Samantha Smith vs. the Cold War with Maris Kreizman

Who really ended the Cold War, Ronald Reagan or a ten-year-old girl? Eighties correspondent Maris Kreizman joins us for a heartfelt conversation about America’s Youngest Ambassador, Samantha Smith, a child who wrote a letter to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov in hopes of cooling nuclear tensions. Then, Andropov wrote back. Maris and Sarah discuss the burden we place on the youth to “change the world” while simultaneously scolding them for their naivety. Digressions include the millennial urge to cut up plastic soda can rings, Christina Applegate’s SNL infomercial, and an important lesson from the Golden Girls. More Maris Kreizman: Buy the book, I Want to Burn This Place Down Subscribe to the newsletter, The Maris Review Maris on Bluesky More You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Sarah's other show, You Are Good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  It's not like New Zealand was like, oh, no, I couldn't possibly have all the nuclear arms people are trying to give me.

• 0:19Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall. It is the fall and we are joined today by our eighties correspondent, Maris Kreizman, author of I Want to Burn This Place Down. We're going to have a conversation today about the Cold War, about what it was like to be a kid in the eighties, about the responsibilities that we put on children as adults in a world where we feel perhaps a little bit too much license to be cynical, and more than anything about a 10-year-old girl named Samantha Smith, who did everything that she could to remind us of our shared humanity. And we are also going to talk just a little bit about the Golden Girls. I loved having this conversation with Maris today

• 1:03Sarah Marshall?

  about both a topic that came to mean a lot to us and also about what it's like to inhabit a world where your youthful idealism has to galvanize into something that you are able to keep feeling and living and doing day by day, and what exists in the place between idealism and cynicism. And I'm very happy to go to that place with you. We also loved getting to talk about the book that we read to research this topic, which is America's Youngest Ambassador by Lena Nelson. There's so much more to this story than we could get into. Please seek it out and read it and also go to samanthasmith.info.

• 1:46Sarah Marshall?

  We also have, as always, some very fun bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus. And our most recent one with Hollywood correspondent Eve Lindley is about, of course, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and Cassandra Peterson, the woman behind the boobs. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for taking this journey with us and for continuing your own journey day by day. Here's your episode.

• 2:20Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where apparently we are doing chapters in the life of Ronald Reagan. I didn't plan it this way, but I am always thinking about Reagan. And with me today is Maris Kreizman, author of the aptly named, "I Want to Burn This Place Down."

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed.

• 2:41Sarah Marshall?

  Maris, oh my God, welcome.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I'm so happy to be here. This is the one place I don't want to burn down, I promise.

• 2:48Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I know. And here comes my cat. So there you go, just to emphasize that point. Yeah, we're gonna talk about Reagan.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:58Sarah Marshall?

  That's true. Yeah, I love you. Oh, my God. Maris, how are you doing today?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  You know, uh, it's a weird time, but, uh, all things considered, I've got a healthy dog, healthy husband. We're doing okay.

• 3:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  How are you?

• 3:17Sarah Marshall?

  I'm insane. I'm eating cherry tomatoes.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Good. 'Tis the season.

• 3:21Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I grew some cherry tomatoes, not as many as I would like. I want to eat, I want to grow so many cherry tomatoes that I'm like, I don't even know what to do with all of these. I just wake up and I have to eat cherry tomatoes for a whole hour. Woe is me.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  That's gonna be me and apples very soon.

• 3:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Oh, yes. Are you going apple picking?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Ooh, I should.

• 3:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I feel like that's something I did a lot as a kid and then, you know, I would have to get out of New York City, but that seems like a good idea.

• 3:53Sarah Marshall?

  That's what New York City really, really needs is a pumpkin patch. Where do you get? This is actually, I bet the answer is parts of New Jersey. Where do you get your pumpkin patch action?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is where. Or upstate New York.

• 4:09Sarah Marshall?

  Of course.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Hudson Valley.

• 4:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, can't forget the apples of upstate New York. I would never. Well, Maris, and you grew up in New Jersey and you grew up in the 80s, and that's part of our topic today.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:22Sarah Marshall?

  I would say is basically the concept of a Cold War childhood. And I wonder if you would like to start us off by maybe telling us a little bit about what that was like. And then I have a clip that perhaps will also help us.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  I can't wait. Yeah, you know. I've tried to remember my own experience and I feel like my experience worrying about nuclear war is so shaped by the pop culture that I experienced.

• 4:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's how I experienced time and space for sure.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Right?

• 4:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And it just like other people's fear, like even I remember in the movie Great Balls of Fire, which is the Jerry Lee Lewis story.

• 5:07Sarah Marshall?

  Which is a weird movie because it's like shitty if married his 13 year old cousin. Well, kind of know, but maybe, yeah, it's Winona Ryder and you're like, hmm.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And the way they first start hooking up is they're watching a documentary about what nuclear war can do. And again, that was in the 50s, but.

• 5:25Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, that will make you have some I'm afraid of dying sex, I'm sure.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And you know, my mom would tell me stories about nuclear war drills where you would have to get under your desk.

• 5:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, my mom too, as if that was gonna do anything. I just wild.

• 5:45Sarah Marshall?

  How do you feel about the Twilight Zone on that topic?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  I don't know much about.

• 5:49Sarah Marshall?

  Are you a Twilight Zone person? Okay, it's a great show. It's really especially in the summertime. It's a great watch. And by the way, it's summer until the autumn equinox. It is summer until September 22nd. You have had it and I don't know about you, but because of climate change, last year I was growing tomatoes until Thanksgiving and that's horrifying, but you know, you get tomatoes. We're at the part where we get tomatoes.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Break out the dresses while you still can.

• 6:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, let's bring out the booze and have a ball if that's all there is.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:23Sarah Marshall?

  You also have an essay in your book, which I love about basically living in climate change while taking care of a pug who has some health issues. And I just really loved it so much. I would, how does it feel? Cause I feel like in the eighties, there was like, and I was born in the late eighties, so I more have a memory of us having, we had a, this is my very specific little Cold War kind of memory that happened late where we had a sticker on our door because my dad was from New Zealand. I'm sure I've told you this story before that said, New Zealand, no nuclear arms. Like, ha ha. And it's like, and by the way, now that I think about it, who was offering New Zealand any nuclear arms?

• 7:09Sarah Marshall?

  It's not like New Zealand was like, oh no, I couldn't possibly have all the nuclear arms people are trying to give me. Which is a great quality in a country to not be offered nuclear arms, as far as I know. Maybe somebody did. I don't know.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:26Sarah Marshall?

  But anyway, I remember my mom, I was like, what does that sticker mean? And being like seven, so well into the Clinton administration, which you also write about, and understanding suddenly the concept of nuclear arms and the Cold War is basically, as far as I assimilated it, like the constant fear of sudden annihilation, or worse, being far enough away from the sudden annihilation zone that you have to survive nuclear winter, which as far as I know is what The Day After Tomorrow, which is a TV movie that's got the shit out of everybody who saw it in the early 80s is about. But the fear of suddenly blinking out of existence, if you're a child who's already prone to anxiety, is like really sticky in your brain, because you're like, oh my God, it could happen at any second, like this one, or the next one. It was sure luck that I got

• 8:11Sarah Marshall?

  through that last second.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Especially if the lights flicker.

