338: The Spokesman

Ira Glass

Adults don't understand anymore what it means to be a nerd. Have you noticed this? Nerd, somehow, has become a badge of honor. You meet all kinds of people who say, proudly, that they were nerds in high school. It's like anybody who had anything that made them feel different now says that they were a nerd.

And that population-- the population that thinks that it was different-- that's like, everybody who went to high school. You know? People who were chubby, people who were in band, people who liked comic books, people who just didn't drink. I've met people who were actually popular, who actually had a social circle and boyfriends or girlfriends, who now claim they were nerds. That is just wrong.

I believe that we have forgotten the sweaty, unsexy, cringe-inducing face of hard core nerdom.

Ira Glass

That's David Iserson. When he was 13, David got a chance to change schools, leave the tiny school where everybody had known him since he was five, and start all over at a big public school where nobody knew him. And he had a very clear strategy for how he was going to create a glorious new life for himself.

Ira Glass

And for a few months it worked. But David didn't just want to be invisible. He also wanted to be an actor. I know. Complete contradiction. He was 13, remember.

He'd had a small part in Guys and Dolls at summer camp. He played a boy who talked to whales in this tiny community theater. And a couple times a week, his grandmother would drive him to auditions for TV commercials, though he never got cast in anything. Then, his dad came to him with a proposition.

His dad worked in the family business, this furniture store called Silvert's Furniture. And they'd just added a room full of desks, and beds, and shelving that was designed specifically for teenagers.

Ira Glass

He was flattered. He was thrilled. And they shot the ad. Which was a gas.

Ira Glass

For somebody who wanted to stay invisible, it is hard to imagine how this particular ad could have been worse for him. Everybody saw it. In the commercial David has an air of perfectly cheerful naivete.

In the first shot, he crosses the screen, careful to never stop facing the camera as he does this. Cut to him putting his school books onto a table. Cut to him lying on a bed on his stomach. In one shot he nods knowingly to the audience.

Ira Glass

He says that a day did not go by for the next year without somebody mentioning the ad. Strangers, his friends, even adults. One teacher tried to get him to quote the commercial in a school play.

The ad ran a lot during New York Rangers hockey games. If you know anything about Rangers fans, this is maybe the least hospitable possible audience for an ad featuring a pompadour-wearing 13-year-old. These huge guys, men, would stop David and make him perform the ad for their girlfriends.

David always tried to protect himself by telling people that the stuff that he said in the commercial-- the way the he acted-- the store made him do all that. But, um, that wasn't true. He had written the whole thing himself.

And when he watched the ad, it was actually a profound thing for him. He thought, this is how I seem to people? This is how it comes across when I talk?

Ira Glass

But whatever it did to his personal life and to the way that he saw himself, the ad worked. It got people into the store. It ran for years. He was a successful spokesman, which is the subject of today's program. From Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

Today on our show, The Spokesman. A program in three acts. We have a story where some people refuse to believe that a certain spokesman is an actual, real person. Adamantly refuse, to the point where it becomes a real public fight. That story from Jon Ronson, in Act One.

In Act Two, we have the story of a teenage spokesman whose private life is the exact opposite, almost, of what he seems like in public. And in Act Three, a very unusual look inside the life of a presidential spokesman. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, What Part of "Bomb" Don't You Understand?" Jon Ronson has this story about somebody who becomes a spokesperson entirely by accident.

A quick warning to people who are listening to our show on the internet, on our podcast or by streaming. For the internet version of this show, we have left in-- this is an experiment for us-- we have left in one curse word that occurs at a crucial moment in the story. Versus the broadcast version, where we bleeped it out. Here's Jon.

Jon Ronson

One morning two years ago, Rachel North, who works in advertising, got on the Piccadilly Line tube at Finsbury Park, in north London.

Jon Ronson

Three years earlier, Rachel had been violently attacked by a stranger in her home. In July, 2005, she wrote an article about the attack in Marie Claire magazine. That's what she was doing the moment the bomb exploded, standing on a packed tube train, reading the Marie Claire article about her violent attack. As she lay on the ground she thought, not again.

