Transcript
Ted Frantz 0:03
On October 9, 2013 former Indiana Senator Richard Lugar sat down with an up and coming Mayor from South Bend named Pete Buttigieg. Their conversation served as the keynote for the first annual Richard M. Fairbanks Symposium on Civic Leadership at the University of Indianapolis. The discussion covers an overview of Lugar’s entrance into politics, pointers about how to build governing coalitions Robert Kennedy’s April 4, 1968 visit to Indianapolis, as well as a memorable exchange about how much Lugar and Buttigieg valued their training in the humanities. Listeners can be reminded of Lugar’s photographic memory, as well as Buttigieg unique ability to frame issues of leadership. Finally, the two discussed the ways in which executive experience is necessary in politics. In 2019 two events conspired to increase interest in the lugar Buttigieg conversation. First, Buttigieg became one of many Democrats vying for the 2020 presidential nomination. Second, on April 28 Senator Lugar died at the age of 87 the longest serving and most distinguished senator in Indiana history. Lugar was renowned as an unparalleled statesman. His close relationship with the University of Indianapolis was one of his many lasting legacies. Together with Symposium partner Indiana Humanities, the Institute for Civic Leadership and Mayoral Archives is proud to release the entirety of this memorable keynote. The University of Indianapolis is thankful for the support provided by the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, the Lilly Endowment and other individual philanthropic sponsors. If you like this conversation, be sure to check out all of our other podcasts on your favorite podcast provider.
Pete Buttigieg 1:46
Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here, and it’s polite, I think, in a situation like this, to say that you’re humbled when often a politician means they feel the opposite of humble. They feel proud. But I’m seriously humbled to find myself in this context. Some similarities were mentioned. Senator Lugar studied at Pembroke College in Oxford. So did I. Senator Lugar was a young Mayor as I am. He was a naval intelligence officer as I am. Senator Lugar also more responsible than any other individual, through a great diplomatic triumph, for the destruction of over 7000 nuclear weapons from the United States and Russia, meaning he’s one of the people walking this earth most responsible for having perhaps prevented a nuclear disaster in Our time. And I read a book about Russia not long ago, all of which is to say that this is very humbling. So in order to try to level the playing field a little bit at the beginning of the conversation, I was hoping I could pull you back to the to the first days of your administration as a young mayor, when there is something that I think we would have had in common, which is that experience of coming through the door the mayor’s office the first time, something you’ve prepared for for quite a while, you’ve campaigned for, the voters have trusted you with it. You know exactly where you want to take the city generally, but you’ve got to figure out how to spend your first moments and first days in office. And I was very interested to know how you saw the challenges shaping up, and how you prioritized your first few days when you were actually at the helm.
Richard Lugar 3:30
Well Pete, I had the benefit of serving on the school board for three years before the mayor business that came about because people came to the west side factory where my brother and I were trying to resurrect the family business. As a Lugar, you got to run for the school board. Our kids are just getting dirt, and we need somebody to stand up for a month. I frankly, didn’t know where the school board met, quite apart from what they did, I was flattered by paying any attention, but Char, my wife, had four boys headed to the public schools. That’s something you probably ought to do. So I ran and found out, because I’ve been so preoccupied with the factory and the farm, that a civil rights revolution was on the horizon in Indianapolis. I was apparent in that race. I emerged as one of the seven people in that large situation. Gertrude Page, an African American woman, got the most votes, and she became a strong ally, as we began to tackle first of all, breakfast for latchkey children, children that had no parents there and they were, matter of fact, sick years because they got anything to eat before school immediately. This is the first thing we tried to do. Chamber of Commerce in Indianapolis. At that time, said, “Lugar, you’ve got to get through your head, we have never taken one dime of federal aid in Indianapolis, and we’re not about to start now because of your crazy idea with latchkey children and breakfast and so forth” By a four to three vote by the board, we did take up the latchkey children and the breakfast. And this is the beginning of one controversy after another, which included trying to begin desegregating the Indianapolis Public School System long before the court orders and what have you, the Shortridge Plan we adopted. The ability anybody in the whole city that come to Shortridge for the freshman year, black, white or anybody else. What had been a 90% black population, 10% white became in that year 50/50, like water going uphill in educational journals. But on the other hand, extremely controversial, as you can imagine.
So, in the midst of all of this, the Republican Party in Indianapolis had come to the conclusion, I suspect, that there had not been a Republican mayor for 20 years, and the prospects demographically were there not going to be for the next 20 for that matter. Keith Bulen was a brilliant tactician, became County Chairman and asked me to run because I suppose I had already become so controversial, there was so much publicity surrounding all of these battles, that he thought at least there might be some hope of a breakthrough of this sort. And I’ll not go through a whole campaign, but nevertheless, I defeated John Barden, a fine gentleman who was the Democratic mayor then former state policeman. But before we got to that point, I had already done some homework and found as I talked to people from other cities in the country that Indianapolis along with Detroit and Buffalo and Pittsburgh and St Louis and so forth were all headed downhill, and they were going downhill in a hurry as a matter of fact, simply because properties were being abandoned, there were fewer and fewer jobs. The resources of the community seemed to be diminishing. It was a phenomenon in terms of an urban demise that was difficult. I found in Nashville, Tennessee and in Jacksonville, Florida, people had envisioned an expansion of the inner city to the suburbs. Different patterns in both cases. But nevertheless, this was intriguing.
