Interview with David Rubenstein
Contents
David Rubenstein is a Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Carlyle Group and the host of The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations.
Ken Burns After Reading
Max Raskin: I wanted to start with Ken Burns – do you have a favorite documentary?
David Rubenstein: I think the Civil War documentary is probably my favorite. I have agreed to help support a number of his projects, so it’s like if you asked me which of my children do I like the best.
MR: If you could have Ken Burns make a documentary about any topic and commercial considerations would not factor, what would you like to see him make?
DR: I’d love to see made The Virtues of Private Equity in Western Society, but I’m not sure he would go in for that.
One of the projects I have supported that I do like is the Unum Project where he’s curating everything he’s done. You can go on the Internet and look up Thomas Jefferson, for example, and find everything he’s done on him, free to people.
MR: Did you watch his Vietnam War documentary?
DR: I've interviewed him about it. I did watch it – yes, I think it's excellent. And it's a situation there where you've lived through events, but until you are older and look back with reflection, you don't realize what you lived through.
MR: Did you ever protest the Vietnam War?
DR: I'm not a protester. We all have our weaknesses, and I'm just not a protester.
America Runs on Dunkin’
MR: What do you drink during the day?
DR: Well, that's a challenge, because I try not to drink sugary drinks – so I drink water and tea. And when I’m being sinful, I have iced tea from Snapple. It’s diet, but it’s still sweetened.
I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t drink coffee. I’ve never tasted coffee and I’ve never tasted alcohol. I just avoid those.
MR: I don’t drink coffee either. We invest in coffee companies, but I never drink coffee.
DR: We owned Dunkin’ Donuts for a while, but I never was interested in drinking coffee. About 20 years ago, I used to drink a lot of Diet Cokes and I read how unhealthy it was. I stopped cold turkey and I haven’t had a Coke in 20 years.
MR: Do you carry around a water bottle?
DR: No, I’m not that obsessive compulsive about it. But there are people that do that – it’s maybe a show of something or other when you do that.
MR: Do you snack during the day?
DR: I do, from time to time, snack. Again, I wish I didn't, but I'm trying to reduce my snacks, so I have eliminated most snacks now.
MR: If health wasn’t a thing, what would you eat?
DR: If I didn't have to worry about calories, I guess cheese crackers, potato chips, pretzels, Fritos – all the other things that I used to think were great when I was a little boy. Now I realize they're putting me in the grave sooner than I otherwise would want – at least some people might say that. I’m sure the producers of those products wouldn’t say that.
I would tell you that one of my daughters has had some health issues over the years – she’s concluded that some of her health issues deal with the fact that she doesn’t eat healthy enough foods. So she now has her own private equity fund that invests in healthy foods. She’s obsessed about it. Manna Tree. She always has the latest healthy thing that you can eat.
MR: Did you ever smoke?
DR: No, I never did. I always thought that there was no benefit to smoking. My parents smoked when I was little. When I was a child, I had asthma, and probably it was caused in part by my parents’ smoking – at least that's my 20-20 hindsight.
MR: Did you ever try a cigarette at a party?
DR: No, I would never do that.
Horse Thieves and King David
MR: Have you ever done the 23andMe?
DR: I haven't. I have interviewed the founder of it when she was first starting. She's very talented – I'm going to try to interview her again for my show. I haven't done it. But I want to do it.
MR: Are you interested in genealogy at all?
DR: I'm afraid that it will show that I come from a line of horse thieves and other kinds of things. It’s not going to show that I came from King David or any royalty. I think I came from some shtetl in Ukraine, and I suspect my ancestors were all illiterate.
MR: You never went to Ellis Island or went through the logbooks?
DR: Well, yes. I lent the Magna Carta on permanent loan to the National Archives. As a kind of gift, they gave me the manifest a boat that my grandfather on my father's side came over on. It said, “Eli Rubenstein, 10 years old, Hebrew.” Obviously I can afford to go back and check, but I never thought it would show very much.
