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Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday morning. We're almost a full year into the COVID pandemic, and even though vaccines are being rolled out, some of those qualified to receive inoculations are actually turning them down. For them, it's a matter of trust, or lack thereof, as Ted Koppel explains. Booking an appointment for a COVID shot can be a challenge, especially for our frontline workers. They don't have the luxury of bringing their beach chairs and sitting on a line and playing on their laptop while they're waiting for a vaccine. And that doesn't begin to address the underlying fears. I don't know if it's gonna be all right for me.

What it often comes down to, especially in our minority communities, is a matter of trust, which, like the vaccine, is in short supply, next on Sunday morning. From there, it's on to a most unusual piano man, harvesting music from a very unexpected place, as our Seth Doan has discovered. High up in Italy's Alps, we go in search of the tree used in some of the finest instruments on earth. The sound is something we cannot describe. And meet the piano maker who's impressing some of the world's top musicians, including Herbie Hancock.

I just started to play it, and I said, wow, what is this? Come along on a magnificent musical journey, later on the Sunday morning. Our Sunday profile this morning, Ellen Burstyn, an Oscar winner for whom the thrill of a good role never grows old. With Nancy Giles, we pay her a visit.

When she finally got me to a doctor, he advised her to just let me go. At 88, Ellen Burstyn is still getting raves, this time for her role in Pieces of a Woman. I never thought I would be acting at 88. It never occurred to me. But on the other hand, it never occurred to me to not be.

Right. A conversation with Ellen Burstyn, ahead on Sunday morning. Lee Cowan is in conversation with Cindy McCain, widow of the late Senator John McCain. Chip Reid shows us the effort to recover and restore headstones from a historic black cemetery. Nicholas Thompson looks into the case of the mystery hiker, plus a story from Steve Hartman, humor from David Sedaris, and more.

It's Sunday morning, February 21st, 2021, and we'll be right back. The decision to sign up for a COVID vaccine ultimately comes down to a matter of trust. And for some Americans, that trust isn't there for a multitude of reasons, as senior contributor Ted Koppel explains.

Sometimes, a cliche hits a little too close to home. The Sandtown neighborhood of West Baltimore, for example, does look like a war zone. Most of the residents are African-American. And what that means, not just here, but nationally, is that they are being hospitalized and dying of COVID at two to three times the rate of white Americans. It's a very depressed neighborhood right now. We still have massive unemployment within the community.

The Reverend Derek DeWitt is a field marshal in the local war against poverty, disease, and hunger. My church is located in a food desert, 74 square blocks of Sandtown. We have about 109 staff members. We have about 109 establishments that sell alcohol, but we don't have one single supermarket.

5,000 families a month are getting food at the First Mount Calvary Baptist Church. Convincing those same people to get vaccinated against COVID is more complicated. Blame some of that on the trash circulating on the internet. There's this conspiracy that Bill Gates has helped them to design a microchip that will be implanted in you as a result of the vaccination. They want to track you. They want to control you.

They want to crush your soul like a grape. This headline claims to show government health workers, clearly many years ago, injecting southern rural blacks with syphilis. Then the question, still want a corona vaccine? The government didn't inject anyone with syphilis, but what did happen was in some respects even worse. The Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in African-Americans began in the 1930s. It was a study that was done without informed consent of the men, and it was done in a way that watched to observe what would happen to those who already had syphilis and it was untreated to see what the effects would be. Dr. Reed Tuckson is co-founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID-19, providing facts about the vaccine. If you care about Tuskegee and it makes you angry as it should, then make sure you know you have a drug that will save you from this disease. Almost 50 years after it ended, the Tuskegee study remains an issue. What happened to those men?

Unfortunately, two things. Those men died because of the disease and became extremely ill for long, long periods of their life. And number two, because they were not told the disease they had, they spread that disease to the women in their lives, to their wives and lovers, who also got syphilis as a result. Was anyone ever punished? No one was ever punished or held accountable, and that is a stain on America's conscience. It has also had a lingering impact on the black community's confidence in the medical establishment.

When I talked to our employees, it was everything. I don't know what's in the vaccine. I don't trust it. They developed it too fast.

