(bright thoughtful folk music) - [Becky] Sometimes life gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you would do with a clean slate.

Our guest on this episode is Patrick Butler, former president and CEO of America's Public Television Stations.

♪ I've thrown away my compass ♪ ♪ Done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ Looking for direction ♪ ♪ Northern star ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ I'll just step out ♪ ♪ Throw my doubt into the sea ♪ ♪ Oh, what's meant to be will be ♪ - Pat Butler is a native of Tennessee and began his career as a newspaper reporter in Chattanooga.

Always with the heart of a public servant and an innovative leader, he achieved great success in many fields.

During his recent tenure as APTS CEO, Public Television Stations secured record levels of federal and state funding.

Butler also served in a variety of roles, including senior vice president of the Washington Post, where he founded and led Newsweek Productions, and at the Times Mirror, where his work evolved into the Pew Research Center.

In addition to serving as a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford, he served as special assistant to U.S.

Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker, Jr., of Tennessee, and was advisor to the White House chief of staff during Baker's service with President Reagan.

He created his own communications consulting firm, where his clients included Presidents Reagan and Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Cary Grant, just to name a few.

Patrick Butler has received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award and Champion of Public Broadcasting Award from America's Public Television Stations, and continues to serve on numerous boards.

Pat Butler, what a treat it is to welcome you home to Tennessee.

This is your native state, right?

- It is.

It's great to be here.

Thank you, Becky.

- Absolutely.

What was it like growing up in Tennessee?

- Well, I grew up in a little town called Kimball, Tennessee, which is in Marion County about 40 miles west of Chattanooga.

And my father was a minister, and he was also a teacher and an assistant principal at Red Bank High School in Chattanooga.

So we lived on Central Time, and my dad worked on Eastern Time, so his day was pretty long.

But it was just ideal for my brother and me growing up here.

We went to South Pittsburgh Elementary School, and I have made some friends there who I've kept my entire life.

This is now 70 years.

And it was just magical time.

We grew up among farmers and textile workers and miners and people who are just the salt of the earth.

And they gave me a sense of what's important in life and what's not so important.

And they gave me a great sense of myself, and they were just as nurturing as they could possibly be, and I couldn't imagine a better childhood.

- That's so great.

That is just... It's so great.

And you spent a lot of your adult life in DC, right?

- I did.

We moved from Kimball to Chattanooga, where I went to junior high school and high school, and then went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

And I was working my way through school as a reporter for the Chattanooga Times.

Actually, it was the Chattanooga Post, the afternoon edition of the Times.

And the paper gave me the opportunity to be the city hall and political reporter at a very young age.

And through that experience, I got to know Senator Howard Baker, then a very new senator from Tennessee, who encouraged me to come to Washington and see how I liked it.

And I liked it fine.

I've been there for more than half a century.

- Wow.

So you met Howard Baker at such a young age, and you had such a wonderful history with him, and in fact, you're still on the school, right?

The Howard Baker School at UT.

- I came into Senator Baker's circle when I was 19 years old and stayed for the next 45 years until the day he died in 2014.

And it was one of the great experiences of my life.

He taught me so much.

He did so much as a senator from Tennessee and as a great statesman for his country.

And working with Senator Baker was an education.

It was a privilege, and we got a lot of good things done.

Everything from writing some of the original environmental protection laws of the 1970s to getting the Panama Canal treaties ratified in 1978 with President Carter to reforming the Social Security System so that we could have the Social Security System in place for 50 years, so that people could count on it.

And one of the things that we did was Senator Baker was so clever about these kinds of things, he increased the eligibility age by two years, but he did it one month a year for 24 years.

So nobody noticed it.

And yet it saved the system, because we were able to raise the eligibility age by two years and strengthen the system, and shore up the finances.

- Wow!

And he was brilliant at bipartisan leadership, wasn't he?

- He was, yeah.

Senator Baker, one of his great tenets of statesmanship, was that one should always hold in the back of your mind that the fellow may be right.

And he gave a great amount of credence to his fellow senators who were on different sides of the political aisle from him.

And he made great friends in people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Abraham Ribicoff, and others who were very much more liberal than he was, but who had interesting takes on the issues of the day, and working with them and Ed Muskie, and others from that era, he was able to pass a great deal of very substantive legislation.

