Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Bill Bradley:

Basketball has a high and it’s over. It’s high and it’s over. In the Senate, it just continues because our life continues, our politics continues, the needs of the people continue, and so it is an ongoing process.

Preet Bharara:

That’s former Senator Bill Bradley, and two-time NBA champion, Bill Bradley. Yes, some people can do it all. After achieving national stardom as a high school and college basketball player, Bradley found himself studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He then spent a decade in the NBA playing for the New York Knicks where he won two titles, the last time the team won a championship. After retiring from the Knicks, Bradley pivoted once again, he served three terms as a Democratic senator from New Jersey until 1997. There, he co-sponsored the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and rallied major bipartisan support for its passage. In 2000, he ran for the Democratic nomination for President, but lost to Al Gore. Now, he’s out with a one man show called, Rolling Along. Streaming on Max, the show chronicles his life and its many ups and downs from his early years to the floor of Madison Square Garden, to the Senate Chamber. He shares all that he’s learned along the way. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions.

This question comes in an email from Stuart, who says, “Preet, love the shows. The OLC opinion says that DOJ won’t indict a sitting president. What about continued legal proceedings? Say Trump is convicted of federal crimes and still gets elected president, he appeals the convictions, how does the DOJ handle the appeal? Do they argue in support of citizen Trump, file an amicus brief on his behalf?” Well, Stuart, these are great questions and it’s hard to know exactly how this will unfold, because none of this has ever happened before. Not only has a former president never been charged before, but certainly we’ve never had a situation where a former president has been charged and is running for president again.

Now, as initial matter, before getting to the particulars of your question, it remains true that the OLC opinions at the Department of Justice mandate that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. So, that means if these two federal cases are not concluded by the time the election happens and if Trump gets reelected, those cases will not proceed and the Department of Justice will certainly not seek to proceed on them, but you raise an interesting possibility, what if he is convicted of a federal crime and still gets elected president? Well, I think that conviction would stand, but as you point out in your question, those convictions would be appealed.

So, here’s how I think it might play out, but I welcome other people’s thoughts on the issue as this is all speculative and even the OLC opinion about the chargeability of a sitting president, that’s never been tested in a court of law. It’s just an internal memorandum at the Department of Justice. So, let’s say, God forbid, there’s another President Trump and his conviction has been obtained by the Department of Justice before a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Obviously, the Trump team, his lawyers, would seek to argue in either the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals for the Florida case or the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia case that the conviction, or convictions, should be overturned on any number of grounds. In ordinary circumstances, the government would stand by its prosecution and would oppose the overturning of the conviction.

The Justice Department, in your scenario, however, Stuart, would be run and operated essentially by Donald Trump’s handpicked Attorney General. Now, you would imagine Trump would order, and the people who serve under the Attorney General, not to oppose the Trump team’s appeal. He might even, conceivably and hypothetically, as you point out in your question as well, order the Department of Justice to argue in support of citizen Trump. So, you would have two sets of briefs from the Trump legal team and the Trump Justice Department, both arguing simultaneously and in parallel that the conviction should be overturned. That doesn’t mean that the panel of judges in either circuit has to go along with that advocacy.

So, I guess, a couple of things could happen since we’re playing out this scenario in hypothetical, the Court of Appeals could affirm the conviction and the convictions stand, whatever that would mean for a sitting President of the United States. On the other hand, the Court of Appeals could decide on one or more grounds to overturn the convictions, and depending on the circumstance of that overturning, could send the case back and order a new trial. And my sense is, given the nature of the OLC guidelines, we would be back at square one. You would have once again a sitting president with a pending criminal case against him and a prosecution that wouldn’t be able to proceed at a new trial, because of those pre-existing OLC opinions.

So, I think that’s one way it could play out. I thank you for your thoughtful question, Stuart, but I must admit, it’s given me a little bit of a stomachache.

This question comes in an email from Shayna, who asks, “How did the Hur report get past Merrick Garland’s desk? Wasn’t he supposed to review it before the public?” Well, that’s a great question. It assumes something, it assumes that Merrick Garland didn’t take a look at it and didn’t review it. I believe that he did and he allowed the report to come out in full form, unredacted anyway. To orient us on this question with respect to the Hur report, which, as I’m sure you have heard, exonerated President Biden from any criminal liability with respect to the handling of classified and sensitive information from his vice presidency. Along the way, as people have talked about, adding a lot of gratuitous statements about President Biden’s memory and whether or not he would be sympathetic to a jury.

Putting that aside for a moment, the special counsel regulations, that were passed a number of years ago, provide for closing documentation. Here’s a section from those regulations, “At the conclusion of the special counsel’s work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel.”

