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QuickBooks, backing you. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday Morning. Pittsburgh, the nation, is in mourning today following yesterday's mass shooting at a synagogue. We'll have the latest in just a few minutes. Then it's on to a crash course in the great financial crisis that rattled our country 10 years ago this fall, with repercussions that we feel to this day.
Jill Schlesinger will report our cover story. When housing prices crashed a decade ago... The Dow traders are standing there watching in amazement, and I don't blame them. Taxpayers had to shell out billions to bail out Wall Street, but many on Main Street never recovered. The fact that they never really got around to helping the troubled borrowers, I think, led to this idea that the system is rigged.
How 2008 changed the world ahead this Sunday morning. The case of NBC Today host Megyn Kelly reminded us this past week of the legacy of the very old show business convention known as Blackface. Racist and degrading, its roots and our popular culture go way back, as Maurice Debois will show us. For more than a century, the most popular form of entertainment in this country involved actors in dark makeup, white, even black performers. Why on earth would a black performer put on blackface and demean him or herself? Look, this is the 19th century. They had limited options.
They were expected to. The Haunting History of Blackface, later on Sunday morning. We'll have some questions for Jonah Hill this morning. The accomplished actor making his debut on the other side of the camera. He'll be answering to our Tracy Smith. I know you're going to love it.
It's green beer. As a comic actor, Jonah Hill never seemed to be afraid to try anything. Just go back and forth on that. And now, as director of a new critically acclaimed film, he's still taking risks. Were there times in this long process that you said, what am I doing?
Yes, this morning when I woke up. Later this Sunday morning, director Jonah Hill's precarious leap of faith. Connor Knighton has licorice on his menu. Roxana Saberi takes us to the birthplace of Frankenstein. Anthony Mason has the gripping tale of a South Pole adventure gone wrong. And more, all coming up when our Sunday morning podcast continues. Ten years later, the great financial crisis of 2008 still casts a long shadow. And given the stakes, not to mention recent weeks on the stock market, we figured it was time for a crash course from Jill Schlesinger. Remember those dark and frightening autumn days of 2008? This is going to be one of the watershed days in financial markets history. Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. The Dow traders are standing there watching in amazement and I don't blame them.
It was very scary. Let's get to our top story, the government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Who was next? Why are these companies failing? Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. Back then, Gretchen Morgensen was a business columnist for the New York Times. Meanwhile, Merrill Lynch, fearing it could be next, agreed in an act of desperation to a shotgun marriage with Bank of America. The banking system was near collapse, the stock market in freefall. And to many, it seemed like government officials were as clueless as the rest of us. There was just a real sense of being in a dark room filled with furniture that you were going to stumble on and fall over and that you didn't know how to kind of maneuver in.
There was so much that we didn't know and that really people did not want us to know. Morgensen says the seeds of the crash were sown in the boom years leading up to it. The housing boom is a coast to coast story with that reliable national barometer, the median sales price of an American home rising every year, jumping more than 9% just last year.
Hurry up, don't wait. Home prices were skyrocketing. Many believed they would never fall. We're pretty confident that the housing market here is not going to go down at all.
It's just going to go up. But to keep their monthly payments low, more and more borrowers were opting for risky mortgages. Out of all the business I do, I'd say probably 75% are adjustable rate mortgages. And out of those adjustable rate mortgages, I'd say 95% are interest only.
Granted. And many lenders were stretching the limits, offering so-called subprime mortgages to those with shaky credit, allowing them to buy homes they could barely afford. There was underlying at this drive for home ownership in the United States that was almost an overarching policy that bigger rates of home ownership was good for America. Few knew that at the same time, some banks were pushing those untraditional mortgages in order to repackage and sell them to global investors. Pension funds, insurance companies, even other banks bought these mortgage-backed securities. That is the trigger.
That's what sets the bomb off. Columbia University professor Adam Tewes has focused his historian's eye on a new take of the causes and effects of the financial crisis. He says policymakers were caught by surprise at just how fast it spread. I don't think they understood the way in which a relatively small bit of the mortgage market, which is what subprime was, how that could spiral into this general crisis of the Atlantic banking system.
Good evening. This is an extraordinary period for America's economy. We are in the midst of a serious financial crisis. As home prices plunged, millions of homeowners could not repay the money they borrowed, driving down the value of those mortgage-backed securities. And the banks didn't have that money that they were using to hold those mortgage securities with. They borrowed it.