My father once told me that my ancestors on his side came from the Ukraine. When there was a pogrom around 1908 or 1909, they all left. But they weren't that smart and maybe not literate, so they bought tickets the United States and it was a scam where they only got you to Leeds, England, not the United States. So 40,000 Jews are stuck in Leeds, England for like 20 years or something before they could afford to figure out how to get to the United States.
Thinking About Thinking
MR: Let me ask you about your day. Do you have to-do lists?
DR: Over the course of my life, I have tried those. And over the course of my life, it lasts about three or four days, and then I don't have them.
I try to train my brain to have them. I think I'd probably be better organized if I had to-do lists, but I don't usually do it. Some people I know are obsessive about it. Jamie Dimon is really good about that. He always seems to have these lists he’s pulling out.
MR: How do you stay organized in your head?
DR: I look at what I'm supposed to be doing in that week, and I prepare for it. If I'm interviewing somebody, I'll make sure I read the materials, prepare the questions – if I'm being interviewed, I try to prepare for that . . . though you wouldn't know from this interview that I tried to prepare for this interview.
MR: It sounds like it’s based around the calendar. How scheduled is your week?
DR: It's highly scheduled, because reason one, I don't like to waste time. I'm always trying to make sure I'm not just sitting around lounging and doing nothing. Secondly, I have two people that work full time putting the schedule together. I'm on 30-some nonprofit boards, I'm involved in a lot of financial organizations, I make a lot of speeches, and I do interviews. It’d be rare that I have a day where there's nothing scheduled – including the weekends.
MR: Do you chunk out time to do nothing?
DR: No, I'm not really good at that. And that's a failing. We all have our personal weaknesses, and I'm not good at doing nothing. I always will feel guilty – maybe it's Jewish guilt, that if I'm doing nothing, I'm wasting my time.
The Osmosis Theory of Exercise
MR: Do you meditate?
DR: No, I don’t.
MR: Do you exercise?
DR: I think about exercising a lot. And I use what I call the osmosis theory. I have in my gym a lot of equipment. I bought elaborate equipment, the best equipment you can get. I walk past it all the time. In theory, by osmosis, it'll rub off. I'm not as good about that as I should be.
Here’s my theory about it: When I was young, I was not a great athlete. I was actually a really good athlete at about seven or eight years old. But then when people got to be 9, 10, 11, they got bigger than me. And so I really wasn't that great an athlete. I went to a public high school that had 1,500 people in my class – it was half black and half Jewish. I just couldn't make any of the athletic teams. It wasn't realistic.
The advantage of not being good has come home now because all my friends who were all-American athletes have artificial hips, artificial knees, artificial everything. They can barely hobble around, so I can play them on a tennis court, and I can beat them now. It's a kind of revenge of the nerds.
MR: Do you care about weight?
DR: Somebody comes in my house every night and I think puts the scale up about 10 pounds above where it’s supposed to be.
MR: When you were young, was there an actor you thought was cool?
DR: When I was smaller, I watched all the usual shows. This year, for example, I have the honor of giving the Kennedy Center Honors to Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke is 95 years old, and he's going to come to the Kennedy Center in a couple of weeks. I liked him. I liked the usual shows that were on those days – the Andy Griffith Show. But Johnny Carson was probably the person I liked the most.
MR: Is it strange meeting your heroes or famous people generally?
DR: When I worked at the White House, I got to meet a lot of famous people in government. At that time, I was a junior person, they were just kind of walking past me. As I built my firm, I got to be involved with people who joined the firm – Jim Baker, Frank Carlucci, George Herbert Walker Bush, John Major – people like that. After a while you get a little bit used to it. I'm not in awe of anybody at this point, probably.
MR: Do you ever get nervous before you meet someone?
DR: Now I do not. When I was younger, I guess meeting the President of the United States, probably. But now, I've worked in the White House, I've met everybody famous you can probably meet – not everybody – but a lot of famous people. I’ve got more self-confidence than I used to have.
MR: How do you keep track of people?
