Interview with Dave McCormick
Dave McCormick is a businessman. He was the CEO of Bridgewater Associates and FreeMarkets, as well as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. McCormick is a West Point graduate, served as a captain in the U.S. Army, and is currently running for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Water Ice
Contents
Max Raskin: I’m from Jersey, and I think being from Jersey, there's something that you get being from Jersey. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but there's something. Pennsylvania has a unique thing too. What’s the thing about growing up in Pennsylvania that forms you?
Dave McCormick: It's gritty, tough, self-sufficient — that’s the character of the Commonwealth. Whether you're in Philly or in northeast Pennsylvania where I grew up, it's a state that’s really comprised of immigrants. It’s a working family, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, make-your-way in Pennsylvania — that’s what defines it.
MR: You live in Squirrel Hill now, right?
DM: Right.
MR: What's your favorite place to eat in Pittsburgh?
DM: In Squirrel Hill there's The Bagel Factory. That's iconic, and we go there for breakfast. And then there’s Pamela's in Shadyside. Pamela's is another Pittsburgh institution where I used to take my daughters when they were little, and now Dina and I go together. And if we're going to have dinner, we typically go down to the Strip District which has all sorts of new restaurants — it’s kind of the next generation Pittsburgh.
MR: Do you eat out or do you cook?
DM: We mostly eat out because we're coming in from campaigning.
There’s also Girasole in Shadyside, which is an iconic Italian place.
MR: What do you get there?
DM: We typically get some sort of pasta — they've got a number of fresh pastas that they'll make every day.
MR: I also got to ask about water ice.
DM: I can relate to water ice.
When I was a kid, I worked every summer at the Bloomsburg Fair, the biggest fair in Pennsylvania. It was in my hometown. It's enormous fairgrounds, buildings, racetracks, horse races, car races. And it was such a big deal that school would stop. We'd have a week off from school and all the kids would work.
I worked at least five years in a row at the orangeade stand called Kohr’s. And my job there was to be the squeezer. So we had this machine and I would squeeze oranges and do it for 12 hours a day. That orange juice would then get mixed with sugar water and then it would be served over ice and that was orangeade. Your fingers would be numb, and you’d come home with everything smelling of orange. And I remember when I started, I was making three bucks an hour. And so six days, 12 hours a day, three bucks an hour, and 36 bucks a day. That was over $200. That was a big deal. I mean, you make all that money, but you couldn't enjoy the fair.
MR: Will you still have it today?
DM: Oh yeah. We were just at the Bloomsburg Fair last year, and I treated the team to a Kohr’s.
Rocky Run
MR: For someone who’s never been to Pennsylvania, what would you recommend they do?
DM: What’s incredible about Pennsylvania is the geographic diversity. You have these incredible cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia most notably, and the history in both of them is remarkable. Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell…all that's in Philadelphia, and that's an absolute must.
We do the Army-Navy game every year, which is mostly in Philadelphia. I've been doing that for 20 years and I now have six daughters, four my daughters, and two stepdaughters, 23 to 17. We go for the Army-Navy weekend. When it’s in Philadelphia, we go in Friday night, we have a big family dinner, and then Saturday morning before the game, rain or shine, I've done this for years, I make them all do the Rocky Run with me. We do the Rocky Run through the streets of Philadelphia and we end running up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum — the Rocky steps. Lots of pictures — lots of complaining!
Hersheypark is also a classic Pennsylvania experience.
100 years ago, Pittsburgh was the industrial capital of America. There were more corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh than any other city in the country. It has the most bridges of any other city. It is a spectacularly beautiful city with the three rivers. You come through the tunnel and it's just unbelievable. You got to see a Pirates game at the baseball park in Pittsburgh, which is gorgeous. You got to see a Steelers football game. You got to see an Eagles football game in Philly.
MR: Are you an Eagles fan or a Pittsburgh fan?
DM: I'm a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. If the Steelers aren't in it, I want the Eagles to win, but I grew up cheering for the Steelers and have been a longstanding Steelers fan.