Jon Ronson

There had been three simultaneous bomb explosions on London Underground trains around 9:00 AM and one more on a bus an hour later. 56 people were killed, including the four suicide bombers who were all from England, and one was a primary school teacher. 700 people were injured.

Rachel had a bad gash full of glass on her wrist, which was so deep she could see her bone. But she was what paramedics call walking wounded. When she got home from the hospital a few hours later, she took a shower and tried to sleep. But she couldn't. So instead she got up and went online to her favorite web site, a large London community message board.

There were hundreds of messages about the bombs already. But none had been written by someone who had actually been a passenger on a bombed train. She began posting.

Jon Ronson

She wrote and wrote, day after day. A flood of blog postings. The BBC discovered her blog and published it on their website. Her accounts of the July 7 bombings became one of the most read, and most beautifully written, on the internet.

Jon Ronson

Rachel started getting emails from other survivors who had seen her blog. These were people like her, who had walked away that day in a daze, and just tried to get on with their lives. But they discovered they were experiencing much the same post traumatic symptoms.

Jon Ronson

Rachel organized for them all to meet in a pub together once a month. They formed a kind of unofficial support group and called themselves Kings Cross United. The media found out about them and thought it was a good story. So they needed a spokesman. Rachel had a background in advertising, and now she was quite a famous blogger. And she was able to hold it together in public. So she was the obvious candidate.

She carried on writing her blog. And this is when it started getting a bit strange. People she didn't know began posting weird, cryptic comments she didn't quite understand on her site.

Jon Ronson

There's a small but loud group of July 7 conspiracy theorists who believe that an accidental power surge had coursed through the London Underground that day, and that the British government wanted to cover up this corporate manslaughter by blaming it on Islamic suicide bombers.

On the site that Rachel found, a poster had quoted one of her original descriptions of her experience, where she writes about the electricity being cut out and the train descending into total darkness. The poster used her writing as evidence to support this power surge theory.

As Rachel read all of this stuff, she wondered how they'd account for the bus bombing. And then she found it. The conspiracy theorists maintained that the bus on Tavistock Square didn't really explode. It was actually a fake stunt using fancy pyrotechnics and stuntmen and actors.

Jon Ronson

And so Rachel felt uncontrollably compelled to do something unwise. She decided to jump into the fray, jump into the lives of the internet conspiracy theorists. She decided to get involved, and try and convince them that their theories weren't true.

Jon Ronson

Rachel believed what most people believe, that the July 7 attacks were the workers of Mohammed Sidique Khan and his three accomplices, and not a conspiracy involving actors and the British government. She told the conspiracy theorists that they were fantasists, and that it wasn't nice to find yourself a character in another person's paranoid fantasy, especially when you've just been blown up on the tube.

But by engaging with them, Rachel herself became part of the conspiracy.

What they were doing to Rachel was incredibly insulting. She'd almost been killed. She runs a support group for people who were almost killed. And now she was getting death threats from the conspiracy theorists. They contacted her parents, who found the whole thing frightening and confusing. So Rachel decided to confront them, face to face.

She went to a meeting where the conspiracy theorists spokesman, David Shayler, was speaking. The floor was opened up for Q and A's. And Rachel raised her hand and argued against the idea that July 7 was an inside job.

Jon Ronson

This is David Shayler, who was on stage that night. He's a former MI5 officer who's jumped sides to become a hero to the conspiracy theorists. He says it's not so crazy to believe that Rachel is the creation of a team of agents from his old organization.

I've crossed paths with the conspiracy theorists myself. I've spoken out against their irrational thoughts. And in retaliation they've set up a discussion thread called "Jon Ronson, shill or stupid?" A shill is a paid stooge.

My experience with them is nothing compared to the abuse and the hate that Rachel incurred. But still, I've had terrible online fights with them. You're probably thinking it's nuts to engage with them. And you'd be right. It is nuts. It does nothing but bad. But when you're inside the bubble, sitting alone in your room, staring at the internet, sometimes it's really hard to control yourself and do the sensible thing.

