Carrie Hessler-Radelet: Choose Optimism

01/20/21 • 77 min

Carrie Hessler-Radelet – a native of Michigan and the former Director of the Peace Corps – and her extended family have a remarkable and unique relationship with that storied organization. They hold the distinction of being the only Peace Corps family to have four generations serve as volunteers, including both of her grandparents, her aunt and her nephew. In fact, Carrie’s aunt, Virginia Kirkwood – who served in Turkey and was the 10,000th volunteer – inspired Carrie to join the Peace Corps.

After her graduation from Boston University, Carrie and her husband served as Peace Corps volunteers in Western Samoa, where they taught at an all-girls school. Her story of their relationship with their host family – Losa and Viane and their nine children – is incredibly moving.

Part of that story includes a return visit to their host family while Carrie was Director of the Peace Corps – 32 years after she served as a volunteer in Western Samoa. If you want to understand how a volunteer can change lives in a remote corner of the planet, Carrie’s story is illuminating and inspirational.

The Peace Corps is one the most popular, successful, and admired organizations in America. President John F. Kennedy, shortly after his inauguration in 1961, created the Peace Corps and called on volunteers to immerse themselves in another culture and another community, in every corner of the globe.

Today, these volunteers (of all ages), work side by side with local leaders, to tackle some of the most difficult and vexing problems on the planet – from health care, to education, to food security, to climate change. The men and women who serve in the Peace Corps are truly among America’s best, representing the best of America.

In 2014, following her nomination by President Barack Obama, Carrie became the Director of the Peace Corps. As Director, she led an extensive organizational reform effort, most notably to enhance the health and safety of volunteers, including the development of a sexual assault risk reduction and response program. That, she will tell you, had a very personal component to it – as a young volunteer in Western Samoa, Carrie was sexually assaulted. When other victims came forward and shared their own stories with her, Carrie knew that the Peace Corps had to take decisive action to ensure the health and safety of its volunteers around the globe.

Carrie’s description of the Peace Corps and the stories of service, humility, compassion and dedication among the volunteers – including a story Carrie shares about a volunteer named Peter – are inspirational. Carrie illustrates beautifully, why the Peace Corps plays such a vital role in America and around the world, and why we should always choose optimism.

If you would like to learn more about this marvelous organization - which celebrates its 60th anniversary on March 1 of this year - you can visit its website at The Peace Corps.

If you would like to learn more about this marvelous organization - which celebrates its 60th anniversary on March 1 of this year - you can visit its website at The Peace Corps.

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Frank Figliuzzi: The FBI Way

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Frank Figliuzzi grew up in southern Connecticut, but with his eyes and ears tuned to the nearby New York City media market and to enthralling stories of mob busting FBI agents. Those amazing tales made a big impression on a young Frank. As an 11-year-old, he wrote a letter to a senior FBI special agent, asking how he could one day join their ranks. To this day, he still has the personal reply that he received, encouraging him to pursue that dream.

Back then, the FBI primarily hired attorneys and accountants to become special agents, and so Frank later went to law school, to polish his resume for the FBI. It worked, and in 1987, after graduating from the FBI Academy, Frank was assigned to the Atlanta field office, where he began a career working – among other things – counterintelligence cases.

In counterintelligence work, the FBI tries to identify and neutralize threats from foreign intelligence services that seek to steal our military, economic, and trade secrets. Our adversaries also attempt to recruit US persons and to turn them against our own country. In this episode, Frank describes the vital work he did in counterintelligence, including how his recruitment of a double agent from another country to assist the United States, came to a sudden halt when the FBI and the United States was betrayed by one of its own – Robert Hanssen – a disgraced former FBI special agent now serving a life sentence in a federal prison for espionage. It is a fascinating and disturbing story.

Frank’s long and distinguished career in the FBI, took him to many different places – San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Cleveland. Among the most challenging posts he held was in the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, where he imposed discipline – including dismissal – on men and women who violated the FBI’s strict code of conduct – decisions that were often agonizingly difficult but necessary to preserve the integrity of the organization.

At the end of his FBI career, Frank ran the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI, and instituted important changes to ensure that intelligence analysts and special agents worked more closely together to protect our nation from relentless foreign adversaries.

Frank was a thoughtful and principled leader and has written eloquently about his time at the FBI and about its core principles – such as compassion, credibility, and consistency – in his new book, The FBI Way.

If you have thoughtful feedback on this episode or others, please email us at [email protected].

Find the transcript and all our previous episodes at MSNBC.com/TheOath

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Carla Hayden: Palace to Knowledge

Dr. Carla Hayden is the 14th Librarian of Congress, and the first woman and the first African-American ever to hold that prestigious pose. Born in Tallahassee, Florida, Carla grew up in Queens and in Chicago. Her parents were both talented musicians – her father taught music at Florida A&M University – but Carla, by her own admission, did not have the music gene. What she did have was a love of knowledge and of reading.

After graduating from Roosevelt University in Chicago, and while looking for work, she became an “Accidental Librarian.” A college friend gave her a lead on a job in a public library. That tip led to a career in librarianship, including a doctorate in library science from the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago, a teaching post at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Science, and leadership roles in the public library systems in both Chicago and Baltimore.

In Baltimore, as Executive Director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Carla led that city’s magnificent public library system for almost a quarter of a century and was widely praised – and properly so – for keeping the libraries open in the wake of riots that shook Baltimore in 2015, following the death of Freddie Gray - an African-American - man in police custody.

In 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Carla to serve as the 14th Librarian of Congress. Upon her confirmation by the Senate, she took over that prestigious post.

The Library of Congress is a crown jewel. It dates to 1800, and one of its first large acquisitions of books came from the personal library of Thomas Jefferson. Though the Library of Congress was originally housed in the U.S. Capitol Building itself, fires in 1814 and 1851 – the first set by the British, the second, an accident – and a burgeoning collection required that the library move to its own building.

Today, its astonishing collection is housed in numerous buildings, including the Jefferson Building, which contains the breathtaking Main Reading Room, completed in 1897. The Library of Congress today has more than 171 million items, including 32 million catalogued books in 470 languages, 61 million manuscripts, 15 million photographs, 5 million maps, the papers of 23 presidents, and extraordinarily rare and precious books, including an original Gutenberg Bible and the Lincoln Bible.

In fact, when Carla Hayden took the oath of office for the post she now holds, she took it on the original Lincoln Bible. She shares with podcast host Chuck Rosenberg a wonderful story about that day, that Bible, her mom, and the oath.

In 2021, Carla is also leading a new Library-wide initiative, Of the People: Widening the Path, to connect the national library more deeply with Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other underrepresented communities. To do this, the Library of Congress plans to expand its collections, use technology to enable storytelling, and offer more internship and fellowship opportunities to attract diverse librarians and archivists. The initiative, supported by a $15 million investment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will allow the Library of Congress to share a more inclusive story about our contemporary American culture, our historical record and how we understand our past.

The Library of Congress is a Palace to Knowledge. It is one of the most important cultural institutions in the United States, and in the world. The person privileged to run it is Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress.

If you have thoughtful feedback on this episode or others, please email us at [email protected].

Find the transcript and all our previous episodes at MSNBC.com/TheOath