So we talked about that in the campaign about greater Indianapolis, about a flourishing situation going onward and upward, and most people had no idea what in the world we were talking about. And it was certainly an upset win. I suspect we finally made it across the finish line. But having done that, I started out it was a campaign year, then in 1968 following the 67 election, went to Lincoln Days all over the state, or to places where I would meet with people who were going to be state representatives or state senators. And I don’t want to make too much out of this, but in the course of a year of time, I had met with all 100 members of the General Assembly, all 50 state senators, talking about what was going to be called Unigov. And the idea was that the civil government of Indianapolis and Marion County would be combined. There would be one mayor, 25 members of the council, all the money on the same table, everybody around the same table, with various districts almost guaranteeing there will be black representatives as well as white ones. And this, to say the least, consumed the entire year in terms of the persuasion coming up to the legislature, which was a battle and a story all by itself, but in the event, finally, we got Governor Whitcomb to sign the bill and got Governor Bowen, who was then Speaker Bowen, to let go of it, I made almost a fatal miscue, I became so irritated with the Bowen and I asked all the citizens of Indianapolis to call him on the telephone down to the State House, and many responded to that and jammed the whole state house with all these calls. But I apologized profusely and tried to get back on the best side of things. Anyway, Unigov was passed, but then it was in the end of it, the Supreme Court of Indiana had to rule we were involved in that. And ultimately we had re election campaign in ’71 in which people said we didn’t get a referendum on this. You did it all by the legislature. We are a creature of the state, but nevertheless, we should have had a vote. So that was the vote. There were more votes cast in that election than they’ve ever been cast again in Indianapolis in the mayoralty election, and we won roughly 60/40 and that settled the issue, but it made all the difference, I would just say, in the life of the city, as immediately, all kinds of investment came in. People began to build the buildings they had envisioned for a long time, we began to clear away all the debris in the downtown area so the people had land. Brilliant people like David Meeker, brilliant tactician for architecture.
And same time, why, President Nixon, who had been elected in ’68 discovered Indianapolis was the largest Republican city. John Lindsay, New York having gone to the Democratic Party. So as a result, his first trip as President with Mrs. Nixon was out here. Some may find that’s a good idea. Some may find that was dubious, but historically, it was important, because Nixon was so excited about the whole business that in the city county building, on our way up to the 25th floor, he said, I want you in Mount. Moynihan. This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an advisor to go to Brussels immediately represent the United States at the cities of the world conference got all kinds of problems there and not lacking audacity about this, I went with Moynihan, and then I invited all the mayors of the world to come to Indianapolis the next year for the so called first international conference on cities. And 50 responded, some from Japan, from Europe, Latin America all came out here revived many of the cultural communities of who had not really thought of each other as Bosnians or Serbs or what have you, for years, but sort of came out of the woodwork, and it made a very exciting difference in terms of the international outlook of Indianapolis then, as we all began to think about exporting and trying to bring together that kind of business, I was elected president National League of Cities. And this led to a whole host of other experiences, which we’ll not go into in great detail.
But finally, to the battle for revenue sharing. This was the first time, at least during the Nixon period, that the federal government balanced the budget. There was actually a surplus for one year, and the Congress passed a revenue sharing plan. And I mentioned that because I had my heart set on the Market Square Arena, and I needed a way to pay for it. And so the revenue sharing money was the way to pay for it. The federal government paid for it so that we did not have a taxpayer expense at that particular stage. The Pacers were saved. Otherwise would have gone somewhere else. We couldn’t provide that kind of thing. And $20.5 million worth of investment by businesses were pledged for all the buildings around us and the development and so forth. So the property tax base rose again, and I was able to reduce property taxes five years out of the eight that I was mayor, largely due to this expansion and excitement. So in a nutshell, this is why I enjoyed being mayor. It was an exciting times.
Pete Buttigieg 13:02
There’s one thing in particular. There’s so much in that, in that story, but one in particular I wanted to unpack a little bit, and that’s the idea of how you try to build consensus or or influence people to do something. You mentioned that you’re elected as a local figure, but in order to get anything done with unigov, you need the entire state legislature to back you. And one of the first things I realized as mayor, first of all, you come in as chief executive of an organization of in our case, smaller city in Indianapolis, but 1000 or so employees, most of them, some of them don’t mind telling you they got underwear older than you and and and you’re supposed to tell them all what to do. And so it’s challenging enough within your own organization and all the people who report to you to try to get everybody on the same page and get them aligned around the same goals, but I very quickly figured out that most of the work in this job was going to involve getting people to do things that you don’t have any authority over them, starting with your own counsel, who, of course, won’t mind reminding you that they’re the legislature, and they don’t report to anybody but the voters. And even more so, if you’re trying to do anything very ambitious, one, one of our biggest efforts right now has to do with a group violence reduction strategy. We’re trying to take a more evidence based approach to how we deal with with gang violence. We used to call it gang violence, and then people said, well, we don’t have gangs in this part of town. I said, What do you have? Said, Well, we have little neighborhood groups so, so now we’re calling it the group violence reduction strategy, but, but one of the the biggest elements of getting anything done was, was you got to have everybody at the table. That’s a federal prosecutor, the county sheriff, the county prosecutor, probate court, stuff. That’s just the law enforcement side. You got to have schools there. You got to have parks. You got to have social services. Pretty soon, I figure out of the 40 people on my commission, only about two of them actually report to me, and if it doesn’t. To operate on a handshake, it doesn’t operate. So I was interested to know whether through the lens of the Unigov experience, or maybe further on, in the Senate, where, of course, you got 100 people, each with their own, their own approach, how you go about getting somebody to do something when they certainly don’t have to?
