Linda Chavez, a Reagan-era official and Library of Congress Living Legend, traces her family’s roots to Spanish Inquisition survivors and New Mexico’s founding. Her debut novel, The Silver Candlesticks, took a decade to write, blending history with themes of assimilation, while her next book—about bootlegger-turned-grandfather Armijo—aims for faster publication. A staunch critic of public unions and affirmative action, she argues policies like the Supreme Court’s 2023 admissions ruling improved minority success by redirecting underqualified students. Now retired from policy work, Chavez shifts focus to fiction, warning against AI shortcuts in writing while championing rigorous research as her legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
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From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
Now from the historic Decatur House in Washington, D.C., a former Reagan administration official and a Library of Congress living legend.
She has written a number of books including Out of the Barrio, An Unlikely Conservative, and The Silver Candlesticks.
Linda Chavez.
Well, thank you very much for coming.
We're doing this interview today about some of your books, Linda Chavez.
But Linda is more than an author.
She's also been a government official.
We'll talk about that as well.
But we're coming to you from Decatur House.
Decatur House was the first house actually built around Lafayette Park or Jackson Square.
It almost was torn down during the Kennedy administration, but Jackie Kennedy eventually got it preserved with the help of President Kennedy, President Johnson.
And we are now in, I hate to say it, but we're in where the horse stables used to be.
But it's been cleaned up and it's in very good shape.
So Linda, thank you very much for coming here today.
Thank you, David.
It's a pleasure.
So you have been the author of four books, and you've also had a very distinguished career in public policy.
And I'd like to go through that first so people can understand your background before we go into each of the books, okay?
So where were you born?
I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And your parents did what?
Well, my dad was a house painter with a ninth grade education.
My mother was in retail, but prior to that, she was in the restaurant business.
She was a waitress.
She was a hostess, worked a series of jobs.
And did you have siblings?
I had four siblings.
However, it was very chaotic my childhood.
My mother had two sons who she gave up when she moved to New Mexico to be with my father.
I then also had a sister who was my father's daughter from his marriage to a war bride, an Australian, and then a younger sister who was my full sister.
But all of them either died or were given up for adoption.
So I spent most of my life as an only child.
Well, I'm an only child, but I didn't have quite as colorful a family background as that.
I was an only child as well.
There's pluses and minuses to it, as you probably know.
So where did you go to school?
Did you go to school in Albuquerque in high school?
Well, I went to six different schools in my first two years.
Did you like any of the first five?
Well, as I say, it was a chaotic childhood.
I was shipped around the country to live with relatives.
My father got into car accidents.
We were quite poor, and so I shipped around a lot.
But I eventually ended up going to school in Denver, Colorado.
We moved from Albuquerque to Denver when I was nine.
And I stayed in that school, Cathedral, both in grade school and graduated from high school.
And you went to college where?
I went to college at the University of Colorado, started off as a night school student.
I was working in a department store, and a girlfriend of mine said she was going to go apply for college, and I went with her.
And I thought, well, I'm going to try this too.
And I did and ended up in school and met my husband the first semester of college.
And we were married at the age of 19 a couple years later.
Wow, okay.
And did you get your degree?
I did.
I got my degree in English literature.
I was not a very good student in high school.
I skipped school a lot, not to go out doing bad things.
I stayed home and read.
My dad had taught me to read as a child before the age of six.
And one of my first memories is getting my library card.
That's the first thing we did when we got to Denver: I went to the library to get a library card.
So I ended up, you know, doing quite well in college and went to graduate school as well.
Why did you pick English literature, not some other subject?
I loved books.
I loved literature.
It was my first love.
It's actually still my greatest love is for literature.
So you got your degree, and then what did you do?
We came to Washington, D.C. in 1972, and I worked.
I worked at the Democratic National Committee.
I was actually there.
You were at the Democratic National Committee.
You worked for Ronald Reagan later, so were you a Democrat for a while?
I was a Democrat.
I was originally a Democrat, worked at the DNC.
I was there the day that the Watergate burglary occurred.
I actually ran into the Watergate burglars when they were taping up the doors there in the Watergate.
And then I went to work on Capitol Hill.
I worked in the judiciary.
You saw them taping up the door?
Absolutely.
What did you think was going on?
I didn't know what was going on.
The man almost knocked me over coming out of the ladies' room and didn't think really too much about it until I saw his picture in the newspaper after they were arrested.
Wow.
Okay.
So after you did that, you left the DNC to do something else?
Went to work for the House Judiciary Committee, and there I worked on the professional staff of the Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee in the House Judiciary Committee under Emmanuel Seller.
Okay, the Democratics.
Absolutely.
Okay, and then what did you do?
From there, I ended up going to work.
I went to work for the American Federation of Teachers, where I started off as a lobbyist.
And then I became a magazine editor.
And that's how I ended up getting in the Reagan administration.
I met this wonderful woman.
She was a Georgetown professor.
Her name was Jean Kirpatrick.
And I asked her to write an article for me.
And then I asked a fellow named Bill Bennett to write an article for me and another guy named Robert Bork.
So I had all of these conservatives writing for me, and that's how I came to the attention of the Reagan administration.
So Reagan is elected.
He defeated my former boss, Jimmy Carter.
He comes into the Oval Office in January 20th, 1981.
And were you invited into the White House then?
I actually did some consulting for one of the agencies in 1981, but it was not until 1983 when I was brought in and interviewed for a job at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
And that's my first job in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and you worked there?
