Transcription of Douglas Rooks for the show Living History #299
Dr. Lisa: My next guest is Douglas Rooks who is a career journalist who worked at weekly and daily newspapers for 25 years. His first book, Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible, was published last year. Thanks so much for coming in.
Douglas Rooks: Glad to be here.
Dr. Lisa: I enjoyed reading Statesman, and I was really impressed with just the sort of the breadth of information that you had to go through to actually create this book, and the fact that you probably left a lot out in the end.
Douglas Rooks: It’s amazing how much you have to leave out when you write a book.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you get involved… If you were someone who has been a journalist for all of these years, why did you decide that writing a book was something you wanted to pursue?
Douglas Rooks: I’d always wanted to write a book, several books probably. Now I hope maybe that I published one, I will get the chance to write more. Book writing is very different than short form journalism, which is what I’ve done for newspapers and magazines nationally and in Maine for many years. Writing a book just requires a level of commitment and focus that I think is pretty liberating for a journalist, because you never really get to spend that much time on any one thing if you work for a newspaper as I did for many years, and really being able to dig into a subject like George Mitchell was… Turned out to be a very wonderful thing for me.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you decide to go into journalism in the first place?
Douglas Rooks: It was kind of accidental. I thought I would be… I loved to read, I was a great reader throughout high school and college, and I studied English literature, graduated from Colby. I really felt something to do with words was, but I had no idea really, in those days it was amazing, we didn’t track ourselves into careers when we were 13 years old. I really graduated from college not knowing exactly what I wanted to do.
I built a house in New Hampshire, that was the first thing I did for my family, and I discovered that there was this newspaper job, fairly nearby in New Hampshire. You wouldn’t think this would ever happen but I called up and they interviewed me and they hired me. That’s how I got into newspapers. It wasn’t a very intentional thing.
Dr. Lisa: If you’ve been doing this for 25 years, you’ve seen a lot of changes in the field of journalism.
Douglas Rooks: Enormous changes.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about, I’m thinking obviously we didn’t have… We didn’t even have personal computers in all of the homes at that time.
Douglas Rooks: Yes. We definitely didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have Google. Obviously we had phones, but they were still landlines. These are just like kind of mechanical things. Yeah, I started writing on a manual typewriters. My first stories were worked out on that thing. I haven’t used a typewriter in years, but I could probably go back if I had to.
Dr. Lisa: You also had, you were doing journalism at a time where it was really like on the streets journalism, you actually had to go, look at primary sources, you had to go do the interviews, probably a lot of them in person.
Douglas Rooks: Yeah, we did a lot of work on the phone but I love that part of it. I happened to be in a small town, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, during the presidential primaries in 1980. New Hampshire as the first primary was a bigger deal then than it is today. People like Ronald Reagan, George Bush the elder, Howard Baker were coming through, I got to talk to all of them. I was like 25 years old. Something like that. I was talking to all these amazing politicians that normally you never get to meet as a journalist. Today you are kept a mile away from politicians. That was a really good thing. I actually miss that part of journalism.
Dr. Lisa: There’s been a lot of conversation lately about what’s being called fake news. What’s your response to that?
Douglas Rooks: I have no idea. I think it’s an absurd concept. There is no such thing as fake news except that people sometimes fake the news, but fake news in my day was in the National Enquirer. Everybody knew that the National Enquirer made up all their stories. They weren’t real. You just figured people reading it didn’t care. The idea that you would get fake news on national networks, and people would be debating this is absolutely ridiculous.
We can find out what the facts of a situation are. They are sometimes a little muddled. Sometimes you have to go three or four different stories. As a journalist I’ve had this happen to me. It’s not clear what happened at first, but you can’t get there. The whole idea that there is something fake about the news, we just can’t really have that. We can’t. As a society and as a political system, we can’t have that concept constantly intruding with our thinking. Let’s get over it. That’s my take on it.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that part of what happens is, because there is such an immediacy to news these days. It’s not a six o’clock news cast on television or a twice daily newspaper. There is such an immediacy of that. Sometimes people maybe get a little, I don’t want to use the word lazy in a derogatory way, but maybe aren’t as thorough as they could be with their fact checking.
