The American Experiment

by David M. Rubenstein

My father broadcasted for the BBC at the time into Czechoslovakia. We had an apartment, and he would come down. I remember his saying, “You have to go down, but there are hot water pipes and gas pipes down there, so who knows what will happen?”

  When I was writing one of my books, I went back to visit that apartment house. And I, stupidly enough, asked the superintendent there, “Does the cellar still exist?” He said, “Of course.” He took me down there, and I remembered the ugly green paint that had been there.

  We spent every night down there, and then would come up in the morning and see destroyed buildings.

  DR: Did you speak English then?

  MA: I learned English. I grew up bilingual. We were in London all through the Blitz, then we moved out to Walton-on-Thames in the country. In London I went to the Kensington School for Girls, and then I went to a school in Walton-on-Thames called Ingomar.

  DR: When the war ended, your father returned to Czechoslovakia and became an official in the government?

  MA: He went back on one of the first planes and then we came a couple of months later. We lived in Prague during the summer of 1945. There was a beautiful apartment owned by the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry that we lived in, right up by the castle. I briefly went to a Czech school. Then my father was made the Czechoslovak ambassador to Yugoslavia, and my mother and I moved to Belgrade. By then I had a little sister who had been born in England.

  DR: Ultimately the communists took over control of the Czech government. Your father resigned?

  MA: By the way, my father did not want me going to school with communists, so I had a governess while we were in Belgrade. And in Europe, you can’t go to the next level until you are a certain age, so I was ahead of myself. They sent me to a school in Switzerland for a year when I was ten, and I didn’t go home for the whole year. In the spring of 1948, my parents came through Switzerland and said, “We’re not going back.”

  He was a professional diplomat, and he had been in Belgrade for three years. His next assignment was to be the Czechoslovak representative for a new commission to deal with India and Pakistan over Kashmir. He accepted that. He was very pleased to do it. And then in February 1948 there was the communist coup in Czechoslovakia. He went to see his best friends in Belgrade, the British and American ambassadors, and they said, “If you resign, they will name some communist and nothing will happen. Take the job. Don’t report to your own government. Report to us.”

  What happened was my father did that. He went to India and Pakistan, and my mother and sister and by then brother and I lived in London until November 1948, when we came to the United States.

  But it’s not a terrible story. We didn’t crawl through barbed wire or anything. We had diplomatic passports. And then my father came to the United States in December 1948, and he defected and asked for political asylum.

  DR: When you came over, you came over on a ship?

  MA: The SS America.

  DR: Do you have any memory of actually seeing the Statue of Liberty going by when you arrived?

  MA: Absolutely. It’s very vivid in my mind. We did not come in through Ellis Island. We did come on this ship and then into New York Harbor, and I definitely remember seeing the Statue of Liberty.

  DR: When you came in, did you think you were not going back ever to Czechoslovakia? Or did you think you would just be in the U.S. for a couple of years?

  MA: The truth is, I don’t remember that. My parents didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about going back.

  DR: Ultimately, your father gets a position at the University of Denver. He goes out there and takes you with him?

  MA: No. When we first came to the U.S., we lived on Long Island, because the United Nations was at Lake Success on Long Island. I started in the sixth grade at the time. At that stage, the Rockefeller Foundation was finding jobs for European intellectuals, and they found my father a job at the University of Denver.

  We had no idea where Denver was. My parents bought a car and started driving. And my mother—I remember her saying this, with three kids in the backseat—said, “They say Denver is the Mile High City, but we’re not going up, so maybe we’re going the wrong direction.”

  But we all went there together. There was a lot of moving around in faculty housing, or people that lent us their houses.

  DR: You grew up and graduated from high school in Denver. Then you applied to a lot of colleges? You went to Wellesley, right?

  MA: I applied to a lot of colleges because I knew that I couldn’t go to college if I didn’t have a scholarship. I applied to five schools. And I’ll never forget, the first answer came from Stanford, saying, “You’ve been accepted but no scholarship.” I went screaming out of the house, thinking that was the end—that I wouldn’t ever go anywhere. It turned out later that I got the Colorado State Scholarship to Stanford. But I went to Wellesley. The reason I even applied to it was because one summer my father taught at MIT, so I’d seen Wellesley, and then my English teacher and my Latin teacher had gone to Wellesley. I thought it would be great to go there.

  DR: Have you ever mentioned this to the people at Stanford?

  MA: They know.

  DR: Okay. So you go to Wellesley. You graduated in 1959, but in 1957 you became an American citizen. In those days, to become an American citizen, you had to be in the United States for five years and then take some kind of citizenship test?

  MA: Yes. And in our case it was somewhat more complicated. We came in 1948, and my father defected. But it took us longer to get our citizenship because technically he had worked for a communist government for a while, even though he didn’t report to them. It was during the McCarthy period, so it all took longer.

