Transcript: Philanthropist and author David Rubenstein on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” Dec. 29, 2024

The following is the full transcript of an interview with David Rubenstein, philanthropist and author, on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Dec. 29, 2024.

MAJOR GARRETT: David, it’s great to see you. Thanks for joining us. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

MAJOR GARRETT: You don’t know this, but I have waged a kind of unsuccessful journalistic battle against the word unprecedented. My sense is, as disruptive as our current times have been, we’ve had jarring and disruptive times before in American history. How would you compare, based on your study of the presidency, our unsettled times now to unsettled times past?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, nothing is as bad as the Civil War when we had 3% of our population killed and the fighting in Washington was so bad that about 60 different times members of Congress hit other members of Congress on the floor of the Congress. So we’re not quite there yet. Clearly, though, we’re going into some uncharted waters because we have a president coming back who had been president before. That hadn’t happened since Grover Cleveland was reelected in 1892 and Trump is- got more power than I think many people would have thought by the virtue of his victory size. In other words, he didn’t win the way that, let’s say, Richard Nixon did in his second term or Ronald Reagan in his second term, but he’s won by enough so that people feel he’s got a mandate and certainly he feels he’s got a mandate. And I do think he’s going to act like he’s got a mandate. And Washington is bracing for what’s going to happen

MAJOR GARRETT:  Related to that, before the election results were known, polls indicated pretty consistently that Trump supporters were afraid if Harris would win, Harris supporters were afraid if Trump would win. Based on your study of this institution, the presidency, can you recall a time where that fear of an outcome was as prevalent as it was leading into this election? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, there’ve been a couple of times when people really were afraid that the next person coming in that was the opposite party would really hurt the country in many ways. Clearly, my former boss, Jimmy Carter, really feared Ronald Reagan. He thought that Ronald Reagan was going to do- undo many of the things that Carter had done. Obviously, Reagan won by a landslide and you’ve seen other times when this just happened as well. So, for example, when FDR won the first time, Herbert Hoover could not believe that this man, Herbert Hoover, had been such a distinguished American before he was president. And while he was president, he had problems. But he was a very distinguished person. He never took FDR seriously, and FDR didn’t really take Hoover that seriously. In fact, he refused during the long period of the- of the- of the period between the election and the inauguration. He refused to really meet with him, essentially, or met with him briefly. And they just didn’t want anything to do with each other. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Interestingly, in those days, the inauguration occurred about six months after the election. The election was in November and the inauguration was in March. A long period of time. It seems like now we’ve got a probably a good period of time, which is about three months or so.

MAJOR GARRETT: You mentioned Herbert Hoover. He fascinates me because going into the presidency, he was about as accomplished an American as there ever been on the world stage. And yet he was overwhelmed by the job of the presidency. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: That’s correct. Herbert Hoover had been very distinguished for his relief efforts in Europe after World War 1. He was considered an incredibly intel– talented person. He was a great Secretary of Commerce, and people thought he should be President of the United States. He was President of the United States. But then he was frozen. He couldn’t really deal with the Great Depression when it arose, and he really was driven out of office overwhelmingly. And even after he lost, he kept trying to get Roosevelt to listen to him and say, we should do this together as two presidents. But Roosevelt ignored that.

MAJOR GARRETT: You mentioned Grover Cleveland. There’s not a chapter in the book about Grover Cleveland. Is there anything that retroactively fascinates you about the Cleveland Presidency now that Trump has returned to office? Or are you similarly fascinated by the time in which he was president, the Gilded Age?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, Grover Cleveland is not that well known to many people. In fact, one time there’s a story about- where- that Tip O’Neill said to Ronald Reagan, when he’s giving me a tour of the- of the Capitol, he said, this is the desk that was Grover Cleveland’s. And Reagan said, oh I played him in a picture. And he said, no, that was Grover Cleveland Alexander. But Grover Cleveland was a Democrat, former governor of New York, very well respected. But he lost the election in 1888 and they came back in 1892. Now, one of the things we don’t really know is whether a president, when he has a second term after he’s been out of office, whether he’ll be fresher, whether he’ll bring better people, win, whether he’ll be more experienced, for example–  And the second- most second terms have problems.

Ronald Reagan sec-  second term, had problems. Bill Clinton’s had problems. Obviously Richard Nixon did, because maybe the people get tired and they’re not as sharp as they are or the fresh people come in and they’re not experienced. Now you’re going to have a whole new administration coming in, a fresh perspective when you’ve got an experienced president. We just don’t know what the impact will be. Grover Cleveland’s second term was reasonably successful and, you know, maybe Trump’s will be as well.

