Rob Reiner loved America. He thought it could be better

0:00America first got to know Rob Reiner in Norman Lear's transformative sitcom All in the Family. Mom, Daddy, this is Michael Stivick. Michael, this is my mother, Mrs. Bunker. Hi, how are you? How do you do? And my father, Mr. Bunker. It was 1971. The Vietnam War was raging. The Civil Rights Movement was still front and center. And Michael Stivick, better known as Meathead, was the long-haired, tie-dye shirt-wearing lefty. It made him the perfect foil to Carol O 'Connor's Archie, a white, working-class bigot from Queens who had no interest in changing with the times. Anything interesting in the paper?

0:42Yeah, 200 arrested at the Vietnam Day peace demonstration. 200. They should have thrown a whole bunch of them in the can. Look at that picture there. Here they are, throwing all kinds of junk and deepers at officers of the law, desecrating on the American flag. The hell are them peace nicks won anyhow. And when Archie tells his son-in-law Meathead that if the protesters don't like the war, they can amscray, Reiner Stivick tries to school Archie about all the ways he thinks America is falling short. Well, what would our leaving solve? I mean, with or without protesters, this country would still have the same problems.

1:15What problems? Well, it's the war, the racial problem, the economic problem, the pollution problem. Oh, come on, if you want a nitpick. Over the years, Reiner's life came to imitate art. Like his alter ego, he spoke out about all the ways that he thought America could be better. And he put his money where his mouth was, quite literally. In the late 90s, thinking that more needed to be done to support early childhood development, Reiner pushed an initiative in California to tax tobacco and use the proceeds to support early childhood education. He explained the effort to interviewer Charlie Rose.

1:48When I hit on this, I knew this was a way to go. This was an answer to really having an impact on crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, child abuse, welfare dependency, and virtually every other society. Okay, you're going too fast for me. The First Five program is still around today, but that's just one of the causes that Reiner put his money and his stardom behind. He worked for years to try and legalize gay marriage. And when in 2016, North Carolina's governor signed a bill preventing transgender people from using bathrooms that match their gender identities, Reiner protested that move on MSNBC.

2:22It's the last piece of the civil rights puzzle that's being put into place. It's the LBGT community is the only community that is not looked at equally under the law. Now, Archie Bunker might have called all of this nitpicking. But speaking to Fox News earlier this week, Reiner's friend, the actor and diehard conservative James Woods, had a different view. When people would say to me, well, what do you think of his politics? I would say, I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot. Do I agree with some of or many of his ideas on how that patriotism should be enacted to celebrate the America that we both love?

3:01No. But he doesn't agree with me either, but he also respects my patriotism. Consider this. Rob Reiner spent his life trying to fix what he saw as America's shortcomings. In an interview shortly before his death, he explained why he was optimistic that America could be better.

3:23From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

3:35It's Consider This from NPR. It's been a week of tributes to Rob Reiner. The actor and director was found dead on Sunday along with his wife, Michelle Singer Reiner. Their son has been charged with their murders. And those tributes, they have centered on Reiner's acting, the movies he's directed, but also on his political activism. It's something he talked to the journalist Todd Purdom about shortly before he died. Purdom wrote about that interview in the New York Times this week and joins us now. Thanks for being on All Things Considered. Thanks for asking me, Scott. When did you have this conversation with Rob Reiner?

4:06Actually, on November 4th, Election Day, in his home in Brentwood, where he had lived for many years and where before him, his mentor Norman Lear had lived. I think people over a certain age might squirm when I ask you to contextualize Norman Lear, but it's been a while. For those who aren't as deeply familiar with just his role as a legendary TV producer, remind us who he was and his relationship with Reiner. Yes, Norman Lear had an extraordinary American life. He lived to be 101 and a half years old. But in the 1970s, he was the progenitor of the dominant television series of that decade. He had, at one point, five of the top 10 shows on the air, and the breakthrough show was All in the Family, the story of a family in Queens with a bigoted, white, loading dock worker father who sparred all the time with his son-in-law, a liberal, pro-McGovern voter named Michael Stivick.

