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It's Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer. And along with travel and backyard barbecues, it's also a solemn time when we remember the more than one million Americans who've lost their lives while serving in our nation's military. This morning, Elaine Quijano will tell us about a woman who made it her mission to bring comfort to families of the fallen. During the Vietnam War, when the military sent casualty notifications via telegram, Julia Moore, an army wife and mother of five, was outraged. And her and the other wives realized that this has to stop. And they rose to the moment and they created fundamental change, not only in the army, but across all services.
How she helped change military culture ahead on Sunday morning. Musician, songwriter and producer David Foster has created so many memorable pop songs. His nickname is simply Hitman. Now he's on Broadway and talking with Tracy Smith. It figures that David Foster's new show, Boop, is up for a few Tony's this year. The Grammy winning producer is famous for getting the best out of everyone he works with. When we go in the studio, I'm going to get a better vocal out of you than anybody ever has or anybody ever will. End of story. Are you always that confident?
Always. David Foster does it his way later on Sunday morning. It's been more than 60 years since Ann Tyler's first novel came out. 24 more books and one Pulitzer Prize later. She still has plenty of stories to tell, as she'll share with our Robert Costa. Ann Tyler is both a bestselling author and a favorite of critics.
But for decades, she has largely avoided publicity, letting her characters speak for her. Careful. It's not the whoppers you're used to.
You'll want to scrape off the extra pickle and onion. Is it fun to run into these characters when you're writing? Yes. It's worth getting out in the morning for. Coming up on Sunday morning, Ann Tyler's first television interview in more than 50 years. Of course, this is one of our busiest travel weekends. Perfect timing for Chris Van Cleave's visit with Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian. As the airline marks its 100th anniversary.
With the folks from Bon Appetit magazine, we'll look at some art inspired recipes that are good enough to eat. Elizabeth Palmer shares insight from one of the last remaining Western journalists in Russia. Faith Salie looks at the legacy of an almost forgotten pioneering female cartoonist. Plus a story from Steve Hartman.
Commentary from Dr. Timothy Johnson. And all through the morning, we'll look ahead to a few of the highlights of summer 2025. All on a Sunday morning for this Memorial Day weekend. And we'll be right back.
Music We begin this morning with correspondent Elaine Quijano and a story made for Memorial Day. When Kisha Patterson last spoke to her husband Esau, it was an ordinary conversation under extraordinary circumstances. We talked that morning and it was like any other day. He was like, hey, I'll call you back. I was like, okay, you know, not thinking too much of it.
Kind of took it for granted. In April of 2004, Army Staff Sergeant Esau Patterson was serving in Iraq. They'd met years earlier in church at Fort Benning in Georgia. They got married, had two children, and were planning a family reunion for when he returned. But then came a knock at the door.
There's two uniformed service members standing there. And they looked at me and I could see tears in their eyes. And that's when I knew. A car bomb had killed her husband.
He was 25 years old. I would never get to say goodbye. I would never get to touch him.
I would never get to do anything else. What did it mean to you to have service members there with you? It meant that what he died for was okay. That he was truly protecting and serving this country. Those soldiers were carrying out a solemn duty that had not always been performed.
During the Civil War, the military had no formal casualty notification system. Occasionally, families would receive a letter. By World War I and through the Vietnam War, the military was sending telegrams until an Army wife named Julia Moore, known as Julie, stepped in. She completely changed the culture of the military.
Greg and Dave Moore are her sons. In 1965, or during the Battle of the I Drang, death notices were delivered to spouses by telegrams and taxicabs. Cold, cruel, dispassionate. She was outraged.
I have two battalions on this valley. Julie Moore's husband, Hal, was a highly regarded lieutenant colonel then, serving in Vietnam, when, as she described in a letter, a taxi driver pulled up to her house. When he rang the bell, I decided not to answer.
That way, everything would be all right. I finally said to myself, come on, Julie, you have to face up to what's to come, so go answer the door. Turned out, he needed directions. And so at that moment, she knew what it felt to get that telegram, and she never wanted to have anybody else get that telegram and not have somebody physically with them. So Moore made a deal with the local Western Union office. They would call her whenever a telegram came. A telegram.