Richard Lugar 15:19
You talk to them, listen more than you talk and find out really where their interests are. But I think likewise, you need to have some ideas. Not just a question of interviewing people and sort of counting heads in the unigov experience, we had an idea. Now it was not an idea that was shared by everybody. As a matter of fact, many of my public meetings here in Indianapolis at that time were with people, particularly in suburbs, who would quote Biblical Scripture as to why this was a dreadful idea. But at the same time we managed this is the time we talk about civility to make sure that we didn’t get into a temper tantrum with anybody. We sort of listened to everybody, even quoting the Bible, as opposed to una gov. And we also, I had to make compromises. I think the panel this morning made a very good point that the public school system did not come into Unigov. That was a situation in which the school corporations simply indicated from the outset that they had the votes in the legislature to stop any such nonsense of that sort, if we thought about it. And so we did not get the schools involved, and we had a police and fire department situation that was sort of fractured for a long while. Did much better with sewers and water mains and other developments, as people in the county really wanted more services of that sort, but lots of compromises along the way, even while we were celebrating with glory of one mayor, one council, one unit of and at the same time the campaign of ’71 that I mentioned was I felt very civil campaign, my opponent, Democrat, on this occasion, side of the fact that we were going to return to neighborhoods, this idea of this vast city and all this encompassing business was very, not really, Hoosier, and we were going to be back to the neighborhoods and all. So all sorts of signs went up, sort of indicating that type of thing, and that a lot of people believed. But I think also underlying a lot of this was the problem. We were working our way through relationships with African Americans and whites in this city. It was the case really around the country, as people observed this and they said, well, two things have been done. These are the cynics who criticized it. All so first of all, Lugar and Bulin and whoever else allied with them have put the Republicans back in charge. That was the whole purpose of this thing. If demographically, the Republicans were never going to win again, if you expand the electorate, why good chance that they might, and they continued to for many years, until Mayor Peterson, I would just simply say that that was very suspicious on the part of many people. Likewise, there was the feeling on the part of some civil rights crusaders. These were the more extreme ones, but they took the position that demographically, Indianapolis, along with a lot of other cities, are going to be ours. And just a few years of time, we’re going to elect the public officials, and we’re going to do so with a pretty strong racial bias of that sort. So how dare you really take the plate off the table before we get our chance at it. And a lot of people wrote a good number of educational doctrines and other papers about all of this for a while that somehow there had been frustration of the black minority, not only by Republicans, but by simply the structure of this situation. But I would just say ultimately, the proof was in the pudding that we the tax base rose so rapidly, the tax cuts, likewise, the facilities sort of coming all around. And I would just inquire of you, Pete, because I know this has been a part of your mission here, but in the old days and Bill would have faced a different problem. But I could go into neighborhoods, and I could see all these houses that have been abandoned and just ramshackle messes and so forth and order. Whatever department I had there, really, to clean the whole thing off. Now I found in later days that probably there were some legal problems, and being so swift sounds kind of nice, yeah, so sort of cleanup. But in the old days, in quotes and so forth, we just went block by block. I would go out, sort of on a cruise and say, Let’s take care of this block today and this one so that eventually we had, then the real estate on which to rebuild, which to take care of things. Plus we didn’t have all the abandoned property, the mess that was generally there. And I just didn’t inquire of you as you took a look at South Bend, because I know you have been attempting to tear down a lot of old houses and what, what was the legal situation you faced? And are really about the public relations situation. It’s,
Pete Buttigieg 20:55
