[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of this broadcast, the longest running in the history of public media, predating the invention of both PBS and NPR.

My grandfather, the founder and creator of The Open Mind, turned the tables and asked his friend, legendary broadcaster, the late Bill Moyers, to interview him, about the series, political life in America, and the future of the Republic.

And I'm so very honored today to pay tribute to a fellow legendary broadcaster, now on MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell, who's familiar to public media audiences and of course, to everyone in the political sphere.

He's coauthored many a West Wing script of that favorite series of yours truly.

And today, I'm going to ask Lawrence if he might interview me to mark this 70th anniversary of what remains the longest running series on television that was born when TV was created in the Eisenhower administration in 1956.

Lawrence, an honor to see you again.

Thank you for doing this.

Alexander, this is really an honor and just pure fun to be doing this, and to be, in our homage to Bill and your grandfather.

Amen.

And, people can check you out, as they know, nightly on MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.

I will turn the mic over to you, Lawrence, for whatever questions you may have in mind.

And I'm thoroughly looking forward to our exchange.

So I want to begin all the way back to the birth of The Open Mind.

How did it happen?

What was the intention?

What's the genesis story of The Open Mind?

So in detail, you can go to the Columbia University or Rutgers University Oral History Project and read, in my grandfather's own voice, how this came about.

But, he was on the radio, when the radio was being invented.

He did a series about men and people in history.

That was the genesis of his broadcast career.

It was kind of like a time person of the year.

But he did it weekly before The Open Mind came on the air.

And while this remains the longest running public television series, it premiered in households on what was then NBC's affiliate in New York and carried forward on commercial airwaves for some period until he, and, a host of other people like Newt Minow, created the public airwaves.

It was called NET before WNET.

And, it was part of that triumvirate of WNET, WTTW, WGBH, the founding fathers of the public media system on television.

And so, to my knowledge, and based on the conversations I had with him and what's in the Oral History Project.

The series itself was as fresh as the medium and his simple idea was to give voice to ideas.

It started in 1956 with an episode on the presidency.

And from that day forward, I think he was just intending to champion the medium for that purpose of, a bastion of ideas.

It's a fascinating thing to see something like this pass intergenerationally.

I think people have an idea of how it would work if you were taking over your grandfather or father's dental practice, or their pharmacy, or something like that, law practice, I've seen that, but this I've never seen.

I don't think anyone's ever seen that.

How did you decide that you were going to find a way to continue what your grandfather created?

I think because I saw him as a kid and my introduction to TV was seeing my grandfather on it.

There was something biological, and then there was something by osmosis that, by the time I was in middle school, I wanted to read the news with the, you know, on the morning loudspeaker.

And I did that, and it was a public middle school.

And it was not without controversy that I did that amidst the Iraq War and other things that were transpiring.

And I had one, dear social studies teacher who did US history in seventh and eighth grade, and she was my backer.

She was my proponent for, you know, being able to tell my peers and in this case, middle school students, about what was going on.

Was she a fan of your grandfather's show?

-She was, she was.

-Yeah.

[laughs] She had seen the show, and she was fully immersed in kind of the popular, public affairs.

So she probably saw you on the McLaughlin Group.

This was the early 2000s, and this school district, like a lot of American school districts, was primarily consumed with athletics.

And you know, that summer following 9/11, I was in my sleepaway camp, but I was not in the cabin I was in, like, the counselor's office writing an op ed about Mayor Giuliani or something.

And at a certain point, my mind not only saw my grandfather on TV, but saw there was more to talk about than, if the Knicks won last night.

So that kind of transformed me.

It wasn't singularly being a Heffner or Dick's grandson.

It was this, transformational, horrific event and being in New York when it happened and seeing the effect.

That really influenced my own journey and psyche and, interest in focusing on the world around me and how it was impacting, fellow Americans.

But to just pick up on the middle school story.

I had enough with them, or they had had enough with me, because by the time I graduated, from eighth grade, I had determined I needed to go somewhere else.

And had aspirations for peers who were like minded in wanting to talk about the world and think about the world.

I applied to Andover, I got in.

First in the family to do a boarding school like experience and went for four years.

So I continued on the radio from the loudspeaker of the middle school to a bonafide radio station, WPAA in Andover, Mass.

And then to your old stomping grounds too, WHRB, where we both went, in Cambridge, Harvard's radio station.

And, as a freshman started, you know, doing news coverage.

That was a fairly new thing for them, too.

It's mostly classical music, but I came in with four years of doing radio at Andover, and they said, alright we'll let you do election night 2008.