And the hope is that we can hope we can help our students at the Howard Baker School of Public Policy to learn how Senator Baker did what he did with all of the impact and the integrity and the ingenuity that he brought to statesmanship and let them continue in his tradition and create a whole new generation of leaders that'll approach public policy in the way he did.

- I love that, Pat.

I think, you know, when I look at your career, you've had such an amazing career, well, in being a leader, but also just in really crafting the story for others to understand the purpose of doing what we do, both on a... You were the youngest speechwriter for a president, for President Ford.

Certainly, you just retired as the president and CEO of America's Public Television Stations, where you had an amazing 15-year career.

And what about, though, right before you went to public television?

You were working at the Washington Post, you were a senior VP, you did television, did 200 hours of television, right?

- Right.

I was the senior vice president of the Washington Post Company for 18 years, and my office was right next to Don Graham, the chairman and CEO.

And he gave me an opportunity to do all kinds of things at our company.

Everything from developing new advertising strategies to working on education issues to protecting the First Amendment for our journalists to starting a television production company that did produce 200 hours of nonfiction programming, including a documentary on the 30th anniversary of the Senate Watergate hearings called "Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History," which won the Emmy for Best Documentary of 2003.

And that experience kind of brought me full circle because I got Senator Baker and everybody else that we could find who had been a participant in the Watergate drama to come and let us interview them for this film.

And perspectives changed over 30 years a bit.

And it was interesting to capture all of that.

But Senator Baker, you know, true to his reputation as somebody who will just do anything for his friends, flew all the way back from Japan just to do this interview with me.

He tacked on a few other visits while he was here, but he flew back from Japan, which was a 13-hour flight, to do an interview with me for our documentary, and he knocked it out of the park.

- Wow.

- And he was as incisive as you might expect he would be.

- That had to be such an interesting time period for you and for our country, right?

So, what do you feel like we learned from really revisiting our history?

- Well, I think one of the things that we learned from the Watergate era is that people have to stand up for what they think is right.

I worked for a brief time during that era with Congressman Larry Hogan Sr.

His son, Larry Hogan Jr., later became the governor of Maryland.

But Larry Hogan Sr.

was a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment proceeding.

And Congressman Hogan went into that hearing with a strong predilection to give President Nixon the benefit of every doubt.

He had been a strong supporter of the president's policies.

He had been an FBI agent.

He was a lawyer.

And he was insistent that the committee give the president every possible deference when they went into the impeachment proceeding.

But as time went on and as he considered the evidence more carefully, Congressman Hogan concluded that President Nixon had, in fact, been guilty of some pretty serious crimes, including obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury.

And so he changed his mind and decided that he had to vote for articles of impeachment against President Nixon, knowing that his own political future was going to be put in serious jeopardy once he made that decision.

And it was.

He was thinking about running for governor of Maryland that year of 1974.

He lost the primary, as he knew he would, but he had to do what he thought was the right thing.

And so, flash-forward 30 years, and his son becomes the governor of Maryland.

- Wow.

- Congressman Hogan, his father, is sitting behind him on the inaugural stand.

Governor Hogan says, "My entire political career has been inspired by the example of my father, who did the right thing when he had to do it."

- Wow.

- And that is the kind of integrity and courage and stand on principle that we have to have in every age, and that we particularly need now.

So people have a hard time sometimes finding their courage and saying, "Just having this job is not worth it.

Is not worth it if I'm having to agree to things that I don't really agree with."

So finding that kind of courage was important to Congressman Hogan, it was important to Senator Baker, and we can hope that it's gonna be important to our current generation of leaders as well.

- I absolutely hope that is the case.

And Pat, I wanna ask you about that, 'cause as a speechwriter for President Ford, he was faced very much with that same challenge of whether to pardon President Nixon.

And what I've read is that he felt like it was the right thing to do, that he had suffered.

Did you have to write any of those speeches?

- No, I came a little bit later, but I got to know all the people who were involved in that drama just a little while later.

And what they were telling me, for example, was that Bob Hartmann, who was the counselor to President Ford and who wrote most of the president's, effectively, inaugural address the day after President Nixon resigned, Bob wrote the famous line, "Our long national nightmare is over."

And the president didn't want to say that.

He thought, as you say, "President Nixon has suffered enough; we don't need to pile on here.

Let's start looking to the future and redefining our country and starting to get past Watergate and past Vietnam and past all the racial riots that we've been experiencing over the last several years.

