When George W. Bush ran for president, the presidency of George H.W. Bush was rarely brought up, though when Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska said that the younger Bush was tougher than his father, George W. Bush was upset – he felt that his father was not fair game. When the elder Bush tried to shoot a video about his son's life for the Republican party, he grew so emotional that he had to stop filming to gather himself. However, the senior and younger Bush worked together to make sure Barbara Bush, who is known for occasionally making tart remarks, didn't make any comments that would hurt the presidency. "It took a joint effort to keep her quiet," an adviser told Gibbs and Duffy. Bush the younger was the one who asked his father and Bill Clinton to work together on the relief effort for the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004, and George H.W. Bush and Clinton famously hit it off, often getting together socially.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