DR: Well, that's a challenge. In terms of their names or their faces?
MR: Let’s go with both.
DR: In terms of remembering people, I can remember peoples’ faces pretty well. I don't remember everybody's names.
MR: What does your phonebook look like?
DR: Over many years now, I've got a lot of contacts and my assistants put them on my various devices.
MR: Do you keep notes next to people?
DR: No, I haven’t done that.
MR: You never did that?
DR: No, because I try to remember things, so I don’t need to put notes on stuff like that.
MR: Do you have a good memory?
DR: I do have a pretty good memory when it comes to things like this.
If you asked me what grade I got in a course in college, I can remember that. If you ask me the name of a football player at Duke University or the Baltimore Colts, I remember that. If you asked me where I put my keys 30 seconds ago, I might not remember that. That's a sign of aging, I suppose.
MR: Are you good with historical dates?
DR: Pretty good, yeah.
MR: Have you ever been to a psychiatrist?
DR: I have not. I have nothing against people that do it, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I just have not done it.
MR: What about sleep? Do you nap during the day?
DR: No. I know that Winston Churchill would say that's a great thing to do. And I think as people get older, it probably is a good thing. But as a general rule of thumb, I don't do that because I don't want to lose the time.
When I interviewed Jeff Bezos, he said that he needs eight hours of sleep a night. And I said, “Oh my God, if I got eight hours of sleep a night, I would be much richer. And I'd be more successful. I've been sleeping on five or six hours all these years.” I probably could use more sleep like most people, but I just decide not to take a nap.
MR: When do you go to bed at night?
DR: I try to go to sleep by midnight.
MR: When do you wake up in the morning?
DR: I try to wake up about 5:30.
MR: Do you wake up naturally or do you have an alarm?
DR: I don't use alarms for some reason. My mother had the same thing. I can wake up exactly when I want to wake up. At hotels I don’t ask for a wakeup call or anything like that. Now, as you get older as a man, you probably are not going to have eight hours of continuous sleep – let’s put it that way. I just wake up around the time I'm supposed to.
MR: Do you dream?
DR: Everybody dreams – the issue is can you remember the dreams? I have lots of dreams, I guess. But, you know, it’s hard to remember them pretty much five minutes after I wake up.
MR: You never analyze them or think about them?
DR: No. When I was younger, I did read Freud's book on dreams. I don’t know why I did that – I was probably in junior high school or high school, and Freud wrote some wonderful books on analysis of dreams. I do think dreams probably do symbolize certain things and tell you something. But to be able to really analyze your dreams I think you've got to have a notepad and you wake up in the middle of the night as soon as you have a dream and write it down because you'll probably forget it otherwise. I don't really do that. I'm not obsessive about that.
MR: Is there anything you're obsessive about?
DR: I do try to be polite to people. I don't try to insult people. I try to respond to my emails politely.
MR: You have a good sense of humor.
DR: People seem to think so.
MR: How do you balance having a sense of humor and being polite?
DR: You don’t use your sense of humor all the time. Sense of humor doesn’t mean you’re offending people or making jokes about them.
MR: Can you turn that offensive humor on?
DR: Yes. If you've analyzed humor, you know there's different types of it. The type of humor that I have generally tends to be about myself.
MR: [Shows copy of Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.]
DR: Okay, right. If you use self-deprecating humor, you don’t offend people. Since my style is not to offend people or make fun of them, I generally am making fun of myself. It also tends to make people think you're not a stuffed shirt or rich person or something if you can make fun of yourself.
Schleppers
MR: You ask about moms a lot. Who would your mom want you to interview if you could interview anyone?
DR: Well, she liked Oprah a lot, so when I interviewed Oprah, she really was happy with that. I introduced my mother to Oprah one time at the Kennedy Center Honors the first year I was the chairman. Oprah was the honoree, so I brought my mother up. I'm from Baltimore, and my mother used to call me and say, “David, there's a really great newscaster named Oprah Winfrey, and she’s going somewhere.” And I said, “Look, nobody from Baltimore is going anywhere.” I told that story in front of everybody and got a laugh. And then I sat my mother next Oprah, and she really had the time of her life talking to her.
