Interview with Tevi Troy
Tevi Troy is a presidential historian and the former United States Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Commentary on Losing Common Ground of the American Mind
Contents
Max Raskin: What does your routine for news consumption in the morning look like?
Tevi Troy: When I started in this business, there was nothing online and you had to read the hard papers. Everything was the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Times was much more relevant then because it had a hard paper. But now before I leave bed, I read the New York Post online, which is great. I get two papers at home. I get the Washington Post, which I gnash my teeth through, and I get the Wall Street Journal, which I read religiously. I also take in Jewish Insider. I look at some of the newsletters. Politico West Wing, since I'm a presidential guy, is really important to me. I listen to a ton of podcasts.
MR: Who are the podcasts you like?
TT: Audio is a really good way for me to take stuff in, and I do it on triple speed. I listen to a lot of them. I listen to the Commentary podcast every day, the Times of Israel podcast every day, the Three Martini Lunch podcast every day, the Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch every day. And when it comes out, the Ruthless podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays is one of my favorites.
MR: What were the publications or thinkers that influenced you?
TT: Commentary is very big in my current house, but also in my parents’ house. We always got Commentary. I'm not sure when I was a kid I was reading it, but I saw all those headlines and those big names. And then when I was in graduate school, I went into the archives and read a lot of Commentary. I've been reading National Review for a long time. In the eighties, The New Republic was interesting because it had left and right voices and they fought it out there. The New Republic is not that anymore, but at the time it was a must-read magazine. In terms of books, The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom is one of my favorites of all time.
MR: Did you know him?
TT: I never met him. Obviously your father-in-law knew him pretty well and has great stories and imitations of him.
Another book that really influenced me was Losing Ground by Charles Murray. Also Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas. It really was such a lesson for me because that book was riveting. It was about the busing controversy in Boston, but there's a quote on the back of the book that to say that this book is about busing in Boston is like saying that Moby Dick is about whaling in New Bedford. It's really about everything.
One thing on Lukas. It was devastating to me that this guy who wrote this book that I thought was one of the best books I'd ever read committed suicide. To see that someone who was so talented and had so much to give chose that path…I just found it devastating when that happened.
MR: This reminds me of Bruno Leoni who wrote one of my favorite legal books called Freedom and the Law. Someone just bashed his head against a wall a bunch of times and killed him.
TT: Because of what he wrote?
Breakfast Tea
MR: How do you describe the field that you are in?
TT: The first thing I say when people ask me what I am, I say I'm a presidential historian. It's only a small element of what I am. When people ask me my profession, I say my goal is to be paid to be Tevi Troy. I have my thoughts and my beliefs, and I want to be able to write about them with full use of my First Amendment rights, which I felt was very constrained when, for example, I was in government.
I'm not an income maximizer so much as I'm a freedom and flexibility maximizer. I write a lot. I'm affiliated with the Ronald Reagan Institute, which pretty much gives me the freedom to write what I want. I teach at the Straus Center at Yeshiva University, where you don't have speech codes or anything like that. And I do various consulting projects. I have a leadership training business.
MR: How do you think about minimizing the time that you do things that you’re not interested in? What does your breakfast routine look like?
TT: I wake up, I go to shul. I come home and I look at the papers while I eat breakfast. But most days when the weather is nice, I play tennis right after synagogue.
MR: What do you have for breakfast?
TT: I actually have a little bit of high fat yogurt mixed with grape nuts. And a cup of tea.
MR: What kind of tea?
TT: I used to have a pomegranate white tea from Trader Joe’s for many years. It's my favorite tea. And they stopped making it. I hoarded the few bags that I either had or could find from friends. When something special happens, like when I finish a book, I will have a pomegranate white tea. In fact, today is my birthday. I'm going to have a pomegranate white tea later today.
MR: Is there anything you are meticulous about?
TT: Language. Precision in speech. I teach classes at YU and I try and get my kids never to say “like” or “um” or “you know.” We even have a board up and if you say one of those words, we make a mark on a board.
Courts and the White House
MR: Are you good at tennis?
TT: Better than some and worse than others.