it’s amazing to hear the matches between some of what I face and some what you came into. You know, South Bend is a city that, outside of our area, we’re best known for Notre Dame, but we didn’t grow up around education. We grew up around industry back when the Big Three automakers were the big four automakers. Number four was Studebaker, and it was right in south bend. So in many ways, we have the attributes of a company town that lost its company, and we didn’t go all the way down the tubes because of leadership and also because of the universities that we did have, but the legacy of that is that we went from having 130,000 people to having 100 and we simply have more houses than people, and we simply have too many houses. Now I love saving houses whenever possible. My own home is a vacant and abandoned house that I’ve been fixing up my little money pit on the river in South Bend. But it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to preserve all of them, and so we found two categories, as you pointed out, of obstacles. Probably the bigger one is the public relations issue. And people, if you let them will tend to divide along whatever fractures there are, whether it’s economic, political, racial, and will often view fast talking politicians with big ideas through that lens, right? So if I come in as I did and said, Look, this city needs to tackle 1000 houses in 1000 days, or we’re not going to be able to reverse the tide of blight in our neighborhoods. A lot of folks are asking, Well, does that mean that you’re attacking my neighborhood? Now what we found as we started listening more closely was that that was what we were hearing from the politicians from those neighborhoods. What we were hearing from the neighbors from those neighborhoods was, where have you been the last 1020, years? Because what they often weren’t aware of is that these vacant and abandoned properties, they didn’t belong to us. Even if I go tear them down, I still don’t own it. At best, we can clear it out under the unsafe building law, if the building can’t be saved, but it belongs to the bank or the county or the original owner. Sometimes the original owner doesn’t even know that they still own it, because of a pretty nefarious practice, in my view, where a bank will kick the family out, but take a couple years to actually foreclose, so that the taxes and the liens and that sort of thing Go to the family and not to the bank, something that ought to get a look from a state or federal policy perspective. But anyway, even when we clear the house out, we don’t necessarily own it, but until we do, a neighbor who lives across the street or next door to one of those houses views the condition of that house as a direct barometer of how much the city cares about them, right? Never mind that I don’t want that house there either to them. It’s a symbol. It tells them whether or not we care. And what we’ve tried to do is make sure there as many ways as possible for the voice of the neighborhood to be driving our decisions. We literally don’t have enough dollars to clear the houses that we need to clear, so we got to do it in some kind of order. So how do you decide what to do first? Well, one of the things we did was we brought in a team from an outfit called Code for America. If you’ve ever heard of Teach for America. This is a similar idea, but, but it’s for IT people. They call it the Peace Corps for Geeks. And every year they pick 10 cities, and their job is to craft some kind of application, web based app, that will help with city issues. And I pointed out to them that we have a lot of seniors and a lot of low income folks, and whatever they come up. Whatever they come up with should be a technology that’s useful to people, even if they don’t understand how to use the web. What they created was a platform that to make a long story short, they stick a yard sign in the yard of a vacant and abandoned house, and it’s got a number you can call, and when you call that number, you can leave a message about how you feel about that house, whether you think it ought to be torn down in a hurry, whether you think we ought to not tear it down because there’s a chance to save it, or whether you’re willing to do something about it. And that registers, and you actually go to our website, South Bend voices.com, you can hear it. You can click on a property, and you can see and hear all these voices of people, some of whom are seniors who’ve never used a mouse in their lives, but. But, but because it’s phone based, it’s web based to me, but it’s phone based to them, and it draws in the neighborhoods. Because you have to make it clear that what you’re doing is not something you’re doing to the neighborhood, but it’s something you’re doing with the neighborhood and for the neighborhood. And if we can establish that, then I think we’ll be on the right path, and people will begin to take it as a confidence builder when we’re able to address the houses, save the ones we can, clear out the ones we can’t. And the other important thing, of course, is that a vacant lot isn’t that much better than a vacant house, so trying to have a community based approach to what that lot’s going to be, even if the best you can do is have it be a veggie garden for a while, or put in wild flowers, like they do in the medians of the highways in Indiana, because you don’t have to mow them. They smell good, they look pretty good, and they actually help suck up some of the rain water from the ground. They take pressure off the sewer system. So we have to get creative, because the problem is too big to solve overnight. But step one is making sure that everybody understands that those properties aren’t there because the city wants them there. And I think getting that across is a real challenge, and I’m sure you’ve had challenges of having your intentions misjudged, maybe because something looks a little too convenient for you, for somebody who’s looking at it through a political lens, when all you’re trying to do is respond.
