The former White House press secretary offers a different kind of tell-all.
‘Conservatism by its very nature is compassionate,” Dana Perino writes in her new book, And the Good News Is . . . : Lessons and Advice from the Bright Side. “Conservatives are charitable, forgiving, and are always — always — more willing to laugh at themselves,” she continues. While she understands why some found the phrase “compassionate conservatism” redundant, it “spoke to her” and “opened a door for me to be more active in participating in the public arena.”
“Being a conservative has given me clarity,” she explains, adding that “it’s given me freedom — my mind is free; therefore my heart is lighter. And that’s a gift from God that I believe we have an obligation to share with others.”
Hers is a book deeply rooted in gratitude — for faith, family, and freedom. In practical ways she offers her hopeful message to anyone looking for sensible wisdom, from one who confronts and engages the world as it is, knowing something might get a little better for someone if she is faithful. We talk a bit about the book (which I review in the current issue of National Review). — KJL
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Your book reads a little like Thanksgiving. Not the food so much as the family and friends and gratitude and good humor. Even travel. Was that intentional?
Dana Perino: I didn’t set out with that description, but now I’m going to steal it! It captures the feelings of my grateful heart. Thanksgiving is also a patriotic holiday, and I was raised from an early age to be grateful for our freedom and to believe that America is a force for good in the world.
Lopez: How do you cling to your roots in Wyoming and Colorado from so far away?
Perino: One of the greatest compliments I’ve been given is that people who met me when I first got to Washington, D.C., in 1995 say that I’m still the same person today, even though I’ve been blessed with opportunities to work in the White House, travel the world, and transition relatively smoothly into a new career in television on The Five. I realized I couldn’t start the book with my recollections of my years working for President Bush — just showing up at age 35 as the White House Press secretary — so I had to tell the story of how I became who I am today. And with every fiber of my being I think of those years in the West as the most formidable, and I miss that way of life so much. And I have always known that if ever I needed to, I could go home. They’d take be back in an instant, though I’d have to shed some of my big-city conveniences and haul my own groceries to my kitchen.
Most important, my grandfather early on taught me about how strength and gentleness can go hand in hand, and that’s a theme repeated in my life when I met my husband on an airplane and worked for President Bush.
Lopez: Has it become easier to forgive since President Bush modeled it with his approach to Scott McClellan’s book?
Perino: It absolutely has. In fact, it is something I have to deploy regularly with Bob Beckel on The Five. I kid. But yes, I think I learned so much from that moment because President Bush reminded me that my faith teaches me to forgive. And when I physically felt more free after I tried to forgive, it felt so much better than being upset. I try to forgive for all sorts of things, big and small — such as when someone whacks me with their bag on the subway, forgets to fill an order, or says something I take as insulting. There is freedom in forgiveness, and it’s not that hard to do once you get into the habit. And it has utility beyond making yourself feel better. I think that a lot of business and political leaders forget that the capacity to forgive is the most important part of getting a deal done or a bill passed.
Lopez: Reading your book, I thought that your experiences capture well some of the beauty of the complementarity between men and women — a grandfather, for instance, teaching his granddaughter that “strength and gentleness go hand and hand.” And where you watched your grandfather and grandmother being “kind to each other and accepting of flaws.” Is appreciating what men and women uniquely give one another important to helping us become less harsh?
Perino: I witnessed that from an early age. Men and women usually had some different responsibilities on the ranch — though that was not always true (I know women who can break a saddle bronc as well as a man), and there was respect and support for each other. Everyone had to work together to achieve a goal. And I also liked the tenderness I saw between my grandparents. I loved it that she would run him his bath and set out his clothes, and that he would rub her shoulders and peel the potatoes to help get dinner ready. Even when they were well into their seventies, they would hold hands and be kind to each other. That’s the kind of marriage I wanted to have . . . though I have to admit that Peter seems to do a lot more for me to help support my career than I can do to help him.
I try to extend some gentleness outside the home as well — I like to surprise workers in New York City with a “Hi, how are you?” which seems to surprise many of them who may not have heard a kind word in a while. And at the office, I try to encourage younger staff to be excited about what they’re doing. I try to help advise them on how they could achieve more. As I write in chapter 6, “Civility, Lost and Found,” there are ways that we can deploy some gentler words to our debates that can make us more productive. There’s no sense in working against each other if we have the same goals in mind — hashing out differences doesn’t have to be a blood sport.
Lopez: Do you find it a bit of a unique responsibility and honor to “live vicariously through” friends who are parents? Marriage and family is in such crisis. Have you found that parents seem to need supportive friends who don’t have their same daily schedules? Perhaps this is needed today in a particular way?
Perino: I admire my friends who are raising children, and I delight in their stories about the joyful chaos of their lives. I also try to absorb their anxiety for their children. For the first time in decades, a majority of parents don’t believe their children will be better off than their generation, and that is fueling all sorts of concerns and arguments both at home and with elected leaders. There is no question that stable families and marriages result in better outcomes for children and more satisfaction and happiness for adults. In all of our public-policy debates, the state of marriage is glossed over, as if it doesn’t exist. But it really is the one constant at the root of all the problems. I try to talk about this on The Five and wherever else I can. I feel like it is an important contribution to the debate. My best advice in the book is something that changed my life for the better: “Choosing to be loved is not a career-limiting decision.”