MAJOR GARRETT: One of the things the nation struggled with this last 18 months or so was the collision of politics and the law. Do you think there are any lessons to be learned from this clash? And the politics that came from a clash of trying to indict and try someone who had been President of the United States and was aspiring to that office again? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: I think there is a feeling among many people that it wasn’t a good idea to indict the president of the United States. I think the trial in New York, where Trump was convicted, I think really helped him in his election effort. I think it emboldened a lot of his supporters who say the Justice Department – in that case, it wasn’t  the Justice Department, it was the prosecutor in New York. But it is really politicizing the legal system. And I think there are many people who are- who are Trump supporters who believe that the indictments that came out of the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, were really political as well. And so I think there’s both sides feel that the other side is really talking past each other. The people who are in the Justice Department now feel that these indictments were fair and correct and have special prosecutor and so forth. The Trump people believe they were completely political. I hope that going forward that the Justice Department is not seen as political because one of the strengths of this country has been the rule of law. One of the reasons people come to this country is we’re seen as a place where has a rule of law. There’s the American dream. You can rise up and so forth. But people aren’t prosecuted for their political views. And I hope that the Justice Department that’s coming in now will continue that tradition. I realize many people on the other side would say, the Trump side would say that we’re just going to do what what was done to us. I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope we basically go back to the rule of law. And everybody feels that if there’s prosecutions, they’re really legitimate and they’re not because of political reasons. 

MAJOR GARRETT: Do you fear that this process is undercut the national faith in that system of justice? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, our system has been around for a couple of hundred years. It’s not going to fall apart that quickly. But I do hope that we can find ways to bring the country together. Donald Trump cannot get reelected under our current laws. You could change the Constitution, but in the current laws, he can’t get reelected. And by the end of his second term, he would be,

you know, 82, 83 years old, presumably wouldn’t want to run again anyway. So I think that he has the ability to step back and say, I’m going to do what’s best for the country. I’m going to campaign a certain way. I did campaign a certain way, but now I’m going to do certain things for the country. And I think a lot of people who are not Trump supporters would say, I hope he will take that perspective. I want to do what’s best for the country. And now I don’t have to worry about reelection. I’m really going to do things that are best for the country. And I am confident they will do that.

MAJOR GARRETT: Based on your study of the presidency, do you think we rate presidents on their initiatives or external events that knock them off their initiatives? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, most presidents plan certain things and then events come along and they can’t predict them. I mean, Jimmy Carter did not predict the hostage takeover, and that really, really ruined his presidency, probably prevented him from being reelected.

Most presidents will find international events will overcome what they expected, or sometimes domestic events. George W Bush had a Great Recession that he could not have anticipated, and the economy almost collapsed. He couldn’t have anticipated that. 

MAJOR GARRETT: He also had 9/11.

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Right, 9/11, he couldn’t- 

(BEGIN CROSSTALK)

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Nobody could have anticipated that. 

MAJOR GARRETT: He came in—

(END CROSSTALK)

MAJOR GARRETT: —to be a domestic president focusing on education and the economy. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: That’s correct. And then we all got into overseas wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were never anticipated. So I believe that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. And you have to have good people who are willing to worry about what’s good for the country. And they have a leader who is always focused on what’s best for the country, not what’s best for me, what’s best for the country.

MAJOR GARRETT: Do you have a president in mind who, based on your study, grew in your regard? And a President, in your mind, who, based on your study, got more diminished? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Harry Truman left office extremely unpopular, very unpopular, and he was thought to be a- a inappropriate successor to the great FDR. Now, because of books by David McCullough and other people have written great books about Truman, people see him as one of our great presidents, because post-World War II, he helped end the war because he dropped the atomic bomb, which many people say was a mistake. But I would say many historians think it was necessary to avoid—

MAJOR GARRETT: And he never doubted. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: He never doubted. He never had self-doubt. Self-doubt was one- was not one of his things. He always believed it was the right decision. But he also was responsible for NATO, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the CIA, which he created as well. All these things, he created—

MAJOR GARRETT: The recognition of Israel.

