, the house is completed and you move into it. That doesn't mean you don't have to do maintenance.
Max:Right. Maintenance and like sometimes you still trying to build, like, a new wing or put a patio on or something.
Clyburn: Yeah, my kids--uh, I shouldn't call them kids cause all of them are grown.
Max: I think you're allowed to keep calling them kids, if you want to.
Clyburn: [laughs] Well, and they're always telling me I'm a frustrated architect. [both laugh]
Max: I understand moving into this metaphorical house as knowing who you are [Mhmm] and I wonder if there was a moment in your life where that happened for you.
Clyburn: No. No one time. There’s been many times in my life. Someone once asked me, when did I find out or feel that I finally made it in Washington? And I said to them, it was the first time I heard somebody refer to me as Commissioner Mignon Clyburn's father. That was a very momentous moment to me. It said to me that, um, I was, in fact, fulfilling the purpose to have my daughter to be significant enough in Washington, as she was, for people to be referring to me [Mhmm] as her father when all through life, people always refer to my children as my children.
Max: Right. She's always been your daughter, but now you were her dad.
Clyburn: Now I'm her father. Uh, I am the number three Democrat in the House of Representatives, but that's not as important as the fact that I'm the father to Jennifer or Angela or to Mignon. That's what it's all about with me.
Max: What kind of dad were you?
Clyburn: I was rather hands on, but what one might call a bit, um, aloof. My wife was much more of a disciplinarian than I was.
Max: Mm hmm.
Clyburn: My memory serves, Mignon was in the fifth or sixth grade when I started doing breakfast for them every morning. I thought that it would be important for me to establish my place as father if there is something taking place in their lives that they felt was contributing to their well-being. So I started cooking breakfast every morning. Every morning and I started cooking. And so I kind of felt that when they got grown and grown, that that would come to an end, but no, it still happens. When I'm home on weekends, and we are together, they expect for me to be doing breakfast for them.
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Max: [laughs]That's such a sweet thing.
Clyburn: And I still do.
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[BREAK/MID-ROLL]
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Max: We just passed the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed, and I wonder what your experience of those protests were last summer. And I think this touches on where we started this conversation around optimism and pragmatism. Are you feeling optimistic about the Black Lives Matter movement?
Clyburn: Yes, I do feel optimistic about the movement because I think that what the movement has done, irrespective of what happened to the legislation. Uh, I think it focused the nation's attention on a very serious problem that had never been so vivid in the awareness of the American people. You know, you read a headline or you see something on the evening news, that's one thing. But when you watch a lynching taking place--and that's what that was, nobody wants to put that name on it, but I do all the time--and people saw that and it aroused people, much like people did back in the sixties when they saw cattle prod being used on high school kids who were demonstrating for the rights of their parents to vote. They were not old enough to vote. Here we go again.
Max: Mm hmm.
Clyburn: It's all about voting. Uh, we can talk about anything else. It's about voting. And so the Black Lives Matter movement has awakened people. One of the things that amazes me when I hear people talk about things like that, that I've heard several people talk about the-the Black Lives Matter movement, and ‘this is the first time this kind of multiracial response’…. That's not true. First time you knew about it.
Max: Does it feel different to you than what you lived through in the 1960s?
Clyburn: No. No different. It's the same, but I said history ought to be instructive. Now a lot of people have reacted to this in a negative way--I'm not backing away from it because it's true--we lost the civil rights momentum back in the 1960s because of sloganeering. 'Burn, baby, burn' is what undermined and killed that movement. Defund the police, if allowed, will undermine and kill this movement. That's why I spoke out against that. That's what was used in the campaign last year. That's what caused us to lose some elections that we never would have lost if we had not allowed that slogan to dominate the airwaves in certain jurisdictions. It may not hurt in some jurisdictions, but it's lethal in others. It's just that simple and people can argue all they want to the contrary, but that's a fact. So it's the same.
Max: When you were a young man, were you saying, 'burn, baby, burn'?
Clyburn: No, I rejected it. John Lewis rejected it. You probably don't know this, but John Lewis was kicked out of SNCC.
Max: Yeah. Replaced by Stokely Carmichael.
Clyburn: Absolutely. And Stokely Carmichael is the one that started to 'burn, baby, burn' stuff.
Max: Did you reject it because it was bad politics or because you didn't believe in it?
Clyburn: It was bad politics, didn't make sense.
Max: But do you think that the problem with 'defund the police' is the slogan or the intent? Like, do you--do you agree with the intent?
Clyburn: I don't know what the intent is. If the intent is to reform, uh, police, that's one thing. // If you’re talking about reform policing, I agree with that. So say that. Say what you intend. You'll find that the vast majority of black people reject that slogan.
Max: Does that feel generational to you?
Clyburn: No. There's nothing generational about that. My children reject that slogan. Maybe it's because... they were born to be pragmatists.
Max: [laughs]How do you think the movement will play out? Do you think, to use your words, that ‘they will lose’?
Clyburn: No. The pendulum has already started back in the other direction with, um, Joe Biden. It's going to move back in another direction.
Max: But you can feel that momentum and you feel optimistic about where it's going to land?
