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  • Playwright Anna Deavere Smith tells her own family story in ‘Basil Biggs’

    Transcript:

    TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

    This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. My guest today, actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, has played a national security adviser on “The West Wing,” a matriarch on “Black-Ish” and a magazine editor on “Inventing Anna.” But for more than 50 years, the work she keeps returning to is America itself. Smith pioneered what we now call documentary or verbatim theater. She interviews people, sometimes hundreds of them, caught inside a national fracture, like a riot or epidemic. And then she stands alone on a stage and performs their exact words.

    In her 1992 play “Fires In The Mirror,” she became Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the aftermath of a deadly racial conflict. In “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” she became the city in the days after the Rodney King verdict. And in her 2016 play “Notes From The Field,” she examined the school-to-prison pipeline. Here she is as Leticia de Santiago, a parent from Stockton, California, on the lengths she takes to keep her kids out of trouble.

    (SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, “NOTES FROM THE FIELD”)

    ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: (As Leticia de Santiago) And I think I was a very strict mother. Anything involving my kids, I was very involved. I used to even go at nighttime and smell them. Yes. Oh, yes. Yes, to see if they were not drinking or smoking. Oh, yes, I did so many things to keep my kids out of trouble, and thanks to the Lord, I think I did a good job.

    MOSLEY: Anna Deavere Smith’s new play turns that lens on her own family. “Basil Biggs” premieres this month in Philadelphia, written for the nation’s 250th anniversary. The title character is her great-great-grandfather, a free Black man who became a prominent Gettysburg figure and the conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping to lead enslaved people to freedom. Smith first learned about him a decade ago while appearing on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates Jr. In this clip, Gates explains the remarkable role Biggs played in the war’s aftermath.

    (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “FINDING YOUR ROOTS”)

    HENRY LOUIS GATES JR: Now, this obituary, Anna, is for Celia Biggs Penn, Basil’s daughter, who died in 1936. And it gives us a sense of what your ancestors did in the fateful days right before the battle.

    SMITH: Mrs. Penn, last of kin who fled ’63 battle, dies. The only colored persons in this section, the Biggs family, was warned to leave this section with the approach of the Confederate troops.

    GATES: OK. So…

    SMITH: Wow.

    GATES: …Your ancestors fled…

    SMITH: Unbelievable.

    GATES: …The Confederate invasion. Now, remember, it’s three days of combat, right?

    SMITH: Right.

    GATES: And Basil’s farm was converted into a field hospital by the Confederates.

    SMITH: My God, that’s a story right there. That’s an amazing – that’s a play.

    MOSLEY: Anna Deavere Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

    SMITH: Thank you for having me.

    MOSLEY: That moment that we just heard, I think the audience, if they watch it, I think we all came to the same conclusion at the same time, including you, that it is a play. And now it is exactly a play. Take us to that moment.

    SMITH: Sure. Well, so (laughter) that was me with my friend, Skip, aka Henry Louis Gates Jr. And it was a very powerful moment, I have to say. But maybe what’s equally as interesting is that I did nothing about it. That was in 2014. When it aired on PBS, my family raced off to Gettysburg – and that would be my generation of cousins and sisters – rushed off. And for some reason, I couldn’t go.

    I mean, you know, I am an artist. I’m nomadic. I go from pillar to post. And the only thing that was in the way? Other gigs. That’s what was in the way. And then Kathy Sachs, who is an extraordinary philanthropist and arts collector, has been putting together a remarkable festival of arts here in Philadelphia, which is where I am right now, called What Now. And she asked me to write something for it. And because it was for the 250th anniversary, and because it was in Pennsylvania, I thought, oh, this is the time for me to write about Basil Biggs.

    MOSLEY: What’s a detail about Basil’s life that completely surprised you? I mean, the entire story is pretty remarkable. But what was something that really stuck with you for years after?

    SMITH: Well, I would say a sort of very pertinent and revolutionary discovery was that he could not read and write. And neither could my great-great-grandmother, Mary Jackson Biggs, which meant that I had nothing to go on in his words, no diaries, no letters. Now, that wouldn’t seem unusual for Black people at that time. But the way I’ve worked for 50 years is to study every single, not just word, but utterance that a person makes in order to put together an American story.

    So I had no document, nothing documentary to go on. I had photographs. That was it. And, of course, you know, the Civil War, it’s been written about extensively, as has the Battle of Gettysburg. So I could sort of put together the facts of the era. But I have not – I don’t have a word out of the mouth of my great-great-grandfather or his children. So this called for me to leave my documentary form. It allows me to still be the Americanist that I believe I am. But I had to do a different kind of writing, a different kind of inquiry.

    MOSLEY: Yeah. How did you bring him to life?

    SMITH: I was really terrified, honestly, you know, staring at the blank page. I had a fabulous time in Gettysburg, you know, made great friends there, felt absolutely at home in Gettysburg, spent a lot of time in the archives. But I still didn’t know how to put the words on paper. And what – the best thing that happened was that I had been able to visit the farm, his first farm in Gettysburg. The farm is still there. The house is still there. The barn is still there. The creek is still there. And we believe that that’s where he did a lot of his Underground Railroad activity.

    This is the house that was taken over by the Confederates and turned into the Confederate hospital. There is still blood on the floor. Walking around the barn, walking around the farm really gave me the rooting that I needed to start writing. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t had the chance to walk around that farm. And so it’s also interesting that, especially for a Black man of that era, all three of the houses that he lived in in Gettysburg are still standing.

    MOSLEY: He is the reason Lincoln had ground to stand on in that fateful November. He reburied the Union dead – right? – so that the cemetery could be dedicated, so that the Gettysburg address could be delivered.

    SMITH: That’s right. And the Underground Railroad also, obviously, is a story that one has to put together shreds for. It’s underground, right? But the reason that he’s commemorated now, the reason he’s honored now in Gettysburg – what happened was that when word got out that the Confederates were coming to Gettysburg, you know, now we think about these things and, of course, you go to the battlefield. But, you know, it was a farm town, right? And when word was out that the Confederates were coming, Black people had every reason to believe that they were going to be snatched and taken back to the South, whether they were free or not. This had happened. A massive invasion and raid had happened nearby in Chambersburg.

    So my great-great-grandfather took his family, my great-great-grandmother and the children, away. When they came back, really just a few days later, the farm had been taken over by the Confederates. They had claimed the house as their hospital. And I believe that my – that Basil Biggs had lost everything. I mean, he couldn’t read and write. But he was very entrepreneurial.

    He had a robust farm. He had a good business as a veterinarian. And I think that he took the grisly job of disinterring the Union dead and reburying them and cleaning up the 7,000 dead bodies with a group of other Black men that he brought together, I believe that he did that because he was broke. Now, it could be that, you know, he had a huge civic responsibility. I’m not sure. But they started that in October, and they had it in good enough shape that by November, when Lincoln came to consecrate what becomes the National Soldiers’ Cemetery (ph), it was possible to do. The irony is that at least then, Black Union soldiers were not buried in that cemetery. And so Basil Biggs was a part of an organization called The Sons of Goodwill, who created a separate cemetery at that time for the Black Union dead.

    MOSLEY: Did you ever consider playing Biggs yourself, like a one-woman show? Because this is a traditional play with a cast of actors.

    SMITH: I’m very excited about these actors. And the whole part of casting the play was huge, you know, trying to find who would play these characters. And one actor walked in and looked exactly like my cousin, Basil Biggs, and like my brother. And there’s a scene in the play that is just a real sort of contentious moment between Basil and this young man called Calvin. And I have to tell you, I just burst out crying in the auditions, sobbing, because it just reminded me of discord between my brother and my father.

    And I made a very intentional decision in 1980, when many of us who were not white heterosexual-presenting males were encouraged, not just invited, but encouraged to write about ourselves. And I made the opposite move. And I said, I’m not going to write about myself, not going to write about my family. I’m going to chase America in terms of that which is not me. And I did that for 50 years. And so to have this kind of homecoming is very powerful in so many ways. And I think to see it outside of myself, rather than trying to embody it, is part of the power.

    MOSLEY: Today, I’m talking with actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith about her new play, “Basil Biggs.” It’s about her own great, great grandfather, a free Black man who reburied thousands of Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground where Lincoln delivered his famous address. We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT’S “EGYPTIAN FANTASY”)

    MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today I am talking with actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Her new play, “Basil Biggs,” traces the life of her great, great grandfather in the Civil War era Gettysburg. It premieres this month at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, written for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

    Smith was born in Baltimore in 1950 and came up through the theater as a classically trained actor. Somewhere along the way, she set down a different path. Instead of playing invented characters, she started turning a tape recorder on real Americans and performing their exact words, becoming a pioneer of what we now call documentary or verbatim theater.

    Anna, I want to talk a little bit about verbatim theater because you came up, as I said, as an actor, and then you did this unusual thing. Instead of looking for roles, you started collecting people. What sparked that shift?

    SMITH: You know, I think everything starts with a question. And I feel, for example, that education should be about us discovering our questions rather than seeking answers. And I had that extraordinary opportunity in a Shakespeare class when I first started studying acting. I didn’t really begin that pursuit until I was 22 years old. And our Shakespeare teacher, on the first day – and I was very worried about Shakespeare class – and it’s about speaking Shakespeare; it’s not Shakespeare scholarship – made this particular suggestion that we expect the rhythm of Shakespeare to be like this, da da, da da, da da, da da, da da, what we call iambic pentameter. And she suggested in her argument that when we are trying to speak Shakespeare, we just speak the words as they are written, right? We don’t add extra emotion or anything.

    In making that argument, she said, but if there is an upside down rhythm in the second beat, this tells you that something is awry with the character. So that little other beats called a trochee. So if the rhythm goes, da da, dada, da da, da da, da da, that means there’s something unsettled. And she gave the example of the end of the play King Lear, when Lear has lost everything. And he says, never, never, never, never, never. Everything’s upside down.

    So when I was in the conservatory, I was trying to figure out, how did that happen? How could emotions be captured in rhythms? And I decided that I would see if I could listen in real life to how people’s rhythms changed, and if those changes would be indicative not only of disarray in a story that individual was telling me, but also in the world around them. And so this is one of those random things.

    I was at a cocktail party and standing next to – like a wallflower, another woman was standing next to me. And she asked me what I did. What was my work? And I never, to this day, say I’m an actor. Like, even on a plane, if somebody says, what do you do? I never say I’m an actor because then you have that very embarrassing question, well what have I seen you in?

    MOSLEY: Right. Yeah. What do you say?

    SMITH: So I said, well, I’m trying to learn something about – imagine at a cocktail party – I’m trying to learn something about language and identity. And I said, and I’m trying to figure out how to get people to break their linguistic patterns when they speak. And she said, well, I’m a linguist. And she said, I’m going to give you three questions that will guarantee this can happen in the course of an hour. And the questions were, have you ever come close to death, have you ever been accused of something you didn’t do and do you know the circumstances of your birth?

    And so the first show that I made was with other actors. I only played one part, and I literally walked up to people on the streets of New York or wherever they were, and I said, I know an actor who looks like you. If you’ll give me an hour of your time, I will invite you to see yourself perform. This was in 1980.

    And so I talked to the lifeguard at the gym. I talked to the lady up the street, who had a secondhand clothes store. I talked to somebody who was in a fancy beauty parlor. And I made a show in which I would talk to somebody for an hour about whatever they want to talk about. Hair, you know, swimming lanes. And somewhere in that, I would ask those questions. And, lo and behold, their language took on these different patterns.

    And so I trained myself how to listen by doing that. And then when you think about it, since I’ve gone to do plays about things that are upside down, are in disarray, are not iambic pentameter but are trochees, then it is the case that people speak in disrupted sentences. And they struggle to make sense, which means that they actually make these gorgeous, as far as I’m concerned, sort of architectures of language. And I’m very interested in those things, I will call them, those moments. And that’s what I perform.

    MOSLEY: I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of people say, oh, that takes a lot of bravery for you to just walk up to people on the street and just ask them questions. What were those early responses to you? Because you weren’t talking to people on behalf of, say, a news organization or something tangible, specific, that people know that this would go toward.

    SMITH: Well, I think, you know, it was kind of a curious thing – right? – for some girl to, you know, ask you that. Or I was doing a lot of temp work at the time. And the person I performed was Julia, who was at JCPenney. We worked in a basement. My desk was right next to hers. And I would hear Julia talking on the phone. And I thought, I’ve got to get an interview with Julia.

    (LAUGHTER)

    SMITH: So I know in advance, you know, of somebody who I thought was very, very interesting. And I think because nobody had ever asked them before. And by the way, this isn’t like now, where people are going around taking selfies and pictures of each other. This is when my tape recorder was, you know, it was like this Panasonic thing that was probably almost a foot long.

    MOSLEY: Yeah. Yeah.

    SMITH: Right? So people weren’t walking around with iPhones that they could record on. So I think it was, like, this odd thing this rather charming girl asking them to do (laughter). And they said yes.

    MOSLEY: My own curiosity, what was so interesting about Julia on the phone at JCPenney in the basement?

    SMITH: She was, well, see – she was just like – you know, she was one of those people who was – she was so – oh, she had a story about somebody who just had a meltdown on a bus going through the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. And she – as often what’s so beautiful about Black people in particular, she acted out, like, all the people, right? So that was so great, you know? And, you know, I’ll have to tell you another sort of epiphany I had about Julia.

    So I said, I only played one part in that play. It was Julia. And she came. It was so exciting to see the people come to see themselves performed in this loft in New York. And Julia waited for me with her friends. And as we were walking down Leonard Street, her friend – Julia, girl, you were the star, girl, you were the star. And I thought, yeah, the character should be the star, not the actor, right? And so, I mean, she just was one of those Black women with a great sense of humor and a great ability to tell a story.

    MOSLEY: Oh. See, this story – OK. I was wondering. You know, a lot of your performances remind me of an oral tradition I know some Black households have, like, the way people slide in and out of imitating others to kind of drive a point home. Did you see that growing up? What was the storytelling tradition in your house?

    SMITH: Oh, yeah. I mean, Ms. Johnson next door, who weighed 400 pounds, couldn’t move very far and would, you know, give me 25 cents to go down, buy her some fatback from the grocery store, Mr. Zelman’s (ph) grocery store. And then, you know, I would sit on her porch and hear a story she had. And my maternal grandfather, who married Virginia Biggs, was a fantastic storyteller, so – as was my maternal grandmother. So I’d do anything for a story when I was little.

    And you’re right. There’s that oral tradition. My Aunt Esther is the first person I ever interviewed, sitting in her kitchen. All my life, I listened to her. But the first actual interview I did knowing that I wanted to create this kind of theater, I tested it out on Aunt Esther.

    MOSLEY: Our guest today is actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. We’ll be right back after a break. I’m Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF RUSSELL MALONE “THE BALLAD OF HANK CRAWFORD”)

    MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. And my guest today is the actor, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith. Over the last four decades, she invented and defined what’s known as documentary or verbatim theatre. She’s interviewed hundreds of people, then performed them on stage. “Fires In The Mirror,” about the Crown Heights conflict, made her a Pulitzer Prize finalist. “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” about the city after the Rodney King verdict, earned her two Tony nominations. She went on to write “Let Me Down Easy,” about the body and the American healthcare system and “Notes From The Field,” about the school-to-prison pipeline. Her new play is called “Basil Biggs,” and it’s the story of her own great, great grandfather, a free Black man who played an important role in the Civil War battle of Gettysburg.

    This thing that you do, this verbatim theatre, I have heard you describe it as you’re borrowing people’s stories with their permission. And there’s something very specific about the people you choose. How do you decide who to interview?

    SMITH: Well, who to interview is just who – you know, say – my play “Let Me Down Easy” was about healthcare, but it was also about the vulnerability of the human body to the state, to disease. And so I did extensive interviewing. I went to, for example, South Africa during the AIDS crisis when Mbeki was an AIDS denialist. I went to Rwanda 10 years after the genocide, sort of broken societies and talked to people. And I have an abstract idea of the problem that I’m trying to investigate. And I don’t have a story. And then in the process of doing the interviews, and more importantly, in the process of being in the rehearsal room, I find a through line of a story.

    MOSLEY: Where did the inspiration come for “Let Me Down Easy”?

    SMITH: Dr. Ralph Horwitz was the head of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine. And he invited me in the late ’90s to come to Yale Medical School and to interview doctors and patients and to perform at something called Medical Grand Rounds as a way of showing the doctors that they don’t listen. And I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And at first, I thought it was ’cause I was just too intimidated to be around all those doctors. And he didn’t give up. And when I finally went and started doing the interviews of patients, I realized the reason I was really worried was ’cause I knew it would have something to do with death.

