The Daily Signal - #454: Why Actor Gary Sinise Is a Grateful American

Episode Date: May 6, 2019

Twenty-five years ago, Gary Sinise played the role of Lt. Dan Taylor in the blockbuster movie "Forrest Gump." It transformed his acting career and changed his life. Today, Sinise is an outspoken advocate for America's military veterans. He's also the author of "Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service." Sinise spoke to The Daily Signal about the book, his acting career, and his passion for helping veterans.Also on today’s show:• Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich talks about his novel, "Collusion." It is the story of two American heroes who are confronting their own struggles while at the same time facing the challenges of Russia and its desire to poison its enemies.• Virginia Allen has an encouraging story about a newfound friendship between three young African American men and an elderly widow. • We share our favorite letters to the editor. Your letter could be featured on our show; write us at [e-mail] or call 202-608-6205.The Daily Signal podcast is available on the Ricochet Audio Network. You also can listen on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts.If you like what you hear, please leave a review or give us feedback. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, May 6th. I'm Rob Bluey. And I'm Virginia Allen. Today we are featuring Rob's interview with actor Gary Seneath. He talks about his new book, Grateful American, and why he's so passionate about helping veterans. We also share your letters, and Virginia has an encouraging story about a newfound friendship between three young African-American men and an elderly widow.

Before we begin, we'd like to ask you to help us spread the word about the day Signal podcast. Please give us a five-star review on iTunes and share this episode with your family and friends. This will help us make sure we are continuing to grow and reach more listeners. Stay tuned for today's show coming up next. We are joined at the Daily Signal by Gary Senise, the famous actor from Forrest Gump, and also the author of a new book called Grateful American, A Journey from Self to Service. Gary, thanks for being with us. Hey, thanks for having you. I want to start with the book. It's a great book. It tells your story. Tell us why you decided to write it. Well, you know, I've been very, very active with military and veteran support for many years,

and I've engaged with many different military charities. I've been all around the world. I've been to the war zones. I've been to the hospitals. I've been involved with many projects to support the men and women who serve. And I thought, you know, maybe I'd start to document that in some kind of way through a book or essays or whatever. And then I started to think, well, how did I kind of get to all that? And so I started to retrace my steps and it turned into an autobiography that really starts with, you know, where I grew up and how I grew up, how I got into acting, my sort of singular focus on self, you know, career. movie business, television business, theater,

to the broader focus of service to others after September 11th. There's a great chapter in the book called Turning Point. It really, it talks about that moment in my life where I turned kind of away from just this focus on my career to this much broader effort to try to help our veterans and support our military. and that's turned into just a full-time thing. So it's all documented in there.

We appreciate you telling that story. You grew up in the Chicago suburbs. You were early on interested in sports and music and then acting really changed your life. But it was that role that you played, Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump, that really introduced you to Americans in a new way. So did you ever imagine that that movie

would have that transformational effect on your life? Well, not at the time. You know, I knew I was working with good people. Tom Hanks was very, very, you know, popular at the time. Bob Zemeckis was an outstanding director. He'd already directed the Back to the Future series and Roger Rabbit and, you know, very, very successful films. So I knew I was working with a lot of good people.

So that's a good start. But you can never tell, you know, what something is, you know, how something's going to go. We didn't know that the movie would be as big a hit as it was. I knew I very much wanted to play that part. I had Vietnam veterans in my family. I had supported Vietnam veterans in the 80s, 70s and 80s, trying to help them in various ways in Chicago.

And then along comes this opportunity very early in my movie career. I'd only done a few things to audition for to play a wounded Vietnam veteran. I very much wanted to do it. I was lucky to get the part. And it had, it changed my life in many ways, not just with the acting career and what it did to kind of, you know, reshape that because the movie was so popular and all of that. But it opened a door to helping our wounded veterans in a way that I couldn't have predicted at the time. And today you have the Gary Sinise Foundation. You have the Lieutenant Dan Band.