I was the executive director, right?
And then did you get a job at the White House?
I did.
I did.
So I, I don't know, there were all these people telling me you should go work in public liaison at the White House.
You know, back in 1985, the top job in the White House for a woman was director of public liaison.
Women did not fill other high-level jobs on the senior staff.
And so I started lobbying for that job and eventually met Donald Reagan, who was the chief of staff.
He was being very annoyed because he was constantly being pestered to hire me.
And so one day I called him up and I said, can I come in and meet you?
And he met me and he offered me the job.
Okay, so you then became the highest ranking woman in the Reagan White House.
Right.
I think it's fair to say you were the highest ranking Latina at the Reagan White House.
Yes, I was.
And were you the highest-ranking Latino of any sex in the Reagan White House?
I was, yeah.
Okay, so you did that and you got to know Ronald Reagan?
I did.
Just absolutely wonderful man.
He was just so warm and personable.
He was very much as he appeared when you saw him, except that he was very, very smart and very articulate.
And I think he was often made fun of by Saturday Night Live and other programs.
But he was really, really well read.
So how long did you work at the White House?
I worked at the White House for a little over a year.
And then a Senate seat opened in Maryland, and folks from the Republican National Committee came over.
By this time, I'm a Republican.
And they thought maybe I should give it a run.
I lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and they talked me into thinking about running, and I decided to do it.
But lo and behold, after I threw my hat in the ring, so did 10 other Republicans.
So it was a very hard-fought primary.
And what happened?
Well, I ended up getting more than 70% of the vote, primarily because a local television station decided to do a pop quiz with all of the candidates, Democrats and Republicans.
And they came in and asked a series of questions, and apparently nobody else could answer them correctly.
And so I became front-page news, not just in the United States, but around the world.
So you were the Republican nominee?
I became the Republican nominee.
Understanding Hispanic Populations00:14:51
And you ran against Barbara Mikulski.
I did.
And she was from Baltimore and a lifelong Baltimore Democrat, and she won.
And she won.
I was considered a Westerner, which is how the Baltimore Sun described me when they wrote the editorial not endorsing me.
Well, I'm from Baltimore.
I know if you're west of Baltimore, that's considered a Westerner.
So what did you do after you lost?
Well, after I lost, I ended up going to work for an organization called U.S. English.
It was promoting English as the official language.
It was started by S.I. Hayakawa, a Japanese American who had been in the United States Senate.
And that was very controversial.
Well, let's talk about that in the context of your own background because, you know, your name is Chavez.
You are from Albuquerque.
I would assume that you're Hispanic in background, Latino.
But it turns out that if you go back far enough, your background is a little different than people might have thought.
What is your real background?
Well, so my family came here in 1601.
The Chavez side of the family, Captain Pedro Durani Chavez, was part of the expedition that actually founded New Mexico, founded that territory.
The other side of my family, my grandparents, Armijo side, and they are the subject, by the way, of my book, The Silver Candlesticks.
They didn't get to New Mexico until 1701, but they left Spain in 1597.
And they left, lo and behold, not just to seek adventure and riches in the New World, but it turns out they were being investigated by the Inquisition because they were Converso Jews.
So for those not familiar with the term, conversos was a word used to describe people that had converted from Judaism to Catholicism or other type of Christianity, but Catholicism principally.
And that's because in Spain, there were efforts to get rid of anybody who was Jewish.
And in fact, on 1492, all the Jews and all the Muslims were kicked out of Spain.
And so many people to prevent themselves from getting kicked out would convert, conversos, as they were called.
And your ancestors were among those, is that right?
That's right.
Well, a lot of people don't understand this, but they were kicked out, but they were not allowed to take any of their wealth with them.
So if you were a peasant, didn't have great riches, you know, you left.
If you were, as my family, were a merchant, it was probably in your interest to stay and convert.
So when you were growing up, did you face discrimination because you were Latino or Hispanic?
Well, in New Mexico, Hispanics were the majority of the population in New Mexico when I was growing up.
But I left at the age of nine.
And suddenly I go from New Mexico to Colorado, where things are quite different.
Mexican Americans were a distinct minority.
And you were presumed to be Mexican, and that's what you were called.
I had grown up being told that I was Spanish.
And so that was the first sort of shocker.
But people were always asking me, what are you?
What are you?
Because I didn't quite look as they expected a Mexican-American would look like.
I spoke English as my first and only language.
Do you speak Spanish?
I don't.
My grandparents spoke Spanish in order not to be understood around the kids.
But no, I grew up speaking English.
So today, what is the percentage of population in the United States that's Hispanic or Latino?
It's huge.
And I think most people would be surprised.
There are 68 million, according to the last count, in 2024, Hispanics or Latinos in the U.S. One in five Americans has some Hispanic origin.
So some people think that the greatest minority in terms of size in the United States is African Americans, but actually Latino or Latino Americans or Hispanic Americans are actually a larger percentage of the population, right?
That's exactly right.
But it's a little more complicated than that because many people are like myself.
They're of mixed origin.
My mother's last name was McKenna.
She was blue-eyed and blonde-haired.
Her heritage was English and Irish.
And that was less common, but it's much more common today.
Intermarriage is very, very significant.
Let's talk for a moment about the books you've written because that's what we're really focused on books.
Now, you're a person that's always liked reading and writing, I guess, from an early age, right?
Absolutely.