• 8:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. You're like, oh God, this is. And then you hear about end of the world prophecies. I don't know about you, but I was, well, you were, you know, like a fully formed human being with a working brain at this point. But in 1999, I was like, but what if the world ends in the year 2000? Yeah. Because people were saying that. And I was like, I don't know, could be.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Listen, I don't think there are any guarantees.

• 8:37Sarah Marshall?

  That's the thing.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  That's the thing. But I do like the moving timeline, the doomsday sayers, just keep moving it up and off a couple of years.

• 8:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's like a deadline. They're like, oh, we'll get it together next time. Give us another quarter. Well, my dad actually helped me in classic New Zealand, no nuclear arms fashion, with my fear of the world's ending at the dawn of the year 2000, because he was like, Sarah, it's a terrible impression. I'm not saying it's a good impression. I just have to do an accent when I talk about him. Sarah, what about the time zones?

• 9:14Sarah Marshall?

  Surely not New Zealand time.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, certainly.

• 9:19Sarah Marshall?

  Would it be Greenwich Mean Time that the world would end, in which case the world would end at like four for most Americans, which would be unfair?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  I remember that, though, when on, you know, December 31st, 1999, at like 4:00 PM, we were like, phew, well, at least part of the world has already made it.

• 9:39Sarah Marshall?

  Right? You're like, there they are in France in the year 2000.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  The wild thing to me is that there was ever such thing as a doomsday clock.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  That is so goth.

• 9:53Sarah Marshall?

  And now we don't have to be scary. Things just are, you know.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Things are just unpredictable and messed up all the time.

• 10:00Sarah Marshall?

  I would say even scarier at this point is the thing, because the fear of the people we're sharing a country with feels pretty. And I say that as a white person. I think that there's also this feeling, because you write about the Clinton administration in your book, and that was a time of such economic optimism for like the middle class and like arguably working class Americans. And it feels like what's happened in the time since then is that like even people who generally have been lucky in the past are like feeling their feet consumed by the stomach acid of late capitalism. That was a gross metaphor.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good metaphor. I like that a lot. I feel it.

• 10:39Sarah Marshall?

  Because I feel like what one of the themes in what you write about is like, growing up in a scary time, but also growing up with a lot of idealism and then figuring out what to do with that as an adult.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, one of the things I write about is when I was 12 years old, my parents took me to the pre-election night, Bill Clinton rally, at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. And it was like a rock star was going to perform for us, but he only plays a little bit of saxophone sometimes. And I remember feeling so hopeful and feeling like the adults around me also felt so hopeful.

• 11:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  That here was this man who's really going to change everything. And then Sarah, the cast of Les Misérables came out onto the stage and sang One Day More. And

• 11:37Sarah Marshall?

  How do you not just go all out for Clinton at that point? It was like, I will give you whatever you want. And then Fleetwood Mac comes out and you're like, oh, my God.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:47Sarah Marshall?

  I forget about all the women whose lives he destroyed, you know? That was, I'm, that's my impression of America.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  100%. And he made some pretty good promises that, you know?

• 11:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And a lot of them came true a little bit, you know? Like there was kind of a period as, yeah, sort of. And, and also kind of like through sheer luck, it would seem, you know? But economically and in terms of foreign policy, things felt like they calmed down a bit. But also as a follow-up act to, you know, not complete nuclear disarmament, that actually has never happened.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  No, of course not.

• 12:24Sarah Marshall?

  But, you know, the, through the end of nuclear proliferation, as we once knew it, and through a feeling of at least, you know, basically the end of the Cold War being that in part, the United States and the former Soviet Union agreed to begin to decrease their nuclear arms gradually to an extent. And we were like, all right, well, that's probably good.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Sarah, it was world peace at the time. It was 1987. I was like, we did it, world.

• 12:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. It was a lot closer than it had ever been, you know? It's like, and I mean, cause it, it does really seem as if, I mean, what were you afraid of? Did you have specific kind of nuclear related fears?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, I did. And of course, yes, I was always most concerned about being a survivor. I was not interested in that at all. But I, I think the other thing is thinking about mutually assured destruction.

• 13:25Sarah Marshall?

  Right?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  That feels like such a thing for right at this moment. Such a small line prevents like the person in charge of pressing the button. And I think in my head, it was bad when the Republicans were in charge. Whoever they were, but especially Reagan, your fave.

• 13:48Sarah Marshall?

  My favorite little boy, yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And so you have the Berlin Wall coming down. You have the USSR dismantled and you have a Democrat in office. Like this was our time. This was gonna be.

• 14:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  And we're almost post feminism.

• 14:08Sarah Marshall?

  Right? We were like, we're gonna achieve the goals of feminism in like 18 months. We're pretty sure.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  It makes me feel so naive, but also so grateful that I got to experience that pure hope.

• 14:22Sarah Marshall?

  I know. Do you ever think about global village coffeehouse aesthetic? Cause I think about it all the time.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yes. And well, I mean, and that's part of it too, right? Like when the internet was very, very young, information was harder to access. I mean, I know that's very obvious, but.

• 14:41Sarah Marshall?

  But it's not necessarily, because if you didn't used to have the internet, you can't guess what it was like.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  It did make finding out about other people and how they lived. It made it really difficult. Like you had to rely on what the news showed you or what a friend's friend's grandma said. Like it was a lot harder to understand the problems in the world and also the lovely things.

• 15:08Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and that is really one of the themes of what we're talking about today. Because what we're gonna talk about, okay, I'm, we are gonna tell a bittersweet tale of the Cold War, but we're gonna lead into it, obviously, by discussing the Golden Girls. And specifically, an episode called Letter to Gorbachev.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 15:31Sarah Marshall?

  Are you a Golden Girls fan?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:33Sarah Marshall?

  To start, yeah. And I mean, I feel like Golden Girls and Designing Women are like sister shows, sassy sister shows in a way.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 15:44Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I was watching this episode and I was also, I just have to connect it to this. I'm sorry. I've been through a lot with this show. The Golden Girls is what And Just Like That should have been, which is women and sisterhood having sex with random guys. And none of that happened. And I'm still mad. And they're like the same age. And let me just say, like Rue McClanahan got so much more action than anyone in And Just Like That. And there's a reason.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  The costumes were still fabulous, too, you know?

• 16:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Nothing was lacking there.

• 16:13Sarah Marshall?

  The cost, the furniture, I'm trying to decorate my house like the Golden Girls' house all the time. And so specifically, and tell me if you remember this, there was an episode in 1987 that I must have seen as a kid where Rose, who's played by Betty White, she's from St. Olaf, Minnesota.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Famously.

• 16:32Sarah Marshall?

  And she's famously, I don't know, Rose is kind of like a Tom Cullen in the stand type character. Like, she seems really simple, but then she's deep. She's, she's also a bit of a Charlotte. She's the wise fool. She's Parsifal. She's the Fisher King, et cetera.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I love that. Yeah. And the wide-eyed innocence followed by a real sassy comment is why we love her.

• 16:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly. And so in this episode, Rose writes a letter to Gorbachev because she is leading like a Girl Scout-esque troop of girls. And she writes saying, "My name is Rose Nyland, and I am worried about nuclear war because the girls in my fake Girl Scout troop talk about if they grow up, not when they grow up. And what are you going to do about this? I'm concerned." And so it causes there to be a big media event and press conference when the Soviets respond to her letter. She's also written to Reagan, but he didn't answer.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I don't think I knew this, Sarah, the parallels.

• 17:36Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And she's written, "Please call our president, but don't call in the afternoon. That's when Reagan takes his naps." That's a classic Rose zinger.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Perfect. Yep.