The result? Taxpayers had to shell out billions to help cover the banks' losses. We're talking hundreds of billions. This needs to be big enough to make a real difference and get at the heart of the problem. What do you think would have happened if the mantra of let them fail were enacted?
I think we would have seen a catastrophe of the type we've not seen before, worse even than the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the bailout sparked fierce public anger. What do you say to them? They're very angry. They're even being asked to contribute. Well, the American people are furious.
Leaving little appetite for then saving what some believed were reckless homeowners. How many of you people want to pay for your name? How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?
Raise their hand. How about we all pay? Swift action may have saved the financial system, but not before $19 trillion in household wealth evaporated, along with nearly 9 million jobs. In retrospect, a lot of people feel like the banks were bailed out. OK, I understand that saved the system. People were left hanging out to dry.
Is there something to that? Absolutely. There's a huge imbalance between the emergency efforts and the very slow moving and inadequate measures that were enacted later on to support American homeowners. Some measures were taken. This plan will not save every home, but it will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild.
They were very slow acting. They provided relief to a small minority of American homeowners in the end, many years after the acute crisis of 2008. And in the meantime, 10 million American families lost their homes. Ordinary American households, ordinary American families, that's where the real loss is.
All of which made the recovery long, painful and uneven. Wall Street today turned back the clock to 2017. Another sell-off.
So what about now? Despite this month's turbulence, 10 years later, the stock market is still near an all-time high. The economy is booming, wages are rising, and more Americans are working today than ever before, ever before.
In fact, the unemployment rate is the lowest in nearly 50 years. But many of the new rules put in place after the crisis to protect the system from another meltdown are now being weakened. What's the danger of rolling back some of those regulations? The danger is that you have banks which are not able to take the hit of a large amount of unexpected losses and are not able to withstand a sudden panic and loss of confidence when people just want to pull their money out of the banking system. Well, the banks are much more well capitalized.
They have a lot more money set aside for a rainy day than they did. leading up to the crisis. But by not prosecuting any very high-level executives who were involved, I think that message was very clear that this kind of behavior, this kind of big risk-taking behavior that risks the entire financial system will not be punished. Gretchen Morgensen, now an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, worries that failure to hold anyone accountable will resonate for years to come. I think people get what happened, that this inequality that was pervasive in the response to the crisis, the very powerful institutions got taken care of, the individuals who were powerless did not.
I think people understand that very well. And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac, October 28th, 1858, 160 years ago today. The day Roland Hussey Macy opened a small dry goods store in New York City. His first day's sales totaled just $11.06.
But over time, business picked up. So much so that in 1902, R.H. Macy and Company opened a huge new store on Manhattan's Herald Square, which it expanded to make even larger in 1924. That same year, Macy staged its first big holiday parade on Christmas Day at first. It was later moved to Thanksgiving. In 1947, the Macy's parade provided the opening backdrop to the classic film Miracle on 34th Street, starring Maureen O'Hara and Edmund Gwen as the department store Santa, who turns out to be the real McCoy. This dress is very cute. Where did you get such a lovely outfit? Here at Macy's, we get 10% off. Today, the Macy's parade and its flagship Herald Square store remain prime attractions for visitors and shoppers from all over the world.
And together with its hundreds of other stores across the country, Macy's racked up nearly $25 billion in sales last year, eclipsing that first day's take of $11 and then some. Trick or treat, these high-end licorice candies are from Denmark and pack an unexpected punch as our Connor Knighton discovered. Wander the aisles of any Scandinavian supermarket and you will find them loaded with licorice. Licorice sticks, licorice caps, licorice pandas, licorice fish, sold in all shapes and sizes. If you're feeling creative, you can make your own mix of skulls and coils, black and salty. Licorice, especially salty licorice, is a favorite Scandinavian treat. But when I sat down to eat some, it felt more like I had been tricked.
Nope. Ooh, I don't like it. Why make it so salty?
It's just bad. Licorice is made from the licorice root, glycyrrhiza glabra. The Twizzlers and red vines that we Americans sometimes call licorice don't actually contain any licorice at all. Licorice is sweet, licorice is salty.
