I was raised by a heroic single mom, wonderful grandparents -- made incredible sacrifices for me. … But I sure wish I had had a father who was not only present, but involved. Didn't know my dad. And so my whole life, I've tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father was not for my mother and me. … I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man.

I went through some really terrible times. I don’t know whether I should really even mention it, but you mentioned that I had to go to prison and all that stuff. I was in a state where they had me in a straitjacket at one time. Can you understand what it would feel like to be in a straitjacket? I know. I couldn’t either, but I was, and it was brought about by sort of a drug psychosis in prison. I mean I just went completely… But it was tough, it was tough. I mean at that time they put you in — there’s a place in New York they used to call the Tombs. You’ve probably heard of it. I mean it was like a living tomb, with all the people. So I was there, and the withdrawal — physical symptoms, which were unbelievable.

God has never let me down. He’s a key factor in guiding my decisions and feeling safe within them. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages, one of them quite late in the pregnancy. Without faith, we would have retreated into our own corners to lick our wounds, but our love increased.

One thing, it's too big a subject and I want to talk about it on paper if I talk about it at all. But I can say this much, because I thought the life that my father and mother would have had together was cut short and something of what they might have achieved I hope that I'm achieving in my work.

So Quigley taught a course called “The History of Civilizations,” and at the end, he said that the great gift of Western civilization to the human race was the idea of progress in a very specific way. He said it was the idea that the future can be better than the present and that every single person, not just the rulers, not just the elected leaders, not just the billionaires, every person has a personal moral obligation to make it so, to keep it going, to make the future better. And it resonated with me. I thought, “That’s the purpose of politics.” It made me really think even more than I had before that I might like a career in public service. It also made me aware of why in the aftermath of something like the 2008 crash you are going to have so much disorientation and anger and frustration because too many people have gotten up every day, and some still do, and looked in the mirror and thought all their tomorrows were going to be like yesterday. It’s the ultimate disempowerment. There’s nothing you can do for yourself, and even worse, for your family. It’s going to be all the same, and Quigley made us understand that our whole culture in Western civilization was designed to counter that, to believe that you personally could make a difference, and I never got over it.

There is always an impulse to degrade people who are different from you, to diminish them, to demean them, and it never seems to go away, even when there is ample evidence that when we work together, we do better. It’s not about material progress or personal comfort. It’s about personal identity, and there are still so many forces at work in the human psyche that lead some people to think that their identity requires them to have someone to look down on or to demean or to feel that they’re superior to, and I think that that’s at the root of all this. It’s the only story in human society. Who is the other? Who is one of yours? Cain and Abel.

Now that’s what happens when people go crazy, where the only thing that matters is whose camp are you in, whose side are you on, what tribe do you belong to — where facts and discussions become irrelevant. And it made me wonder whether the way I was raised and all the listening and storytelling skills I learned as a boy would even be relevant today. They’d be good if you’re in. They’re still really important to getting anything done, but if you live in an environment where everything is a litmus test and everything is a-hundred-to-nothing, and the only thing that matters is feeding your resentment, and anger blinds you to answers, and being very sanctimonious somehow proves your sincerity and authenticity, it’s really hard to get anything done. It’s a whole new challenge now, and that’s why — and the Russians knew that. You know, that’s when they get in here and start fooling with all these politics. They realize you just sort of load it up because once people take sides based on what tribe they’re in then there’s no difference in facts and fiction. There’s no difference in truth and lies. It’s just, does this confirm what side you’re on? And you can’t run a democracy that way. It is utterly impossible to preserve democracy.

I thought that I had lost for a reason, and I thought that I was a little unseasoned and immature, and I had — the way I made decisions my first term, I got a lot done, but I was better at doing what I wanted to do than listening to other people about what they thought I should be doing or how they thought I ought to be doing it.

My job was basically to be a delivery boy for all kinds of things, but they also — because I was at Georgetown and studying international affairs, I was assigned to read six newspapers a day and clip the most relevant articles. This is the technology we used. You couldn’t scan articles. There was no “online.” There was nothing, right? So I would read the newspapers, clip the articles I thought they ought to read, put them on a routing slip, which had on it the names of the senior staff of the committee and all the senators who were committee members. And I would send it to the senior staff, and they would decide whether to send any of them on, but I don’t think I’d have won a Rhodes Scholarship if I hadn’t been a clerk on the Foreign Relations Committee. Nobody else I was competing with read six newspapers a day, and they actually paid me good money to read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Washington Star, which existed then, The Baltimore Sun , The St. Louis Post Dispatch , and then we alternated — and — oh, and The Wall Street Journal . We read them every day. Those were the six papers we read. I did, and then that’s what the senators got.

We have all these interesting challenges now. No one knows whether automation and robotics, nanotechnology, will kill more jobs than it creates. If it does, that presents a serious problem. What are we going to do? Have a few of us work to support everybody else, or shorten the workweek for everybody? If so, how do we get from here to there? No one knows yet how we’re going to stop cyber terrorism from wrecking honest discourse in democracy and maybe putting our very lives at risk.