Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, y'all.
Introducing Sharon Tennyson from the Center for Citizen Initiatives.
That's at CCISF.org.
And there's a great profile about her.
People making a difference here in the Christian Science Monitor called How One Woman's Citizen Diplomacy Has Strengthened U.S.-Russia Ties for Decades.
Welcome to the show, Sharon.
How are you doing?
Well, doing just fine, thank you.
Great.
Very happy to hear that.
And what a great article this was to read and to find out about this effort.
So I guess tell us all about it.
It goes back all the way to the Reagan years when I was just a boy that you started this.
True, true.
Well, I very quickly, I was just deeply concerned about the nuclear war problem because I had four small children, and I wanted a future for them.
And so I just decided that somebody had to go see the enemy, and that was in 1983.
And so I took a group of 20 people with me.
Somehow or another, I was able to get people interested in going.
But I was not a member of any peace group or anything like that.
I was just an ordinary citizen.
And that was the first group.
I never intended to go but once.
And then I found myself going back a second time and a third time and a tenth time and a hundredth time.
And that was the way it happened, just organically.
It's amazing.
I look back now and I think, I can't believe that this happened.
But it did.
I've written a book.
It's called The Power of Impossible Ideas because there were so many impossible things that we tried to do during this whole period.
We thought that we had no chance of being able to implement them.
And actually things happened so that we were able to, far beyond anything we could have ever imagined.
Wow, that is so cool.
That's the story.
That's really great.
So from the first time you went over there, the way they talk about it in the Christian Science Monitor here, you decided you didn't really focus on, I guess they say you did meet with politicians here and there, but essentially your entire thing was to try to communicate with regular, presumably at first at least, residents of Moscow, but just regular people on the street and kind of interact with them, I guess in their shops and their stores and what have you, or however it was there.
I don't know if they had any shops.
Somebody had to drink somewhere, so there must have been bars.
I don't know.
Tell us the story.
But then this turned into you bringing many people with you and making a real, not just a tradition, but like a major operation out of this thing.
What, throughout the Reagan years?
Well, throughout today.
And never stopped this whole time even?
Well, I stopped taking people over there in 1990 because it was so dangerous for Americans to be on the streets because they were recognized, of course.
They had different clothes.
And it was known that they had American dollars with them, and the place was criminal in the 90s.
The ruble was worthless.
Nothing was being able to be bought and sold with rubles.
And so dollars were what were used for currency, but it was a good time.
I would be concerned – I was concerned – that any American that I would take over there might stand a chance of having some sort of criminal act on them.
And I'm surprised that I stayed myself.
I'm a pretty gutsy person, I think, so that's probably why I just kept right on going.
But before that time, I had already started doing programs.
So I was much more interested in developing programs that would help Russians understand how to survive in a new world than I was bringing Americans over there.
And so that started back – well, I started the first program in 1986, I guess, and that was Alcoholics Anonymous because we had such a horrible alcohol problem that somebody had to do something.
And so I knew of AA.
I'd never been in it or had a family member in it.
So if it all happened, we were able to start AA across the whole country – 11 time zones, actually.
It took about seven years for us to have staff that were just dedicated to doing this alone.
So that started my – that whet my appetite for program work rather than just traveling over there.
I'd lost interest in that.
And so then in 1988, I brought the first ever Soviet citizens who were not Communist Party members to the United States and traveled them to 264 American cities over a two-year period.
Steve Wozniak paid for that.
Wow, really?
Yeah, because there was no government money to do anything like that then.
And so that was another big program that had started.
And to this day, I believe that Gorbachev knew about that program and began giving us exit visas for non-party members for the first time ever.
But at any rate, then that matured on, and I realized that they were going to have to – they start small businesses, and they called them cooperatives.
And I knew that these people didn't have a clue how to start a business.
And they were coming to me and saying, would you please give us a program and help us understand how to start businesses?
And so I started bringing them to the United States and putting them in the same type of business that was parallel to the one they were trying to start and leaving them for a month, and they were absorbing as much as they possibly could and were taking it home.
And by the way, we didn't have anybody at State.
They all wanted to go back home and start their businesses.
So at any rate, that started the business programs of which there eventually was – there were five of those that I was able to create one after another depending upon what was needed.