Douglas Rooks: I do worry about that because the 24-hour news cycle, which was just coming into being when I left my newspaper jobs behind, I was worried about it then, and I’m more worried about it now, because I do think people absolutely, they tend to go to the first place and their reactions are often very emotional, visceral and wrong as it turns out. You can get any number of examples of things, when you go back and look at them more carefully you realize it was more complicated than I thought. Journalism at one time had a kind of a filtering process in it that it largely lacks today.
I don’t have any magical answer to this but I think each of us as Americans, as Mainers, as citizens of our own towns, need to be a little more critical about what we read, and also self-critical and realize that our own biases and our own tendencies, sort of steer us in certain directions. We have to be citizens, I’m preaching this in my next book, which is about Maine politics, that we all have to become citizens again, and take that responsibility seriously. Nobody else is going to do the job of being a citizen for us. We have to do it.
Dr. Lisa: When did we stop being citizens?
Douglas Rooks: I don’t think we’ve stopped being citizens, but I think the concept of citizenship needs some reevaluation. My subject, George Mitchell has wonderful, he gave many speeches about his experiences when he was a federal judge. He was only a federal judge for about seven months. He was right here in Portland, at the courthouse there and he did naturalization ceremonies. The punchline to his, when he asked new people why they became Americans, why do they want to become Americans? I think there was a young man from the Philippines who told him, he said, “In America, everyone has a chance.”
That was his summation of what it was like to be in this country. Mitchell’s other comment on that was that Americans who were born here, tend not to appreciate what a wonderful privilege they’ve been given to live in this great country. I think that’s the sense that I wish we all need to be a little more involved, and not figure as we often do, that voting is enough, and if the wrong persons gets elected, we’ll just try it again next time. I think we have to all become a little more involved in our communities, and really in ultimately the political system to make it work better again.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you choose George Mitchell?
Douglas Rooks: That was an easy choice actually because George Mitchell came into the Kennebec Journal newsroom in 1985 and I met him for the first time. He was a US senator who just kind of showed up. They said, “George Mitchell is here, you might want to talk to him.” I was really fascinated by him because he was so unusual as a politician in those days or this one, where he knew tremendous amounts about history. I was amazed, I can’t remember the country I asked him about, some fairly obscure country in Europe. It was probably in the Balkans or somewhere like that.
He not only answered the question brilliantly, which I wasn’t necessarily expecting him to know. He wasn’t on the relevant committees, but he told me the background, the history, and I had no idea that he originally aspired to be a history professor. He was amazingly good at understanding and knowing things that very few people in a lot of politics know. That was his strength, because he just knew more than anyone else. Naturally as somebody who was always as a journalist seeking to know more I said, after he left the center particularly about 10 years later, I had just this thought that really he would make a good book. It took a long time to get there, but I finally made it.
Dr. Lisa: I’m not sure that everybody remembers, and maybe some people weren’t alive, that’s why they don’t remember this, but he ran for governor and he lost.
Douglas Rooks: He did, and it was a very, it was one of the great learning experiences of George Mitchell’s life. He did, he was, he lived in Portland at the time, and ironically given that he grew up amid really severe poverty in Waterville, his grandfather lived right on the river at the time that Kennebec River in Waterville was a sewer. Absolutely was a sewer. It stunk to high heavens all summer longs. It was the lowest you could go. George Mitchell and his siblings went to college. He went to law school and became incredibly successful. It was ironic because he was a very serious young man and a very serious lawyer, very good in one to one context, but he didn’t project well in large groups.
I think that was what happened in 1974. He didn’t make that connection to the broader collection of people you need to do to be successful at a statewide level. He learned an enormous amount through that, and I said it was ironic that he was perceived almost as like this buttoned-down lawyer, because he came from nowhere, but he had succeeded in becoming a different person and now he had to learn how to connect with Mainers. By the time he ran again, which was eight years later for the US senate, he had learned those lessons very well.