And did you ever, you know, think as a young girl that you were going to be an author, or you just thought you might be a reader, not an author?
Well, I had ambitions to be a writer.
I had a teacher, Sister Marie Florence, when I was 13, who wrote on one of my papers, you have a God-given talent.
Now use it.
And that was sort of an instruction.
That wasn't just a compliment.
Right.
So your first book is called Outside the Barrio?
Out of the Barrio.
Now, what is a barrio?
A barrio is a concentration.
It means a city, a part of a city in Spanish.
All right, so what was that book about?
That book was about the Hispanic population.
The subtitle was Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation.
It was published in 1991.
And I wrote it primarily because there was a lot of misunderstanding about the Hispanic population.
If you looked at the statistics in the 1980s, you would have believed that Hispanics were mostly uneducated, did not have high school diplomas, many of them did not speak English, et cetera.
Well, it turns out it was confused because there was a huge influx during the 1980s of newcomers from Mexico, primarily, as well as people like myself who trace their origins back many hundred years or people who came after the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
So the general perception that you were trying to address in the book is that people, let's say white Americans, would say people who are Latino, Hispanic, they are not from well-educated backgrounds, they don't have a lot of money, but we need to figure out how to assimilate them and to make them like us.
Well, actually, they were assimilating quite nicely, thank you.
The perception was.
The perception was they were not.
And your book is trying to design to say...
Right.
Okay, go ahead.
Yeah, so my book is trying to explain that, in fact, Hispanic immigrants were doing what every immigrant group has done.
They learn English, they get educated, and they move into the middle class, and they do so rather rapidly.
Certainly by the third generation, they are more or less indistinguishable from others.
So of the Latino or Hispanic population in the United States today, I assume the largest number trace their ancestry back to Mexico.
What would be second?
Well, there's a very large population now of Central Americans.
There are also Puerto Ricans who are Americans by birth, because Puerto Rico is a territory of the U.S.
But you have Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and in the last 10 years or so, we've had a large number of people coming from South America, particularly from Venezuela.
Now, in your book, you talk about the importance of learning English.
Now, when I was working in the White House before you in the Carter administration, in those days, bilingual education was something that the Democrats very much supported, was if you're Hispanic, let's say, you're supposed to learn Spanish as well as English.
Don't learn only English.
Today, the conventional wisdom is that maybe that's not as good a thing.
Is that fair or not?
Well, I think the problem was in order to be bilingual, you have to, if Spanish is your first language, you have to learn English.
And the problem during the Carter years, and they actually had a policy to promote Spanish language instruction, so that a lot of kids who were coming in as young immigrants or the children of immigrants were not learning English when they went into school.
And ironically, some of these kids from Mexico weren't Spanish speakers.
They spoke indigenous language, and it was really the LA school system that forced them to learn Spanish.
So if you came, let's say, from Mexico, let's say in the 1970s, you're a young child, and you speak Spanish very fluently, were you able to go to school and get through school only by speaking Spanish, or were they being forced to learn English as well?
You actually, in some school districts in the U.S., could spend almost your entire school life being instructed in Spanish, and that's what I had a problem with.
You thought that English would be something they should learn.
Well, if you want to move up and into the middle class, you have to learn English.
That's your key to economic success.
Let's talk about your second book.
Your second book was on a different subject, and why don't you go through what that was?
My second book was An Unlikely Conservative, The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal or How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America.
The subtitle was not my choice.
My publishers picked that.
And it really, it stemmed from my having failed to become Secretary of Labor.
I was nominated by George W. Bush, and my nomination lasted all of about a week, I think, before it was discovered that 10 years earlier I had taken into my home a woman who was an illegal immigrant.
And I knew she was an illegal immigrant.
I was asked by a friend if I could give her a place to live, a friend who knew that I had taken in Vietnamese and other people who I helped try to give a helping hand to.
And unfortunately, back in that period, that was enough to derail my nomination.
So you were the first Latina to be nominated to be a cabinet secretary.
Correct.
But it didn't go through because of that.
And that's somewhat similar to what happened to Zoe Baird, I guess, to some extent.
Right.
She actually employed a couple and didn't pay taxes on them.
I didn't employ this woman, but she eventually went back to Guatemala and came again as a permanent resident.
So why are you seen as an unpopular Hispanic?
Well, I think it all stems from the controversy around my job at U.S. English, the idea of promoting English.
And I think there were people who misunderstood and thought that I was promoting English only.
No, I was promoting English as a way to advance yourself, to be able to move into the middle class.
And I also was a Republican, and that was thought to be unusual.
Turns out it's not all that unusual.
A third of Mexican Americans actually voted for Richard M. Nixon in 1972, but there wasn't a lot written about that.
Well, he was the first Republican candidate, I think, to really appeal to the Latino or Hispanic market.
Absolutely.
He had something called the Cabinet Committee for Opportunity for Spanish-speaking people.
Okay, so your second book comes out, and it's, let's say, a lot of people criticize it because they think you're saying we should only learn English if you're Hispanic and not learn both languages.
Is that right?
That's right.
And, you know, I think there were a lot of people who didn't think that I celebrated my Hispanic heritage, which is not accurate.
I was very aware of my Hispanic heritage my entire life and very proud of it.
Okay, so then you wrote another book, a third book, which is, I would say, somewhat critical of the labor unions, would you say?
Right.
It was a book about the way in which public employee unions in particular, I thought, had become just extensions of the Democratic Party.
And I thought that was both bad for the Democratic Party, but most importantly, bad for working people and union members.
