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By Root 556 0

We have a lot of people that we take care of who would be in a bad way if we could no longer help them financially. We do it out of love, not duty. We need to have a steady income. It sounds ridiculous to think that, with that kind of income, I would still worry about our finances but, whether you have a little money or a lot of money, the worries are the same. You spend it accordingly. Houses still need repair, cars break down, health insurance costs continue to rise, as do home, auto, and retirement insurance. Utilities cost more every year. And Jesse and I are not getting any younger. I knew he could still get his message out even if he was not on TV, or radio, or in the newspaper every day. Jesse talks about the current events of our nation to everyone he meets. He has made the effort to serve and improve our government at every level he could, since the day he went off and joined the Navy. I felt justified in keeping the contract with MSNBC.

I don’t know how much of a factor the Iraq War was in MSNBC’S getting rid of me. Maybe they’d hired me thinking that, as a Navy SEAL and Vietnam vet, I was probably a right-winger who would automatically be for the war. I wasn’t. I opposed it from the beginning. Remember Ashleigh Banfield, the blond with glasses who had her own show on MSNBC? She disappeared quickly, after she gave a speech at the University of Kansas and said the media were being inherently dishonest in their reporting of Iraq. Gone. Nobody was being allowed on the air who was questioning our invading Iraq. Phil Donahue got the ax, too. He was considered way too liberal by MSNBC.

I remember seeing another quote from Erik Sorenson in The New York Times. “After September 11,” he said, “the country wants more optimism and benefit of the doubt.... A big criticism of the mainstream press is that the beginning point is negative.”

Well, I guess he tried to steer the “right” course, but Sorenson is no longer president of MSNBC. He left that job in 2004, and I don’t know where he is now. But I often wonder how good his memory is, concerning those two phone calls from Washington that he told me about when we left the Super Bowl that night.

But they could only keep my big mouth shut for so long. The contract expired in 2006.

Maybe I missed my true calling: the soaps. I was doing multitudes of interviews when I first got in office, covering a wide spectrum of topics, and one reporter wanted to know my favorite TV show. I sat there thinking for a moment, because I don’t watch much network television per se. Then, all of a sudden, it came to me: The Young and the Restless.

I found that I could relate to the predicament of daytime TV. Those are the hardest-working people in Hollywood. They’re also some of the most talented. Yet they’re the most rebuffed, abused, poked fun at, and disrespected. But just think about the difficulty of doing daytime TV. In one week, the actors need to memorize enough script pages to fill an entire film. They’re the blue-collar, hard-core, working actors and actresses. And they don’t get the praise they deserve, although in many cases these daytime shows are the stepping-stone, the experience-giver. Look at the people who have gone from daytime into Hollywood stardom: Demi Moore and David Hasselhoff (a Young and the Restless alumni), just to name two.

When it made the papers that The Young and the Restless was my favorite program, apparently someone connected with the show read about it. Lo and behold, what came in the mail? The most beautiful portrait of the whole cast, all autographed, accompanied by a great cover letter. I have it hanging on the wall at home in Minnesota.

Then, in the summer of 2000, the producers invited me to CBS Studios in L.A. to make a cameo guest appearance. My scene had me knocking on Victor Newman’s office door. Victor seemed very surprised to see me, but invited me to have a seat. He asked what brought me out here, and I said, “It’s not another campaign contribution, if that’s what you’re worried about, Victor.”

After a minute, Victor asked, “Why did you