The salty stuff is really important to the Scandinavian people and it's really, really strange to foreigners. Johan Bulo is the founder of Lakeris, a licorice company based in a black fortress on the outskirts of Copenhagen, Denmark. Lakeris is the Danish word for licorice. Like the second you step in this building, it smells like licorice.
Definitely. I've been driving around with the smell of licorice for 11 years now. 11 years ago, Bulo opened his very first store in the seaside town of Svanaki. He was born on Bornholm, a small picturesque Danish island in the Baltic Sea. This is paradise on earth when it's summer and it's like this.
This is super amazing. Bornholm is the sunniest place in all of Denmark and the crowds of tourists passing through gave Bulo a chance to try out his licorice creations. The idea was actually to create a recipe or two and then just be in front of the actual consumer and to sample them and to look in their eyes and see what do they like. Are they smiling?
Are they throwing up? What he found was that he could get international visitors to try his product if he mixed a licorice taste with flavors they were more familiar with. Okay, and so what flavor is this? This is wild blueberry. At the factory back in Copenhagen, licorice now produces licorice coated in various flavors of chocolate. Oh, see this is more for me.
I think you've got to hide it in something else to make me like it. There's also licorice mixed with habanero chilies. There's a caramelized organic slow-cooked licorice for connoisseurs. There are licorice syrups and sprinkles to mix in with other dishes and you won't find any of this in the grocery store. Lacris has marketed and packaged itself as a luxury good, sold in small boutiques. When we have guests over or family parties or anything, we got like the good licorice. When Danes like Patrick Nielsen buy lacris, it's a special treat. At stores in the Copenhagen airport and the Tivoli amusement park, Danish employees try to convince curious tourists to sample a taste they've grown up with. Do you feel like you're on a mission to convince them? Yeah, I do.
Then you have to try this one. For example, we have a salted caramel. It's a flavor everybody likes. Lacris just opened two stores in Dubai and is now sold at Chelsea Market in New York City. But it all began back on Bornholm. I call it the Vatican of licorice because it's where everything started. Technical director Tay Kusk has worked with Bulo since the beginning, helping develop new recipes. The packaging and the presentation are important, but licorice is still at the root of everything. If you give us the time, we can make the whole world love licorice.
It's Sunday morning on CBS. Here again is Jane Pauley. His is a tale based on a book whose author was first listed as anonymous. Maybe because back in 1818, stories written by young women wouldn't be taken seriously. But there's no question its very young author created a classic.
Roxana Saberi has chapter and verse on Frankenstein. We all know the tale. The crack of lightning. The mad scientist. An unholy creation. And that unholy creation which became his undoing.
I will have revenge. Frankenstein! Frankenstein's monster has taken many shapes over the years. It's alive! It's alive! It's alive! But it first came to life two centuries ago.
On these pages written by a young woman barely 18 years old. Here we have something that really gives us the genesis of the novel Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's original manuscript is held at Oxford University's Bodleian Library in England, where Chris Fletcher is keeper of special collections. From relatively modest beginnings of 500 copies of this in 1818 to what it's become now.
A classic. Tells a really interesting story. That story began two years earlier when its author left England with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They joined fellow poet Lord Byron at this Swiss villa for what was supposed to be a pleasant holiday on the shores of Lake Geneva. How much has this place changed since Mary was here 200 years ago?
Well, not much at all. It's almost exactly as it was in Byron's day. Down to the railings along the terrace. While the villa is much the same, University of Geneva professor David Spurr explains that summer was like none other. An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house. It wasn't just the perpetual rain, as Shelley wrote in her letters, but a freakish volcanic eruption in Asia that shrouded much of Europe in cold and darkness, setting the gloomy stage for a gothic masterpiece. Lord Byron suggested one night we shall each write a ghost story. And so the results of that famous contest are known. Are you saying if the weather had been fine that summer, we might not have a Frankenstein?
I think that's quite probable. The storms figure heavily in Shelley's ghost story, which would become the novel Frankenstein published in 1818. Her tale about a man-made monster turned murderer has been translated into dozens of languages and mutated into countless adaptations and spin-offs. Hello handsome! Ranging from slapstick comedy. Oh, I just love success. He's a credit to your genius, master. To dramatic theater.
A few comic books, even songs. Frankenstein has taken up a permanent place in popular culture. But this monster is often misunderstood. A lot of people think that Frankenstein is the name of the creature, of the monster, when in fact it's the name of his creator. The creature himself does not have a name. Another common misconception is that Frankenstein's monster is purely evil. But events marking the novel's bicentennial portray him as a lonely character, neglected by his creator. So, inside he might have beauty, but he just, people don't give him a chance to show it.
