Robert Strauss Interview (page: 2 / 7) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

The character that you refer to, and your ability to inspire trust, has taken you into the confidence of more than one president. Where do you suppose that talent for people came from?

Robert Strauss: I have said many times to my children and grandchildren that my father was a poor businessman and never accumulated any amount of money whatsoever, but he left my brother and me great strength, and one of the great strengths was our ability to like people, and the personality that attracted people and attracted their confidence. I think that has had everything to do with my success in politics and other things. Whenever I have worked with people in the political game, I have been successful, and it isn't because I was the smartest politician around, but I was certainly one of the most reliable ones.

You said you were a terrible student, but did you like to read?

Robert Strauss: Oh yes, I loved to read, but I didn't read very many worthwhile things. People now are too young to remember Tom Swift, or to remember Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Those are the kinds of things that I read growing up. I couldn't get enough of them, and I can remember the marvelous stories that were in The Saturday Evening Post. I couldn't wait for it to come every week, so we could read the fiction story that was in there or the novel that was in there. Sometimes it was continued from week to week, other times it was in one issue. So I read, and I read newspapers. When I was 12, 13, 14 years old, I read the paper regularly. Today, I guess I read four papers a day, maybe five or six. That comes from a habit of my early youth of enjoying reading current stories. I never was as interested in history as many of my friends, but I was always more interested in the current than they were. So you can have chocolate or vanilla; I chose one flavor.
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What newspapers do you read today?

Robert Strauss: I read The Washington Post to begin with, and then I read The New York Times, and then I read The Wall Street Journal, and then I read The Dallas Morning News, because I want to know what's happening in my home state of Texas. About two or three times a week, I read the Los Angeles Times, because I like to keep in touch with what's going on on the West Coast, and know what the editorials are dealing with there, as well as on the East Coast where I now live. So I cover the waterfront. I read the Financial Times sporadically, once or twice a week. When you've read The New York Times and The Washington Post, it doesn't take long to read these other papers; you go through them pretty fast.

When you were a student, were there any teachers that helped or inspired you?

Robert Strauss: No, I don't think so. I liked most of my teachers, and most of them liked me. I don't think any of them particularly inspired me. I don't think I was inspired.

What about other people, growing up?

Robert Strauss: My mother was the major inspiration in my life, not my father. I got along with him well, but he was not very strong. My mother was strong and kind, and I guess we never had a cross word. She used to worry that I was studying too much, and my father used to say, "Good God Almighty! How can you say he's studying too much? He never does anything but run around, and he makes terrible grades, and you tell him not to study so much." And her answer would be, "Well, you know, if he starts worrying about his grades, he'll get an ulcer, and I don't want him to lose his health. He's got such a long life ahead of him, and he's going into politics and diplomacy." So she had already begun to carve out -- that's the inspiration I had. Instead of a teacher, it was my mother.
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So she saw a talent for politics when you were quite young.

Robert Strauss: Very early.

I came from a Jewish family, and my parents lived, as I said, in West Texas, and I had a grandmother who lived in Forth Worth, and on one of the high holidays in the fall, the family would all come to Fort Worth, and we would spend a day or so with my grandmother, who came from Germany and who was very German -- in fact, we called her grossmama not "grandmother." But when they would gather around there, my mother would always say, "My son Bobby is going to be a diplomat, and he's going into politics, and he'll be the first Jewish Governor of the State of Texas." I can remember being 14 years old, 12, 13 years old maybe, in that age, and walking into the room, and one of my uncles would say, "Well, here comes the Governor," and they would all laugh, and I could have killed the sonofabitches. But my mother ignored them totally. She would just smile. And she wasn't far wrong; I had a successful political career.
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Did she live to see your career blossom?

Robert Strauss: Not near enough, no. My father outlived her. That's one of my great regrets, that they didn't live to see me become Chairman of the Democratic Party, because I was a very successful chairman. She would have liked the publicity I had for rebuilding the Democratic Party after McGovern was defeated so badly. We pulled the party together and elected a president. They didn't see any of that.

That's a shame. You had heard your mother talk about your political talents. Did you feel attracted to politics as soon as you did get involved?

Robert Strauss: Oh, I always knew that I liked politics very much. In my second year at the University of Texas, I worked for a fellow who was running for office.

Who was that?

Robert Strauss: A fellow named Travis B. Dean was running for the world's worst job, that's being a member of the Texas legislature in the '30s. It was not a very distinguished group. But he had about $120 a month in patronage, and he told me he would give me half of it if he got elected, which would be $60 a month. It was a fortune! And he got elected to the legislature, so he had $120 to pass around, and I thought I was going to get 60 of it, but I ended up with a third of the patronage, with $40 of it a month, but that was a lot of money, and I didn't have to do really any work. It was sort of a scam, his patronage to hand out, and I was happy to participate in it. So that $40 a month came in handy. I had that job for two or three years: Committee Clerk in the Texas legislature. You won't see it in my résumés very often, because I'm not quite as proud of that. Maybe I ought to be.
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