Rob Reiner loved America. He thought it could be better

Consider This from NPR

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🗓️ 18 December 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Rob Reiner spent his life trying to fix what he saw as America’s shortcomings. In an interview shortly before his death he explained why he was optimistic America could be better.

The actor and director was found dead on Sunday along with his wife Michelle Singer Reiner.

Their son has been charged with their murders.

And those tributes – they’ve centered on Reiner's acting, the movies he’s directed, but also on his political activism.

It’s something he talked to the journalist Todd Purdum about shortly before he died.

Purdum wrote about that interview in the New York Times this week, and joins Scott Detrow to discuss what he learned about Reiner's work and view of America's future. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by Elena Burnett.

It was edited by Courtney Dorning.

Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	America first got to know Rob Reiner in Norman Lear's transformative sitcom all in the family.
0:06.2	Mom, Daddy, this is Michael Stivick. Michael, this is my mother, Mrs. Bunker.
0:12.5	Hi, how are you?
0:14.2	How do you do?
0:17.2	And my father, Mr. Bunker?
0:21.7	It was 1971.
0:23.7	The Vietnam War was raging.
0:25.2	The civil rights movement was still front and center.
0:27.4	And Michael Stivik, better known as Meathead,
0:29.8	was the long-haired tie-dye shirt wearing Lefty.
0:33.0	It made him the perfect foil to Carol O'Connor's Archie,
0:35.6	a white working-class bigot from Queens,
0:38.1	who had no interest in changing with the times.
0:40.5	Anything interesting in the paper?
0:42.6	Yeah, 200 arrested in Vietnam Day peace demonstration.
0:46.7	200. They should have thrown a whole bunch of them in the can.
0:49.9	Look at that picture there. Here they are.
0:52.6	Trowing all kinds of junk and deeper as at officers of the law. Decreting on the American flag. The hell of them peace makes war on anyhow. And when Archie tells his son-in-law Meathead that if the protesters don't like the war, they can amscray, Reiner Stivik tries to school Archie about all the ways he thinks America is falling short. Well, what would our leaving solve? I mean, with or without protests, this country would still have the same problems.
1:14.6	What problems?
1:16.6	Well, it's the war, the racial problem, the economic problem, the pollution problem.
1:20.6	Oh, come on, if you want a nitpaker.
1:22.6	Over the years, Reiner's life came to imitate art.
	...

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