• 17:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Where she's like, "I think the great thing about Rose is that you got read by her, but so innocently that you're like, God, that must be true. She's not even saying it in a mean way."

• 17:56Sarah Marshall?

  And so comedy arises when it turns out that the Soviets thought that Rose was like a little girl and not Betty White, a grown woman. And so it seems like she's written like a really like ridiculous letter and she feels really embarrassed. But then Blanche reads her letter and it turns out to be very profound and deep and to have basically this message of sort of, why can't we just sort this out because the, you know, the kids don't want this to happen. And so I learned about the world as you learned about the world and as so many of us do through sitcoms and sitcom jokes. So much of the time, I was also, this

• 18:39Sarah Marshall?

  episode was fun because like, I forget how often in these old sitcoms that are just like full of great jokes, the audience is just going like absolutely bananas. And it made me think of lately, I have been unable to stop watching the, I think, classic iconic Christina Applegate Saturday Night Live sketch from the early 90s where she plays Cher in the Focus on Beauty infomercial. Do you remember this?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Gosh, I wish I, I wish I had your references there. I have to brush up.

• 19:13Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I just have to send it to you because it'll bring you joy.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Please.

• 19:17Sarah Marshall?

  But it's just like, it'll just get stuck in your head because they have Chris Farley as Lori Davis, hair care expert, being like, do you girls use hairspray? And Melanie Hutzle saying, I use it, but I hate it. And I think that like, once a day, I'm like, I use it, but I hate it, you know? And it's just like, I don't know. And it's funny because it's like, seven minutes long. And it's just like, a representation of how infomercials were like, people just saying the same thing over and over and over again.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  At three in the morning, usually, yeah.

• 19:54Sarah Marshall?

  At three in the morning. And it was boring, but in kind of a way that like, set your soul free.

• 20:00Sarah Marshall?

  Because real life was never that boring.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:03Sarah Marshall?

  And so I know I must have seen this episode of Golden Girls at one time. And I think, I don't know if it was through that or not, that I also learned that at one time in the eighties, there had been a 10 year old girl named Samantha Smith, who had written a letter to the then leader of the Soviet Union. This was in the fall of 1982. Oh, my gosh, what was his first name? Is it Yuri Andropov?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yuri, yeah.

• 20:29Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my gosh, thank you. Look at that. Yuri Andropov. And when she didn't get a response, she wrote to the Soviet embassy, saying, why haven't I gotten a response to my letter, by the way?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Such a beautiful act of entitlement.

• 20:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. And I believed, I think as a kid, when I learned about this, somehow for years, that she had basically ended the Cold War. And then I feel like I learned at some point, no, this happened in the early eighties and really things were longer and more complicated. And then in researching the story, I'm like, I don't know, I think she did kind of end the Cold War.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it really does get back to my point about the internet. Like, she was the first person who allowed Americans to see how Soviet Russians lived in some, I mean, and of course, they didn't show everything.

• 21:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  As Johnny Carson so aptly asked her. But, but it was enough to see that these were human beings, happy children, some of them, and people who could be just like you and me.

• 21:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And the idea that our ability to envision each other as human beings, and especially to envision a country having children in it. Is shaped by how much we're able to see and what technology brings us and what, you know, what media chooses to bring us or has access to.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, you know, that was the time of the iron curtain when there was no important export of culture from the Soviet Union, which of course I think is a great example of how to create a monster in the minds of people who don't know anything better. And Reagan called them the evil empire at around that time and gave us a lot to fear.

• 22:33Sarah Marshall?

  You're telepathically reading my notes, which I think I knew would happen. So I just sent you, this is from SamanthaSmithInfo.com. And this is the letter that she wrote to Yuriy Andropov in the fall of 1982. And I would love for you to read this to us.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yes, I actually have America's Youngest Ambassador.

• 22:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  I was able to find a used copy for not that much. So I have, I have my own version here. Dear Mr. Andropov, my name is Samantha Smith. I am 10 years old. Congratulations, sick, on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war, sick. Also, I, every time you hear Samantha pronounce that word, it's nuclear.

• 23:30Sarah Marshall?

  I love that. Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't, please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like it if you would. Why do you want to conquer the world or at least our country? God made the world for us to share and take care of, not to fight over or have one group of people own it all. Please let's do what he wanted and have everybody be happy too. Samantha Smith, Manchester, Maine, USA, Box 4404351. P.S. Please write back.

• 24:11Sarah Marshall?

  Tell me, yeah, I guess your thoughts on that letter.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I love that the story is that Samantha asked her mom to write to Andropov because she was worried about nuclear war. And her mom said, well, why don't you write the letter?

• 24:33Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And it is so beautifully earnest and so unafraid

• 24:43Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  that I just, who wouldn't love that? Who like?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  It's, it's hard to remember a time when I wasn't so, so, so cynical. But there was, and it had to be in my younger years. And this is a kind of a breath of fresh air.

• 25:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and one of the things that you write about is like taking part in events and like walking to cure diabetes.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:19Sarah Marshall?

  Which makes me think of two things, which is A, if you ever thought about, how do I get insulin in a post-nuclear war type situation?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, of course.

• 25:29Sarah Marshall?

  Where do you do that?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  We know where the Eli Lilly factory is.

• 25:33Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  And we have emergency plans to get there. By we, it's like three people from the internet and me.

• 25:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. Well, I mean, you gotta know. And, and then that like, you know, one of the things you talk about, I don't know, that just to me feels like a definition maybe of youthful idealism being confronted by history where when you're young, you believe that entities, including the pharmaceutical industries, will attempt to cure diabetes.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:02Sarah Marshall?

  And now, in a way that you say you never imagined, they're like, what if we just make insulin cost so much money? Just, what if it becomes like a luxury item? That would be something, right?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  That would be something. And GoFundMe would just be full of people begging for money to buy the insulin. That was supposed to be affordable for everyone.

• 26:24Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  The patent of which was sold for a dollar when it was invented a hundred years ago.

• 26:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And so in the eighties, that framing was everywhere. We are going to cure diabetes. It wasn't like we're gonna incrementally make your life a little bit better. We're gonna make improvements. We're going to invent new technologies to ameliorate the problems with the disease. It was like, one day you're gonna wake up and you're gonna have a shot and then you'll be able to eat ice cream for breakfast again.

• 26:57Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. It feels like the idea of cure versus care is interesting, too, because it's easier to sell people on action if they can be heroic, maybe, than if they can take part in ongoing effort and caretaking, it seems.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and the JDRF, which is what it was called then, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, was really good at the marketing of that, that every single person you know is gonna walk for a cure.

• 27:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Especially if they are, have been taking money from the drug companies all along.

• 27:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And that this idea that focusing on developing a cure for something is so important that it's possible to not even perhaps imagine that one day the mere treatment for a condition will become out of reach for people.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, this is at a time when, it was during the AIDS crisis.

• 28:02Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  We were gonna cure AIDS, too. It wasn't like we're gonna make this disease, a disease with which you can live for a number of years happily and healthfully. It was, we're gonna eradicate this from the world. And as we've seen, it's, it's just not.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  It's just not that simple.

• 28:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And do you remember the story from when it took place at all? Cause you would have been like a little kid. This was like spring of 1983 that this showed up in the news, I think.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  I was real little. But I do kind of, I remember the idea of youth, a youth diplomat.

