Thank you, Dean Evans, and congratulations, Martin. It is wonderful to be with you as we think about legacies. And this has been a rough year. And we've had two people who have left legacies and left us all recently, Congressman John Lewis and Justice Ginsburg. And I just wondered when you think about those legacies and legacies in the digital world which you're so familiar with and helped shape, what has inspired you and motivated you?
Thanks, Carla. It's great to be with you as well. What inspires me the most with legacies is summed up in the word gratitude. When a person passes, it's an opportunity for us to refresh our recollections and remind the greater population that may not be as familiar with the accomplishments of those individuals as to the tremendous efforts they made to create a better world for all of us. And I know that this is something that also resonated with Lyndon Johnson. He often referred to the soldiers who died in the fields of Flanders. World War I was concluded when he was a child. World War II, he was in the midst of that as a legislator and for a short time in battle. And he would talk about the people who came before us. They sacrificed so much. We owe it to them. We morally, ethically owe it to them to continue their mission and to make this a better world. And when I think of the contributions of Justice Ginsburg and the contributions of Congressman Lewis, the extraordinary fortitude and strength of character and persistence that they had to improve the lives of women, to improve the lives of blacks and other disadvantaged minorities in the United States, I feel that I would be an ingrate and that any of us would be an ingrate if we did not use our life and the abilities and resources we have to continue their mission and make the world as great a world as we possibly can make it.
And so the legacy really envelops appreciation but also gives you some motivation to carry on.
Absolutely. Absolutely. If somebody like Congressman Lewis could be, you know, one of the key members of a group that led us from, you know, outright disenfranchisement in blatant contravention of the Constitution over a hundred years after it was made abundantly clear that everybody born in the United States had the right to vote. If he could lead us from that, you know, absolute pit of civil rights to if not like the highest mountain, at least to, you know, a much higher vantage point where, you know, most of the most egregious restrictions on voting rights have been pulled back. Then what can we do to continue to build other aspects of what LBJ referred to as the great society? How can we say, 'Oh, it's impossible to get rid of childhood hunger' when Congressman Lewis took us from, you know, having ridiculous poll taxes and other obstructions to even vote, having, you know, so few rights at all to at least having a modicum of the American dream. How can we complain about our inability to achieve say a parity of women on corporate boards and a parity of women in the legislature after 250 years just about? How come there has been no woman who has been president or vice president of a country that everybody here was born from a woman and women have shouldered more than half of the burden of creating this country from the beginning. So, it's from Justice Ginsburg's accomplishments and it's from Congressman Lewis's accomplishments that first I feel a deep sense of gratitude and that gratitude is what waters and nurtures my inspiration and I believe all young people's inspirations to make this a better world.
And what people might not realize, I just finished John Meacham's book about Congressman Lewis. He was a young student at the time and when LBJ signed, and that took a lot of courage for him to push for the Voting Rights Act in '64, and he carried on the legacy of what had been the work that had been done. He worked with John Lewis. John Lewis was right there and he gave him one of the pens. And so I wish you could talk a little bit more about how LBJ recognized you needed to work across the aisle. You needed to bring people together, respect young people, and he was the master of the Senate.
Well, I think also President Johnson showed us that there's no substitute for interacting one-on-one with other people. He was a people person and whether it was going to the Hill or having people come to the White House, getting people in a corner and talking with them one-on-one, he was a people person and it was a two-way exchange. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was in my opinion perhaps the greatest legislative accomplishment of a century. But then that followed with the Voting Rights Act. And that was only because he had spent enough time one-on-one with people like John Lewis and Martin Luther King that he realized when Martin Luther King said, 'We are not going to accept any substitute for a voting rights act,' Johnson was the consummate negotiator and bargainer. And he realized that the only way that he could balance the scales of that negotiation was in fact to get the Voting Rights Act passed in '65, even if it was over the blood and over the deaths of too many martyrs down in the south, Selma in particular, it did eventually get accomplished. But had Johnson put himself away in some ivory tower and just read reports, I don't think any of these changes in our society would have occurred. You get change in society when you meet with people one-on-one. One of my truest beliefs is that each person is like a library. There is so much information within each person. And it's sad when a leader passes like Justice Ginsburg or Congressman Lewis because it's like an entire library has gone up in flames. So how can we stop that library from going up in flames? We can stop it by absorbing into ourselves all of the life experiences and the teachings of a Justice Ginsburg and a Congressman Lewis. And that way their libraries expand our own personal libraries.
Well, you know, that resonates with me, as you do with me. I'm sitting in right now the world's largest library with legacies all around. And I wondered what connected you to LBJ. I have an LBJ story, too. So, I want to hear yours first.
What connected me to LBJ was his quest to go to space. And this seemed to most people such a far out notion that we could actually launch things into space when nobody had before. He was already excited about space even when the first Sputnik went flying over his ranch in Texas. And he carried forward John F. Kennedy's legacy of before the end of this decade will land a person on the moon and bring them safely back to Earth. So Johnson was somebody who thought big but had his feet on the ground. And I remember when I received my bar mitzvah which was in 1968, the rabbi said, 'Martin, you are somebody who has their head in the stars and their feet on the ground.' And so to me, I was a little teeny tiny Lyndon Johnson because he always tried to be practical. He didn't just say we're gonna have a great society and did nothing about it. He passed hundreds of bills creating all the different building blocks of the great society. Medicare. Today, our company makes medicines available to tens of millions of people that it would be impossible without. And so, it's his combination of thinking big and being practical that bonded me to LBJ. And even though I've read Robert Caro and different biographies, it was Doris Kearns Goodwin who called him one of her guys with Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and LBJ. She worked with him and she is such a renowned historian. But she had her admiration for him and my admiration for her. She introduced me to those other parts of him too.
Yes. Yeah, I love the biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin and also by Robert Caro. He was a complicated individual, but anybody that amazing would be complicated. Roosevelt was complicated. Lincoln was complicated. Martin Luther King was complicated. Great people are by their nature complicated.
But what inspires me about all of these great individuals is that they were able to balance the big picture with all the small steps you need to do to make it. And I believe that, you know, young people coming out of the LBJ school today or other universities and academic programs they should say to themselves what is the biggest impact that I could practically have in this life and then go for it. You know, the mantra that I use in my company is to go big or go home. And that is to me an LBJ mantra. Go big or go home. And we can all be inspired by that.