Assassination Attempt
MR: I want to ask you about the assassination attempt on President Trump. Who’s your first call after it happens?
DM: Dina.
Dina was my first call, she was at home in Pittsburgh at the time, and we didn't have cell coverage for a while, so she was freaking out. I didn't get home from Butler until 10 or 11:00 at night and my kids were really freaking out. They don’t follow this stuff at all, but their friends were texting them and saying, "Was your dad there? We just heard your dad on CNN."
Someone had told somebody that I had been shot when in fact I had been coming up on the podium and then he had asked me to sit down. I was very close to the whole thing.
But Dina is the first call.
MR: Was it too fast to compare to any experience you had in the Gulf War? Did it trigger anything?
DM: No, it really didn't. To be honest with you, and I don't mean this as some sign of bravery, but I was very calm through the whole thing. People around me were freaking out and I tried to be a force for calmness as everybody was hunkered down, and we weren't sure if there was multiple shooters. But I didn't have a personal fear for my safety for whatever reason. Even though Corey Comperatore was killed right behind me and Trump was right in front of me, I didn't feel a sense of personal fear — just a sense of calm in those moments.
MR: Was that because of your training in the military or do you think you're that kind of person and that's why you went into the military?
DM: I don't know. But the training of the military, your live fire exercises, parachute jumps, being in Iraq, all those things, even though it was a long time ago, the most important thing is that your safety, your wellbeing depends almost entirely on you remaining calm when things start to happen. So I think that's probably partly my personality, partly just the conditioning.
But I will say when I got home that night and had a chance to think about it and talk to all my kids who were freaked out, it did sink in that it had never occurred to them that their dad might be at some risk solely because he chose to run for office to serve his country. The nastiness of politics notwithstanding, it never occurred to them that there was a risk of physical harm.
MR: Did you go to a therapist after it?
DM: No, no, I didn't.
Mom and Dad
MR: What kind of watch do you have?
DM: I've got just your basic Timex. I've been wearing a Timex Ironman watch for 25 years, and I wear it this weird way [watch face on inside of wrist].
MR: I wear my watches that way too.
DM: That's from my time in the military. I got out of the military in 1992, but I used to wear it that way. I was in a parachute unit and I’d wear it that way so it so it wouldn't get snagged on my equipment.
MR: That's not such an expensive watch, right?
DM: No, it's a pretty cheap watch. I think it's 60 bucks.
MR: It’s not a secret that you're a pretty wealthy guy, but you didn't grow up super wealthy. Do you have any luxuries that you can’t really justify — like a certain kind of coffee or something that’s outrageously expensive.
DM: Nothing comes to mind. I have maybe two or three things I really appreciate about having financial security. One is I can spoil my parents. My mom and dad still live in Pennsylvania. My dad's 86, my mom's 84. We have a family farm which they bought in 1975, and I bought from them about 15 years ago. And so I built a new little house on it for them. My mom's in a wheelchair, so it's handicap accessible and it's very manageable. That's one of the joys of not having to worry about making ends meet.
The second is I’ve got six kids and five of them are in college. I see some of my friends struggling to be able to have your kids be able to go to whatever colleges they want. And so I really appreciate the fact that I don't have to worry about that. I also recognize that many Pennsylvanians don’t have the same luxury.
Capt. Dave McCormick, Paleontologist?
MR: Do you collect anything?
DM: When I was a kid I used to collect old bottles that were blown by glassblowers. I had a collection of those, which I now have in boxes in my attic. And I also had a collection of fossils.
MR: That's pretty nerdy.
DM: Yeah, those were nerdy things. We had a friend of my dad who was a paleontologist, and so he used to take me out fossil collecting.
MR: I’m assuming you never thought about being a paleontologist?
DM: No, not really. The thing I always thought I might be, but I'm getting kind of old in the tooth now, so it may not happen, but I always thought at some point I'd be a writer of fiction.