They're trying to make us sterile. In addition to his ministry, the Reverend DeWitt runs a nursing home. That nursing home was started by a group of pastors in the city as the Maryland Baptist Age Home for Colored People in 1920. Nationwide, more than 160,000 COVID deaths have occurred in nursing homes, all of which makes this nursing home's health record that much more remarkable. How many people among your staff have died? We've had no COVID infections amongst our staff or our residents, thank God, so we count that as a miracle and a blessing.

It is also the mark of a tough, disciplined manager. We were extreme in our measures because we didn't allow anybody in. Our residents didn't go out unless it was an extreme emergency. But when time came to vaccinate the staff… Mr. Koppel, I was surprised, even at my nursing home, which has 42 employees, our first vaccination clinic, we only had 11 employees take the vaccine. The Reverend set the example. He was the first to be vaccinated. He talked to his staff one-on-one. He prayed with them.

So that kind of helped. And then we had to get down to the point where, for the sake of our residents and the type of facility that we are, I'm not sure that I can guarantee your job if you don't take the vaccine. All but two of his employees got the message and the vaccine. Have you had to fire anybody? We have not had to fire anybody. There is some discrepancies of whether or not we can mandate the vaccine. But what you're telling me is that we've now had COVID in this country for over a year, and in that time you haven't had a single case?

We haven't had a single case. A.G. Rhodes operates three non-profit nursing homes in the greater Atlanta area. Over the past year, 26 of their residents and one staff member have died from COVID.

Javon Harvey is marketing director at the flagship facility. About 90 percent of the facility is probably African-American. And when the patients first heard about the vaccine, what was the reaction? They welcomed it because they wanted to get back to their normal daily functions.

And what about the staff? Same thing? They weren't as excited to receive the vaccine as the residents were.

You're being very, very diplomatic. They not only weren't excited, they were resistant, weren't they? Yes, they were very resistant. I would say about 30 percent of the staff were prepared to take the vaccine. The company's CEO recorded a video educating and encouraging the staff to get vaccinated. Javon was initially reluctant, but she got the vaccine and encouraged other staff members to consider it. So you were kind of the role model in some respects?

Yes, they could see me and see I'm OK, I didn't have a reaction, I'm not walking backwards, I'm not speaking in tongues, I'm actually OK. Did that help? I think it helped a lot. Well, not so much.

The company even offered incentives, paid time off, bonuses of up to $500. But as of now, just 48 percent of the staff has been vaccinated. That's not great. It's not great, but it is definitely a start. Javon, we've been on the clutches of this pandemic for over a year. How much time do people need? We've got 450 some odd thousand dead.

I know. What's holding them back now? I just think it's just overall fear. They're not quite sure which way to go.

Often, says Dr. Reed Tuckson, reaction is a function of generation. We are seeing from the data that older African-Americans are much, much more willing to accept the vaccine than the youngest. The population segment in the black community that's most resistant are going to be our young people. These are young people that have grown up with the greatest level of distrust because of all the issues that they have faced in their life, particularly around the criminal justice and policing issues.

So they are the ones that are the toughest right now to reach. The most intense concentrations of COVID occur at the intersection of poverty, black and Latino neighborhoods. Los Angeles is a perfect example. You know, L.A. is really a tale of two cities.

You have the extremely wealthy west side, and then you have the extremely poor south side and east side. How long do you think most of these folks are going to wait today? It's not long. Jim Manja is president and CEO of St. John's Well Child and Family Center. Their community clinics in South L.A. and Compton see 100,000 patients a year, including 35,000 undocumented immigrants. She's saying that I've had my cousins, my aunts, even she has gotten the vaccine. There should be no fear regarding it.

Exactly. St. John's has been dispatching Spanish-speaking outreach workers into the Latino neighborhoods. Some fears are common to every community.

I don't know if it's true, like the side effects. Health workers need to provide the undocumented with reassurance on two counts, that the vaccine is safe and that they needn't fear immigration authorities. So what would you say are the biggest hurdles in the way of getting the most underserved communities in California vaccinated? The lack of vaccine is a major issue.