And the largest one was based on Marshall Plan Technical Assistance Program.
And fortunately, I was able to talk with the person who put the real Marshall Plan Program together, that technical assistance program.
And he was a 90-year-old man, and we were able to communicate by phone a number of times, and he was able to tell me how to do it in the 20th century again.
So that was a real blessing.
And that program ran up until 2008, and it brought over some 6,000 Russian entrepreneurs and put them in 45 states in the United States and I think over some 400 cities where they were literally working in American companies that were parallel to their own – what they were trying to start or what they were trying to manage after they had already gotten it started.
So this was the largest program that we ran.
In 2008, that was when the financial crisis happened in our country, and it bled over into Russia within three months.
And so at that time, the Russians were paying full fare for their trips.
It was about $8,000 that they would pay to come here and study.
And by the way, Rotary clubs across the country were responsible for about 85% of that program's capability because they would put them with wherever they were, whatever city we were putting them in.
At the time, they would then provide all the housing for them free and also provide lots of other types of activities for them free.
And so that way it made it possible for me to have a staff of 30 people working on this and pay salaries in addition to the amount of money that the Russians pay.
So it was just one of those things that happened.
As I say, it was a miracle.
It was a miracle organization, miracle programs that were happening.
And looking back, I think, how in the world did all that happen?
I'm not sure.
Anyway, I can talk all day about it.
I like it.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it just sounds great.
It sounds like you made it happen is the answer to the mystery there, pretty obviously.
And, you know, listen, I remember the 1980s.
I was just a boy, but I was 13, 14, 15, somewhere around there when communism finally fell apart.
So I was interested in the Cold War and all that, even in elementary school and that kind of thing.
And I know that I remember my own kind of point of view from back then was all I knew about the USSR, the Soviets, the Russians was their government is doing this or that.
The Russian people or the people of the Soviet Union were almost entirely invisible.
And so and the thing of that is, is that means it's very easy to say they're all commies.
They're all the government.
They're all the enemy.
They're all whatever they are, because there's just this gap.
There's just pure ignorance.
And then that can be filled in with total nonsense, where, in fact, of course, Russians are just like Americans.
They're just from somewhere else.
They're just human beings, but they're just from somewhere else.
They're just like us.
And it takes efforts like yours to really point that out and really make the effort to show people that that is really the reality here.
Well, yes.
And I guess you know that Soviet Communist Party members were only 7 percent of that population.
And this meant 93 percent were not communist members.
So but today, I can't figure out why I don't really even have to be enemies with them.
They like us.
I've just returned from a group, from taking a group of 25 Americans, putting them in 15 cities across 10 regions and saying, go out there and investigate for us and tell us what you think about this, that, whatever, all of these things that they were investigating.
They came back to St. Petersburg when they met after they had all traveled, and basically they all said the same thing.
These guys like us.
As a matter of fact, they admire us.
They want to have relationships with us.
Putin wants to have relationships with us, they say.
And what's going on?
We don't understand why we don't get visas.
We can't travel to your country.
We can't interact.
What is this?
They're aghast at what's happening today.
And yet nobody in the United States knows this.
Why?
Because it's not printed in The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or you name it.
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That's Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, libertyclassroom.com.
Well, and so let me ask you about that in terms of the changing of the new Cold War, because it was not so abrupt as one big Iron Curtain speech or anything like that here, where this has started, I think, you know, probably like if I asked you about the maybe the beginning of NATO expansion in the 90s, or especially the color-coded revolutions in the George W. Bush years.
Was there a time where the Russian people really started to say and the Russian state started to really react against what America was doing?
You know, they were watching it.
But as far as really reacting against us, no, this didn't happen until over the last two or three years.
And it happened concurrently, but they're becoming more appreciative of their own country, more sure that they were on the right direction.
Everything in the country has progressed so rapidly in Russia over the last 10 years, and particularly since 2000 when Putin came in.
But it took them time.
I think they were still thinking, well, America is still – the American people still like us.
We've all traveled over there – not all, but many of us have traveled over there.
Their relatives have traveled to the United States.
And all these people are really good people, and if something's going to happen, it's going to change politics.
And they labored under this for all of these years up until about two years ago or three years ago, and they began saying what – to me.
