[J]ournalist and author James Fallows is delivering the address at the University of Vermont’s 216th commencement ceremony today.
VTDigger caught up with Fallows for an interview from Washington, D.C., where he works as a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. The following has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
In your 20s you were President Jimmy Carter’s speechwriter. How did that come about?
The reason is that, in a sense, presidential campaigns are like startups where most of them are going to fail. So people who have other real career options are usually doing something else.
I had worked for the Washington Monthly for a couple years out of graduate school. My wife was starting graduate school in Texas, and I was freelancing from there. I had written some things that were sort of similar to Jimmy Carter’s pitch about ethics and reforming government.
I heard from some friends on the campaign that they were trying to put together a staff. Again, it’s a roll of the dice to work for a presidential campaign. But I thought, “You know, why not? It will be good to have done this one time in my life if I want to be a writer about public affairs.” That’s because you learn things about politics from working inside that you can’t learn otherwise.
I’m grateful to have done it. Jimmy Carter was an admirable but not fully successful president. He’s still the world’s greatest former president.
Given the polarized nature of our politics and media, would that be a harder leap, and the transition back to journalism, be more difficult today?
When I worked at Washington Monthly, the editor, Charlie Peters, who had experience in government, he said that in order to understand politics and government try one finite experience, but to have that be the only time, and to be clear that you’re not planning to go back and forth.
I wanted to be able to say, “I’m doing this one time, but before this I was a magazine writer, and forever after this, that is what I wanted to do.” I think that is still a sustainable model. Think of George Stephanopoulos. He actually worked in government for a while, but since then he’s been able to draw that clear line.
Was it difficult for you to draw those lines as a young person?
There were people who were telling me then, as I’m telling you now, about the virtues of having direct experience in public affairs.
I’ll give you another illustration from The Atlantic itself. When I started working there, the editor was a man named Robert Manning who had spent his early career as a newspaper and wire service reporter, and later a magazine writer.
But during John F. Kennedy’s administration, he spent three years as a State Department spokesman — the current State Department doesn’t even have one — but like a good version of the Sean Spicer role for the State Department.
He, again, said he wanted to do that one time because he believed in John Kennedy and wanted to have that experience. Then, after Kennedy’s assassination, he left and joined The Atlantic.
Manning and others were all telling me that it broadens your experience in how the world of public affairs works to have done it, and you never conceal that fact afterwards. It’s something like working in business or serving in the military that gives you inside experience.
How do you think that translates into advice for young people who aren’t going into journalism?
The 10 years after college are the time when you can best afford to try a lot of different things, where family responsibilities are minor, and your overhead costs aren’t what they’re going to be later on.
It’s the best time to build experiences that you can then draw on in the years afterward. So one of my bits of advice is: When you come to a fork in the road, take the more adventurous path.
People who have the good fortune, for example, to be graduating from the University of Vermont, they know they’re going to be OK in the long run. There are other people living more on the margin who might not be able to take those risks.
A virtue of having that kind of educational background is to equip you to take risks like that.
What about young people who may be graduating with serious debt and little family support?
Debt is a reality, and it’s a major difference from my era of being in college and today’s. I came from a very modest family, but I didn’t have to take on much debt because college was so much cheaper back then.
Debt is a reality that young people have to work around. Most programs have debt forgiveness for a period of public service. I think that becomes a realistic option to gain experience, to take advantage of the flexibility of being young, and to face the realities of debt.
What’s the attenuated version of your pitch to young people about getting involved in politics?
You’ll have to wait and see. It’s going to be partly about, in a time when national politics are so troubling, why it matters so much that people stay engaged at a local and regional level, how and why they can do that and why it makes a difference.
How do you feel the media has responded to Donald Trump’s campaign and the first months of his presidency?
To disclose, I was not a supporter of Trump during the campaign nor since his taking office.
There’s been a lot of discouraging things in the last couple months for the United States at the national level, but there’s also been some encouraging things, which includes the engagement of certain parts of the national-level press. I think you have the next generation of reporters stepping up.
During the campaign you could find a lot of the national press mis-serving the public by focusing on second-level scandals like email servers and things like that, but I think the national press has done its best to rise to the challenge of this era.
The question for national politics now is: What’s the strength of the institutional buffers and constraints on a president like Donald Trump?
I think many organs of the press, led by The Washington Post, are rising to that challenge.
What is your assessment of how other institutions in government or civic society are rising to the occasion?
It was probably a surprise to Donald Trump, and a positive sign for the public, that, to quote him, “so-called judges” were, from the beginning, unafraid in asserting their view of the rule of law and constitutional values.
No matter which party you identify with, you can’t be very happy with congressional Republicans. I would contrast it this way: When Bill Clinton was president, congressional Democrats tussled with him many a time. When Jimmy Carter was president congressional Democrats were not patsies for him. When the various Bush presidents were there, again the Republican Party didn’t just approve what they were looking for.
So, I think the weak leg of the institutional structure so far has been the Republican Party.
You’re a huge fan of new technology. What in the tech scene has you excited right now?
The tech and big data application that will probably make the most difference in your lifetime and the lifetime of your children is in biological technology. Genetic-based diagnosis and all the rest. I think biotech will mean that the world of your children will be unrecognizably different from the world of today.
In terms of consumer tech, when voice-to-text really works, as it only does now in limited ways, that will have real implications, not simply for being able to dictate to your computer or transcribe interviews, but think of the difference it would make in language, to have simultaneous translation through voice recognition.
My friends in the tech world say the power of data is increasing so rapidly that that will actually work at some point. Really powerful voice understanding from big data computing is going to be revolutionary.