As an initial matter, unlike in other jurisdictions or generally speaking within the Justice Department, where it’s up to the discretion of the prosecutor’s office to write a closing memorandum of this nature or not, in this case, it’s required, but as the regulation I just read makes clear, it is not required that that memorandum, that that report be released publicly. It’s first provided confidentially to the Attorney General, but then the regulations go on to address the public release of such a confidential report. “The Attorney General may determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest to the extent that release would comply with applicable legal restrictions. While other releases of information by any Department of Justice employee, including the special counsel and staff, concerning matters handled by special counsels shall be governed by the generally applicable departmental guidelines concerning public comment with respect to any criminal investigation and relevant law.”

So, going back to your question, Shayna, the report almost certainly reached Merrick Garland’s desk. At which point, when he read it, he had a number of options. He could have decided to keep the entire thing secret, which was within his right. He could have decided to order the special counsel, I suppose, to remove the offending passages, if he found any, and he probably did. He could have decided to release a version of the report that was redacted. Then, as Joyce Vance reminded me on the CAFE Insider podcast this week, he could have done another thing for which there is some precedent, although it was much criticized, I think understandably and correctly. He could have, as an initial matter, released a summary of the special counsel report declaring a full exoneration of President Biden. You’ll recall that that was a controversial move by former Attorney General Bill Barr when Special Counsel Robert Mueller provided his confidential report as per these guidelines that I just read to you, to then Attorney General Bill Barr.

So, Merrick Garland had a bunch of discretion here, and I got to imagine that he didn’t like some of the statements made in the report, like I didn’t and like many, many, many legal experts have opined on. But on the other hand, and weighing against that, Merrick Garland had pretty much promised Congress and the public that he would see the report and he would make as much of it public as he was legally allowed to do. So, I think for understandable reasons, before the fact, Merrick Garland wanted to make sure that he was making a promise of transparency to the public and to Congress, and didn’t want to interfere in any way with the work and the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Hur.

You can criticize that decision, but I think there also would’ve been a lot of outcry had there been redactions without an understanding of why those redactions were made. I think it would’ve become public had he ordered Robert Hur to remove certain passages, and I think he decided even though it’s not a perfect result, which I think caused some prejudice, politically and otherwise, to the sitting President of the United States, because these passages are outside the bounds of what the remit of the special council were, that on balance, overall, better to let the whole report out.

I’m curious though, what other listeners think. Should Merrick Garland have taken some act? Should he have redacted portions of the report or not? Curious to know what you think.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Bill Bradley.

Before we get to the interview, we have some exciting news. Melissa Murray, who is part of the CAFE family and is my NYU Law school colleague, is releasing a new book entitled, The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary. The book is a guide to Trump’s four criminal indictments, featuring analysis of the charges, and historical background, and international comparisons for prosecuting political leaders. It is a necessary handbook for anyone who will be watching the forthcoming Trump trials. You can pre-order the book now on Amazon, just follow the link in the show notes of this episode.

THE INTERVIEW

Former Senator Bill Bradley is a champion of many things, the three-point shot, passing bipartisan legislation, and now stage performance. He’s out with a new one-man show about his life and its many lessons.

Okay, you ready?

Bill Bradley:

Ready to go.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not a jump ball.

Senator Bill Bradley, welcome to the show.

Bill Bradley:

Thank you, Preet. It’s great to be with you. I’ve been an admirer of yours for many, many years.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I need to say at the outset, so that people understand where I’m coming from on this and understand what a treat and honor it is to be speaking with you, I grew up in the great state of New Jersey, where you served in the Senate for three terms, and I told you this a couple of months ago when we met, but I want the listeners to know that you have been a role model and inspiration to me since I was 14 years old, so thank you.

Bill Bradley:

Thank you. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

Thank you for that. There aren’t a lot, and maybe we’ll get to this, I have found that there are not a lot of people in public life, particularly in political life, who can serve as that kind of inspiration, certainly not as many today as there were in the past. So, I thank you for being that. And if you were that for me, I know you were that for many, many, many people, not just people who decided to go into public service like I did, but also people who wanted to overcome barriers that they had faced, whether it’s professional sports or anything else. So, at the outset, I just want to thank you for that, and thank you for your service, and thank you for your example.

Bill Bradley:

Well, thank you very much for saying that.

Preet Bharara:

So, speaking of example, you have this one-man show that’s now made into a film, and I watched it as I was telling you before we started recording. I think it’s wonderful, and I was very moved by it, and I found myself getting emotional at various points of the show-

Bill Bradley:

Good.

Preet Bharara:

… and I wasn’t sure exactly why. Part of it was when you talked about your parents, and I think about my parents.

Bill Bradley:

For the first time in 52 years, my mother didn’t have the responsibility of caring for my father, but her freedom was short-lived. A year later, her emphysema took a turn for the worse.

Preet Bharara:

A, tell us why you made the show-

Bill Bradley:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

… and B, what have been some of the reactions and if they’ve been similar to what I just described?