But unions went after you for that, I see.
They did.
And that was probably, that was, you know, after my Labor nomination, by that time, they were not very happy.
And that book was called Betrayal.
Betrayal.
And what unions had done to betray their workers.
Correct.
It was mostly about public employee unions, which is now the biggest part of the labor movement.
Okay, so after you wrote that book, you wrote another book more recently, is that right?
Now, the first three you wrote were non-fiction books, and most non-fiction authors kind of stick with it because they know how to do it.
But then you wrote a fiction book, and was that harder to do?
And did you take a lot more time working on that than the non-fiction books?
Well, it took a long time to get published because I was doing a lot of other things at the same time.
In my mid-60s, I decided to go back to graduate school.
I had decided I wanted to write fiction.
And I started writing short stories.
I got some of them published.
And I decided to go back and get an MFA from George Mason University.
And it was during that period that I discovered my Jewish roots because I was featured on the television program Finding Your Roots.
And that story very much inspired the book.
And my thesis advisor, Alan Shoes, who was at George Mason, he said, don't, you know, I was going to be writing stories about North Korean prison camps, which did not have a wide audience.
And he said, no, no, no, you have to turn your family story.
That television show on PBS is hosted by Skip Gates, a professor at Harvard.
And I've never gone on it because he told me, we're going to surprise you and we're going to show you who your ancestors are.
And I said, I'm afraid I don't want to learn who my ancestors are.
I'm afraid they're not the kind of people I want to be associated with.
So I never went on the show, but you were willing to go on.
And did they surprise you right then and there live?
Well, I was so arrogant, I didn't think he was going to be able to find anything I didn't know because I had grown up on stories of my ancestors.
One of my ancestors gave up Mexico's territory to the United States.
That's how New Mexico and other states became part of the United States.
So I didn't think they'd find out anything.
But they did ask me, do you have any mysteries?
Well, my grandmother had a plaster saint that she used to turn to the wall.
And I was curious about that.
So that, I think, sparked their interest and they started digging around.
Spanish Inquisition Secrets00:15:48
And that's when they came up with these Inquisition records.
So they went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition, which was in the 1500s.
Correct.
And they found out that your ancestors, at least some of them, were Jewish.
That's right.
They found out that they were Jewish.
Now, you sort of have to fast forward a little bit.
By this time, I'm married to a Jewish man.
I've converted to Judaism.
My three sons have all been bar mitzvah.
So it was sort of like the circle coming around that it turned out that I was Jewish after all.
Okay, so but you're Jewish now.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, so let's go back to writing fiction.
So when you come up with fiction as an idea, you have to come up with something creative nobody ever thought of before, and you got to sell it to a publisher and all that.
What was your idea for the book?
Well, I thought telling the story of this family and leaving Spain.
First of all, there's not a lot written about the secret Jews of Spain, the people who were conversos, like my family, who didn't leave in 1492, who stuck around, practiced Catholicism.
Some of them became devout Catholics and never went back, but many of them didn't.
Many of them tried to hold on and preserve their heritage.
So I wanted to turn that into a novel.
And that meant doing a lot of research.
I had to spend a lot of time researching the Spanish Inquisition.
I had to spend time learning about the Conversos.
I had to visit Spain.
I visited Spain a half dozen times.
I was in Seville.
I was able to go to the street where my family lived, to the church where they had been baptized, married, and buried.
It was really a lot of work.
So for those who don't remember the history, people may not remember it, just saying that in 1492, I think it was October, you had to leave if you were Muslim or Jewish.
Those people that didn't leave, the conversos, they converted.
But the Spanish Inquisition was saying, well, wait a second, you really are Jewish and you shouldn't be still here.
So the Inquisition, to some extent, was to go after those people and root them out.
Is that right?
Actually, that's exactly right.
It wasn't per se aimed at Jews.
It was aimed at what they called Judaizers, people who were ethnically Jewish and who had converted to Catholicism but were practicing their Judaism secretly.
And that was the story I wanted to tell.
In other words, if you converted, but you're a good Catholic and you don't show any signs of still being Jewish, they would leave you alone.
Well, maybe not.
There's a lot of controversy about that because one of the things the church did when it found out you were Jewish was it confiscated your wealth.
And so there was a lot of incentive for people to accuse others of being Judaizers, and it was like a police state, really.
All right, so let's go back to the premise of your book.
The premise is what?
And what's the title of the book?
The title is The Silver Candlesticks, a novel of the Spanish Inquisition.
Where does that title?
Where did you get the title?
Well, I tried to create a motif that would run through the book.
And I settled on this idea of silver candlesticks, basically the Sabbath candlesticks that are used at the Sabbath meal on Friday night.
You light the candles before the meal.
And the novel begins with the first auto de fe, which is the burning of the heretics, they were called, in Sevilla.
And I create a scene where one of my ancestors gets caught up in the crowd that is in the Plaza San Francisco, which is where they tried.
They lit the fire and took these accused six people, three men and three women, and ultimately burned them to death.
So if you were part of the Spanish Inquisition, they have a trial or something like a trial, and then they found you guilty, the punishment was burning at the stake?
That's exactly right.
You were given the chance to basically renounce.
And if you did that, if you renounced your Judaism, you wouldn't be burned.
You would be choked to death, garrotted to death.
So that was the nice treatment.
And it wasn't the church.
The church could not execute anybody.
They were released to the state, and it was the state that actually burned them.