I was a freshman at the time.

So, I co-anchor with another disc jockey, the election coverage and then the inaugural coverage in 2009.

So, it was somewhat fate, I studied history then, and my grandfather had studied history, and by the time I graduated, I went to work for a year as a speechwriter to a governor.

And, then after a year of doing that, Dick passed and, you know, he had hinted that he wanted The Open Mind to continue and had suggested me as his successor, but wasn't so explicit.

But then my grandmother, who was still alive at the time, who you met, she made it more explicit that he wanted me to carry forward this tradition.

And I feel humbled to have done it and to be able to do it in this media climate for 12 years, on this medium that you and I cherish, that is still alive by some threads.

I'm just grateful to our viewers, to people who still care about the issues and want to get their information this way.

You know that introduction to political coverage for you, election night 2008, on your college radio?

That is just an astonishing thing to have been able to do.

I could imagine someone working on a college radio station or in a college newspaper who wasn't paying that much attention to politics, but then was assigned or had a duty, to cover some aspect of election night 2008.

And that could be a life changing moment.

That could be an occupational life changing moment, because you couldn't have asked for, at that point in our history, a more exciting election night to cover.

That must have been a real engine behind you, whether you were aware of it or not driving you in this direction.

It was.

It definitely was.

It really started at Andover when I did a series of interviews with, candidates who were challenging incumbents in 2006.

And one of those was Tim Walz, who called the WPAA radio station outside of an Arby's in Mankato, Minnesota.

You know, that was my education, and I was grateful for the connectivity of the internet and the willingness of these outsider candidates who were fighting the good fight against an unjust war.

Before President Obama gave voice to that campaign mission.

So, it started then.

And when I was a senior at Andover, we started a website I did with a gentleman that I met in the New York press, political scene, interning in Senator Clinton's office or constituent affairs office.

It was called Scoop08.

And you probably remember this, too.

And it was students around the country covering the 08 race, all the issues that were salient to young people, all the campaigns and candidates, from Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to, you know, all the Democrats running.

So, you know, that was a beginning education.

And to your point, the thing that I most vividly remember, Lawrence, because that website enabled me to cover the conventions too.

We got credentials to cover Minnesota and Denver.

And, you know, I was just excited for the country.

Because, you had these two candidates who were patriots, in different ways.

And that continued on election night.

And being in a country where, you know, if you flip the coin and it was heads or tails, you'd still be happy, you'd still be feeling like, proud of who you are and your heritage.

And that was the convention.

When you think of Donald Trump today relative to like, even Sarah Palin, there was something inspiring about Palin, you know, and to at least the crowd in Minneapolis.

And I think more broadly, I mean, just the idea of a, woman governor giving voice to, a new generation in our political life.

I mean, our fellow journalist Katie Couric may have exposed her lack of fundamental literacy, and that became quite evident.

But anyway, it was just, it was exciting to be able to anchor that coverage for the Harvard student body and anybody in the Boston area, and to feel like we weren't tipping the scales, we were reporting.

We had, you know, great guests, as you do every night, calling in with the latest, you know, analysis both of the, individual Electoral College states and just what was going on.

People like Sam Donaldson and others, you know, so it was a lot of fun.

But, depression that we've experienced as a country since then is just really insane that, we've gone from such a high morale, even amidst the financial crisis to what we have today.

And you may ask me to diagnose it as like an old fogy Luddite millennial, which I'll try to do.

It actually is one of those great election nights where, there was eloquence in the victory speech as well as eloquence in the concession speech.

And if you look through campaign speeches, often the concession speech, the losing speech on election night, is often one of the most poignant and, beautiful speeches that can occur, in elections that's become a lost art on one side of our politics, unfortunately.

Do you ever wonder how your grandfather would see our current politics?

[laughs] He'd wake up from the grave and then say, I'm going to continue my slumber.

-Yeah.

-I genuinely believe he would say something wittier, but to that effect.

If you watch The Open Mind and, you know, his episodes over the last two decades of doing The Open Mind, there were a lot of allusions to amusing ourselves to death, Neil Postman's work, and Postman, the NYU professor, media critic, really I think implored America to watch out, because the sound bite was going to be reduced to the tweet.

I mean, he basically predicted that whole cycle.

And for my grandfather, Neil Postman was like, and that book was like a Bible.

So, I think he would recognize that in the American ethos and the fact that celebrity, had once again hijacked the presidency.

But, in this case, if that's what transpired with Reagan now, it's like just mindlessness and unreasonableness.