A cap. The 2002 movie We Were Soldiers portrayed how Moore would rush to comfort the widows. Even as she cared for her five young children, Moore helped other Army wives on the home front as she recounted in an interview. I think people forget that these men have families, and these families have problems, and the wives are left alone to deal with them as best they can, and these women were really up to the task.
They really were. Moore and Moore, the Army wives, successfully lobbied the base commander. What they really wanted was the Army make a fundamental change, which they did, in that the Army should take responsibility for delivering these telegrams to the wives and personally care for the spouse during that time of cathartic change. Service members now notify families in person and offer additional support. In that moment, right before you knock on the door, what goes through your mind? I just said a prayer, like, how can I be of service to this family? I don't know what they're going through, but give me strength to face whatever it is once I ring the doorbell. When Army Sergeant 1st Class Kendrick Ray delivered a casualty notification in 2021, it was a sacred mission. Now he helps families in the days after. I believe now it's my purpose. I can let people know, like, hey, you're not alone.
We're right here with you every step of the way. Julie Moore died in 2004. Her husband died 13 years later. In 2023, the Pentagon renamed Fort Benning Fort Moore to honor them both.
It marked the first time an American military base had been named for a civilian. It's not a legacy she asked for. It's a legacy she built herself towards. And a hero rises to a moment and achieves great things.
This year, the Army Post was again named Fort Benning. But just down the road at the National Infantry Museum, her name endures. When you think about what she did, what comes to your mind? She's a no-no.
I can't imagine having received a telegram with that information on it. So I just thank her. There are husbands that endure the same pain. There are mothers and fathers.
There are children that get these knocks. So she has, yes, she has truly made a difference for all of us. Hi, this is Joe from Vanta. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation, and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 or a growing enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta makes it quick, easy, and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here.
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Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. It's been another one of those weekends in Ukraine. Massive Russian drone attacks on Kiev, while in northern Ukraine the two nations swapped prisoners. Whatever happens in this three-year-old war, Moscow-based BBC journalist Steve Rosenberg will cover it.
He's talking with Elizabeth Palmer in our Sunday Journal. In Russia, they are grieving too. That's the voice of the BBC's Steve Rosenberg, still traveling the length and breadth of Russia, reporting on the fallout of the war in Ukraine. Independent Russian media have been silenced. The Kremlin controls the narrative and the messaging. Are there red lines that you know you can't cross? I don't know, actually. There probably are.
It feels like walking a tightrope over a minefield, and you don't know at what point you're going to fall off the tightrope. A tightrope because the Kremlin suppresses all criticism of the war in Ukraine. When some Russian critics were jailed, Rosenberg drew attention to the repression by covering their trials. Vladimir Smithnova is accused of spreading fake news about the Russian army.
We caught up with him this month in Moscow. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But at the outset, Russia's government banned the words war and invasion. But can't you get into big trouble for saying that? I try to report as accurately and as calmly what's happening as I see it.
And so far, that's been okay. It's pretty clear what happened. Russia tries to justify its actions. But it was a Russian invasion of a sovereign neighboring country. If you were crossing the line, would you get a signal from the Kremlin? I've absolutely no idea. No one has picked up the phone yet and said, Rosenberg, we didn't like your report.
You're pushing it. Rosenberg came to Russia 34 years ago. His first job was as a receptionist for CBS News. This is exactly how Vladimir Putin likes to be seen, as an action map.
But he rose through the ranks to become a veteran correspondent. A lot of concern that Red Square today could be targeted by Ukrainian drone attacks. He's a fluent Russian speaker with a deep understanding of the country, its people, and the way they see this war. From morning till night, if you switch on Russian state television, you're told that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is good. Russia is the liberator.
If there is a war, it is a war started by the West, by NATO, by America. It's a very powerful message, and many people here believe it or are willing to go along with it. You say some Russians buy it. That implies some don't.
How do they cope? If you're talking about public opinion here and what people think of the war, I get the feeling that maybe 15% of the population really support it and maybe 15% really don't. And then you've got this mass in the middle who may be a little bit confused or maybe just go along with it. And it's easier to go along with it.
It's easier to believe that your country is on the right side of history than to believe that it's not. Rosenberg is a gifted pianist. For me, music is a great solace.