The arduous website and appointment system is extremely difficult to navigate. And many of our patients who work all day, by the time they get home, all those appointments have been taken by folks from the west side, white young hipsters that can spend all day searching for vaccine. St. John's outreach efforts are starting to pay off with long lines at their appointment-only vaccination sites. Our patients don't have the capacity to take off of work and go wait on a megapod line for four or five hours to get vaccinated. They need to come into a clinic at 5 30 or six or seven or on a Saturday. They don't have the luxury of bringing their beach chairs and sitting on a line playing on their laptop while they're waiting for a vaccine.

Preliminary government data confirmed Jim Munger's suspicions. More than 60 percent of vaccinations have been going to whites, less than nine percent to Hispanics, less than six percent to blacks. I don't think we're going to be successful unless we figure out a way to bring the vaccine to the people. We're seeing 5,000 people a month come through our church to get food. Got some good stuff in there today. Y'all doing all right?

Good, good. If we could vaccinate during a food drive, if we enlist the faith-based community as partners in the vaccination process, I think that it would go a long way to making sure that people get the vaccine. You have to vaccinate the most vulnerable first. And that's how you're going to really get to herd immunity.

You have to vaccinate the most hesitant, the most vulnerable, and then you can really start to do mass vaccination and get us to a place where we can return to a normal life. During this month, when we focus on black history, Chip Reid's story about the fate of a Washington, D.C. cemetery is all the more disturbing. His is the tale of righting a wrong. Virginia State Senator Richard Stewart and his wife Lisa were exploring their new farm on the Potomac River when they saw something in the water that brought tears to her eyes and made him feel ill. Lisa and I looked at each other and both of us said, is that a headstone? And then we looked and we saw another and another and another. What did you feel at that moment?

Horrible. It was just a horrible feeling to think that this person's headstone was here on our shoreline and not where it belonged with her body, where her family could grieve and mourn and remember her life. And that was four years ago. And since that time, we've been working to get them back where they belong. They consulted with historians who followed the trail of names to the old Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C. For about 100 years, starting in the late 1850s, it was the final resting place for 37,000 black residents of Washington, including many of its most prominent citizens, such as Elizabeth Keckley, seamstress and confidant of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood, recipient of the Medal of Honor during the Civil War, and Mary Ann Shad, anti-slavery activist and America's first black female publisher. So how did all these headstones from a cemetery 60 miles upriver in Washington, D.C., end up here? Well, about 60 years ago, that cemetery was sold and all those headstones were either sold or given away as scrap.

A previous owner here bought truckloads of them to shore up this riverbank. Today, there's a metro station where the headstones once stood. The only recognition, a plaque that reads, many distinguished black citizens, including Civil War veterans, were buried in this cemetery. These bodies now rest in the new National Harmony Memorial Park in Maryland.

But most were reburied without headstones, so the precise locations of the bodies are lost forever. It's an ugly thing. And it's ugly because cemeteries are a mark of humanity. Professor Michael Blakey, director of the Institute for Historical Biology at William and Mary, says there's a long history in America of what he calls dehumanization of black cemeteries. It's casual dehumanization at this point. It's a kind of disregard. It has a lot in common, he says, with the death of George Floyd. The murder of George Floyd, as I see it, by Officer Chauvin, was casual.

Chauvin clearly did not see Mr. Floyd as a real, complete human being. A Virginia nonprofit, the History, Arts, and Science Action Network, has taken on the job of recovering as many of the headstones as possible. But it is a monumental task. So far, only 55 have been recovered, with thousands more believed to be buried in the muck.

Virginia's governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, put $5 million in his budget for the recovery effort and is working closely with his longtime Republican friend, Senator Stewart. Republican senator, Democratic governor, what's the message here? There are some things that transcend politics, and this is one. This wouldn't have happened to a white cemetery in Virginia. And the fact that it happened in an African-American cemetery is wrong, and we need to make it right. That's music to the ears of William Hart, whose great-grandfather, William Henry Harrison Hart, was a civil rights champion and legendary law professor at Howard University who was buried at Harmony. Has his stone been found in the river?

No, it has not. I think that I would be overjoyed if I found a headstone. Hart admits he has every reason to be bitter about what happened.

But he says that's just not how he feels. I am overwhelmed that other people care so deeply about this issue. Even though this was a tragedy, the fact that people care today brings me great joy. Ellen Burstyn earned an Oscar nomination for her role in The Exorcist.