MR: How long have you been playing for?
TT: I started playing in my twenties.
When I was at the American Enterprise Institute, a lot of the scholars played tennis, including Ben Wattenberg, for whom I worked. Norm Ornstein was there; Dinesh D'Souza was a good tennis player. And I realized that tennis was a very good social sport because you could play with others and it got you into different crowds. It also was a good adult sport.
When I worked at the White House, I had the honor and pleasure to be able to play on the White House tennis court and actually bring in people from the outside. There are people who come up to me and say, "I still so treasure that time you had me on the White House tennis court."
MR: Did Bush play tennis?
TT: Bush played with Condi Rice, but the rule on the White House tennis courts was you couldn't play when Bush was in town because he might want to go walk on the back lawn.
MR: Did you ever go bowling at the White House?
TT: I bowled when I was in the White House the first time, but I also bowled in the Trump administration. Tom Rose brought me along with Scooter Libby to bowl in the White House bowling lanes. And it was really special because that was the first time that Scooter had returned to the White House after he left, after being unfairly prosecuted back in the Bush days. I was there on the day we were sitting next to Scooter in the White House senior staff meeting when he got the note that said he'd been unfairly indicted and he had to leave. He left the White House that day and he didn't return until that day we went to the bowling alley.
Politico
MR: Which politician in your life do you think you had the closest personal relationship with?
TT: I'll name a couple. Chris Cox was who I worked for when I worked my first job on the Hill. Super smart guy. I would not say I was close to him while I worked for him, but we've developed a friendship since. He's actually called me and asked for writing advice, which was incredibly flattering because he used to tear my writing to bits when I would write stuff for him back in the day.
Elaine Chao for whom I worked in my first job in the Bush administration. She was just terrific at building camaraderie among her staff. She interviewed people up and down the organization. A lot of the secretaries I worked with would interview just the closest layer of people around them, and she would go a couple of levels down. She was looking for people who could get things done, get along, and also were conservative or committed to the mission. She really filtered for that in the interviews. And it showed because a) we made an agenda when she first started and she made sure she carried out everything, and b) the people that I worked with at Labor are among the closest group of people that I ever worked with. I left there probably 24 years ago, and I still am in touch with a lot of people from that group, and we still get together a couple of times every year.
The third person was Mike Leavitt, who was the Secretary of Health and Human Services for whom I worked. He was personally very kind to me and was a very good leader. I used to call him a five-tool player. There's all kinds of things that you need in politics. You have to be good interpersonally, you have to be good at giving a speech, you have to be good at fundraising. Anyway, he seemed to have all of the tools you needed to be a successful politician.
MR: For someone who has never been to DC, do you have any hidden gems to visit beside the big tourist attractions?
TT: There is this place called Brookside Gardens that is a spectacular botanical garden. The cherry blossoms I think are worth seeing. You don't even have to go to DC. There's also a church near Rockville Pike that has this interesting cemetery with some famous people buried there, including F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Portnoy’s Complaint About A Confederacy of Dunces
MR: What's your favorite fiction book?
TT: A Confederacy of Dunces.
MR: I love that book.
TT: He committed suicide before the book came out.
MR: Walker Percy made that book happen.
TT: I was just thinking of Walker Percy this morning because of his famous quote, “Where are the Hittites? Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people.”
MR: Reminds me of the Sopranos line, “You’re lookin’ at ‘em.”
TT: I think that Walker Percy is the inspiration for that line.
I also like Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. And Saul Bellow. I try and find interesting contemporary fiction. It's not easy to do. I agree with the Joseph Epstein thesis about how the novel seems to have gone away as a piece of unifying social commentary. But sometimes I see novels I like. Iain Pears, for example, has written some interesting books. An Instance of the Fingerpost, for one. And also A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
I try and read about 120 books a year, and I have about an eight-to-one nonfiction-to-fiction ratio.
Jewish Study
MR: Where are you holding in your Jewish study?