Richard Lugar 26:21
Well, I’m sure that was probably right, without being self justified, I would say in one of the campaign pledges that I made as I was campaigning was once again to the people on the west side. And I mention that because our factory, Thomas o green company, my grandfather had started out there, was on the west side of Indianapolis. And so the people came and said, you know, in addition to our schools being dumped on, we’re being dumped on all the air pollution. Just somebody settles out here, because every night, they just put a torch to all the refuse down in the southwest Indianapolis and burn it up. And so I pledged that we were going to close the first order of business, the city dump and get into a different mode. Well, at this point, other Republican officials said you just are overstepping altogether, including a couple of prominent judges, and you’re not going to be able to do that so fast. And it came, you know, to the very day that I was sworn in office. And the car the mayor had in those days was given to me. It was an old Cadillac car. A policeman drove it out my first act was to go down to the city dump and sort of a shovel of dirt indicate it was being closed. It took a while, however, as a matter of fact, for that all to occur, and that was that was true of many of these instances in which, by and large, as a public good being served, but not immediately apparent to people. What also happened, very tragically, is in the very first year, on April 4, 1968 it was my birthday that day. This is my we’re just in office three months, and that was the day that Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated. As some of you will recall, Robert Kennedy was campaigning in Indiana that day. I had had asked the Kennedy people not to come to downtown Indianapolis that night, which was their intent, because I said, this is going to be a very difficult, if not dangerous situation, but they literally wanted to come to the heart of Indianapolis, down to 17th and Broadway that particular night to indicate the courage of the candidates and lots of other things. So it was one of these strange occasions in which, fortunately, I had fashioned friendships with two people called Snooki Hendrix and Ben Bell. Now these are what might be called activists, and this occurred because our campaign was successful, but I noticed that all sorts of strange things had happened in some precincts, and so Snooki and Ben said, Well, let me tell you how politics goes. And I said, Well, you tell me, Ben and Snooki took me down to 20th in college, and they said, now here, as a matter of fact, you guys sent out Republican lawyers and they were to be supervising the polls because there were no Republicans around there, but very rapidly, why? Mayor Barton’s brother Patrick took care of that situation by saying civil rights were being violated. So. The Police Department came out and picked up all of these young Republican attorneys who were horrified that their reputations were going to be burnished by all of this, took them down to the jail. Now, fortunately, the sheriff was Lee Eades, a Republican so very rapidly, in the course of two or three hours, I got Lee to release all of these Republicans. They didn’t go back to the polls, however. And so Snooki and Ben were showing me the after effects of of votes that were sort of like 120 to zero and so forth. And so I said, Well, how did, how did this work out? I said, it appears to me maybe there were more votes cast here than there are people living in this neighborhood. They said, not to worry. They said, We all knew how this elderly person of that one would have voted. We voted for them, and this sort of took care of that to make sure everybody was heard and so forth. Well, I was glad we counted the votes already and that I was mayor, listening to how all this was going to be handled. But I mentioned all of this because on the night of April the fourth, I was in the Murad hotel for a banquet of the short reach high school basketball team. My alma mater at short reach, it was a team that was all black, a black coach. And there was a situation which we were celebrating that, but I was also in the maraud hotel, because that’s what the Kennedys were going to come and I sort of had set up a battle command station that was not that far from 17th in Alabama, or what have you, to try to take care of the situation, in fairness, historically, and they couldn’t have done it all, but Ben and Snooki were out there in the crowd down there at 17th, and they were, in fact, counseling people. This is not the time, and made a very large difference as black activists that night, which saved lives in Indianapolis and all sorts of difficulty. You know, the next few days were horrible because people all I was on in one church basement and street corner. What happened after another one of the television channels gave me five minutes every night just to reassure the people we were going to be okay. But it was a very tense situation out in Richmond, Indiana, a refinery blew up, and the Rumors were that already the insurrection had occurred. But this was sort of a tough way to start the mayor business, but I stress the fact that in the campaign, because we had had these associations with these activists, it was very, very important in the history of Indianapolis that at the right time, they stepped forward.
Pete Buttigieg 32:55
You mentioned that night, which is one of the most extraordinary course in Indianapolis history, as well as in American history. And it’s remarkable to hear the story behind the story, in the role that that played in keeping the city calm, because I think most people know only the part about Senator Kennedy’s remarks, which was itself extraordinary. He got in front of a room full of people and without condescension, right? He was the one. He was the messenger. He wound up telling a lot of people, a lot of young activists, African Americans, mostly that Dr King had been killed. And he then did something that I think nobody would dare do today. But he did not condescend. He quoted literature. He quoted Aeschylus, actually, there’s this passage, passage that begins that God whose rule it is that he who learns must suffer. And he didn’t quote that part, but he quoted a part where it says, and even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls, drop by drop, upon the human heart in our in our own despite against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God and connected with the audience, sharing that which had been a comfort to him when he was processing the death of his own brother, the violent death of his own brother a few years earlier, I happen to know that that was a translation from a book by Edith Hamilton called the Greek way. And I know that because I stumbled on it during a little time I was reading in my office about a year ago, I realized I wasn’t reading anymore, and reading got me everything good in life, and I wasn’t reading much. So we have a new rule that for not much, but four or five hours a week. There’s a requirement my staff has to help me protect just four or five hours when I can hold up and read and not necessarily read about policy, maybe