The Oath with Chuck Rosenberg

Dr. Carla Hayden is the 14th Librarian of Congress, and the first woman and the first African-American ever to hold that prestigious pose.  Born in Tallahassee, Florida, Carla grew up in Queens and in Chicago.  Her parents were both talented musicians – her father taught music at Florida A&M University – but Carla, by her own admission, did not have the music gene.  What she did have was a love of knowledge and of reading.

After gra...

Carrie Hessler-Radelet – a native of Michigan and the former Director of the Peace Corps – and her extended family have a remarkable and unique relationship with that storied organization. They hold the distinction of being the only Peace Corps family to have four generations serve as volunteers, including both of her grandparents, her aunt and her nephew. In fact, Carrie’s aunt, Virginia Kirkwood – who served in Turkey and was the...

Frank Figliuzzi grew up in southern Connecticut, but with his eyes and ears tuned to the nearby New York City media market and to enthralling stories of mob busting FBI agents. Those amazing tales made a big impression on a young Frank. As an 11-year-old, he wrote a letter to a senior FBI special agent, asking how he could one day join their ranks. To this day, he still has the personal reply that he received, encouraging him to pu...

Matt Olsen held so many important and difficult jobs in federal law enforcement and national security that it is hard to know where to begin.  A son of North Dakota and a graduate of the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School, Matt worked as a civil rights prosecutor, an Assistant United States Attorney, on the staff of FBI Director Bob Mueller, as the Executive Director of the Guantanamo Review Task Force, as the General Co...

Mike Bush, the former Commissioner of the New Zealand Police, served for more than four decades in law enforcement – starting as an 18-year-old constable, serving as a detective, and promoting up through the ranks of this highly professional and respected organization.

The population of New Zealand is roughly five million people. About one in six New Zealanders are of Maori descent – an indigenous Polynesian community – and that ...

Heather Penney was born in Tucson, Arizona, the daughter of a fighter pilot. Flying was in her blood, and Heather earned her own pilot’s license while studying as an English major at Purdue University. Heather harbored a dream of being a fighter pilot, like her dad, except that there was one problem: back then, women were not allowed to fly in combat.

Fortunately for Heather and for the nation, Congress removed the combat exclus...

Jon Jarvis grew up in rural Virginia, in the magnificent Shenandoah Valley. With national forest land in his backyard he learned to love the outdoors, roaming, hunting, and fishing with his father and brother. Shortly after graduating with a degree in biology from the College of William and Mary, Jon began a four-decade career with the National Park Service that culminated in an eight-year tour of duty – from 2009 until 2017 – as i...

Anne Milgram grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey, the daughter of a college professor and an engineer. But other relatives – including her grandfather who was a New Jersey police chief – were in law enforcement, and so Anne thought of law enforcement as the family business. Though she was to spend much of her adult life in that family business, she was not particularly interested in it growing up.

After attending Rutgers Univers...

Robert S. Mueller III – Bob Mueller – is an American hero. Though best known as the sixth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and as the Special Counsel that led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the story of Bob’s public service starts half a century earlier.

Bob was born in Manhattan and raised in Princeton, New Jersey. The oldest of five children, and the only boy, he was a star three s...

In the Fourth Season of The Oath, Chuck Rosenberg speaks with thoughtful and inspirational men and women from the highest levels of public service – men and women who took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. At a time when our most cherished institutions are being tested, these selfless leaders light the way. This season: FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram, ...

Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger, III (Sully) was born in Denison – a small North Texas town on the Oklahoma border. There, as a teenager, he learned to fly a single engine prop plane off a grass strip. A serious and talented - but shy and introverted - high school student, Sully was admitted to the highly competitive United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When he graduated in 1973, he received the Ac...

Mike Leiter grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, where his extraordinary public service career began early – in high school – when he worked as an Emergency Medical Technician. After graduating from Columbia University, Mike served as a Naval Flight Officer before attending Harvard Law School, where he was one of only four military veterans in his class of more than 500 students. At Harvard, Mike was elected President of the prestig...

Amy Hess dreamed – as a child – of being an astronaut. A star student and athlete in high school, she studied aeronautical and astronautical engineering at Purdue – though poor eyesight dashed her NASA dreams. Instead, Amy got her start in the FBI as a special agent in Kansas City, working violent crime. She rose quickly through FBI ranks to run the Memphis and Louisville field offices, and to run two large FBI divisions at head...

Fiona Hill is the former Senior Director for Russia and Eurasia on the National Security Council. A highly respected scholar on Russian history and culture, Fiona was born and raised in the industrial northeast of England. She comes from a long line of coal miners – uncles, cousins – families, like hers, that persistently struggled with poverty. Fiona’s father, Alfred, joined his own brother in the coal mines at the age of 14. ...

Jim Miller is the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. In that vital role – the number three position in DOD – Jim was at the forefront of some of the nation’s most important and most difficult national security issues. As a key adviser to three Secretaries of Defense – Bob Gates, Leon Panetta, and Chuck Hagel – Jim guided reviews of nuclear weapons policy and ballistic missile defense policy, and led the formulation of n...

Carol Lam grew up in New Jersey, and was educated at Yale and Stanford Law School. Soon after law school, she found a job she loved in the Justice Department – as a federal prosecutor in San Diego – where she handled complex health care fraud cases. Though she enjoyed the work, she accepted an appointment to the California Superior Court bench from Governor Gray Davis. Carol envisioned a long tenure as a judge – a difficult and ...

Kathy Sullivan is an explorer and a pioneer, an oceanographer and a scientist, an astronaut and an American hero. Selected as one of the first female astronauts in NASA history, Kathy flew three missions on the space shuttle and became – in 1984 – the first American woman to walk in space. Kathy also flew on the space shuttle mission in 1990 that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope – one of the most advanced and important scientifi...

Vivek Murthy is a doctor and an author - a deeply thoughtful, interesting, kind, caring, and reflective medical professional - who served as the Surgeon General of the United States. As Surgeon General, Vivek was also a Vice-Admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. In that role, and after an exhaustive listening tour throughout the country at the beginning of his tenure as the “Nation’s Doctor,” Vivek realized th...

Maya Wiley is a brilliant and powerful woman who has spent her professional life at the intersection of law, education, and policy. Born into both privilege and poverty – the child of two prominent civil rights activists, Maya grew up in a loving and intact home and, yet, in a broken educational system. And if that seems contradictory, Maya explains why it is not.

Educated at Dartmouth and Columbia, Maya served in city government ...