How did Dolly Parton unite a polarised America?

0:02This is a global production. She was a poet and her poetry was about the ordinary lives of so many Americans. She supported avowedly gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter. She managed to make both Republican and Democrat adore her.

0:21Jon Sopel:She just walked that path so brilliantly, just transcended all of those things that divide people. This is a woman who wore the politics lightly and yet had a kind of morality to her that both a Tennessee churchgoer and a Tennessee drag queen could identify with. I'm sure I'll be as ridiculous as an old lady as I am as a young one. Somebody said to me once, what do you want people to say about you 100 years from now? And I said, I want them to say, boy, does she ever look good for her age. So that's sort of like I like them to think. Dolly Parton's death announced last night, I mean, really did send shockwaves around the world.

1:03Jon Sopel:Genuine, sincere, outpouring of emotion for a woman who did that rarest of rare things. She unified America. She may have been the most famous woman in the world. But more than that, as John said, she was virtually unique. Someone that Democrat and Republican alike could love and adore. What was the secret to that political success in this most outwardly seeming apolitical of women? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:40Jon Sopel:The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And on our morning call today, we discussed Andy Burnham on the world stage. We discussed whether we should be doing what's happening to housing in this country or whether enough is being built. we talked about America and sanctions and the war with Iran and found there was only one thing that we wanted to talk about on the podcast today, and that was Dolly Parton. And that left us with three options. Option one was to say nothing and just play her music for half an hour. But for rights reasons, that's not possible. Option two was to bring back Emily from holiday and have her sing Dolly Parton.

2:21Jon Sopel:The Queen of Appalachia herself. We decided against that. and so you've got me and Lewis talking about the Queen of Country. And I think there's a good reason to talk about her life and of course there are many people far more qualified than John or I, heaven forbid, to talk about her musical achievements and her cultural achievements in that sphere. But I genuinely do think it is worth thinking about Dolly Parton's life politically and as I was saying at the top there, on one level that's curious because she is someone who through, you know, a multi-decade career spanning, you know, more than half a century, tried to move as far away from politics as it was possible to be.

3:01You know, people throughout her entire life constantly tried to draw her on her own party politics. She always found a very elegant and witty way to sidestep it, including this here where she was being asked by a reporter, I think, how she was going to vote.

3:15Jon Sopel:I just try to make life a little better. I try to lift things up when they're down. I write my songs about that sort of thing. You'll find me and my opinions, you know, in a lot of the songs. But most of it's based on love and acceptance and lifting people up. I ask God every day to let me be a blessing to mankind and to uphold him and to glorify him. And that's how I go about my day. No political rallies for you then? No political rallies for me. My joke is that my daddy was a Republican, my mama was a Democrat, and I'm a hypocrite. Another time she was asked about whether she was going to run for president.

3:52She said, I think there are enough boobs in politics. So, you know, this is a woman who was very, very good at being able to just, you know, very deftly sidestep these questions about politics. and yet she was a deeply political person um in what she represented she wasn't big p party political or big p political and yet if you look at some of the positions that she held she her most famous song perhaps nine to five you can argue is basically a feminist and labor anthem about unequal pay and about women in the workplace she supported avowedly gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, including trans rights as well.

4:35She supported lots of causes, some of them political, some not. Most famously, her imagination library, which was, you know, which was dedicated to literacy and books for poor children across the world. And what she was able to do, and this is what was remarkable about her and probably unique is that she managed to make both Republican and Democrat adore her. There was a poll not long ago asking Americans which cultural or political figure they most admired. And Dolly Parton came out with a net favourability rating of plus 63, way head and shoulders above almost anybody else. And as I say, the unique thing about that was that she enjoyed equally favourable numbers from Democrat and Republican, which in today's hyper-polarised American political environment is virtually completely unique.

