Interview with Gov. Howard Dean
July 10, 2002
OPENING QUESTION: Champion land deal.
PART I: Life before politics.
PART II: Political career, lighter questions, and views on leadership and politics.
PART III: Some issue questions.

 

PART I - Life before politics.
QUESTION: You mentioned in an earlier interview that your first political memory was when your baby-sitter warned you of the dangers of... 

DEAN: Mao Tse-tung.

Q: Do you have other early political memories.  I have seen written that you were at the '64 Republican Convention.  Was that at the Cow Palace?

DEAN: That was in the Cow Palace.  I remember Scranton being booed and Rockefeller being booed--sort of my introduction to the far right, which has now taken over the Republican party.

Q: What brought you there?  Were you there with your dad?

DEAN: No, somebody said I was there with my father.  That wasn't right.  I was there with a friend of mine from boarding school who lived in California.  He invited the four of us out for a month in the summer and that was what was going on, and his father got us tickets to it so we went.
 

QUESTION: You also mentioned that you worked down in Florida.

DEAN: I worked on a cattle ranch in Florida, in Lake Okeechobee when I was 16.

Q: Was that for summer?

DEAN: Yeah it was a summer job.

Q: What did you learn from that?

DEAN: It was hard work.  Made $1.15 an hour, $1.25 on Sunday.  We worked 6 1/2 days a week and lived by ourselves in an apartment over the ranch house.

Q: What were you doing during the day?

DEAN: We were shoveling you know what, burning up brush to open up fields for the cattle.  We were just the lowest of the low in terms of laborers; we were basically agricultural laborers.  It was my first exposure to Spanish because most of the people who worked on the land had escaped from Cuba and many of them didn't speak English, so we had to learn a little Spanish.

Q: How did you end up down there?

DEAN: One of the people who was down there with us, who was not in our class, was the son of one of the part-time owners.  So he wanted his son to come down and the two of us went along.
 

[Note: In an earlier interview with DEMOCRACY IN ACTION (May 10, 2002), Gov. Dean talked about his first overseas travel...

QUESTION: Your first overseas venture was with the English Speaking Union? 

DEAN: The English-Speaking Union, at age 17.  I lived in England for a year and visited both eastern and western Europe and also North Africa during that time; Turkey as well...  We actually drove through France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, what was then Yugoslavia--which is now Macedonia, Croatia, etcetera, etcetera--Bulgaria, which was very interesting 35 years ago as you can imagine, Greece, and then ended up in Turkey. 

It was a great trip.  Especially as a kid, you just really start to learn about foreign cultures, why people view the United States the way they do and--you know people in the world, especially in developing countries, have a very strong dichotomy of views, inside individuals--they love and admire America on the one hand and they resent its use of power on the other.
 

QUESTION: At Yale [Dean graduated Class of '71] were you at all politically involved?   

DEAN: Not particularly.  I certainly didn't support the war.  Most of my political involvement was I did some tutoring in the inner city and some things like that, but I wasn't active in the political causes of the day...  I had some sort of deep-seated suspicion of extremes on both sides.  I mean I couldn't stand Dick Nixon of course, but I really didn't trust the leadership of the left either. 

Q: How about clubs?

DEAN: No.

Q: How about any professors you remember?

DEAN: There was  a great guy named Ken Mills, who was a radical professor, but who had brains.  We were actually, there was a big huge rally which I went to, it was probably 15,000 people during the Bobby Seale trial, and that was the same weekend that the Kent State murders occurred.  And Ken Mills, who actually I took a course from, was a radical professor from Jamaica who was incredibly bright.  I admired him so much because he cut the rally short and sent us all home.  We had no idea why at the time but they had received word of the Kent State killings that occurred and they realized the place was going to go up in smoke, and it was really smart of him to do that, otherwise there would have been God knows what kind of bloodshed and whatever else.  So I always remember him for that. 

There was a guy named Charlie Reich who I took a course from, who wrote a book called The Greening of America.  That was the great thing about Yale is you could take courses from people like that who were leaders in their fields...

There were two others that come to mind.  One was a guy named Wolfgang Leonard, who had escaped from East Germany, actually a former member of the Politburo in East Germany--had defected and escaped and was teaching a political science course at Yale.  And he said something, which I'm sure was a quote from someplace else but I've never forgotten it because its true of the extremes on both sides.  He said the Pravda lies in such a way that not even the opposite is so.