• 28:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  That like, it, it sounds like something that like, it would have been in a few years after that, like a role for the Olsen twins and like some made for TV movie, you know, that the littlest diplomat.

• 29:01Sarah Marshall?

  It's like how the West was fun, but a different pun having to do with Russia.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it was very much about how if you're a kid and you just speak your mind, you can be the change in the world that you want to see.

• 29:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And that's kind of, it feels to me like part of an optimism that I even remember from the nineties, this idea of like, you know what? Kids can change the world. And then you kind of look back on it. Cause, cause what I remember about the nineties is that we were starting to sort of get into like a certain form of environmentalism. That's very different from what I think we see today culturally. But it was, a lot of it was focused on like, let's save the monarch butterfly. Let's save seals, which is great, obviously, but it's cause we hadn't progressed to like, oh my God, let's save everything and ourselves as well. We were like seals.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Start with seals.

• 29:51Sarah Marshall?

  And one of the things I remember is that they really taught kids about seabirds, getting their heads stuck in like six pack, plastic soda can rings. And I did not let a plastic soda can ring carrier leave the house for years without being chopped up into oblivion. If I'm being honest, I still don't. People just buy soda in cases now.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Every now and then I will see those six rings and the first thought is, okay, but you have to cut them up.

• 30:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. You're like, gotta save the bird. And then sometimes you can't find scissors and you're just doing it with your bare hands. And you're like, I can't not. I'm gonna lie awake thinking about the birds I'm killing.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And later it was, much later, it was plastic straws, but.

• 30:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. The straw thing is hard because I paper, we were pushing paper straws hard for a while and those are not the way.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Those are no good.

• 30:40Sarah Marshall?

  It's, it's terrible to be given an iced coffee and it feel, it's like being given an iced coffee by Jigsaw. It's like you have seven minutes to drink this iced coffee.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Otherwise. Yeah.

• 30:53Sarah Marshall?

  You will find yourself eating papery mush. Make your choice. That was a terrible Chicksom impression. But I feel like there were like, and of course, we should have been cutting up all these plastic soda can rings, but also I feel like somewhere in there was this feeling of like, in retrospect, why did the children have to do so much work? You're the adults, you have money and companies that you run and resources and access to infrastructure and, and you're asking children to be the conscience of a country? Kind of like Greta Thunberg said, I believe, once yelling at adults who

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:30Sarah Marshall?

  I hope some of them listened. If, if even one of them does, I would, that would be something, you know? Because this, this kind of dual idea, maybe to start with, that like, children often do have a capacity, I think, to be able to see the simplicity and the like, often fairly simple reality of what's happening morally in a way that adults find ways not to, but also that we shouldn't force them to be our conscience to maybe such an extent.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  The way that Samantha Smith became briefly an international superstar really speaks to this desire to have one little girl be able to save it all.

• 32:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  And yeah, I think at the time, when I was four or whatever, I would have been like, yeah, that's great, but come on, you guys.

• 32:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and then, okay, so to, what are, what's the president doing? You may be wondering, I'll tell you, I'm always thrilled to. So my source here, I'll read you some quotes from, this is from a book called The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tomalte. It is a weird fact about my life that I have read so many books about the Reagans multiple times, just to try and sort of learn this stuff by heart. Why do I care so much about the Reagans? It's hard to say. My therapist could tell you. I guess, I feel like their dysfunction is modern America's dysfunction and also. My dysfunction and maybe your dysfunction. And one of the things I find fascinating about Ronald Reagan is that I think he was

• 33:00Sarah Marshall?

  a chronic people pleaser who had an alcoholic father and who was obviously like, I'm not going to say he was a great guy. He was very racist, even when he was running for governor of California. People were like, Ronnie, you gotta put those long jockeys away. It's a bit racist, even for us here in the early 70s or 60s. And, you know, he was obviously very interested in protecting his money and helping other hideous white men protect their money. But I do think that he also had the heart of a codependent in a way that I just, just speaks to me, you know? And so, so Karen Tumulty writes, "In the opening months of his first term, Ronnie,"

• 33:45Sarah Marshall?

  she calls him Ronnie in her book, which I feel is from Nancy's perspective, but it's also, it's, it's a lot of Ronnies, I'll tell you. "Ronnie also made a more personal overture. It came in the spring of 1981, shortly after the assassination attempt. Perhaps facing his own mortality, instilled an urgency in the new president, a sense that he had no time to wait for an opening. As he began his recuperation, Ronnie composed a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, his counterpart in Moscow." And when she says shortly, what she means is like two weeks after he was shot by the subject of our last episode, John Hinckley. And this is kind of like, he has a conference about this letter that he's writing to the,

• 34:28Sarah Marshall?

  at the time, leader of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev. And he has the conference in his pajamas and robe. You know, this is really like the first thing he's doing. I love that. "The US president asked, 'Is it possible that we have let ideology, political and economic philosophy and governmental policies keep us from considering the very real, everyday problems of the people we represent? The peoples of the world, despite differences in racial or ethnic origin, have very much in common. They want the dignity of having some control over their individual destiny. They want to work at the craft or trade of their own choosing and be fairly rewarded.'" Yeah, they do Reagan. They want to raise the and unionize. They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves. Government exists for their convenience,

• 35:13Sarah Marshall?

  not the other way around. Mr. President, Mr. President, should we not be concerned with eliminating the obstacles which prevent our people from achieving these simple goals? And isn't it possible some of those obstacles are born of government aims and goals which have little to do with the real needs and wants of our people?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  That's some great politician speak.

• 35:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. What do you think of of dear Ronnie's little letter there?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  It reminds me of Bill Clinton in the 90s. Like, yeah, all of these things would be great, but let's see you help enact them in any meaningful way.

• 35:50Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah, he knew how to. He knew how to make a speech by gum. And my belief is that if Reagan had stayed as sports radio guy in Iowa, America might look very different.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:02Sarah Marshall?

  But it could also look worse. Who the heck knows? Not that that's a defense of Reagan, just that you just it could. It could be worse. I don't know how, but it could be.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Oof. Let's not contemplate that.

• 36:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But so the thing is that he reads this letter and his advisors are like, ah, no, that's insane. You can't send that to the Soviet Union. You need to like have our boys at the State Department write something for you to send because they've been doing it for 20 years. They'll do a great job and they write something very kind of that seems to Reagan very bureaucratic. I'm sure it is. And he's like, no, I want to bear my heart to the Soviets. And he does. He does that. He sends his original letter.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:44Sarah Marshall?

  And the Kremlin responds and is like, yeah, basically they're like, they don't. It's like when you send a text with like a lot of like emojis in it and somebody responds in sort of like a way where they're like, no, no, we're not. We're not texting friends on that level. And you're like, okay.

• 37:04Sarah Marshall?

  And the other problem you might recall is that then the leaders of the Soviet Union keep dying on Reagan.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yes, they do. Rapid pace. You know, in researching Samantha, I didn't realize how short Andropov's term was. Term, is that the word?

• 37:23Sarah Marshall?

  Sure, yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Like, he was not in office for a year.

• 37:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, he had died within less than a year of this correspondence.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, but Brezhnev, yes, yes.

