- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by.

And also by.

A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- Freedom that America provides and many different interpretations of this is a gravitational pull that allows people to leave a world they know, sacrifice struggle to come to a place and give their kids that chance, called America.

(bright orchestra music) (bright orchestra music continues) (bright digital music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the Library was dedicated by our 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, over a half a century ago, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Rahm Emanuel is an emblem of public service.

Over 30 plus years, he has served as senior White House Advisor to Bill Clinton, congressman from his home state of Illinois, White House Chief of Staff for Barack Obama, mayor of Chicago, and US Ambassador to Japan under Joe Biden.

Tonight, I talk to him about his career and views on the challenges we face in America today, including the tenuous state of our democracy and the growing inaccessibility of the American dream.

Rahm Emanuel, welcome.

- Thank you, thanks for having me.

- You and your family seem to be a living embodiment of the American dream.

Your brother Zeke is a very prominent oncologist.

Your brother Ara is a prominent executive in Hollywood.

You are you.

(both laughing) So what do you attribute- - In living color.

- In living color, what do you attribute that to?

- Well, I mean, there's a lot of qualities that go into it.

One is a culture that comes from being an immigrant family.

My dad comes to America in the early '50s, and that sense that America is a gift, it's a very special place, and that you have to not abuse it, make the most of it.

The second thing is, in our family room, there's a purse that carried my grandmother on my mother's side, and my two great aunts' passports.

So we have both the purse and the passports framed.

And then on either side are these gray faded photos, about 28 eyeballs of all the relatives who never made it to America on both my mom and dad's side.

And it's a reminder again of that point, and there's nothing subtle in a Jewish home, that America is special.

It's a gift.

And that we as kids are not to be frivolous with that opportunity.

The notion as an immigrant family of there's a gravitational pull of America on your heart, and to make the most of this opportunity, people in your family beforehand never will see something like this.

- What else is that foundation comprised of?

What makes us?

What are the common denominators that make us American?

- Well, one is, and this is actually an interesting at this point we're having that question is, I believe America's not a location, it's a set of ideals.

That's not just me.

Other people have talked about that, written about this.

But America is an idea.

It is also a set of ideals.

I just finished on the plane ride from San Francisco here, Walter Isaacson Book about the most important sentence ever written.

There are others, as articulated by JD Vance, who don't.

They believe it's soil, land, and blood.

And I think that is fundamentally wrong.

Because I don't know where your family came from, but there are families that journey the Atlantic.

There are families that journey the Pacific.

There are families that journey the Rio, and there are families that journey the Mississippi.

But all of them sacrifice, struggle, and leave to get to a place that offers more.

More not just kind of material, but opportunity, the ability to become America, and realize everything America has to offer, and what they can give.

And so I think for what we have to do in the 21st century, touching that by calling upon service and then reestablishing and doubling down on that set of ideals, that would actually fortify us in more ways than any one other thing you could do.

- You've said recently that the American dream.

- Yeah.

- The American dream that you and your brothers were able to attain is unaffordable.

It's inaccessible, and you said, "And we as Democrats, that's unacceptable to us."

So what happened to the American dream?

- Yeah, well, again, dial back a little.

We all grew up, or at least I did, and I think you did, Mark, because we were going to get ahead.

When you unpack getting ahead, it meant getting ahead of your parents, going farther than they went.

They kind of launched you with this fault, and you were going to go farther, better, not just financially, but in other things that you could achieve.

Today, that concept, people don't believe it's possible.

- Right.

- And nothing in their lives has shown them it is.

There's no guarantee to that, but the opportunity to achieve that has been shrunken to the point that all the air is out of that balloon.

Now, the American dream by way of putting it, and if you though about it, is also a middle class style of life, is owning a home, affording your retirement or saving for your retirement, affording your kids' education, and you have healthcare, and the ability to take care of your family.

You achieved it, you strived for it.

Today, you struggle to stay part of it.

Every part of this is broken, and it's been broken over 30 years incrementally to the point now it's shattered.

The first time home ownership in America has gone from the mid 20s to now 40.

First time a person buying a home, 40 years old.

College education is supposed to be a ticket to the middle class.