There's a lot that you do for veterans. What's one of the most memorable moments that you've had or experiences you've had working? with a veteran? It's very difficult to pinpoint one thing. I try to talk about a number of people that have inspired me in the book. From Medal of Honor recipients, I'm very involved with the Medal of Honor Society and the Medal of Honor Foundation. I have been for over a dozen years now.

Met extraordinary Americans who did extraordinary things and survived and received the Medal of Honor, Congressional Medal of Honor for that. So some of those I talk about in the book, I have many, many friends in the Medal of Honor Society. I could tell stories all day long about each and every one of them. Some of the many, many hundreds, if not thousands of wounded service members that I've met over the years going to the hospitals and watching them in various stages of their recovery and being inspired by how they persevere through that physical challenge that they've had.

built houses for quadruple amputees and triple amputees and double amputees, traumatic brain injury, very severe burns, spinal cord injuries. I mean, you name it. I've met these folks, and they have changed my life for the better. They really put things in perspective, and giving back to them has been a great privilege. How can people find out more about the work that you're doing or support the foundation? Well, I've been involved in this for many. many years. My foundation is actually in the scope of things for how long I've been at it. The foundation is relatively new. We're only about eight, eight and a half, almost nine years in. But I've been doing this for many, many years, supporting many other military charities.

My particular military nonprofit is the Gary Seneese Foundation. And you can go to garycinese Foundation. And you can pick up a copy of Grateful American, learn the story of how I got into this and why I'm so passionately involved in it, why I care so much about it, what my goals are in the future. You can learn some of those things at the Gary Snee's Foundation. Tremendous videos on our YouTube channel that show the people that we're working with and the impact that we're making on them and the impact that they make on us as well. You wrote a piece that people can find on, our listeners can find on the Daily Signal on the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and how that day had a profound impact on your life and how it

changed your thinking. The work that you do supports not only veterans, but as I understand, first responders and others who come to the aid of others. So can you talk a little bit about where we stand? I mean, we've just had a terrible attack in Sri Lanka. I mean, terrorism is still having a profound effect across the globe. No question. And our people are still getting hurt. I mean, we lose people every month. You know, they get blown up or hurt. We just, there was just a funeral just today for a firefighter in New York City who also was serving the Marine Corps and was killed. Just terrible things that continue to happen.

Our Gold Star families, there's thousands of them. We take care of them, try to help them through. I would say that unfortunately there's kind of a disconnect between the average American and its military. If you don't have a personal relationship with somebody serving in the military, a friend, a family member, somebody you've grown up with or something like that. You may not have any relationship to what the military, relation to what the military actually does for us. I would caution that that puts us in jeopardy. There's a great quote from Calvin Coolidge

that says, the nation which forgets its defenders will itself be forgotten. I don't think we can ever forget our defenders. It weakens our nation when we do. We saw that after Vietnam when we forgot our defenders and turned our back on them. I work each and every day to try to ensure that that doesn't happen again. And if people go to Gary Seneese Foundation.org, they can learn a lot more about the great people that are serving our country. Well, Gary Seneas, thank you for reminding us about the contributions they made. Thank you for spending time with the Daily Signal and sharing your story. I appreciate that. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head?

If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to Scotus 101. a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Last week, I had the opportunity to host a special guest at the Heritage Foundation. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich joined us to talk about his new novel, Collusion. We'd like to play a portion of his remarks for you on this show. First, there really is collusion. Robert Hansen was an FBI agent who spied for the Russians for 25 years. There was, Ames, was a CIA agent who spied for the Russians for about 20 years.

Alger Hiss, the second or third highest person at the State Department, was given personally a medal by Stalin, the highest medal the Soviet Union had for civilians, for the quality of the work he had done representing Russia inside the State Department. So we have had, in fact, Diana West in her remarkable book, American Betrayal, estimates that there were 500 Soviet agents at one point working in the United States government. So the notion of collusion is real. Second, the Russians do have this weird fascination

with poison. I don't know of any other country in the world that goes to such a radically sense. They invent new poisons, and then they find people to try them out on. So back about 2006, they wanted to kill a particular dissident who had fled Russia and was living in London. They used polonium to.