Bill Bradley:

Well, yes, people have an emotional reaction to different elements of the show. I did it… Well, one reason I did it is that I thought if I put this out there, it might lead to a little healing in the country and other people might see some of their lives in the stories that I tell about my life. Then maybe they could tell us about their lives and emphasize the common humanity that underlies all of our beings. So, that was my hope. That’s one of the hopes I have for the film, that it will inspire people to tell their stories, and the totality of all of our stories is the American story. So, that’s what my hope is.

How it happened? I gave my papers to Princeton, my political papers, and they did an oral history and interviewed about 60, 70 people. I then did a reception for all those who participated in the oral history. About 40 came, and I stood up, and I told stories about each one of the 40. One of the people there was a guy who had produced 72 plays in Broadway, a friend of mine named Manny Azenberg. He came up afterwards and said to me, “Sounds a little bit like Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain, you ought to work something up.” So, that caught my fancy and over the next year, I wrote this show. Then I took it to 20 cities around the country to workshop it. I would read it and then I would ask people, who were in attendance, maybe 40, 50 people, maybe a 100 people, rarely that many, but they’re in theaters in Austin, Texas, in law firms, in Chicago, in theaters in California, Miami. What evolved was this show, and I would take my notes and make the changes. One of the aspects about this…

And then COVID hit, of course. And when COVID hit, I was going to do this in theaters. I couldn’t do it in theaters, but, strangely, that period of the COVID sequestration, or whatever, allowed me to go deeper. And I think the film is deeper because of that. One of the things when I came out of COVID, I clearly wasn’t going to go to theaters around the country. So, I decided to rent a theater in New York, which I did, the Jewel Box Theater at Signature, for four nights and five cameras, and made the film.

Preet Bharara:

Let me point out to folks, and I hope it’s okay for me to say this, that it’s a 90-minute or so one-man show that you performed from memory without notes. And during this time, when people are discussing the ages and the relative cognitive abilities of the two people who are likely to be the candidates for President, you performed quite an impressive feat. Why aren’t you, sir, running for president this year?

Bill Bradley:

That’s long past. That’s long past, Preet. I appreciate the sentiment, but-

Preet Bharara:

You’re younger than one of the guys and barely older than another one of the guys.

Bill Bradley:

Well, yeah, I guess, that’s true, but I just wanted to say one additional thing to how it happened, then I’m happy to get back to this subject if you like, but there were angels that appeared along the way that helped me do this. For example, one of the places I did it in that 20-city tour was the commissary on the Warner Brothers lot in Los Angeles. After I did it there for about, I don’t know, 80 people, a guy came up to me and said, “I think this could be a film.” His name was Mike Tollin, who made The Last Dance, the great documentary about Michael Jordan.

Then one day I ran into my friend, this was after I had memorized it walking around Central Park, because I asked somebody, “Do I have to memorize this or can I just have the script?” “Nope, you got to memorize it.” So, I’d walk around Central Park and people would say… I could see them, “Who is this guy muttering to himself?”, but I got it memorized.

So, I ran into my friend, Spike Lee, at Clyde Frazier’s restaurant one night, and I said, “Spike, I’ve done this show, I’d like to come do it for you.” He said, “Well, come on over to Brooklyn to my office.” He said, “What do you need in order to do it?” And I said, “How about a glass of water and a stool?” So, he sat in the room and I did it for him. At the end, he had tears in his eyes and I knew then that I think I have something.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, you sure do.

Bill Bradley:

Yeah, but then once you’ve memorized it, you have to do it every day, like shooting baskets every day. You got to shoot baskets every day if you’re going to keep a shot and you got to do it every day if you’re going to do this. So, every day at 3:30 in the rec room of our apartment building in New York City, I would do this and it kind of got around. Sometimes five people would show up, I’d do it. Sometimes eight people, I’d do it. 14 people was the high mark, but usually four or five.

One day, two people walked in, and one of them was Frank Oz, who’s the great director on all of Jim Henson’s movies, and The Muppets, and Yoda, and Star Wars.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, yeah.

Bill Bradley:

After I did it for him, he said, “I want to help you do this.” So, he made significant contributions on editing notes and other things.

The last angel that appeared on this journey came two weeks before I debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. I was honored to be selected, and I opened the show at that point with a song by Van Morrison called, And The Healing Has Begun. Then two weeks before Tribeca began, Van Morrison’s agent called me and said, “Van does not give you permission to use the song.” So, what am I going to do two weeks before Tribeca?

Preet Bharara:

Well, we got to start boycotting Van Morrison, that’s for one.

Bill Bradley:

I got to get a song. So, I called my friend, Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band, and I’d send him a version of the film about six months earlier, and I said, “Steve, I need a song to open. Van Morrison did X, Y, and Z.” He said, “Well, Bruce wrote a song in the early ’80s for Clarence and me called Summer At Signal Hill. That might work.” So, I got it, listened to it. It did work. It was perfect as a matter of fact.