    And I did this performance at Medical Grand Rounds, and I performed doctors and some people who had been very, very sick. And after that performance, maybe a year later, he asked me to come back and do it in another situation, and I did. And those same patients, they were waiting eagerly backstage to say hello. And I thought, now, why would you want to come to see a show again that’s dealing with a moment in your life where you almost died? And it dawned on me – because dying or not, something about the performance made it all real in a good way and solid in a good way ‘Cause this was before the big healthcare conversation. But once the healthcare conversation – as we’re starting to approach Obama and the whole conversation of healthcare starts to become real, then I realize I have a real sort of political place to put this excursion, really, around death into a frame. And that’s what made me continue to work on it.

    And also because, you know, people say, oh, how did you get this person to talk to you or how did you get this person to trust you? I say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m looking for the people who are screaming from a mountaintop and I just happen to be walking by. And when you go into a palliative care unit, you sit with somebody who’s dying. If they have the strength, it’s a scream from the mountaintop. They want to be heard. They want to communicate. And that’s very dramatic and very stageworthy.

    MOSLEY: In “Let Me Down Easy,” there’s a person that you embody, Brent Williams. He’s a rodeo bull rider from Idaho. You talk about him quite a bit over the last 20 years. He was someone who really taught you what seems like a lot of lessons. But I want to play a little clip because he talked to you about the ways bull riding has wrecked his body, that – he has this one story that a bull shoved his face through metal chutes, for example. And in this clip of your performance as Williams, you’re talking about his health care deductible.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    SMITH: (As Brent Williams) Yeah, I got insurance. Blue Cross of Idaho, family policy, 260 bucks a month cover all of us. Then we got a $7,500 deductible, (laughter) which is stupid. I mean, you know, we don’t ever meet that. I mean, all this paying money, then we got to pay 7,500 before they meet it. They’re just trying to rape us, like all the people that got the money. They rape the poor till pretty soon – or they rape the middle class till the middle class becomes poor. Then they going to start raping the rich. And they’re going to break the whole country, I think. But basically, I’m an optimist.

    (LAUGHTER)

    MOSLEY: That was my guest, Anna Deavere Smith, as Brent Williams in “Let Me Down Easy.” And when you watch this, there is a lot of physicality to that performance. You’re wearing a cowboy hat. Your legs are wide. You’re strutting across the stage. And these are parts of the story as well, that body language. What is it telling us? What is it telling you that words don’t convey?

    SMITH: First of all, if my performance is attentive to detail, then you see the choreography. You don’t know why you’re drawn to that person. But if we were to sit down and break it down for you and show you the choreography, you’d know why. I mean, with Brent, he was kind of outrageous. You know, I actually invited Brent to New York a couple of times, and he’s a very different person than the sort of artists that I hang out with, very, very conservative. But, you know, he’s a perfect example of someone who’s game, you know, who comes with goodwill. He knows. And I have – he was in my apartment, dancing cheek to cheek with the astute legal scholar Patricia Williams.

    MOSLEY: (Laughter) What? Wow.

    SMITH: And so it’s about goodwill. You know, we talk about how do we get over these differences. It’s like, he doesn’t agree with anybody, in this case, sitting around the dinner and then dancing afterwards, when people had drank enough. You know, he agreed. Nobody agrees agreed with Brent. But he felt at home in my house, right?

    MOSLEY: You like talking to people that you don’t agree with.

    SMITH: Well, not necessarily all the time. For the purpose of putting them in a play, yes. So, you know, we have to admit that that’s also different, in a way, from real life, right? I can do things in my art that I may not be able to do in my life. So with Brent, I went to the national rodeo finals with him and standing around with all of his friends, you know, swigging Chivas and telling stories about women that weren’t so great, right? Would I be doing that just for fun? Probably not.

    MOSLEY: Today, I’m talking with actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith about her new play “Basil Biggs.” It’s about her own great-great-grandfather, a free Black man who reburied thousands of Union dead at Gettysburg and prepared the ground where Lincoln delivered his famous address. We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF RAY CHARLES’ “THE RAY”)

    MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today, I am talking with actor and playwright, Anna Deavere Smith. Her new play, “Basil Biggs,” traces the life of her great-great-grandfather in the Civil War era Gettysburg. It premieres this month at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, written for the nation’s 250th anniversary. Smith’s earlier plays include “Fires In The Mirror,” Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992″ and her 2016 play “Notes From The Field.”

    I want to talk briefly about the choices you made in “Notes From The Field.” You showcased a wide range of people – civil rights leaders and high school students and prisoners like Denise Dodson. She was an inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women, and she was serving time for murder. And I’m going to play a clip. Here she is talking about her children and the circumstances of her crime. You playing her. Let’s listen.

    (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “NOTES FROM THE FIELD”)

    SMITH: (As Denise Dodson) I had six children. Now I have five. One of them died since I’ve been here. The oldest being 34, the youngest being 21. I had my youngest child when I was in the Baltimore Detention Center. I’ve been here 23 years. Well, my boyfriend – my former boyfriend, ’cause we wasn’t together at the time – shot and killed a guy who tried to rape me. Well, they didn’t consider it accomplice. I got the same charges he did. First degree murder. I think it’s fair. You talking about somebody’s life. Whether it’s in your control or not, somebody’s life has been taken, so I do think it’s fair. But I think that if I had had a better education, I would have been more upright, so to speak, you know, because without that education, I always felt less than. And I think if I had had that education, I would have known that I am somebody. I am a good person.

    MOSLEY: That was my guest Anna Deavere Smith as inmate Denise Dodson. I can almost hear your questions and her answers, Anna, of course, like, the questions you asked to elicit those answers. But it’s her demeanor. She was one of several Black women and girls at the heart of this – “Notes From The Field.” What drew you to put people like her at the center of the story?

    SMITH: Well, the story really was about looking at the pressures or what we call – what are the things that pull us away from giving people an education? And why, when they are unable to fit into maybe the sorting mechanism of education, do they end up incarcerated? And I heard a chilling statistic that there’s something like in the 70% of Black and brown kids that can’t really read at the level they need to read.

    MOSLEY: Just across the board in the United States.

    SMITH: Yeah. And so we have to ask deeply, deeply, what’s in the way of that? And “Notes From The Field” was looking at education and the things that pull people away from school and the things that pull school away from people. And with Denise, you know, of course, sitting in a prison, I mean, she’s aware of being under surveillance all the time. You know, she’s probably about a year, maybe, from going before the review board again. She’s very conscious of every single thing she’s saying. And there was extraordinary humility in Denise and emotional power. And her job in prison was to train service dogs. And she talked about how dogs are more decent than people. And even that the amount of attention that she gives those dogs to train them, what if we gave the same type of attention to children?

    And the last thing I’ll say about this is even if you go back to Thomas Jefferson and you look at his plan in the notes from the State of Virginia – on the State of Virginia, his plan for education was to find the excellent ones and throw out the rubbish. The word rubbish is in that document. So – and that’s just talking about white men. And so, our system has always been one of sorting. Let’s sort out the people that we don’t want to be bothered with.

    MOSLEY: You ended up studying at the American Conservatory Theater. This theater community that you then became a part of. You know, the way we think about theater today is always talking about it in terms of keeping it alive. And this sounds like this was a vibrant place for you.

    SMITH: First of all…

    MOSLEY: Yeah.

    SMITH: My first job (laughter) was for a Black theater company that had been started by Ed Bullins, great Black playwright. And it was called The Grass Roots Theatre Company (ph). And I went in there to see if there was something I could do, and they said, well, you could be the stage manager. I said, well, I don’t know how to do that. Oh, you’ll be fine. You look like you could be good.

    MOSLEY: (Laughter).

    SMITH: I was their so-called stage manager. And I had a crisis when I decided to go to school at the American Conservatory Theater, which would be like the white people’s theater, you know, in the middle of town that was very, you know, resourced, and not to work anymore at the Grass Roots Theatre Company. But the American Conservatory Theater had a company of 52 actors, and that’s where I was trained. So that was entirely different type of time than now.

    And, you know, we always say the theater is dying, but I think it’s that it has another economic model now. Those were the days when the idea was to have a theater in your town that was the sort of gem, the cultural gem of a town, like a symphony. And that changed when those theaters started to see themselves as breeding places for Broadway. And so I would say it’s not that the theater is dead. It’s that it had a different economic model. And we never know when that may change again.

    MOSLEY: I mean, you’re deep in the Basil Biggs story right now. But is there an American story you have your sights on for the future that’s been swirling in your head, that you’re dying to explore?

    SMITH: No. Because I think that Basil Biggs’ story about approaching the Civil War, about being a part of restoring his town after this massive, massive catastrophe and following through to touch the American promise and going through the 15th Amendment, which – the play takes us through that. I think there are many things about that that are still unfinished business in our country right now. And so I’m pleased to be able to see what lessons I can learn, the actors can learn and the audience can learn by looking at that moment in history and looking at this particular family and how they came through it.

    MOSLEY: Anna Deavere Smith, thank you so much for this conversation and your time. This has been a real pleasure.

    SMITH: My pleasure. Thank you so much to you and your producers.

    MOSLEY: Actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Her new play, “Basil Biggs,” debuts at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia this weekend. Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews Larry David’s new HBO series. This is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MARY LOU WILLIAMS’ “IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO”)

  • The Obamas team up with Larry David in this irreverent look at American history

    Transcript:

    TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

    This is FRESH AIR. Tomorrow, HBO presents a new seven-part sketch comedy series that’s an irreverent look at American history, just in time for the country’s 250th anniversary. It’s called “Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness,” and it stars Larry David and comes from Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company. Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.

    DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: One of the first things the Obamas did for TV after forming their Higher Ground production company was build a series around a singular, American voice. That voice was Studs Terkel, the Chicago writer whose 1974 working-class oral history, “Working,” was a major influence on the young Barack Obama. In 2023, Obama saluted and continued Turkel’s vision by hosting and narrating “Working: What We Do All Day,” a very impressive, very serious four-part Netflix documentary series.

    Now, Higher Ground is building another series around a singular, American voice. The results are equally impressive but much less serious because this time, the voice belongs to Larry David, America’s unofficial national curmudgeon. He’s turned being disgruntled into a massive fortune and into a lengthy, brilliant comedy career that includes “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and now, “Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness.”

    This new series is created and written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer. They’re also executive producers, as are the Obamas. Schaffer directs and is well-tuned to Larry David’s rhythms and sensibilities. Over the decades, Schaffer wrote dozens of episodes of “Seinfeld” and wrote and directed even more installments of “Curb.” Their new collaboration is much more heavily scripted than ad-libbed and is expensively mounted. Costumes, sets, even action sequences all look first rate. But even when Larry David is part of a silent tableau recreating the Continental Congress, wearing a powdered wig, while Barack Obama opens the show as the host, Larry can’t stay silent for long.

    (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “LIFE, LARRY AND THE PURSUIT OF UNHAPPINESS”)

    BARACK OBAMA: But what truly makes America unique is the fact that we’ve always been a work in progress. We’re not perfect. We can be irascible, petty, selfish, cheap. And let’s face it, some of us will always find something to complain about. But as Americans, we have always found a way to overcome these naysayers, these deeply unpleasant people who stood in the way of progress. These miserable, intolerable – did I mention petty? – wretched…

    LARRY DAVID: Hey, none of that’s in the script.

    (SOUNDBITE OF UNITED STATES MARINE BAND’S PERFORMANCE OF JOHN PHILIP SOUSA’S “THE STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER”)

    BIANCULLI: “Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness” is subtitled “An Almost History Of America” and provides just that. Each sketch, introduced by narrator Samuel L. Jackson, starts with historical fact, then veers wildly and enjoyably off the rails. In every sketch, the guest stars get the vibe David is after and add to it effortlessly. The opening sketch imagines that founding father Robert Livingston, played by Larry David, suggested some rather unusual rules for the Declaration of Independence before Thomas Jefferson took over the job of writing it. Henry Winkler plays John Hancock, and Chris Parnell plays Benjamin Franklin, who’s reading some of Livingston’s outrageous ideas to the assembled Congress.

    (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “LIFE, LARRY AND THE PURSUIT OF UNHAPPINESS”)

    CHRIS PARNELL: (As Benjamin Franklin) Here’s another gem. No sharing desserts. If you want a dessert, order it. None of this pass it around.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) We’re not animals, Mr. Franklin, all eating out of a trough.

    PARNELL: (As Benjamin Franklin) We can all have our own forks.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Then we’ll all take bites, put the forks in our mouths, put it back in the pie after it’s been in our mouths, Mr. Franklin. It’s unsanitary.

    PARNELL: (As Benjamin Franklin) Sometimes I don’t want a whole slice of pie. I just want a taste of pie.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Get your own damn piece of pie, Franklin.

    BIANCULLI: The next sketch jumps forward a full century, from 1776 to 1876, and has Larry David, as Alexander Graham Bell, unveiling his newest invention, the telephone, to a small invited group of guests. The guests, though, are quick to offer suggestions of their own.

    (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “LIFE, LARRY AND THE PURSUIT OF UNHAPPINESS”)

    DAVID: (As Alexander Graham Bell) My assistant Watson is in another building out of sight and sound. But with this device, I will be able to communicate with him as if he was standing right next to me.

    (SOUNDBITE OF CROWD GASPING)

    DAVID: (As Alexander Graham Bell) I will pick up the phone on my side, and it will ring on his.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) What kind of ring?

    DAVID: (As Alexander Graham Bell) Normal ring. It’s just a ring. It’s a ring. It’s a typical ring.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Maybe there could be a menu of rings that people could choose from.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Oh, yes. I would like mine to sound like a doorbell.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) I’d like mine to sound like a clown horn.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) Or perhaps a bicycle ring, you know, (imitating bicycle bell).

    DAVID: (As Alexander Graham Bell) Oh, all wonderful ideas, but hardly the point. The point is, I’ll be able to communicate with someone who is miles away.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #7: (As character) What if I’m at a piano recital, say, and I don’t want it to ring, so it just vibrates like a Jew’s harp in your pocket.

    (CROSSTALK)

    DAVID: (As Alexander Graham Bell) Oh, that’s just a fascinating idea.

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #8: (As character) Oh, what if you could send short little messages…

    DAVID: (As Alexander Graham Bell) What if you invent your own? Go off and invent your own. That’s not this. You want something that vibrates? Go. Go invent it. This is all nonsense.

    BIANCULLI: Yes, it is all nonsense. Even with some punch lines that are sharp and pointed, it’s all so whimsical it’s wonderful. Other sketches in the first show include trench warfare during World War I and Rosa Parks on a Birmingham bus ride predating her famous bus boycott.

    HBO wants a lot of the sketch details kept secret, and I’m fine with that. But every sequence brings its own unexpected joys. Hey, isn’t that Richard Kind and Michael Chiklis and Sean Hayes, Kathryn Hahn, Bill Hader and Jon Hamm and Jerry Seinfeld from “Seinfeld” and Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman and J. B. Smoove from “Curb” all joining in? Yes, it is. And there are others aboard, too, as unpublicized special surprises.

    Upcoming sketches are based on everything from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Army-McCarthy hearings and the Moon Landing and are equally hilarious. I’ve seen enough to say that Larry David isn’t just having great fun with history. He’s adding to his own with yet another high concept comedy series home run.

    MOSLEY: David Bianculli reviewed “Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness.” The series premieres on HBO tomorrow.

    If you’d like to catch up on interviews you’ve missed, like our conversation with Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis about the rise of masculinism or with actor and activist Laverne Cox on her new memoir about her life career and the attack on transgender rights, check out our podcast. You’ll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what’s happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers’ recommendations on what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.

    (SOUNDBITE OF OLIVER NELSON’S “BUTCH AND BUTCH”)

    MOSLEY: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Therese Madden directed today’s show. With Terry Gross, I’m Tonya Mosley.

    (SOUNDBITE OF OLIVER NELSON’S “BUTCH AND BUTCH”)

  • John Cena wanted to step away from the WWE ring before he became ‘too slow for the show’

    John Cena on Wild Card ( (NPR))

    A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: First a confession: I have never watched a WWE match in its entirety. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the athleticism and the performance, it’s just not my thing. But there is something about John Cena I’ve never been able to shake.

    Yes, he is a wrestling legend, but he has built a career as an entertainer that transcends the ring. The first time I saw him lead a cast was the 2019 family movie “Playing with Fire” and his rapport with kids in that film didn’t seem like acting at all. The man contains multitudes!

    He co-stars with Eric Andre in his newest film, “Little Brother.”

    Transcript:

    RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

    Have your feelings about death changed over time?