I mean, everybody needs a way to de-stress. Everybody. Twenty years ago, as a young reporter, he even found himself jamming with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I was playing. He was singing. I learnt more about that man, the man who entered the Cold War, in ten minutes of accompanying him on the piano than I did in a whole 45-minute interview with him. As a foreign reporter in Russia, Rosenberg is often under surveillance. And once, he actually confronted his tale on camera.
And as a pillar of the Moscow media, he's challenged President Putin too. The stress must be constant. The stress must be constant. It's stressful.
Yes, it is. But as I say, I want to be here. I want to see what's happening and what's going to happen in this country because I fell in love with it so many years ago. How will this end?
I wish I knew. Russia is like a Tolstoy novel. It's like War and Peace and you keep turning the pages to try to find out what's going to happen, how it's going to end, and it never ends.
I would like to think that the current nightmare will end and that there will be peace and that somehow life is going to get better. For decades, novelist Ann Tyler has let her characters do the talking. But this morning, she's sharing her own story with Robert Costa. One writer once said that you love to break America's heart. Oh, dear. Well, don't you think life kind of breaks your heart? Stories about life breaking your heart and how love can sometimes mend it have made Ann Tyler a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and a best-selling author for six decades. In 1977, Ann, you told the New York Times, it does matter to me that I be considered a serious writer.
A serious book is one that removes me to another life as I am reading it. It has to be an extremely believable lie. I don't remember saying that, but I believe every word of it still.
Still to this day. The fact that it's a lie is a very important part of what makes it. Not real life, don't worry. And the fact that it's a believable lie makes you say, I am actually being another person right now. The people who live in Ann Tyler's two dozen books have touched countless readers. Dinner at the homesick restaurant, breathing lessons, a spool of blue thread. Going with The Accidental Tourist is like going in a cocoon. Well, this is very nice to hear.
Times I've flown clear to Oregon and hardly knew I left Baltimore. The Accidental Tourist became a critically acclaimed film with William Hurt as a travel writer who hates to travel. All right, hey, stop for that woman.
And Geena Davis won an Oscar for playing the woman who shows him that love is possible for those willing to take a chance. I think, first of all, I should thank Ann Tyler for writing such a wonderful book. What makes me keep going as a writer is a more selfish motive, which is I'm just always wanting to know what it's like to be somebody else. And I feel almost deprived that I have just this one life.
I have to be greedy and reach out and see, well, that guy had just passed in the street who said that strange thing. What is it like to be him? It's just self-indulgence to sit and write all day and pretend I'm somebody else. Ann Tyler grew up in a quiet Quaker community in North Carolina. Is it true you would tell yourself stories to fall asleep at night?
Yes. I would fold my knees up and that would be my desk, and I would be a doctor seeing patients, and I would whisper these conversations. And it always ended with my brother in the bed across the room shouting out, Mama, Ann's whispering again.
This is a floor plan because I'm going to have a family switch around and somebody move in, so I have to figure out where we're going to put these people. This is something her readers have long heard about but never seen, her blue box full of handwritten notes to herself. Is it fun for you to page through the blue box and go, oh, I forgot I thought about that.
Yes. But we should never page through it too often because then it won't be surprising. The box is filled with ideas and snippets of overheard conversations that she might slip into a book. I love listening to people. I like to hear them nattering on.
Even when you're in a grocery store or a coffee shop? That's why the pandemic hit my writing career very hard because I love to just be walking down the street and you hear somebody say two words. As I go on I think, I wonder what that was about, and that's where stories begin. No place is more associated with Ann Tyler than Baltimore, Maryland.
It's where she and her late husband, Iranian novelist and psychiatrist, Taggi Motoressi, raise their two daughters. Why do you keep coming back to Baltimore as a setting? Laziness. Oh, stop. You seem to have a love for the setting. But face the fact that if I wrote about somebody in New York, I'd have to find out a bunch of things about New York, and here I am.
But I don't know why it is that I feel there's sort of more there there in the average Baltimorean than there are in people in other places. Tyler's latest book, Three Days in June, details a long weekend in the life of a school administrator, bookended by the loss of her job and her daughter's wedding. I wonder what on earth she imagined that might be. I am not the kind of woman who dreams of doing things. If you could pretend to be anybody, why choose the assistant headmistress at a school in Baltimore versus a movie star or a head of state? You think that's bad. The current thing I'm working on, the guy remodels kitchens for a living. So that's...