MR: Were you a fan of H.L. Mencken?
DR: H.L. Mencken was fairly virulently anti-Semitic, and so because of that I was never as enamored with him as maybe some people who could overlook that. I would say I wasn't one of his big admirers.
MR: Do you believe in God?
DR: I'm still sorting that out – I hope to get a resolution to that. Like most people, when you get older, and you're kind of approaching death, you're kind of hoping there is some God there. But it's hard for me to imagine how the system all works. I would say it's not been probably my biggest belief.
MR: You’re Jewish?
DR: I was born Jewish, and I was bar mitzvah-ed, but I'm not an observant Jewish person.
MR: Do you observe anything?
DR: No.
MR: Did your mom observe anything?
DR: In Baltimore, the Jewish community was very segregated from the rest of the community. And the Jewish community was in three different categories: the wealthy entrepreneurs, the middle class, white-collar workers, and the shleppers, or the blue-collar workers. We were in the blue-collar worker category. The blue-collar workers were not wealthy enough to be able to afford to go to the conservative or the reform synagogues, so they were all orthodox.
My parents, who didn't really understand Hebrew, would go to sit for the high holy days, but they didn't really understand what was going on. I went to Hebrew school, but my Hebrew was so bad that when I got bar mitzvah-ed, the rabbi had to write it out phonetically for me in English to make sure I got it right. So I would say I'm not observant.
But I would also say that when Hitler came around, he didn't say, “Oh, you're not observant? Then you’re okay. Oh, you don’t go to high holiday services? You’re okay.” He didn’t do that. If you're Jewish, you have a Jewish name, and you look like me, you are not going to be spared anti-Semitism. I don't pretend to be not Jewish and try to pass as Robert Redford or something like that. But I'm not really observing.
A Theory of Time(x)
MR: Why do you wear your watch on the inside?
DR: It’s because it slips. I should tighten it up, it should really be on the outside.
I have a theory on watches, which is that I always like to have the least expensive watch. I've always been afraid that somebody would steal an expensive one. I always get the cheapest watch I can and always say, “Good. if somebody steals it it won’t make a difference.” In my 71 years, nobody's ever stolen my watches.
MR: What kind of watch are you wearing right now?
DR: This is Tissot, which is maybe about $150. I had had Timex’s. I generally like the least expensive car and the least expensive watch.
MR: Your glasses – where are they from?
DR: My optometrist.
MR: You don’t care about fashion?
DR: No, as is apparent.
MR: Where is your blazer from?
DR: This one is from Brooks Brothers.
MR: If there were no social conventions about what you had to wear, what would you wear?
DR: Well, I guess what I'm wearing now – blue blazer, gray pants, blue shirt – nothing that stands out.
MR: How bad is your vision?
DR: My vision is age appropriate.
I would have probably done better in college had I realized my eyesight wasn't perfect. Because what happened was, I went through college with no glasses. And I remember I was squinting toward the end, but I just didn't pay attention to it. Then I went on a trip with somebody, and they said, “Hold my glasses.” I didn't want to lose them, so I put them on. And I said, “Wait a second. I can see 10 times better. My God what is this incredible thing?” So I went and got glasses, and I’ve had glasses ever since then. But I just wonder whether I'd have done better in college if I had glasses.
MR: You were at UChicago at a very heady time. Was it palpable you were with some real giants there?
DR: Sounds like you know some of my classmates – Frank Easterbrook, Doug Ginsburg, people like that. We had a really good class, though the person who finished first in the class was somebody nobody ever heard of – he just practiced law, he didn’t become famous, he didn’t want to go on the law review or anything. I’m surprised that if you look at the same year at Harvard Law School, which was a great law school, they didn't have as many famous people as I think we had.
Simon & Tchaikovsky
MR: What kind of music do you listen to?
DR: I like to listen to classical music. I like to listen to Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon.
