Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ar’n’t I a woman?

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ar’n’t I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

 

Nixon: I am Not a Crook

Now, I have no complaints. In the next 8 years, I made a lot of money. I made $250,000 from a book and the serial rights which many of you were good enough to purchase, also. In the practice of law–and I am not claiming I was worth it, but apparently former Vice Presidents or Presidents are worth a great deal to law firms–and I did work pretty hard.

But also in that period, I earned between $100,000 and $250,000 every year.

So that when I, in 1968, decided to become a candidate for President, I decided to clean the decks and to put everything in real estate. I sold all my stock for $300,000–that is all I owned. I sold my apartment in New York for $300,000–I am using rough figures here. And I had $100,000 coming to me from the law firm.

And so, that is where the money came from. Let me just say this, and I want to say this to the television audience: I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service–I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.

SURVEILLANCE OF DONALD NIXON

Q. Mr. President, Harry Rosenfeld of the Washington Post. Sir, there have been reports that the Secret Service was asked, at your direction or authorization, to tap the telephone of your brother, Donald Nixon. Is this true, sir, and if so, why?

 

Giving More Corporate Chiefs the Steve Jobs Treatment

I admired the film’s effort to capture both the complexities of Mr. Jobs’s personality and the relationship between his professional and private lives.

There are very few books like this written, and I think it has an effect on the way business leaders manage their enterprises. Most observers attribute a chief executive’s short-term orientation to the pressures of capital markets or the lure of market-based incentive compensation, and I agree these are powerful forces.

But there are also quieter, inner-directed, psychological forces that play a role in C.E.O.s’ managerial myopia. I believe the outside world’s limited interest in making long-term evaluations of business leaders’ legacies is one factor that leads them to prioritize the here and now over the long term.

Like political leaders, every business leader thinks about — and should think about — his or her legacy

.. Business leaders can take no such comfort, because in their world this re-examination rarely happens. Once they leave office, even the best-known business leaders are quickly forgotten. Last year in my commencement address, I had planned to refer to Lee Iacocca, who wrote a best-selling memoir of the turnaround he led at Chrysler in the early 1980s. My staff talked me out of it: They argued that today, more than 20 years after his retirement, many M.B.A. students may have no idea who Mr. Iacocca is.

.. Today many of the brightest M.B.A.s may know little of Thomas Watson or even Andrew Carnegie.

Against this backdrop, it’s only natural for business leaders to want to manage in a way that allows them to enjoy the fruits of their efforts during their time in the job — and to make decisions that cause the company to be successful now, while they’re leading it, instead of tomorrow, when hardly anyone will remember that they led it.