Robert Siegel

I wanna talk about the arc of your experience and the wisdom that comes with that.

You started your career at NPR working with Robert Siegel, um, covered some of the nation's most momentous stories.

I actually have a little sound here.

You produced the conversation with then President Bill Clinton.

Literally.

And the Monica Lewinsky story was on the front page, and we knew we had to ask him the question about the story we just read.

And what you just heard was the President of the United States lying to Robert Siegel and lying to the American public live on All Things Considered.

The other piece of that story is that, um, we'd gotten to the White House at about 11:00 AM and expected to tape the interview and bring it back and put it on the air that night.

Yeah.

There was somebody who I really adore, who did a lot of training with reporters and hosts, who said, "When you're on the radio for NPR, you should sound like yourself when you've had the exact right amount of sleep and the exact right amount of caffeine," not like Walter Cronkite, not like Susan Stamberg, not like Robert Siegel, like yourself-

Mm

...

He says that in 1961, his mother went there with his older siblings, quote, with the intention of moving back.

But nearly two years ago, when Rubio was still running for the Senate seat he now holds, he gave All Things Considered host Robert Siegel a very different account of why his mother went back to Cuba with her children.

My grandfather,

who was already had been stricken with polio when he was a young man, had an accident.

It was communism.

which is why his mother decided in March of 1961 to return permanently to the United States with his siblings.

Again, that's at odds with what Rubio told Robert Siegel two years ago.

That wasn't true either.

They still play jazz, they just don't play news.

And so she kind of introduced me to NPR, and I heard Robert Siegel on All Things Considered, and this storytelling style just sort of leaped out.

And so the kid in me that loved theater and the kid in me that liked education and learning both kind of perked up at the same time, and I was like, "Oh my God, I didn't know that this could exist." So it, it sort of was right for me, but I think the fact that it was also a community institution, and I grew up with these kinds of institutions, made it feel like something that was built for me.

I never thought I was gonna end up on NPR.

From NPR News, it's All Things Considered.

I'm Robert Siegel.

And I'm Madeleine Brand.

The National Endowment for the Arts, it's the largest federal funder of the arts.