  When I got to Wellesley, there was this whole system where if somebody came to visit, they announced it over the whole loudspeaker. So somebody said, “Madeleine Korbel, there are some ladies here to take you into Boston to show you what the American girl wears,” and I come downstairs in my Shetland sweater and Bermuda shorts. They thought I was a foreign student, and the truth is that it was very strange because I was not a citizen.

  There was this club called the Cosmos Club that was partially foreign students and partially American students. But when I went to see the dean about how I’d done on my SATs, because they didn’t used to tell people directly, she said, “Remarkable, remarkable.” I think it’s because she thought I was a foreign student and didn’t speak English.

  I did not become a citizen until between my sophomore and junior years. And you did have to study to take the test. My parents had become citizens a few months earlier, but I became a citizen at the courthouse in Denver, Colorado.

  DR: Before you became a citizen, did you feel discrimination in high school or in college because you were not an American?

  MA: Yes and no. We lived in Denver and my parents were very ethnic, you know. And people were so kind to us, in terms of lending us things. We were refugees.

  I started out going to public school, and then my father heard there was a private school that was giving scholarships. So, he made me go to this private school, and there were only sixteen girls in the class and they were primarily rich.

  I felt out of it mainly because we lived under fairly modest circumstances, had these parents that cooked strange food, and we all had to be together every Sunday. I did in some ways feel that I was not part of the group.

  DR: After you became a citizen, you went and got your PhD at Columbia and did many other things, worked on Capitol Hill. Did you ever feel that as an immigrant you were not fully accepted in America or that you were any different than somebody who had been born here?

  MA: I really did not. When we were in London, people would say, “We’re so sorry your country’s been taken over by a terrible dictator. You’re welcome here. What can we do to help you, and when are you going home?” When we came to the United States, people said, “We’re so sorry your country has been taken over by a terrible system. You’re welcome here. What can we do to hel
p you, and when will you become a citizen?” My father said, “That is what made America different from every other country.”

  That is what I grew up with. I was proud that I had become an American. I didn’t feel discriminated against when I was working. One of the first things that happened when we were living on Long Island, it was Thanksgiving and we were singing “We Gather Together,” and I heard somebody “aahsk”-ing for God’s blessing. I was the one “aahsk”-ing. From then on I did everything I could to lose my British accent. I didn’t want to stand out. But I felt more that I didn’t fit in because we didn’t have money.

  DR: You became ambassador to the United Nations under Bill Clinton, in his first term. At that point, you’d been an American citizen for quite some time, so you didn’t feel that becoming the ambassador to the U.N. was unrealistic for somebody who wasn’t born in the United States, I assume.

  MA: No. I’d had to get my clearances to be on the NSC staff. The question obviously came up: “Where were you born?” I filled out an awful lot of papers. But you also have to remember, I worked for Zbigniew Brzezinski, who hadn’t been born in the United States either, so it didn’t seem to be an issue.

  DR: When you were appointed by President Clinton to be secretary of state, you must have had a great deal of pride to think that you, a not-born-in-America person, could have become secretary of state. Henry Kissinger did as well, but you were the first woman to be secretary of state. Did you ever feel there was any chance you wouldn’t get it because you had been born elsewhere?

  MA: That was never a factor. Henry Kissinger was the first person to call me to congratulate me. He said, “Madeleine, you’ve taken away my one unique characteristic of being an immigrant secretary of state.” I said to him, “No, Henry, I don’t have an accent.”

  DR: What makes you most proud to be an American?

  MA: I believed when I represented the United States—and I continue to believe—that we are an exceptional country in terms of our capabilities and the kinds of things that we had done. I was very, very proud to represent the United States. The part that I saw at the time was the things we had done in partnership with other countries.

  As I was trying to sort out what our policies should be, first at the U.N. and then as secretary of state, I used to make the argument that when the U.S. was absent, as it was during the Munich Conference when the British and French made this agreement with the Germans and Italians over the heads of the Czechoslovaks, the country was sold down the river.

  When I was a little girl, I remember the American soldiers coming to London. I remember the parades. I remember the Iron Curtain, when Europe was divided.

  My mantra has always been and is that the U.S. needs to be involved, and that is what made me grateful to be an American. Certainly grateful for what happened with my family, but also for what in office I was able to do, with the backing of the government and President Clinton, to make a difference by having the U.S. be a partner with other countries.

  I recently was at a dinner and had to describe myself in six words, and I said, “Worried optimist problem solver grateful American.” And really I am a grateful American.

  SONIA SOTOMAYOR on Civics and Civic Education

  Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

  “When you are asked to serve, there is a moral compulsion to serve your country. To be a federal judge is service as a lawyer, the most service that you can do for your country.”