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Yes, he recognized Israel even though his secretary of state threatened to resign over it. George Marshall said, I will resign over this, though he didn’t. And it was the State- the entire State Department was against the re- the recognition of Israel. So he was a person who’s really risen up. A person who’s gone down, I would say there are two that have gone down a lot. One is Andrew Jackson. Remember, Democrats used to say, we’re going to have a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. You don’t have that anymore because Jackson is now widely seen as being racist and very anti Native American. And he really did many things that I think killed a lot of people, particularly in the- in the Native American community. So he’s not really well respected today by scholars. Another person I would say is- is that, whose reputation has gone down is Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson was the great reformer after being president of Princeton. Two years later, he’s- he’s governor of- of- of New Jersey, then president of the United States. However, he now is widely seen as having done two things that were really big mistakes. One, he resegregated the federal workforce and had been integrated. Two, and this was very damaging, I think, as well. He- he had a stroke with about 18 months to go. He couldn’t really do what he had done before. He hid that from the public and his wife essentially became a shadow president. She was really making decisions and deciding things that maybe he should have decided. And the public didn’t know this, and that was a big problem.

MAJOR GARRETT: You often ask biographers what question they would most want to pose to the subject of their presidential biography. Let me expand on that. If you could go to dinner with any president, who would it be, and what question would you want to make sure you got answered?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Without doubt, the greatest president and the greatest American, ever, is Abraham Lincoln. He was a person who was not an abolitionist, but ultimately came to free the slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation. And he also won the Civil War, despite the fact that many people in the North didn’t really want to fight the Civil War. They say, let the South go. We’ll have our own country. Lincoln said, no, we’re going to hold the union together. And he did that. We lost 3% of our population in the war, but he kept the union together, and I think, made the United States a stronger country as a result. We ended slavery eventually because of the 13th Amendment. But most importantly, he did it with humility. He didn’t run around saying, look, I just won the Civil War. I just did the Gettysburg Address. Isn’t that a great speech? He didn’t do that. He didn’t brag about it. He was very humble. And I think he had a sense of humor and a sense of perspective that is a really good thing for presidents. So he would be far the person I would want to have dinner with. And I would like to ask him, do you have any regrets about not having freed the slaves earlier? Do you have any regrets about not getting rid of some of your generals earlier, who were not very good, and yet he waited a couple of years before he got Ulysses S. Grant in. Grant is also a person I should mention. He had the most amazing meteoric rise of almost anybody who’s become president. He was selling firewood on the streets of St. Louis in 1860. The war breaks out in 1861, more or less, and eight years later, he’s president of the United States. I mean, it’s just amazing.

MAJOR GARRETT: You mentioned humility. George W. Bush told you in your interview with him that that was the most important characteristic a president can possess. I’ve read other words that are important for presidents: courage, compassion, curiosity, decisiveness. Based on your study, what would you say is the most important? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: I think the most important thing is having a perspective that you really want to do what’s right for the American people. You’re not trying to make money. You’re not trying to feather your own nest. You’re not trying to worry about history. You’re just trying to do what’s best for the American people. The qualities that I admire in leaders are people who are reasonably intelligent, but not geniuses, you don’t need to be a genius to be a great president. People who are willing to listen to other people. People that have some humility. People that are highly ethical. Those are the qualities that I think great leaders have in any area. And certainly president of the United States. And interestingly, the United States has had a limited number of people to serve as president. 47 people served as president of the United States. But we’ve had a lot of very, very talented people that have not served as president of the United States. Do we really get the best people to serve or not? I think no country gets absolutely the best people in its population to always serve, because being president is a complicated thing. Great geniuses may not want to be president of the United States. Great leaders may say, I’d rather do something at a university or a foundation or a company. I don’t want to really be somebody the political constraints that a president has. But for- overall, we’ve gotten some pretty talented people who’ve served as president of the United States, and we’ve been fortunate. Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Jefferson, and modern day presidents, Eisenhower, among others, have had some really great attributes, and the country’s good, and I think, better off for having had good people serve. And one of my concerns in the future is that because it’s become so political in Washington sometimes and they fight- infighting has been so intense, that I’m not sure as many good people want to rise up and run for president in the future as we’ve seen in the past.

MAJOR GARRETT: Picking up on that, do you have a sense of which system has produced better presidents: the party system, meaning the bosses, or the primary system in which voters are in charge? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, the primary system is one that we would say is good because everybody has a chance to vote. And the backroom system that we had years ago isn’t so wonderful. But the backroom system did produce some pretty good people, too. So I don’t know that there’s any one that’s better than the other. But I do think that when you have more transparency about who should be president and who’s running and who’s getting money from people, I think that’s probably a good thing. Transparency generally is a better thing than- than having things be obfuscated.