just read about the Greeks, or read history or read poetry, because if you don’t do that, you can lose I think you’re more in on the other. My hand, I’ve never felt so much pressure away from study and scholarship. And it’s a strange thing if you have a scholarly disposition to find yourself in a job that seems almost to actively discourage, either just through scheduling pressure or also through the kind of the culture you’re immersed in tends to discourage reflection and reading and writing, and it brings me to something that I recall from the opportunity that I had to visit your office in Washington, where there’s an entire wall of books. It resembles the office of some of my the professors I most admired, and the kind of books that that I have or would like to have. So I’m interested to know whether you think it’s become any less possible today to be a reflective practitioner, for somebody who practices politics, also to to have a scholarly life or indulge academic instincts, or whether that’s always been a challenge, and there’s always going to be a way to somehow protect or reinforce the importance of doing that for for anybody who makes decisions and anybody who speaks to large numbers of people,
Richard Lugar 36:14
I think it’s always been a challenge in public life, but I sort of share your passion for reading and for study, and something that’s been very important in my life, regardless of which you’re you’re in, I admire your discipline and actually setting aside time to do this. But I remember at Oxford for the first time in my life, I really had a block of time in which I could write a novel, and I did. It was it was never published. I got signs from publishers, a lot of promise and so forth, but no cigar. They get a and ultimately, I disposed of the novel. It probably was not a good idea, but still, I had met Joyce, Carey, Graham, Greene, other luminaries over there, because I was deeply interested in the creative arts of how you how you write a novel. So ultimately, I wrote another book called Letters to the next president. And I did that after a very busy year in which I was over supervising the election of Corazon Aquino over Ferdinand Marcos and all the aftermath of that, the problems of apartheid in South Africa, getting the majorities over President Reagan’s veto that brought about, really a change in the relationship that we had there, and a host of other things. And from my standpoint, I wanted to write a book that said what I was thinking at the time, what the resources were, who said what to whom, and so forth, which has turned out to be very important, because each of these are controversial events in the countries that were involved, quite apart from our own politics. But what a thrill it was to actually see my work published, to actually go to book signings. And the thing I always am excited every quarter a small royalty check comes in and char asked, Why in the world, are you still worried about that? I said, char, you don’t understand that’s sort of the beauty of all of this, but, but I think that’s important to take time, and I hope you will do that too as your experiences unfold, because some recollection along the road which is historically accurate, at least from your own point of view, is very important in setting the argument for other historians or other people who may be writing about this sort of thing down the trail. I think one other fact, and seeing bill here just reminds me that right here at UIndy, we had this remarkable program with the five mayors, and that was a time in which we celebrated the fact that for 40 years there had been five mayors, and the flow of activity of the work that each one had done was picked up and augmented by the next. In other words, as a situation we heard today with regard to Republican politics or Indiana situation in Benjamin Harrison’s day. But this was not a question of the next mayor chucking it all out and saying, you know, my way or the highway. Was always a question of really building upon all of that. Bill picked up things and ran for four terms and had a huge impact, but each of the words that were spoken by the mayors were complimentary of the one who had proceeded before, or of the economy of the group. It was a beautiful time, and I was so pleased that they replayed it during the time of the Super Bowl, because for the rest of. The country that was watching Indianapolis at that point, wondering, how do you come to a point where Indianapolis to be selected for the Super Bowl? This wasn’t the total reason, but it was a city, a story of a city, that showed how the whole sports business might have started from from a very small beginning, and moved national and international, and finally led to that glorious time when we entertained the rest of America here. And I cite the five Mayor program that was brought the four right here at UIndy as a very important starter for all that
Brandon 40:40
I see Brandon towards back with the microphone. So maybe we could take a little bit of time for questions from the group.
After that ring endorsement of humanity, I thought it was a good time. But yeah, I think that it would be a way to have this great opportunity to not allow great folks in the room to chime in with some questions. So.
Audience Member 40:59
To both of you. It seems that on the municipal level, the partisanship that we’re seeing really hurt our country today can be overcome. You have to work with people that you know as two people who have accomplished that on the local level, and Senator Lugar you on the international level. What kind of advice do you have for both citizens who are worried about what’s going on in Washington, but also those policy makers that are that are have allowed partisanship and extreme ideology on both sides to to get us into the mess we’re in today?
Richard Lugar 41:38
I’ll let Pete handle that. [laughter]
Pete Buttigieg 41:43
Well I think it’s certainly the case that in local government, you don’t have the luxury of indulging or retreating into partisan camps nearly as much, because stuff simply has to get done. We need a federal government, and the shutdown of the federal government is dreadful, but if a city government shuts down within about 48 hours, the place would become uninhabitable, because, among other things, we provide drinking water, and if you don’t have that, you can’t live. So it doesn’t get more basic than that. And there’s a very perceptive op ed piece ran last couple days by the Mayor of Baltimore suggesting that if more of the people in Congress had had the experience of being in local government, or any executive experience, there might be less willingness to let things reach this point. I’m certainly a fan of mayors being being in Congress because, because there are people we can work with better and the same, I might add, for the state legislature, where I sometimes worry that mayors and cities are being treated like just another interest group, and we really count on the state to continue to have policies that benefit us. And would love to see more people with local government experience here I am talking about experience at my age, but, but I think it’d be a real benefit at every level.
