On Civic Duty | Jim Lehrer | Big Think

On Civic Duty

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Jim Lehrer talks about duty, shared experience, and what it means to serves one’s country.

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Jim Lehrer:

Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1934, Jim Lehrer attended Victoria College. In 1956, he received a Bachelor's journalism degree from the University of Missouri before joining the Marine Corps, where he served three years as an infantry officer. For the following decade, Lehrer worked as a reporter in Dallas, before moving on to a local experimental news program on public television.

He came to Washington with PBS in 1972 and teamed up with Robert MacNeil in 1973 to cover the Senate Watergate hearings. In 1975, they started what became "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report" and then the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" in 1983, the first 60-minute evening news program on television.

The program became The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in 1995 when MacNeil retired. Lehrer has received numerous awards for his work, including a presidential National Humanities Medal in 1999. He also has moderated ten of the nationally televised candidate debates in the last five presidential elections.

Lehrer is the author of 17 novels, including Eureka (2007), The Phony Marine (2006), The Franklin Affair (2005), and Flying Crows (2004). He has also written two memoirs and three plays. Lehrer and his wife, Kate, have been married since 1960. They have three daughters and six grandchildren.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jim Lehrer: It’s crucial. It’s essential for me. I think it’s essential for every human being. We all have it in us to want to give back; to want to serve; to want to have our best, rather than our worst.

For instance, I’m a big believer in mandatory national service, which is not a very popular view.

For instance, after 9/11 the young people of this country rose up and said, “What can we do?” And what did we say? The big “we”? They didn’t get an answer. They still haven’t gotten an answer! There’s no ordinary, organized, routine way for Americans to serve, not only to serve people who need service, but also to get the glow and the good feeling that comes from service. And I’ve served

My three years in the Marine Corps changed my life. In viewing that; just about everybody I knew before I went into the Marine Corps looked exactly like me, talked like me, thought like me. I had never ridden on an airplane before. All my travel had been in Texas, and Kansas, and Oklahoma on buses and stuff like that. And suddenly here I am in the Marine Corps on an airplane. I was suddenly responsible. I was a platoon leader. I was responsible for other people – their safety, their comfort. And the guy on the right, the guy on the left, we were all dependent. And it didn’t matter what he looked like. We were all together.

And the lessons of service; of what it does to your sense of self; what it did for me and what it; and everybody I talked to; talking about just the Marine Corps and the military. But service itself is a really satisfying experience. But some kids say, “You’ve got to volunteer.” You’re going to tell some kid who can barely afford to go to school that he’s got to go volunteer? It sounds great; but he lives in a home with an income of $20,000 a year, and he’s supposed to volunteer too in addition? No! The kid’s got to work.

And most volunteer service is performed by upper middle class Americans who can afford. Their parents can afford for them to volunteer. And so that’s why I’m a big believer in mandatory. It could be military option where everybody could choose what they wanted to do. We could figure out a system similar to the G.I. Bill. We could give schooling and credits and all that sort of stuff.

Because here is the problem. We talk about shared experience in the news. We have so few shared experiences now as Americans. We do live on our little places. And I’ve been fortunate because, not only because I was a Marine, but also I’m a journalist. I’ve seen all kinds of people. But I’ve also seen all kinds of people who have never seen all kinds of people. And they’re all clichés. And to me there’s no such thing as a cliché about an individual, whether it’s a racial cliché or a gender cliché. I’ve worked and lived with all kinds of people.

And if you have mandatory national service; it could be a Peace Corps; it could be a neighborhood corps; police corps; it could be a teacher corps, whatever.

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