It's now put you into the poor house because that's your down payment.

The kid's now living in the basement and if the parents sell the house, the kid comes with the house.

Your 401k backstops your paycheck.

It's not your retirement.

It actually ensures that you don't have to take too much on your credit card.

And so every piece of this has been broken.

And what's even worse, my kids are going to be okay.

There's an element, 10% a sliver of our society will be secure.

90% are outside the window, and it's a frosty window trying to get, not only look in, but be on the other side of the glass.

And we've basically walled off the American dream.

And the iteration of what I said is the American dream is unaffordable, and the moment it became unaffordable is exactly when our democracy became unstable.

There are heads and tails of the same coin.

You want to establish democracy, solidify it in America, make sure that more people have access to the American dream.

The moment we became twisted in our 200 plus year history is when parents thought that their kids' future was going to be worse off than theirs.

Every generation thought the future was going to get better, brighter.

It was an upward trajectory.

The moment people thought skis down, black diamond, we're going to hit the moguls, that's when our democracy and everything else becomes unstable.

- You've worked for presidents as a senior advisor, as a chief of staff, you've worked as a congressman, you've worked as a mayor of a big city, you've worked as an ambassador abroad.

What role has given you the greatest fulfillment?

- Father, the one you didn't mention.

- The one that's not on your resume.

- Oh, it's on my resume.

Nobody will ever say Rahm Emanuel's Wikipedia page is empt (Mark laughing) Or B, the guy couldn't keep a job, but both the highest and lowest?

Mayor of the city of Chicago.

- Why?

- One, I mean, if you're from.

For me, it's the city my grandfather comes to from Moldov 1914, 14 years old by himself to flee the pogroms of Eastern Europe.

Two generations later, his grandson is the mayor of that city.

Where else?

Nowhere else in the world is that possible.

And he goes from truck driving, meat cutter, steel worker to his grandson.

And I used to joke, my uncle, his son, was a police officer, a sergeant in the 17th in Chicago in Albany Park.

My dad, when he comes from Israel, open a medical practice, is a doctor in Albany Park.

My grandfather, when he leaves the west side to move the family, because they made it to the north side, Albany Park.

When I run for Congress, I'm going to represent Albany Park.

So I used to say the Emanuels traveled many miles.

We just didn't go very far.

So that was kind of it.

(Mark laughing) But the highest of highs, you could create a free community college and see parents in their eyes, the relief, that they didn't have to choose about being a good parent or a second mortgage for their children's future.

You could do stuff that was a river walk that transformed a natural, the river of the city of Chicago that had been basically a second class citizen at best to the lakefront of the city, and make it a world-class phenomenon as called by the FT.

On the other hand, and there's a Friday night, you're rushing to a hospital and a kid leaving a park district facility, a basketball game on a weekend that we opened up the park is shot, and you're in a hospital with a mother and a grandmother by their side of their bed.

Or a police officer who was doing his job, a commander and he's killed, and he has a daughter who's going to grow up with a seat always empty at the dining room table.

So it has the lowest of lows that just takes your gut out, and the highest of highs are the most rewarding that you can transform a child's life or a family's life that they never had before, so.

And it's also, when I wrote a book about this, if you think about how you live, work, and play, the government that's closest to you that affects your life.

Where the school is, what the hours are, where the stoplight's going to go, whether we have full, how many librarians in the library, just all the things that make up your life, it's city government that gets to the front door, the back door the most.

And if you believe in public service, and more importantly, you believe in the public good, that's where it is.

And so that would be it.

- Let me quote you from - Uh-oh.

your 2015 Mayoral address, (Rahm laughing) your second mayoral inauguration in which you lamented presciently the plight of the lost and unconnected young men.

How did we lose young men and how do we get them back?

- You know it so, look, this is my second inaugural, if I may go like this for a second and stretch my shoulder and my.

It's a decade before everybody writes Of Boys and Men.

- Right.

- It's a decade before Scott Galloway starts talking and wrote his book, which is also both are very pressing, but I had been going around the city and I used to go.

I would teach high school classes every Friday, and also just being accessible taking the train.

And I wouldn't say it was like that, but there was a emptiness in young men's lives that I would never accept in my son.