He not only could connect with people on a personal basis, but he was able to hold just a couple of a major issues at the time. One was social security, because Ronald Reagan had been talking about reducing benefits. One was acid rain, which was the prelude to what we know as global warming. He had a couple of things that he could get people’s attention with, and then he could make relationships with them. We’ve had a lot of good politicians in Maine, but if you just measure it by the box office. His 81% of the vote in his 1988 reelection race is still the record for any statewide race in Maine. He became very, very good at his job.
Dr. Lisa: It’s interesting the way you are describing because I think people are inclined to believe that there is something they are good at, by virtue of I guess their birth. If they are not good at it, then maybe they don’t need to get good at it. You are saying, he didn’t necessarily project himself well to large groups, but he learned how to do this. He taught himself how to do this.
Douglas Rooks: You don’t see it that often. Most political careers frankly, either you have it or you don’t, because there are not that many chances. Mitchell would be the first, in fact, he got a second chance when he didn’t expect it. He was appointed to the US senate in 1980 when his mentor, a guy he’d worked for years earlier, Ed Muskie, decided to step down and become secretary of state.
It’s the only time in Maine in the entire history that we’ve had a vacant senate seat in the last century. George Mitchell was the guy who got the job. He’d be the first to admit, he would never have probably run for office otherwise, but having been given that gift by Governor Joe Brennan, another great Portland guy, he made the most of it. He did have that second chance. He was able to go on to his remarkable career after that.
Dr. Lisa: One of the things that I thought about as I was reading your book is, it’s interesting to be writing about a person who is kind of an icon, but is still alive, is very much going to read this book hopefully and collaborate with you presumably.
Douglas Rooks: I’ve thought an awful lot about that. Fortunately, we had done a lot of interviews some years earlier, because the book, I really wanted to write it back in the early years of the century. For whatever reason it just quite penned up. I had a lot of material from Mitchell himself, and he had been very helpful really in trying to steer me in the right direction. This is just the way he is. He’s very helpful. He helped me, we were trying to find a publisher, and he was helping me. Not in a pushy way.
One of the remarkable things about George Mitchell, yes he is alive, there is a tremendous amount in the book, I’m sure some of it is wrong, or at least from his perspective, there are some problems with it, and yet he never tried to interfere in any way, he’s only been extremely complimentary since the book came out. You do get nervous about that because I’ve known… I’ve had other friends who’ve written biographies of people that have not turned out nearly as well.
Dr. Lisa: It seems like there could be a lot of potential problems and not from person you are writing about, but from the people around that person.
Douglas Rooks: Of course. I realized in retrospect I had to pass a bunch of tests. For instance, I interviewed all of his surviving siblings. I knew they all talked to George a number of times probably before they consented to do that, because the Mitchell family like most families is very protective of their members. I had to pass some sort of test but as far as I can tell, he never told anyone, “Don’t talk to him.” It was almost always the opposite. There are many people I interviewed at great length for the book that I didn’t know going in and really George was the only connection. I have to say, it went rather well. I don’t think I’ve had anyone yet coming up and waving a book at me and saying, “This isn’t the truth so far.”
Dr. Lisa: One of the things that struck me was just how difficult being a politician was on his personal life and the fact that he was previously married and he has a daughter from his first marriage. It doesn’t seem as though at least according to what I read, that there is a lot of acrimony but still it’s divorce, and it’s very, very hard.
Douglas Rooks: I think it was one of the hardest things that George Mitchell and Sally Mitchell, his first wife ever went through. They were a very devoted couple. They met outside of the Catholic Church in Georgetown in Washington, at a time when George Mitchell had no intention of having a political career. Their agreement, she had actually worked for a couple of political offices in New Hampshire and I think she was at the federal aviation administration at the time he met her, and she did not like politics. It was too bad in a way that he was married to someone who really didn’t like politics, because that just became a bigger and bigger strain.
I think it was the moment when he realized that he would be running for the senate for a full six year term that it really wasn’t going to work. I think she did try briefly moving to Washington, because senators mostly lived in Washington in those days. It just didn’t work for them. He really looked after him. There is amazing little stories there. His accountant became her accountant and his daughter’s accountant, and George paid for them all, even though he obviously wouldn’t have to after a divorce. They just seemed like a very well matched couple who ended up being driven apart. Much the way, somebody wants to live in California, and they love it there, and you want to live in Maine. Guess what? It’s probably not going to work long term. It didn’t for them, but it did not lead to any acrimony within the family.