Richard Lugar 42:59
I’d just like to pick that up, because I think Pete’s on to something very important here, many of the members of Congress presently. We heard some terrible tales about the 19th century this morning, but let’s just talk about the current Congress. It came to these responsibilities not because they have been mayors or governors or attorney general or had had any particular responsibility, they are persons who have very strong views about various subjects, but they’ve come to Congress, and I can just say, from my own experience, in the last 10 years, we’ve not moved long before this year, very many appropriation bills, that is, the spending bills, have hardly ever passed a budget. This is not new. It may be one of the worst examples, and I would say in large part, is because the people involved do not have really legislative experience or experience really in dealing with other people. If you take the situation my way or the highway and you say, I’m a member of Congress, but I hate Washington. I don’t want to spend any more hours here than I have to three days a week. Is about it for me, because I want to be back on the hustings with the people. These are the people I’m interested in. Well, that’s fine, but in terms of actually physically doing the work, not so fine, because nobody is there. Or if the House decides that they haven’t last two years to take a whole week off every out of every forward, it’s arbitrarily so they can be back on the hustings and so forth. You finally get to a situation in which people, first of all, don’t know each other. They don’t ever see each other because they’re back on the hustings. They’re not so this, this has implications, for instance, in the Foreign Relations Committee, and we. I was deeply interested, or the Ag Committee with the Farm Bill, very, very difficult to move anything in either situation. And finally, I would just say that, frankly, that many people with whom I visited, say, in the last five years in Indiana, frequently, quite apart from the rest of the nations, I won’t categorize that I would go out to a town hall meeting or some other meeting, and they respectfully would say, Now, Dick, we appreciate work you’ve done in getting all those warheads that were aimed at us and taking care of the world and so forth, but we’re not interested that anymore. Let’s not talk about that. We’re interested in budgets and taxes, in jobs. That’s what we want to talk about. That’s all we want to talk about. Well, somebody still has to talk about the rest of the world occasionally, and it’s very difficult. People will criticize the president for lacking congressional support and so forth. But in fact, is if nobody is studying, nobody’s reading, speed it nobody is doing anything about this. We’re really talking about a federal government that may have some talented people, but they’re not prepared, really, for this particular thing. I think this may change over the course of time. I’m always optimistic. These are cycles we go through. Having heard about the other centuries today. Why it was even worse still, I suppose, on other occasions. But we’re in a very complicated world in which we have large responsibilities and we need people. I just make a final point, and that is that I used to worry as I went around Indiana. It’s not berate anybody who’s been serving in public office, but I would talk to people who are gifted, attorneys, doctors, civic leaders, and they would be prepared, really, to be a part of a committee that would raise money for my campaign or but not to put their own names on the ballot, not to put their own decks in the news, so that finally, after you eliminate several rafts of very talented people in this state, what is left finally on the ballot sometimes is not exactly what you would want. And so you ask if some of these people, okay, don’t make your whole life of it, but you know, maybe you might really run for the school board someday, or for the city council or something of that variety. Disagreeable as that may seem, you don’t have to make a lifetime of it, but at least put your own neck out there and but I don’t get many buyers for that, I hope that there will be many more.
Audience Member 2 47:44
Hello. Just wanted to for you to think about this for a little bit and reply to it. We know we all went through the recession, and it’s not been a good thing, but yet we’re looking at a comeback of some sorts. And if you come right here to the state of Indiana, and look all around at the other states surrounding us, we seem like we’re number one. We’re number one in getting new business and taxes in budget and the fact that we’re not in debt over our head. Why do you think that we are shining so brightly, if indeed we are shining brightly?
Pete Buttigieg 48:29
Well, certainly you’re appealing to my Indiana pride on one level. So I think there’s, you know, I think there’s a discipline that our state has had and that our government has had that’s been beneficial. I think it’s something we try to do at the local level too. We’re very proud that we have the best bond rating of any class two city in Indiana. It’s not the flashiest thing to talk about your bond rating, but, but it really matters for a lot of reasons. But let’s not lull ourselves, I think, into a sense of complacency. At the same time, we’re doing well by a lot of measures, of some fiscal measures, and also measures of how we’re regarded in the near term by business decision makers, but in the medium to long term, I think business decision makers will evaluate communities and states based on, certainly fiscal strength, but two other big things, education and infrastructure, and in those two respects, I’m not comfortable with where we are in Indiana, and, for that matter, not comfortable with where we are in South Bend, which is why we all got to work so hard to find more solutions. The good news is for somebody who’s passionate about the local level, especially as federal government creaks into dysfunction, we hope temporarily, a lot of the most interesting innovation when it comes to infrastructure and education can happen at the local level, but not without some level heads in Washington as well.
Richard Lugar 50:00
I would just pick up the education part. Especially, many of the surveys now did not put Indiana at the top of the list with regard to the public school system, to matter of fact, way down the list. Likewise, with regard to the so called STEM skills, those are not the whole thing, and they’re big arguments as to whether mathematics and engineering are more important than philosophy and so forth. And I’ll get into that. Pete and I were philosophy types, but in any event, I think Ivy Tech, in its extension, is trying very hard. This is called bridge the gap between the jobs that are possible and available in very wonderful industries, and the lack of the skills of people, regardless of age, who are not really able to meet those and this is a big gap in Indiana. I think many are trying to address it, but we had no discussion this morning about the public school system. And from a sentimental standpoint, this is very important for me, because I remember so well all the struggles were involved in this, but this has not gone well. It’s not going well at all for the children who were involved, or their parents, or really, I think, for the heart of the city, and it’s something that really has to be addressed.
Brandon 51:21
Think we got one more question. Over here.
Audience Member 3 51:26
Hello. I know that there are many students here, along with myself, that are seeking careers in politics, and I just have a question for both of you. Are there certain aspects of human character, human character that one needs to possess to succeed in their field. Or do you have any advice to the students here in the audience?