5:33Jon Sopel:Well, you've listed a number of areas where she's sort of, her viewpoint comes through. I mean, look at the culture wars that were stoked during Covid about face masks, vaccines and all the rest of it. And she made absolutely clear where she stood on the vital issue of whether people should get vaccinated or not against COVID. Well, hey, it's me. I'm finally going to get my vaccine. I'm so excited. I've been waiting a while. I'm old enough to get it and I'm smart enough to get it. So I'm very happy that I'm going to get my Moderna shot today. And I wanted to tell everybody, I think you should get out there and do it too.

6:17Jon Sopel:I even changed one of my songs to fit the occasion. It goes, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. I'm begging of you, please don't hesitate. And of course, so many people in America were hesitating about getting the vaccine. She even gave a million dollars to Moderna. Yeah, exactly. So she's played a very direct role in actively promoting people to get the vaccine and all sorts of other areas of social life, you know, which you talked about, Lewis, a moment ago, where she's taken a view without being directly political about any of it. And I think, I mean, Emily kind of came on our group chat a little bit earlier on.

6:58Jon Sopel:And she came up with, I thought, was a great observation. I'm being very nice to Emily Maitlis now. She's back next week. I'm just putting money in the bank here. But she said that, you know, the thing about Dolly Parton was that she sounded like a Republican, but acted like a democrat so she appealed to both camps in the what she did and the way that she behaved and I think there is something to that in the sense that I just think she was totally comfortable in her own skin totally comfortable with the wigs totally comfortable with the rhinestones and she was just a natural and she was whip smart you can just hear how deftly she navigates you know potential elephant traps and just says you know what I'm not going anywhere near any of them.

7:42Yeah, I mean, I think Emily's point is exactly right. She is someone, and I think this is again, what progressives in particular could learn from her life. Because as Emily said, and as we heard in that clip there, in many respects, a lot of the politics insofar as she did espouse them, it was never party political, she refused the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian award, twice. actually twice from Trump. And then because she refused it from Trump, because she said she had scheduling problems, she refused it when Biden offered it to her because she felt that if she accepted it from Biden, that would betray some sort of party politics.

8:21But progressives could learn a lot from her in a sense that she did share clearly quite a lot of certainly their social views and their views on a lot of contemporary political trends. But though her views were socially liberal, she was culturally conservative in her presentation. You know, she was Christian. She was patriotic. She was rooted in family. She never forgot where she came from. She was rooted in Appalachia. She was rooted in Tennessee. And that was so obvious about her. She had the politics of authenticity before the politics of authenticity became a thing. Existed, yeah. And as a result, her words travelled so much further than any liberal celebrity's words ever could.

9:05And this is the other thing that I think also added to that sense of of of cultural or of authenticity as well. And when I was thinking this morning about why it was that she was so popular, that she could hold some of these relatively polarized positions, albeit in a very subtle way. And yet she maintained that popularity with Republicans. I think Dolly Parton was political in the way that most Americans are political, actually, which is to say not very political. that they have certain views that come out now and again, but most of the time they don't want to talk about politics. And that is exactly what, I mean, people like you and me, John, you know, this is sort of slightly alien to us and it is from people who are hyper into politics, but we forget that even in America, which we think of as a hyper-politicised, hyper-polarised society, in fact, most Americans go through their days without thinking about politics very much and certainly usually without talking about politics very much and will only do so when pressed.

10:01And in a way, Dolly Parton encapsulated that perfectly and precisely. And that is why when she did talk about politics, whenever she did, it was powerful and it was authentic and it travelled because you knew it was her. Which is to be contrasted with a lot of modern cultural figures and celebrities and singers and actors who are avowedly often frequently political in a way that someone like you and I are, but which the average person isn't. I think that was Dolly Parton's great power.

10:30Jon Sopel:Yes. And when we had our call this morning about what we were going to do and how we were going to frame it and what we're going to say, we talked about, right, let's get some clips of her with various different presidents or video of her with various presidents. You can't find any. I mean, we found one photo of her with Jimmy Carter, which is a rather strange photo where Jimmy Carter seems to be almost pressing his body against her slightly. and Rosalind Carter watching on kind of askance. And that was it. We did find something about her talking about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Events in the White House.