And to hear some talent, yet another Oscar nod may soon be in the offing. Nancy Giles has our Sunday profile. During these challenging COVID days, Ellen Burstyn enjoys her solitary walks in Central Park, with the ducks and geese as company, and the occasional human interaction. A Frisbee came over the fence and landed near me. And I went and got it and gave it to the girl. And she said, thank you. And I felt so much better.

Just that exchange. She related to me. And not only that, I was useful.

I had a reason to be on the planet Earth. Martha, please. Still at 88, she's as busy as ever. Her latest film, the Netflix drama Pieces of a Woman. We need some justice here.

You need. This time, as a mother whose daughter, played by Vanessa Kirby, loses her baby after a home birth. Martha, if you had done it my way, you'd be holding your baby in your arms right now. It's not an easy relationship, but we go through something together. Vanessa and I really bonded. It's wonderful when you get to work with another actor that it's like you're jamming, like you're jazz musicians jamming. When she finally got me to a doctor, he advised her to just let me go. That I wasn't having that, that I wasn't, I wasn't strong enough to survive. Is it so exciting when you hear that, you know, your work might be Oscar worthy?

Oh, you bet. You slept with him? Mama! Burstyn's first Oscar nod came in 1972 as Lois Farrow, mother to Sybil Shepherd's Jacey in The Last Picture Show.

I thought if you slept with him a few times, you might find out that there isn't anything magic about him. It was her first big role in film with Peter Bogdanovich as director. We had a scene where I hear my lover drive up. Oh, good. My lover's here. And I just about to open the door and my daughter comes in. And then I realize, oh, it's not my lover coming to see me. It's my daughter.

Oh my God, my daughter's been with my lover. So I said, Peter, I have eight different things to express here and I don't have a line. And he went, I know. Dastardly.

Yeah. And I said, well, how am I supposed to do that? And he said, just think the thoughts of the character and the camera will read your mind. That was the most important acting for film lesson I ever got.

It was just brilliant because that's the truth. Next came The Exorcist. Another mother with a daughter possessed by the devil.

And another Oscar nomination. A year later, Alice doesn't live here anymore, as a single mother trying to do it all. A story that mirrored her own experience. In the 70s, we all kind of woke up, you know, and when I don't have to be a wife, I don't have to. I could be a woman. I can be a wife and a woman, or I can be a woman without being a wife.

That's right. And Alice wasn't a wife once her husband died. And she raised her son by herself, like I raised my son by myself. And that was never kind of dealt with yet. You brought a real, a total sense of what being a woman was and is to all of your work.

That was my intention. This time, she had the power and the moxie to choose her director, a very young Martin Scorsese. And the winner is Ellen Burstyn and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Third time was the charm. But on Oscar night, she was on Broadway, starring in Same Time Next Year. People waited four months for their tickets to see that show. Ellen is in a play tonight in New York.

She can't be here. She asked Scorsese to accept the award for her. He said, what should I say? And I said, thank yourself. She also asked me to thank myself. Thank you. And then he walked off. And then he walked off.

God, Marty, if I had known you weren't going to say something, I would have written a speech for you. She's worked steadily ever since. It's a beautiful building.

It is. And mentored generations of young actors along the way. So this was probably some event for the Actors Studio. She credits coach Lee Strasberg in the Actors Studio for showing her how to become her authentic self. It's my creative home.

And I just wouldn't be the person I am or the actors I am without this place. Edna Rae Giluli grew up in Detroit during the Depression, except for the two years her mother sent her away. She put her two children in boarding school until she got husband number three. Did husband number three know you guys existed? And not until she was pregnant with his son, which did not make him like us very much. There's a lot of mother-daughter interaction in almost, I think, everything that you do. Do you feel like your relationship with your mom was something that helped you in doing these roles? My mom and I had a difficult relationship. And I remember sort of taking notes when I was a kid. I was like, I'm not going to do that when I'm a mother.

Really? So I had in my mind what a good mother was. What's that like now for you as a mom and a grandmother? I just know that I did right by my kid because our relationship is so real.

The last time Burston was nominated for an Oscar was in 2001. Does he give you pills? Of course he gives me pills. He's a doctor. What kind of pills?