    JOHN CENA: Yes. I will die. I always used to say it out loud, like, as a young person. Like, oh, I’m never going to make it till I’m 40. That was just cannon fodder.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Now my perspective has changed that we all die. We are all going to die. And it gives me gratitude towards the now. It allows me to reflect with great feelings. That’s why I don’t have a void for retirement. I have love and gratitude and thanks.

    MARTIN: I’m Rachel Martin, and this is WILD CARD, the show where cards control the conversation.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They’re allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. My guest this week is John Cena.

    CENA: I look back on – like, I had 23 years of being a pro wrestler.

    MARTIN: Yeah (laughter).

    CENA: What? That’s my vocation.

    MARTIN: John Cena is a WWE legend, but he has built a career as an entertainer that really transcends the ring. The first time I saw him lead a cast in a movie was the 2019 family film “Playing With Fire.” And his rapport with kids in that movie did not seem like acting at all. The man contains multitudes. His newest film is called “Little Brother,” and I am so very happy to welcome John Cena to WILD CARD. Hi, John.

    CENA: Thank you. Glad I could play today.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: Here we go – memories. I’m going to hold up three cards. And you pick, John, randomly. One, two or three?

    CENA: Has anyone ever asked you to pick?

    MARTIN: Sometimes. We call that a dealer’s choice.

    CENA: Dealer’s choice.

    MARTIN: OK.

    CENA: I like this ’cause the dealer can see all the questions.

    MARTIN: I’m going to go with two.

    CENA: OK.

    MARTIN: When’s the first time you really got in trouble?

    CENA: My older brother, Steve, was performing in his second-grade play at a central elementary school in West Newbury, Massachusetts. I, before the show started, climbed up on the stage and said, I’m Superman, and jumped off into a bunch of steel chairs. And there’s a pretty cool picture of me peering up from one of the steel chairs with two huge…

    MARTIN: (Laughter).

    CENA: …Black eyes.

    MARTIN: Black eyes.

    CENA: And it is just – I think that was the first time I worried everyone but got in trouble as well.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: That’s the first time I remember that.

    MARTIN: You can draw such a clear line between that moment and what you ended up doing for a living.

    CENA: Imagine that.

    MARTIN: I mean, there’s – imagine that.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: Funny that. There’s the performance gene – percolated early…

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: …It seems…

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: …And being able to use your body…

    CENA: Thinking you’re invincible (laughter).

    MARTIN: …And not being afraid…

    CENA: Yeah, yeah.

    MARTIN: …Yeah, thinking you’re invincible…

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: …And being comfortable with risk.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: Was that emblematic in general of your childhood?

    CENA: I think so. I think so.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I’ve been using the term, like, courageous ignorance a lot. You know, a little bit of – certainly, a lot of curiosity, but I think that the courageous ignorance of not knowing enough…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Has led to a lot of interesting experiences.

    MARTIN: It gives you permission or you’re giving yourself permission to just – to be bold, to try things. And hopefully, you don’t get burned, but I imagine the risk reflex will kick in eventually and protect you from actually doing damage to your body.

    CENA: I think that’s well said, and even in the realm of you do know your limits. Like, you learn your limits. I have experienced that it’s far more effective for me to learn my limits rather than to be told them. And I think that courageous ignorance, that blissful ignorance of, like, not even having the conversation about limits…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Allows you to find them…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …In real time.

    MARTIN: Yeah. You came from a big family. I mean, you were one of…

    CENA: One of five.

    MARTIN: …Five brothers.

    CENA: All boys.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: All boys. So were your parents…

    CENA: Everybody always – everyone always does that – all boys? Oof.

    MARTIN: (Laughter) Well, I’m the mother of two boys. I love being the mom of boys. Boys are great. I am – they are a total treat, adventure, craziness, all the things. But it does force one to think about what boundaries you need to put up, you know, just for safety. What – were your parents – what was their parenting strategy with you? I mean, were you different from your siblings?

    CENA: So I think their strategy was like, just make sure they live, you know? And I will say…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …I really – I tip my cap to my parents for not protecting me so much and, I think, the rest of us because it allowed us to live. It allowed us to kind of figure it out.

    MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah.

    CENA: And there wasn’t – I mean, we did get in a lot of trouble, but no one was ever severely injured, and we learned a whole lot of lessons.

    MARTIN: Yeah. That’s the thing I’m starting to say to my kids as they get older and they have more independence. I’m like, go out. Be in the world. Make mistakes. Please call me if someone’s getting hurt or about to get hurt or you yourself…

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: Like, just I want there to be open communication, and that is the hard line – like, safety for yourself and your buddies.

    CENA: I think that’s well said. Sometimes, though, like, I – again, so, like, drawing the limits of safety – I don’t know. I’m – I think I’m…

    MARTIN: Oh, God.

    CENA: I benefited that there were very few limits of safety.

    MARTIN: Really?

    CENA: Yeah. It was just a different time. And through that, I got to go out and skin my knee with, like, no one around to…

    MARTIN: Yeah. I get it.

    CENA: The most important thing was just hanging out and playing with your friends.

    MARTIN: OK. Next one. One, two or three?

    CENA: Gosh, I want to go dealer’s choice on all these.

    MARTIN: You can’t.

    CENA: So…

    MARTIN: John, that’s a different show.

    CENA: OK. It’s your game. They’re your rules. And if you say I can’t, I can’t. So you already chose…

    MARTIN: OK.

    CENA: …Two. I will say you choose between one and three.

    MARTIN: Oh, my gosh. OK. OK, I’m going three. What’s something your parents taught you to love?

    CENA: Imagination. My dad was a huge theater buff. He directed small plays. He had aspirations to do larger things and then had a bunch of kids. My mom met my dad in the theater. He’s directing a play where she was involved, and, you know…

    MARTIN: Wow.

    CENA: …A theater romance started.

    MARTIN: I love that.

    CENA: And they formed a family out of that. Both of their roots are in imagination and performance.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And they taught us to love imagination. It was always embraced. I think my parents struggled to see parenting from the same level in a lot of cases and values…

    MARTIN: You mean…

    CENA: …From the same level in a lot of cases. But the one thing they wholeheartedly agreed upon was embracing of imagination.

    MARTIN: Did your parents support the imagination part of your wrestling career? You know what I mean? Like, in WWE, there’re – I mean, there’s all the athleticism, but there’s this real performance part of it. Did they see that as a creative act? Did they appreciate it as the creative act that it was?

    CENA: So my dad – oddly enough, like, wrestling was and has always been our through line, like, our conduit. He was one of the first homes in West Newbury to get cable television in, like, the mid-’80s…

    MARTIN: Whoa.

    CENA: …So we could watch more wrestling.

    MARTIN: (Laughter).

    CENA: And I’m serious. Like, he – I never played catch with my dad. He wasn’t really into sports, which was – that was different because growing up in New England, a lot – it’s very sports-focused.

    MARTIN: Yeah, for sure.

    CENA: We watched wrestling.

    MARTIN: Yeah. You watched wrestling.

    CENA: So we used to beat the tar out of each other as kids, and when it was allowed was we had a ring and a wrestling league in the basement. When I say basement, I mean concrete and poles.

    MARTIN: Yeah. Oh, my God.

    CENA: And the poles were like the ring posts. So we would wrestle…

    MARTIN: Wow.

    CENA: …Next to the furnace that was heating the house. Like, that’s what I mean by, like, not a lot of governance as long as we’re…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …OK kind of, you know?

    MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

    CENA: My dad fully embraced the imagination of WWE in pro wrestling. My mom…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Didn’t quite understand it. Yeah.

    MARTIN: Did she ever come around to it?

    CENA: She did. She did. She…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Man, this last year, the retirement tour, she was – she loved it. Absolutely loved it and, like, really let me know how proud she was and really did her best to try to understand everything. Yeah.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: But for the longest time, she just didn’t want me to get hurt.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: You know?

    MARTIN: I get it. OK. Last one in this round.

    CENA: Yeah. I got to choose one ’cause that’s the one that hasn’t been chosen.

    MARTIN: All right. I like your style. Where was the first place you lived when you felt truly on your own?

    CENA: Ah, Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, as a 15 1/2- or 16-year-old. Yeah.

    MARTIN: Boarding school?

    CENA: Yeah. Yeah.

    MARTIN: OK. Tell me about that. Was that your idea, their – your parents’ idea?

    CENA: So my older cousin has kind of always been an inspiration in my life. And especially at that age, I kind of wanted to do all the things he was doing. And he applied to Cushing Academy because a friend of his was already in. So I’m like, I want to do all the things you’re going to do. We’re…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I’m going to get accepted. We’re going to get accepted. We’re going to go together. I’m going to live at school. This is going to be great. He didn’t get accepted and didn’t continue a path. I also didn’t get accepted. But in the school letting me know that I wasn’t accepted – I was, like, a C, D student, and I was a freshman at the time – the dean of students said, hey, on your tour, we really saw potential in you. If you can take your grades from C’s and D’s to A and B’s, and if you can become a two-sport varsity athlete this year, we’ll take you.

    MARTIN: Wow.

    CENA: And I did. In my sophomore year, I kind of turned my ship around. I now had academic purpose and switched…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …My grades from C’s and D’s to A’s and B’s. I varsity lettered in baseball and football. I went back to do the whole interview process again, the whole application process again, the tour of the school, sitting down with faculty. And finally, they said, hey, you’re in. And my dad was like, I’m broke. And they were like, we will figure that part out, but we…

    MARTIN: Wow.

    CENA: …Think you’d be an asset just by your perseverance alone. And I got a chance to do – I got a chance to have an opportunity I never thought I would in life.

    MARTIN: So this is so interesting because I don’t – we don’t know each other. We’re just meeting here now. But based on what I’ve followed from your career and interviews I’ve read of you, you do seem like a person with such a strong work ethic, and you work a lot and you give, like, 100%. And this seems like maybe that – was this one of, like, the origin stories of where that started, is all of a sudden there became, like, this goal that you attach to outcomes that maybe could help your future trajectory? Or you – like, were you like that when you were a younger kid, too?

    CENA: I don’t know. I think the origins might be my, like, family base. My mom has a work ethic that I inspire to have. My dad is – at times, he could be labeled maybe a workaholic. Like, effort – we were never shy in the effort category in the Cena household…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Ever.

    MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah.

    CENA: I think this was just a thing where – again, courageous ignorance. I didn’t even know these schools existed.

    MARTIN: Right.

    CENA: I had a perfectly good social life where I was. And obviously, being a C, D student, my focus wasn’t in the classroom. I showed some athletic promise. And then someone was like, hey, we think you can do this. Do you think you can do this? And I think I just enjoy hearing that.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And from then on, I was like, man, I think I can do this. I’ll do this.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: You know, I just needed the right mentorship, I guess.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: We’re going to pull out of the game for a couple minutes.

    CENA: Yeah. Let’s talk some movies.

    MARTIN: Let’s talk some movies. So you have a new one out…

    CENA: Yep.

    MARTIN: …Which we need to say because there are just so many. Like, you do work a lot of – as we have indicated.

    CENA: I’m grateful for the opportunity.

    MARTIN: But the one I’m talking about today…

    CENA: Right.

    MARTIN: …(Laughter) Is “Little Brother.” This is with Eric Andre.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: I’m going to attempt to summarize this plot. You are reunited with this guy, who Eric plays. It is a guy you mentored when…

    CENA: Yep.

    MARTIN: …Your character was, like, in high school. And then you sort of forgot about him.

    CENA: Yep.

    MARTIN: And he did not forget about you. And so he, like, tracks you down and finds you at a different stage of your life, and shenanigans ensue.

    CENA: That’s correct.

    MARTIN: So Eric Andre, had you worked with him before?

    CENA: I was a special small guest on “The Eric Andre Show,” and that’s ’cause I expressed to the folks that connect people that I was a huge fan. I loved how freewheeling the show was. It’s…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: It’s amazing. It’s – it is raw.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: We keep in touch. Ever since I – I was in touch with him before I did the show.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: We stay in touch. He said, I have this project. I want to send it to you. I read it in a day and said, I’d love to do it. The script is great. It’s going to be in the Netflix family. They’re – I know…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: So I know the people putting it out. You know, I…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: We’re going to be OK. This script allows you to shine. Like, this is for you, man. Like, you’re going to be great in this, and the part is great for me. Let’s assemble a good team and go out and try to make a great movie. And that’s…

    MARTIN: I love it.

    CENA: It was as short as that.

    MARTIN: So their fraternity is at the center of the movie – right? – like, the idea of brotherhood, your relationship with Eric’s character. And you also have your actual brother in the movie, played by Chris Meloni. And that’s a lovely thing. I mean, it’s a funny movie, right? Like, but it’s not supposed to hit you over the head with some big moral message. But there is something really tactile in there about brothers, and that clearly had to have been a draw for you as a person with many brothers.

    CENA: So I think that’s interesting you say that the movie’s not supposed to hit you over the head with a moral message. As an entertainer, I want to just entertain audiences. I never want to tell…

    MARTIN: Right.

    CENA: …Audiences how to feel. I don’t think that’s…

    MARTIN: Right.

    CENA: I don’t think that’s right. Even if you’re a performer trying to send a message, if you’re an artist trying to put out art with a message and someone appreciates your art but interprets their own message, your art is out to the world. That’s perfectly OK if you see it and you like it for different reasons. You know, we’re not supposed to hit you over the head with messaging in pro wrestling, so to speak, but there’s…

    MARTIN: (Laughter).

    CENA: I invest in every opponent of, why are we fighting? What is our story? And it can be, like, the struggle in our fraternity, the lack of fraternity. I’m frustrated. I’m embarrassed. You start there, even though no one gets it. They just go into the audience, and they whip themselves up into a frenzy, and everybody has fun.

    For me – this story, for me, looking through my lens, is I’m a big believer in you choose your family. And love isn’t just simply granted because you say the – you have the same last name.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Love is a very powerful thing that – I just don’t throw that word away. And for this movie – and this is where I read a script, and I’m like, I think my talents, strengths and gifts could be well served here, especially with good coaching and good castmates. To me, this was my perspective of the family you choose.

    MARTIN: Do you like using your body this way? I mean, you have built so much of your career on your physical body. And throwing it around in the ring is one way to use it as an instrument, and acting’s a totally different way. And especially physical comedy, you get to flex that muscle – no pun intended – in this movie. But is it fun for you to inhabit your body in this different way in acting? You know what I mean?

    CENA: Let’s make no mistake about it. For me, playing dress-up is fun.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And that could be doing nothing, just simply the director wanting to catch introspection and their coaching note is, I need you to do nothing. Be elsewhere. I’m just going to roll. Just be someplace else.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: All of it is fun. It’s all imagination. And it is whimsical and creative and – I don’t know. But that’s the beauty of it for me. And those things aren’t for everybody. But when you talk to folks in the professional field, they like talking about that stuff. And…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Yeah, all that stuff is fun. To be able to be a physical storyteller, like Chaplin or Jackie Chan or, you know, Keaton, like, that’s so…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Cool. That’s a universal language. People can turn the volume down, and people around the world…

    MARTIN: Totally.

    CENA: …Can laugh with you…

    MARTIN: Totally.

    CENA: …And at you. And that’s fun.

    MARTIN: Right, right.

    CENA: So I like it all. It’s all fun.

    MARTIN: So you made this big change recently. I mean your retirement…

    CENA: Ah, yes.

    MARTIN: …From the WWE…

    CENA: Yes.

    MARTIN: …Just this past December. Huge deal for WWE. Huge deal for your fans and for you. I mean, 17 world championships?

    CENA: Seventeen. We ended with 17.

    MARTIN: Seventeen.

    CENA: That means I lost it 17 times, too. That’s…

    MARTIN: (Laughter) I mean…

    CENA: …A great lesson on the inevitability of failure.

    MARTIN: Right. But did you – I mean, it has to have created a void that you were anticipating for a long time that would exist in your life. Did you know intellectually that you were just going to double down on Hollywood to fill that void, or is there still a grief in there?

    CENA: So neither. You speak in an absolute that there has to be a void.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I don’t think that’s true.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I started very early in my career. And I went on record to say, when I’m a step slower, I’m going to step away. And the reason I said that is ’cause I saw performers hit a certain age, and their performance just didn’t match the rest of the show.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And that’s what people remember. They don’t remember the moments you want them to. They’ll remember you at the end, when you were too slow for the show. So I learned that lesson early on. And I’m not perfect with keeping my word, but I believe it’s the strongest currency I got. And I also know, like – I don’t know how many people face mortality. And I knew getting into this it was going to end, maybe ’cause I had to face almost getting fired once. But I wasn’t in this to hang around forever. And, I mean, instead of the void of it’s not there anymore, I look back on – like, I had 23 years of being a…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Pro wrestler.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: What? What?