So, I called him back and said, “Steve, it works. Do I have your legal permission?” He said, “Oh, Bruce and I sold our catalog to Sony two years ago.” So, I had to go through Sony, got that with their help, and the result was that he was the last angel, but every step along the way, there were people who helped me do this. And I realized at the end about the Van Morrison song, I liked the song, but it was not the song that got me. It was the title, And The Healing Has Begun, because that’s what my hope is for the film.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I think to paraphrase what someone once said, it takes a village of angels, doesn’t it?

Bill Bradley:

Yeah. I mean, it takes people who are interested in other people, who were willing to help, who were willing to understand, listen, and act.

Preet Bharara:

So, the show is about 90 minutes, as I said, and I didn’t use a stopwatch, but it was my sense that you spend a bit more time talking about basketball, and what that meant to you, and your time playing basketball than you did talking about being a senator or anything else. Why is that?

Bill Bradley:

Well, I actually don’t spend more time. Maybe you feel that, because basketball was in my childhood and there’s a section of the film about my childhood that there was some basketball. But why? As I say in the film, and since it’s been on Max, I’ve had a number of people who’ve reacted to this element of it, where they say, “Well…” In the film I say, basically part of the story of my life is a search for belonging. And in my childhood, my father was a small-town banker in a little town, in a big factory town, and all my classmates were sons or daughters of factory workers. So, I was the banker’s son, that made me feel different and I didn’t, in some ways, feel I belonged.

Then when I was at Princeton, I had become an evangelical. I was an evangelical at a supremely secular university, and that made me feel different too. It wasn’t until I got to the Knicks on the team that gelled in 1969, and won two titles in ’70 and ’73, that I really felt that I belonged. I belonged to that group of people, and I belonged to that experience, and it was a big foundation in my life.

Preet Bharara:

You say in the show…

Bill Bradley:

“People have always asked me, ‘What was the bigger thrill, winning two NBA championships or being elected to Senate three times?'”

Preet Bharara:

You went back and said, “Well, being on a basketball court, and winning the title twice, and knowing you’re the best in the world, now, that’s a thrill.” How do you compare, and I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, how do you compare the job, and labor, and also thrill of politics versus the job, and labor, and thrill of athletics at the highest level?

Bill Bradley:

Well, the thrill of basketball is the game itself, how you feel when your body’s moving. You see the pass that leads to pass, that leads to basket before it happens. You’ve mastered the field, you’ve shot millions of times literally. And that moment comes to a peak when you win the championship. It’s, you’ve won the championship, you’ve achieved the objective, at least for that year. The thrill lasts about 48 hours and you got to go back and try to do it again the following year, but it does have a conclusion.

When you’re in the Senate, you’re elected senator, and all that did was to give you the chance to work 14 hours a day for six years to prove the people weren’t wrong in sending you to the Senate. And the work is, there’s always more. There’s always more to do. So, there’s, in some ways, a deeper continuum in the Senate than in basketball. Basketball has a high and it’s over. It’s high and it’s over. In the Senate, it just continues because our life continues, our politics continues, the needs of the people continue. So, it is an ongoing process that is different than the peak of the championship. I will say though, there are great moments. I mean, it’s not that it’s drudgery. Far from it, it’s great joy, particularly if you’re with a great group of people, your staff and other senators.

And when we managed to reform the whole income tax system and got the rates down to 28 and eliminated lot of special interest loopholes back in 1986, Paleolithic era, that was a big rush. That was a rush. It wasn’t quite similar to standing in the center court with your fist raised in the air and children going up and down your spine-

Preet Bharara:

But it’s pretty good.

Bill Bradley:

… but it was a great satisfaction, because for every day, for four years, literally, I talked about tax reform.

Preet Bharara:

You point to another difference between what it’s like to be on the basketball court, which is a form of performance, and also engaging in retail politics, which is obviously also a form of performance. The way you say it is that when you’re in politics, and running for office, and asking people for their votes, you have to connect to the eyes of the people in the audience. You say one thing you could not do at Madison Square Garden was connect to the eyes of the audience.

Bill Bradley:

No.

Preet Bharara:

Expand on that, because that’s interesting.

Bill Bradley:

That makes politics, in some ways, more intimate. When you’re in Madison Square Garden with 19,500 people, and there’s a roar, and the building shakes, and so forth, you’re relating to that group that’s in that room at that time, that’s taking you to a new level. But if you’re in a town meeting in New Hampshire, or Iowa, or wherever, or New Jersey, there are fewer people, many fewer people, maybe a 100 people. Sometimes I’ve had as many as 300 or 400, but usually it’s around a 100, 150. And what I got in the habit of as I was talking and trying to explain things, you have to be really in touch with the people in the room, and the way I did it was to look at their eyes. And if I could go from one set of eyes, to another set of eyes, to another set of eyes, and they were all paying attention and listening intently, then I thought that I was connecting.