A purple one, a blue one. Playing a woman addicted to amphetamines in Requiem for a Dream. People say to me, well, how do you feel at the end of the day after you've gone through all that torturous stuff?

You know, when you do something that's hard and you pull it off, that only feels good. And this year, if she's nominated yet again, she'll make Oscar history in the acting category. You'd be the oldest nominee, I think.

Yes, and I really want that. And possibly the oldest person nominated in any category this year. But there is Anne Roth, who is a designer, and she gets nominated a lot. And she's older than I am. We won't say anything bad about Anne, but... And if Anne really needs it, okay. But if she can just skip this year.

If she could and just wait till she's 90, you know? This is The Takeout with Major Garrett. This week, Stephen Law, ally of Mitch McConnell and one of Washington's biggest midterm money men, list for me the two Senate races where you think Republicans have the best chance of taking a Democratic seat away. Nevada, New Hampshire. Not Georgia. Well, Georgia's right up there, but New Hampshire is a surprise.

In New Hampshire, people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation, follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out.

What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation, is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts. It's believed he started walking the Appalachian Trail sometime around April of 2017. From a state park in New York, he hiked south at about 1,000 miles and 10 months later, crossed into Florida. I saw a man walking on the side of the road. The thing that stood out to me first was his beard, also his trekking poles. His trekking poles let me know that he was a hiker.

Kelly Fairbanks was a so-called trail angel offering help to weary hikers. Why did he make an impression on you? He just had a really kind aura about him. He was joking and laughing with me, had a beautiful smile, and he had beautiful eyes. Sounds like he thought he was kind of handsome.

Yeah, most of the women do. Fairbanks took a few pictures of him. So did other hikers. Some caught him on video. Did you ask him his name? He introduced himself to me as mostly harmless.

Mostly harmless. That's what he called himself when he was on the trail and off the grid. He said, I'm not using a cell phone. And I said, what do you mean you're not using a cell phone?

And he said, you know, sometimes people just want to disconnect. Six months after that, in southern Florida, hikers made a terrible discovery. Call your county 911. What is the address of your emergency? They were calling from the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida's Alligator Alley. We just found a dead body. Okay. Are you on the trail?

Yeah, I'm on the trail. And then the dead body is at the Noble Camp Noble site. The body was curled up in a yellow tent. We had a white male. We had no electronics, no identification, no wallet, no personal information. There was nothing there that gave us a hint at the time. David Herm is a detective with the Collier County, Florida Sheriff's Office. We just typically don't see people go to that lengths.

Most people are not comfortable being completely off the grid like that. The Sheriff's Department put out a sketch. So you're looking at Facebook at work. You open up a group that you're part of, and you see a picture of this person you recognize.

Yes. How do you react? Freaked out a little bit. Kelly Fairbanks was sure it was mostly harmless, but his real name remained a mystery. Sheriff's detectives searched databases using his face and fingerprints. Nothing.

The autopsy couldn't even pinpoint a cause of death. But over the next two years, the case slowly gathered attention. I do a lot of hiking and things like that. And that's part of the agreement is we all know that we look out for each other. You know, you don't leave someone behind. Natasha Teasley manages a canoe and kayak company in North Carolina. Surfing online, she became fascinated by the case of mostly harmless. She helped form a Facebook group to try to identify him.

Named for an alias he sometimes used, Ben Bilemy. The group grew to more than 6,000 members. My phone stays blown up all the time with people sending me messages of like, could it be this person or could it be that person? Teasley went through public records, including a government website called NamUs, a clearinghouse for missing and unidentified persons cases across the country. According to NamUs, 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year. You have a look at the face of every white man between the age of 25 and 60 who's listed as missing in the entire United States?

I have, and there are a lot of them. There are a lot of missing people in our country. I was not aware of how many missing people there are in our country. The search didn't pan out, but a new high-tech tool held out hope. We're the only lab in the United States that does this kind of advanced forensic testing in-house. David Mittelman is the founder of Authroom, just outside Houston.

Testing there would cost $5,000, money not in the Collier County Sheriff's Office budget. Enter the online sleuths. There was a dedicated group of folks that really wanted to see this case move forward. And so being that funding was the only bottleneck, and when we encountered that situation, we opened it up for crowdfunding. In this particular case, you know, there was so much pent-up interest in the case that we crowdfunded it with the crowd in the truest sense of the word in about, I think, like eight days.