And of course, you know, rife with corruption and, so I think he'd be displeased, with the climate, but unsurprised that the reality TV culture had kind of usurped any serious tendency towards deliberation.

But I also think he would say it doesn't have to be this way.

I mean, he would be the perpetual, Popeye optimist, in wanting to seek a new course, and see the potential for that through the democratic and electoral process.

So, that's how I try to live every day.

And as long as we have these airwaves, I think you probably subscribe to the same idea.

Mm-hmm.

I'm going to ask you a question that I'm going to confess to you ahead of time, is one that I'm not able to answer.

And that is, did your grandfather, as far as you know, have a favorite interview?

It's a great question.

I know he had some favorite interviewees.

Mm-hmm.

So your old boss, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, definitely one of them, Elie Wiesel, Ruth Westheimer.

I mean, I don't think that anyone talked about sexuality and sex in the multitudinous nuances and the graphic detail, on public television or maybe anywhere in the mainstream, until Doctor Ruth made her many appearances on here.

I mean, he loved talking to Floyd Abrams on The Open Mind.

He was definitely one of his favorite guests.

To him, the King interview in 1957 was the most remarkable Yeah.

historically, but at the time that it was transpiring, he knew of King through, Julius Waties Waring, a judge who effectively chaperoned King on that interview, because in 1956, people of color were not on TV.

I mean, they just... Right.

And so, to our knowledge, in the body of The Open Mind history, King's first broadcast interview that was nationally distributed was on The Open Mind.

And at the time it might not even been national, but it was in certain cities and he was unknown.

I haven't seen any television interviews, of King in that same year or before.

So that was 57, The Open Mind began in 56.

So, and that is an interesting experience because, he understood the risk associated even as a northeasterner, a New Yorker.

Championing, The Open Mind, this newborn series as a platform for civil rights.

But that exchange, was so rigorous.

It's not as if he was just endorsing King's movement.

It was a genuine exchange of ideas that, I think he was just doing his job.

He just felt like, you know, that was the purpose of this series, and so that interview itself, I think was the most momentous that he returned to over the years.

And those other people were his favorite interviewees, I think, over the course, the body of The Open Mind.

It might be hard for people to believe this now.

But in 1957, Martin Luther King Jr was unknown, was absolutely unknown.

It was not until the early 1960s that he was on any of the national, ever found his way into national news coverage, and national television news coverage, and shows like Meet the Press.

That was years, years, after your grandfather did that interview with Martin Luther King.

It inspires me, to keep the torch of The Open Mind alive.

And I think it's wholly applicable in every sense to questions of character, debate, integrity, everything America has been about or is supposed to be about.

So I know you're planning to, shift your focus to mayors, -Yeah.

-why mayors?

Well, I could tell a funny story about my grandfather having dinner with Mayor Kach, and I think, they read the menu and squab was on it, and he said, I hope that's not one of ours.

My grandfather also interviewed most, if not every New York City mayor in his lifetime.

So, Giuliani, and police commissioners, too.

But, Giuliani, Dinkins, Koch, of course.

But, the focus shifted because the last two years I traveled around the country interviewing governors and senators, and the kind of culminating event after two specials of The Open Mind, we call them Breaking Bread.

And they were distributed on, here and also on Bloomberg TV.

The 2024 election made me really evaluate this idea of, are these conversations around bridge building with the senators and governors, are they really just in these vacuums?

And we just don't have the systemic hardware in America to forge consensus and compromise anymore.

I think the jury is not out on that.

We can't do that at the national level.

What I tried to do after 20 plus interviews, visiting all these people.

So I went to Fairbanks with Senator Murkowski, and Tucson with Senator Kelly.

And, governors too, there's a great governor of Wyoming, Mark Gordon, who's a stand up guy, and in the interview with me was unafraid to talk about, dogma, and extremism, even in his own ranks.

But, I came to the conclusion we had to go to mayors, for one, because they are accountable in a way that senators and governors often are not accountable.

But, also, we need to go to the world.

And for the first time in The Open Minds history in these 70 years, I said, we need to take the show on the road.

So, we explored civic life with the mayor of Athens, Greece, Lisbon, Portugal, Santiago, Chile.

Other places around the world, because I think we need to resuscitate or rescue those values that are not active in our political life right now.

So the unifying issue of all these mayors, is housing, and they each have prescriptions.

And we got into the policy details, including with the mayor of Atlanta, who's doing some revolutionary and impressive things around housing, taking some of the structures that were imported and built during the early stage of Covid and converting them into housing, not just temporary, or transitional housing, but permanent housing for the people of Atlanta.