The conspiracy theorists insist that if I, or Rachel, or anyone else sits down and takes their briefing, we'll agree with them by the end. I think they truly can't imagine it working out any other way. I guess it's pejorative, but the reason why I don't want to take the briefing is because I think the experience would suck the very soul out of my body through my ears.

Ira Glass

Jon Ronson, who did that story, is the author of a book about conspiracy theorists called Them. A version of this story also appeared on his BBC Radio 4 series, John Ronson On.

Coming up, I was a teenage spokesman. Not me, actually, the kid in the story. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show The Spokesman. Stories about what it can be like to be the spokesman.

We've arrived at act two of our program, Act Two, Mr. Successful.

OK. Anybody's who's ever been to a wedding knows that not everybody can stand up in front of a roomful of people and just talk. Well, Anthony Pico discovered by accident, at 15-years-old, that he has a gift for doing that. He's 18 now. And he has become so well-known as a public speaker on the subject of foster care, which he knows well, that he was appointed to the blue ribbon commission that's now aiming to reform the largest foster care system in the country, the one in California, Anthony's home state.

In addition, Anthony still speaks to judges and legislators all over the state and all over the country, to different groups, sometimes every week. But it's gotten complicated. Douglas McGray tells the story.

Douglas McGray

Anthony is at a hotel near San Francisco Airport. He knows the room. Not this one, exactly, but dozens just like it. The long, windowless walls, the bad carpeting, the government officials, social workers, and nonprofit types sitting in quiet rows, as his host wraps up a long interaction.

Douglas McGray

Anthony walks toward the mic. I know what he's thinking right now, because I asked him.

Douglas McGray

Anthony is a steady presence up there, eyes calm and appraising. He doesn't shrink, doesn't hesitate. He just lays out his life.

Douglas McGray

Most kids in foster care couldn't stand up there, talk for an hour with a half page of notes, and own the room the way Anthony does. Most of them are struggling just to hold their lives together. University of Chicago researchers did a massive survey of teens leaving the foster care system at 18. Within a year, nearly 70% had dropped out of high school. Half had lost their health insurance. Almost half the girls had gotten pregnant. One in five kids had spent a night in jail. And 15% had been homeless. What saved Anthony is public speaking. It came easily to him. He has always been a talker.

Douglas McGray

Anthony has the kind of life story you'd expect from a kid in foster care. Born crack-addicted to a mother who disappeared from the hospital just after she gave birth. Never knew his father. Relatives have mostly abused or ignored him. By 15, he was an angry, withdrawn kid. He weighed almost 300 pounds. He hated school, hated his life, thought about killing himself.

Then he started giving speeches, and everything changed. Suddenly foster care wasn't just something happening to him. It was knowledge, knowledge that other people wanted, especially from a teenager who could speak fluent grown-up and who knows how the bureaucracy works and doesn't work.

Douglas McGray

It's the quarterly meeting of California's blue ribbon commission on foster care. Big shots in the state legislature, the courts, foundations, and the University of California have gathered for a couple days in a hotel near LA. They just finished dinner-- white table cloths, steaks, it was a nice spread. Now everyone's milling around, schmoozing, networking. Anthony too.

He's always angling for new speaking gigs.

Douglas McGray

He is especially interested in tonight's guest speaker, an influential judge from Utah. Anthony has two half-siblings in Utah he wants to contact, but they've been adopted and their file is sealed. He wants the judge's help finding them. They end up talking for more than an hour. Anthony keeps up easily, even when the jargon and the acronyms start to span several complicated, overlapping bureaucracies, like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, BIA. Anthony and his siblings are Native American.

Douglas McGray

This is what Anthony has learned in three years of public speaking, how to work the system and his connections to get what he needs. In the end, the judge agrees to help him. Later, he tells me about a time he transferred schools and got stuck halfway. The new school wouldn't let him in. Most foster kids would have stayed home for weeks, maybe longer. And they do. This sort of thing happens all the time.

