Have you ever had an incident in your life that suddenly propelled you in a whole new direction?
That happened to Pat Brown. After a close personal run-in with a suspected criminal Brown embarkrf on a whole new career path, even though many people said she was too old, and would never fit into a man’s world .
Brown became a criminal profiler. And a very good one — you may have seen her on TV, on CNN, MSNBC, The Discovery Channel, and elsewhere .
I met her in 2010, when she wrote a book about her experience, called The Profiler. And what you’re about to learn, about Pat Brown and about profiling, you will find fascinating .
So here now, from 2010, Pat Brown.
Pat Brown is 67 now, and still profiling the bad guys.
As a young man, Jeffery Deaver was a journalist. Then he was a lawyer for a while. But then his first love, writing, took over, and Deaver became a mystery and suspense writer.
And he was very good at it, but his real smash-through success came in 1997, with his novel about a quadriplegic police detective named Lincoln Rhyme.
Since then, Deaver has written 15 Lincoln Rhyme books, and is one of the world’s most acclaimed suspense authors.
I had known Jeffery Deaver years before the series began, and we talked about his first Lincoln Rhyme book, The Bone Collector, when it was published.
So here now, from 1997, Jeffery Deaver.
Jeffery Deaver turned 72 last week. His 15th Lincoln Rhyme mystery, The Midnight Lock, was published last yaer.
It’s mother’s Day weekend. So today on Now I’ve Heard Everything a conversation with a woman whose mother was, and is, one of the world’s most famous women, the great Lucille Ball.
I met Lucie Arnaz in 1997 when she was on tour promoting a CD-ROM project she had created called “Lucy and Desi: The Scrapbook.
She was also promoting a companion project, a kind of do-it-yourself family, scrapbook and album, and she was encouraging other sons and daughters to create family memories.
Now, you’ll probably chuckle a bit when you hear us discussing such “cutting edge” technologies as the CD-ROM, but in 1997, they really were.
So here now, from 1997, Lucie Arnaz.
Lucie Arnaz will be 71 in July. She lives in California.
In the 1980s, the presidency of Ronald Reagan was facing two distinct foreign policy challenges.
Members of Hezbollah had taken several Americans hostage in Beirut, Lebanon.
And in Central America, a rebel group known as the Contras was trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
To free the hostages, the Reagan administration undertook a secret plan to sell military missiles to Iran, in hopes that the Iranian government would persuade Hezbollah to release the hostages.
In Nicaragua, meanwhile, the U.S. was funding, arming, and training the Contras. That is, until Congress abruptly cut off the entire funding.
Oliver North with Bill Thompson’s daughter Jennifer
That’s when someone had the idea to take the money that Iran was paying secretly for those missiles and hand it secretly to the Contras. The plan became known later as the Iran-Contra affair.
When this plan became public in 1986, Congress was outraged. Hearings into the Iran. Contra affair began 35 years ago this week, May 5th, 1987.
And witness testimony quickly pointed to one man who seemed to have all the answers to the scandal.
Oliver North was on assignment to the National Security Council, and became the central figure in the Iran Contra scandal.
In July 1987, North appeared before I congressional committee, offering testimony that was at once defensive and defiant.
North was convicted on three felony charges but his convictions were vacated, and the criminal case against him was dropped in 1991.
And a short time later, North published a book called Under Fire. And that’s when he and I had the first of what would be several conversations over the next few years.
So here now from 1991 Lr. Col. Oliver North
Oliver North is 78 now. He lives in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.
Edie Adams was a very popular movie and television star in the 1950s, known widely for her comic impersonations of sexy singers, and her own wonderful singing voice.
But eventually she became even more widely known for being the wife of legendary television comic Ernie Kovacs. The two of them were a hugely popular comic duo.
But their story had a tragic end. In early 1962, Kovacs was killed in an auto accident. He was the only occupant of the car, and it was never known precisely what happened to cause the accident.
I met Edie Adams in 1990, when she finally wrote the book that publishers had been after her to write ever since Ernie kovacs’s death.
Many people think we’re on the verge of another Cold war, a cyber war, in which skilled hackers will break into systems abroad and wreak havoc with them.
But back in the 1980s, such a concept was still such a novelty that intelligence agencies and police didn’t pay much attention to it.
That is, until 1986, when an astronomer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory made a startling discovery.
Cliff Stoll was a systems administrator at the lab, and noticed an unusual pattern of usage in the lab’s computer network.
In a groundbreaking game of cyber cat and mouse, stole eventually traced the activity back to a KGB recruit in Germany named Markus Hess.
Stoll told the amazing story in his 1989 bestseller The Cuckoo’s Egg. I spoke with him about that book, and again a year later when they paperback version came out.
At the very height of the Cold War, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, one of the most vilified man in the world – at least in the U.S. – was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev,
For 11 years the USSR was led by this brash, arrogant, often angry man.
You may have heard that he wants. Famously said the Soviet Union would “bury” the United States. That, however, was a mistranslation, and it was not something Khrushchev ever actually said.
Khrushchev’s second son, Sergei, was in his 20s, watching closely as his father guided the USSR. Sergei eventually became a highly educated, and well-respected, engineer in the Soviet Union.
But finally, in 1991 — the same year the Soviet Union crumbled apart — Sergei Khrushchev emigrated to the United States, and became a naturalized US citizen in 1999.
I met him two years later, when he wrote a book about his father.
So here now, from 2001, Sergei Khrushchev”
Sergei Khrushchev died just days before his 85th birthday in 2020 at his home in Rhode Island. He died of a gunshot wound to the head, but an investigation found no signs of foul play, and no criminal charges were ever filed.
Gloria Gaynor began her professional music career in the early 1960s, when she was barely out of her teens. She was recording by the time she was 22, and had a couple of albums by the time she was 30.
But her songs and albums didn’t really have great success- until 1978, when she went into the studio and recorded a song that became a defining moment in pop music.
“I Will Survive” became a smash Hit, and inspired millions.
But, of course, Gloria Gaynor’s life was more than just one hit song. In her 1997 autobiography, also called. I Will survive, Gaynor told her life’s story, with all of its ups and downs.
So here now, from 1997, my conversation with Gloria Gaynor.
Gloria Gaynor is 78 now. Her most recent album was released in 2019, and won the Grammy for Best Roots Gospel Album.
Let me take you back four and a half decades, and tell you about one of the most popular books of the late 1970s, a family saga said in Australia, called The Thorn Birds.
But if you happened to miss the book, The Thorn Birds was also a hugely popular TV miniseries in the early 1980s .
The author of The Thorn Birds was Australian-n-born Colleen McCullough.
Just 4 years after the TV miniseries, I first met Colleen McCullough when she wrote a novella called The Ladies of MIasslonghi.
And I was as enthralled as I’m sure you’re about to be by Colleen McCullough’s Witt and Good humor.