Dr. Lisa: He seems to have people that he becomes friend with or acquainted with and carries those relationships forward really for a long, long time.
Douglas Rooks: Remarkable. His friend Shep Lee who is an auto dealer, his son Adam lee, as many people are getting to know better in this area. Shep was, said about George Mitchell, he said, “He never forgot his friends, he never forgot where he came from.” That’s very unusual because most of the time when you ascend to the levels that George Mitchell did, not just in politics, but in law and in business and in a whole lot of other areas, he became a very eminent person. He’s known around the world. Yet, he always had time for his old friends. I think that is kind of remarkable, but it shows how well grounded in Maine George Mitchell really is.
Dr. Lisa: As I was reading back through the book, one of the things that I kept coming back to was, I lived through a lot of this. I’ve lived Maine for a big chunk of my life. I think as I was going through it, probably because I was too young to really know. There were things that were happening that, I was kind of surprised to go back and have the retrospective on. I’m, I guess some people would say middle age, I’m in my forties. Did you find things as you were going through that you had lived through once or you had reported on once that surprised you looking backward?
Douglas Rooks: Yes, it’s just amazing, the impressions you have. I was a journalist, so I was always reading the news, I was always getting EP news-feeds, all throughout the day I was reading editorials on every subject known to editorial pages. Yet I missed a lot in researching my next book, which is more focused on Maine politics. There were certain key episodes at state government history that I had either, I didn’t really miss them but I misevaluated their significance. I didn’t understand the full significance of what was going on at the time. I think this is why I was talking earlier about being a citizen. It’s really important for everybody to know their own story. To understand it in all these complexities, and let’s face it, life is a very complicated thing. We need to simplify it for the sake of getting through it.
We also need to look back occasionally at least and saying, “That event seems very different to me now, that I understand more about it.” I think that’s … It’s a wonderful process really for research, because I had not done any significant amount of research on the scale anyway since I was in college. I spent like 13 months in the Bowdoin College library to research this book.
In fact, the only reason I stopped was I realized I’ll never get the book written if I didn’t just wind it up. It would be fun to go back and find out how many more things there are there that are interesting to know that I could find out.
Dr. Lisa: Knowing all of this about George Mitchell and knowing how he’s been such a part of the fabric on not only main but the country and really the world in many ways, do some of the recent things that have happened in politics surprise you?
Douglas Rooks: They don’t surprise me because again I’ve been following politics for a long time and I can see, it will not come as a big surprise to your listeners that I think politics is kind of in a bad way these days. I just think the level of conflict has gotten out of hand. There is always a lot of conflict in politics. People have to understand that politics is not pretty to watch. Somebody is always trying to get the jump on someone else. Someone is always trying to pull off a deal that is going to inconvenience someone else.
This is part of the nature of public life because we have difficult issues to settle, and nobody gets a 100% of what they want. I think the lack of civility, which Mitchell himself has talked about repeatedly recently is very concerning, because it used to be that George Mitchell and Bob Doyle, two of really of the great senate leaders of our day would go at it, you’d listen to them on the senate floor, they’d just be hammering away on each other and saying, “That’s not true, senator. You said earlier that this is the case and now you are…” it was a real debate. At the end of the day they went out and had a drink together and sat down and talked about their families.
That is so important to a good political system. I suspect it is very, very rare in Washington today, and we miss that. You have to have those connections that go beyond, when I was saying earlier, do your job well, you need to be able to do your job well, but also still remain human beings to each other. Unless we can do that and start getting serious about that again, bite your tongue, maybe you don’t want to say that even though it’s a great zinger, and it would look great on Twitter or whatever.
If we can’t do that then I suspect we are kind of doomed to keep repeating this, the turn that keeps going on there. One election comes, and another election comes, but it doesn’t really seem to make much difference in terms of how we live or what the government is able to do for its people.