Of course, they considered me a person that they know and trust, and they were asking Sharon, what's going on?
What can we make of this because we've always trusted you guys?
And so now they're pretty much – and it's not a matter of Russian propaganda.
It's a matter of when Putin goes on and speaks to the nation like he did a couple of days ago and doing his annual reports to them, he is very clear about where they are, where we are in the world, and he's still pretty generous with us really.
There's none of this hate stuff going on from the Russian side that's coming on from the American side, nothing, no demonizing, nothing.
All along, Putin would say – Hillary would call him – say he was liking to go Hitler.
And what would he say back?
Putin would say, these are our American partners.
We want to work with them.
And he would never stoop to the place where he would start any of that demonizing, and he still doesn't.
But he's very frank today about what's going on as far as the policy goes.
Well, and it would or it wouldn't make sense – it seems like it would make sense for him politically to go ahead and demonize the Americans the way the American political class demonizes Russia.
It's good for their business, apparently.
Well, I can – But I guess he has higher priorities, you're saying.
This is not common to Russian character in any place, and I think that any Russian that would do this would be in hot water with his own people.
For instance, after Germany literally almost obliterated the Soviet Union, what did they do?
They still honored the German people.
They still used German music in their great memorials to World War II.
They were taught – actually, they were taught, and I was told by several different people, that they were told that this was not the fault of the German people, that the German people were taken in by Hitler and his group, and they just simply believed too long, and they simply moved into action, and this war was the result.
And there were war crimes, but certainly it could have been worse.
That's true.
Yeah.
Well, no, they knew the crimes.
They still have all of those monuments up running in every city, and all the eternal flames still burning, but they don't blame the Russian – the German people.
I was there in Volgograd, which was the turning point of the war, when about – oh, I've forgotten how many – maybe 50 Germans came in and camped outside of Volgograd in order to, number one, mourn their own losses.
These were people who had relatives that died in Volgograd.
And secondly, to say to the Volgogradians how sorry they were, their deep sorrow that this had happened to them.
And what did the Russians do?
They accepted them just like long lost – I was kind of – I said, well, what are you going to do with these Germans that are coming?
He said, we'll accept them.
We honor the fact that they've come, and they will come to the memorials, and they will feel that they've got people that are laying here someplace, their bones are someplace in all of this debris around the war.
Well, now when Putin – It's not a thing critical.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's a nice story and all that, but – so a critic would say, yeah, but Putin, he is a strong man.
He's an autocrat.
Anybody would have to admit he's been in power for quite a while now.
So where is he on the scale between a very conservative Republican and something much worse?
Well, you're asking the wrong person if you want that information.
I've met Putin, spent about an hour and 15 minutes, maybe up to an hour and a half with him on a very serious issue.
I wanted to do a program that I couldn't do without somebody's permission, and he just happened to be a person that was giving permission for these kinds of things in St. Petersburg at that time.
This was in about 1992.
I found out later he had just come to work for Sobchak as a deputy mayor so that Sobchak could go and travel around the world.
But I didn't have a clue who this person was when I walked into his office, and when I left, I didn't have a clue.
I would have never expected he would be able to be president.
So I've had my own personal experience with him.
That's interesting.
During that time, any time I wanted – if I needed anything from a Soviet bureaucrat, I always had to be prepared to talk them through the fact that I wasn't going to give any bribes.
Because the first thing they would ask is, I would say, this is what we need to have happen here.
And they would say, well, I think if you can give my wife a trip to the United States and let her see networks over there, then I will be glad to consider this.
Or if you can find a university for my son to go to for a year or two, that would really be great.
These kinds of things.
There was always a bribe.
There was something they wanted in order to be able to give me the freedom to do what I felt like needed to be done.
We never gave a bribe.
But at any rate, I was expecting this when I went and met this rather small, very serious man sitting behind a brown desk in a brown suit.
And I knew I would have to do this when – go through that spiel when the ask came.
And so literally he looked over my proposals.
He asked dozens of really irrelevant questions, and I answered them as honestly as I could.
And after an hour and more, he finally put his pen down and he said, you know, I've tried every way possible to see whether this could work.
But I'm sorry to tell you that it's not legal today.
And I can't put my name on it.
And that was it.