    MARTIN: (Laughter).

    CENA: That’s my vocation, like…

    MARTIN: Yeah. Right.

    CENA: …That I got to be a traveling carnival performer. Like, that’s…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And I made that my career.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: How cool is that? So…

    MARTIN: People paid you to do it. That’s crazy.

    CENA: Can you – I can’t believe it. It brought us together.

    MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah.

    CENA: Like, this is amazing. Instead of a void, it’s more like gratitude.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I’m not trying to replace that chapter with anything. And I wouldn’t even plan it the way I planned it if I hadn’t come to peace with it. I’m still filled with joy, love, curiosity. There’s so much to do in the world. There’s so much to do in life. Each day is mine to do whatever I want. I certainly was not like, acting, wrestling – this one just takes over. ‘Cause I don’t control the opportunities I get in acting. It’s not like…

    MARTIN: Right.

    CENA: …You know, I got a long cigarette holder in an old art deco Hollywood place going, like, ah, put this kid in the picture.

    MARTIN: (Laughter).

    CENA: I’m just waiting – I’m waiting for the phone to ring, like everybody else. And one day, it’s not going to ring, and I know that. So I love life, you know, and I’m grateful for the run that I had. I continue to be a member of the WWE family and try to contribute wisdom and pass on tricks of the trade where I can, where I’m useful. And when I’m not, I step aside and let the show go run its course ’cause that’s what happens. The show was there before me. It is there after me. I should just be grateful to have a spot on the timeline, and one that is incredible. Twenty-three years and 17 championships? I will take that.

    MARTIN: John Cena, I want you to write a book of inspirational vignettes because that was just lovely.

    CENA: Oh.

    MARTIN: That was a lovely thing you just said about how to…

    CENA: I don’t know. I just…

    MARTIN: …Navigate your life and how to close chapters and feel grateful and not feel regret or longing for a different version of yourself, you know?

    CENA: I’m happy with the self that I see. Like, I’m happy with it.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And I also know that that self is going to evolve. I know the things that I’m lucky enough to be able to do now at 49, they’re going to change. If life expectancy takes its course and nothing – no force majeure gets in the way, I’m going to be a different person at 55. I’m going to be a different person at 60, 65, 70…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …As you go along.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And I’ve – I guess I’ve had my share of looking back, going, like, man, I used to be able to. And now I just am like, man, I get to.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: OK. Round 2. Three new cards – insights. One, two or three?

    CENA: Dealer’s choice.

    MARTIN: Oh, my God. John Cena, I can hear my editor being like, what? Are we going to let this stand? It’s John Cena.

    CENA: I’m picking one – dealer’s choice.

    MARTIN: Oh, OK. I’m going to ask this one. How comfortable are you with being alone?

    CENA: Very. Very.

    MARTIN: Are you?

    CENA: That is not how I want to live my life. I want to live my life as a loving member of a team. I also cherish my alone time. I think in a sense of longing for the person or people I love, I think absence does make the heart grow fonder in a lot of cases. And I think you need – for me, I need to not forget who I am, and a lot of that…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Comes with alone. Now, when I say alone, it could be – heck, it could be, like, 20 minutes in the sauna…

    MARTIN: Right.

    CENA: …Or five minutes in cold water or stretching by myself for an hour at the end of the day or waking up before everybody just to enjoy, like, 45 minutes with a warm cup of coffee. That’s what I mean by alone time.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Am I comfortable with no love and connection in my life? No. I would not want that life.

    MARTIN: For some reason, I imagine just the life of a WWE wrestler being a lot of planes.

    CENA: Correct.

    MARTIN: And being – you’re with people. There’s a lot of people managing you. But I imagine it being kind of lonely in some ways.

    CENA: How so? Let’s talk about that.

    MARTIN: Well, I guess I’ve never been a wrestler.

    (LAUGHTER)

    MARTIN: You’re such a – you’re a rarified kind of person. And you’re the top of the pyramid. You’re the talent. And everyone’s managing, manage you. And there’s a lot of pressure and expectation on you. And sometimes that, I imagine, could feel lonely. But I guess if that wasn’t your experience, maybe because you’re always traveling with other people who are at your level, and they are genuinely your friends?

    CENA: There is. There’s – even still remains. Although the management side has increased a little bit, there still remains a deep fraternity and sisterhood within all performers. It was a lot less management than you think, where we’re responsible for a lot. That’s why I loved the profession. It – no one manages you, pretty much. It’s a lot like stand-up comedy.

    MARTIN: Really?

    CENA: If you’re starting out, like not a stadium tour sell out stand-up comic. I mean like, even at the highest level, with me performing in sold-out arenas, it’s still like an upstart stand-up comic. You are responsible. So I like the fact that it creates a sense of independence.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: It also creates, you know, that sense of fraternity, of you have your brothers and sisters who are going through the same thing with you. And you can…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Bond and have fun with them. And then, I learned this through failure as well. Like, my wife, she knew nothing about wrestling. And we met by chance. She’s not in the entertainment business at all. She’s an engineer by trade. I say she’s the brains of the operation.

    MARTIN: I love this. Just for listeners, so you know, I think you guys just met, like, in real life just, like, in a restaurant.

    CENA: Like an old-fashioned, what are you doing here?

    MARTIN: Like the old times (laughter).

    CENA: Hey, can I have your number? That sort of thing.

    MARTIN: That’s so cute.

    CENA: And through my previous failures in trying to be loving, I would carve out these safe spaces for myself. And it basically led me to be able to have the freedom to live a double life. And no one really got to know the full me. And in doing so, I probably didn’t know the full me because I was one version of me and then another version of me.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And there was a lot of selfishness of, like, man, I’m in, like, my late 20s. I want to kind of be a rock star. Like, this is all fun. Like…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Let’s just see where it goes. So I put myself…

    MARTIN: Yeah. Not great for a long-term, steady relationship.

    CENA: But my fault. Like, I put myself there. A long-term – long-term and steady, I don’t know. There’s always ups and downs, right? A long-term loving relationship involves giving your whole self to the team, you know?

    MARTIN: Yeah. And making yourself vulnerable, letting that person see…

    CENA: This is all. This is it.

    MARTIN: …The 360 of you, right?

    CENA: Yes. You still interested? Because this is it.

    MARTIN: Right.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: It’s not just, like, John Cena in the ring.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: You know, awesome, strong, amazing performer guy. It’s all of you, your flaws and your insecurities and the whole shebang.

    CENA: Yeah. And I just – I struggled with a lot of that. And a lot of it was literally I just didn’t want to mess up this dream. I was able to try to connect. But I was always – it was always my own downfall of, like, I want to be a WWE superstar more than anything else.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Now I want to be the best husband to my wife that I can, more than anything else. So that – like, if that’s the thing, OK, make all decisions based off that. My past is make all decisions based off of WWE. And that led me to tremendous opportunity in WWE. It just – something has to give, you know?

    MARTIN: Yeah. Three new cards.

    CENA: OK. I can’t do dealer’s choice.

    MARTIN: (Laughter).

    CENA: You chose No. 1. You can choose between two and three.

    MARTIN: (Laughter) I’m going over here. How big of a role does fear have in your life?

    CENA: So it’s definitely there. As a human being, it’s definitely there, I think managed. Certainly, like, fear of whatever life will deal. Gosh, I simply have been very, very lucky in life.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And every day that goes by, I realize more and more exponentially how lucky I am. So I think the fear of what’s the worst that could happen wanes to, man, let’s go out and try to do something good. As far as, like, fear of spiders, ledges, you know…

    MARTIN: Are you afraid of spiders and ledges?

    CENA: And snakes, heights.

    MARTIN: Are you?

    CENA: Yeah. But then again, like, even then I’ll sit and ask myself, so why am I afraid of this? Like, why am I…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Skeeved out?

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: You know, like I think the ledges thing is – the ledges and heights are the same thing. I’m a professional fall down man. So I know, like…

    MARTIN: But, dude, didn’t you have to stand up on, like, the pillars of the ring? That’s high.

    CENA: Yes. But that’s also like, I’ll be able to walk away from this. But then you also know if it was like, oh, if it was three more feet, I can’t.

    MARTIN: (Laughter).

    CENA: So, again, like, I think the ledges and heights thing is like, oh, wouldn’t want to take that spill because I know what taking a spill feels like, you know?

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I think a takeaway is, like, we certainly all have fear. And we should have fear.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I tend to try to talk about mine and figure it out, you know? Man, I could have the – like, a fear of mine or a trigger of mine is not feeling heard.

    MARTIN: Not feeling heard?

    CENA: Yes. Yes. Man, that puts me in defense. Whew. I just – and I’ve worked hard to create far more of a balance there, but I think it’s like I started not really as anybody’s first pick as a professional and then somehow made it to every cut. And then finally, it took years for people to kind of listen to me, even though I thought I had good ideas. And I ended up having some ideas that were good and kind of did good not only for myself, but everyone involved. So maybe there’s a fear in there that, like, oh, I’m not heard, or I’m not enough, you know. But I think this is something a lot of folks struggle with, and a lot of folks think. I just think…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …It’s OK to have fear.

    MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you approach it from curiosity – yeah – as…

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: …It sounds like you are, too. It’s like, why is this happening?

    CENA: Why is this happening?

    MARTIN: Why am I feeling this way?

    CENA: Yep.

    MARTIN: Yeah. OK. Last one in this round.

    CENA: We will do number two.

    MARTIN: One, two, three. Two. Has ambition ever led you astray?

    CENA: Uh, so I’m going to ask you to use more words. What do you define by…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Astray?

    MARTIN: Well, it’s a great pushback. Have you ever done a thing because it was going to get you somewhere in your career, and you didn’t like who you were when you were doing it. I guess that’s the root of that question.

    CENA: So the answer to that is yes, and I’m faced with those all the time. I think we all are. Those are the – those are my most teachable moments, and those are the ones I reflect on with guilt, borderline shame.

    MARTIN: Really?

    CENA: Because you define your values, and you define, you know, how you want to live. And if an opportunity comes where you’re like, oh, man, this could be really good, but it’s not who I am…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …People see through that immediately. Immediately. And then you feel guilt of, like, IOUs or paper IOUs are cool, but the currency you have is your integrity – is who you are. And, you know, everything and everybody’s got a price is a real comment. You just got to to be accountable. That weight’s heavy. It’s heavy.

    MARTIN: Is there an example you would feel comfortable sharing?

    CENA: I think one time I tried to get involved with an entrepreneurial social network startup. And I didn’t tell my boss. And we talk about everything. This was like, man, we’re going to do this together. And in potentially being part of this startup, I would – my name’s John Cena, so I would essentially be leveraging intellectual property.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: That’s a team decision. And…

    MARTIN: This is when you were wrestling, yeah. Yeah.

    CENA: And I love and trust my boss. He’s far more than my boss.

    MARTIN: Sorry, John, is this your agent or, like, the…

    CENA: No, no…

    MARTIN: …Head of WWE?

    CENA: …This is Vince McMahon.

    MARTIN: Oh, oh, the big boss.

    CENA: The big boss.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Yes.

    MARTIN: Vince McMahon. Yeah.

    CENA: I was just trying to get more money, simply. I have my own philosophy on social networks. I’m very limited in my use by design. So it’s not something I’m interested in, not too fond of, like, limited access stuff. And this was a curated idea that seemed nice. But I looked at the projections. And man, my boss found out, and to be honest, he was great. He was great. He, like, walked me through the – OK, this is the choice you’ve made. Let’s walk through all the tentacles…

    MARTIN: The repercussions.

    CENA: …Of what might happen. And in a moment where it was a direct violation of trust to somebody I had worked years – and he invested years in trusting me, too, so it was a moment where he could have just gone nuclear because, you know, trust takes years to build and moments to destroy. And he didn’t. He didn’t. He had patience and tolerance. And I think possibly as an entrepreneur himself, maybe tried to put himself in my shoes and walked me through it, and, like, it took five minutes or less to realize, like, I’m such an idiot. And I immediately called the company back and said I’m out. This isn’t for me.

    MARTIN: And isn’t it a lovely gift to have people in your life, whether it was Vince or your wife now, who can see around your blind spots, right? Like, we – sometimes we can’t see what’s good for us. And you need other people who you love and trust to be like, I don’t think this is you.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: I don’t think it is. I think…

    CENA: I really do like that perspective. Also, we can’t see it all. The term blind spots, I think, is incredible. And everyone has a different perspective. And the folks I have around me, no one shares the same. Like, it’s almost as if it’s a – if we all say yes to an idea, it’s a no ’cause something’s wrong. Like, we’re all missing something.

    MARTIN: Oh, interesting. Yeah.

    CENA: Our conversations are all, have we seen it from this side? Have we seen it from this side? And…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …The environment that like, yo, that’s OK – whatever your perspective is, it’s OK. That’s why we have the time to talk about this.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: So that’s – I love the term blind spots. I think that’s very appropriate.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: John Cena, we’re at Round 3.

    CENA: OK.

    MARTIN: Beliefs.

    CENA: All right.

    MARTIN: Three new cards.

    CENA: All right.

    MARTIN: One, two or three?

    CENA: Starting with dealer’s choice.

    MARTIN: Starting with dealer’s choice.

    CENA: That’s the – this is the last one I’ll use, I promise.

    MARTIN: This is so – I feel so much power. It’s – and no one really gives me this kind of control. I’m really into it. OK. Let’s see. Wow, these are all pretty good. All right. I’m going to ask this one.

    CENA: Sure.

    MARTIN: It’s heavy. How do you think your life should be judged?

    CENA: However people want. I think they have the freedom to have their own perspective. And each day, I try to work hard to be the person I say I am for my own sound sleep. But as far as people judging how I live my life, I wouldn’t want them to tell me how to live mine. And they have earned the freedom by waking up each day to do or say whatever they want about me.

    MARTIN: And that stuff falls off you? I mean, have you always been able to…

    CENA: No, of course not.

    MARTIN: …Keep that kind of – no (laughter).

    CENA: No. I’m not – that is not easy. And…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Again, I know what I signed up for. There’s a whole lot…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Of negativity out there. There is. And anytime – you know, personally, anytime I feel, you know, you try to get something going, there’s always a criticism out there. Yet, that’s the world I signed up for. I am a performer to put my art out into the world, or I am a businessperson who needs to put product out for consumer consumption. I’m not allowed to tell them how to think about it. They’re allowed to tell me how to think about it so I can change it and curate it according to supply and demand. Like, that’s the fun of playing dress-up. It’s not all the highs. You got to deal with that stuff.

    So it’s – no. I – that stuff does not roll off my back. I love it because it allows me to be open to criticism. It allows me to consider the source. It allows me to deal with negativity. It keeps me grounded. It keeps me humble. It humiliates me. It keeps me vulnerable. If I am struggling with it, I can lean on people I love and say, like, my feelings are hurt, and this is a safe space to talk about that. It is not easy, but – and it doesn’t roll off my back, and it’s there. It’s part of the existence. But I don’t care how people judge me.

    Sorry. I should say, I do care because if I had apathy towards life, I think I would lose curiosity. People have earned the right to judge me however they want. I think that’s better said.

    MARTIN: I get it, yeah. Also, it’s just very liberating to be at that stage, you know?

    CENA: God, it’s a lot of…

    MARTIN: Age. Age – it helps with age…

    CENA: I think…

    MARTIN: …Let’s just say.

    CENA: …Time on the track helps, and…

    MARTIN: (Laughter) It does. How old are you?

    CENA: I will be – I’m 49. I’ll be 50 next year.

    MARTIN: It’s great over here. Let me just tell you.

    CENA: Oh, I can’t wait.

    MARTIN: On the other side of 50…

    CENA: I can’t wait.

    MARTIN: …It’s pretty good.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Yeah.

    MARTIN: Yeah. It’s pretty good. I think you’re going to like it.

    CENA: I will…

    MARTIN: Three new cards.

    CENA: I will take No. 3.

    MARTIN: Three. I thought you were going to tell me that you were going to invite me to your birthday party, and then you didn’t say that, so then I was disappointed.

    CENA: It’s still a ways away, so I’m still working on the guest list. You still got a couple of questions left to lose your invite.

    MARTIN: It’s true. It’s true. It can all go off the rails in the last two questions, and my invitation gets lost in the mail. OK. One, two or three? Sorry. You picked. What did you pick?

    CENA: Three.

    MARTIN: Three. Have your feelings about death changed over time?

    CENA: Yes. I will die, and I think about that often. And I never – you know what? I always used to say it out loud, like, as a young person, again, having fun with life. Like, oh, I’m never going to make it till I’m 40, or if I make it till I’m 40, I’ve overstayed my welcome. That was just cannon fodder and to do things that were, like, dopamine hits. Like, that is just a way to say that to be like, this is OK to do ’cause I’m not going to make it till 40, right?

