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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Ax Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

This week we're running one of my favorite throwback episodes of the Ax Files. This one, a 2017 conversation with Christiana Manpour, Chief International Anchor for CNN host of,

Ammanpour and Company, and one of the world's most distinguished and intrepid journalists.

Christiana is brilliant, she's insisive, and I just loved our conversation. I hope you will too.

Christiana Manpour, you are one of the world's great storytellers, but now I want to hear yours,

because it's a great story in and of itself. Tell me about your growing up here in England, where we're visiting with you and in Iran.

Yes, so I was born in England. My mother is English, my father was Iranian, and they met on a really romantic, adventurous journey that I, you know, only had learnt about way later, my mom drove a car, a brand new car for,

clients of her father who wanted to go to Tehran, and she drove them. She was 21 years old or younger, in 1956 or around there.

Young British women didn't do that kind of stuff, so she was a real adventurer, and she drove over there through the bad lands of, you know, the Turkish sort of mountains and across to the border,

having gone through France and not gone on a boat and, you know, leban and a whole lot, and finally ends up in Tehran, where she then goes to a party and meets my dad who's a confirmed bachelor, 20 years older than her, and they fall in love.

And then he chases her all the way back to London and asked for my mom's hand in marriage from my grandfather who said to me, said to him, sir, you seem to be close to an age to me than to my daughter.

Anyway, so they got married. They had us. I was born in England and immediately, you know, taken over to Iran, where I grew up. For me, my first home was Iran.

And all I can remember all these years later, I remember everything, but in terms of, of just, just happiness, I was really happy. I had a fantastic childhood.

We weren't rich. We weren't poor. What did your, what your father was? He ran a travel agency, but my father was connected to all the top movers and shakers in Iran.

It's a very, very small community. They all went to the same school and he was close to members of the royal family, close to many people who moved and shook the place around, which is relevant when it comes to the revolution when I'm 20 years old.

Shower, isn't the shower was empowered. My mom was a stay at home mom looked after us raised us and life was was really great. And it was very special. I was able to do sports. I went to school, had friends, did all the kind of things that kids used to do before social media and barely television.

I mean, you know, we were allowed to watch only a little television. And I had a fantastic childhood and I had a rock solid childhood. And the reason I'm saying that now is because I realize how much your childhood affects your whole life, how much what you experience then, how your parents treated you, how,

how, whether you know, if you grew up in a secure and loving environment, what it does for you for the rest of your life. And I hadn't realized what a dead of gratitude I owe my parents, but just being great parents for being there and for loving us and for never, ever, ever asking me telling me, expecting me to follow their path or to do what they thought for me.

Well, the story you told about your mother helps explain your intrepid nature as a journalist that she, she would well approve of that. I assume I think so. And you know, my, my mother and my father, I think they must have been worried when I went to war zones when I spent so long under, you know, these bombardments and sniping and, you know, dreadful genocides and really a refugee crisis. All these things, they must have been really, really worried.

But I know that they never express that they obviously always ask what was going on, but they never tried to say, oh, come back or don't or we're afraid for you never. And again, it's only after was you realize how empowering and liberating that is because you don't, you're not doing your job thinking, oh, my goodness, everybody at home is terrified. Oh, my goodness, I got to get out of here. Oh, my goodness, there's the pressure.

And I wasn't married. I didn't have a kid and for all the years that I was doing that, what I call balls to the wall reporting in the war zones. And, and so that was a very important for me. And I think that had I had I been more of a domesticated animal back then, I might not have done what I did. Yeah, I would have felt I had a responsibility to stay alive.

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