Well, without giving away the entire plot, what's the kind of theme of it then?
What happens?
So the theme of the book is it's a love story, really.
It's about a young woman.
She's madly in love with this Nair Dewell.
She finds out she's Jewish.
Her mother tells her she's Jewish, and she's told you can't marry this guy you're interested in.
You have to marry this other person, and you have to marry him so that he will protect you, because he's from an old Catholic family.
And at that time, what the church would do is if two people were getting married, they'd look and see, are these two old Catholics?
Are they two new Catholics?
If you were a new Catholic, that meant you were both from Jewish origins, and that made you suspect.
So she's told she has to marry another man, and it's the story of that relationship.
It's the story of the Inquisitor, the Grand Inquisitor of Sevilla, who tries to entrap this woman, and how she ultimately learns to love the man that she's forced to marry, and they end up fleeing to the United States.
And those were my ancestors.
So when you tell your husband and your three sons that you're going to Spain to do research for a novel, they say, you've never written a novel before.
You know what you're doing?
Is that what they said?
No, my husband is a big fan of my fiction.
He loved my short stories.
And I was very fortunate.
I got all of the stories that I submitted for publication.
I actually got published.
So, you know, I thought I knew what I was doing.
Did you get a publisher in advance?
Did you have a publisher?
No.
I did not for the novel.
I had to find the publisher afterwards.
And I ended up going with Wicked Son, Adam Bellow, who is known not just for being a publisher, he's also Saul Bellow's son.
He was good enough to decide to take a chance on the book.
Okay, so when you're writing fiction, I always wonder when you're a novelist, do you sit down and say, this is how it's going to end?
Some people write novels, tell me they want to know exactly how it's going to end.
They have the outline, they know exactly how it's going to end.
Other people say, look, I'm figuring out one as I get along.
Which school are you in?
Well, I'll tell you how I write.
So I got taught when I was in graduate school that the best way to write fiction was to write scenes, particularly if you were writing a novel.
So I immerse myself in the scene.
I create a scene.
I created the scene of the first Ottawa De Fey in Sevilla.
I create the scene where Guillaumar, the heroine of the novel, learns from her mother that she's a Jew.
And it really does flow for me.
I find writing fiction much easier than writing nonfiction because I immerse myself in the story.
Now, some writers say I write a page a day and then I'm done.
Some say I write until I can't keep up anymore during the day.
I'll write all day and then I just start again the next day.
You were in which category?
Do you have to write a certain amount each day or you write as long as you can or what?
I would find time to write and then I would write as much as I can.
That could be as little as.
You write at night?
I mostly write at night, yes.
Mostly at night.
I have a day job, so I have to write.
Oh, so you have to write at night.
So you write, all right, when you write it and then you go look at it the next day, do you say, this is terrible, how did I write this?
Or do you always like what you wrote before?
You know, I try not to go back and read until I finished a chapter because I'm, you know, I'm trying to be in the story.
And do you write longhand or by computer?
No, I write by computer.
Okay, and you ever push a button and the thing got erased or anything?
That never happened.
Oh, I lost chapters.
I pulled my hair out trying to retrieve chapters.
Eventually, I always found them, but it was sometimes quite hair-raising.
Okay, so when you write this novel, how long did it take you to write the novel?
It took me almost 10 years.
10 years?
10 years, yes, to write the novel.
Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in seven years.
I know.
Well, what can I do?
It's 400 pages, David.
It's not a short book.
All right, well, maybe.
And actually, it was longer.
It was longer.
I had to cut it.
Yes.
Okay, so when it comes out, everybody's excited about it, and you promoted it.
I'm promoting it.
I'm still out there trying to sell books and getting myself on television and other places to talk about the book.
Now, one time when we started this series, I interviewed John Grisham, and he said that he was told by, I think, his agent that if you're going to be a great novelist, you've got to write one book a year, every year, a new book.
So are you in that school yet?
Are you going to write another one?
Well, at my age, I don't know if I'm going to write another book every year.
I will tell you, I have to.
You're too young to be president of the United States.
You're young.
Oh, yes, right.
Well, I'm a year younger than our current occupant of the White House.
So you're younger than the president.
Yes, I'm younger than the president.
I would like to write a sequel, and I have it planned.
When I originally started writing the novel, it was going to be a trilogy, but I'm not sure that I will finish all three, so I may combine the second and third into one.
It will take place after the Armijo family ends up in New Mexico.
They were part of the reconquest of New Mexico in 1701, and it will come into the 20th century.
During my grandfather's era, he was the biggest bootlegger in the Southwest and spent 11 and a half years in Fort Leavenworth.
Okay, so let me ask you: when you're writing a book, do you ever have any doubt that you're going to finish the book?
I always wonder when I'm writing something, I say, geez, why did I start this?
I don't know if I want to finish it.
Do you ever have that problem?
I think I had more of that problem with my nonfiction books than with the fiction.
I knew I was going to finish this book.
It was really important.
So do you ever have writer's block?
You just sit down there and they just say, today it's just not happening.
Never happened?
Never happened in the fiction with writer's block.
The problem I had is I was doing too many other things.
Okay.
So are you writing articles now still or short stories or you're just focusing on your novels?
Well, I do a lot in the public policy arena.
I have a small think tank that has been around for 30 years now, the Center for Equal Opportunity.
So I do that.
I do write.
I write regularly for the Renewed Democracy Initiative has a publication called The Next Move.