MR: Do you listen on Spotify?
DR: No, I don’t know how to do that.
MR: How do you listen?
DR: Well, I have this iPhone. A couple years ago, somebody helped me put some tunes on it. But I'm not an obsessive-compulsive Spotify person or anything like that.
MR: If you had to guess what song was your most listened to over the past year, what do you think it would be?
DR: Probably Paul Simon albums – I interviewed Paul Simon and I've always admired his songs. When I got a chance to interview him, I maybe spent more time listening to his music – but a lot of Tchaikovsky I like.
MR: Do you have a favorite Paul Simon song?
DR: “Graceland” maybe that or “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
MR: What Tchaikovsky does it for you?
DR: Let’s say “Capriccio Italien” or obviously the “1812 Overture,” “Romeo and Juliet.” Things that are fairly standard.
MR: Do you watch a lot of TV?
DR: No, I don’t.
Walter Isaacson has no TV. I asked him how he writes all these books, and he says, “I don’t have a TV, so I don’t have to be distracted.” I do have a TV, but I only watch news, and occasionally a sports thing that might be super famous. But generally, it's news.
Unfortunately, there's not much to watch because the news is now not on the TV anymore. Everything is either far left or far right.
MR: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
DR: I read the emails that I get.
MR: Do you check every email you get?
DR: I read every email, yes.
MR: How many do you get a day?
DR: I probably get about 600 or so emails a day. I can't respond to 600, but a lot of them don’t require a response. I try to respond to as many as I can.
MR: Do you do it all at once?
DR: During the day I try to have some time to do it.
MR: Do you binge watch shows ever?
DR: No, I don’t do that.
Netflix is a big thing. I interviewed the founder of it for my TV show –he didn't ask me whether I'm a subscriber. I'm not a subscriber of Netflix – everybody is. I can't imagine spending hours and hours watching a TV show. I will read books for hours because when I’m interviewing people, I have to read the books and prepare. I can’t imagine, but people do it, so I guess there must be something to it.
MR: Do you like Robert Caro?
DR: I do. I've read all of his books. I think he's a very thoughtful writer. I hope he can finish the last volume on LBJ.
The Interviewer’s Interviewer
MR: Who do you think is a great interviewer?
DR: There’s two different types of interviews. There's an interview that's an entertainment interview, and I thought in his time Johnny Carson did a pretty good job as an entertaining interviewer. The smart man's interviewer in those days was seen as Dick Cavett, who was more cerebral – a different type of interview. But I thought they were both pretty good.
In terms of news interviewers today, I think there are a number of good ones. I think Fox’s Chris Wallace does a pretty good job in a difficult situation. He sometimes interviews political conservatives and gives them a tough time – appropriately so in some cases. I think he's a good interviewer.
MR: What do you think about Howard Stern, do you ever listen to his interviews?
DR: No – I heard he’s a great interviewer. You have to subscribe to Sirius, don’t you? I don’t subscribe to anything that would detract from my either reading a book or doing something.
MR: What’s the last book you read cover to cover?
DR: I just finished a book called Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times by David Reynolds.
MR: What about fiction?
DR: I don't read fiction. Never. My theory, which of course everybody will criticize, is that I'm trying to maximize the amount of information and facts that I get. And if you're reading fiction, that's not all facts.
MR: I have the same view as you, but I think it’s wrong. I don’t read as much fiction as I should, but I think we’re incorrect.
DR: Everybody has theories that are not right. But I'm trying to read an enormous number of books. I read in history, business, biography, I would say philanthropy, and politics. I read enormous amounts of these books. I try to keep three or four going at one time, and I just don't want to interfere with great fiction books. But I realize everybody has their flaws. And that's a flaw, probably.
MR: What's your favorite newspaper to read?
DR: I am old fashioned. When I went to high school, you could get a copy of the New York Times for five cents a day – they would have a discounted rate – so I started reading the New York Times and before that, I just read the Baltimore Sun. Now I obsessively read and buy the hard copy every day. I don't like to read newspapers online if I can avoid it.