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: Now my perspective has changed that we all die. We are all going to die. And it gives me gratitude towards the now. It makes me excited for things down the road. It allows me to reflect with great feelings. It’s why I don’t have a void for retirement. I have love and gratitude and thanks. If my day gets a little gritty, I’m alive, you know?

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: When we start saying, like, what’s the worst that could happen, you could not be alive, you know?

    MARTIN: Right.

    CENA: And I know life will deal me a whole set of challenges, and the challenges will get different exponentially as the days go on and the birthdays pass. I think about my mortality often, and I encourage folks to do more of that, and not from a morbid sense – from a factual sense.

    MARTIN: Yeah, yeah.

    CENA: We all think we got all the time in the world. And I think when you realize you don’t, it helps you appreciate the time you have, at least from my perspective.

    MARTIN: Totally. Yeah, for sure. Same. I also wonder – I wanted to ask you about your involvement with the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

    CENA: Sure.

    MARTIN: Because especially in the…

    CENA: Bonus question for you. Go for it.

    MARTIN: …Under the architecture of this question in particular about death, though, because these are kids you – first of all, you have, like, the Guinness World Record or something of most Make-A-Wish visits. I mean, it’s really incredible, John, the amount of time that you’ve given to kids who are having a hard struggle. And I imagine some of those kids who you have spent time with have died, have passed on. And that is the toughest of things to watch children suffer. And I wonder how that has impacted your view of living and your thoughts about dying.

    CENA: So that’s a great question. Again, there is not a better chin check on, like, how bad are my problems? – than to go into someone really fighting a – climbing a steep hill. And when that person is, like, a young person, and to see them so full of joy and excitement and hope, even with that steep climb, it has made a world of difference in my life, even when I didn’t understand why it was making a world of difference.

    MARTIN: What do you mean?

    CENA: I think at a younger age, I very much appreciated always being involved with Make-A-Wish. It was only as I began to truly lean into mortality – I would say last decade – that it really had a profound impact on we do have a select amount of time, and that’s beyond our control, period.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And you can still have joy, and you can still have excitement, and you can still be curious, and you can still have an imagination. And you can be grateful for all those things.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: And that’s – man, a lot of the questions are kind of like leading-the-witness questions of, like, oh, this must be tough for you or, man, it must’ve been so hard. My experience with Make-A-Wish was incredible – incredible. Getting a lot of letters after the visits, explaining circumstances – those are emotional to read. It doesn’t slight the moments that I’ve had and the excitement that I’ve shared. Those were so fun.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: I don’t know. They just – it was a stout reminder to be grateful for life and a…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …Easy, easy way to be like, man, whatever I’m carrying, I just need to lighten that ’cause…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: …My hill’s not as steep as this one, and they are rocking. They are here to have fun.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: So let’s see if we can change the lens.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: You know, inspiration through those and meeting so many young minds who are so inspiring to me and families who are so inspiring to me, they don’t even realize it.

    MARTIN: Yeah. Last one. Last one.

    CENA: OK.

    MARTIN: One, two, three. What you got?

    CENA: I want to say dealer’s choice, but your producer’s going to kill me. We’ll go No. 2.

    MARTIN: (Laughter) What truth guides your life more than any other?

    CENA: That’s a good one. The powerful play goes on – we get to contribute a verse – is pretty good. And then, again, all…

    MARTIN: The power of play lives on. Oh, that’s nice.

    CENA: The powerful play goes on. We get to contribute a verse. “O Me! O Life!” Whitman. So truth – I don’t know. Like, so truth in itself is – it’s possessive. Truth is constantly changing. We’re constantly finding out more. As the facts change, I change my mind. What we know today will be outdated tomorrow. And tomorrow, today’s answer is wrong, but it’s right right now. And that’s OK. That’s fine. We don’t have to – we can evolve. We can change. I think that’s the truth. The only truth is the constant of change and the fact that we’re mortal.

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: You know, until those things are fixed, that’s it.

    MARTIN: (Laughter) It just is.

    CENA: The only constant is change, and we are all…

    MARTIN: Yeah.

    CENA: We are all renters.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: OK. John Cena, we end the show the same way every time with a trip in our memory time machine.

    CENA: OK.

    MARTIN: OK? In the memory time machine, you revisit one moment from your past. It’s not a moment you want to change anything about. It’s just a moment you’d like to linger in a little longer.

    CENA: Sure.

    MARTIN: What moment do you choose?

    CENA: Oh, my goodness. My wedding day.

    MARTIN: Yeah?

    CENA: The week was great. The lead-up was great. The day, I – it felt like it lasted a while. Man, it was just such a great day. Such a great day. And…

    MARTIN: I’m sure there were many moments. Can you give me one?

    CENA: Yeah. Us eating chocolate chip cookies, way in the cheap seats, just looking at everybody having such a good time because our mission statement was, this day is about us. It’s about allowing our friends to hold us accountable if we hit tough times as a team. And in doing that, we are going to be as hospitable as we can and try to create an environment of love and joy ’cause that’s – if it starts with us, it’ll just permeate. And towards the end of the night, we’re just each eating a wonderful chocolate chip cookie, looking at each other. And we were like, they’re having a lot of fun out there. This is such a good moment.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: John Cena. You can see him in the new film “Little Brother.” It was such a pleasure to do this with you. Thank you.

    CENA: Thanks so much.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: Hey, thanks so much for listening. It has been a little bit since I’ve asked, so I’m going to ask again. If you love WILD CARD, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen. It really helps other people find our show. And, hey, it also makes our team feel great. We really appreciate it.

    This episode was produced by Mitra Arthur and Lee Hale. It was edited by Dave Blanchard and mastered by Andie Huether. WILD CARD’s executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni, and our theme music is by Ramtin Arablouei. You can reach out to us at wildcard@npr.org. And we will shuffle to deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  • Venezuela Earthquakes, Trump Senate Fight, Pentagon Shuffles

    Transcript:

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

    What appears to be two powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela just seconds apart.

    A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

    They hit Caracas and a crowded region west of the capital. Buildings collapsed. The main airport is damaged. The government fears a high death toll as recovery efforts continue.

    MARTIN: I’m Michel Martin. That’s A Martínez, and this is UP FIRST from NPR News.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTIN: Senate Republicans reversed course in Iran last night, voting against a resolution to end the war just a day after a bipartisan rebuke of President Trump. It was a peace offering to a furious president who had blown up a popular housing bill and berated his own party over loyalty.

    MARTÍNEZ: And one of the Army’s top generals is set to retire, catching many by surprise. General Chris Donahue was the last U.S. soldier out of Afghanistan in 2021, and his exit fits a pattern of Pentagon shake-ups. Stay with us. We’ve got news you need to start your day.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: Venezuela was hit by what seems to be two powerful earthquakes on Wednesday. They are among the largest in its history. The capital, Caracas, is one of the worst affected areas.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Shouting in non-English language).

    (SOUNDBITE OF DEBRIS CLATTERING)

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).

    MARTÍNEZ: In sound from this verified video, you can hear a resident screaming in terror as their apartment sways violently from side to side.

    MARTIN: The tremors, measuring magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, shook just 39 seconds apart, bringing down buildings and severely damaging the international airport, which has now been closed. More than 20 aftershocks have followed. The government has declared a state of emergency amid fears of significant casualties.

    MARTÍNEZ: Reporter John Otis joins us from neighboring Colombia. John, do we have any updates at all on the extent of the damage on casualties?

    JOHN OTIS, BYLINE: Well, A, there’s still a lot of confusion over just how much devastation was caused by these back-to-back earthquakes. Their epicenter was west of Caracas, but that’s a very densely populated area with some big industrial cities like Valencia and Barquisimeto. From photos and videos, the damage looks quite extensive. You can see huge clouds of dust rising into the sky over collapsed buildings and rescue workers pulling survivors out of the rubble on stretchers. People were ducking for cover under tables at restaurants and dashing out of their homes into the streets.

    Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, said at least 32 people were killed and 700 injured. And she said dozens of buildings collapsed in La Guaira, which is a town near the capital. Yesterday was a public holiday in Venezuela, so rather than at work, many people were at their homes when the quake struck. Now, models put together by the U.S. Geological Survey project that in earthquakes this strong, there could be thousands of casualties. That said, we don’t have total numbers at this point, but people are already posting on social media, looking for missing loved ones.

    MARTÍNEZ: OK. So what’s been the response of the Venezuelan government?

    OTIS: President Rodriguez spoke to the nation last night. She declared a state of emergency. She canceled public schools, and she called on doctors and nurses to immediately report to work. Let’s listen.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    PRESIDENT DELCY RODRIGUEZ: (Non-English language spoken).

    OTIS: And she’s saying, “my main message to our people is to show solidarity.” And she goes on to say that her entire government has been mobilized and that the No. 1 task right now is saving lives.

    MARTÍNEZ: OK. What’s been the response from the international community?

    OTIS: President Rodriguez says she’s received calls from the U.S., Mexico, Colombia and many other countries offering to help. President Trump has said on social media that he’s ordered U.S. agencies to prepare to move quickly. The U.S. State Department says it’s mobilized a disaster assistance team and task force to Venezuela. It will also be sending search and rescue teams, medical and humanitarian supplies.

    It helps that the Rodriguez government’s been working closely with Washington ever since the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, was ousted by U.S. special forces back in January. And the U.S. Embassy has also reopened, so that should help. But remember, under the Maduro regime, Venezuela’s economy collapsed due to corruption, mismanagement and U.S. sanctions. Today, there’s triple-digit inflation. The health system’s in shambles and firefighters and rescue workers lack equipment. So it’s going to be tough for Venezuela to try to recover from this natural disaster.

    MARTÍNEZ: That’s John Otis, who is reporting from neighboring Colombia. John, thank you.

    OTIS: Thanks very much.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: President Trump shocked Washington yesterday when he blew up plans to sign the widely supported legislation to lower housing costs across America.

    MARTIN: The president said he won’t support the measure until the Senate passes his sweeping elections bill that, so far, Senate leaders have said just does not have the votes to pass. That’s just the latest example of his frustration with those who won’t follow his lead. Not only is the president showing his frustration with the Senate, but also U.S. allies around the world.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I just want their loyalty. We don’t need their money. We don’t need anything. We have the most powerful military in the world by far. But I just want loyalty. You know, we’re so loyal to them.

    MARTÍNEZ: NPR’s Franco Ordoñez has been following this. Franco, it feels like the president was celebrating Festivus at the Capitol with the airing of grievances. What can you tell us?

    FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: (Laughter) Yeah. I mean, first, he really abruptly canceled a popular bipartisan achievement in Washington that both Republicans and Democrats wanted – really a rarity these days. It was, you know, a bill that focuses on one of the most important challenges Americans are facing right now, and that’s affordability. But Trump was just not having it, saying that his pet issue – this election bill – had to be first. I mean, it really was kind of like a serenity-now moment for some of these senators.

    MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter).

    ORDOÑEZ: You know, Trump later went into a closed-door meeting with some of those senators and expressed frustration with those who rebuked him on the Iran war, actually prompting them to reverse course later in the day and vote against a similar war powers resolution that they had approved earlier in the day.

    And then finally, A, in a meeting with Mark Rutte, NATO general secretary, Trump went off on European leaders who he felt did not support him enough in the war against Iran. As we heard, he said he doesn’t want their money. All he wants is their loyalty.

    MARTÍNEZ: So on that elections bill, John Thune, the Senate majority leader, has explained that the votes are just not there to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Does President Trump not understand how the Senate works here?

    ORDOÑEZ: You know, it’s not clear if he doesn’t understand or if he just doesn’t care about the norms and procedures of the Senate. I mean, Trump is more focused on having Republicans loyal to him than having a majority who can pass his legislation. You know, as you pointed out earlier, this speaks to much bigger issues about expanding his executive and political power and the loyalty he expects from those he works with. You know, that, of course, includes the Senate, who he ripped into earlier in the day over Iran and, of course, withheld support from the housing bill that could have helped the party in the fall elections. But it also extends to foreign leaders, which we also saw yesterday. After Trump criticized European leaders, Rutte, the NATO chief, was clearly trying to maintain ties between Trump and the rest of Europe. I mean, just showering him with praise and only delicately pushing back when Trump criticized those allies.

    MARTÍNEZ: There must be political implications, though, especially with the housing vote.

    ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. I mean, it speaks to the divide in the Republican Party, just five months from the midterms. Republicans have been clamoring for Trump to turn from Iran and focus on domestic issues, to focus on the economy. And then here you have them delivering to his desk, something that addresses one of the things polls show Americans are most worried about – the cost of living. It would probably help him in the polls. It would help the party. And he doesn’t sign it. I mean, House Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to meet with Trump today to go over some of the challenge Trump faces with Capitol Hill Republicans, but it just gives Democrats another example that they can point to and argue that Trump is focused more on election fights and not on kitchen table concerns.

    MARTÍNEZ: That is White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez. Thanks a lot, Franco.

    ORDOÑEZ: Thanks, A.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: Army General Chris Donahue will shortly announce his retirement, according to two U.S. officials who are not authorized to speak publicly.

    MARTIN: The news caught many by surprise. Donahue was a Special Forces soldier who now oversees U.S. Army operations across Europe and Africa. But he’s perhaps best known as the last American soldier to depart Afghanistan in 2021, during the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces under the Biden administration.

    MARTÍNEZ: Here with more is NPR’s Quil Lawrence. So, Quil, who is General Chris Donahue?

    QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Yeah. He’s a West Point graduate, combat-decorated veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria. He was a leader in Delta Force, which is an elite group even within Special Forces. He also commanded the 82nd Airborne. He ran the Army’s Infantry School. In Europe, he’s worked with Ukrainian military leaders. He’s very highly respected across the military. But he was only in this four-star Army job in Europe for a year and a half. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did come into office saying that there were far too many flag officers in the military. He shrunk down the possible jobs that four stars can go to, but Donahue would have seemed like a competitive candidate for any of those remaining jobs up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

    MARTÍNEZ: So do we know anything about the backstory behind the abrupt news of his retiring?

    LAWRENCE: No one has any official explanation. If you follow military Twitter – and the Trump administration does seem to be concerned about what’s said on social media – there are some trolls focusing on the fact that Donahue was in charge of trying to evacuate Kabul Airport. You may remember from five years ago, this green-tinted night vision photo of a man walking up the ramp of an aircraft, the last man out of Afghanistan. And people are sort of pinning that whole debacle, that messy conclusion of 20 messy years of war, capped by the death of 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghans in this suicide bombing at Abbey Gate. They’re pinning that on Donahue.

    MARTÍNEZ: OK. With that in mind, then, the Pentagon is now doing an investigation of what it calls a, quote, “disastrous and embarrassing withdrawal” and has promised accountability. So is Donahue to blame for any of that?

    LAWRENCE: There’s really no evidence that he was. He arrived in Kabul after the city had fallen to the Taliban. He wasn’t in charge of Abbey Gate. He came to run the withdrawal and coordinated hundreds of flights that probably saved thousands of people’s lives. And that photo of him being the last man out is widely seen as what right looks like in the military, the way a commander takes responsibility. You know, it was a general who was the last man to board the plane, not some unlucky private.

    MARTÍNEZ: You know, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has had a few firings in his time as secretary of defense. Does this fall into that pattern?

    LAWRENCE: Yes and no. Hegseth’s been trimming the ranks, and as we’ve watched that play out, more than half of those cut have been female or Black officers, and Hegseth has been doing this highly unusual thing where he reaches way down into the promotion lists to block people. And of course, he summarily fired CQ Brown, who was a Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as soon as Hegseth came in. But Donahue is a white man and he seems to fit even the, you know, let’s say, narrow vision of what Secretary Hegseth calls a war fighter.

    This seems much more like back in April when Army Chief of Staff General Randy George was fired by Hegseth with no explanation. The rumors were that George was seen as an ally of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who had been outshining Hegseth a bit, and this was some sort of retaliation. That upset many in Congress from both parties. And now, at least the Senate version of this year’s defense bill will require written justification from the Pentagon before promotions can be delayed or withheld like this.

    MARTÍNEZ: All right. That’s NPR’s Quil Lawrence. Quil, thank you.

    LAWRENCE: Thank you.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: And that’s UP FIRST for Thursday, June 25. I’m A Martínez.