Preet Bharara:

I will be right back with Bill Bradley after this.

There’s a decision you made that maybe in the modern era, people would scratch their heads over. So, you’re a phenomenal basketball player. You’re a phenom, as they say in high school. You win the gold medal as a member of the 1964 Olympic basketball team for the United States. You’re the NCAA player of the year in 1965 when Princeton finished third in the tournament. So, you’re a cause célèbre as a young basketball player that everyone knows. And instead of going straight to the NBA, you went to get your Rhodes Scholarship underway at Oxford, and delayed the salary, the cheering crowds, and two years of your youth on your education as opposed to the NBA. Can you elaborate a little bit more for people as to why you did that and what lesson that holds for people who might be listening as they make decisions in their lives?

Bill Bradley:

Sure.

In high school, I got about 75 basketball scholarship offers. In the spring of my senior year in high school, I signed an athletic scholarship to go to Duke. My father, who had never graduated from college, somehow had the idea that I needed to go on a trip to Europe. So, I went on a trip to Europe with a tour that had 13 women and me, and I was trying to play basketball at YMCAs in London, or playgrounds in Milano, or something. And they couldn’t figure out though, these women, why I went to Duke when I could have gone to Princeton or Yale. Then I came back from that trip, broke my ankle, contemplated the world without basketball, as you always do when you’re injured, you contemplate, “Well, what if this is it? It’s all over.” And I then said to myself, “Well, where would I want to go to college if I wasn’t going to play basketball?”, and the answer was Princeton.

So, I came home from a date on a Friday night, the freshman class at Princeton was supposed to convene on a Monday morning and a Duke class on a Wednesday morning. I woke my parents up and said, “I’ve changed my mind, I want to go to Princeton.” My father called an alumnus in St. Louis on Saturday, who called the admissions’ director, and I was on a plane to New Jersey, arriving about 10:00 or 11:00 on Sunday night before the Monday convening of the class of ’65. That’s how it happened, and it made all the difference in the world, but that’s how the decision was made.

Preet Bharara:

But then deciding to get the Rhodes instead of going to the NBA?

Bill Bradley:

Well, on that trip to Europe, one of the places we visited was Oxford and I walked into Christ Church quad and I thought, “Oh, I got to come back here someday.” So, the idea of Oxford had been lodged in my mind on that trip and in my senior year in high school. I then started reading books when I got back and read about something called the Rhodes Scholarship. So, what happened was that I wanted to go to Oxford, and the Rhodes scholarship was the way to get there. So, I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship, I won it, and I’m on my way to Oxford, and the thought was, “That’s where I want to go. That’s what I want to do. And will I play professional basketball? Maybe someday, but right now I want to go to Oxford.” And that’s exactly-

Preet Bharara:

Did some people think you were crazy, or no?

Bill Bradley:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Plenty of people thought I was crazy. “What are you doing?”

Preet Bharara:

I mean, just to repeat again, you were the NCAA player of the year.

Bill Bradley:

Yeah, I gave up two years of income, but so what? I had two great years at Oxford. I drove 1,200 miles through the Soviet Union. I studied German in Germany. I played basketball in Italy with an Italian team in the European Cup Championships, which we won. I made friends from all over the world. It was a different life. I got out of the rigidity that I lived in at Princeton to a much more open life at Oxford, and I think it was a time of enormous personal growth.

I got to my second year at Oxford in the spring, they never had a gymnasium until that year, first in 700 years. I went down to that gymnasium one day and started shooting baskets, as I used to do all the time. And pretty soon I was announcing the game again, “Bradley to basket”, and then I realized how much I really love the game. So, I decided law school or pro ball, I wanted to come back and play with the Knicks. That’s where my heart was. So, I called the Garden and said, “Look, I’m coming back. I’d like to talk to you.” And we got an agreement and I joined the Knicks.

Preet Bharara:

Senator, so we have something in common, I too was at that crossroads, the NBA or law school, and I chose the road less traveled, and I went to law school, decided to turn the NBA down, as one does. As one does.

Bill Bradley:

Yeah. Well, what can I say? I heard you were a great shooter.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. You heard wrong.

There were other things… I just want to stay on this theme of what you learned from basketball and how it applied to politics. You have this line in the show…

Bill Bradley:

“There’s a big difference between being a star and a champion. New York’s got a lot of stars, only a few champions.”

Preet Bharara:

What is that difference?

Bill Bradley:

Well, being a star is, you’re primarily interested in yourself. Being a champion, you’re interested in your team and you define your success not by how many points you score or what your average is, but by whether your team wins a championship. That’s the fundamental difference.