He never asked me for a thing.
And he just said, no, it's not legal.
And so I walked out of that place and I said to the person who went in with me, I said, do you realize that this is the first time we've ever talked to a Soviet bureaucrat that didn't want something big for us, from us, in return for some sort of favor?
And we mused about this and just walked off.
I had his business card.
I looked at it.
I remember looking at it and saying, what kind of name is that?
That doesn't sound like a Russian name.
And I think my friend had heard it once or twice before someplace else, and he said, no, it's OK.
He's Russian.
And that was it.
I would have never dreamed he would have been president one of these days.
To start with, he was too – and I even told my friends later in 1999 when all of a sudden it was announced that he was going to be the president, probably would be the next president of Russia after Yeltsin.
And I said, this is a disaster.
This man is too intellectual, and he's too introverted.
It's just not – however, he's probably not corrupt.
That's the only thing I can say.
But he would never be a good president for Russia.
So here he is today.
It's amazing.
That really is a great story.
Yeah.
At any rate, and I also have met a number of people who worked very closely with him because he was in charge of helping create those joint ventures between the West and the new Russia.
And they had the same experience with him at that time that I had with him.
And so none of us have much faith in the fact that these people who claim that he's taken bribes and he's worth $50 billion – we don't see this.
This is nonsense.
This is makeup stuff.
He's not that type of personality.
I'll tell you what he is, and I've never said this before in public.
I am convinced that he's an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs categories.
And this spells out his personality to a T.
Well, elaborate a little bit about what that means.
Well, Myers-Briggs was started back during World War II to help the government understand better personality-wise who they could trust and so forth.
And so they came up with all these categories, and there are, I think, 16 of them, but maybe more than that.
But at any rate, there's an ENTJ, and these are the real go-getters and pretty courageous people and explorers and so forth, particularly in business.
And then there's the INTJ, and it's more the intuitive type of – well, it's – you just have to look it up and see.
It's too big to go into on anything like this, but it describes Putin's personality to a T as far as I can see.
That's interesting.
And his role in the society, I mean, is he – they portray him here as really just a lawless autocrat where the Constitution is just a fig leaf for his power and this kind of thing.
Is that your take on his role there in the society?
Not at all.
Not at all.
And most of the people that – all the people that I know of that have met him and have followed him closely don't take this seriously at all.
No.
I mean, he is a man who is – he's a lawyer to start with, but for some reason or another, he is dedicated to law.
And he said early on, law will be the dictator of what we're going to be doing.
Is it against the law or is it not against the law?
Is it possible?
And we will change the laws, and we will make them such that they will work for us as a society.
And that's exactly what he started doing when he came in in 2000.
But believe you me, this is not anything that he could do overnight because he was trying to lead a country who was flawless, that was flawless, and that had no concept of no corruption or law or anything like this.
I mean, the Soviet system had been in itself was a system that expected bribes.
It expected payoffs.
It expected perks.
And that was the way they got along for, what, three generations of people.
So to come in and try to change it overnight was impossible.
But as I look back and see what he has done over the time that he's been in since 2000, 18 years ago, I find it almost impossible to believe what he has accomplished with the country.
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And now, so tell us about Mikhail Gorbachev.
In the Christian Science Monitor piece, there's a great picture of you and he together, and I have to assume you've met with him more than one time.
So what's he like, and what have you learned from him?
Well, to start with, he was my hero back in the 80s.
It was just, it was amazing when he came in and what he was able to do in terms of world opinion and particularly opinion of the United States.
And so I had honored him all of this time.
And so when I finally did get to meet him as an aging man, I was so, so deeply grateful to have the opportunity.
And as far as he goes, he is simply, he says, you know, we are living in a totally different country now.
The changes that have been made are absolutely a miracle.
And this is the way it happened with Ronald Reagan.
Some of the parts you've heard of and other parts I want to tell you about.
You can read in some of the other articles that I've read.
It's too long to go into.
But he basically supports what is going on in Russia today.
If he were in, he probably would make some minor changes, but he would not make major changes.
He believes in the system that's happening.
He's delighted that Russia is doing as well as it is.
And he also wants to set the record straight about the fact that he was told and he was convinced that the Americans stand by the fact that they would not push NATO an inch further toward Russia than they were in East Germany.