I write for the unpopulist, and I write for the bulwark.
A lot of writing.
So you do that in the daytime and the novels at night?
I'm ostensibly retired from my paid work, so I have a little more time.
And so when you're writing a book, do you ever consult people for ideas or you come up with the ideas yourself?
And you ever take what you've written and say, ask a friend or your husband or your children, what do you think of this?
Oh, I absolutely ask people to read it.
I ask experts in the field to read it.
When I was doing short stories on North Korea, I gave it to people to read who were experts in that field.
Now, for somebody that's watching and wants to be you, a writer who's started writing maybe later in your life than earlier, but let's suppose somebody wants to be mid-career, starting how to write a novel or a nonfiction book.
What is your best advice about how to become a book writer?
The best way to become a good book writer is to be a good book reader.
Reading is the key to good writing.
You have to be well-read.
You have to read a lot and you have to read good books.
Not every book is worth reading.
So if you're reading a good book, who do you like to read?
Are there authors, fiction, or nonfiction authors that you really enjoy?
I am a huge fan of Russian literature.
That was because of my father.
His favorite book was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
And Dostoevsky is still my favorite writer.
I read a lot of Russian literature.
I just read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich, which was my most recent book.
Well, those books are long and complicated to read.
As I say, I tried to read War and Peace about 12 times.
I've gotten to, you know, about page 10 or 11, but it's always, I realized there are 500 characters in War and Peace.
I just couldn't keep them so straight, so I keep putting this.
And every Russian has like four names.
I know, so eventually I'll get it at some point, but I haven't read that yet.
But other than Russian novels, are there American novelists or writers you like?
Yes.
I liked John Updike.
I liked John Steinbeck.
I like a lot of British writers.
I'm a big fan of Victorian literature.
So if President of the United States came along now and said, you know, you've got a distinguished career.
You're a writer.
You've been in public policy.
I'd like to make you an ambassador or cabinet secretary.
What would you say now?
Well, I don't know.
I've never been successfully confirmed for any job.
I was nominated by two presidents and wasn't confirmed in either position.
Well, Congress has changed a lot, so you never know.
Not for the better.
Not for the better.
So today, would you attribute your interest in literature and writing to the fact that you read when you were a young girl and your parents read to you and you went to the library a lot?
Is that an important factor?
Absolutely.
I don't remember my parents reading to me.
My father taught me how to read, but I remember reading on my own.
It was my escape.
It was the way I went into a world that was much better and more interesting than my own.
And did either of your parents live to see any of your professional success?
Yes, actually, my father lived until 1978, and by that time I had worked very briefly for President Carter.
Worked at OMB and worked at the Health and Human Services, which was then health and education and welfare.
My mother lived until 2012, so she saw much of my success.
And do you ever think about teaching writing and teaching people?
You've taken writing courses yourself.
Would you ever consider teaching writing?
I actually taught.
I taught at University of Colorado at UCLA.
I taught in the first affirmative action programs there.
It was a very eye-opening experience and formed my views of becoming a critic of affirmative action.
Let's go back to the issue of affirmative action, which you know a lot about.
Today, the Supreme Court has more or less said that affirmative action, at least certainly in education, is not permissible.
Do you think that's changed universities for the good or the bad?
Or what's your assessment of that?
I very much believe it's changed universities for the good.
And it's not just that it has taken out impermissible discrimination.
I think it's been really good for Latino and black students.
My organization has done studies over the years taking a look at the admission of students into university who did not meet the normal qualifications.
Admissions Disparities00:05:55
And what we found over 80 different universities was that admitting a student whose grades and test scores were not similar to those of his white and Asian peers meant the student was more likely to fail.
And so now you've got students, they may not be going to the top-tier school in as great as a number, but they're going to schools where their preparation allows them to succeed.
Now, there have been some people in the United States who want to have a constitutional amendment making English our official language.
Do you think that's a good idea or not necessary?
I don't think it would do much harm to make it an official language.
Many countries have official languages, but the practical matter is that English has been our de facto official language almost from the beginning, and that no matter where people came from, what country they spoke when they got here, they eventually learned English.
So today, when you write a novel and people come up to you and they say they enjoy the novel, that must be a great thrill, I assume.
Absolutely.
There's nothing nicer than people who can come up and not just tell me they like the novel, but start to talk to me about the characters.
They talk to me as if they are real people, which, yes, they are based on real people, but they're, you know, figments of my imagination.
And are you surprised at how many people think you are a person who was born in, let's say, Mexico and came up to the United States and when you were young and so forth?
And you tell them that actually my ancestors were here for three or four hundred years.
What do they say?
Yeah, people are always surprised at that.
It used to be very common.
People would say, when did your family come here, Ms. Chavez?
And when I said 1601, that was usually a conversation stopper.
Wow.
So your ancestors, as they were discovered by Skip Gates and his people, what did they do in Spain?
Were they prominent people?
They were merchants, and yes, they were wealthy.
Unfortunately, none of that wealth saw its way down to me.
By the time my father was growing up, they were desperately poor, and I grew up struggling.
Your parents had no idea that they had this kind of roots, though, I assume.
No, they did not.
I mean, my father knew about the Spanish history in New Mexico because it was, you know, passed down generation to generation.
But as I say, his dad spent most of his childhood in federal prison because of the Prohibition Act.
And so it didn't much matter that his ancestors were well-to-do 400 years earlier.
So how has artificial intelligence changed the way people write books?