MAJOR GARRETT: You mentioned in your very first answer, the Civil War, the greatest time of testing in our country’s history. You don’t have to be very aggressive online to find casual talk among Americans about another civil war. They bandy it about with some frequency. How worried are you about that? And do you think the mere discussion of it creates the potential of an inevitability? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, I think there has been discussion. Some people say the red states and the blue states should separate, but I don’t think that’s realistic or really going to happen. I think the country realizes that we are the strongest power in the world economically, militarily, politically, culturally, and part because a country’s got a big enough population and part because we have a lot of attributes in red and blue states. I don’t think it’s realistic. People talk about that, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The country is not going to be split up the way it was in the Civil War. I just don’t see that as being realistic or desirable. 

MAJOR GARRETT: Is there any doubt in your mind that presidents, all presidents, must guard against bitterness, anger, resentment, some of the things that fueled their pursuit of the office in the first place? Meaning once they got there, they need to set those things aside, even though they were part of the engine?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Everybody goes through life and has ups and downs, and you get a lot of bitterness and you get resentment of people. People that are good presidents hopefully rise up above that. A lot of people criticize Abraham Lincoln for many, many things. They called him all kinds of terrible names. And they did say he was barely human. And—

MAJOR GARRETT: Called him a gorilla. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Yes. And he rose above that. And I think you have to rise above it. And hopefully, when you don’t have to worry about politics anymore, in a second term, for example, you can rise above all the concerns you’ve had. Resentment is- is a wonderful thing in life for a couple of minutes, and then you should get over it. And you know, I’m resenting some things from time to time and I try to get over it. When you’re president of the United States, if you carry your resentments too long, it can affect other people adversely. So I think in the case of President Trump, for example, clearly he has some resentments. But I think overall, I believe he’s going to rise above that in his second term.

MAJOR GARRETT: Is Richard Nixon, which you in your book describe as a tragic figure, almost a Shakespearean- like tragic figure, the most-available cautionary tale about resentments and the presidency?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Richard Nixon, as I said in the book- if only Shakespeare had been alive to write about Richard Nixon, it would have been a wonderful tragedy. Here’s a man who’s really talented, very smart. He stumbles running for president in 1960, barely loses, loses for 1962 in the governorship of California and comes back and is elected in 1968 against all the odds. But he resented the people that looked down on him. He resented the liberals. He resented the ‘Ivy Leaguers,’ as he would call them. And he really, I think, took those resentments and he perpetuated them through his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, and other people. And the result was a terrible thing called Watergate. I think Richard Nixon, had he not had Watergate, I think he would have gone down as a really impressive president because of the opening to China, things he did on the environment. But Watergate will be what he’s remembered for.

Sadly, it didn’t have to happen. And actually it – amazingly, that he didn’t have the supporters that Donald Trump has on Capitol Hill. For example, Donald Trump has enormous support among his Republicans on Capitol Hill. Richard Nixon really didn’t have that kind of support. Had Richard Nixon burned the tapes before they were subpoenaed, I suspect he would have stayed in office, because nobody would have believed what was in the tapes. And he probably would have been within his legal right to get rid of those tapes because they weren’t subpoenaed at that time. And for national security reasons, he could have said, ‘I’ve got to destroy them.’ But he didn’t believe that the Supreme Court would ever take away the tapes from him. And he always was using them, I believe, to help write his- his memoirs.

MAJOR GARRETT: Was he the least ethical president in our history?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: I don’t think there’s- that’s easy to say because some presidents had, uh, issues that we don’t know about as much. For example, Warren Harding. Warren Harding was widely seen as having tolerated a lot of scandals in his administration. Ulysses S. Grant, while an honest man, tolerated a lot of unethical behavior. He just–

MAJOR GARRETT: Of his subordinates and friends. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Yeah. So I don’t know that- Grant was honest himself, but he was not- he was too trusting of certain people in his administration. Harding was widely thought not to be the most honest of politicians. Richard Nixon, um, wasn’t a person who was trying to make money for himself necessarily. He wasn’t grafting himself into- into business deals and so forth. But I think he had some ethical failings. 