11:10Jon Sopel:You got any of you on what's been going on there? Oh, well, that's sad. I really... It's like when something bad happens in your own family. It's sad and it's bad, but it's a bad wound, but you hope that it'll heal and not leave too many scars. Americans are upset, aren't they? They're really... Well, it's a bad thing. It's embarrassing. Did you ever meet President Clinton? Well, no, I didn't. It's probably just as well.

11:34Remarable. But I think that... The other thing I think about her is, and I think that adds to her allure, I think that what she was, if she was never avowedly political, she was avowedly moral. And we sort of heard that there. She had a sort of morality to her. She had a sort of moral teaching to her. This is another reason.

11:52Jon Sopel:She had a compass which pointed north and taught her what to say. Completely. And I sort of like, again, talking about our, might as well have just played our morning meeting. We've talked about it so much now. But when you said, actually, John, you said something that initially made me sort of slightly laugh this morning to myself. But the more I thought about it, I thought you were spot on. You actually compared her to our queen. Yeah. And when you said that, I was like, what, really? And I was thinking about it more on the train this morning. I was like, you know what, John's completely right.

12:15Not something I often say, but John was completely right. You know, she had a sort of deeply, you know, Trump has, And you can tell that she was special because Trump is on his best behavior, which doesn't happen very often. Right. Normally he hates it when the attention is on anybody but him. Right. But even Trump is recognized he's flying the flags for American public buildings are half massed for a week. Right. And there is a reason that to most Americans that will not seem over the top or silly. There was something in a very American way, a deeply Americana way that was quite stately about her, about there was something that was transcendent in a way.

12:50She rose above. She rose above. She rose above the politics. And yet, as we were saying, sort of in her own way, kind of omitted a certain politics. I mean, you know, you think about nine to five, nine to five, lyrics to nine to five, working nine to five. There's more politics in that than in some presidential campaign literature. Right. I mean, seriously. Right. It's basically an anthem about feminism. It's about labor rights. It's an anthem about and this is what's so impressive about her. you know basically a woman with agency and a woman needing agency again and this is something i think a lot of progressives and liberals could learn from she made feminism seem like common sense you know when she's telling the story of how she did not give elvis the right to sing i will always love you because his agent wanted always insisted that on any song that elvis sang he had a songwriting credit and she was like, no, she wouldn't give that.

13:44I mean, and imagine the pressure she must have felt as a youngish woman at that time to Elvis, you know, literally the king. And no, because she wanted ownership. She wanted agency. She wanted to have her right over this stuff. And in the end, very shrewd businesswoman that she was, it completely bore fruit because, you know, 20, 25 years later, whatever it was, she sold a song for the film The Bodyguard and made tens of millions of dollars from Whitney Houston's version of it. So, you know, I think this is a woman who in so many ways sort of wore this, wore the politics lightly and yet had a kind of morality to her that both, you know, a Tennessee churchgoer and a Tennessee drag queen could identify with and could find solidarity with.

14:26And I think that is really, really remarkable.

14:28Jon Sopel:And you're seeing that on social media from whether it be the drag queen end of that spectrum or the Tennessee churchgoer in the Smoky Mountains at the end of that spectrum. And when I said this morning about, you know, the queen, it was when it was, you know, when she died in 2022. I'd just come back from the States and I thought, God, what unites Britain anymore? when everyone was tearing each other to bits over vaccine, scepticism and all sorts of other issues, where there were these enormous polarising differences, you know, the Brexit rows of where we were as a country. And then the Queen dies and suddenly everyone finds that they do have this common bond that glues them together to some extent, not on everything, but it was, you know, you put aside your differences and you came together to celebrate a remarkable life.