It was really quick. Authroom received some of Mostly Harmless's DNA from the Sheriff's Department and went to work. What we do is we capture tens of thousands of markers to hundreds of thousands of markers, and we do a more of a relationship search instead of an exact match.

Some people call it a genealogical search. The results show that Mostly Harmless was probably from Assumption Parish in Louisiana. Articles appeared online.

One that I wrote for Wired was read by one and a half million people. Still, months went by with no positive ID. But then Randall Godso from Louisiana saw a post. And as soon as I saw the pictures, I knew immediately it was like, oh, that's Vance. It was his college roommate.

Um, tingle ran down my spine. Two and a half years after his body was found, the hiker had a name. Today we know that Mostly Harmless was a man by the name of Vance Rodriguez. The thousands of people following the case soon learned that Vance Rodriguez was complicated.

He indeed grew up in Louisiana, and he moved to New York in his 30s. He was a brilliant computer programmer, whose notebooks found in the tent where he died were filled with computer code. Vance Rodriguez was estranged from his family, had troubled even abusive romantic relationships, and he'd sometimes disappear on his friends. Still, why had it taken so long to identify him? Partly because he had erased his tracks, and partly because no one was looking for him.

It wasn't entirely the answer that the people who'd been working on his case wanted to hear. All the people who met him on the trail describe him as friendly, amiable, easy to talk to, whereas all the other people who knew him in real life describe him as a little distant, a little bit of a loner. What's the difference?

How did that happen? It's not really a difference. It's a difference in when you're talking to him. When he was in a good mood, he was very easy to talk to, he was very friendly. But he would also turn off and be in a bad mood. And the trail people never saw that because if he decided he wasn't going to talk to anyone, he literally just would not talk to anyone. And so no one would know, no one would remember him, I'm sure.

To me, him being imperfect was always a possibility. We're all humans, and we all have really complicated pasts, you know? I don't think it changes the value of what we did as a community, you know? Like, we came together out of human kindness. And so Natasha Teasley started the Kindness Project. The idea is to harness the online energy that helped identify Vance Rodriguez, and to use it to identify the thousands of others who remain missing and unidentified.

It's a postscript to the strange story of Mostly Harmless, an effort to give names to the nameless. My hope is that it doesn't end here, that every single person who was impacted by this story in some way will at least carry away with the knowledge of, like, care about it. Care about who these people are, and that they have friends and family.

They do, even if you've given up that they have friends and family, they have friends and family. This morning, our Steve Hartman delivers. A pizza delivery man got a much bigger piece of the pie last month, when a customer here in Tipton, Indiana, tipped him way more than 15 percent. You know, I couldn't believe it.

It's almost like it's surreal. Robert Peters has been delivering pizzas 31 years. Pizza Hut says he's one of their longest-tenured delivery people, which Robert admits isn't something most folks aspire to. There are people in my family that were, you know, say, maybe you should consider something a little bit more financially stable, but it is my purpose in life, trying to make people happy. You know, when you're delivering to somebody, you may be the only face they even see all day.

It's good to see you again. And it's that attitude, combined with an almost obsessive devotion to customer service, that has earned Robert a real reputation in this town. Tanner Langley is a regular. He says, God forbid you pay for a pizza, and Robert can't make exact change. He'll drive three or four miles down the road in a blizzard just to bring you 15 cents and change. But you're tipping him anyway. Why does 15 cents matter?

It's the moral of it. He didn't want to feel like you had to tip him because he didn't have the change. After so many experiences like that, Tanner felt compelled to make a change. He felt compelled to give Robert a tip, commensurate with his job performance. So he reached out to the community and asked them to pitch in to buy Robert a new car. Robert's 93 Olds was an ancient. But in just three days, the good people of Tifton donated enough for this.

A shiny red Chevy Malibu, plus insurance and gas money, $19,000 total. Tanner, how do you explain this? That's what I'm saying. That is the type of impact that he has on people.

And that really makes me, makes me feel really, really good inside. A lot of people think certain jobs are more important than others. But Robert proves the most important job.