Preet Bharara:

Are there people who are both stars and champions, or are they incompatible with each other?

Bill Bradley:

Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Sure. I mean, every team has to have a star, right? I mean, that’s just nature of the world we live in. So, the issue is in whether one player gets more publicity than other players, or two players. The issue is whether the attitude on the team is selflessness, and imagination, and responsibility, and courage, and whether those values play out in your life on the team. You can be a great player and have those values play out, but part of you, as a great player, is sacrificing that 15, or 20, or 30% more you could score for the benefit of moving the ball and playing the game the way it should be played that leads to victory and championships, which is the real thrill. I can’t imagine people, say, 20 years after or 30 years after, or in my case, 40 years, 50 years after, say, “Oh, yeah, I remember, back in 1970, I won a scoring championship.” Who cares? But if you won the championship, that speaks to everyone of excellence. That, to me, is what it was all about.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you for a few minutes, why you got into politics and why you got out of politics. What caused you to want to run for office and how did that go? You tell a great story about how you ran and you were pretty young. I think you were 34 when you announced your candidacy, and people called you a carpetbagger, and they said, “How can you go to the top first?” How’d you react to that? How’d you think about all that?

Bill Bradley:

Well, yeah, I mean, when I decided to run for the Senate in New Jersey, I was called a carpetbagger, “You’re not from here” Or, who did I think I am, starting at the top, meaning the Senate as opposed to a county office, or running for mayor, or whatever. But I decided to, “Look, I want to make a difference in the world, and life is short.” The place I felt I could make the biggest difference was the U.S. Senate, and one route would be running for the Congress for two or three terms and then running for the Senate, and there are plenty of people that do that. But I decided, no, I’m going to go directly for the Senate. The whole Democratic establishment was against me, but I knew that the people were for me, and actually being a Knick, a professional basketball player, was not a disadvantage, to the contrary, not for the reason-

Preet Bharara:

It wasn’t?

Bill Bradley:

No, not for the reason you think, because I had been in the living rooms of the people of New Jersey, at least the northern two thirds of New Jersey, every Wednesday at night for 10 years when the games were broadcast, and they had some sense of who I was. I wasn’t just some kind of interloper coming from the outside. I was a part of it. I’d gone to Princeton. I was in the Air Force at McGuire Air Force Base, et cetera, et cetera. So, when I ran to the politicians, I was a carpetbagger, but to the people, I was very much New Jerseyan.

Preet Bharara:

How is the Senate different today than it was when you served, if you know?

Bill Bradley:

I’m not there now, Preet, so I can’t really say how it is now, but I do see indications. When I was there, it was a place where collegiality was not only possible, but where it was necessary to get things done. For example, the big Tax Reform Act that I passed in 1986, that affected 50 million people, passed 97 to 3 with the President Ronald Reagan’s backing, because we’d managed to stitch together a coalition of bipartisan support, because Democrats always wanted to eliminate loopholes. Republicans wanted to cut rates, not that the Democrats didn’t, but we put those two things together and we got broad acceptance.

I remember when Cory Booker went to the Senate, we’re friends and he asked me, “What should I do?” I said, “Make five Republican friends, real friends. They’ll find a way to help you sometime.” And indeed he did, he went around to almost every Republican senator, and visited with them, and got to know them as a human beings. One of the people he visited with was a guy named Inhofe, a very conservative senator from Oklahoma. And Cory had a bill, and when he went to Inhofe’s office to get to know him, he noticed pictures of children. Inhofe had adopted kids, so Cory knew that because of that visit, and he had a bill on foster children and asked Inhofe if he would co-sponsor. He said, “Yes”, and he got other Republicans to support it. That’s an example.

Another example would be the third tunnel under New York, where decisive vote was cast by Republican against somebody that Cory got to know, Roger Wicker of Mississippi. So, the result is, it is a collegial institution where human relationships are very important.

Now, what has happened is, just looking at it from the outside, that is less the case now. I mean, for example, one of my best friends in the Senate was Al Simpson. He was the number two Republican in the Senate. He still is a friend today. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, pretty funny guy too.

Bill Bradley:

Very funny guy. Bob Packwood was the chairman of the Finance Committee. Bob Dole, I served with for a long while. A lot of respect for these people. We always knew we were legislators, and what does a legislator do? Legislator doesn’t just make a speech. A legislator gets a bill, a law. In order to do that, you have to have that, as I told one conservative Republican one day, “What do you need is, you need better ears and less mouth.” In other words, you listen and see what does your opponent really want.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a good lesson.

Bill Bradley:

And then you figure out how you can give him something, and you get something, and that’s how you move your collective humanity, and inch forward, and get great things done, but you never finish, because there are always other things that you need to do, particularly in a world that’s changing, in an economy that’s changing, in a world where, ideally, only the values of our democracy remain the firm underlying factor.