Now, if you need to do research, you can do it very quickly on chat GBT or some other artificial intelligence.
Is that something you use when you're doing research?
I have to tell you, I'm very skeptical.
I actually fed my first, my preface to my book into artificial intelligence to see what it would turn into.
It made it much worse, so I didn't in any way use any of it.
And I'm always skeptical even of the research.
I always trust but verify, as my old boss would say.
I always want to check out when I'm told something in an AI answer.
I try to dig a little deeper to make sure it's really correct.
So when you go to Spain and say, I'm researching a novel, do people say, look, I'm busy, I got a job, I don't have time to help somebody research a novel, or do they say, oh, here, I have nothing better to do, I'll help you.
Well, I wasn't going to Spain so much to research the novel.
I was going to Spain to get the sights and sounds and smells and tastes, you know, right.
I wanted to have the right atmosphere.
Much of the book is written, I hope, to try to give you a sense of Spain in the 16th century.
And so I'm going to places that are old places.
As I say, I went to the church where my family were baptized, where my grandmother, who opens the book, is actually buried in the crypt in Santa Ana in Triana, the neighborhood of Triana in Sevilla.
So today, without again giving away the whole plot line, is it a happy ending to your novel?
Well, I'm here.
So they obviously got out.
Okay.
And so what is the theme going to be of your second novel?
Well, the theme is really going to be what happened in New Mexico.
I mean, it was a really amazing story.
And, you know, it ultimately, New Mexico becomes part of the United States.
But the Mexicans gave it to us.
Well.
Well, with a war.
And, you know, the story in my family is that my great-great-great uncle, he was my great-great-grand grandfather's brother.
My grandfather was Francisco Armijo.
Manuel Armijo was the last territorial governor of New Mexico.
And he turned over the territory without much of a fight.
So today, so the story of your second novel is going to be how New Mexico was more or less settled?
Yes, it's going to be about New Mexico, Santa Fe, the families, and what happened to those families.
Because it's not unusual for great families with lots of wealth to basically end up losing all of that.
So it's going to be about the downward trajectory of my family ending up with my grandfather in prison and my father struggling through the Depression.
Today, how do you prefer to be called a Latina, Latino, Hispanic, or an American, and none of the Hispanic Latino?
Well, my mother would always tell me when people ask you what you are, you tell them you're American.
So I'm first and foremost an American, but I'm very proud of my Hispanic heritage.
And I do think of myself more as an Hispanic than a Latina.
But I don't care really what you call me.
Jack's Hollywood Stories00:07:09
So you worked in the White House for Ronald Reagan.
Did people really know much about what Latina was then or Latino?
Or did they really give you the kind of treatment and respect that you thought you deserved working in the White House?
Or people said she's just a liaison to the Hispanic community.
Well, I was a liaison to the business community, a liaison to all of the groups.
I was head of public liaison.
I dealt with the veterans group, business, colleges, universities, all of that.
Liaison means your job is to, when somebody complains, your job is to say it's not as bad as you think and it's really better, something like that.
It was to introduce people into the White House to meet with the president or with appointees.
And when the president went out, I would often go out with him.
I traveled with him in various places.
And what was he really like?
I never met him, but was he as jovial as he always seemed to be, smiling and you know, he was a vuncular.
He did have this wonderful personality.
He loved to tell stories.
A lot of them were stories about Hollywood.
Over and over again.
Some people, Jim Baker used to say, he used to tell some of the same stories over and over again.
Yes, he would sometimes tell the same story.
I can remember being on Air Force One and he came back and I was seated with the press corps and he came back and he said, now, Linda, cover your ears.
I don't think you want to hear this story.
And I don't know what the story was because I think it was probably a little off color.
But he was just a wonderful man.
Once I was getting beat up a lot in the press when I was at the Civil Rights Commission.
It was a Saturday morning.
I was in bed.
The telephone rings.
It's the White House Signal Office.
They had President Reagan on the phone for me.
He was on the treadmill, but he was watching me on C-SPAN, and he wanted to tell me what a good job I was doing.
That's the kind of guy he was.
He was a wonderful man.
So when Reagan was getting ready to be sworn in, he and Jimmy Carter rode up, as most presidents do, together.
Sometimes they don't talk to each other.
I think Truman and Eisenhower didn't talk.
FDR and Hoover didn't talk.
But they were having a conversation, Reagan being jovial, and Carter was listening.
And after it was over, somebody went to Carter and said, well, what was he talking about?
And he said, I don't know.
He kept talking about this guy, Jack Warner.
Who is Jack Warner?
Jack Warner being the head of a studio that Reagan had worked for, but Carter didn't know anything about studio heads and he couldn't understand who Jack Warner was.
But Reagan liked to talk about the movie days, right?
He did like to talk about the movie days.
I rode in the limousine when I was running for Senate with President Reagan.
My husband and I rode with him.
And it was in Baltimore, and there were people lining the streets.
And the president looked out and he said, Now, take a look.
There's a group of women there.
When they see me, they're going to start jumping.
They're going to levitate off.
And sure enough, that's what happened.
It was just the funniest thing I had ever seen.
So when Reagan was president early on, there was something that the Hollywood studios wanted to get, something related to the Finn Sin rule.
And the Hollywood studios weren't getting what they wanted out of the FCC.
So eventually, I think Jack Valenti, who was then the head of the Motion Picture Association lobby, got all the studio heads, all of them, to come to Washington.