- And you noticed this, this was palpable to you.

- Yeah and it internalized a self-loathing and alienation.

And I got attacked for that inaugural, because, oh, why don't you talk about pensions?

And I said, "We're going to always talk about that.

"I want to dedicate this to the unseen, unheard men of our city."

You don't send young boys off to prison to become men, which is what we were doing.

And there's other parts of it.

Now it's not just words.

University of Chicago lab shows me a program called Becoming a Man.

There's 100 kids, four high schools.

We, over my 10 year remaining, blow it up to 8,000 young men, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, and 11th grade, four hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year.

It's the largest mentoring program in America.

President Obama's coming to Chicago, Hyde Park High School.

And I said, "I want you to participate."

When they do a part of their day, they participate in this circle.

I participate in many of them, like six or seven, probably more even.

Anyway, he said, "Oh, I don't have to do it."

I said, "Look, man, working for you "almost ruined my marriage.

"I have money in the account.

"I'm taking 25 bucks out of my checking account with you.

"You're doing this for me."

So he does it.

Now, if you know anything about President Obama, 30 minutes is 30 minutes.

That's what he's going to do, then he's going to go down.

He's participating upstairs at Hyde Park High School near University of Chicago.

He goes on an hour and 20 minutes, and then he comes down.

When he introduces My Brother's Keeper, his mentoring program, the young man that sat next to him in the circle at BAM, Becoming a Man, is the person that introduces him in the East Wing upstairs because it so moved him.

You and I wouldn't be sitting here.

I wouldn't be sitting here if there wasn't a guy called Benjamin Emanuel, my dad.

My greatest friend, my kids say I'm not allowed to talk to him because I start crying, so.

But for a lot of young men, there is no Benjamin Emanuel.

My grandfather also lived with us on my mother's side.

There's no Hermite Smilovitz.

I can bemoan that, I can talk about that, but every one of us, whether it's our father, our grandfather, there's a coach, there's a mentor, there's somebody in our lives who guides us, who's our benchmark, who's our moral navigator.

And there's a lot of young men who don't have that.

And the problem is it kind of seeps in and internalizes this alienation and this self-loathing.

And I started to see it and given that I thought it was going to be my last inaugural.

If I said X about pensions.

- Right.

- I wanted to dedicate it, because I don't think we have another generation to lose to the streets of Chicago or the streets of Houston or the streets of Austin or anything.

- So we're in our 250th year as a nation.

How do we reclaim the American dream?

- Well, the first and thing on every big challenge we have, it's not going to be instantaneous.

So if you think you're going to have it like this, that's not this.

We've got in here over a 30 plus year slide.

It's going to take getting that rock up, it's going to take even harder and longer and more steeper.

So just put your seat belts on.

But a series of things policy wise we have to do that I think really, really matter.

Now, do we need more supply, yes.

Do we need to change the zoning law in Texas?

I think did some very interesting things, California did in the sense of putting more land, people from a price standpoint on the market, et cetera.

But at the end of the day, across the board, so ticking them off, one is, and I think owning a home is the most important piece of the four pillars.

I think it's insane that I'm getting a mortgage deduction on a second or third home, when other people can't afford a down payment on their first home, which is where they build wealth, and where they build an opportunity to build a family.

I think it's insane.

We have an entire tax code built for the preservation of wealth and not the creation of wealth.

- Right.

- There's other things on education.

I'd like to talk more about this, but at least on the affordabilit of higher education.

I think the President Dartmouth had an interesting column yesterday in "The Wall Street Journal".

One of the things I would look at, we have these walls.

High school is different from elementary, there's community college, there's four year.

There's nothing religious or biblical or 10 commandments about four years for a bachelor's degree.

Make it three.

What could you rejigger in the system that makes it only three years?

Second is on community colleges, and we were rated in Chicago by the World Bank has the best college career program in America was the Chicago community college system.

So each school had a very specific.

Malcolm X was only healthcare.

Olive Harvey, transportation, distribution, logistics.

Richard J. Daley, Advanced Manufacturing, Harold Washington, business, blah, blah, blah.

Bring industries in, write the programs, this is the curriculum, et cetera.

