I've taught a college journalism course at two universities where my students taught me more than I did them about how political news is consumed.
That's true that Sen. Robert Bird was in the Klan and a lot of people were friends of Robert Byrd in the U.S. Senate, Democrats and Republicans.
I did not feel - in President [J.F.] Kennedy's words - that we could win the war for [the government in Saigon]. When I sought the reason for the dedication shown by the enemy, it seemed to me that the leadership and charisma shown by Ho Chi Minh was a major part of the answer.
The challenge for me was not just the prosthetic work and how to move like an older man would move, but more so how to have 50 years of experience in the workplace and talk to a young Robert F. Kennedy as if he was some political upstart that didn't know what the hell he was talking about. That was the big challenge [in the J. Edgar Hoover m?vie].
Sen. Edward Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.
The John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics was originally intended to bring scholars and politicians into closer contact, on the assumption that other office-holders can use academics as profitably as Kennedy did during his political career.
Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.
Someone earlier made a remark about losing 500 soldiers and 2,200 wounded in Iraq. Those soldiers were sent there by the vote of Sen. Lieberman, Sen. Edwards and Sen. Kerry. I think that is a serious matter.
Robert Bloch taught me about mixing horror and humor.
To be sure, Kennedy did not discount the importance of words in rallying the nation to meet its foreign and domestic challenges. Winston Churchill's powerful exhortations during World War II set a standard he had long admired. Kennedy was hardly unmindful of how important a great inaugural address could be.
I looked at early movies with Robert Redford, and I like how Robert, even though he had that automatic charisma and was a very verbal person, he always played those more silent characters and played within the scene and never overacted.
Working with [Robert] De Niro taught me a lot about being an actor's director.
But they were as different as fire and ice. Robert Kennedy thought Eugene McCarthy was pompous, petty, and venal. McCarthy thought Kennedy was a spoiled, unintelligent demagogue.
I was taught as a young person that the far political right and the far political left aren't located on a spectrum but on a circle, where they inevitably meet in their extremity.
I was a trial lawyer. At the same time, I was a teacher. I taught about the political and social content of film for American University. Then I left and became a teacher at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I taught about the political and social content of film, but I also taught a course in law for undergraduates.
But most of what I've learned about acting - and a lot of what I've learned about life in the past seven years - was taught to me by Robert Altman