  On August 6, 2009, after an appointment by President Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor became only the third woman in the country’s long history to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, and the first justice with Latinx heritage. She also embodied the classic American Dream story: the daughter of blue-collar Puerto Rican parents; raised by her mother after her father’s premature death; a summa cum laude Princeton graduate (when there were very few Puerto Ricans from the Bronx at Princeton); winner of the Pyne Prize, the highest honor awarded to a Princeton undergraduate; a Yale Law School graduate; a U.S. district court judge at the age of thirty-eight, appointed by George H. W. Bush (a Republican president); and a U.S. court of appeals judge at the age of forty-four, appointed by Bill Clinton (a Democratic president).

  Like her two female predecessors on the court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sotomayor has tried to lead a normal life, staying in contact with close friends and avoiding the often isolated life that is possible for a justice. Her outgoing, gregarious personality would probably make an isolated life almost impossible for her.

  Justice Sotomayor has also tried to follow one of her predecessors, Justice O’Connor, in another way. After leaving the court, Justice O’Connor helped to start iCivics, a nonprofit designed to help students—through the use of online games—learn more about civics. She felt strongly that civics education had been pushed aside in the American school curriculum, and thought the result increasingly was citizens who are largely uninformed about basic information about government and civic responsibilities. Justice Sotomayor shares that concern, and as a result has joined the board of iCivics.

  The need for better civics education was the principal topic of my interview with Justice Sotomayor, whom I have known for a number of years and previously interviewed. The interview was part of a 2021 leadership series being held virtually between Mount Vernon and the Brookings Institution.

  * * *

  DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Was it clear from your early days that you wanted to be a lawyer?

  SONIA SOTOMAYOR (SS): It was, but for reasons that weren’t self-evident. I grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx, and there were no lawyers or judges in the projects in which I lived.

  But when I was seven, I developed diabetes. It’s not so true now, but back then, if you had juvenile diabetes, which I did, you were not permitted to become a law enforcement agent. And that’s what I wanted to become, a detective, because of Nancy Drew. The first chapter books I began to read, at about seven and a half or eight years old, were Nancy Drew mysteries.

  By the time I was ten, Perry Mason appeared on TV. He was the first TV lawyer, and the first lawyer about whom TV ran a weekly series. From him I learned of the work of lawyers. And I began to think about that as a potential alternative to being a detective, because Perry Mason spent the first half of his show investigating the crime his client was charged with, and the second half in court proving his client was innocent. I thought, “Gee, that might marry the two skills that I really admire—playing sleuth to a mystery, and liking to talk a lot.”

  DR: When you were growing up in the Bronx, in junior high school and high school, did you get very much civic education? Do you feel that you learned a lot about the way our government works at that time?

  SS: Nothing. I was an early product of the change in the country. When Sputnik was launched by Russia, the United States had an immediate visceral reaction that it was behind in technology and science and that we needed to catch up. What started to happen after Sputnik in the 1960s is that the country became much more concerned with STEM education, as it should have been. It is an important issue that needed correcting in our country at the time.

  But one of the things that began to suffer was civic education. There’s only a certain number of hours in a school day, and if you were going to load up more on STEM subjects, you had to reduce other subjects. Most schools began to forgo civic education. And that, I think, was a great detriment to our country.

  DR: When you became a member of the United States Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was already a member of the court, and you had a chance to get to know her. Did she talk about her interest in civic education? When did you get so interested in this?

  SS: When I joined the court, Sandra Day O’Connor had stepped down as an active member. As most people may know, she was the first female justice on the Supreme Court, and she was appointed in 1981. It was a momentous time for me because I had just graduated from law school in 1979, two years ear
lier, and at the time there were no women on the Supreme Court. There were no women on the highest court of my state, New York, the court of appeals. And women were still a fraction of the judges throughout the country—a tiny, tiny fraction.

  When Sandra was appointed, it was such a beacon of hope for me. An idea formed in my head that my future wasn’t limited the way I thought at first it might be, that I had the potential to achieve other things in life besides just being a working lawyer, which is not unimportant, but that I could aspire myself to do something like becoming a judge eventually.

  Sandra took senior status [a form of retirement], and she had decided that there were two things she wanted to commit to doing. One was educating the public about the dangers of electing judges. She thought that judges participating in elections might be tempted to make promises to voters that they should not keep, because judges are required to keep an open mind in all cases.

  But the second, and probably the more important, object of her education of the public was civic education. She had seen that civic education had declined in school. She had also seen that civics was being taught in a really boring way. What are the three branches of government? Who’s the president? Who’s the vice president? How many senators are there? How many people in the House of Representatives? It was filled with facts, but not with understanding about what our civic process was about.

  Sandra believed, having watched the decline of civic discourse in our country, that was directly tied to the time in which civic education had declined in the U.S. She became committed to starting an organization called iCivics.org, which uses game-playing to teach kids about civics in a creative and innovative way. It has reached over 7.5 million students, and over 120,000 teachers are using iCivics to engage kids in learning about our republican form of government and about their role in participating in that government.

  Sandra’s involvement in civic education dovetailed with my own aim of devoting my time on the Supreme Court to educating students on the importance of civic participation. You cannot participate in something you do not know about.