There's also a guy named Frederick Barghoorn I took a course from who had been imprisoned in the 1950s in the Soviet Union, ostensibly for spying; I doubt very much he was a spy.  It was pretty remarkable to talk to somebody who lived in a Soviet jail during the 1950s. 

And lastly I took a writing course from Jerzy Koszinski, who wrote The Painted Bird.

Q: What was he like?

DEAN: He was just what you'd expect after you read his books.  He also wrote--though The Painted Bird was of course his first book that was a big hit--but the most famous one, which I didn't think was as good, but it was very funny, was Being There.  It's a great book; from a political point of view it's a great book.  And of course the movie with Peter Sellers.  Who can resist Peter Sellers?
 

QUESTION: After Yale I'm not quite clear on whether you went off to become a stockbroker or went to Colorado?

DEAN: I went to Colorado first and then became a stockbroker.

Q: An you were in Vail for a year?

DEAN: Aspen.

Q: Were you just skiing or were you working?

DEAN: No I was working.  First I poured concrete, and then I washed dishes.  Skied during the day.

Q: Did you have any favorite runs out there?

DEAN: I think there was a trail called the North Face, which was great.  It was all the hard stuff.  Silver Queen.  I was a ham down in those days; I was a hot dogger.

Q: Did you get into any hairy situations?

DEAN: Yeah one time there was so much powder I almost drowned.  I fell in the powder on this really steep trail and inhaled...it was really deep.
 

QUESTION: Stockbroker.  I guess that gave you some understanding of what they were talking about today?

DEAN: Right.

Q: What firm were you working for?

DEAN: I was with a company called Clark Dodge, which was subsequently taken over by Kidder and that was subsequently taken over by General Electric Capital.

Q: What was your job?

DEAN: Well first I was just a broker.  I had people's accounts.  It was in the '73-74 recession so that one didn't go very well.  So then I became the assistant to the president of a small mutual fund that the firm had bought.  Which I learned a great deal from.

Q: But after a while you got sick of that?

DEAN: I didn't like living in a city, in a big city.  I'm a country person, an outdoors person.  And I wanted to do something different.  So I had a friend who had gone to medical school after she graduated from college and gone back and taken science courses because she hadn't taken any science courses.  And that sort of inspired me to try it myself.

DEAN: Well first I went to Columbia General Studies, which was a night school.

Q: We're you working during the day?

DEAN: I was working during the day for a while.  And then after the first semester I realized it was going to take me forever so I quit, moved back in with my parents, and then went and took night school full time.

Q: That took a year?

DEAN: Yep.  Chemistry, organic chemistry, biology and calculus.  I loved all of it, believe it or not.  I've always liked science.  I was great at science in high school, I just never took any at Yale, which was a mistake as it turns out...
 

QUESTION: At Albert Einstein, any professors who had a big impact?

DEAN: Yes, the dean, Dominic Purpura.  I met my wife in his class, and he actually absolutely terrified everybody.  He's now the dean, he wasn't then--he was neurobiology.  It was the toughest course in basic studies.  Victor Seidel, the well know community medicine person was our community medicine professor; he and his wife Ruth were just terrific.  Very interesting.  It was actually a great place to go to school because it majorly dominated health care in the South Bronx, or actually all over the Bronx, but particularly in the South Bronx.  So that introduced me to the needs of the inner city again after having taken a hiatus of three years after Yale.
 

QUESTION: You came here [to Vermont]...

DEAN: I came here to do my residency.  I did three years of residency at the University of Vermont Medical Center Hospital.

Q: And after that?

DEAN: Then I established a practice in 1981.

Q: And what was it called?

DEAN: What was the practice called?  Dr. Dean, Dr. Fink and Dr. Steinberg...general internal medicine practice.

Q: I came across a book, Beach Conger Tales of a Vermont Doctor.  Was that what it was like?

DEAN: No.  Beach is a really great storyteller, but no that's not what medical practice is like.  He's very funny.  It was a reasonable medical practice of the kind that you'd find in any small town.

Q: You were there for 13 years?

DEAN: 10 years.

Q: Okay because of the residency.  Did the profession change markedly during that time?

DEAN: Yeah, you know HMOs came in and there was more bureaucracy, more federal bureaucracy.
 


 
OPENING PART I PART II PART III

Copyright © 2002  Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action