This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series A New Citizenship,

given by Michael Sandell, was originally broadcast in 2009.

Hello and welcome to Washington, D.C.

Tonight for the fourth and last of this year's BBC Reith Lectures,

we're in the capital of the United States at the

George Washington University. Our subject, appropriately, is new politics. Here in America and in

Britain too, the phrase new politics is on everyone's lips. Barack Obama is six months into his

historic presidency and the world is watching and waiting to see what changes

to the world's problems his new approach will bring. In Britain, revelations of how MPs spend

public money to support their lifestyles has undermined the country's parliamentary system.

Politicians and the public are calling for reform. It seems that the time is

right, for, as the title of our lecture has it, a new politics of the common good. Ladies and

gentlemen, will you please welcome the BBC Reith Lecturer for 2009 Professor Michael Sandell.

Michael, you said at the outset of these lectures that you might have been a politician,

you might have been a political journalist.

In fact, at the age of 21, some time ago now, well, in fact we can date it,

you were present at the impeachment of Richard Nixon, were you not in the role of the journalist?

How come you were in such a poll position at such a young age?

Well, I was very interested in politics and in political journalism, and I was able, by sheer luck, to get an internship that summer in the Washington Bureau of the Houston Chronicle. I'm not from Houston.

I hadn't been there. I still have never been to Houston. But this was Washington in the summer

of 1974, when the Supreme Court was hearing arguments over the Nixon tapes and whether he would have to give them over.

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