Preet Bharara:

But at some point, you left the Senate. In 1995, you announced you weren’t running again. And you said at that time, “Neither political party speaks to people where they lived their lives. Both have moved away from my own concept of service and my own idea of what America can be.” Now, Senator, that was 29 years ago. Same now, worse, or better?

Bill Bradley:

Well, what I was referring to then primarily was the overpowering influence of money in politics. That’s not focused on as much now as we did then. I mean, the reality is that, when the Supreme Court… It’s always a Supreme Court that makes these kinds of decisions, whether it’s money in politics or gambling on sports, they make a dumb decision. And the decision to say that spending on politics is speech, that money is speech, was a colossal mistake, which meant you could not limit it. So, I was referring to the role of money in politics that I think even today distorts things. Now, it’s shifted around. There are plenty of rich Democrats as well as rich Republicans, but the idea is, it focuses too much on the money and not enough on the substance and not enough on the human element of politics.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s all still true, and perhaps worse.

Bill Bradley:

I’m not there, so I don’t know what the calculations are in the caucus.

Preet Bharara:

So, you decide to leave the Senate and you make that announcement in 1995. Then you make another decision to run for president in the 2000 cycle. It’s basically you and Al Gore, and please don’t tell the Gore family, but as a proud New Jerseyan and someone who’d admired you for a long time, I was hoping that you would get the nomination. That was not to be. You talk a little bit about that in the show as well. What did that experience teach you? Do you have any regrets about that?

Bill Bradley:

I’ve no regrets at all. I had reached a point where I thought I could help the country move forward. I thought it was my duty to try. I tried. I failed. The experience itself was tremendously rewarding, talking about knitting eyes together all over the country, in town meetings, listening to people. When I was in the Senate, I would do these American Journeys two days with a wheat farmer in South Dakota, or the Cajun Country in Louisiana, or visit to a steel mill in Ohio, or the border at El Paso, because I thought that made me a better senator if I learned about those parts of the country. And for a number of years, almost two terms, I was the Chairman of the Water and Power Subcommittee, which meant I was in charge of water in 20 Western states. So, it gave me an exposure to a world that was much different than New Jersey or Missouri.

So, when you run for president though, you’re running to represent everybody. It was a tremendous honor to begin to think about, as I had tried to in the past, but now as a reality, think about the country as a whole, the diversity of the people, the diversity of the geography, the diversity of religion, and it was just a remarkable experience, and knitting those eyes together were still one of the high points.

Preet Bharara:

What did you learn about race in this country as a basketball player traveling from city to city and also as a politician?

Bill Bradley:

Well, in the film that’s on Max now, I describe that basically I learned a lot more from my African-American teammates than they learned from me. For example, I saw America through their eyes. Dick Barnett told me about his Tennessee state team, all-Black Tennessee state team, won the national championship, came back to Nashville, and went directly from the airport to a lunch counter sit-in downtown, where they were protesting segregated restaurants, and he had to have the discipline not to respond when white people spit on him for protesting segregated restaurants.

The African-American rookie from Mississippi, who tells me he will always vote, because for over 150 years, nobody in his family had a right to vote. Or, one day we were at an off day practice in Detroit and Cazzie Russell was a teammate of mine, was coming from Ann Arbor, where he went to college, driving down to Detroit to make the practice. He’s late and he’s fined, which was the rule. You’re late, you get fined. Five minutes into the practice, Cazzie’s in a fight with a white rookie. Willis steps in to break it up and Cazzie snaps, “Uncle Tom…” And Willis is Uncle Tom… “What’s uncle Tom’s going to do some ass-whooping if you do that again.” Only later did I discover that Cazzie’s lateness and foul mood came from being stopped by Michigan State Police on the way down.

So, I saw the distrust and suspicion that my Black teammates had about white Americans. I saw how far we have to go before our ideals match the racial reality of our country. And I also saw how much I will never know about what it is to be Black in America. So, it was a tremendous thing for me. And we get to a point in the film toward the end, and I say, maybe given all the division that we have in the country today, maybe we could all learn from what made the Knick team successful so many years ago, take responsibility for yourself, respect your fellow human being, question them, but question them civilly, and disagree with them civilly and honestly, enjoy their humanity, and never look down on people you don’t understand.

Preet Bharara:

You have gotten to the phrase that I’ve been wanting to ask you about for this whole hour, I think it’s something your grandmother said to you, which is, as you just mentioned, “Don’t look down on people you don’t really understand.” Do we, in America, today, do too much of that, looking down on people we don’t really understand?