Do you think they should? Yeah. We're going to talk Frankenstein. At University College London, Professor Jack Stilgo says Frankenstein is still teaching us. About science, about responsibility. For example, as a researcher, is what you're doing ethical?
Do you have responsibilities for the things that you create? Now there are real tools that are giving scientists the potential to enact potentially massive changes to life. Say, should we be editing the human genome? Should we be trying to improve upon human nature? That's a question that we should all have a say in. Enduring questions first posed by a young writer 200 years ago. She is dealing with eternally relevant issues here and articulates them in such an innovative and fantastic way. Should we read the novel in 2018? Absolutely.
Now more than any other time. As you may have heard, NBC Today host Megyn Kelly's show was cancelled this past week following her on-air remarks expressing acceptance of blackface. It's a racist show business practice most of us thought was long gone. But as Maurice Dubois is about to tell us, blackface has a long history in our country.
And we caution you, his report unavoidably includes many offensive and disturbing images. It happens all too frequently, often at Halloween, but not exclusively. They thought it was a joke, but it really just was not funny at all.
For example, two years ago in Maplewood, New Jersey. Her daughter posted this photo of herself and a friend in blackface. The two girls had no idea what blackface was or the history of it. The history of blackface is long and complex and deeply ingrained in our culture. Who was that lady I saw you with this afternoon? That was no lady.
That was my wife. Even Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd blacked up. For more than a hundred years, whites and then black performers wore dark makeup and created not only a popular theatrical form, but stereotypes that are still with us today. This makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it?
Absolutely. It does make me feel uncomfortable to talk about these things, because they are incredibly disturbing and revolting. Eric Lott, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, says blackface represents a strange mix of envy, fascination, desire and fear. Explain the fear part to me. What are these white performers, what are these white people afraid of?
They're afraid of black groups, mobs rising up and taking the power. Minstrel shows began in the 1830s and white performers used burnt cork or later black grease paint. Minstrelsy eventually became the most popular form of entertainment in the country.
Ah, yes. I asked Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, to look at some images from the New York Public Library. The shininess of the black against the big white clown's mouth, the hat, the overlong tailcoat, mocking. It always gives me the jolt that racist history does. Blackface is so tied to comedy, to people enjoying themselves, to people having fun, that that rattles you still more. Well, Mr. Tambo, you seem to be enjoying yourself this evening.
Enjoying myself? I sure is. White minstrel performers claim that what they did on stage was based on their perceptions of how black people lived. Some of this came out of a genuine fascination with the music, the songs, the dances, the performance styles of black people. But it's also where Jump Jim Crow was born, along with other characters depicted as lazy, lying, or buffoonish. Remember, this was all happening before the Civil War. Slavery was all about creating visions, types, stereotypes of an entire race of people as subhuman in every way. By the 1860s, African Americans began using blackface on stage.
Why on earth would a black performer put on blackface and demean him or herself? Look, this is the 19th century. They had limited options. They were expected to.
Why? Because it made the audiences comfortable. You can be fascinated, you can be excited, but you can always feel superior. In effect, the black makeup on a black performer became a theatrical mask with many layers of meaning.
Professor Eric Lott. The mask, I think, says to white audiences, you have nothing to fear. Go ahead, enjoy yourself. To black audiences, I think any number of things might have been communicated. Like, can you believe that these people are making me put on this mask so they will be entertained? In other words, there's a kind of winking to the black audience. But it gave black performers access to the stage. One of the biggest black stars to come out of the minstrel tradition was Bert Williams, who wore blackface from vaudeville to Broadway. It's clear that he was a genius of a performer. But how did he reconcile performing in this demeaning art form? He was very melancholy about it. He knew it was necessary for his career, as all other black performers knew it. Minstrelsy on stage basically died out in the 1920s, but blackface lived on in the movies.
In 1927, Al Jolson starred in the pioneering talking picture, The Jazz Singer, playing a young man who prefers singing popular music rather than his family's traditional Hebrew prayers. I don't want to look at it. What reaction do you get? I totally understand. Wait a minute.