And let's turn the page and celebrate our bicentennial with a positive spirit."

So President Ford did not want to say, "Our long national nightmare is over."

Bob Hartmann says that he practically got down on his knees to beg the president to leave it in the speech, which he did.

And it was the defining moment, defining words of his presidency, because that's exactly how President Ford should be remembered, as the president who ended our long national nightmare.

But it was a heady time for us, and we were able to help the president get past all those traumas that the country had been through in such strong succession over the last several years.

And that, in itself, for a very brief presidency, was quite an accomplishment for him.

And you asked about whether he thought the pardon was the right thing to do for President Nixon?

He thought it was the right thing to do for the country.

He thought that we had no reason to keep rehashing the allegations of criminal behavior against President Nixon, the president.

President Nixon was gone, President Ford was here, and he, President Ford, did not want to spend, you know, 50% of his time, which is about what he was spending, dealing with the issues surrounding President Nixon's impeachment and potential crimes.

And so he made a very difficult decision, which he again knew was gonna be very unpopular, but the right thing to do.

It turned out it was the right thing to do.

Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, in 1974, right after the pardon, called it the "last act of the cover-up."

25 years later, Senator Ted Kennedy gave President Ford the Profiles in Courage Award for issuing the pardon.

- Wow.

You have seen so much in your career.

That's amazing.

Let me shift to public television before I run out of time.

- Okay.

Sure.

- You have had such a long tenure at America's Public Television.

You've really defined our message of doing what we have always done, which is to educate and to connect our communities and to protect our communities.

And what was that tenure at America's Public Television like for you?

- I thought my main job was to remind public television, the public television family, of just how important the work they were doing every day was.

I think too many people in our family took it for granted, and they were doing the good work and not telling anybody else about it.

And all of the discussion was about national programming, and good as the national programming it was only, it was only the tip of the iceberg of what local stations were doing every day and every week to tell the stories of their communities, their history, their culture, their public affairs, teaching children in their communities, keeping their communities safe through their public safety networks.

And that was really important, essential work that we thought that everybody in Congress would appreciate if they thought about it in those terms.

The most famous conversion story that we had in my time was Governor Mike Pence of Indiana.

As a congressman, Congressman Pence in 2005 had led an effort to defund public broadcasting.

And when I took this job with America's Public Television Stations in 2011, he brought me to Capitol Hill for lunch and said, "Now, what's all this?

I like you, but I don't like public television."

And I said, "Well, you'll like this.

You'll like the fact that we educate our kids, that we keep your community safe, and that we tell the story of heartland America in a way that nobody else is gonna do.

And he said, "Well, nobody's ever described it like that to me before."

And I said, "Well, that's what we do, and that's what you're investing your money in."

Well, Governor Pence, when he got elected governor, put money in his own state budget to support public television in Indiana.

I brought him to Washington in 2014 to present him with our Champion of Public Broadcasting Award, nine years after he had tried to defund us.

So we don't give up on anybody.

(Becky laughs) We think that everybody has potential for redemption and conversion.

And if we tell our story well enough and often enough, we think it's gonna have the right kinds of results.

- I appreciate that.

And you have done that so well, and I was honored this year to receive the first inaugural advocacy award in your name, given by America's Public Television Stations.

And that is such an honor for me.

I just can't even begin to tell you.

- Well, you're most deserving.

And from your time in Cookeville to your time here in Nashville, you've always made the time, and I'm sure you didn't have a lot of time, but you've made the time to take our national issues seriously, to contribute to our advocacy issues in Washington.

And to make sure that the stations that you've been in charge of have done the kinds of things that are going to generate support for us across the ideological spectrum.

And so it was just a natural that Becky Magura should have the first Patrick Butler National Advocacy Award, and I'm glad you received it.

- Well, thank you, friend.

I am, too.

I'm thrilled with it.

And Pat, during your tenure, our federal funding grew with bipartisan support because, really and truly, everything you just shared really and truly is what we do at a local level.

And that's where that federal funding lands.

- That's right.

- Is at the local level.

You also were very instrumental in helping Ken Burns get on his way before you even got to public television.

Share that story.

- Well, this is almost 40 years ago.

In 1987, I was the chairman of the Public Programs Committee of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

And we had a promising young filmmaker who was trying to get funding from our endowment to finish a big project that he was doing for public television.