    MARTIN: And I’m Michel Martin. Today’s episode of UP FIRST was edited by Tara Neill, Rebekah Metzler, Andrew Sussman, Mohamad ElBardicy and H.J. Mai. It was produced by Ziad Buchh and Nia Dumas. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Neisha Heinis. Our technical director is Carleigh Strange, and our deputy executive producer is Kelley Dickens. We hope you’ll join us again tomorrow.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  • From Hormuz to Suez: the chokepoints of global power

    From Hormuz to Suez: the chokepoints of global power

    Transcript:

    RUND ABDELFATAH, HOST:

    As evening sets in, on July 26, 1956, the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, stands at a podium in Alexandria, looking out at a crowd of a hundred thousand.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    GAMAL ABDEL NASSER: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: He’s about to throw a wrench into the plans of the most powerful countries on Earth. At first, the speech seems fairly standard, kind of upbeat, but about halfway into the nearly three-hour speech, Nasser begins to rail against what he calls the imperialists who have mortgaged our future, his voice growing more fiery.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    NASSER: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: And then he repeatedly says the name…

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    NASSER: Ferdinand de Lesseps.

    ABDELFATAH: Ferdinand de Lesseps, the 19th century French developer who built the Suez Canal in the 1860s, which dramatically cut down the travel time between Europe and Asia.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    NASSER: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: The canal was mostly built by Egyptian laborers. It runs through Egyptian territory, but the two biggest shareholders of the company that controlled shipping in the canal – Britain and France. And towards the end of the speech, Nasser reads a presidential decree nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, putting control of shipping there in the hands of Egypt.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    NASSER: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: At that exact moment, miles away, Egyptian military forces mobilized to occupy the canal offices, taking control of all its assets.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    NASSER: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: The crowd erupts with cheers.

    (CHEERING)

    ABDELFATAH: Almost immediately, the British and French owners of the Suez Canal Company start freaking out.

    (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “SUEZ CANAL SEIZED BY EGYPTIANS”)

    UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #1: A new Middle East crisis arises, as President Nasser of Egypt tells a wildly cheering crowd…

    ABDELFATAH: The clock begins ticking. Can Egypt and these empires come to some kind of agreement?

    (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “SUEZ CANAL SEIZED BY EGYPTIANS”)

    UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #1: His announcement touches off a rapid series of reprisals and counter-reprisals.

    ABDELFATAH: Turns out, Britain had already been working on a secret plan to try to get rid of Nasser. And now the moment has come to put it into action, a conspiracy that will nearly bring on World War III.

    The feeling that we’re hurdling towards World War III isn’t unfamiliar today. And over the last week, the headlines have been dominated by one question – will the latest U.S.-Iran tentative deal hold, and will the oil keep flowing through the Strait of Hormuz? Which highlights an important reality. For decades now, the real power in the region has often flowed through water. Three narrow waterways shape the Middle East relationship to the world, carrying up to a quarter of global trade. Together, they form what may be the most powerful triangle on Earth – the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. In times of crisis, these waterways become chokepoints, a single disruption sending shockwaves across continents, shockwaves that often reverberate long after ceasefires are signed and tensions cool.

    I’m Rund Abdelfatah. And on this episode of THROUGHLINE from NPR, we’re taking you to three moments on these waterways that helped define the modern Middle East and rewrote the rules of global power.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    NASSER: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: When we come back, we return to the secret murder conspiracy on the Suez Canal.

    FORTSON DESRAVINES: My name is Fortson Desravines (ph) from Silver Spring, Maryland, and you’re listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Part 1 – Suez.

    ALEX VON TUNZELMANN: When people try to talk about what triggers the crisis, they often come to Nasser and nationalizing the Suez Canal Company in July 1956. But I think that you have to understand the world in which that happened.

    ABDELFATAH: This is Alex von Tunzelmann.

    VON TUNZELMANN: I am a historian, and my book is called “Blood And Sand: Suez, Hungary, And Eisenhower’s Campaign For Peace.”

    ABDELFATAH: A few months before NASA made his earth-shattering announcement to nationalize the Suez Canal Company, the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, had actually phoned a colleague in the foreign office and said…

    VON TUNZELMANN: I want him murdered.

    ABDELFATAH: So before we dive into what happened next on the Suez Canal, we need to rewind a little to understand what the world looked like back then and how Nasser ended up at that podium.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    VON TUNZELMANN: So Britain and France had been the imperial powers in the Middle East. They’d carved it up between themselves under what’s called the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

    ABDELFATAH: In 1916, the Sykes-Picot agreement drew new borders around the Arab territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, places like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, and put them under the control of either Britain or France. Around this time, a British intelligence bureau was set up in Egypt to monitor its neighbors. And then a couple decades later…

    VON TUNZELMANN: Of course, you got World War II shakes up the entire world. After World War II, complex time in the Middle East.

    ABDELFATAH: In theory, it was the end of empires, the end of colonial rule, the beginning of a new world order defined by international law and organizations like the United Nations. In 1947, the U.N. drafted a plan calling for the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. Israel was established the following year. An Arab state was not created.

    VON TUNZELMANN: That created a lot of instability in the Middle East, largely because most of the other Middle Eastern countries were very unhappy with what they saw as a sort of colonial move after World War II.

    ABDELFATAH: The U.S., not a huge player in the Middle East yet, was a big supporter of this plan and helped push it through.

    VON TUNZELMANN: The day after the state of Israel was declared, you had a joint force of Arab armies invading, and that first war that kind of establishes that.

    ABDELFATAH: News reels from the time show Israeli soldiers driving trucks through the streets.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #2: Latest pictures from war-torn Palestine provide these impressions of Haganah forces consolidating areas under their control.

    VON TUNZELMANN: And Gamal Abdel Nasser was among those who fought in that war.

    ABDELFATAH: Nasser was from a middle-class family.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Very, very bright.

    ABDELFATAH: Very ambitious.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Also very good-looking. Not irrelevant.

    ABDELFATAH: And like a lot of young men in Egypt then, who had bigger dreams for themselves, he joined the military.

    VON TUNZELMANN: And he really started to come onto the radar of people like the CIA in the early 1950s.

    ABDELFATAH: The CIA had been established after World War II and was just starting to build its relationships worldwide.

    VON TUNZELMANN: In March 1952, when the CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt was in Cairo, Nasser was a colonel. Roosevelt had a series of meetings with him and actually established that NASA was rather a positive figure from the point of view of American interests.

    ABDELFATAH: This is the same Kermit Roosevelt that staged the coup in Iran in 1953?

    VON TUNZELMANN: Oh, yeah. There weren’t too many Kermit Roosevelts. These guys were busy.

    ABDELFATAH: Yeah.

    VON TUNZELMANN: You know, there was a lot happening at this time.

    ABDELFATAH: A lot of secret plots and backroom deals.

    VON TUNZELMANN: You can’t disentangle it from the history of oil. This part of the world is just becoming incredibly important, and the struggle to control that is absolutely enormous.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    NASSER: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: Meanwhile, Nasser helps stage a coup and goes on to become prime minister of Egypt in 1954 and president in 1956.

    VON TUNZELMANN: He was politically positioning himself in a very interesting way ’cause you got to remember, the Cold War was really kicked off by this point.

    ABDELFATAH: Nasser refused to align fully with either Washington or Moscow. He promoted Arab unity and anti-colonial nationalism, which made him very popular across the region and threatening to France, which blamed him for encouraging resistance in Algeria.

    VON TUNZELMANN: So at this time, Algeria is still part of France. It’s held in a colonial situation, which it’s very unhappy about.

    ABDELFATAH: Lucky for France, there was one guy in the British foreign office who absolutely could not stand Nasser.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Anthony Eden.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    ABDELFATAH: Anthony Eden started off as a foreign diplomat and eventually became prime minister.

    VON TUNZELMANN: He actually spoke Arabic and Persian.

    ABDELFATAH: Eden only ever met Nasser once in person.

    VON TUNZELMANN: That was in February 1955.

    ABDELFATAH: According to witnesses, it did not go well.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Eden brought his wife with him. Eden’s wife was much younger than him. It was his second wife, Clarissa Churchill, Winston Churchill’s niece.

    ABDELFATAH: Long story short, Eden, who was getting up there in age, seemed to be trying to impress his young wife and started reeling off classical Arabic poetry to Nasser, this young, handsome Arab trailblazer. You can imagine Nasser thinking…

    VON TUNZELMANN: What is happening? Why are you saying this?

    ABDELFATAH: Then Eden tries to lecture him on defense strategies. He and Nasser start arguing politics.

    VON TUNZELMANN: And there he is, kind of losing an argument to a much more handsome, much younger man in front of his wife at dinner. You know, do we think this was maybe a factor? I don’t know. The strength of that vendetta against Nasser was so extraordinary that we have to say it’s hard to imagine there wasn’t some kind of personal element.

    ABDELFATAH: Now, this is definitely speculative territory, but she says it gets at something important about big historical moments.,

    VON TUNZELMANN: As a Cold War historian, I often have a little motto which is never assume rationality. Never assume that somebody’s doing something for really good, logical reasons.

    ABDELFATAH: By the spring of 1956…

    VON TUNZELMANN: The British Secret Services were looking into ways to assassinate Nasser.

    ABDELFATAH: Around that time, totally unrelated to that, the U.S. withdrew funding they had promised Nasser to build a massive hydroelectric dam in Egypt. The U.S. and the U.K. were growing impatient with Nasser’s foreign policy and decided to withdraw funding. Nasser was furious, and that’s when he nationalizes the Suez Canal Company. Soon after, France and Britain start to set in motion a plan to invade Egypt, get rid of Nasser and retake control of the Suez Canal Company.

    VON TUNZELMANN: And, you know, Eisenhower heard about it. They didn’t actually approach him.

    ABDELFATAH: The American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been a general in World War II. He’d seen the devastation firsthand. Plus, it was an election year, and he was determined to keep the peace. So he wrote a strongly worded letter to Eden, telling him to stand down, insisting on diplomacy. He then sent in the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to mediate things.

    VON TUNZELMANN: He really drove massive diplomatic campaign with the U.N. to hash out some sort of user plan for the Suez Canal Company, some kind of joint running of it.

    ABDELFATAH: Dulles was actually making a lot of progress. Nasser was playing ball. It was looking like they were going to be able to figure it out.

    VON TUNZELMANN: But at the same time that was happening, Britain and France were not happy with it. They were going along with it to, like, you know, show good face for the Americans and this. But they were also planning what they called Operation Musketeer.

    ABDELFATAH: And they needed Israel’s help to carry out Operation Musketeer. The basic plan was Israel would invade Egypt first. Britain and France would then pose as neutral peacekeepers, send in troops and use the fighting as a pretext to seize control of the canal. Israel agrees to go along with this plan.

    VON TUNZELMANN: I think we need to remember this is incredibly soon after World War two, incredibly soon after the Holocaust. There’s a real sense among Israelis that this is about survival, and there’s quite a ruthlessness that goes with that.

    ABDELFATAH: Alex says they were also interested in expanding beyond the border they shared with Egypt.

    VON TUNZELMANN: And they had their eyes on the Sinai Peninsula at this point. I think Israel was far more preoccupied with its own borders, as indeed they are today.

    ABDELFATAH: At the U.N. in October, Egypt had agreed to a set of principles for how the canal should be governed. Still, Britain, France and Israel secretly agreed to go ahead with Operation Musketeer. And on October 29, 1956…

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #3: After weeks of stalemate, the Suez crisis bursts dramatically into the news again, for Israel has invaded Egypt. Britain and France have declared the canal in danger.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Initially, Britain and France got together in London for what they said was emergency talks. Of course, this had all been planned.

    ABDELFATAH: You can hear the sense of surprise in news footage from the time.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Come out of this meeting in London and say, we’ve got an ultimatum. If Egypt or Israel refuses these terms, Britain and France will intervene in 12 hours – very, very short deadline, just 12 hours.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    ANTHONY EDEN: I know that you would wish me as prime minister to talk to you tonight on the problem which is in everybody’s mind.

    VON TUNZELMANN: So, you know, people literally are listening to this on the radio and British civil servants are putting their heads in their hands and saying, what the hell is going on? They don’t immediately suspect it’s a conspiracy because they can’t possibly believe that such a thing has been done. One former civil servant wrote in his diary, you know, we think AE, Anthony Eden, has gone off his head. And one foreign office official was asking another what was going on. And the guy said, don’t ask me, and then sort of flicked his thumb at 10 Downing Street and said, ask that f***ing madman over there.

    ABDELFATAH: Meanwhile, Nasser also can’t believe this is happening.

    VON TUNZELMANN: He kind of said, look, let’s not leap to conclusions too much. Let’s kind of take our time and really work out what’s happening here because it seems so unlikely.

    ABDELFATAH: But Eisenhower…

    VON TUNZELMANN: Eisenhower did work out very quickly that he’d been betrayed because he knew that Britain and France were planning something like this. The journalist James Reston, he wrote, the White House crackled with barracks-room language, the likes of which had not been heard since the days of General Grant. So I think probably some big swears going (laughter) on in the White House. So…

    ABDELFATAH: They’re mad.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Yeah. Super mad.

    ABDELFATAH: Operation Musketeer had quickly started causing huge ripples and confusion. Even before the 12-hour ultimatum was up…

    VON TUNZELMANN: French warships are out there in the Mediterranean working with Israeli ships on joint operations. So it’s incredibly obvious that they’re working together, really, to anyone who’s paying the slightest attention.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    DWIGHT D EISENHOWER: The United States was not consulted in any way about any phase of these actions, nor were we informed of them in advance.

    ABDELFATAH: The next day, Eisenhower gives a speech telling everyone to chill out and respect international order.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    EISENHOWER: In the past, the United Nations has proved able to find a way to end bloodshed. We believe it can and that it will do so again.

    VON TUNZELMANN: It’s a very pressure-cooker situation, and probably this is the point to mention it. There’s the first major uprising against Soviet control in satellite states. So the Hungarian uprising begins at this exact point, totally separate from what is happening in the Middle East.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #4: But the heavy breath of freedom was short, as 20 red-armored divisions sent Hungarians by the thousands fleeing to the Austrian border.

    VON TUNZELMANN: The Americans are thinking, what the heck is going on? Why is this happening at the same time? And meanwhile, Moscow starts to think that the CIA must be behind the Hungarian uprising. This is all part of some kind of anti-Soviet move.

    ABDELFATAH: So basically, everyone is paranoid about these two crises unfolding at the same time.

    VON TUNZELMANN: And this is when people start talking about this could turn into World War III. That’s the word they use at the time.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    ABDELFATAH: Less than a week into Operation Musketeer, things were spiraling way more than expected. The Hungarian uprising is heating up, and on the ground in Egypt, Britain, France and Israel were militarily pulling off the operation, but not without some serious mistakes, which only intensified the diplomatic firestorm.

    VON TUNZELMANN: To give you an example, Britain intended to bomb Cairo West, which was an airfield in Cairo. So the idea is you take out the air power, right? That’s always one of the first sort of acts in the war. So British planes are in the air heading for Cairo West.

    ABDELFATAH: But at the last minute…

    VON TUNZELMANN: A message crackles through.

    ABDELFATAH: Saying 1,300 American civilians are being evacuated through Cairo West.

    VON TUNZELMANN: So if the British bomb it, they’re probably going to kill 1,300 American civilians.

    ABDELFATAH: Eden frantically sends a message to the bombers and says…

    VON TUNZELMANN: Change the target. Change the target. Bomb something else.

    ABDELFATAH: Wow.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Just take that out instead.

    ABDELFATAH: Crazy. Like, it’s crazy that you would…

    VON TUNZELMANN: Right.

    ABDELFATAH: …Just bomb another place haphazardly.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Right. Just something else. Anyway, it goes even wronger than that, though. The planes only had 10 minutes to change those plans. They hadn’t been fully briefed, and they mistook the civilian airport in Cairo for Almaza, the military aerodrome, which is, of course, a major act of war. That shows you kind of the levels of chaos that were going on here and the sort of disorganization.

    ABDELFATAH: At this point, the U.S. and the Soviet Union both jump into action. These sworn enemies, engaged in an existential fight over control of the world, end up on the same side, trying to force a ceasefire at the U.N.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Of course, the problem for the U.N. Security Council is that Britain and France are on it. So there is a resolution brought against them, but because they’re both permanent members of the Security Council, they use their veto, and it can’t be passed.

    ABDELFATAH: And then the U.S. decides it’s going to hit Britain where it really hurts – its pocketbook.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Eisenhower realizes he has a very, very big lever here, which is oil.

    ABDELFATAH: Eisenhower knew that if he forced Britain to pay for oil with dollars, they would soon hit a wall. Inflation would soar, and they’d start to crumble economically.

    VON TUNZELMANN: He actually says in a private meeting that he’s inclined to let them boil in their own oil.

    ABDELFATAH: It was a form of sanctions.

    VON TUNZELMANN: One Labour MP of the time said the only successful use of sanctions in history was the Americans over Suez.