15:17Jon Sopel:in this case the queen and I kind of argued at the time I thought this sort of justifies the monarchy alone if you can get so many people accepting that this is your you know figurehead she wasn't a figurehead in that formal way that the queen was but you realize that in her death and you know sometimes Lewis you and I have spoken about some of the kind of saccharine falseness of the way people react to certain public figures deaths i don't think there's any of that today following the news of dolly parton's uh passing i think it is absolutely sincere and it's heartfelt and she made everyone's lives kind of a bit better a bit brighter and she just transcended all of those things that divide people that you know if you look at some of the other great American music artists now if they were to die they would probably not have that you know Bruce Springsteen would be divisive you know he was seen as a figure that was too closely allied to the Democrats and there'll be other people as well who will be seen as one side of the aisle or the other and she just walked that path so brilliantly.

16:27I think and I think there's two reasons for that one is as we sort of touched upon her authenticity but it wasn't just her authenticity it was that she was never patronizing and again this is what i mean about sort of liberal movements progressive movements learning from someone like her and needing communicators like her because she could have all of these positions i mean look what she said about trans trans right she's basically like you know i just i i when i need to pee i don't really care where it is you're talking about toilets now it's coming out of a sort of you know hollywood type or or sort of uber-liberal and easily excoriated, easily dismissed.

17:05And yet there was just something about this woman which was almost sort of the politics of decency. I think she represented sort of what is basically a disappearing form, not only in American public life but in celebrity culture, which is she never appeared to be saying something because she wanted the approbation for saying it. She never appeared to be saying something.

17:23Jon Sopel:It was a virtue signaling. No, not for a second. And there wasn't any hint of that or element of that. She could support gay marriage, she could support Black Lives Matter, she could support trans rights and vaccination without treating people who disagreed with her as stupid or irredeemable because she would say it in such a fleeting way and she would say it with such sort of quiet authority. I don't think that was political cowardice on her part. I just think it spoke of her authority as a cultural figure. I also think that she could laugh at herself. And I think that that is an underestimated quality to have the ability that she would laugh about herself in the wigs she would laugh about her body shape she would laugh about all these things can i say one more thing about right i'm sort of waxing lyric on that i think the other part the reason why um left and right could could find solidarity in her is actually something that isn't talked about much in these terms in american politics but it's basically about class like this is a proper class story right this is a proper a literal log cabin story.

18:29I mean, this is a woman who is born in rural Appalachia and is one of 12, and literally her parents are so poor they have to pay the doctor with a sack of cornmeal, right? And then she becomes one of the richest people in the world through her own guile and her own talent. And if you... Some of her lyrics, I mean, I was reading this morning loads of stuff about her, and you know, in Coat of Many Colours, we can't play it, but Coat of Many Colours, right? This is class politics, right? And this is a class story with which so many people around the world and America will identify. So with patches on my britches and holes in both my shoes, in my coat of many colours, I hurried off to school just to find the others laughing and making fun of me.

19:13In my coat of many colours, my mumma made for me. That's poetry. she was a poet and her poetry was about the ordinary lives of so many Americans who loved her for having the same experience that she did and they had we'll be back in just a moment

19:47Jon Sopel:We are going to have a slight shift of gear now, a minor change in direction and tone. And I'm trying to think of ways of doing it elegantly to go from Dolly Parton to the CIA director in Moscow. And frankly, I'm floundering. Well, if you can't, John, if you can't do the soap or segue, then frankly, no one can. Well, I'm struggling. OK, all right. Well, anyway, yes. Bit of a weird one, this. Could be nothing. Could be a third world war. Who knows? Should we just leave it there? Only time will tell. Only time will tell. Lewis Goodall, the news agents, Central London. Well, this is the news that the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, has, and this is very unusual.

20:35It's emerged in the last 24 hours or so. He travelled to Moscow for unannounced talks. This is John Ratcliffe reportedly arriving in the Russian capital earlier on Tuesday. Neither Washington nor Moscow have confirmed the nature of the visit or who he was due to meet, although there has been speculation that Mr Ratcliffe might have been meeting the Russian president Vladimir Putin himself. Now, in-person talks between this kind of high-level American and Russian officials, a pretty rare, even rarer for the head of the CIA to turn up in Moscow unannounced and not say what he's doing. And the reason why, one of the reasons why it has prompted such a flurry of interest is the last time this happened amidst the end of the Biden administration.