I love fiction and I really appreciate good fiction. I particularly appreciate historical fiction.
MR: So I have this friend who has an interview question where he asks what the person is reading. And it’s always something like Malcolm Gladwell or Dan Kahneman. So then he asks what fiction they are reading. And if they say they don't read any fiction, he doesn't hire them.
This is just a free association, but what's the first novel that comes to mind right now?
DM: Well, the one that I've been recommending to people, it's not necessarily the most recent, but is this incredible Erik Larson book, The Splendid and the Vile.
DM: There’s a great book about the Civil War called The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, which is grounded in the actual letters and history, but it's told with a dramatic flair. The same with the other Erik Larson book, In the Garden of Beasts. These books are a window into the actual history, but they're also a window into the human condition.
I also am not beyond reading some not-so-serious fiction, Scott Turow or things like that, John Grisham, just sort of mindless things that allow you to have a little escapism.
MR: If you were to write something, you’d have to do a lot of research — what topic would you want your novel to be about?
DM: Probably something at the intersection of national security geopolitics. David Ignatius is a well-known columnist for the Washington Post with very different politics from mine, but has taken a crack at fiction of that genre.
Power Couple
MR: You and your wife are definitely a power couple, no doubt about it. How do you guys find time together? Will you do share calendar invites? How do you maintain your actual relationship with everything crazy going on?
DM: Not sure you would say “power couple” if you saw me picking up dog poop in the backyard in Pittsburgh. It's a really good question. It's with a lot of intentionality. We review our calendars every week. It's harder now when I'm in the campaign. Unfortunately my schedule is determinative at this point because there's only one way to do this, which is throw everything you got into it. There's no way to do this part-time. It has to be a 100% commitment to the cause. You do everything you can and hopefully when the dust settles, you can make a real difference. But no matter what, you got to put yourself all in.
So she and I share calendars regularly so we can figure out ways that she can be with me or we can overlap. And then within that time together, there's work together and then there's play together and you got to find time for a dinner, so we try to do that. We try to have at least a day a week which we're mostly not scheduled, and we can just recover and spend time together. We don't always accomplish that.
MR: Will you take a digital break from your phones too?
DM: Probably not as much of a digital break as we should. It's pretty hard to totally unplug. In normal times, we were better at that. We would take weekends away, but campaign time is not normal time, unfortunately. But that's the kind of thing I'd like to get back to.
We would be pretty intentional about scheduling time away…just the two of us really unwinding. So I think that's the key to a healthy relationship.
And then the other thing is, there's no one's advice that I would defer to more than hers. I think she feels the same way about me. So we have a lot of common interests politically, a common interest in business. And I think we are able to appreciate and help each other in that respect.
MR: Do you have any advice on raising daughters, specifically in this day and time where social media and the phones are so unhealthy with respect to body image and emotional development? I guess I should first ask whether your daughters turned out good because otherwise I wouldn’t want to ask your advice.
DM: Everybody has their bumps along the way, but all our kids have come out great. I didn't have any preconceived notion about what they should be. I didn't have any preconceived notions of whether they should be brainy academics or rugged sports people or whatever. I just had an open mindedness to them. If I had boys, I'm not sure, sadly, I would have been so openminded. It's hard to not see everything through the thing you are.
Lady Gaga’s Bus Driver
MR: What do you do to stay in shape on the campaign trail? It must just be terrible.
DM: It's terrible to the point where I'm almost maniacal about insisting on working out every single day. Most days, that means in the morning. I will stop the campaign bus at a gym in some town and I'll go in and pay the 10 or 20 bucks, work out, take a shower on the bus, and keep going.
MR: What’s your routine?
DM: I almost always do a circuit. I'll do a 40 to 60 minute circuit where I'll just go from exercise to exercise and try to do it at a pace where my heart rate goes up. In the worst case, I have a push-up, sit-up workout I do in a hotel room, which takes me 30 minutes. But there's almost never an excuse not to do something.