Now, Polonium 210 is only produced by the Russians. And because it's radioactive, it leaves a very clear trend. It's very clear if you have Polonium 210 right here, you'll know exactly what it is and you'll know exactly where it came from. And apparently the Russians like you to know they're poisoning you because they're sending a signal to would-be defectors. Just remember if you leave, we may kill you. So last year they had two guys who went and put,

smeared a nerve agent on the doorknob of a defector in Britain. And, of course, London is the most heavily televised place in the world. They literally have these guys on a series of street cameras walking up to the door. So they know exactly who they were, and they know exactly what they're doing. It was a Russian nerve agent. Luckily, the British had an anecdote for it. And so the man and his daughter survived although I think they're both still seriously ill. These are long-term, I mean, these are serious poisons.

These are not mild things. So we wanted to take the collusion of an American and the Russian propensity for poisoning. And we began to put together a story. Now, we also wanted it to be a very modern story. So in Brett Garrett, we have a Navy SEAL who is severely wounded in combat, ends up to treat the pain using opioids and ends up with opioid addiction. And part of the story is the struggle he has struggling with his addiction while trying to serve the country. Now, to put all this in context, I now do a free podcast at nudesworld.com.

Last Sunday's podcast was a CIA agent of 30 years' experience who had actually gotten people out of Moscow when the Russians were trying to kill him. And so he gives you a sense that part of the story we're telling you has a real depth of reality that these things really do happen, and there really are techniques and approaches and ways of trying to evade the KGB. The other, next Sunday, we have two Army combat doctors who are developing non-addictive pain treatments and talk about the work they're doing and how they're doing it. It's really pretty fascinating stuff trying to respond to this. crisis of opioid addiction.

The process of writing this and laying it out, we want to communicate to people that you have to be very aware how dangerous Russia is. We open with a quote from Putin who said that the Cold War isn't over. And Putin had said at one point that the greatest disaster of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Empire. And people who talk about it.

looking at Putin's eyes or understanding Putin or a reset with Russia. This is a KGB colonel who spent time in Dresden, Germany, trying to keep the East Germans under control. He has all the skills and attitudes of a KGB colonel, which means that torture and murder are reasonable behaviors. It's all in a day. You know, it's just a day's work. You know, three tortures, two murders. You know, tomorrow morning we'll go back and start again. He is extraordinarily tough. And he's surrounded by tough people. I mean, the base of Putin's power is three things.

It's the KGB, now with a new name, but still the KGB. It is criminals, and it's oligarch billionaires. And those three form the baseline of how he stays in power. If you're a reporter and you write negatively about Putin, you probably don't get to write a sequel because they kill you. And this is a regime of fear. He's playing a relatively weak hand, and he knows it. So he tries to win on the margins.

He does things that are not direct confrontation. He currently has some people in Venezuela to sort of annoy us, but he probably won't confront us if we're serious. He occupied Crimea knowing that no one would do anything, and he has been nibbling at eastern Ukraine, but in a very controlled, careful way. But as recently as a few weeks ago, they assassinated somebody in Kiev.

So this was an ongoing, very real problem. problem. I think you'll find the novel very exciting, and Paige Turner, and I think you'll also find at the end of it that you see the world, sometimes the value of fiction is it allows you to piece together at a human level realities that you don't quite pull out of the daily headline. Tom Clancy was probably the best of this, the hunt for it October, is still the best book ever written about modern submarine warfare. Clancy is the person who had a 747 crash into the Capitol, and years later when people were so shocked at commercial airliners

hitting the World Trade Center, I kept saying to him, he wrote about this almost a decade earlier. So when people said, oh, gee, we never thought about an airliner hitting a building. Well, Clancy wrote an entire novel about it. So I think there's sometimes when you learn things from novels that are more coherent and make more sense though when you try to piece them together in daily newspaper reports. You can watch Speaker Gingrich's full remarks at heritage.org.