• 37:35Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. So Brezhnev is the leader of the Soviet Union for 19 months. He dies and is succeeded by Andropov, who dies after 15 months, which is in February of 1984, less than a year after Samantha's letter. Then we have Chernenko, who dies within 13 months. And then finally, we get Gorbachev, who Rosenfeld writes to. And the, one of the things that does seem to weirdly be true about how all this unfolded is that Reagan, I think just through not having a mind that operated on a bigger scale than this, was like, I just want to sit down with the leader of the Soviet Union. And then Gorbachev was like, yes, I am, I am a friendly guy.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  As you can tell. Before we move on too much, the one thing I do remember about the 80s more than anything is going to temple. And every week, there would be a new bar mitzvah. And just about every week, there would be an adopted Russian Jewish child who could not be bar mitzvahed in their home country and were not allowed to leave. And so therefore, whoever was doing their haftora would be doing it in the honor of this other sad Soviet Jew as well.

• 39:01Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. And if you have a, I mean, speaking of creating a feeling of connection between children in other countries, what effect did that have on you?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it definitely, in my little child's mind, it's like, why, why aren't they allowed to go? Like, they want to be here having a bar mitzvah and getting little shots of manishevitz served in a little cup. And if that's what they want to do with their religious freedom, then what's the holdup, you know?

• 39:33Sarah Marshall?

  What was your sense of the Soviet Union at that time, where, you know, kind of getting through the 80s?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Very much the way that my temple in the 80s would talk about the Middle East. Same kind of thing. Kind of subhuman, run by absolute lunatics who had it in for us and hated freedom and hated America. And one of the things that I always, from the TV footage I watched, it seemed like there was no color there. That everybody was dressed in browns and muted tones. And Samantha's trip highlighted that there is nature, there is greenery.

• 40:22Sarah Marshall?

  They're like the things that are cropped outside of the image that you're shown to give you. The same way that like, in like, the early 2000s, if like, a spy show had a scene set in the Middle East, they would open with like, a guy singing in a way they deemed to be Middle Eastern sounding, and like, a camel and a mirage ripple effect. And it was like, yep, it's not like they have KFCs there or anything.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 40:48Sarah Marshall?

  Which is, you know, the marker of, I think, true cultural connection.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Speaking of that, of course, pop culturally, in the 80s, the villain was always a Soviet spy.

• 41:02Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Well, and then you've got Oh my gosh, you know, the big blonde scary guy in one of the Rocky sequels who

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Dolph Lundgren.

• 41:10Sarah Marshall?

  Like punches Apollo Creed's head off. Yeah. And this idea, and I mean, this came up in the skating narratives of the time too, where we always had like the spunky American facing off against someone representing the Soviet Bloc of like the spunky all-American versus the specter of pure iron will and discipline skating for the Soviet Union. And they always won, by the way, you know?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:36Sarah Marshall?

  It was very tough to compete. And of course, what you learn later, and we probably knew at the time, is that like, you know, the very young people often who were competing for the Soviet Union were doing so in an attitude of a lot of fear and anxiety because of how they would be treated if they didn't show well when they represented not just their nation, but the whole concept of communism, because we were having this sort of like, I mean, really, just like the Cold War was a decades-long dick fight about which way of living is best. And it's like, I don't know, it all, it's really more, more about execution than anything else. We all, a lot of us seem to be-

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's not ideology.

• 42:22Sarah Marshall?

  None of us are doing a perfect job. I'll tell you that much. I mean, the, I, the nice thing about America historically, and certainly in the late 20th century, is that we have had less secret police, less detainment of random people for no stated reason, less secrecy and spying, we hope. But we seem to be, you know, trying to, to compete now. And you can see how it is useful to have some sense of what your country's ideals are, even if you don't see them being held to all the time. I mean, how do you, speaking of kind of growing into cynicism, how do you feel about that path and

• 43:03Sarah Marshall?

  what you need to see in the world to sort of get through your daily life?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Sarah, I should say, my book isn't all about cynicism. It's more-

• 43:14Sarah Marshall?

  No, it's about so many other things.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  One of the ways that I sold this book-

• 43:20Sarah Marshall?

  It's about Barney's, for example.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, indeed. It's you're wrong about but for my life, for every assumption that I was wrong about.

• 43:31Sarah Marshall?

  We are wrong about Maris.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  And I think that while my trust in American institutions as a whole is almost gone, and that has certainly led to some cynicism, it's also just changed my ambitions for what I want to see succeed in their place. And I think especially going back to the insulin question. It was when I realized that politicians can tweet about it all they want from both sides over and over again, many times. But until someone actually does something about it, we diabetics have to send insulin

• 44:20Speaker 01

  to our fellow diabetics who are in need of it, because that's the only way that anything's ever really going to get done.

• 44:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and I think that there's, to lose belief in institutions is not remotely the same thing as losing belief in the human.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, worth remembering. Well, and so tell me about, tell me first of all, the, again, the title and author of this book that you showed me and then.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 44:44Sarah Marshall?

  Because tell me about what you learned and kind of, yeah, your thoughts about Samantha Smith and what it feels like to learn about her. And then, if you will, what happens next for her, because she does get a response to her letter and it leads into an interesting next chapter.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Truly, yeah. This is America's Youngest Ambassador. It's written by Lena Nelson, who was a child growing up in Russia at the time that Samantha Smith is coming over. And just like the absolute hero worship on their end, on the Soviet end, that.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Samantha's letter does first get printed in Pravda.

• 45:23Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  And that leads her to ask why she hasn't gotten a response.

• 45:29Sarah Marshall?

  Which is a good question, because if it's in the newspaper, then like, you know, you know, they've received it.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  They've received it. And Andropov writes back to Samantha and invites her to come to the USSR. He also says that she resembles Becky from Tom Sawyer.

• 45:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which is like, I can't think of a single character trait Becky has, to be honest. It's, uh, it's been a while.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  She's an American girl who's tennis, I think.

• 45:59Sarah Marshall?

  Perfect.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Seems like that's her main thing. And of course, he says, like, yeah, I don't want to start a war. I want peace, which you gotta say. But she goes. She and her parents go to Soviet Russia for two weeks.

• 46:20Sarah Marshall?

  And it's paid for by the government, right?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  The Soviet government.

• 46:25Sarah Marshall?

  By the Soviet government, yeah, which is, you know.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  They did get permission from the State Department. They just, they wanted to like, at least clear it.

• 46:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, cuz they're, I mean, cuz the thing is at that, I mean, what it feels important to stress maybe is that there is this aphorism that I'm fond of, because only Nixon can go to China, right? That Nixon is sort of this conservative, not someone who's going to be suspected of being too much of a dove in the sort of, you know, at that time Communist China and the United States negotiations. He's the one who's able to go and make that venture because everyone knows he's such a dick. It's not too scary to think of Nixon there. That's maybe not everyone would give that exact summary of what that means. But, you know, but then you also have this, I think, this class of diplomat or diplomatic figure at this time.

• 47:19Sarah Marshall?