    ABDELFATAH: And the Soviet Union applied its own pressure.

    VON TUNZELMANN: The Soviet leadership sort of elliptically threatened a nuclear attack on London and Paris. Now, it didn’t go so far as to say, we’re going to nuke London and Paris, but said, if rocket weapons were used against Britain and France, you would no doubt call this a barbarous act. But how is this different from the inhuman attack carried out by the armed forces of Britain and France on an almost unarmed Egypt?

    ABDELFATAH: Was it a real or empty threat? Anthony Eden didn’t want to wait to find out.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Under threat of rocket attacks, but also with Britain’s economy imploding, he actually pulls out.

    ABDELFATAH: And just like that, a little over a week after Operation Musketeer begins, it ends in failure. Nasser, still in power, and Egypt still in control of the Suez Canal Company.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Nasser himself was actually very depressed after the Suez crisis because his army had lost all the battles. But actually, he emerged really as unquestionably the preeminent figure in Middle Eastern politics, and, you know, was seen as a hero that had defeated two empires.

    ABDELFATAH: The defeat was especially felt by the British.

    VON TUNZELMANN: The British Empire was pretty much over already by this point. But I think what it did was kind of end that era psychologically in a huge way. And if you look at how the world has talked about in papers at the time, initially, when people use this word superpower, they discussed three superpowers, and it’s the Soviet Union, the United States and the British Empire. After Suez, nobody talks about there being three superpowers anymore. It becomes a bilateral world, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and that’s it.

    ABDELFATAH: Eden left office pretty soon after the Suez crisis.

    VON TUNZELMANN: And apparently, Nasser, when he saw Eden, you know, fall from power, lose his health, he said it was the curse of the pharaohs.

    ABDELFATAH: Where does Israel come out in all of this?

    VON TUNZELMANN: Some in Israel are hoping that they will hang on to Sinai and the Gaza Strip, two territories that they have occupied during this war. But actually, Ben-Gurion says quite quickly to Eisenhower, we’re not intending to occupy it long term. We’ll give it back.

    ABDELFATAH: Which will, of course, culminate in 1967 – right? – and…

    VON TUNZELMANN: Absolutely.

    ABDELFATAH: …The war that will lead to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the Sinai.

    VON TUNZELMANN: Yes, you can see the roots of that at this point.

    ABDELFATAH: Many later saw Suez as a long-term strategic win for Israel because it strengthened Israel’s relationship with France, which helped lay the foundation for Israel’s nuclear program. For the U.S., Suez marked the beginning of a new era. As British influence receded, the U.S. stepped into a leading role in the Middle East, positioning itself as a central outside power. If there’s one lesson from this moment, it’s that waterways like the Suez Canal can give an underdog like Egypt a massive amount of leverage on the global stage, and possibly even upend the power structures of empires. The rules that govern the water are more fluid than those on land, and the people who start a crisis don’t always get to decide how it ends.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    ABDELFATAH: Coming up, we travel back to the very first time the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire on the Strait of Hormuz.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    JACK: This is Jack (ph) from Springfield, Illinois, and you’re listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Part 2 – Operation Praying Mantis.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    PAUL RINN: The flooding is being pumped out in AMR3. We found a hole in AMR2. The engineers have shored it up.

    ABDELFATAH: It’s April 14, 1988, somewhere in the Persian Gulf, and the USS Samuel B. Roberts has just hit a mine. On fire, holes in its hull, gathering water fast…

    HAROLD LEE WISE: The ship was buckling and threatening to come in two.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    RINN: However, we’ve got to fight this problem ourselves. We don’t know what the size of the minefield is.

    ABDELFATAH: There’s no way for another ship to come to their rescue inside the minefield without risking getting hit themselves, so its 200 crew members are stranded. They have to find a way out on their own, or else sink.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    RINN: It’s getting dark. We need to maintain visibility.

    ABDELFATAH: By the next morning, they managed to hold the ship together long enough to get out of the minefield and back to safe waters. Miraculously, no one died.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    RONALD REAGAN: Hello.

    RINN: Mr. President, good morning.

    ABDELFATAH: President Ronald Reagan calls the captain of the USS Roberts to congratulate him.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    REAGAN: I just wanted to call and congratulate you and your men for such a great job in getting your ship safely into port after being struck by that mine.

    ABDELFATAH: Almost as soon as the USS Roberts was in the clear, American officials in the Middle East got in touch with the Pentagon and Reagan to respond to this attack with a plan that would put the U.S. and Iran on a collision course in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow 100-mile-long waterway that borders Iran to the north and Oman and the UAE to the south. It’s the second stop on our triangle, and the one you’ve likely been hearing about a lot lately. But first, how and why did Iran take control of this strip of water and convert it into a minefield? To understand that, we’ve got to turn back the clock.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    ALASTAIR BURNET: The most dangerous place for merchant shipping today is the Gulf, surrounded by the Gulf War.

    ABDELFATAH: By 1988, Iran and Iraq had been at war on land for nearly a decade, a war that began just a year after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people died, including tens of thousands of child soldiers, and when the war stalled on land…

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    BURNET: An oil tanker runs the gauntlet of air attacks in the Gulf War.

    ABDELFATAH: …It spilled over into the water, with both countries attacking each other’s oil tankers.

    WISE: Iran was sort of by itself. The smaller Gulf countries were supporting Iraq. Iraq was at the time led by, as we know, Saddam Hussein, and ironically, the United States was supporting him. Iran wanted to disrupt the flow of oil and gas, ultimately money, to the allies of its enemy. And so they would attack the tankers going to those countries.

    ABDELFATAH: This is Harold Lee Wise. He wrote a book called “Inside The Danger Zone: The U.S. Military In The Persian Gulf, 1987-1988.” It features many firsthand accounts from people involved in what became known as the tanker war.

    WISE: It’s one of the busiest waterways in the world. The numbers vary, but they usually hover around 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas, the world’s energy supply.

    ABDELFATAH: So Iran armed small boats on the water and placed mines all over the strait.

    WISE: The Kuwaitis – they approached the United States with a request to escort their tankers. They had to be reflagged with American flags in order to legally be protected by the U.S. Navy. This is what became known as Operation Earnest Will.

    ABDELFATAH: For the most part…

    WISE: The escorts are going along just fine. And in April of ’88, the Samuel B. Roberts was just not on an escort mission. It was just on a normal patrol. It hit a mine.

    ABDELFATAH: In the days after the USS Roberts hit that mine, American military officials in the Gulf and politicians back in Washington debated exactly how to retaliate for this attack.

    WISE: The folks in the Gulf, the military leadership there, wanted to go after the silkworm sites on land.

    ABDELFATAH: Silkworm missiles was the nickname given to a new kind of anti-ship cruise missile developed by China around this time and sold to Iran. It was relatively cheap and could be launched from platforms on the shoreline of the strait. Iran would eventually reverse-engineer the silkworm missile to create an arsenal of anti-ship missiles.

    WISE: Military people on the ground believed Iran was acting as pirates. Let’s take the gloves off and put a stop to some of these things. Washington thought the same, but they wanted to be just proportionate and maybe just a hair over, but not too much over.

    ABDELFATAH: They reached a compromise and sent the plan over to Reagan, who gave it the green light.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    REAGAN: They must know that we will protect our ships, and if they threaten us, they’ll pay a price.

    ABDELFATAH: The plan was named Operation Praying Mantis, and it was set to take place on April 18, 1988.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED NAVAL OFFICER #1: Evacuate the platform immediately. I repeat, evacuate immediately.

    WISE: The orders came down to start at 8 o’clock.

    ABDELFATAH: American warships were deployed to attack two Iranian gas-oil platforms.

    WISE: They approached the first platform. They warned them first. They radioed to the platforms.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED NAVAL OFFICER #1: Evacuate the platform immediately.

    ABDELFATAH: The clock struck 8. They waited a few more minutes. And then…

    WISE: They started blasting.

    ABDELFATAH: On one of the platforms…

    WISE: The Americans accidentally hit a gas tank. The platform blew up.

    ABDELFATAH: At that point, Iran decided to strike back.

    WISE: They send out a missile boat called the Joshan. They started attacking an American boat called the Willie Tide, which is an oil rig support boat. Well, the order came down to destroy that boat.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED NAVAL OFFICER #2: This is a warning.

    WISE: They warned them. They warned them four times by radio, stop.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED NAVAL OFFICER #2: Stop and abandon ship. I intend to sink you. Over.

    ABDELFATAH: A couple minutes later, they spotted a cloud of rocket exhaust coming from the Joshan. The U.S. returned fire.

    WISE: So for a just second, the missiles were both in the air. And this is the first surface-to-surface missile attack in world history.

    ABDELFATAH: Quick side note – the missile fired by the Joshan was ironically an American-made harpoon missile that the U.S. sold to Iran during the Shah era, before the 1979 revolution brought the ayatollah to power, when there was a lot of business happening between the two countries. The Shah had been installed in 1953 after a U.S.-backed coup orchestrated by Kermit Roosevelt, that CIA agent we heard about earlier in the episode. OK, back to the battle.

    WISE: The harpoon flew by and it landed in the water 100 feet away from the ship.

    ABDELFATAH: As for the missile, the Americans fired…

    WISE: It hit the Joshan.

    ABDELFATAH: Eventually, the Americans managed to sink the Joshan.

    WISE: Iran started launching planes, and one of the U.S. ships started shooting missiles at them.

    ABDELFATAH: Meanwhile, American planes were circling above the water.

    WISE: And all this time, the USS Enterprise carrier group was outside of the Strait of Hormuz.

    ABDELFATAH: A carrier group is a naval task force built around an aircraft carrier that can execute a really serious attack on water.

    WISE: The Enterprise had received an earlier set of orders that told them to definitely destroy one of the big ships. The latest orders said it was optional, but they thought it was a mission priority. These kind of things happen.

    ABDELFATAH: These kinds of things as a miscommunication that can lead to a ship getting blown up?

    WISE: Yes. In any case, Iranian commanders sent one of the two large ships out, and it was the Sahand. Now, Iran would play some tricks with these ships. They would repaint their numbers and swap them around. Suppose you see a ship coming out and it has this one number on it. The next day you see it in a different number, you think, oh, that’s two ships. Iran has more ships than we thought.

    ABDELFATAH: The Iranians send out what the Americans think is the Sabalan.

    WISE: It had the number that the Sabalan had previously.

    ABDELFATAH: Whose captain reportedly had a habit of sending oil tankers a message before attacking them.

    WISE: Have a nice day. And they had kind of a grudge against that guy.

    ABDELFATAH: An American attack jet flies in for a closer look.

    WISE: And the Sahand started shooting at him.

    ABDELFATAH: At the same time, remember that carrier group? Well, their jets also started attacking this Sahand, just as another U.S. warship radios them…

    WISE: And says, back off. I’m attacking the ship. And they said, you back off. We’re attacking the ship.

    ABDELFATAH: The Sahand gets hit from all sides, and they sink it. Iran reported 45 dead and 87 injured.

    WISE: And it’s interesting that in the press release, the Pentagon put out that this is a coordinated attack. See the irony? It was accidentally coordinated.

    ABDELFATAH: There’s something interesting about that, right? Facts on the ground create a new narrative.

    WISE: Exactly. I mean, you’re in media. You know you can’t go by some of these information that you get. Later on, they told the pilot you would either get court-martialed or get a medal for what you did because it was iffy, you know, justification for attacking the ship.

    ABDELFATAH: Whether it was, like, a war crime versus an act of heroism.

    WISE: Yeah. But they ended up getting the medal.

    ABDELFATAH: At this point, the American military was sure Iran would cut its losses and back down. But instead…

    WISE: Iran sent out their other big ship. The American planners, they said, this is crazy. Why are they sending it out?

    ABDELFATAH: An American plane dropped a single bomb on that ship.

    WISE: The bomb went down the stack ship and exploded in their engine room. And the ship just drifted to a stop and started leaking oil all over the Gulf.

    ABDELFATAH: And for a few minutes after, there was a question about whether they should continue the assault on the Iranian ship and try to sink it. Harold says people who were there told him the pilots radioed the Pentagon. And Admiral Crowe, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said…

    WISE: No. Call it off. That’s enough for today.

    ABDELFATAH: In less than 24 hours, Operation Praying Mantis was over. For the U.S., it was the largest air-sea battle since World War II. They had taken out two Iranian oil platforms, two of Iran’s biggest warships and several smaller boats. And although escorts of oil tankers would continue for another year, this operation effectively ended the tanker war, with one notable exception.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: The USS Vincennes shot two missiles at an Iranian Airbus, mistaking it for an Iranian jet fighter.

    WISE: It was in early July of ’88 that the U.S. ship, the USS Vincennes, mistakenly identified an Iranian passenger plane as an attacking plane.

    ABDELFATAH: All 290 people on board died in the crash.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: The Reagan administration this week offered to pay compensation to the families of the downed airliner. The move was unpopular in the U.S., but it’s likely to weaken international support for Iran’s charge that the missile attack was intentional.

    ABDELFATAH: Despite that fatal error, the success of Operation Praying Mantis loomed large, and the U.S. was seen as the de facto guardian of the Strait of Hormuz.

    WISE: It really increased the standing of the U.S. military worldwide. It showed the smaller Gulf countries that U.S. was a reliable ally, which was questionable before this operation started. This reassured the world that the U.S. would keep this oil flowing.

    ABDELFATAH: A status quo that was in place until the current war between the U.S., Israel and Iran began.

    WISE: And when there’s instability in there today, we see in our own pocketbooks how it’s affecting us.

    ABDELFATAH: Coming up, we travel to the newest frontier in the water wars, which may deepen that hole in our pocketbooks even more.

    TAYLOR: You’re listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR. This is Taylor (ph) from Aromas, California. And I love this show. I find it to be eye-opening, thought-provoking. Thank you all so much.

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Part 3 – Hostage At Sea.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    YAHYA SAREE: (Speaking Arabic).

    ABDELFATAH: On June 8, 2026, a spokesperson for Yemen’s Houthis released this video, announcing a missile attack on Israel. He also declared a ban on Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, raising fears that there will be major disruptions to shipping traffic in Bab el-Mandeb, which loosely translates to the gate of grief.

    FAREA AL-MUSLIMI: It can be the word of grief because el-Mandeb is a double linguistic word in Arabic. It can be the way out or the way to get stuck in. It’s the neck of many things.

    ABDELFATAH: Like the choke point.

    AL-MUSLIMI: Yes. Yes, exactly.

    ABDELFATAH: This is Farea Al-Muslimi.

    AL-MUSLIMI: I am a Yemen and Gulf researcher at Chatham House in London. I am originally from Yemen.

    ABDELFATAH: The two waterways we visited so far, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, might be more familiar to you. But Farea has spent a lot of time thinking about this third point of the triangle, Bab el-Mandeb, the narrow passage between Yemen and the Horn of Africa that links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Each story reveals a different kind of power hidden on these waterways. At Suez, we saw how a waterway could shift the balance of power between nations. In Hormuz, we saw how it could disrupt the flow of oil and goods around the world. In this third story, we’ll see something different. A narrow stretch of water can be used by non-state actors to make themselves impossible for the world to ignore. Bab el-Mandeb only really came on the radar of many Americans in the last few years and has become almost synonymous with the Houthis.

    AL-MUSLIMI: The militia, the group supported by Iran – they’re originally Yemeni. I personally think the Houthis are a combination of Taliban, FARC in Colombia and North Korea. They’re Shiite Taliban because their extreme explanation of Islam is radical and their worldview of human rights, of equality of women, of the West, of the other is extremely criminalizing. They are like FARC of Colombia because they depend highly on illicit business revenues – drugs. And they’re North Korea because they believe in isolating themselves and everyone from the world. Their biggest dream is to basically keep millions of Yemenis under their control that has nothing to do with the world.

    ABDELFATAH: The Houthis came to power in Yemen a decade ago, with a headline-making move.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Houthi fighters seized control of the presidential palace in Sanaa.

    CLAIRE PRYDE: They also took control of state media.

    MOLLY HALL: The situation on the ground remains unstable.

    ABDELFATAH: This spiraled into a brutal civil war that quickly ballooned into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. A decade later, it’s still ongoing.

    AL-MUSLIMI: A disturbing mixture of Libya, Syria, Iraq and somehow Lebanon together, all put into one package called Yemen.

    ABDELFATAH: In the U.S., the war in Yemen received very little coverage, despite becoming one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.

    AL-MUSLIMI: It was not a domestic issue. It was not an election issue.

    ABDELFATAH: But then…

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: They burst into the wheelhouse and ordered the crew to lie down.

