It's Friday, August 18, 2023, the day of the week when I pass along quotations intended to be inspiring or elucidating. Today's lines come from a birthday boy, Robert Redford, born in Southern California on this date in 1936. That's right: "The Sundance Kid" is 87.
Besides being an indelible leading man for decades, Bob Redford is an acclaimed movie director, mentor to young filmmakers, and political activist. I've only met him once (more on that later), but for a time a decade ago he was also a journalistic colleague: Redford wrote for the Huffington Post.
In The Candidate, a novice politician wins his Senate seat, and then says to his campaign manager, "What do we do now?" That phrase became a stock line in American political lore, but every moviegoer of a certain age has his favorite Bob Redford movie lines. Some of us have several:
In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford says to Paul Newman, "You just keep thinkin', Butch. That's what you're good at."
In The Sting, a vulnerable Johnny Hooker knocks on the door of a lady he met in a diner and responds to her assertion that she barely knows him. "You know me. I'm just like you. It's two in the morning and I don't know nobody."
As the title character in Jeremiah Johnson, Redford is teaching English to a woman from the Salish tribe. He starts with the word "yes." Pointing to himself, he says, "Great hunter, yes?" She nods and replies, "Yes." Pointing again to himself, Redford says, "Fine figure of a man, yes?" When she repeats the word he says, straight-faced, "Good. That is all you need know. For now."
In Out of Africa, his Denys Finch Hatton character tells Karin Blixen (Meryl Streep), "You do like to change things, don't you?"
As cowboy Sonny Steele In The Electric Horseman, he's skeptical when Jane Fonda's character an New York television reporter insists she's been to a rodeo. "Did you stay for the rattlesnake roundup?"
As Tom Booker in The Horse Whisperer, he says, "Truth is, I help horses with people problems."
Admittedly, all those lines are written by other people. But what makes Redford so good is that part of him inhabits all these characters, including Norman Maclean, the protagonist of A River Runs Through It, a film he directed. The off-screen Redford isn't bad, either, whether he's encouraging generations of younger filmmakers with his Sundance Film Festival, writing pro-environment op-eds for the Huffington Post, or giving interviews to Esquire magazine, which he does every few years.
Some of the lines in Redford's 2014 session with Esquire are as good as the ones in his movies. Here are a couple:
"When I was a kid, nobody told me I was good-looking. I wish they had. I would've had a better time."
"I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity -- suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad -- and I wanted out. I went to Utah because I didn't know anybody there."
I met Redford out West while covering the White House. The setting was a campaign photo-op at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the context being Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign. Shortly after Clinton was first inaugurated, Redford urged him to preserve the Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah. Three years later, in a creative use of the Antiquities Act, Clinton did just that, setting aside 1.7 million acres of Utah land. That picturesque scenery included Native American art carved into canyon walls, cliff dwellings, and other historic artifacts, but the real prize for Clinton, as cynics pointed out, was the eight electoral votes in Arizona, the state where Clinton actually made the announcement. (The gambit worked, too: With a little help from Ross Perot, Clinton carried Arizona in November.)
I was there the day of the September 1996 announcement, as was Redford, who was hardly unmindful of the political considerations involved. I asked him, "Is Clinton a good environmentalist?"
Flashing his famous smile, Redford replied, "He is today."
Nearly two decades later, he was asked for his thoughts as Donald Trump began his unlikely ascent in U.S. politics.
"I'm glad he's in there because him being the way he is and saying what he says the way he says it, I think that shakes things up -- and I think that's very needed," Redford replied. "Because on the other side, it's so bland, it's so boring, it's so empty."
Redford is a loyal Democrat, so when he says the "other side," he's referring to the Republican Party. Nonetheless, Trump gushed over Redford's remarks. "Wow!" Trump proclaimed in a tweet that reprised the lines I just quoted above. "Such nice words from Robert Redford on my running for President. Thank you, Robert."
But that wasn't all Redford said in his August 27, 2015, interview with Larry King. Redford prefaced his thoughts on Trump with this observation: "Look he's got such a big foot in his mouth, I'm not sure you're going to get it out."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