And, of course, it took very, very short while before NATO was leaping over boundaries and going over to Russia's borders.
Well, and that's important.
I mean, first of all, in his heroism, I mean, this guy is arguably one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century, depending on how exactly you rack him up.
But for him to oversee the dissolution of a massive totalitarian empire without ordering his armies to massacre anyone, but just drawing them back all the way behind Russian lines.
I mean, that is absolutely an unbelievable, unbelievable miracle.
And I remember when it happened, how unbelievable it was.
Really, their armies are turning around and driving a thousand miles east from where they were before.
It's over.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's really incredible stuff.
And, I mean, they tried to do a coup d'etat against him and he overcame that and faced it all down.
I mean, man, that's really something.
I want to read biographies of him or something now.
He really is, you know, such an important character.
And it seems like when he says stuff like, hey, guys, we really don't like the way you've expanded your military alliance east when you said you wouldn't.
It seems like maybe he's one of the people we could take real seriously when he says that.
If everybody's so frightened of Putin, maybe we'll take it from old Gorby.
Well, he's saying it these days, which I'm so delighted to hear.
And he's determined that he's going to get as much of his voice out as he possibly can before he leaves the planet.
And I think right now this is one of the things that's keeping him alive, is knowing that he can get the voice out to different audiences.
And we videoed him, and I don't know whether you've seen the videos or not, but those were done in May.
No, not yet.
No, this was done in September, just a couple, three months ago.
Yeah, I'll send them to you if you give me your email address.
Okay, great.
And I see something labeled video here on the site.
Is it on the blog at CCISF.org?
It is.
Okay, great.
Yeah, we have two parts on there.
And tell us a little bit more about the Center for Citizen Initiatives.
This is an ongoing project to bring American citizens to travel to Russia and back.
Well, that's one of the things, but we've done very little of that since the 90s, as I've said.
I didn't start...
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you had kind of kicked that back up again recently.
No, well, I did.
I did, but not until 2014.
We didn't take any...
I was still going back and forth and doing various small projects and programs, but nothing large like we had done in the earlier years.
Between 1989 and 2008, we were literally just running programs, sometimes five programs at a time.
And fortunately, we had a lot of government money to do that.
We had a lot of State Department grants.
But then also, we had the part that the Rotarians played in it, and then we had some money from Steve Wozniak, some of those programs.
Have you had much trouble getting the different administrations to allow you to do this?
I mean, it sounds like you got some State Department money, so that's pretty good.
Well, yeah, I had a White House appointment back in those days, so I could get into any Congress member's office I wanted to, and I did.
I was calling on Washington all the time, but most of those Congress members are gone now.
Dick Gebhardt and Newt Gingrich and these people when they were all in were people that I could see any time I was in Washington.
But these days, it's very difficult.
I was back in April trying to make calls, and it was almost impossible to get an appointment with any of them.
And we're talking about State Department money for what you're already doing, not a CIA project from the get-go or anything like that, right?
Well, we got the State Department money between 1996 and 2004.
And since then, I've had to be responsible for raising money in other ways, from foundations, from wealthy people, from people that didn't know the truth about what's going on.
And also, Russians paying for their own flights.
And I'm sorry, Russians paying for their what?
For their own transportation.
Oh, for their own flight.
Okay, I thought that's what you said.
I want to make sure I understood you right.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Great.
All right, well, listen, I think the only shame in all this is that I hadn't heard you all along.
I think this is just the greatest thing that you're doing here.
Where are you located?
Try to build these bridges and forge these connections between humans and other places like this, and especially in the face of a new Cold War like we are right now.
Well, we absolutely have to have more of this now.
We have to have many, many more kinds of situations, programs like this.
And so I'm hoping that in 2019, we will come up with something really spectacular.
Cool, great.
I won't say more.
All right, well, don't, but I'll definitely be paying attention to what you're doing from now on, that's for sure.
Thank you for coming on the show, Sharon.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
All right, y'all, that's Sharon Tennyson.
She is at the Center for Citizen Initiatives at CCISF.org.
And you can read about her in this great piece in the Christian Science Monitor, How One Woman's Citizen Diplomacy Has Strengthened U.S.-Russia Ties for Decades.
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