He had done some very worthy but modest documentaries up to that time.

And he was asking for a lot of money for a very big project.

And we had to consider whether to take a big risk on this young filmmaker and give him what was then the largest grant in the history of the endowment.

We gave it to him.

It was $1.3 million, and his name was Ken Burns, and his project was "The Civil War."

And we brought him to the White House to meet President Reagan, the first president he had ever met.

And President Reagan listened to what Ken was doing with his Civil War series.

And then at the end of Ken's presentation, the president grabbed him by his shoulders and said, "Young man, I'm so glad you're doing this.

When I was a young boy growing up in Dixon, Illinois, we'd have a 4th of July parade every year at which veterans of the Civil War would march.

And I've never felt so close to the history of my country as I did on those parade days.

And I've been worried for most of my life that we're losing our national memory.

And here you are, preserving it."

So Ken comes into that encounter as a promising young filmmaker.

He emerges from it as the preserver of the national memory, which is the mission that he has pursued for the rest of his life.

And he's coming up with a fantastic series on the American Revolution this November on public television.

- Yeah, I can't wait.

And thank you for sharing that story.

Now, before we run out of time, you know the name of this show is "Clean Slate," and I would just like to ask you, Pat, what would you do with a clean slate, either personally or professionally, or maybe it's for your community?

- Well, it turns out I have a clean slate because I have just retired after a long time in public television and a longer time in other pursuits.

And I have found that this new chapter of my life has given me a wonderful opportunity to serve people in my local community in ways that I had not been able to do before, because I just didn't have the time.

And so I've been fortunate to serve on all kinds of boards and such, but what I'm enjoying doing now is going to a place where I was the chairman of the board for years, an organization that helps homeless people in Washington, DC.

And now I'm able to go and serve meals to these people.

I'm not the chairman.

I'm not anybody important.

I'm just serving meals to these people.

And it feels great.

And what I'm hopeful of is that other people during these very difficult, stressful times can find some inspiration and some joy and some satisfaction in doing those kinds of modest things that have real impact on real people.

So that if all of us do our little bit in our little world, the combination of those things is going to have a tremendous impact on the good of our country.

And that's the clean slate that I'm really enjoying right now.

- Well, you're making such a difference.

In fact, you're getting the Humanitarian Award this year from that organization for your work with the homeless.

And you know, that's just the kind of champion you are.

That is who you are.

Are you gonna write books?

I do need to ask you.

- I'm gonna write.

I'm gonna write at least one, and if only for my family, but they've asked me to write down some of the exploits from my life.

And I'm gonna be doing that.

And I'm thinking about a book also about America at its best.

- [Becky] Mm!

- When we do our best work, when we create a new democracy, when we win a world war against fascism and Nazism, when we do the right thing on civil rights, when we find the magic cure to COVID, there are all kinds of things that when we do our best, we can work miracles.

And I'm gonna write a book about how we do those things and what it takes to think of ourselves as can-do people who can do anything we set our minds to.

- Well, I can't wait to read the book, and I wish you and your wonderful family... I know you're a great family man.

- I am.

- I just wish you the very best and hope that you'll come back when you get that book written.

- Thank you, Becky.

I'd love to come back.

Thank you.

- All right, thank you.

(bright thoughtful folk music) ♪ I've thrown away my compass ♪ ♪ Done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ In one direction ♪ - Pat, before you leave Nashville, I have to ask you how you got to know Cary Grant?

- Well, I was working for President Ford in 1976.

There was a big dinner for him in Los Angeles at which Cary Grant was supposed to be the master of ceremonies.

(Becky chuckles) I met Cary Grant at the reception before the dinner.

He called me aside and said, "I'm scared to death.

I've never been master of ceremonies at anything before, much less a dinner for the president of the United States.

Would you be so kind as to review my script and see if it's all right?"

So here's a 26-year-old kid from Kimball, Tennessee, in Chattanooga reviewing Cary Grant's script.

I said, "This is fine.

And you should have confidence in it and enjoy it, and the president will love it."

So Cary Grant, being Cary Grant, was wonderful.

He found me at the end of the dinner and said, "I just wanted to thank you for giving me the confidence to go on tonight."

And I said, "That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me."

- Well, that's what you get to all of us.

(Patrick laughs) Lots of confidence.

- Thank you.

(bright thoughtful music)