    ABDELFATAH: On November 19, 2023, a little over a month after the October 7 attacks and the beginning of the bombardment of Gaza.

    AL-MUSLIMI: The Houthis showed up in the Red Sea.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: But a dozen men wearing body armor and carrying assault weapons jump out of a helicopter and run along the deck of the Galaxy Leader.

    ABDELFATAH: A cargo ship called the Galaxy Leader was traveling near Bab el-Mandeb when armed Houthi hijackers suddenly descended on the ship.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: According to the Lloyd’s List, a shipping journal, the Galaxy Leader is Israeli-owned, Bahama-flagged and operated by a Japanese company.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: A Houthi spokesperson didn’t comment specifically on the seizure, but said all ships owned or operated by Israel could be targeted.

    AL-MUSLIMI: From a media point of view, it was the perfect entrance for them, a Hollywood-style.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: The Houthis provided the video and blurred faces.

    ABDELFATAH: Which they released on social media the next day.

    AL-MUSLIMI: That was how the Houthis decided to announce themselves to the world. Hundreds of millions of young men and women around the world, feeling senseless, looking for any compass, frustrated partially. A lot of people say nothing will be the same in Palestine and Israel after that.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: They’re disrupting one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes in the Red Sea, where thousands of massive cargo ships travel through every year.

    AL-MUSLIMI: Obviously, my immediate reaction was, like, holy crap. But in another way, I was like, wait, this actually can be a huge global opportunity in which Yemen can be redefined from, oh, a poor suffering country into an important country. You know, the Red Sea attacks in 2023 was the very first time since 13 years the world has paid for Yemen war.

    ABDELFATAH: Farea says, in reality, the Houthis weren’t even all that comfortable on the water.

    AL-MUSLIMI: They’re a mountain group. They hate the water. They’re afraid of the water. They’re caves people. But, suddenly, like, as the whole world, the global, was coming, they saw, oh, water. That can be something. You know? The mountain and the sea in Yemen – they hug each other.

    ABDELFATAH: Which meant the Houthis could launch attacks on ships in Bab el-Mandeb from the mountains without ever stepping foot in the water. And they got weapons, drones and maritime training from Iran.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    SARAH KELLY: Now three people have been killed and at least two injured in the latest attack by Houthi rebels on a merchant ship.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #5: The attacks already leading to a 5% increase in the cost of shipping a container from Asia to the East Coast of the U.S. since October 7.

    AL-MUSLIMI: It has started to create an immediate insurance panic. An insurance beyond anything, it’s a feeling. So that feeling was broken. You’re no more safe in Bab el-Mandeb. You’re no more safe in this part of the world, you know? But it was a panic that you could see in numbers. You can see in Wall Street, it was something in which businessmen started to basically worry about.

    ABDELFATAH: And is it too simple to say that part of what garners the attention is as soon as a state or a non-state actor begins to threaten money, the bottom line, that’s when, you know, the global community tends to mobilize most aggressively?

    AL-MUSLIMI: Absolutely. You had the EU, one of the most inefficient bureaucracies in the world and the most consensus and time-consuming, they started to make a military operation called the Aspides Operation in the Red Sea.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    SHONA MURRAY: The mission named Aspides, the Greek word for protector, involves four countries – Greece, France, Italy and Germany.

    AL-MUSLIMI: Ended up until today happening in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb.

    ABDELFATAH: Would you call this a form of political piracy?

    AL-MUSLIMI: Yes, yes.

    ABDELFATAH: Farea also has another name for it – drone mine diplomacy.

    AL-MUSLIMI: They change the rule not just of business, but of war. If they shoot a drone that takes a few thousand dollars, then if U.S. Central Com interrupts that drone with a $70,000 rocket, the Houthis win. It’s a choice in which you can only bleed and bleed, and the other side only win or win. If they hit you, they win. If they don’t hit you, they also win because they created that fear.

    What will happen of the Houthis? You will sanction them. They don’t care. Will you ban them from travel? They don’t spend August in Las Vegas, you know? Don’t have bank accounts in Belgium or in New York you can freeze. It also came in a moment where the international law and order is already collapsing by states. It was fracturing in Palestine. It was fracturing in Ukraine. It was fracturing in Syria. It was fracturing everywhere else. And the Houthis were like, OK, we can do it, too.

    ABDELFATAH: And Farea says there isn’t such a clear difference between what non-state actors like the Houthis did in Bab el-Mandeb and what countries like the U.S. have done in recent years.

    AL-MUSLIMI: Holding a Venezuelan president.

    ABDELFATAH: Or U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

    AL-MUSLIMI: It’s exactly the same playbook. It’s a hostage policy. Hold the entire world hostage. We cannot differentiate it whether it happens in a dishdasha or in a suit.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #6: It’s a sight to behold off the port of As-Salif. The Galaxy Leader was anchored in the harbor under tight security until recently.

    ABDELFATAH: The Galaxy Leader was taken to a port on the coast of Yemen, and its captive crew was held hostage for 430 days, the news media keeping a close eye on things. During that time, the Houthis continued to threaten other ships on Bab el-Mandeb, leading to some casualties, though some countries were given free rein to travel through it.

    AL-MUSLIMI: The Houthis buy drones, buy toys, buy a lot of stuff from China. And that relationship is actually quite strong. And there was some intelligence report about the Russians trying to tell the Houthis about information and intelligence on Western ships.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Goodbye. Thank you very much. I’m go home now. Thank you.

    ABDELFATAH: The crew of the Galaxy Leader was finally freed in January 2025 in response to the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. No one was killed while on board. A few months later, in July 2025, the Israel Defense Forces said they’d bomb the port where the Galaxy Leader was being held. The IDF claimed, quote, “Houthi forces installed a radar system on the ship and have been using it to track vessels in the international maritime arena to facilitate further terrorist activities.” A Houthi spokesperson posted on X that they, quote, “effectively repelled” the Israeli attacks.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    ABDELFATAH: Since then, the Houthis have been relatively quiet on the water. But in the last couple of weeks, they announced a renewed blockade of Israeli ships through Bab el-Mandeb, and their involvement may soon escalate further, depending on whether the deal between the U.S. and Iran holds.

    AL-MUSLIMI: Bab el-Mandeb will always remain vulnerable. It’s the opportunity and the problem of geography. And to have Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb close together, that is an absolute nightmare, actually.

    ABDELFATAH: There’s also the question of whether the Houthis would be able to potentially target the undersea cables that run through Bab el-Mandeb, which are essential to the internet worldwide.

    AL-MUSLIMI: Then you will start having Google suffer, Microsoft suffer, Amazon suffer.

    ABDELFATAH: I mean, as you’re looking towards the future, do you think that that is likely to happen?

    AL-MUSLIMI: I think everything is possible. This world is running out of sanity and leadership for the sake of stability. And even beyond Bab el-Mandeb and Hormuz, if we look into the way military and wars and recent conflicts, they really have moved from the mountains and the land into the sea. Everyone is holding each other hostage in the sea. You can be the Houthis. You can be Putin. You can be Erdogan. You can be Iran. It’s all about water. This is the world war of water.

    ABDELFATAH: The world war of water, whether it’s the Suez or Panama Canal, a strait in the Persian Gulf, or a shipping lane in the Black Sea or the South China Sea, geography might not be destiny, but it is leverage. And sometimes a few miles of water can shape events half a world away.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    ABDELFATAH: And that’s it for this week’s show. I’m Rund Abdelfatah. THROUGHLINE was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and…

    SARAH WYMAN, BYLINE: Sarah Wyman.

    CASEY MINER, BYLINE: Casey Miner.

    CRISTINA KIM, BYLINE: Cristina Kim.

    DEVIN KATAYAMA, BYLINE: Devin Katayama.

    KYANA MOGHADAM, BYLINE: Kyana Moghadam.

    IRENE NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Irene Noguchi.

    LIANA SIMSTROM, BYLINE: Liana Simstrom.

    JULIA REDPATH, BYLINE: Julia Redpath.

    SCHUYLER SWENSON, BYLINE: Schuyler Swenson.

    AMY PEDULLA, BYLINE: Amy Pedulla.

    JASMINE ROMERO, BYLINE: Jasmine Romero.

    ABDELFATAH: Thank you to Johannes Doerge, Cheyanne Butler, Yolanda Sangweni and Tommy Evans. Archival audio in this episode includes clips from Thames TV, TRT World and France 24. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keeley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes…

    NAVID MARVI: Navid Marvi.

    SHO FUJIWARA: Sho Fujiwara.

    ANYA MIZANI, BYLINE: Anya Mizani.

    ABDELFATAH: And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline@npr.org, and if you’re open to us giving you a call back, leave your number too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way, you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

  • What’s My Noise?(Car Talk +)

  • Democratic Socialists won big in NY. Do they offer a way forward for Democrats?

    Transcript:

    SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

    It’s CONSIDER THIS, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, a banner New York primary for left-wing candidates and what that means for the Democratic Party.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Where all three of the congressional candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani advanced to the midterms.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Claire Valdez, she was declared the winner in Brooklyn.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Darializa Avila Chevalier, a community organizer, she toppled incumbent Adriano Espaillat.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Former New York City comptroller Brad Lander, he had a big win over incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman.

    DETROW: Tuesday’s electoral victories were a major win for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who put his political reputation on the line by endorsing the slate.

    ZOHRAN MAMDANI: It’s a statement that the status quo will no longer be sufficient.

    DETROW: But about a year ago, some in the Democratic Party establishment considered him a pariah. Here’s Congressman Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey, speaking on CNBC last year.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    JOSH GOTTHEIMER: We don’t need a job-killing socialist.

    DETROW: CONSIDER THIS – since 2024, the Democratic Party has been struggling to define itself. So do centrist Democrats have something to learn from Mayor Mamdani? From NPR, I’m Scott Detrow.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DETROW: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. The congressional candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won big in New York City last night. The trio of wins, two by democratic socialists, amounts to another major shift left for the Democratic Party. And the fact that Mamdani helped oust two incumbents from his own party has led to a lot of questions about the path forward for Democrats. I spoke with the New York mayor earlier and began by asking him what the three candidates he supported had in common.

    MAMDANI: At the core of each of their candidacies is a belief that working people have to return back to the heart of our politics. You could see it’s a concern for the fact that in many of these races, we see special interests looking to buy the outcomes of them. We see a federal government that is embarking on immigration policy that is cruel and does nothing to serve in the interests of public safety. And we see an exhaustion with a foreign policy that would rather invest in bombs than in babies back home in our own districts. And in each of these candidacies, we also see a hunger from working New Yorkers for exactly that kind of politics.

    DETROW: What is this a collective statement against? Because these three wins, two incumbents being ousted, is a pretty big anti-establishment statement.

    MAMDANI: It’s a statement that the status quo will no longer be sufficient. It’s a statement that working people are not willing to accept a politics that neglects their everyday needs. And I said in the lead-up to yesterday evening, as I endorsed three candidates for Congress, five candidates for the state legislature – all of whom prevailed yesterday evening – that for those who are wondering when the race for 2028 begins, it was yesterday. Because what this slate shows, what New Yorkers have shown, it is a glimpse into the future that we have to bring forth to ensure that we’re not just fighting back against a federal administration and its cruelty, but we’re also fighting for a vision of working people.

    DETROW: I want to get back to that idea in a moment. But first I want to ask about some of the decisions you made yourself. As you are well aware, taking on incumbents in your own party is a pretty surprising move for most people in politics. There’s been a lot of grumbling from officeholders across the state today. Why, to you, was that risk worth it?

    MAMDANI: Anytime there is the chance to deliver for working people, I think it is a risk worth taking. And what I saw in the candidacies of Darializa Avila Chevalier, who last night prevailed and became the first Afro-Latina Dominican woman to now represent that district – what I saw in the candidacies of Claire Valdez, who will be the first Mexican American and Indigenous woman to represent that district, and what I saw in the candidacy of Brad Lander, the former comptroller who will now be the next Congress member representing New York 10, are candidacies that would fulfill our vision of delivering on an affordability agenda that is just as relevant as it was a year ago when I became the Democratic nominee for mayor in this city, because we continue to live in the most expensive city in the United States of America.

    DETROW: I did see a lot of quotes from council members, from legislators in Albany amounting to, I don’t know if I can trust the mayor at this point. Do you have any worry that this could alienate the coalitions you need to get stuff done?

    MAMDANI: I think this shows the fact that the vision that we have, the agenda that we have is one that is in line with what New Yorkers want to see. We saw New Yorkers come out and vote for change. We saw them come out and vote for a new kind of politics. And I’m excited to deliver on exactly that kind of politics now with more partners in office, whether at the federal level or at the state level.

    DETROW: Israel was a major focus in several of these races. What is the best way to put what you want to see when it comes to foreign policy and aid for Israel if Democrats do win back the House next year?

    MAMDANI: I think Darializa says it best. It’s time to invest in babies, not bombs. You see in each of these three candidates, now soon to be Congress members, a commitment to cosponsor the Block the Bombs legislation. And what that reflects is an exhaustion – not just a political exhaustion, but also a moral exhaustion – with our nation’s complicity in the continued killing of civilians, whether in Palestine or Lebanon or beyond. And all of this happening in a period that we have been told to describe as a ceasefire. And it is time tens of billions of dollars that are killing innocent civilians are instead spent investing back into what are some of the poorest congressional districts in America, to deliver for working people who help to make this city what it is and yet are constantly thinking about if they can afford to live in this city.

    DETROW: This is the latest in a series of primary wins this spring and summer for democratic socialist candidates. There’s been wins in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, here in Washington, D.C.’s, mayor race, now in New York congressional races. Why, to you, does the DSA message seem to be resonating so well right now?

    MAMDANI: It speaks to the fact that working people are fed up. And when we look at this country, we know that the only majority that really exists is that of the working class. And for too long, that hasn’t been reflected in our politics. For too long, our politics has felt as if irrelevant to the struggles of a working person trying to pay their rent or afford going to the grocery store or thinking about having a kid. And what each of these candidates have shown is a willingness to speak directly to those struggles, and not just name them, but also put forward a vision that would actually address those struggles and make it easier to live in this city.

    And, you know, many of us, when we look back at the history of the Democratic Party, this idea of fighting for working people, it’s not alien to what our party is about. In fact, it’s at the heart of some of the greatest successes we’ve ever had. We think about FDR. We think about the New Deal policies that he gave rise to, and so much of that is exactly what working people are calling out for today. These are the kinds of congress people and partners that will help to fulfill that.

    DETROW: There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who think the opposite, who think a big reason the party lost in the last election cycle was it drifted too far to the left.

    MAMDANI: Well, I think what we see is that Democratic voters, which is where the Democratic Party draws its power from, feel very differently. And what is a party if not its voters? And what we see is that those voters have chosen leaders who are willing to fight for the working person. And no matter how you want to describe that, it is a fight that for far too long has been missing from the forefront of our politics.

    DETROW: A question adjacent to that is, you are well aware how successful Republicans are at trying to link Democrats in more moderate swing districts to left-wing candidates, to DSA candidates. Any worry at any level, or what do you think the best path forward is, that as the more prominent the DSA becomes, it makes it harder for Democrats to win a majority this fall?

    MAMDANI: I invite Republicans to try and smear the cause of universal child care. I invite Republicans to try and go after the idea that we should not spend billions of dollars bombing civilians abroad and instead investing those back in our districts. I invite Republicans to have to defend the indefensible, because that’s what they’ve been doing for far too long. And we’ve been told every time we take a step forward for working people that this will now become the new face of the Democratic Party. I think it’s time that it does because for far too long, we haven’t been able to answer what we’re fighting for, only who we’re fighting. And now we have the answer.

    DETROW: Have you had a chance yet today to talk to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New Yorkers, about all of this?

    MAMDANI: I’ll be speaking with Congressman Jeffries later this evening. And I look forward to that conversation because at the end of it, we’re all trying to deliver for our city, for our state, for our country. And I’m excited at the fact that there’s so much more to be done.

    DETROW: Last question, Mr. Mayor. Were you happier when these three candidates got their races called for them or when the Knicks won?

    MAMDANI: You know, last night was an incredible night. It is hard to pale, however, when we compare it to 53 years of wait. So got to go with the Knicks. Got to go with the real king of New York, Jalen Brunson.

    DETROW: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, thank you so much for talking to us.

    MAMDANI: Very welcome. Thank you.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DETROW: This episode was produced by Michelle Aslam and Tyler Bartlam. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon and Tinbete Ermyas. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning. It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I’m Scott Detrow.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  • The race to save Arizona’s groundwater

    The race to save Arizona’s groundwater

  • Politics: What Donald Trump’s Defense Policy Means For Black Service Members

    Politics: What Donald Trump’s Defense Policy Means For Black Service Members