In fact, the only job that you know can make the world a better place is yours. Thank you. You too. Thank you. See you later. Former President Trump's impeachment trial may be over, but what lies ahead for the Republican Party is still a question mark. This morning, Lee Cowan is in conversation with Cindy McCain, wife of late Republican Senator John McCain.

I still suffer from a little bit of, you know, feeling not adequate sometimes, you know, like, oh, who would listen to me kind of thing. But they do. I know.

I know they do. And I'm grateful for that. Cindy McCain.

Thank you. She's no stranger to the sway her last name brings in politics. Most people say, why isn't she the candidate? My wife, Cindy McCain. For nearly four decades during her husband's life of public service, she was right there by his side, including his two runs for the White House. She lost Senator John McCain in 2018 to brain cancer.

The man who was never president was mourned by several. What do you miss most about him, you think? Oh, gosh, I miss the I never thought I would say this. I miss the chaos in the House because his chaos.

Yeah, his cat when he would walk in the door. And I mean that in a good way. It's good chaos. There was always action happening. It was always something. I miss that. I miss the commotion. And I miss I miss his partnership and his friendship and his love.

And it's, you know, you just it's day by day. And with his passing, it's been said the Senate lost its conscience, too. So where is the moral center now without him? We're going to find it again. It's swung right now. Our side is swung way to the right. It'll come back.

It'll come back. To see just how far that political pendulum has swung, she says, look no further than former President Trump's second impeachment trial. His acquittal on the charge he incited the insurrection at the Capitol was proof, she says, that the GOP is in danger of becoming a party defined by the personality of one man. We have got to overcome this. We have to. Not just as a party, but as a country. We cannot allow this. Do you think there'll be a split within the party? You're probably, maybe. I know something's going to happen.

I know that much. Our party's dead if we don't. What do you think the senator would have done if he'd been there? Oh, oh, he would have gone in the hall and started fighting. I mean, he absolutely, he wouldn't have hidden. I guarantee you he wouldn't have gone to the safe room. I'm not suggesting there was anything inappropriate about going to the safe room, but, but just, he was a fighter. He would never have stood by and let that happen.

He just wouldn't have done it. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Republican Senator John McCain, is endorsing Joe Biden for president. Months before the attack, she felt so strongly, she publicly urged her fellow Republicans to turn their backs on the Trump wing of the party and vote for Joe Biden for president instead. It was obviously a decision you didn't take lightly. No, I didn't.

No, no. I, I thought about it a great deal and prayed about it. And I could no longer sit back and yell at the television set like everybody else and just complain without doing something. And so I did the only thing I knew, and that was to support him. There have been whispers out there about a possible role in the administration.

Would you be open to something like that? I want to do whatever the president wants me to do. If he comes back and suggests, look, we need you here. I want you to do something.

Of course I will. You can't turn down, you know, when a president says to you, we need you. The McCain's and the Biden's have been friends for a long time. It was first lady Jill Biden who actually introduced John McCain to the then Cindy Lou Hensley back in 1979. It was a cocktail party in Hawaii. And I was with my parents. Jill's the one that said, why don't you go over and talk to her? You know, go over and because I guess he was looking my way. I wasn't paying any attention anyway.

I don't know. McCain would later join Biden in the Senate. And although their view across the aisle was different on so many issues, their friendship never wavered. I watched my husband argue and fight with Joe Biden, with Ted Kennedy and others. But he did it for the good of the country. And that's what we have to do now.

We have to do it for the good of the country. And afterwards maintain those relationships. Oh my God, they were best of friends. I mean, it was never personal. But her endorsement was personal for the Arizona GOP. They voted to censure Cindy McCain for her apparent defection in supporting a Democrat. Does that mean anything? What does that mean? Oh, it's laughable. I'm sorry. There are a lot of names in the Arizona Republican Party that have been censored.

So I'm going to have T-shirts made with all the names on it. But she wasn't just the maverick's wife. She had a political life of her own, working with the McCain Institute on human rights issues, especially human trafficking. But she's never had any desire to run for elected office herself, she says.

Still doesn't. These are all the babies now. She's found that rhythm of life without a spouse, taking joy in her grandkids and spending time with family during the pandemic. She and her daughter-in-law started creating recipes for what she called quarantine cocktails and posted them on Instagram. And it kind of took off. It did take off.