I don't know. I've often asked myself, if I want to be somebody else, why not somebody heroic and crusading out in the world? But I don't get to choose. I always say novels are like olives in one of those tall, thin bottles.
You just get out an olive that's on top. This is the one that comes next. But if I've learned anything from reading you, it's those lives, those jobs are anything but humdrum. I'm glad you see that. There is a beauty in the acceptance that people have in their own life, whether it's a character or someone you know. Sometimes people just end up in a place like Baltimore, and they make a life there. They make a life there. Like someone right here.
Someone you know, yes. Now at age 83, Ann Tyler says she'll keep doing what she has always done. Listen, think, and write about people who might shatter your heart or stitch it back together. How many more books can we expect? Well, I'm going to be writing this book forever, and when I finish it, if I do finish it before I die, I will rewrite it. And if I'm still not dead, I will rewrite it again, because I'm not going to bring out another book. I'm horrified that I have 25 books in a list in the front of this latest novel. Isn't that a joy, Ann? No. Twenty-five books. My next door neighbor many years ago said, you do churn them out, don't you? That comic clearly lingers in your mind.
It's engraved there, yes. Robert Costa talking with bestselling author Ann Tyler. While we're on the subject of books, summer reading season is almost upon us, which means it's time for a visit from Washington Post book critic Ron Charles. This is the Book Report.
Here are five hot new titles to check out this summer. If you're trying to figure out what's happening with artificial intelligence, pick up Empire of AI. Journalist Karen Howe investigates the rise of open AI and its visionary co-founder Sam Altman. With alarming detail, she shows how this once idealistic company became everything it said it would not be, even as it remakes and gobbles up the world.
On July 3rd, after taking off from New Guinea, headed for Howland Island... Everybody knows about Amelia Earhart's mysterious final flight, but what about the years before she disappeared? In The Aviator and the Showman, Laurie Gwen Shapiro draws on newly uncovered sources to explore the famed pilot's life and her marriage to wealthy publisher George Putnam. Theirs was a relationship that lifted love, publicity, and especially risk to mythic heights. Take a chance on a new writer and you may be delighted. Rob Franklin's debut novel Great Black Hope follows a young African-American man whose family launched him for success.
But after an arrest for drug possession and the death of a close friend, his once bright future feels anything but guaranteed. What better escape this July than a novel called A Summer for the Books? Michelle Lindo Rice tells the story of Jewel, a best-selling writer, and Shelby, who owns a bookstore, two old friends who went their separate ways years ago.
But when Shelby loses her memory after a bike accident and reaches out to Jewel for help, how can she refuse? Jess Walter, the best-selling author of Beautiful Ruins, is back with a new novel called So Far Gone. It's about Reese Kinnock, a journalist who's been living off the grid. But when his grandchildren are kidnapped by a right-wing militia, Reese is forced back into the world and he charges off on a wild adventure to save them. Well, that's it for The Book Report.
Until next time, I'm Ron Charles. Read on! Put one in your cart and find out why it's the best-selling men's antiperspirant for the last decade.
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Visit Babbel.com today to get started. With a record 45 million of us expected to be on the move this holiday weekend, Chris Van Cleave looks back at 100 years of flying on America's oldest airline. When you picture a garage sale, you might think of your neighbor's driveway down the street. Not an aviation workshop in the shadow of the world's busiest airport in Atlanta, where Delta Airlines holds their monthly surplus sale. Here, we have another bag. How are you going to get all this stuff home?
We actually flew down with empty bags. Delta fans came from as far as Michigan and even Korea to buy the stuff the airline no longer needs, from seats to engine parts and a chance, these folks say, to have a piece of airplane history. I actually need a bar cart in my apartment of these exact dimensions. Sarah Zeis came in search of this piece of Delta, a well-used beverage cart.
Drive slow. Though, getting it home will be a journey all its own. Proceeds from the sale go right across the parking lot to the Delta Flight Museum, now celebrating the airline's 100th year, a first for an American carrier. This is one of my favorite little items. It's a century of service that started without beverage carts or passengers, but due to a tiny pest. Marie Forrest is the archives director here. Does Delta owe its existence to a boll weevil in this station?