Lopez: What is it that makes you so confident your great-grandmother said goodbye to your family in a dream? If it’s faith, where do you get and nurture that confidence?
Perino: There’s no other explanation. I had not seen my great-grandmother in a few months, and I don’t recall having spoken to her even by letter. And then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, she’s in my dream and I try to stop her from going into an elevator (she probably had never been on one, by the way) because I knew there was no floor, but she stepped in and fell all the way to the bottom. In the morning my mom told me that my dad had been called in the middle of the night with the news that Great-Grandma had passed away. We were tethered somehow — and in my mind, that was through God and the family connection that we shared. I tend to look to logic and fact to explain phenomena, but in this case, there’s nothing that can explain it. And that’s where faith steps in to give me comfort. I still miss her.
Lopez: How did your dog Henry make you a better person?
Perino: Well, Henry hated to hear any arguing or curse words, so I watched my p’s and q’s around him. And Henry was so noble — he really did give us his best. He didn’t care that I got to have lunch with the president of the United States or that I had a seat on Air Force One. He wanted to be around me as a part of his pack family, and he absolutely kept me grounded during the White House years.
Lopez: Do a lot of young people really write you wanting to be White House press secretary? It wasn’t the most glamorous job even before you got hit with a shoe. What do you make of that?
Perino: Yes, there are many young people who see the White House press-secretary position as their dream job. And it certainly was for me. If they ask me how they can become the WHPS, I always tell them, Well, first you have to start as a country-music DJ working overnights for minimum wage on the weekends. There’s no clear path for any of us. My book talks about how I like to try to plan things out, but every time I do, God intervenes with another plan. I encourage young people to follow their hearts a bit. They’ll be working for the rest of their lives, and the key to a successful career is taking risks on new opportunities (and that includes being willing to move).
Lopez: You’re very insistent on the duty to mentor. Is it even more crucial right about now? When a lot of people find themselves not quite where they would have expected or hoped, and the “scripts” for life that once were a guidepost aren’t quite always plausible? It’s easy for a young person to get lost in one way or another?
Perino: Women in America owe thanks to the generations before us who fought for our right to vote, to be educated alongside men, and to work in whatever careers we chose. Our obligation is to pass on advice to the next generation. How can we continue to be dismayed by Millennials if we are not willing to help them improve? That’s one of the reasons I wrote my book — it’s a one-stop shop for all of my best advice, told with candor and humility and based on my experiences. The advice is memorable, such as not wearing your Ugg boots around the office, being a reverse mentor and helping your boss set up an Instagram account, and being willing to stick up for people even if they don’t know you’re doing it.
Lopez: And one doesn’t have to have every answer to every question to do so?
Perino: Absolutely not. In fact, telling someone precisely what to do is the wrong way to go about mentoring. Mentoring should be about shoring up confidence, encouraging people to strengthen skills where they are weak, and providing a gentle nudge in the right direction. We should not try to make decisions for them about their next career moves or whether they should go to graduate school. Some of the best advice I ever got was from a fellow church member who said I was distressed She reminded me that God says, “Fear not.” I wrote that down and even carried it around in my back pocket for a while until I could use that as my guide. She didn’t tell me what to do, she told me not to fear. And being fearful was my biggest hang-up.
Lopez: Your mom worked in hospice care for dying patients. What did you learn from that? And from her work with refugee families?
Perino: My mom’s first instinct is to help people. She’s a good organizer with a big heart. So when the Oklahoma City bombing trial got moved to Denver, she organized volunteers to get up at 4 a.m. to stand in line for seats for the families so they could get some more rest before another grueling day in court. They also made hot meals for all of the victims’ families every day of that trial. And when we were kids we’d help her and my dad deliver washers and dryers to refugee families, many of whom had fled the Soviet Union. It taught me that there was joy in helping others, and that part of living was giving, and that often the most valuable thing you had to give wasn’t money but your time and talents. Again, with my mom, I saw that her strength in a crisis was supplemented by her gentle heart, and the results were people who knew there was someone in the world who cared for them, even when they felt their worlds were ending.
Lopez: Is this where you got your heart to support Mercy Ships?
Perino: My concern about Africa started on a trip in February 2008 with President Bush. We visited five countries in seven days, and I saw firsthand the suffering but also the potential for healing, especially through the well-spent generosity of Americans. I went back with my husband after the administration ended and volunteered at a PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) clinic that served people that had HIV/AIDS, and it gave me what I call Perspective (with a capital P). I’ve since been to Africa several times, including to Congo when Mercy Ships was docked there. Peter and I like to go together because it draws us closer and we get more tenderhearted and committed with each trip. When we went to Mercy Ships, Peter shot all the video and interviews, and it was good enough to air on Fox News. Fox gave me a producer to edit the package, and that work ended up helping so many people by giving Mercy Ships a lot of deserved attention. So my worlds combined — President Bush, Africa, my parents’ example of giving back, and Fox News for publicity. A quadruple win.