I don't like the way he said that. In the Our Gang comedies of the 1930s, Spanky appeared in blackface. Buckwheat. Did you say Spanky was in a lot of trouble?
Yes, sir. The gag here is that the gang doesn't realize that that's Spanky in blackface until they actually see Buckwheat. Hiya, Buckwheat.
Hiya, Buckwheat. So, the gist of it is that you put blackface makeup on anyone and they become black. And that's supposed to be hilarious.
And it's supposed to be really funny. And it goes on during the golden age of the Hollywood musical, Judy Garland. Bing Crosby. That's why we celebrate this blessed February day.
Abraham. Fred Astaire and many others all blacked up. It's still in the culture.
It is too easy, I think, simply to dismiss the history of blackface as that racist stuff. And we're, you know, most of us are better than that. I don't think most of us are better than that. We are that.
That's what we are. You know, some people say in order to move forward, we need to put this stuff behind us as painful as just upsetting that it may be. Well, you know, any form of history that gets suppressed or repressed or erased out, it comes back to haunt. What's has to happen now is a discussion, an acknowledgement of this charged, complicated, painful history. You may know actor Jonah Hill from any one of his many movie roles, but he'll has a new role, which prompted some questions from Tracy Smith. Sad, this dish is time.
What's the holdup? We're going to fake ID, so. Jonah Hill helped make 2007's Superbad one of the great coming of age movies. No, that's how I roll. That's the thing.
All right, action. And now it seems he's made another one. A lot of the time, we feel that our lives are the worst. The film Mid 90s is about a tight knit band of skaters and a young woman who's been in a tight knit band of skaters growing up and raising hell in mid 90s Los Angeles. And it's Jonah Hill's first time directing a feature. Were there times in this long process that you said, what am I doing?
Yes, this morning when I woke up. The story is about Stevie, a 13-year-old from a troubled home who bonds with a group of skaters who introduce him to things beyond skating, like cigarettes. To clean the smoke off at the local gas station before he goes home. I'm so sorry I'm late. It won't ever happen again.
It's only 7 30. And since it's set in the mid 90s, the crew has no smartphones and apparently no fear. Spoiler alert, Stevie lives to skate another day. It's about growing up. It's about youth and about a time in your life when your friends are more important than your family and when it's you and your friends versus the world. The movie is not his autobiography, but there are a few parallels. Jonah Hill was born in Los Angeles, the son of an accountant and a dress designer. And as a teen, he spent a lot of time on a skateboard, but he really wanted a life in showbiz. I accidentally fell into a 16-year acting career that I immensely love and I'm grateful for.
But it was an accident. Yeah, I was going to a new school and I was writing these one-act plays there. And when I would talk to actors, I didn't have a good bedside manner.
I would be like, why aren't they saying it like I want them to say? And so I took an acting class to see how I'd like to be spoken to, to maybe help my skills as a director or a writer. Hey, hey, guys, don't go in there.
This is breaking and entering. And that acting class paid off. I'm scared.
I'm not scared. Early on, Hill made a name for himself playing the insecure loser. But after a dozen or so comedies, he was tired of everyone always expecting him to be funny. So in comedy also, it's like a lot of it's being mean to each other. And I don't, I can't live like that. I'm literally too sensitive to survive it. I think a lot of comedians don't make it because they have to pretend to be funny. And life's not always that funny all the time.
How's Boston? Impressive. So he started doing some seriously good work, like in Moneyball opposite Brad Pitt as the geeky numbers man on a mission to change baseball. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players.
Your goal should be to buy wins. And this role put Jonah Hill himself in a whole different league. Thank you, Tom. For best performance by an actor in a supporting role, the nominees are Jonah Hill and Moneyball. It was his first invite to the big dance, and it wouldn't be his last.
You show me a pay stub for $72,000 and I quit my job right now and I work for you. Just two years later, he had another big role with another big star and another Oscar nod. You were nominated for two Oscars, both ceremonies you took your mom. What's mom like as a date? Demanding.
Demanding? She's great. I mean, she put up with a tremendous amount and that is definitely my way of like saying thank you. Is she whispering nice things in your ear?
She's just talking to all of the people I don't want her talking to. Kidding aside, even as an Oscar contender, Jonah Hill had his eyes on a different prize. So when you were on set for, be it Superbad, Moneyball, Wolf of Wall Street, you were the whole time kind of taking notes? Yes, I was a gnat.