These are my papers: number one is the Washington Post, number two the New York Times, number three, the Wall Street Journal, number four, the Financial Times. And then my favorite paper, the New York Post.
MR: The best.
Were you a Jimmy Breslin or a Pete Hamill fan?
DR: I did read them when they were in the New York Daily News.
Cross Words
MR: Do you do the crossword puzzle?
DR: No.
I'd read about certain things that you could do that will improve your ability to avoid Alzheimer's, assuming you don’t have a genetic predisposition. And they say learning a music instrument, learning a language, and doing crossword puzzles. I haven’t done them, but I would like to maybe learn how to do them because they're frustrating. Every time I start a crossword puzzle, I can't get the words right away, so I go onto the next thing. I don't like that.
MR: How do you deal with frustration?
DR: I go onto the next thing.
MR: What’s something else you get frustrated with?
DR: Sometimes I interview people and they can’t keep to the script. I won't mention names, but there's some people I've interviewed, you have 30 or 40 questions, and they just take the entire half hour on one question. They just keep going on and on and on. It's hard to interrupt them sometimes. That's a bit of a challenge.
The biggest frustrations are when I can’t get my technology to work – you know, Zoom isn’t working. Technology is beyond my control, but also beyond my capacity to fix. I have people that help me do that. I wish I could fix all these things myself.
MR: Did you ever play an instrument?
DR: No. Because my last name is Rubenstein, my mother thought maybe there's an Arthur Rubinstein gene there. But after like one lesson the piano teacher told my mother, “Look, he really doesn't have it.”
MR: What about chess?
DR: I do play chess, but I don’t like to lose, so I don’t play as much as I used to.
MR: Do you have a favorite opening?
DR: No, I don't. I'm not that good at it.
My cousin by marriage was a grandmaster. His name is Ken Rogoff, he teaches at Harvard. He dropped out of high school to play chess in Europe. He recently played a match against Magnus Carlsen, and it was a draw. Could you imagine that – you could play the number one guy in the world and draw.
I was watching something the other day about Bobby Fischer – he was on Johnny Carson. He looked like he wasn't crazy.
MR: I always joke with people that his book Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess sold much better than the follow-up, Bobby Fischer Teaches Virulent Anti-Semitism.
DR: Right. Yes. Yeah, he went off the deep end.
MR: How do you read books? In hardcopy?
DR: I don’t read the electronics. I like to go to a bookstore, pick up the book, caress it, fondle it, buy it, and then take it home and then read it.
MR: Do you do marginalia?
DR: No. I did that in law school, and it didn't seem to be that useful. I think what I try to do now is when I'm preparing for an interview, I will read the whole book. Then after I'm done reading it, I will think what are the most important things, and I'll go back and try to remember the most important things and write questions up. But I don't write things in the margin because I think it's distracting. I'm not sure if it really helps you remember any more.
MR: You really do care about your ability to remember things and cogitate and analyze.
DR: Everybody has to worry about their best feature. My best feature is probably my brain. It’s not my body or my looks. So I try to make sure my brain is working well and I do that by reading a lot. You may have heard, it turns out that a large percentage of Americans never read another book after they graduate from college.
MR: That’s not good.
DR: Right. And actually, it’s a sad, sad situation. So, I believe reading is important; you got to keep exercising the brain.
The Pope, Bruce Springsteen, and Elon Musk Walk into a Bar
MR: Do you have anyone you want to interview that’s said no?
DR: Well, I'm working on getting an interview with the Pope. You know, he's not dying to be interviewed by David Rubenstein at the moment, but maybe he will be at some point.
MR: If you could only ask him one question?
DR: I guess I would probably ask, “Is this job as good as you thought it was going to be – any second thoughts about taking it?”
Bruce Springsteen is probably not going to give me an interview. Elon Musk is elusive.
MR: Do you have a favorite Springsteen song?
DR: “Born in the U.S.A.” even though I realize it's not a patriotic song.