MAJOR GARRETT: You worked on the Carter campaign and within the Carter White House. How did that inform your curiosity about other presidents, and did it harden or soften your sense of how difficult the job is? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well, when you work in the White House as I did, when I was 27, you realize what an incredible job it is and how powerful the position could be. You also recognize that you make a mistake, you know, the whole world knows about it. So I began to be intellectually curious about the presidency when I worked there, but I was interested in it before. I’d always been interested in the presidency. But when you work in the White House and you see a president up close, it does tend to keep you interested in it. And I’ve lived in Washington ever since I left the White House. And so I’ve always been interested in meeting presidents, talking to presidents. And I do a lot to kind of support presidential memorials and monuments and so forth. And so it’s just been a part of my life that I think is very enjoyable to me.

MAJOR GARRETT: You’ve talked to biographers and presidents. Who’s more candid?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Biographers are probably going to be more candid for sure. But presidents, when they get to the latter stages of their life and they can look back with some dispassionate views on things, I think they can be honest. I think Bill Clinton has a book out now about his post-presidency, and I think he’s pretty honest about his failings and some of his mistakes that he made. I think Jimmy Carter, before he was- inability, inability to talk really right now, he can’t really communicate. But I think he recognized some of his failings after he left office and so forth. I think when you have perspective of being out of office for ten years, 20 years, 30 years, it makes you much more open to being honest about what really happened. 

MAJOR GARRETT: Presidents right after they leave are pretty defensive.

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Of course, because when presidents leave right away, they are still trying to defend their image. And I think it’s a very important thing for them. And remember, we have a unique system. No other country in the world perpetuates their former leaders in quite the way we do. We have large presidential libraries and other things like that. And these are a way for our leaders to kind of perpetuate their image. And I don’t think it’s a terrible thing, but I- I do think we should recognize you’re going to take 10 or 20 years before somebody has a perspective that will be really honest about how they performed. 

MAJOR GARRETT: President Trump told you it’s a lonely job to be president, but Trump’s a loner. Everyone knows that. He says that about himself. And as your book reveals and other books have, the presidential story is full of very close advisers, friends, confidants. Do you regard the presidency as lonely a job as Trump described? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: People have often said it’s the loneliest job in the world. That may be an exaggeration, but it’s a very lonely job because in the end, you’re making the final decision. As Harry Truman said, ‘The buck stops here.’ When you make that final decision, you can’t really say, ‘Well, somebody else made it for me,’ or ‘I really didn’t make that decision. My staff did it.’ You did it. And you have to, in the end, sit down and think about what you’re going to really want the country to do. And you have to make that decision. It’s a very lonely process.

MAJOR GARRETT: Does the job change the president or does the president change the job? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: I think the job changes the president more than the president changes the job, because you’ve got a gigantic federal bureaucracy, several million employees. You’ve got a gigantic military arsenal you’ve got to oversee as well. And you’ve got the world events that are- that are around the globe that are going to change things. So I think the presidents, when they come in, they have great plans and they have the best intentions, but sometimes it’s just very hard to get these things done.

MAJOR GARRETT: The book’s called ‘The Highest Calling.’ Is the presidency the highest calling? Some might argue that an age defining innovation is a higher calling, or being a captain of industry is a higher calling, or just being a simple CEO employing tens of thousands of people is a higher calling. Why is it the highest calling? 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: The reason I called it the highest calling (and I had historically said the private equity, my profession, was the highest calling, but that was more tongue-in-cheek) is this: when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to help end World War One, he was cheered by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Parisians, and people for the first time realized the most important person in the United States, in the world really, is the president of the United States. And that’s been true almost since Wilson came back from Paris. When FDR was running the world really effectively because he was president of the United States during World War Two, he was the most important person in the world, for sure. And I think ever since then, because of the economic, military, political power of the United States, whoever is the leader of the United States is almost certainly the most powerful person in the world and pursuing what I would call the highest calling, because you can affect the lives, lives of people so much more significantly as president of the United States than any other job in the world. 

MAJOR GARRETT: Last question: What makes a president’s legacy, the presidency or the persons that president places on the Supreme Court?

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Well the Supreme Court justices live 10, 20, 30, 40 years after a president. So they do have a big impact. But in the end, I think what the president does with his own actions, as opposed to putting people on the court, is probably going to be his biggest legacy or her biggest legacy in the future. There’s no doubt, though, that some justices on the court have been there for a long time, and they really have shaped policy in ways that people couldn’t have anticipated when they went on the court. But I think the president of the United States, really what he does when he’s president of the United States, not just the appointments, but what he’s done in terms of policies he’s implemented and pursued is probably the biggest legacy.

MAJOR GARRETT: Thank you very much. 

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure. Thank you.