I did not expect that at all. One of the most popular. I'm glad you're here.

I would have it on the ceiling with her blended watermelon margarita. Cheers. Cheers. They're fun. Indeed, they are. Oh, it's strong, but that is good.

Yeah, we probably could have gotten away with the eight ounces. She does have a lot to toast, despite it all. A stroke in 2004 left both her mobility and her spirits in pretty rough shape.

To boost those spirits, she returned to a love she'd had for a long time. Cars, race cars especially, and took lessons in the art of drift racing. It's how to keep the car under control at the most out of control point.

You know, you're about to lose it. Yep, that used to be her sliding around corners like that at speeds that would make the rest of us blanch, but not her. How much do you think that contributed to sort of getting you past your stroke?

100 percent. Being able to celebrate something that I could do and learn and it just meant everything to me. She confronted her fear of flying in much the same way. In the 80s, she bought a Cessna 182 and she learned to fly it herself.

It's ridiculous for me to be scared of flying, so I thought I'll just do this to increase my confidence and at least I'll know what's going on and I wound up loving it. Grief, however, has proven a tougher obstacle to overcome. She moved out of the Arizona home she and the senator had shared and bought a house in the Phoenix neighborhood where she grew up. Give you a little bit of a fresh start a little bit. Yeah, I just kind of wanted to just be up here. The senator's presence, though, still looms large.

Bits of his life are everywhere here. By the fire are the shoes McCain wore during his first campaign for Congress back in 1982. She had them bronzed. The Bronzing Company wrote me back and said, are you sure you want to do these shoes like this? We usually get baby shoes, but I said, nope, I want to. Look at the holes in everything.

Yeah, complete with the holes. John McCain was a war hero and a statesman. And for that history will record his achievements. But for Cindy McCain, it's more personal. His politics were rooted in family.

And that, she says, is what still matters the most. Is there a pressure to carry on the senator's legacy? Or do you feel like you almost have to do something?

It's not a pressure. It's what I need to do. And maybe for my grandchildren.

You know, that's part of it, too. I want them to know him, even though they never will. I would like them to know him.

Some thoughts for a Sunday morning now from contributor David Sedaris. My MacBook stopped working, so I made an appointment at the Genius Bar where everyone was 23. Someone named Jason helped me. And by the time I returned home, I'd received an email asking how the experience had been.

And the answer, I guess, is fine. I didn't doubt Jason when he suggested I buy a new MacBook. He agreed to suck the information out of my old laptop and put it on the new one. So I left everything with him and returned the next day to talk to Reese, who looked like Jason, but with a beard. How was your experience with Reese? I was asked a few hours later. I wondered who writes the survey questions Apple sends out, and then I wished that I could write them. How old did Dylan make you feel this afternoon?

I'd ask. This is relatively simple, as there are only two choices. A, his age, or B, however old Mount Shasta is. If the answer is B, Dylan's not rude, just not fully engaged. It's like when you're a teenager and your mother yells from the kitchen, David, your granddad's on the phone. Really, you think?

Now? But he just sent you a check, so you pick up saying granddad, hi. At the Genius Bar appointment I had last year, a young man named Adam was poking at my phone when I noticed a white-haired woman on the other side of the room. She was likely in her mid-80s and wore the same dress and shoes that a witch might but finally made. Wow, I said, that woman over there is amazing. Adam followed my gaze. You should go for it.

I said, I beg your pardon? Walk over and chat her up. I mean, hey man, you never know. I wanted to point out that the witch was a good 25 years older than me. Then I realized that to Adam, she and I were the same. Both of us in a category simply labeled old. Hey man, she eats soft food, you eat soft food? Invite her out for baked apples and see what happens. So that's how my Genius Bar appointment was. No one was discourteous, just patronizing, which I understand. I was young once.

There are a lot of people my age with computer problems though. So how about something along the lines of a withered Apple store? The logo will be like the current one, but shriveled.

Maybe with a worm poking its head out. How was your appointment with Mabel? The survey will ask. And I'll say, you know what? It was great. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. The good fight. The Final Season, now streaming exclusively on Paramount+.