Lopez: I was struck by this line: “No one should think they can’t make it to the top because they didn’t go to Harvard.” It immediately made me think of a conversation I had recently with Rosemary Putnam, the wife of, as it happens, Harvard professor Robert Putnam. She makes it a point to mentor poor young women. What if everyone reading this interview, who reads your book, made it a point to mentor someone who could use someone investing a little time in them? Even while plenty of people we know do wonderful things, we could always do more. There’s a selfishness to our day, isn’t there? Is that part of what you are trying to push back against with the book?
Perino: I wanted this book to be widely read — not just by people who want to go into politics or public relations, but also by kids who are growing up outside the coastal elite cities. I want them to know that you should not shorten your horizons because you didn’t get to go to an Ivy League school. Believe me, no one at the White House had ever heard about the college I attended, Colorado State University — Pueblo, then called University of Southern Colorado. If I said I went to USC, they assumed I was in Los Angeles. But my small-town upbringing and my Western roots were as valuable to the policy and communications decision-making at the White House than anyone who went to Yale or Harvard. I contributed on a different level, and the president has said he appreciated my sound judgment and commonsense advice.
Lopez: Like mentorship, friendship seems to be something you try to model a bit even with the colorful mix of personalities you spent your day with. Is this intentional?
Perino: I am blessed with many friends from all walks of life. I like the diversity, and I’m lucky that my husband makes for such a great conversationalist. Whenever we meet new people, I immediately can tell that they like him more than me. And that’s perfectly fine!
Lopez: Why do you feel so strongly that no child should go without public-speaking experience before graduating from high school?
Perino: The No. 1 fear in America remains speaking in public — not terrorism, not crime, but expressing oneself in front of other human beings. I’m convinced that this fear is what holds people back from enjoying life and even from promotions or reaching other career milestones. This doesn’t mean that someone needs to be able to give a speech to 500 people in a crowded auditorium, but it does suggest that when you have to present at a meeting, in front of a board, or even argue on behalf of your children at the PTA meeting, you should be able to do so without getting all tied up in knots. The speech team was the best training I received — I learned how to think critically, argue persuasively, and to control my nerves. There’s a section in the book about “making your butterflies fly in formation.” That was advice from my college speech coach, and it’s served me well in all sorts of occasions (unless I forget, as I did on Celebrity Jeopardy!).
Lopez: “Writing a thank-you note should not have to be one of these tips, but somewhere along the way young people stopped writing them. A handwritten thank-you note is a must, not an option. And no, an e-mail doesn’t cut it.” Is it possible to win this war? It seems like it’s quite countercultural at this point. And handwritten notes to five people a month?
Perino: I tell young people who are surprised about my insistence on writing thank-you notes to think about the people they are asking for help — they are usually older than they are, and that generation grew up writing thank-you notes. You can choose to shine or to be run-of-the-mill, and writing thank-you notes will ensure that you are memorable. And you never know where those five notes a month will get you — look at me, I ended up back in D.C. after the 9/11 attacks because I’d kept up with a friend from my first days on Capitol Hill. It’s a small investment to make — and the payoffs could be huge.
Lopez: Why is gratitude so important?
Perino: Without gratitude you can get bogged down in the “all this crap happened to me today” type of thinking. Chin up, shoulders back, eyes and heart wide open — that’s the way to ensure that you’re living with gratitude. We are here in America — it doesn’t get better than this.
Lopez: Is it really true that “you are better at everything that you think you are”? How is that more than a Stuart Smalley saying?
Perino: I think it is mostly true (unless you’re a classic narcissist, and in that case it is most certainly false!). Self-doubt is more natural than self-confidence, and learning to master that negative voice is so important for taking risks and succeeding. Tony Snow told me that, on his last day at the White House, regarding briefing the press corps. I didn’t know what he meant until a couple of weeks later: I didn’t have to try to be just like him, I just needed to be myself.
Lopez: Has the Serenity prayer changed you over the course of years of praying it?
Perino: Sure. I think that it helps in all kinds of situations — the highs, the lows, and the in-betweens. Sometimes when I would get so worried, I would make a list of all the things I was worried about. I would mark with an X the things I could not change. The things I could change, I marked with a C (for courage). And then I’d review the list to see whether anything needed to be moved to the other category. Realizing what you cannot change and then dealing with that is how I’ve learned to find the good news. If there’s a problem, I focus on what I can do about it, not what someone else should do to change the facts.
Lopez: Is public service really a “bad episode of Real Housewives”? (Is there a good episode?) How can we do this upcoming election better? How can media help?
Perino: I’m just waiting for a cable station to start the “Oh Brother!” reality show on Capitol Hill. Imagine a group house of Republicans and Democrats having to live together. It could be hilarious . . . or horrible.
I hope when people read the book they’ll snap it shut after the last page and feel better about our country and themselves. We really are better than we’ve been led to believe we are.