TT: I am trying to get through the entire Gemara. I'm not doing it on a seven-year cycle, but a 14-year cycle. I’m going through Menachos right now. I also do the weekly parsha exchange with a friend. We each pick a different commentator. This year we're doing Rashi because we do Rashi every seven years just to make sure we don't forget about Rashi. This is a Rashi year again.
I got to give a plug here to Sefaria, where I find the commentaries.
MR: What rabbi do you think encapsulates your worldview the most?
TT: That is a terrific question. I have a lot of gratitude to the [Lubavitcher] Rebbe. My wife Kami became religious through Chabad.
I just read Yitz Greenberg's book, The Triumph of Life. I thought it was a really impressive achievement. He's 91 years old, he's got a PhD in History from Harvard. Really thoughtful about things. I think he's maybe a little more liberal than I am, but he’s spent a career thinking through these issues. Rabbi Meir “Solly” Soloveichik is also an inspiration.
MR: Did you ever have any desire to just study in yeshiva all day?
TT: No, not really. I went to Ramaz in the eighties. It was a very career-oriented place. Very few people went to Israel to study in yeshiva for the year. I was not one of them.
I'm very Jewish, but I've never been a professional Jew. I don't want to work exclusively in the Jewish world. I work in America and I love America. And America allows me to honor and celebrate my religion. But that's one component of my life. And I have my secular life as well.
Movies and Books
MR: Do you floss?
TT: Yes. My dentist laughs at me when I say this. I floss six days a week. She said, “Why six days a week?” I said, “I don't floss on the Sabbath.”
MR: What about TV and movies?
TT: I do watch movies. I have a movie club with some friends of mine…three couples. We watched movies after Shabbat on Saturday nights. But the rules of the movie club are we don’t watch science fiction, tentpoles, or superhero/comic book movies. We're trying to watch actual movies, like in the old days, that could appeal to the broad swath of the American people.
MR: What’s the last one you watched?
TT: I keep a list here, let me find it.
MR: Do you have a lot of lists?
TT: I have so many lists. Lists are really big. I keep a list of all the books I read, the books I want to read, the movies I want to see.
The last movie we saw was terrific. It was September 5.
I also watch action movies with my brother Dan on Thursday nights. The last action movie we saw was Weekend in Taipei. We often watch Asian action movies because they're really good at making action movies and they don't have all the politically correct nonsense. I really can't stand how Hollywood does villains these days. It's more likely to be a pharmaceutical executive than a Chinese spy or an Islamist terrorist. But these Asian movies, it's just a straight-up bad guy.
Jokes for Jerry
MR: What are some other lists you have?
TT: Books I want to read, books I read, places where I can publish articles, people I know in various cities. If I do a book event, here are the people I should invite to the event.
This is a good one: My wife doesn't like telling me what she wants as her birthday gift, so if she mentions something throughout the year, I put it on the list. PR ideas for books. I just had a book come out, The Power and the Money about presidents and CEOs.
MR: Anything else on the list of lists?
TT: I have this friend who likes jokes — his name's Jerry. I write down jokes for Jerry. Plays to see on Broadway.
This one indicates my age: I have the name of my doctor, and whenever I have an ache or pain or something bothers me, I'm going to write it down so I can talk to him.
MR: These are so good.
TT: I probably have 500 notes, but most of them are notes from books. When I read a book, I'll write down the notes and then I put it in my files.
MR: Can we end the interview with one of your jokes for Jerry?
TT: I'll tell you the joke I just gave him.
TT: After the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon is elated. There were three soldiers who were particularly heroic in this battle. A Polish soldier, a German soldier, and a Jewish soldier. He grants each of them one wish.
The Polish soldier says, “I would like the reclamation of my people’s empire and their glory. And the German soldier says, “I too would want the reclamation of my people's empire and their glory.” And the Jewish soldier says, “I would like one schmaltz herring.”
Napoleon says, “Very well.” and they all leave.
The Polish and the German guys just start mocking the Jew…start ripping on him for the ridiculously small request. And the Jewish guy says to them, “I know that at the end of this I will get one schmaltz herring. What are you guys going to get?”
MR: That's really good. I like that.
TT: I gave it to Jerry and he loved it.