It does. It is the most unique beginning of a U.S. airline, I think. It's the only airline that started as a crop dusting company. Before Delta, it was Huff-Dalen Dusters, started in 1925 in Macon, Georgia. After the first growing season, they realized that most of the center of the business was in the Mississippi Delta region, and so that's where the name Delta comes from. And in 1929, Delta Airlines founder C.E.
Woolman expanded the company from pest control to people. Its first passenger flight? From Dallas, Texas to Jackson, Mississippi, with two stops in Louisiana along the way. How much was that first ticket? That first ticket was $90 round trip. About $1,700 today.
Expensive, and not for everyone. At that time, about 80% of Delta's passengers were businessmen, and they're trying to speed up their business. So a five-hour flight would take about 12 hours by train. Nearly a century after that first flight, Delta now has more than 5,000 a day. The airline has survived mergers, recessions, and bankruptcy.
Growing from that single route to a nationwide carrier, as it grew into the global force we know today. Fasten your seat belt by inserting the metal tip into the buckle. And if you've flown Delta lately, you've seen flight attendant Susan Slater in the pre-flight safety video.
And keep it fastened whenever you're seated. If you've flown Delta in the last 60 years, you may have shared a cabin with either Susan or Kaye Carpenter. And you started a Delta when? In January of 1966. And I started in March 2, 1964. They started during the golden age of air travel.
That romanticized era of flights with exceptional service, extravagant meals, and everyone dressed to the nines. You had to be unmarried. Your hair couldn't touch your collar. You had a weight restriction. Back then, I think I weighed 103 pounds, and I was five foot two and a half.
I'm five feet now, barely, and not 103. What was it about the job that you think spoke to you so much? I had no idea what the job was.
All I knew is that this was glamour personified. We certainly had a so-called golden age of flying back in the early 1960s, but it was less convenient. There were fewer flights. You often had to connect. And it certainly wasn't as reliable and safe as it is today.
Atmosphere Research Group's Henry Hartevelt is an airline industry analyst who says, no need to be quite so nostalgic. We're in a new type of golden age now, where flying is a lot more accessible. You can either buy or create a much nicer journey for yourself.
You can buy an extra legroom seat. You can pay for priority boarding. And by the way, if you don't need or value those things, or perhaps can't afford it, you're not being charged for services that you don't want. Air travel is one of the great bargains. If you think about the average fare today versus where it was 30, 40 years ago, it's less than half of what you pay in real dollars. Ed Bastian is the CEO of Delta Airlines. While low fares are sought after by some flyers, Delta has built its business around a premium experience. The single biggest reason why people chose an airline was fare.
Whoever had the lowest cost won. And Delta, yes, we have a product to compete on the lower end. The majority of our revenue comes from higher-end tickets. Their 100th summer is about to take flight amid clouds of uncertainty, worries about a slowing economy, and aviation safety. But Bastian says it could still be their busiest ever, as he looks to the future. What do you see for Delta's next 100 years?
Paint me a picture of what the next century of Delta looks like. When you think in the United States, air travel is relatively ubiquitous. You can jump on a plane almost any hour of the day and get to almost anywhere you want pretty easily.
However, when you think about the world and you realize that only one in five people in the world have even been on an airplane, it's pretty remarkable. We need to figure out ways to make it accessible, to make it affordable, to make it sustainable. I think part of that legacy is just how much the world has shrunk in those 100 years.
Yeah, that's what we do. We make the world a more connected place, a smaller place, and that's needed now more than ever. Delta helped shrink the world in the 20th century, and they hope that growth continues thanks to folks like Susan Slater and Kay Carpenter. Kay, what about you? What makes you keep coming back year after year? Well, it's been a wonderful adventure. I never dreamed that I would be here for this long. When I started, we had just small airplanes, we flew to small cities, and now we fly to six continents. So I tell all these new hire flight attendants that to always remember that one mile on a highway is going to take you exactly one mile, but a mile on a runway will take you anywhere. Never too late goes the expression, and this morning, Steve Hartman has a case in point.