King Henry VIII’s Prenup
MR: This is a stupid question but if you could have interviewed any historical figure?
DR: The interview format that we're now engaging in is probably something that didn't quite exist as a form of information entertainment 100 years ago. It may have started as a form of entertainment, maybe on the Tonight Show in the Jack Paar or Steve Allen days. Now everybody's an interviewer, as you know. Everybody's got their own podcast. But 100 years ago, people didn't do it.
There are no interviews, for example, of Abraham Lincoln. There's no interviews of Julius Caesar. There's no interviews of William Shakespeare. So if I interviewed William Shakespeare, I'd say, “Okay, who really wrote these plays for you? You probably couldn't have done it all yourself.”
Or ask Henry the Eighth, “Why did you chop off the heads of your wives? Why didn't you just get a prenup or something?”
Or ask Cleopatra, “Who was a better lover, Julius Caesar or Mark Antony?”
If I could interview any one person, it would be Abraham Lincoln. He was in my view, the greatest American. Lincoln would be number one. I think Shakespeare was pretty good.
MR: What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?
DR: Favorite one probably is Hamlet or Othello – nothing unusual.
MR: Do you have passages memorized?
DR: I haven't memorized Shakespeare. I'm pretty good at memorizing some speeches.
MR: Do you have the Gettysburg Address memorized?
DR: I used to be able to do it. Now I can do it a bit, probably.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure etcetera, etcetera.
You know a lot of people around the world memorize that. When Jimmy Carter was doing the Camp David meetings with Sadat and Begin, he took them to the Gettysburg battleground as a way to kind of relieve tension. And there Begin recited the Gettysburg Address word for word. He had memorized it as a young boy.
A lot of people 100 years ago used to memorize the Gettysburg Address. Today, we're not as big on memorization.
MR: H.L. Mencken hated the Gettysburg Address.
DR: I read Gary Wills’ book on it, which I think is pretty good. He points out that Lincoln kind of pulled a fast one in the speech.
MR: I always forget the name of the guy who preceded him with that two-hour speech.
DR: He was the president of Harvard, former governor, former senator from Massachusetts. He was getting paid to make that speech. And he printed the speech up in advance – I have a copy of it printed up. He was the big deal – Lincoln was an afterthought.
MR: They thought they were going to be able to take a picture of Lincoln because he would go on for longer than he did, but they only caught him sitting back down.
DR: There are five copies of that speech, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – you can’t buy one. One is in Cornell, one is in the White House, two at the Library of Congress, and one at the Illinois Lincoln museum.
MR: I have to ask you this question. Do you know the movie National Treasure where Nicholas Cage steals the Declaration of Independence?
DR: No. I don’t know that. But it’s hard to do that.
MR: Is this movie your nightmare?
DR: No, the truth is, the one in the National Archives along with the Constitution are set up so that if something bad happens, it goes underground.
MR: I know! But in the movie, he figures out how to do it even with that being the case.
DR: The truth is they're now so faded that they're beyond recognition. The Declaration of Independence is so faded that there’s nothing you can see there. I have copies of the rare ones made before that fading occurred.
MR: What about art?
DR: I have three types of collections. I have a collection of American historic books that some people would say is one of the better ones in private hands in the United States. I think I own more copies of the Federalist Papers than anybody else.
I have a document collection – for example I have more copies of the Declaration of Independence than anybody else – the Stone copies, and other historic documents like the Emancipation Proclamation.
MR: Where do you put them?
DR: I put them all in places that people can see them. They're in museums so people can see.
MR: Do you have anything that’s just for you?
DR: No. I don't have anything in my house. I don’t have any documents in my house. Everything is in a museum or something.
The Greatest Investor in the World, Steve Martin
MR: One last thing – has anyone ever told you look like Warren Buffett?
DR: People used to tell me I looked like Steve Martin, but then when I got side-by-side with him, people didn't agree. But no, they haven't told me that.
I wish I was as smart as him or as good an investor, but okay.