Karl Zinsmeister: Building a creative career

Karl Zinsmeister, journalist and vice president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, was George W. Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser, but how he got there is a story worth contemplating by college seniors thinking through their next step.

After college you worked for an influential senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York, but it was disappointing. The senator was a fascinating guy, interested in poverty, race, welfare, immigration. But it was an election year. He was running for reelection in a very liberal state, and he couldn’t even talk about those things honestly; he had to politic. I saw the gap between the kinds of fresh and unorthodox thinking he was capable of, and what we had to do to win an election.

So you did something unorthodox? Washington, D.C., back in 1981 was a bereft city with a lot of beaten-down real estate. It’s astonishing for me today to drive through Washington and see the wealth sloshing around: That wasn’t always the case. When I realized that within walking distance of where I worked in the Senate stood beautiful 19th-century houses that had fallen into ruin in a very romantic way and were just begging for someone to come rescue them, that appealed to me. I like physical labor. My grandfather was a farmer. My dad was an engineer. I grew up with tools. I decided I would buy one of these old houses.

You rebuilt the house yourself, including the wiring. Yes, I didn’t use any other laborers or any architect or anybody else—I did it all myself. I got out books on how to wire houses and how to do plumbing. I grew to love all that stuff. There’s joy in this, but it’s more than that. I worried we’d become a country with day-to-day life consigned to experts. It’s not healthy that none of us has a clue how our car works anymore. We’re completely dependent upon a class of “other men” to take care of our cars, fix the house that our wife and children live in with us, or solve a problem in the neighborhood. The traditional notion of citizenship in this country was that you are self-reliant. I understand that we live in a new world, but I do aspire to have as many competencies as possible.

‘Life is such a joy. There are so many things you can experience, taste, and wander through—but don’t expect to have it all.’

How many houses have you done? I think 10. For a while it was an economic imperative. I aspired to make it as a freelance writer, and that’s a very good way to go broke. I didn’t want to take grants—I thought that would probably prevent me from selling my work on the free market, which is how you get a good signal that what you’re doing is worthwhile. At that point I had a wife and children, so I decided to have a split personality and work as a carpenter or plasterer or electrician for half or three-quarters of the day, and in the evenings I would write. I did that for years. As I got better and as editors began to recognize me and I could get my pieces placed, I went three-quarters, one-quarter the other way. About the time my back gave out I was able to retire and become a full-time writer.

So, it doesn’t sound as if you were always resumé-building and thinking, “OK, I need to take this step to move to this step, to get to this step, and this step.” You had a circuitous route. I follow my loves. Life is such a joy. It’s such a magical world we live in. There are so many things you can experience, taste, and wander through—but don’t expect to have it all. It’s delightful to be a freelance writer, but you have to learn to live cheaply. I lived for three years in a 12-foot-long travel-trailer with nothing but a garden hose for my water supply. That’s what it took for me to be able to afford that first renovation experience. If you can live on a nickel, that’s power. If you reverse the order—figure out how much money you have to have and then what career goes with that—you’ve tremendously limited your options.

Later, during the Iraq War, you were well-established as a writer and editor, but then you embedded with the military—not just having cameras on you for a moment and then heading to a hotel, but living a soldier’s life. I hope it doesn’t sound horrible for me to say this was also a thrilling experience for me. I would not have covered the first Gulf War where it was basically a bunch of reporters in a theater with the general showing videos of what had happened, then back to high-rise hotels that night and a steak dinner. When I first heard the U.S. government was considering letting reporters onto the battlefield without restrictions, without handlers, without guides, I was shocked and thrilled. That’s my style of reporting.

We’ll talk more about that experience and your White House time later, but I want to ask about your new book, The Almanac of American Philanthropy. Maybe the biggest lesson I took out of the White House is that sometimes we don’t need leadership: We need deference to local forces that will solve the problem if you don’t get in the way. That’s a big part of philanthropy, too, because people in most communities know what the good schools are. They know the good doctors in that neighborhood. From Washington, you have no idea which are the good schools. By relinquishing power and equipping local saints to solve problems, you will often have a much better outcome.

Usually better than government can provide? Government only has so much reach and breadth: Philanthropists tend to solve problems in much more inventive, creative, and efficient ways.

Let’s look at an example. What did Milton Hershey do with his profits from candy bars? He and his wife were unable to have children, but based on his own experience growing up in an unhappy home he wanted to save other children from those same trials. He decided to create little houses with married couples who would be surrogate parents for children who had lost theirs, or who were basically derelict. These houses literally surrounded his own home: first one, then two, then 10, then 20. He built up this ring and created an impressive orphanage where children gained attention, affection, and education. Then he gave his entire company to create the Milton Hershey School. The school still owns most of the stock in The Hershey Company, and 2,000 kids go through this school every year and have their lives transformed.

See “Karl Zinsmeister: Relinquishers and polyarchs.”

Later this year we’ll have more from Karl Zinsmeister, including thoughts on his White House experience.