What Made Nelson Mandela So Unique

UPDATED December 6, 2013

I had Suzanne Nossel on the podcast earlier this year. She is a  highly regarded foreign policy expert here in the USA who specializes in human rights. Nossel served as a deputy assistant secretary of state who guided US policy on the UN human rights Council, was the former executive director of Amnesty-USA and is currently the head of the PEN American Center.

In the course of my interview, I  learned that Nossel got her start in the human rights and foreign policy field by working with grassroots human rights groups in South Africa. She has family ties to the country and we ended up having an extended conversation about how the unique attributes of Nelson Mandela kept the country together during a difficult transition from apartheid to representative democracy.

I’ve reposted the clip from our interview. If you want to hear the whole thing you can download it on Itunes or visit my podcast page.