Richard Lugar 51:50
Well, I will start out with saying I heard, for instance, Mayor McBarnes this morning, he did not dwell on this, but he really pointed out the strength of his faith in God and the fact that he is guided by this. I think that is very important. I don’t want to go into a sermon today, but I would say that the fact is that I think someone who is going to be a successful public servant really has to start with prayer and asking what is expected of me, and how should I conduct myself, and how can I make a difference in this life, however many years I’m given, and that, I think, is pretty fundamental. Now, after that, you may come to the conclusion this is going to require a great deal of work on your part. It’s going to require that from the beginning, you were a good student, maybe a good boy scout, if you’re a male, a good person in terms of going to church services and taking part in Sunday school, and when Mike met his youth fellowship and all of this. And finally, of course, having the ability to learn new skills, to understand that the world moves on, whether you have or not, and that there are other people are going to require, really, that somebody study a little bit ahead of the situation if, in fact, the challenges are going to be met. These, these, I think, are very important aspects of people looking at public service. And I’m always excited visiting with the interns that we’ve had in the Senate office, and now this wonderful program that UND has created out of our lugar Center in Washington. The first year, we have 10 students from und. These are all students who would ask the same question you have asked, What do we do? How do you prepare for this? And we’re helping the preparation through matching up with other members of Congress in their offices, a gifted professor from Georgetown who comes in twice a week for extended lectures and a good number of tours that Connor Burns of my staff sitting next to you, takes around Washington with the students they Were out of Mount Vernon this week, for example, and it’s an attempt, however, to think aloud, as I do with the students each week for a couple of hours about where we all are headed and what it will take.
Pete Buttigieg 54:35
What a deep question human character is. First of all, points to the importance of being a student. So for all the experiences I’ve had that prepared me to do what I do now, from campaigns to time in the business community to even military service, nothing was as important in my formation as the time, of course, that I spent as a student. So. So I hope it’s recognized among students, what an important moment you have on your hands right now, the only time in your life when it will be your full time job, or at least your primary job, to find out as much as you can about yourself and about the world that you operate in. That is incredible. It’s a it’s a great racket that that we’ve managed to organize through the university, which may be the greatest invention of mankind. We’ve managed to organize opportunities to do that, because then you will be able to formulate your purpose, which may or may not be formulated in terms of a job title you’d like to have. I tend to think of that as secondary, but purpose in the sense of what you aim to do, so that whatever job title you get, you know what to use it for. And that’s where character is so important. And that, by the way, and I’m not just pandering, is why humanities is so important, right? So I think the Senator and I both studied, when I did history and literature for my first degree, philosophy, politics and economics for my second just about the only thing I didn’t study with policy and how to be a mayor and any of that stuff, but, but, you know, you use the word character, which is a great word, tired word, because people use it and wear it out in some cliches, but it’s important, because there’s two kinds of challenges that any I Think leader winds up dealing with, and one is what you might call technical challenges. They’re, they’re problems that have a right answer. They’re they’re things that, if you could just figure out how to do something a little more efficiently, a little more cleverly, a little more quickly, a little more cheaply, you’ve made progress and and by the way, leaders who are exceptionally good at that, is one reason that Indianapolis and Indiana, more generally, has been in such good shape in the last half century, but that’s table stakes. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong, but that’s the beginning. The real tricky part is the challenge that comes to any leader to deal with decisions where there’s no amount of technical work is going to tell you the right answer, because there’s no technical right answer. You can’t solve the puzzle. It’s not math. The only thing you can do is make a choice between two alternatives that pit valid values against each other. Situations where you can make one person or group better off, but not without making another person or group worse off. And how you handle those how you handle those situations that put your values into conflict, is the very stuff of character, and you will have no better chance in your life to form and inform that character than the time you’re spending right now as students, hopefully reading novels in history and philosophy as well as whatever your chosen field of study might be.
Ted Frantz 57:45
Much as we’d all like to stay here all day, at least, I know I would, we have reached the time where we need to depart, and I hope that you all will join us in the Schwitzer Center Atrium right around the corner for our special announcement involving the Mayoral Archives, which is really going to be exciting. And we’re glad to have Senator Lugar, Mayor Hudnut, Dave Frick, here to help with that. Thank you all. It’s been a very, very exciting day, exciting last night, great programming. We’re just thrilled that the inaugural Richard M. Fairbanks Symposium got off to such a great start. Thanks. From young gun mayors to historians to our deputy mayors and, of course, this just unforgettable conversation here that we just were fortunate to be a part of. Finally, also, thank you to Indiana Humanities, our partner in this incredible endeavor. Over the last two days, Kira staff went out of their way and the entire UIndy community, from students to people setting up lunch and having to do things at the last second. It was an incredible effort. Thank you all so very much, and we look forward to seeing you back here next year for our second Fairbanks symposium. Won’t you join us now around the corner and give one last round of applause? Please. This podcast was produced by the Institute for Civic Leadership and Mayoral Archives and the Department of Communication at the University of Indianapolis. It is made possible by the support of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Indiana humanities and the Lily Endowment. For more information, please see our website, uindy.edu/mayoral.