Dr. Lisa: How did we get to this place? How did we get to the place where we don’t mind being civil to one another?
Douglas Rooks: I don’t think anybody really knows. We can see it happening, and we can deplore it, but what do we actually do about it. I think for each of us we have to think about that. I’m trying to think a lot about myself and I’m getting a little more politically active myself. For instance, I plan to testify on two bills up with legislature, not because I used to… When I was at the Maine Press Association I would represent them. I worked for some clients that required not lobbying per se but just testimony to committees of the legislature. I’ve done that, but this is just for me. I’m going to be up there tomorrow and I’m going to say, “I’m testifying as a citizen, and I’m willing to take the risks that go along with that.”
I’m stepping up my own professional corporate zone here, because I think certain issues are so important that we all need to make special effort to play a part to the degree that we can. I guess my part is, I feel like I’ve stayed in this stuff for so long and I know a lot about Maine politics, maybe I could help at a difficult moment with some legislators. I may be completely wrong about that but I’m going to try anyway. I think we all need to just try a little bit. Talk to our neighbors, it’s very important, we know a lot of families in which people are very divided by the last presidential race.
You have to talk to those people and find out what did this… And don’t just say, “Oh my God. They voted for the wrong person. How could they do that?” That’s not going to help. Talking to them on a more human level may help. We’ve got to try it. That’s where I start anyway.
Dr. Lisa: I agree with you. I have patients that come in to see me as a family doctor. They are on both sides… I don’t want to say both sides. They are on the political spectrum. Some of them are kind of left leaning republications and some of them are right leaning democrats. Some of them are in one camp or another. If you can actually have a conversation, you realize that you are probably closer together on a lot of the issues than you realize.
Douglas Rooks: I think that there are really more attempts to divide us than really needed. If I look at, George Mitchell is a great example of this. He said that, of course this may seem old dated now that we have a new president who is constantly on the airwaves with talking about what he think is a problem. Mitchell was using the example of World War II. His figure I believe was that 78,000,000 people were killed in World War II, either as a result of combat or actually in fighting. It’s just a number that none of us can even imagine how big it is. His comment was, “If a bomb blows up in an airport in Germany or wherever, and 30 people are killed, it’s worldwide news, and we are all like, “Oh my goodness, this huge problem.””
That’s where the perspective has to come in, we may not be as unsafe and insecure as we actually think. I happen to believe that. I feel very safe in Maine. I really do. Yes I’m an older guy and all that, but if I were a kid I’d still feel very safe. A lot of people come here to be safe, and they feel safe here. Frankly, in most parts of this great country, we are very safe.
We might just want to, when somebody is trying to alarm us about something, particularly about another group of people or another religion or whatever, we might just stop for a minute and say, “Really,” because most of the time you find that as Mitchell talks about often is, these people are like us in many ways. They all want their kids to succeed in life. They all want them to get a good education and good healthcare, which is a big problem in this state and this country now to get everyone access to healthcare.
If we approach it from this perspective yes, there is a lot of agreement. You rarely get disagreement on people saying, “Kids should have access to healthcare. Then the question becomes how do we do that? Naturally there are going to be divisions about how, but if you look at the goal, and you focus on that, it really changes the conversation. I really think it does.
Dr. Lisa: Doug, when should we expect your next book?
Douglas Rooks: It’s now scheduled for spring of 2018, the reason I have to get it out, we are going to have some big political contest in Maine. I figured a book about politics will probably do best in that year. Also, I just would like to get it out by then because I have a lot of ideas that I’ve kind of been circulating about my brain over the years, and this is a great opportunity to put it together into something, a little bit like a political program. We see very much of that these days, I read party platforms and they don’t really say anything. I like party platforms from the old days. They say, “We are going to do this, this and this.” They were elected and they did it, or at least they tried. That’s kind of the politics I want to see.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Douglas Rooks who was a career journalist who worked at weekly and daily newspapers for 25 years. His first book, Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible was published last year. Congratulations on a great book, and I look forward to the next one.
Douglas Rooks: Thank you so much.