But beyond two years, maybe you can get a certificate for 24 months, another one for 16 months, but the pay for that is X. Change the timeframe.

Now the other thing we did, which I'm very proud of in Chicago, first city to do this, if you earn the B average in high school, we made community college free.

So there's just a lot of things you got to do to bring in the affordability and accessibility of the American dream across that.

And every day at the Oval Office desk, number one item has to be the accessibility and affordability of the American dream.

And if the president makes that decision and everybody in the cabinet hears about it all day, it becomes the top priority.

- You talked about education, which is a passion of yours, but one of the things that you did - It was a passion for Lyndon Johnson.

As a topic of, I mean, a lot of people, civil rights of Vietnam and Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare, probably more so if you took a topic, if my reading history is correct, from higher education to elementary, et cetera.

Probably one of the most dominant areas of where all those pens are from downstairs.

- Right, and his passion was education for the same reason it is for you.

He knew it was fundamentally transformational.

- There's no way you can say the word opportunity without it.

- But one thing you did in Chicago that was also transformational in the school system was you got young people thinking about their future.

Talk about that.

- The years you lose kids the most is high school.

When you look back, there's a plan.

When we were going forward, it was not a prospectively thought through strategic plan.

One, the Chicago Star Scholarship.

You earn a B average, community college is free.

And if then there was Chicago Star Plus, if you keep the B average in community college, every university and college in the state of Illinois gave you somewhere around 40% on average off of the next years.

Number two, bring college classes into the high school so kids can graduate with no cost to their parents with college credit.

And 50% of the kids in Chicago are 49.7.

We're graduating with at 10 credits, 20 credits, a semester.

And then third was what we call learn, plan, succeed.

98% compliance.

You were not allowed to get your high school diploma without showing a letter of acceptance from a college, a community college, a branch of the armed forces or vocational school.

You weren't walking graduation day without telling us where you were walking to.

98% compliance in a city and a school system with 80% poverty.

So there are things that we as a society have to take on to give every child that same sense of confidence.

I want to be an electrician.

I want to be a nurse or paralegal or a lawyer.

I want to be an electrical engineer.

Whatever it is, I don't care.

Follow it, but we're going to make sure you have an idea that you have something tomorrow.

And the other thing that when we talked about reforms, my kids, and I don't know about your family, but my kids grow with a concept, where am I going to be in four years?

And there are kids in America where the question is, will I make it four more weeks?

Will I see my 18th birthday?

And I want to be honest, as a mayor of a Over those eight years, that became a revelation to me.

I didn't start with that concept or that insight that my kids' timeframe of their calculations of their career, were different where a lot of other kids.

Making it to 18 was a victory lap.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And so the educational component of this is allow kids who are thinking getting to 18 and having them see a future, and just be honest.

Your prisons here in Texas, like Illinois, 18 to 35, male, kid of color, no high school degree.

There's only one of those you can change, high school.

You give them a diploma, they got it tomorrow.

You don't have a diploma, you're going to do something stupid today.

It's just that simple.

- We are a country that is striving to live up to our ideals.

- Always.

- Always.

What makes America great today?

- Well, I do think those ideals are eternal, and I also think they're universal.

And those ideals not only were our north star, they were our glue.

And is America still the place where dreams are possible?

Yes.

And that's not to take away from that.

But at the end of the day, freedom that America provides, and many different interpretations of this, is a gravitational pull that allows people to leave a world they know, sacrifice, struggle to come to a place and give their kids that chance called America.

No other country.

How many people are fleeing to go to China?

How many people are fleeing to go to Iran, North Korea, Venezuela or Russia?

In those countries, people are trying to get out.

Don't ever underestimate how seductive of a pull freedom is on the heart.

And no country has that in ample supply like the United States.

The only time, if we turn our back on that and turn our back on what America means, and why people will leave a world they know for the unknown and all the risk associated is because America means something.

And it's not just, oh, that sounds great in the history books.

We are that gravitational pull.

And the only people that can break it, ruin it and destroy it are us.

- Rahm, thanks for being with us.

- Thanks.

(bright orchestra music) (bright orchestra music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by.

And also by.

A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(soft flute music) (vibrant entertaining music)