Bill Bradley:

Yeah, I think so. I think that one of the reasons I did this film was to, through my life, being honest, brutally honest about my life, encouraging other people to tell their stories about their lives, and that the more people tell their stories honestly, honestly, the more we’ll find common ground. That’s one of my hopes that we can find common ground. And people who disagree politically share a common humanity, and you have to continue to realize that. Otherwise, you turn people into caricatures, and unreality, and then the extremes take over, and then you never move our collective humanity an inch forward.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know that you use this word, but as I watched the film, as I’ve followed your career for many decades, and the word that comes to my mind is decent and decency. I think of how that word and that phrase can be thought of as weak, and not relevant to public office, and not important. What do you think about the concept of decency and what does it mean?

Bill Bradley:

Well, it’s what I was taught. I mean, they didn’t say, “Be decent”, but the result of what my parents taught me. I mean, let’s just think about it, every kid, who plays a sport or his family will tell him or her, “If you lose, you congratulate your opponent. Congratulations, you won'”, that’s true in sports, it should be true in politics.

Preet Bharara:

Really? You don’t try to overturn the result of the game?

Bill Bradley:

No. No, no. Right. And you should act out of honor, not grievance, right? And you should know that with humility and hard work, you can achieve excellence. And if you do that, you will be able to take care of your family. And if enough of us do that, we’ll not only continue to be innovative as a country, but we’ll continue to have a very bright future, because we’ve set a standard of excellence that we’re all striving for, that is underlaid by a common humanity. We won’t waste a lot of time with stupid disagreements and name-calling. And I can name call with the best, but no, that’s not really what politics should be. That’s not where we are right now, but my point is, there’s still a lot of things that we can do together.

Preet Bharara:

Second to last question, as compared to 25 or 30 years ago, what is your level of optimism or pessimism about our country?

Bill Bradley:

I’m an optimist. I believe that our country can survive any crisis. And the key is, the institutions being flexible enough to allow change to be made, and that enough people giving their opponent the benefit of the doubt, then we move forward. If we end up in two corners shouting at each other and armed, well, that’s disaster. Then we don’t have America. We have some other place. But I believe that we want America. I believe we want the country that we have loved all our life, that we’re proud of on so many levels, that we know we can improve on so many other levels.

I look at this and I say, that’s really what the challenge is for anybody in elected office today. And when people are running for president, that’s the side of us that they should appeal to. It’s not the anger side, it’s the innovative side. It’s the humanity side. It’s the part that gives other people the benefit of the doubt, because those are the truest parts of what I believe it is to be an American, because those are the values that are taught in most homes in America today.

Preet Bharara:

Final question, sir, that will be important to many people, how do you like these Knicks?

Bill Bradley:

Well, I loved January, where they were 13 and 2. I saw play the last couple of games, because I was talking about Rolling Along, the film on Max, at the Garden a couple of times. I had a great visit with Clyde on the broadcast, and they had it up on the big jumbotron. So, I was there for three or four games, saw them all, and I was very impressed with the team’s energy, and hustle, and selflessness. Now they’ve had a couple of injuries again, and we’ll see what happens. They’ve also made a trade. When you make a trade, it’s always interesting. You trade for what? You trade for skills. You also should trade for whether the personality meshes with the other players on the team. You never know how a trade is going to turn out until you play a number of games.

I could see in the game the other night that the players, who’ve always been there were, kind of feeling their way toward, “Well, how do we integrate these new players into the team and still keep our spirit moving forward and winning?” But once a Knick fan, always a Knick fan. I’m for the Knicks.

Preet Bharara:

God bless that.

Senator Bill Bradley, thank you for your service, thank you for your wisdom. Congratulations on the film, it’s an extraordinary piece of work. Rolling Along now streaming on Max. Thank you so much.

Bill Bradley:

Thank you, Preet.

BUTTON

Preet Bharara:

To end the show this week, I want to shout out a member of the CAFE team, David Kurlander. David had his last day at CAFE last week, after over four years with us. While you don’t always see the behind-the-scenes work of the CAFE team, they’re the ones who keep this show up and running every day. David wore many hats here, serving not only as my assistant, but also as an exceptional producer of Stay Tuned and Now & Then. He’s now off to tackle a new project that couldn’t be more perfect for him, and we wish him nothing but the best in his next adventure.

With that, here’s a clip from David about his time at CAFE.

David Kurlander:

I’ve learned something every day, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a job like that before, where I’ve both potentially learned something about audio, or about software, or about logistics for a plane flight or a hotel, but I also think I’ve learned something substantive about the law, about politics, about history every single day on this job. And something not only that has just been a new factoid, but actually has changed the way that I think about our society. And it’s very cool when the mission externally of a company, because I think that really is CAFE’s mission with its content, is also something that you can feel daily as an employee.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Senator Bill Bradley.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or, you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE from the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer was Tamara Sepper, the technical director was David Tatasciore, the deputy editor is Celine Rohr, the editorial producer is Noa Azulai, the audio producer is Nat Weiner. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.