His book is called Collusion. We'll be right back with this week's letters to the editor. Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at letters at dailysignal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each Monday, we feature our favorites on this show and in our Morning Bell email newsletter.

Virginia, who's up first? Tony Kanzza from Philadelphia writes about the Mueller investigation. Mr. Mueller, I want my tax money back. I had thought Mueller's task was to investigate collusion based on a false, salacious steel dossier. His job was to establish fact and indict, if appropriate. The investigation found no facts to support. any collusion, but Mueller could not stop there. A dossier with no facts started off this whole nonsense. Now Mueller produces a report with innuendo and unsubstantiated opinion. And Bernie Penkin

writes, I have been downloading and listening to The Daily Signal for a while now. Really enjoyed Miranda Finney's story about adoption. As a parent of two adopted children from Liberia, my ears always perk up when the subject gets a mention. Adoption is such a worthwhile thing to do. We adopted older children, which has its own set of challenges, but I don't regret doing it. My kids were born in the middle of the librarian Civil War, and the adoption was made final right after the war ended. Today, both are healthy and happy in their lives. We couldn't have been more blessed by them.

Perhaps you could spotlight adoption success stories from time to time just to show that there are folks out there who will love an unwanted child. Your letter could be featured on next week's show. Send an email to letters at dailysignal.com or leave a voicemail message at 202-608-6205. Do you own an Amazon Echo? You can now get the Daily Signal podcast every day as part of your daily Alexa Flash briefing. It's easy to do.

Just open your Amazon Alexa app, go to settings, and select Flash Briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast, and add it to your flash briefing so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. Virginia, you have an inspiring good news story to share with us today. Take it away. Thanks, Rob. An elderly Alabama widow named Eleanor was eating dinner alone at a local barbecue restaurant earlier this month, one day before what would have been her 60th wedding anniversary. Jamario Howard, a young African-American man, was also enjoying dinner at the restaurant,

with two of his buddies. Jamario noticed that Eleanor was sitting alone, and he decided he was going to do something about it. He just came up and he said, I saw you sitting over here alone, and he said, do you mind having some company? And she said, go right ahead. And then I introduced myself,

and she introduced herself. And it's kind of how it all got started. Jamario and his friends joined Eleanor at her booth, and the four quickly found themselves talking and laughing. Out of that one dinner, they have all become fast friends and have determined to make time for each other on a regular basis. When you make that kind of connection with somebody, it's hard to let it go. I already feel like we're her grandkids.

Eleanor says that what these three young men have done for her serves as an example of the importance of people taking the time to stop and care for other people. I used to say when I was younger and I still said today, like, I'm going to change the world somehow. And I don't know how, because I'm not rich, I'm not famous, and I'm not very smart either. So I can't be the president. But we can show the world that it's all right to be kind. And then before long, maybe the world be a bunch better place. I have to say well done to Jamario and his friends for stepping out of their comfort zone

to friend someone who's in a totally different season of life from them. This is such a powerful reminder that we need to stop once in a while. and take time for the people around us because Jamario's right. This is truly how we change the world by loving that person that is in front of us. Great story, Virginia. Reminds me of the conversation that we had on this podcast with Arthur Brooks, the author of the new book, Love Your Neighbor. I mean, it seems to have some of the same very lessons that Arthur recommended.

And I would really encourage our listeners maybe on this very day to go out and try to do something like we heard in that story. Thanks for sharing it. Absolutely, Rob. We're going to leave it there for today. The Daily Signal podcast comes to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. You can find it on the Rurcashay Audio Network along with our other podcasts. All of the shows can be found at daily signal.com slash podcasts. You can also subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app.

And be sure to listen every weekday by adding the Daily Signal podcast as part of your Alexa Flash briefing. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review or give us feedback. It means a lot to us and helps us spread the word to others. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at DailySignal and Facebook.com slash the DailySignal News. The Daily Signal podcast will be back tomorrow with Kate and Daniel. Have a great week. You've been listening to The Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis.

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