  And going back to skating, this also similar to the situation with skating and gymnastics during this period. And these sports that center on young women or really young girls in the cases of, you know, Nadia Komenich and Olga Korbut, for example. That you have this kind of this young female, almost diplomatic figure, whether she's simply representing what your country is supposed to be about, or in this case, actually has access. I mean, I, the thing that I can't stop thinking about at this point is that I think Samantha Smith had, you know, despite the concerns, and I'm sure that these are extremely well founded, that she was being given essentially

• 48:04Sarah Marshall?

  the like congressional tour of Jonestown, where you have a very curated

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 48:08Sarah Marshall?

  view of like, oh yeah, every, look at that. Everyone's happy and certainly eating enough. Go back and tell your country that. But also still that she, you know, she went to kind of a children's summer camp. She met other kids. She developed friendships and came back, I think, able to articulate seemingly in part, or in large part because of that trip, this belief in children needing to encounter and befriend each other across these diplomatic lines that had been drawn around them by adults. And that if you look at the world now, that still is, I think, there's a lot of things that we need. But I think that, I do think that is one of them.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Samantha advocated, after she got back from the Soviet Union, she advocated for a granddaughter exchange program, which is like the cutest, most eighties idealistic little girl thing to advocate for. But, but there's some truth in it. If a Russian child, just somebody's granddaughter, maybe not a professional athlete, could just come to America, the Americans could see that child and realize that that child is a child, like other children. But that we are a society made up of humans all over the globe.

• 49:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Every single country you're gonna go to. And I think that's a real simple lesson that still gets lost.

• 49:41Sarah Marshall?

  Do you ever think about the time, I don't know, like 10 years ago, Ben Affleck was on one of Bill Maher's stupid shows and Bill Maher was trying to imply that like, I don't know, all Islamic culture is somehow terrorism adjacent. And Ben, Ben Affleck, I can't stress this enough, was like, that's bullshit, Bill Maher. Like, most people just want to live and take care of their families and eat sandwiches, basically. He definitely said the thing about sandwiches. And like, it couldn't be more true. I really, I think.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 50:11Sarah Marshall?

  And will never stop thinking. Yeah. Well, and can you actually read us some of that speech? Because this is, she's, is it like, it's an international children's conference in Japan that she's invited to?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:25Sarah Marshall?

  The thing is, too, she's also funny. And you know who else was funny? Helen Keller doesn't get enough credit for it. Very funny person and funny kid. But she like, starts to speak and she's like, my apologies, my dad helped me write the speech and he doesn't speak any Japanese.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:44Sarah Marshall?

  I think like, I mean, wherever you think is good, but I like the sort of thing about like, the computers in 2001, you know, that idea.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, yes, I love that. So this is from the Children's Symposium on the Year 2001, held in Kobe, Japan in 1983. I have to begin with an apology. My father helped me with my speech and look, I discovered that he doesn't know a single word of Japanese. Luckily, I have learned some of your language since I got here and I've been trying to learn as much as possible. So let me begin by saying, nihon, I'm not gonna try, sir.

• 51:25Sarah Marshall?

  I know. Let's actually, let's skip ahead.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 51:30Sarah Marshall?

  Let's see. I think.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Oh, when I close my eyes and.

• 51:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I like that. I was just looking at that. Yeah, that's perfect.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  When I close my eyes and think about the future, this is what I see. I see a computer. Oof, she was so right. And stored in that computer is information on exactly how much food there is in the world. It tells where there are large crops. It tells where the wheat supply is good for that year, and also about the crops of corn and rice and potatoes. And it won't forget the beef and poultry and fish. This computer will also show where the people are who don't have enough food. By the year 2001, the computer can also tell us where the ships and airplanes are that can take the food from where it is directly to the people who need it. In my computer of the year 2001,

• 52:23Speaker 01

  it also says where the wood for houses and the steel and concrete for building can be found, and it shows where the work are for the building the new houses and roads and hospitals and schools and factories. And when I close my eyes, guess what? I know how to work that computer and match up all the things that will be needed for the people who will need them. And soon we will know how to move one to the other regardless of what country they're in or what borders have to be crossed. And it's like, didn't you, I, I, I for sure thought by now we'd have that all figured out.

• 52:59Sarah Marshall?

  I know. Well, and the thing is that, you know, there was, I think, a time when it was like, boy, if only we had that information, we sure would use it for good. And now it's like, no, it turns out, and we kind of knew this back then too, but now we really know that like, a few people make a lot of money by creating artificial shortages of things that there are plenty of, including wheat.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:22Sarah Marshall?

  And I don't know, it's, I feel like I don't want to look at this kind of idealism that you can see in a child and say that it's incorrect because it isn't. It does make the most sense. Like it is what people should do. And the fact that we don't do it, isn't proof that we can't do it. It's just that, I think maybe one of the things that this makes me think about is that we were, you know, people in my generation, your generation, the sort of overlap in there. And maybe kids always get told that they are the ones who need to change the world on a global scale. And there are ways that they can do that and that. Children like Samantha Smith have done that and continue to do that because she

• 54:05Sarah Marshall?

  has a legacy. She inspired a foundation that led to children kind of having a grandchild exchange, not exactly grandchild exchange, but something approaching what she envisioned. And, and yet also that just sort of the ongoing care and protection that we offer each other on a more everyday level is also just as important and often what sustains us more than, than these big moments, or that, you know, that change happens through friendship much more than through policy in many ways.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  100%. And I think that right now and in my book, you know, it is really about the idea of community, that when we see other people as our problem, I don't mean that in a bad way, just like when we care about other people, the world becomes so much stronger.

• 55:06Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. I'm looking for a, a section of this, uh, this speech I'd also like you to read. Let's see. Okay. Can we start with what I wish for is something I'll call the International Granddaughter Exchange?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:21Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  What I wish for is something I'll call the International Granddaughter Exchange. I guess if I were a boy, I'd call it the International Grandson Exchange, but I'm not a boy, so I'll stick with granddaughter. The International Granddaughter Exchange would have the highest political leaders in nations all over the world, sending their granddaughters or nieces, or okay, grandsons and nephews, to live with families of opposite nations. Soviet leaders' granddaughters would spend two weeks in America. American leaders' granddaughters would spend two weeks in the Soviet Union. And wherever possible, granddaughters of other opposing countries would exchange visits and we would have a better understanding all over the world.

• 56:07Sarah Marshall?

  The security implications are quite staggering on it, but the general gist I love.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  The Secret Service would be, uh, yes.

• 56:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, we can skip. I'm not going to make you try and read Japanese.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 56:22Sarah Marshall?

  We can skip to last summer.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Last summer, I had the amazing chance to visit the beautiful and awesome Soviet Union. I loved making friends with those girls and boys, and I think they enjoyed meeting an American kid. Let's keep doing it. Let's find a way to get some of those girls and boys to visit Japan and America and China and Peru. And let's find a way for you to visit Soviet kids and American kids, kids who can't speak a word of Japanese, even kids who drive in American cars.

• 56:53Sarah Marshall?

  Ha, ha, ha, ha.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  If we start with an international granddaughter exchange and keep expanding it and expanding it, then the year 2001 can be the year when all of us can look around and see only friends, no opposite nations, no enemies, and no bombs.

• 57:13Sarah Marshall?

  And I was thinking recently too about the kind of like, the optimism that I remember from the late 90s and this idea of the new millennium as something where we had reached a time where we had the technology to be united as a globe. Like that was a feeling that a lot of people had. And what I find interesting is that it might be the kind of conventional narrative to be like, yeah, and then nine 11 happened. And we realized we were all idiots for thinking that. And it's like, well, not, I mean, actually, we all arguably used it as an excuse to pretend that that was a ridiculous thing to believe. And I don't think it was a ridiculous thing to believe. I think that it's, you know,

• 57:51Sarah Marshall?

  it's difficult to try to bring about less war and less suffering and less humanitarian crises on a global scale. And global terrorism is one of the things that you have to learn how to deal with. But using a terrorist act against your country as an excuse to believe in the annihilation of your enemies forever and ever after that seems like it doesn't ultimately benefit anybody. It also occurred to me as we were talking before, there's this whole, you know, it's like shorthand in newspapers, the hawk and the dove. Do you want to attack other countries or do you want to let other countries attack you? And it's like, neither bitch. I'm a crow. I'm collecting shiny objects. I'm cunning, but I don't start stuff.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  I love that. Yeah. And certainly after nine 11, I remember that if you weren't a hawk, you were unpatriotic.