I was an annoying mosquito on everybody's shoulder and I am so grateful for their education. Do you think the third Oscar nomination could be for directing? I don't think like that.
I don't. Instead, like a skater learning a new trick, what Jonah Hill really wants is the chance to keep trying. For you with this film, what is success? That I get to make another film. All I want to do is make another movie. I love it. I love it so much.
Mid 90s, like was my best friend. And when I say I want to be back in the process, it means I hope I get to have another best friend. A century after a legendary British explorer made his name in Antarctica, a modern day admirer decided to follow in his footsteps his story from Anthony Mason. It may be the most desolate and forbidding landscape on the planet. Before he tried to cross Antarctica alone in 2015, British explorer Henry Worsley got some advice. Don't ever think you're going to conquer the pole. If you're really lucky, the Antarctic will allow you in for a snapshot, but don't ever think you're going to beat it. Trekking the vast frozen continent, Worsley would say, was like being an atom on an ice cube. This, this is as big as Europe.
Oh yeah. Journalist David Grand chronicles Worsley's expedition in his new book, The White Darkness. He arrived by the Weddell Sea, uh, which is part of the Atlantic Ocean. And then he trekked 570 nautical miles to the South Pole. Worsley's inspiration, some of the old Arctic explorers are here, was another British adventurer honored on the walls of the Explorers Club in New York. And this is Shackleton who obviously Henry Worsley revered so much. Sir Ernest Shackleton led three expeditions to Antarctica in the early 1900s. Worsley, a descendant of one of Shackleton's crew, became obsessed with his adventures.
I really believe very strongly in marriage, not stopping individual dreams. Henry's wife, Joanna Worsley, and their children, Max and Alicia, would write messages on his skis before his trips. Max encouraged him, as you can see. Push it flat-ass.
Push it flat-ass. That was mine. Come back to me safely, my darling. I didn't worry about him ever.
Why not? He was just invincible, Henry. A retired officer of the elite British commando unit, the SAS, Worsley made his first trip to the Antarctic in 2008, as part of a three-man team re-enacting Shackleton's journey to the South Pole. His face said it all. You don't often see someone quite that happy. He wasn't expecting to go back. I was expecting him to go back.
Why? The Antarctic seems to grip people. It seems to grip and not let go. It had got him. In 2015, Worsley planned a trip no one had ever attempted, crossing a thousand miles of Antarctica, solo and unsupported. Good evening.
On the way at last. On November 13, 2015, in a satellite phone message, the 55-year-old explorer announced he was off, hauling a 325-pound sled of food and supplies. Almost from the beginning, he runs into problems. Everything seemed to go wrong. He found himself in one whiteout after another.
He was pinned down in his tent. But Worsley pressed on, and after 51 days, 656 miles, reached the South Pole. He sent this postcard home from the U.S. research station there. I will never forget what I owe you. Onwards.
Onwards. But in satellite calls, Joanna began to sense something was wrong. He cried quite a lot.
He'd never done that. She urged him to call to be airlifted out. He just said, I know I'm not going to make it. I will call him, but please let me make that call. On day 70, just 30 miles shy of making history, he finally did. Flown to a medical station, he called Joanna to report he was safe and having a cup of tea. Was that the last time you talked to him?
It was, yes. Doctors soon realized Worsley had bacterial peritonitis. Which is essentially an infection of the inner lining wall and the tissue of the abdomen. He went into septic shock, and all his organs began to fail.
Two days later, Henry Worsley died in surgery. He was posthumously awarded Britain's Polar Medal, also given to his hero, Shackleton. His expedition flag was brought home to Joanna. Which is all very tattered now. Who in time went to the cold land that had claimed her husband. I didn't learn what he loved, Anthony, I didn't. But you needed to be there. But I needed to be there.
In her grief, Joanna Worsley had doubted her husband's love. I was worried that he loved the Antarctic more. You stay in a black fog of grief for a year, and when I came a little bit out of that black fog, I knew that I didn't believe that. And you knew that, how? Because if he had loved the Antarctic more than us, he would never have made the call. There's a lovely photograph where he has written in the snow, I am the Antarctic. And I only ever saw that after he died.
I actually, it sort of, it took my breath away, and I thought, gosh, yes, he is the Antarctic. I'm Jane Pauley, thank you for listening, and please join us again next Sunday morning. 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.
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