Douglas McGray

Anythony's gotten good at a lot of things most kids leave to their parents, like finances. During a break, I give him a ride to a cash machine so he can make a deposit. Savings are a huge problem for most kids leaving foster care. But Anthony's banked $10,000, working close to full time at a movie theater.

Alone in his hotel room, Anthony unpacks. He's been on the road all week. He came to LA straight from another speaking appearance outside San Diego. He pulls an armful of conference swag out of his wheeled suitcase. A windbreaker. A travel thermos. A squishy stress ball. He unfolds four or five dress shirts, hangs them in the closet. Then he stops, pushes everything else to the floor, and plops in an overstuffed chair by the window.

He is quiet for a minute. Then he says what's on his mind.

Douglas McGray

At 18, he's almost out of foster care. And when he leaves the system, his days as a spokeskid are pretty much over. All this will end.

The next day, Anthony visits a local prison with the blue ribbon commission. It's a low, sprawling complex. It's looks a bit like an elementary school surrounded by razor wire. We have to go through a security checkpoint. It takes forever.

Once we're through, a man approaches Anthony.

Douglas McGray

Anthony winces. People say stuff like this to him all the time. And he hates it. He doesn't like being called a success story, because he knows there's a big difference between the way people see him and the way his life looks and feels from the inside.

The fact is, Anthony's gone to six high schools in four years. And he's not close to graduating. Most people who meet Anthony have no idea. The few who do are worried and keep nagging him to finish. If you want to drive Anthony crazy, talk about his potential. The word is like an insult to him. A bunch of times, when we talked, he cut me off mid-sentence. You're not going to say potential, are you? Don't say potential. I know, I know, potential. Please don't say anything about my potential.

I hang out with Anthony for a few weeks, trying to understand how this kid who seems like he should be doing great isn't doing well at all. Our relationship settles into a routine. I follow him everywhere with a microphone. He feels free to tell me--

Douglas McGray

He gets a kick out of needling me.

Douglas McGray

God, that still makes me shudder. And he calls me late at night to talk about girls. He is always up late. Sometimes that means grown-ups having to drag him out of bed in the morning, like at a blue ribbon commission meeting that was supposed to start at 8:30 AM.

Douglas McGray

This sort of thing can frustrate the adults who depend on him as a speaker. Despite really good intentions, some of them want it both ways. They want Anthony to speak for kids, but they don't want him to act like one.

The more time I spend with Anthony, though, the harder it is to see anything but a kid.

Douglas McGray

For the last couple years, Anthony's been living on his own in a group home for foster youth near a highway overpass in San Francisco.

Douglas McGray

The dirt is not what gets me. What does is this. The place is crushingly lonely. The neighborhood outside is dead. Anthony's roommates are strangers. Every couple months, someone moves in and someone else moves out. Some are OK. Some pick fights. For the most part, everyone holes up in their locked bedrooms and avoids each other.

Anthony spends his time online, checking email, MySpace, Facebook. When he gets curious who else is home, he flips off the hallway light and looks for a glow under each bedroom door. I start to understand why he travels so much.

Douglas McGray

Most of the time, there is no adult at the group home. None. There's someone there during business hours. But when the kids come home from school or work they're alone. Nobody for advice or protection. Nobody to crack the whip.

Public speaking gave Anthony access to caring adults. He's lucky, kind of. When he's anxious, or facing a big decision, he makes the rounds, asks all the adults he knows what he should do. But the problem is they never agree. And they can't make him do anything. Add them all up and they don't equal even one stable parent.

Back at the hotel, I had watched Anthony put on his tie, and asked who taught him. No one, he said. He stood in front of a mirror one day, knotting and unknotting, until he figured it out. He doesn't have a driver's license. He doesn't really know what it takes to get one. And he doesn't want to go to the DMV alone.

I'm driving Anthony to school. Finally, I'm going to see what happens that keeps Anthony from living up to his-- sorry, Anthony. No other word for this-- potential. I could tell as soon as I had picked him up it was going to be a bad day.