79-year-old Linwood Riddick of New York could have spent his golden years here in Summerville, South Carolina tickling the ivories or whatever else tickled his fancy. But instead, this retired shop owner has spent the last six years pouring over textbooks and dragging himself to class here at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, relentless in his pursuit of a college education. I just stepped on the accelerator and it didn't stop. It didn't stop. I was determined to complete what I started. To understand why it mattered so, you need to go back to 1968.
Protests against segregation were erupting across the country, one of the deadliest at South Carolina State, where three unarmed black students were shot and killed by police in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Like many of us, Linwood Riddick had never heard of the Orangeburg Massacre until a few years ago when he stumbled on this campus memorial, and he says he knew right then what he had to do. I said, you know, I'm coming here. I'm coming here.
Why? Because I want to put my contributions to their sacrifice. And when I get my degree, it's going to be in their name. In his mind, he was completing their mission. University President Alexander Conyers. He started here in 2019 with zero credits, you know, driving from Somerville every day, which is almost an hour, to class and back home. That patience and persistence earned him a bachelor's degree in music industry.
Linwood James Riddick. Earlier this month, he walked across the stage to a standing ovation. But the more important walk was yet to come, one done alone, without any pomp or circumstance. I've been here six years. We connected with me graduating. You graduated. Thank you, brothers. And with that, Linwood Riddick's mission was complete.
And although it started as a symbolic gesture, President Conyers says it'll have a very real impact. Mr. Riddick has brought this back to the forefront for this university, for this community, for this state, to remind us of our solemn duty to never forget. Bachelor's in Music.
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T's and C's apply. Now playing. Clock is running. You will never see a movie like this again. Mission Impossible is a symphony of action scale and spectacle. Tom Cruise has outdone himself. Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning. Now playing. Rated PG-13. Just one of the classic songs that's made producer David Foster one of the best in the business. This Morning with Tracy Smith.
He's our Sunday profile. If I could make music like the Rolling Stones, that's what I would do. But when I lay my hand on the piano, what comes out comes out, you know?
And I love digging in the drums and like the big mo and the strings and the, that's what I love. It works. It does.
It works all right. For the past 50 years, David Foster has produced some of music's most iconic artists and most enduring moments, like this one in a Whitney Houston cover, something he calls the Boom and I. And I will always love you. Foster also has an amazing ear for talent. He discovered superstar Celine Dion singing at a picnic. And years later for a Grammy's rehearsal, he plucked a 17-year-old Josh Groban out of high school to sing with her. But the hitmaker's latest project is all new and all him.
It's the Tony-nominated musical Boop, as in Betty Boop, for which he wrote something like 50 songs. A little versatility never hurt. A little versatility never hurt.
Boop, boop, be doop. What made you say, I need to do a Broadway musical? I've always been very pragmatic about my career. And since the very early days, I always planned for when I wasn't hot anymore. What do you mean you planned? I planned it. In my head, it was like, that day's going to come because nobody avoids that.
Nobody. So Broadway for me was a place that I could write a song where you have to write a good song, but you don't necessarily have to write a hit song. His Boop songs might not be hits yet. But in her Broadway debut, the Tony-nominated Jasmine Amy Rogers knocks them all out of the park.
Orange, orange, violet, indigo. We were in the studio last month as they recorded the Boop cast album, and Foster was at the board hanging on her every note. That ball, those gloves, those gloves, that ball, that shawl. Wait, this wig, that ball, those gloves, that shawl, that wall. In my mind, I tell myself, I'm going to get a better vocal out of this person than anybody's ever gotten before or anybody ever will get.
And of course it's not true, but that's my mantra going in, because good is the enemy of great, and we all try to be great every day if we can. It seems the Canadian-born Foster was great from the start. He had perfect pitch at age four, and his parents spent basically all they had to buy him a piano. They took their life savings, $1,700, cashed in their bonds to buy me an electric piano and an amplifier so that I could leave Vancouver Island at 16 and go to England and try and be a rock star. It's just like, what were they thinking? I mean, why would they do that? They had faith in you. I know.
Somewhere we'll find a new way of living. Turns out Foster's true talent was getting the best out of people, like producing Barbra Streisand on her 1985 Broadway album. Barbra Streisand has said that you are difficult. Well, so has she.