And they come to the Oval Office.
Reagan is outside somewhere else.
He comes back and he sees all the studio heads there and he says, My God, if I could have gotten a meeting with any of you when I was an actor, I wouldn't be in public policy.
I never could get a meeting with any of you guys.
But he had a good sense of humor, I guess.
He did.
He had a great sense of humor.
He was really genuinely a good person.
I just was always impressed with how he would not just tell stories, he liked to listen to stories.
And he took care of people and he cared about America.
So was that hair dyed or not?
You know, he had a few white hairs in there.
He really did.
You could see them up close.
Not many.
I don't know.
Every once in a while, you could look real close.
You could see one of them.
It was a great set of hair, but I don't know if it was great.
He had a full head of hair.
That was very true.
And people forget that he left the presidency when he was 77, I think it was.
So he wasn't.
We've had two, the current president and the previous president were both older than him.
Reagan was considered old at that time, but actually today, not as old.
And he ever talked to you about what it was like to ride horses.
That was one of his great loves as well.
No, I would love to have gone out to the ranch.
That was one of the trips I wasn't able to make.
And today, if you had to look your life all over again, what would you do differently?
Anything different in your life?
You're happy, got a very successful career, good family, and so forth.
Is there anything you would have done differently?
I would have started writing fiction earlier.
I think I was always a little afraid to do it.
It's very competitive.
I wasn't sure I was good enough to do it.
I think I would have started writing fiction sooner.
Well, you still had a long time to write a lot of fiction, so are you going to write any more nonfiction?
Most of my nonfiction is going to be short.
I'm going to continue to write op-eds.
I'm very interested in lots of public issues.
I continue to be interested in race.
I continue to be interested in foreign policy.
And I continue to be interested in immigration.
Well, to get those issues in front of you is the best thing you do watching C-SPAN.
Yes, it is.
Very good.
So you watch C-SPAN to learn whatever you want to learn about public policy, right?
That's right.
Well, it's, first of all, no commercial breaks.
That's, you know, unless you're watching it on streaming and then you do get commercial breaks, I found.
Okay, so when will your next novel be out?
Well, I hope it's not going to take me 10 years because I'll be almost 90 if that's the case.
So I would like to spend the next year trying to get it.
And you have a title yet for it?
No, I don't have a title yet.
I'm not good at titles, frankly.
And who did you dedicate your novel to?
I dedicated it to my two grandparents, both of whom were descendants of the people in the novel.
They were both descended from the Armijo family, Petra Armijo de Chavez and Ambrosio Chavez de Armijo.
Well, look, it's a very interesting career and very impressive.
And I really enjoyed talking with you.
And you and I both worked in government.
We both have done some writing.
I haven't written any novels yet, but maybe you've inspired me to try to do that.
It's not that easy to do, right?
No, it's not that easy.
So thank you very much for being here.
I enjoyed it.
Thank you.
After the interview, David Rubenstein and Linda Chavez viewed memorabilia from her career in public service.
So this is the Decatur House.
Yes.
You're probably familiar with it.
Yes, I am.
And I guess this was the first real house built around what's now called Lafayette Park or Jackson Square.
Mending Political Relationships00:03:01
And this is the Reagan China that was very controversial, you may recall.
I do remember that.
Nancy Reagan ordered it, I think, and it was New China and caused quite a scandal.
Then it was paid for, I believe, privately.
It was, yes, but still a scandal in those days.
Yes, it's funny how things change.
So, let's see, there's you with Ronald Reagan.
Yep, that in the background, that's actually that was the first time I met President Reagan.
That was at a reception for a bunch of former Democrats who had either joined his administration or supported him.
And Phil Graham is standing there.
They were called Reagan Democrats.
Reagan Democrats, and that's what I was at the time.
This is the White House Christmas party, my one and only Christmas party, since I was only in the Reagan White House for a year.
And there you are.
There I am.
So That's President Reagan when I ran for the U.S. Senate for Maryland.
I was the Republican nominee, right, in 1986, and he came up and supported me.
And that was a great time.
There's George Herbert.
And that's George Wright.
And that was just before I left the White House when I was the White House to run for the U.S. Senate.
And this is Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
That's right.
And that was right after a Supreme Court decision had come down that was quite critical of affirmative action in contracting.
And Bill Clinton said he wanted to mend affirmative action, not end it.
And he invited me to the White House along with a handful of other conservatives.
And we met with him and gave him what we thought was a way to mend it.
Fortunately, he didn't take us up on it.
No.
That was when I was sworn in to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
And it's a pretty unusual swearing-in.
It's Warren Berger, who was Chief Justice at the time.
And I was invited over, much to my surprise, invited over to meet him and to have him swear me in.
It was pretty lowly office to be sworn in by the Chief Justice of the United States.
Oh, well, sure.
I'm just happy to do it.
And these are your books.
These are my books and some of the work I've done with my Center for Equal Opportunity.
So that was my first book out of the barrio, which is about Hispanic assimilation.
An Unlikely Conservative was my memoir after President George W. Bush tried to make me Secretary of Labor.
That didn't work out.
And then there's a book about the labor unions and their political.
And that is- And then you have your new book.
And I have my new book.
Yes, my new book, which is the silver candlesticks.
New Books Discussed00:01:53
I see it here, but yes, I have that.
And those are, I was very involved in trying to reform bilingual education so that kids who didn't speak English learned English.
And so that's some of that as well.
Watch past episodes of America's Book Club at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
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