Douglas McGray

Fair enough. Here's the situation. Anthony should be off to a university in the fall. He's fallen a full year behind though. So he enrolled in a couple summer classes at City College to try and catch up. Today is his first day of class. But it isn't the first day of class. That was a week ago. He skipped week one of just a six-week session so he could make his speaking gigs in southern California.

I'm relieved he's finally here. Anthony's a little dismayed about this, but I've become one more adult in his life, all wound up about his high school diploma.

Douglas McGray

He had to skip orientation too. So he's not sure where the classroom is. We start wandering around campus. We go to one office then another. We cross the entire campus twice. Finally, someone points him to a building.

Douglas McGray

The longer we look, the more anxious he gets. And embarrassed. He pokes his head into another classroom.

Douglas McGray

We go outside, stand in a small courtyard, silent for a moment. I don't know what to do. I wonder if I should keep my mouth shut, see what he decides to do on his own. But I can't help it. I try to convince him to go back inside, ask someone else, make a phone call, anything.

Douglas McGray

I don't get anywhere. So we walk to the car and get in.

Douglas McGray

This is the flip side of everything public speaking has given him. At some point, it turned into maybe the biggest obstacle keeping him from graduating. He's made the same choice-- in one form or another-- over and over again. He's put public speaking first and school last.

Speaking, he gets his own hotel room. He gets to spend time with people who appreciate him. He gets to feel mastery over something. He gets to be a star. Going to school, he gets math homework and the feeling of being a screw up. It can't compete.

Douglas McGray

It's not clear to anyone whether Anthony will make it or not. Not to me, not to him. And if he can't make it-- with all his talent and connections, an actual spokesman for foster kids-- you have to wonder, who can?

Anthony is the kind of kid you can find at any high school. That super smart one, who has so much messy, distracting stuff going on outside school that he can't keep it in the background. Anthony's problems are just bigger. And he has nothing like a family to help him through, not even a dysfunctional family. But now that he's 18, he doesn't have much time left to fix things and graduate.

The fact is, foster kids who don't have a diploma when they leave the system almost never get one. Anthony knows he's contributing to his own problems, probably more than anyone else at this point. He also knows that the older he gets, the more he'll be able to mess up his life in a lasting way. He's just not sure he knows how to stop. It's a lot harder than talking about it.

Ira Glass

Douglas McGray, he is a fellow at the New America Foundation. In the year since we first broadcast this story, a lot has changed for Anthony. He met a California legislator. And she took a chance on him, hired him onto her staff, answering phones, helping out. Anthony moved out of the group home, got an apartment, got his GED, and is currently enrolled in community college.

[MUSIC - "BAD MOUTH" BY FUGAZI]

Ira Glass

Act Three, Impeachment Day. Well you can't do a spokesman show without hearing from a presidential spokesman. And there is an unusually candid recording of Joe Lockhart, who did that job for President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2000. Long after Lockhart was out of the White House, he agreed to go on stage as part of The Moth, which is this group that does these great storytelling evenings.

Lockhart went on stage and talked about his early days on the job as White House spokesman.

Joe Lockhart

Just after I started, we went on a trip. We went off to Russia. We were going to Ireland, doing big foreign policy stuff. Trip was going pretty. The last night in Moscow, I was coming into the hotel. And I ran into a friend of mine, an old friend of mine, the godfather to my daughter, I hadn't seen in a couple years. He said, come on, we've got to go out. We've got to go out. And he convinced me, you know, we were going to go see the real Moscow. And we went to-- I'll never forget-- a place called The Hungry Duck.

And they were doing things there that I couldn't take my eyes off, so I had to stay till 5:00 in the morning, which was OK because we weren't leaving till 6:00.

So I got back to my hotel and made one mistake, which was to sit down on the bed. And obviously, I fell asleep. And I'm telling you, you don't know anxiety until you've woken up as the White House press secretary on your first foreign trip at 6:15 in Moscow without a passport, knowing you've missed Air Force One.