21:24But when the head of the CIA turned up in Moscow, it was drumroll in the early part of 2022, just before the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the then CIA director reportedly told the Russian president and his officials that the Americans knew what they were about to do and were giving him a stiff warning to back off, which, of course, Putin did not do. But it has led to some speculation that perhaps a similar trick could be happening here with speculation that maybe Vladimir Putin might be about to do the thing that has long been feared, which is to, in some way, try and stress test NATO unity along its eastern frontier, possibly in the Baltic states.

22:07Jon Sopel:So this has always been the long fear. And funnily enough, you talk about the previous CIA director, William Burns. I heard him speak the other day, actually, and he was fascinating about that and what it was like to deal with Putin. But, you know, Burns had had a long relationship. He'd been involved in diplomacy. He'd been an ambassador. And then he, you know, he became head of the CIA, despite not having an intelligence background um so it wasn't seen as that abnormal for him to go to moscow at this particular time and also the manner of it is so weird and i don't want to go all geeky now but this guy arrives john ratcliffe arrives on a c-17 globe master transporter planes these are the great big heavy lift aircraft that have not got normal seating and it's where you You know, when the president when the president goes abroad, you know, Marine One will be loaded onto the back of one of these things and the beast and all the attendant vehicles and heavy equipment that needs to go.

23:12Jon Sopel:Why has he arrived on a military transporter plane? Was there kit on it? You can just see how ripe this is for speculation and also the question of whether the Ukrainians were aware of this trip. It looks like they were because, you know, it seems that the firing of long range drones did not happen at any point whilst he was in the air, landed or departed. And we have had no word from Moscow and no word from Washington about who he met, what the subjects were for discussion, how many officials travelled with him. It's all very much in the dark. Indeed. And one of the reasons that were no attacks is that a Ukrainian official has told CBS News that the Americans did ask Kiev to suspend their drone and missile attacks until the delegation had left for obvious reasons.

24:08and indeed as I said John a lot of speculation, I mean John Foreman who is a former British military attaché to Moscow has said he told the BBC the visit he thought would most likely be focused on escalation management particularly given recent speculation that drone activity in Germany could be linked to Russia saying the Americans don't normally send such a high ranking official to Moscow unannounced at short notice unless something is up. Other speculation as well that there have been a prisoner exchange deal which has been done quite recently it might be related to that the truth is no one knows or at least no one um apart outside of the us and uh russian intelligence communities and governments and maybe our own really knows what is going on but it is interesting as well because ratcliffe is known to be one of the because there was some speculation to say oh god what does this mean for ukraine are the russians the americans sort of cooking up some deal that would leave ukraine high and dry sort of countervailing view to that is that ratcliffe is one of the most hawkish anti-Russian voices within the Trump administration.

25:13So for him to be doing it and for him to be there sort of has indicated that perhaps this is something more on the warning, don't do something, end of the spectrum, although that's not very comforting either in some ways.

25:26Jon Sopel:Yes, you know, look, it sounds like we are saying we don't know very much. It's true. We don't know very much. But I'm slightly surprised that it hasn't had more attention. because it because it is so extraordinary it's so exceptional for something like this to happen the manner in which has happened the silence of moscow the silence of washington these are not normal events so we just wanted to kind of wave a flag in this general direction to say not a white flag not a white flag but to say we are fascinated by what is going on and we think this is you know potentially really really important and you know if they have got wind if the american does have intelligence, that Russia is planning something in the Baltics or in Poland, which is the other thing that I've seen being speculated upon, then that is kind of a big, big moment for the world.

26:17Jon Sopel:And interesting to see whether this director of the CIA will have any more success than the last success, the last leader of the CIA, who patently failed when he warned Russia against the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Well, it is interesting. I mean, there's been so much speculation that this might come now because so many analysts are talking about, you know, now or, you know, the imminent future being potentially if Putin does want to try something, that this would be the sweet spot for him. We obviously know that European-US relations are pretty much all time low. We know that America is bogged down in the absolute quagmire, the mess that is Iran.