The food is what kills you on the campaign trail. You're not my age yet, but what you'll see is that working out is like 30% of conditioning and 70% of it is diet. You're probably 70/30 the other way right now.
MR: Do you drink?
DM: I'm not a huge drinker. I probably have a couple drinks a week, but not much.
MR: I got to ask about the campaign bus. Your campaign bus driver was Lady Gaga's tour bus driver?
DM: He was.
MR: Everyone said I have to ask you about the bus. What’s the deal with the bus?
DM: The bus I have now was owned by Alan Jackson. This bus has more than 500,000 miles on it. And our first driver said that Lady Gaga used to sleep on the bus when they would drive from place to place. Her big thing was she liked to see the sun come up. So she'd get a cup of coffee and she'd go up to the front of the bus in her underwear and sit next to him on the steps and they'd chitchat. He felt like he really got to know her.
But he said, “I'd rather drive for you than Lady Gaga."
And I said, "Really?"
“Lady Gaga can't lower my taxes.” That was his big thing.
MR: How do you keep your sanity on the campaign?
DM: The hardest part about it is the negativity. I'm generally a very positive person. I'm upbeat about life and the future. I feel like I'm doing this for all the right reasons. But it’s so negative. The social media is so awful.
How I stay above that is I don't read social media responses. I know why I'm doing it. I'm trying to be a force for positive energy.
The second thing is that I'm an introvert who presents himself as an extrovert. So by the end of the day, I'm tired. I'm not tired physically, I'm tired emotionally from the interaction. I have an iPad and I'll watch Netflix or something — just something mindless to try to unwind.
MR: What's the last thing you watched?
DM: Dina and I watched a movie over the weekend — it was a movie about a UFC fighter.
Once an Eagle
MR: What's your favorite World War II movie?
DM: I think there is almost nothing comparable to Saving Private Ryan. My unit, the 82nd, jumped into Normandy, but seeing those landing craft come on the beach and then that photography of the bullets whizzing down into the water and the carnage, I mean, it's hard to imagine exactly what it must have been like to be there on that day, but that seems like about as good as you could get.
MR: Were you a Band of Brothers fan too?
DM: I like Band of Brothers. That was great too. I was just at the Dick Winters statue, in his hometown of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, and there's a statue recognizing his service. He was in the 101st Airborne, our sister unit.
MR: What does your morning reading look like?
DM: All sorts of clip services. I'm a huge fan of John Ellis. I think he does a great job. I read Mark Halperin. I read Politico, the Wall Street Journal. I've got eight or 10 feeds.
MR: When you were younger were there any thinkers or books that influenced your worldview?
DM: Yes. There is an incredible book that every young lieutenant reads which I always cite called Once an Eagle. It tracks two officers throughout their careers. They are in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam — and one's Sam Damon, the hero and there’s the other side, Courtney Massengale. It’s the careerist, self-serving versus selfless service. And it follows them both through this incredible career and it flows through history as well as through a model of leadership. So that's the book that I've probably come back to a half a dozen times over the last 40 years.
MR: What's the bracelet you’re wearing?
DM: Oh, this is really important. I'm glad you asked. This is called Mission 22. It’s a non-profit in Pennsylvania that raises money to help veterans with mental health. We lose 22 a day to suicide. It's a shocking statistic. It's remained true for about the last 20 years. 22 veterans a day take their own lives, and it's a real disgrace. And sadly, roughly half of those veterans who take their own lives have not received any mental health care.
Another organization providing high-quality support for veterans' mental health is the All Secure Foundation, which my friend Sam Rossa introduced me to. They support active duty, veterans, and families who are working through Post-Traumatic Stress. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has expanded their mental health resources, as well.
MR: Evan Hafer and Black Rifle Coffee are really serious about that. Is there anything you want to share for veterans who are having a tough time.
DM: I really love the work Black Rifle does and the coffee. My message to veterans who are suffering a mental health crisis: "We love you. We honor you. We are grateful for your service. There is no shame in your struggle, and there are many people and organizations who stand ready to help you."