Yes, she did. What happens in that situation if you have Barbra Streisand and David Foster, both who have a vision? We certainly respect each other, and we are friends. If I called her at 3 o'clock in the morning from jail, the first thing she'd say was, how'd you get this number? Then she'd be like, okay, I'll come and help.
She's a really good friend. One of the things I love about her is Barbra Streisand has never compromised, ever. The guys in the supergroup Chicago learned that Foster doesn't compromise much either. He turned their 1982 album, Chicago 16, into a platinum masterpiece but ruffled a lot of feathers with his My Way or the Highway producing style. If I did anything for them, I reminded them of their greatness because they were and are great, but they had lost their greatness.
Did they grumble quite a bit as you were telling them what to do? Well, yes. By the way, it took 13 months to make the Chicago 16 record. The record before that had sold 100,000 copies.
Our first record together sold 7 million. Is he strong? Isn't he funny?
He's got radioactive blood. David Foster's also credited with discovering superstar Michael Buble, but he says his own role in the music business is changing. Do you think you'll ever have another top 40 hit? Wow, what a question. No, I don't. You know, when I stopped making records 10 years ago, in my own little way, I felt like an athlete, like it was time to get out. And I haven't missed it for one second.
No? No, not for one second. He hasn't taken a break from performing. Foster tours with his wife, singer Catherine McPhee, whom he married in 2019.
And cliche as it might sound, they make beautiful music together. Lead us to a place, guide us with your grace. Do you think about legacy? What's the David Foster legacy? I don't really care about it. You don't care?
Why not? I was acquaintances with one of my heroes, Henry Mancini, and his neighbor told me that when Henry was diagnosed with cancer, and he was going to die, and he went over to his neighbors, and the neighbors said, yeah, but Henry, think of your legacy. And he said, I don't give a **** about my legacy. I'd trade that for three months more right now.
And so would I. But for a guy who says he doesn't care about legacy, David Foster has built a lasting one. Each of the 16 Grammys on his wall is for a song you'll never forget.
Of course, winning's not everything, but it actually is. No, I mean, sometimes I get so annoyed when I walk in front of the Grammys. It's like, is that it? That's all you've got in your whole life? Is that?
It's nothing. Honestly, I swear to God. That's what those words would say to you? Yeah, well, I mean, sometimes. But honestly, I got rid of them for like five or ten years. And how were you able to bring them back?
I missed them. The National Institutes of Health is the world's largest source of funding for medical research. It has also undergone huge budget cuts recently imposed by the Trump Administration, which prompts thoughts from Dr. Timothy Johnson, former longtime ABC News medical reporter and founding editor of the Harvard Medical School Health Letter. Over the course of my long career in medical journalism, I had the great privilege of getting to know many of the leading medical researchers in this country. They were typically people of great integrity who had dedicated themselves to the often frustrating and tedious task of painstaking research to find new cures and preventions for important medical problems. And the bottom line for many of them was that without government support, they could never have achieved the discoveries that have helped us all. Which is why I am stunned by a recent report that states the Trump Administration's National Institutes of Health has stopped payments on grants totaling more than $1.8 billion for nearly 700 specific medical research projects. Stand up!
Fight back! This sledgehammer approach will cause terrible damage to many outstanding research programs. And it will destroy the careers of many young medical scientists just starting their research. These are dedicated people who have already put in many years of difficult training and may be on the cusp of some major discoveries. And I believe it is possible that many of these suddenly defunded researchers will find positions in other welcoming countries a brain drain in reverse from the flow of many scientists into this country during and after World War II. So, why aren't more politicians insisting on a more surgical approach that would find legitimate savings without potentially destroying the research infrastructure that has served our country so well for decades? Put simply, we are facing a choice between smart decisions or reckless destruction that may affect our nation's health for generations to come.
And if I may use a sophisticated medical term, it seems to me that the right choice is a no-brainer. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. Survivor 48 is here, and alongside it, we're bringing you a brand new season of On Fire, the only official Survivor podcast. If you're a Survivor superfan, you won't want to miss this deep dive into every episode where we break down how we designed the game, the biggest moves, your burning questions. It's the only podcast that gives you inside access to Survivor that nobody else can. Listen to On Fire, the official Survivor podcast, with me, Jeff Kropes, every Wednesday after the show, wherever you get your podcasts. NCIS Origins Season 1, now streaming on Paramount+.