• 58:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And if you didn't agree ultimately to believe that we needed to go to war with Saddam Hussein for reasons that were technically unrelated to September 11th, but which everyone all but told us were revenge based, even though they were not, they were profit based.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:06Sarah Marshall?

  And it was like, basically treasonous to point out that we were brainwashing people as best we could into participating in war for the enrichment of the 1%, especially the oil company holding class by using a sense of justifiable fear and trauma against people ultimately in order to get them to act against their best interests. And really like the, the American foreign policy and domestic policy response to the threat of terrorism, such as it is, which has always been pretty minimal in this country. And we have a lot more to worry about clearly now from Christian nationalists and the kind

• 59:46Sarah Marshall?

  of people who bomb abortion clinics. But the way that we respond to threats as a country is what ultimately defines us. And I think that, you know, comparing kind of post nine 11 America to Cold War America is, I don't know, it's, you can't, I'm not here to make any comparisons in terms of better or worse, but you know, to speak of this being a time when our president, George W. Bush, was talking about going to war against terror, just the feeling, just no more terror ever again. I always found that funny. It's like, we're all going to be scared for the rest of our lives. You can't stop that from happening. It's the kind of thing you say when you're never going to go into therapy.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  And of course, that's what 15 years after the war on drugs.

• 1:00:32Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It's like, we gotta stop. And then, you know, the war on poverty, which we'd, I think, declared over a little bit too fast. And as far as I can tell, we could have stuck that one out for longer. But yeah, we gotta stop waging war against these amorphous concepts.

• 1:00:49Sarah Marshall?

  We also, of course, famously referred to terrorists as evil doers, I think, during the Bush administration. And as you mentioned before, so Samantha Smith is in the news in the United States and the Soviet Union in April of 1983. And it is in March of 1983 that Reagan, feelings apparently still hurt from getting rebuffed by the Kremlin, calls the Soviet Union an evil empire. He's giving a speech where he talks about, you know, this isn't about two countries of equal merit who can't come to an agreement. This is a good country and an evil country. And it's like, well, yeah, like, I didn't, we don't need to say that everybody involved in every international dispute has like equal legs to stand on, because that's generally not true. And there are American values worth

• 1:01:32Sarah Marshall?

  protecting and defending, although not as many as we seem to think. Yes. But also, saying that everything about the country you are in opposition to and the way that its people live, not its leaders, its people, who all this is really about. Yes. That everyone there is evil, or that the way of life is so fundamentally evil, that the people in that country can't possibly be understood by us. The president at this point is doing less for foreign policy than a 10-year-old girl going on 11, you know? It's just the truth. Absolutely. And that's, I guess, my big conclusion, which is that I had a childhood misunderstanding

• 1:02:13Sarah Marshall?

  that Samantha Smith, a young girl like me, had done something instrumental in ending the Cold War. And now, looking back, I'm like, no, she did, though, I think, because she was the person who, when the president was not doing it, you know, despite the imperfection of any diplomatic mission, was able to show Americans images of normal Soviet citizens, normal adults and kids and people who

• 1:02:42Sarah Marshall?

  As you talk about this book explaining, say the author's name again.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  The author is Lena Nelson, who is the person who set up that website that we're referring to.

• 1:02:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And she writes in this book about like realizing there was no Samantha Smith website and no source for Samantha Smith documents, right? And she had like, as a child, started a scrapbook of Samantha Smith and the news. And I wonder if Americans being able to see that people in the Soviet Union loved Samantha the way that we, America, loved her, that allowed us to see that maybe we might understand the people over there better than we thought that we might.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, you know, I'm sure we'll, we'll get to this, but Greta Thunberg, doing this kind of work now, hits so many of the same marks.

• 1:03:34Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. And it makes me think that in another world Samantha Smith might have ended up also getting arrested and illegally detained in international waters by the state of Israel. Yeah.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:46Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and so why don't we watch, because I want to look at some footage and for people to hear some. Samantha Smith comes back from her and her family's tour of the Soviet Union. It's huge news in the US. It's huge news there. I believe there have to be multiple kids making scrapbooks about her because this is how kids learn about the world. And then she comes back and is on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I also love, at the start of the story, she went on Nightline. And when I think Ted Koppel thanks her for coming on, he's like, thank you for coming on. And she's like, you're welcome. What I was struck by about this appearance, she, she's here on The Tonight Show, it's July

• 1:04:27Sarah Marshall?

  1983, she's with Johnny Carson, who's got just sort of, I don't know, a little bit of an intense energy in that late night talk show host kind of a way. And you realize that she's like actually pretty nervous. And she takes a couple of minutes to kind of like warm up and get used to it. But then she like, she's doing it. She's on The Tonight Show.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  She's doing it.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Now, they tell me the, the subway, did you get a chance to see any of the subways at all?

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Tell me about those, tell me about it. They say they're gorgeous.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  They are really.

• 1:04:58Sarah Marshall?

  Talking about the subway stations.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  On the ceilings, they're painted, um, like little tiles, you know, the rocks.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Right, like little murals or something?

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, and pictures painted of war or something, showing the miseries or something like that.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  And then other ones, other subway terminals are painted white and gold. And it just, it looks just like a really expensive church or something.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  That's what I hear, they say they're beautiful. Do they actually have chandeliers hanging in the subways?

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Yes, they do.

• 1:05:32Sarah Marshall?

  I love how he's like, tell me what things look like, nobody knows.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  Chandeliers?

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Chandeliers.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Wonder how long those would last in New York?

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  We have, we have paintings in New York subways also.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Number five aerosol can.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Now you took some presents, t-shirts and stuff and so forth. You got a lot of things too, didn't you?

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  What, what did you get?

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  Well, a lot of it, I'm jealous of some of the kids because they're, they sew so well. I got lots of stuffed animals that were sewn by them by hand.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  And they look like they were just bought in a store. They're really good.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you got some stuffed animals?

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  And then I got books about Russia.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  And mostly books and stuffed animals.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  And, oh, I did get a Russian beauty costume.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Russian beauty costume?

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  That's nice.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  You might, somebody might have seen it on TV. It's got like a, sort of like a crown.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  And then a dress.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Yes, they're very, very lovely costumes. Have they got any girls as pretty in Russia as you are?

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  I think most of them are prettier.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Really? Oh, they must be knockout sent. Somebody told me you went to, was it a summer camp? Or a version of the summer camp for a few days with a?

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Um, art tech.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  And I was really surprised. Usually I'm really shy to meet new kids. And, but I was so surprised as soon as I touched the ground from getting down the stairs off the plane, they grabbed me and pulled me onto the bus.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So kids are pretty much the same everywhere, you think, huh?

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, you didn't get to meet Yuri Andropov, did you? What did they tell you was going on? Why didn't you get a chance to meet him?

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  They just said that he was too busy.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Just.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Too busy.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess world leaders get pretty busy sometimes.

• 1:07:30Sarah Marshall?

  What does it feel like to watch her on The Tonight Show?

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  You can feel her nerves, right?