Clyburn: How else do you elect a Black and a Jew to be the United States senators in Georgia. How else do you do it? First Black, first Jewish guy to the United States Senate... from Georgia? You know who it was populated by.
Max: That question of like, um, tactics versus belief, like, uh, pragmatism versus idealism. Can you think about your decision to endorse Biden and the timing of that through that lens? My understanding is that you believed he was the-the person who could win.
Clyburn: Yes, I did, 'cause my wife told me. Uh, my wife passed away six months before the election, before the South Carolina primary. Um, but the night of my fish fry, she told me if we wanted to win we'd better nominate Joe Biden. And you talked about seminal moments, uh, the Friday before the South Carolina primary is one--one of those seminal moments took place. When, I now know her name I didn't know it at the time is Janie Jones, the woman I'd never seen before called me over to where she was sitting in the pew in that church, and asked me who I was going to vote for him, and I told her, she told me she needed to hear that and the community was waiting to hear from me. And, um, that was a seminal moment.
Max: So it wasn't some long planned thing for you? You weren't--you didn't know that for months and were waiting for the right time?
Clyburn: Yeah, the site of the endorsement had been planned a long time. I picked a site for the endorsement near the airport because I was on a 11 o'clock flight [laughs] to come back to Washington. I was going to just say I'm going to vote for Joe Biden and I'm going to call Senator Gerald Malloy to introduce him or present him. That was the plan. But at that breakfast, it just created the emotions. [Mhmm] It was that moment I knew that I was going to, uh, be getting this award at this breakfast. I didn't know that the award was being named in honor of my late wife. I didn't know that. And I was being declared the first recipient of the award. Uh, none of this I knew [Max laughs], my daughters knew. And they all went to the breakfast with me. So when I got to the mic, two my daughters, Jennifer and Angela, were sitting in front of me--sitting in the audience and there they were sitting a seat apart. There was a vacant chair between the two of them. And I looked over at them just having this breakfast and getting this honor, named for my late wife, I just imagined her sitting between the two of them, as she often did. And the emotions of that moment is what led me to, um, to make that endorsements the way I did. I had no idea what the impact would be because it wasn't planned that way.
Max: Right. What I'm hearing you say is you knew you were going to do it.
Clyburn: Right.
Max: But it wasn't some long plan about when. It wasn't some long plan about how. And what prompted you to do it was another moment in which someone pulled you aside and said something [right] that resonated with you.
Clyburn: Absolutely.
Max: The same way that woman did at the agency and the same way that Emily's note on the mirror did.
Clyburn: Absolutely.
Max: And that's part of how you've lived your life and how you do this work is you got these ideals, you got this pragmatic approach, but also you’re looking for inputs all the time.
Clyburn: Yeah.
Max: How much longer do you think you can do this work?
Clyburn: Oh, I don't know. I'm going to make a decision about this after the next election.
Max: How do you make that choice?
Clyburn: My children. I've had the conversation with them and they know that, uh, the moment they see anything, feel anything, hear anything. Let's have a serious conversation.
Max: What do you mean by that? What-what would they hear or feel?
Clyburn: Well, my-my kids are pretty intelligent. They'll know if I'm showing any sign of, um, missing the beat. I've had a serious talk with him about that and th-they know that, um, their job is to make sure to let me know when they think it's time for me to come home.
Max: Thinking about that story at the breakfast and the empty chair between your daughters makes you think of your wife, Emily, of John Lewis. You've lost so many people who I imagine were your support system. What's it like being without them? How do you keep going?
Clyburn: I'm not without them. Uh, they may not be present in person. Um, I'm never without them. With Emily... I learned a whole lot from her. See, we grew up totally different, totally different. So much of what I am, you know, when I'm asked about my --a lot of people call it my obsession with rural communities, maybe it's because he grew up on a little 22 acre farm, walking two and a half miles to school every morning. When I grew up, three blocks from my elementary school, was six miles from my middle school and I-I went to what we call a boarding school. Our background experiences are totally different. So most of what I do in public service, I learn from her. You know, physically, I'm alone, but I'm not alone mentally. I--these thoughts, how I react, it's all there. Even if you watch me doing a zoom event from my house, here in Columbia, you see Emily here behind me, still having my back.
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Max: Feels like she's with you all the time.
Clyburn: Oh, yeah, absolutely. No question about that.
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CREDITS
Max: 70 Over 70 is a production of Pineapple Street Studios, and it’s produced by Jess Hackel.
Our associate producer is Janelle Anderson. Our editors are Maddy Sprung-Keyser and Joel Lovell. Research and additional reporting by Charley Locke.
Our mixers are Elliott Adler and Raj Makhija, and Jenna Weiss-Berman and I are the executive producers.
Our theme song is Like a Dream by Francis and the Lights and the music you’re listening to now is by Mavis Staples, who’s 81. Original music by Terence bernardo. Additional music by Noble Kids, and music licensing by Dan Knishkowy.
Our cover art is by Maira Kalman, who’s 72 and our episode art is by Lynn Staley. She’s 73, and she’s also my mom.
Thank you, William Locke, and thank you, Jim Clyburn.
I'm Max Linsky. Thanks for listening.
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