Now the only good thing that I could think of--

[LAUGHTER]

The only good thing I think of was the day couldn't get worse. When I finally caught up with the traveling party, I was immediately surrounded by reporters who said, how do you feel about being the first White House press secretary to ever miss Air Force One on a foreign trip? And a strange phrase just caught in my head. And I couldn't lose it.

About a week earlier, the president had been at a prayer breakfast talking about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. And he said, you know, I'm really sorry for what I did. And I'm working very hard to make up for it, particularly to those I've hurt the most. So when I got the question of how do you feel, I said, I'm really sorry for what I've done wrong. And I'm working hard to fix it, particularly those who I've hurt the most.

Now mocking the president of the United States when you make a mistake isn't always the best idea. But it came in my head, and I said it. So anyway, the day went on. And we finally had a little break where the president had some private meetings. And I went to the back of the Irish Ambassador's residence to go to sleep. And I hadn't been asleep for more than five minutes. And I was actually pretty hungover, which was why I needed the sleep. And the president's personal aide came back and said, the president's in a meeting right now. And he wants you to come into it.

Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. But this had practical joke written all over it. And I said, get lost. About three minutes later, he came in and said, hey, the president's in. He's in with the band U2, with Bono, and they want to talk to you.

I said, well, if the president wants to see me, he can walk his presidential ass right back to this room and ask me himself. Well, about 60 seconds later, the presidential ass showed up and said, what is your problem? These guys want to meet you.

So I walked into the meeting. And this guy, this rock star, Bono comes up and gives me this big hug and says, I really want to meet you. And I said, well, that's great Mr. Bono, but why? And he said, anyone who can handle world affairs-- you know, Monica Lewinsky and all that-- and still has time to stay out all night drinking is my kind of guy.

Ira Glass

When he was on stage at The Moth, Joe Lockhart also talked about what it was like to be press secretary the day that Congress voted to impeach the president, December 19, 1998. He had, he said, three things to deal with that day. The impeachment vote, of course. Also the same day, Bob Livingston, the speaker of the House, declared that he'd had an affair and he was going to resign. And so the White House had to beat back the notion that President Clinton should also resign because of Monica Lewinsky. That was just the early afternoon.

Also that day, the Defense Department had bombed Iraq with cruise missiles, because Iraq was not complying with the UN weapons inspections. And Joe Lockhart had to convince the press-- and the country-- that the attacks on Iraq were not a kind of Wag the Dog distraction.

Joe Lockhart

I then had what we call in the business a communications challenge, because we had two things we had to do in the same time space. And we tried to figure out what to do. We had 150 members of Congress down to stand with the president-- Democrats-- and say, this impeachment was all partisan, it's all politics. And then we had to talk about the war.

And I thought, you know what? Sometimes the best thing to do is not worry very much about it, just go out and do it. So out on the south lawn we had the Democrats, very simple message. Partisans, this is politics, Republicans suck. It all went well.

Then we went inside-- only 10 minutes apart, the same podium, just a different room, a different set of flags-- and said, there are no Republicans in this country. There are no Democrats. It's just Americans, and we've won the war. And then the president left, leaving me in the room to explain to 50 waiting reporters how the two things fit together.

And I think it was so audacious that we even took the breath away from the press. And they seemed to let us get away with it. And I remember at the end of this long day, walking across the hall about 20 feet to my office, going in. And one of my closest friends in the White House was there, one of the president's top aides. And he saw me come in. And I sat down. And he went over to the little bar in the office, and got two beers, opened them up, sat down, put his feet up.

And I'll never forget what he said to me, which was, you know, except for getting impeached, we had a pretty good day.

Ira Glass

Joe Lockhart. He's now a consultant in corporate and political messaging in Washington DC. Thanks to The Moth, You can listen to all kinds of stories like this at their website, themoth.org.

And of course, those are the musical stylings of the 42nd president of the United States, recorded in Prague on an official foreign trip.

Our program today was produced by Lisa Pollak and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, John Jeter, Sarah Koenig, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our web site. Production help from Seth Lind and PJ Vogt. Musical help from Jessica Hopper.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who, as always, has this bit of narration to end our program.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.