So, and he also opened the first supermarket in downtown Atlanta.

There had not been a supermarket until 2025.

I mean, I think about Newt Minow and the Vast Wasteland and the idea that you could deprive people in this country of basic necessities, because they were born in one zip code or another, and because it was not safe to operate a supermarket in Atlanta.

The mayor wanted to put that to rest.

So they opened the first supermarket.

So, I mean, real things happening that it's, back to Mayor Koch, how am I doing?

How am I doing?

And these people, talked about it.

The mayor of Lisbon talked about, you know, matching funds for people who are seeking housing, renters who can't afford to rent in the city.

So there's some important policy discussions and a sense of resilience, because I don't know how much longer the world is going to wait for America to restore its sensibility, not of liberalism or conservatism, but, a sensibility of common decency, and not feeding the outrage machine, and not expecting the status quo to exploit partisan, you know, vitriol and division.

I mean, that's like what we accept as America now.

And I'm not sure how much longer the world is going to wait for us to reform ourselves.

We just may become an entirely different type of country, whether that's purely oligarchic, authoritarian, something else.

But that was one distinction I draw between my grandfather and myself.

I don't think he ever saw the pendulum turning in America from, republicanism to autocracy.

He saw it maybe going farther to the right or left.

He saw it going from, intelligent to stupid.

Go look at, Rick Shenkman's episode of The Open Mind, Just How Stupid Are We?

He saw that, but he didn't see that degrading into, a complacency that accepts autocracy, authoritarianism, whatever.

Not just in the discourse.

I mean, the murders in Minnesota demonstrated that it's not just the discourse, it's actual events.

And of course, now this, you know, two unauthorized wars that are in clear violation of what our framers wanted us to do when we were engaging in military conduct.

I mean, again, that is going from uneducated and stupid to just, I would say unmistakably autocratic.

One person can dictate use of the nuclear weapon, that's not what the framers envisioned.

You know, I now have an answer to the question, what is your favorite interview that you conducted on The Open Mind?

I have an answer to that question, having conducted exactly one interview on The Open Mind.

It's just so enlightening, you know, I thought I knew the history of this show, and I knew the tip of the iceberg of the history of this show, and your grandfather, and everything, that you've done with it.

What is your vision for the future of the show?

Well, 70 is a lifetime.

And, like I said, I'm just humbled and honored to bring it into the airwaves that still exist.

As long as these airwaves exist and the FCC hasn't cut our throats off, you and I both.

[laughs] And we can operate whether it's as independent producers, in our case on the public media channels that have survived the dissolution of CPB because of foundations and individuals who want to keep it going or because of, viewers who want integrity in news on MS NOW and who see you as they saw Bill, Bill Moyers, you know, the last of a crop of the Murrow's, the Heffner's as in my grandfather, Statesman, Newsman.

So, it's really just a case of keeping it alive, that motivates me and will continue to motivate me.

I'll be curious from our audience who are going to be exposed to documentary episodes for the first time in all these different geographies and questions about the future of democracy, if that's what they want more of, to engage in ideas outside of our sphere.

I was just going to ask.

What you're anticipating, in the next two election cycles that you'll be covering?

Well, I mean, if we're talking about the midterms then the presidential, look, we all wake up every morning with the fear that this idea of federalizing elections is a real thing that Donald Trump wants to do.

Taking over elections is something that he could do if he was in power to do it.

I'm fearful about that.

But I also recognize that as much as, the Republicans have kowtowed, and been, sycophantic, Senator Thune has been tested here about the filibuster.

And so far, he's meeting the test of what has been kind of a conservative position on minority rights in the Senate.

And so, I don't know if the Supreme Court and Senator Thune, are that backstop against, to protect the franchise in 2026, I think they will be and I think we'll have free and fair elections.

In 2028, I think the Democrats have to recognize that they cannot put on a ticket that alienates the Sanders, Warren, Mamdani, AOC, coalition.

That doesn't mean it has to be the top of the ticket.

The absence of that perspective, I think really hurt the party.

Let me just say, Lawrence, I'm grateful to you, for hosting me on The Open Mind.

I'm just so honored that you agreed to do it.

And, encourage all of our viewers to watch you nightly if they don't already on MS NOW.

Alexander, thank you very much for allowing me this piece of television history.

Thank you.

[music] Please visit The Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind.

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Continuing production of The Open Mind has been made possible by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus, Robert S. Kaplan Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, Draper Foundation, and Lawrence B. Benenson.