4:56And at the age of 23, that was Rob Reiner's breakthrough role. And this is a show that tapped into real life conversations and arguments that so many families across the country were having were playing out on that TV show. Yes, and it brought the situation comedy of age, it dealt with issues that were of moment and current import in national life, not with burned cakes and messed up homework and who dented dad's car. It was really the beginning of adult sitcom entertainment. And Rob Reiner's participation in the show and his, he also participated at times as a writer, was a crucial part of the dynamic.

5:38Tell me a little bit about the projects that Lear was involved in on the political side.

6:07And ultimately, that organization was instrumental in defeating the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. And Norman, you know, to the end of his life, kept up civic activism as became a model for Rob. What did he tell you that he learned from Lear? He learned that an entertainment person could have a role in public life, especially if he did his homework. And he was determined always to do that. He didn't want to be mocked by the right with half-baked views and hadn't done his homework on the issues that he cared about. I think that's something that struck a lot of people. It's very easy when you're at a certain level of success to write a check and maybe make a statement or two into a microphone or on social media.

6:49Rob Reiner went so far beyond that. He got deeply involved in the various political initiatives that he wanted to work on. Yes, he wrote plenty of checks, as Norman also did, but he got very involved in the brass tax fieldwork. In 1998, he was the leading light of a California ballot initiative that would tax the tobacco industry to finance early childhood education programs. And when the measure passed, he then became the first head of the statewide program that was focusing on the first five years of life and education for children. A few years later, when California voters passed a ballot measure that outlawed gay marriage, Rob felt that that was the last frontier of civil rights.

7:29He was involved in the founding of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which financed the court case that ultimately led to the Supreme Court's embrace of gay marriage. I'm sure you've been thinking about this over the past week. Do you have a thought of what one particular area or two really kind of would be his most lasting area of influence? Well, I think you really have to say the successful fight for gay marriage, although there are some forces on the Supreme Court itself that have now suggested that decision should be revisited. But you have to say that that is a remarkable achievement in American history.

8:04And when he got that battle going, one of the first calls he made was to Norman Lear, who kicked in$100 ,000 of seed money to help support the fight. When you talked to him last month, how much did you talk about the current mood of the country? Quite a bit, actually, Scott. He was reflective about it. And one of the things that struck me and that I'll take away from the conversation, especially in the poignancy of hindsight, is how optimistic he remains. He acknowledged that we're seemingly in a dark and backward moving time, but that in the arc of American history, as Martin Luther King said, you know, the moral arc of the universe does eventually bend toward justice.

8:40And he seemed very hopeful about the ultimate future of the United States and of our experiment with, you know, 250 years of a democratic republic, as he put it. What did you make of that? I mean, if you are somebody who had Rob Reiner's worldview, 2025 was not really a year for optimism. him. No, and I think he acknowledged that. But I think like Norman before him, he believed very strongly that you had to look to the light where you could find it. You had to look for the glimmers of hope and for the, you know, glimmers of possibility. And he seemed more determined than ever to keep up that fight.

9:17He was not sounding retreat. Yeah. Is there anything else from that conversation that you've been thinking about since Sunday? Well, just how warm he is, how warm he was, how embracing he was as a personality. You know, he seemed to have lost a good deal of weight in recent years, but he was a great big bear of a man. And, you know, he asked me a lot about my children, what they were doing. He's just suffused with a great deal of warmth. And it was also, I will think very much, I'm kind of haunted by sitting in that warm house, which had, as I said, belonged to Norman Lear before that, and had at one point belonged to Henry Fonda.

9:55in the 1930s, and Henry Fonda's Rose Garden is still there. So I think of the, you know, the tragedy that unfolded there last weekend and the way that that house has, you know, been exploded as a refuge for his family. Yeah. There have been so many conversations about framing Rob Reiner's artistic legacy. Do you have any sense what he would have framed his political legacy as, how he would have summed it up? Well, you know, he's been quoted a lot. I've seen a lot of quotes this week that his fundamental belief was in the golden rule. Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. And if you did that, that was enough for him.

10:32And I think that's what he tried to live out. You know, he really did try to put his money where his mouth was in that regard. And I think show mercy, do kindness, walk humbly with your God. I think those were kind of his watchwords. That is journalist and writer Todd Purdom, who's working on a book about Norman Lear. His most recent book is Desi Arnaz, The Man Who Invented Television. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Elena Burnett. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.