Rudy deLeon, a born and raised Southern Californian, left his temperate home for Washington D.C. at 22. His first job on the hill was to answer constituent mail for California Senator John Tunney, but in between, he caught Henry Kissinger and colleagues debating foreign policy on the hill. He went on to shape that policy at the Pentagon under Bill Clinton, and is currently Senior Vice President of National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Q. What do you wake up to?
A. The news.
Q. What is your favorite word?
A. Interesting.
Q. What inspires you?
A. Getting things accomplished. Making progress.
Q. What do you consider beautiful?
A. My wife and children.
Q. If you could live in any time, past, present or future, when would it be and why?
A. I think I’d like to live now. It’s the moving forward that’s most interesting, and not reliving something.
Q. When are you most creative?
A. In the early morning.
Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. Baseball season tickets for the Dodgers. I follow them from the East Coast.
Q. What worries you?
A. Can the country find a way forward given all the serious challenges it faces?
Q. Whose talent would you like to have?
A. Shakespeare or Churchill or Lincoln. To be able to find words that match human experience and that inspire and help us lead.
Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Going with my grandfather to Cape Canaveral to see the early rocket launches.
Q. Who is your favorite Beatle, and why?
A. Paul McCartney because his songs are the easiest to sing in the car.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. My SLR camera, and what you can capture with it.
Q. What’s your favorite season and why?
A. Spring, because it’s balanced. It’s not too hot, and not too cold.
Q. Who is the one person, living or dead, that you’d love to have a beer with?
A. Franklin Roosevelt. It probably wouldn’t be a beer, it probably be one of his cocktails.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.