• 1:07:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  I feel like a stage mom, sort of like, hoping that she's gonna be able to pull through.

• 1:07:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And then, when she does get off a zinger, or like,

• 1:07:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  smiles in a way that's incredibly endearing, it's so lovely. Especially when Johnny Carson isn't being creepy to her.

• 1:08:01Sarah Marshall?

  I know. And then there's the feeling of like, oh my god, she's in the world of creeps now.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Truly.

• 1:08:07Sarah Marshall?

  That's called showbiz, yeah. But what's so strange about it, and amazing, is that, you know, like, they had, I think Drew Barrymore went on The Tonight Show when she was a little kid. Like, you would have children on occasionally on shows like this. And I'm sure there still are on late night shows where like, they would be kind of treated as a sideshow attraction, you know? It would be like, you know, treated affectionately, but as if they were like a dog that was doing somersaults or something. And in this case, there is that attitude. And then it will switch to like, a genuine question about like, do they have chandeliers in the subway stations? We have literally no other way of knowing. Did you see this with your own eyeballs? And she's like, yeah, I did. And it's like, well,

• 1:08:50Sarah Marshall?

  let's add that to the very short list of things we know about the Soviet Union, you know? That she's like, she is an actual diplomat in this situation, you know? That it's like, no matter how self-serving you imagine the goals of the adults who brought her to this level of prominence might be, and if we're talking about politics and media, then, you know, the sky's the limit.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Sarah Marshall?

  Still, like, she has real power and is using it, again, I think, a lot better than the president.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Amen to that.

• 1:09:23Sarah Marshall?

  And the story has a really sad ending, which is that there's a producer who's looking for a child actress to play a role in his new show, which is going to be called Lime Street. It's about an insurance investigator who gets up to, I guess, all kinds of actiony adventures. He has two daughters. One is Maya Bruton from Adventures in Babysitting. And this guy's brother sees Samantha on The Tonight Show and is like, you should look into casting that girl. She's great. And so she does end up cast on the show. They film it in London. And then on a break from filming, a couple of years later, this is the summer of 1985, she and her father are headed home and they're on a small commercial plane

• 1:10:08Sarah Marshall?

  that crashes short of the runway and kills everyone on board. And so she didn't live to see even the beginning of the end of the Cold War in the United States. And I wonder, Maris, if that's something that you remember.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  That I don't remember quite as much. But how devastating.

• 1:10:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  And she did at least get a hero's send off. And Ronald Reagan then finally did write to her, to her mother.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Better late than never.

• 1:10:47Sarah Marshall?

  He was too intimidated by how much better she was at diplomacy. I tend to imagine.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. She writes a letter, Jane Smith, Samantha's mom,

• 1:10:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  writes a letter back to him. And she says, in your telegram, you mentioned that people will remember and cherish Samantha's idealism. Too often that term is equated with naivete. But in Samantha's case, her father and I felt that her dream of a peaceful relationship between the United States and Soviet Union was based on the most practical of all considerations.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  It's like, good, you got the last word in, Jane.

• 1:11:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I think that that should be our last word, too. And I, again, I, going back to her original letter, one of the things I love about it is that it is written just with this true sense of urgency, which is the only really reasonable response to the situation, which is like, what are you planning to do? You need to tell me what your plans are because I need to know and I have a right to know as a child who would like to grow up in this world. And I think I just want maybe people to, as we leave this story, to think about how we often will try and dismiss idealism or a belief that things could be better

• 1:12:10Sarah Marshall?

  or a belief in what we are able to do for each other as people. Many people have tried to teach us that that kind of belief is stupid or wrong or simply too naive. And it's not. Believing that your oppressors will reward you is, uh, is the only naive thing. Tell me what, what you're gonna take from this story.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  I think that part of my book is about learning to feel okay with the fact that I was intensely idealistic as a child and was constantly told that I was naive. And then grew up and realized that, yes, I was naive in, in many, many, many ways. But now more than ever, connection with other human beings is the thing that makes me feel most hopeful about the world. And having that hope, you know, it's like climate change activists say,

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  without having some hope, what are we even striving for?

• 1:13:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah, and I also just think children, children are living in a world clearly where adults do a lot of terrible things in their name all the time. And I think that just for today, let's balance that out by listening to them. And if we're in that position, and you're very lucky if you are, to nurture that hope within them, or to listen to the hopes of the child that you once were and still are, and encourage your kid to write letters.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:14:01Sarah Marshall?

  It matters what you think, and it matters what children think, not just the things that we want to use them as an excuse to do, but what they actually think and believe and know about their lives, and what they recognize about the world that we have become too desensitized to put into words, they can. So let's pay attention to what they're actually saying, and not just use them as a reason to pass another terrible law. Maris, this is, thank you for just joining me in this journey, and thank you for, I just love getting to learn about anything with you, but especially learning about Samantha Smith, talking about Lena Nelson's book, talking about this kind of community that

• 1:14:42Sarah Marshall?

  I think that she wanted to build in her lifetime that goes on, it means a lot to me, and especially getting to do it with you.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Me too. Sarah, you know, I'm a long, long, long time fan, so it's, it's really an honor to be here.

• 1:15:00Sarah Marshall?

  And I'm such a fan of yours. And one last thing, in the words of Columbo, Maris, you have a book out. What's the name of your book? Where can people find you? Where can they get more of your wonderful flavor?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, my book is called, I Want to Burn This Place Down, and it's available wherever books are sold. But, you know, if, if you have the means, not doing it from Amazon would be wonderful. I also have a newsletter called The Maris Review.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  Because I like puns and that's where I keep track of all the books I read and my thoughts about the publishing industry and media. And that's just themarisreview.com.

• 1:15:41Sarah Marshall?

  And you also had a longstanding podcast called The Maris Review, Author Interview Podcast. And that is just my favorite title of any podcast. I don't think I've told you that, but it's just like, we're done here. There isn't a better one out there. It's over. And, you know, that we have this resource that you have created of getting to have, I feel like listening to an interview with an author about their work is like having your, when it's great, and on your show, it is, is like having your brain cleaned with an ostrich feather, in the best way. That might sound bad. It's good.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  You like ostrich feathers. Yeah.

• 1:16:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. It's just like, there's a degree of specificity in talking about language and the things we can do with it, that when you get to hear two writers talk to each other, it just feels amazing. And, yeah, thank you for, thank you for everything that you make. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for just finding the joy, as you do in your book, and as you have here with me today, and just continuing to live here in this world and get to know each other.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Sarah. This was great.

• 1:16:55Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you so much. Let's go have a lovely snack. What are you gonna have when we get off this call?

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Ooh, probably a couple of string cheeses. That is not a lovely snack, but...

• 1:17:09Sarah Marshall?

  I just had cheese before this call. It's no, string cheese is pretty lovely, you know, I mean, really, it's, it's food and entertainment at once. What else can you say that about?

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  What are you gonna have?

• 1:17:20Sarah Marshall?

  I'm gonna have a big bowl of ramen, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

• 1:17:42Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you to Maris Kreizman, both for being on this show with us and for writing her wonderful new book, I Want to Burn This Place Down. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing and producing. Learn more at mariskreizman.com. Subscribe to Maris's newsletter there, The Maris Review. It is as delightful as she is. And also, again, check out samantha smith.info. There is so much lovingly archived information there. And thank you again to Leema Nelson for her book, America's Youngest Ambassador. And thank you, most of all, for listening. We'll see you next time.