Note: At the time this interview was conducted, the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute was known as "O'Connor House." The organization's name was changed in 2015.

Barbara Barrett
My name is Barbara Barrett, and I'm proud to be associated with the O'Connor House.

O'Connor House
Great. Ambassador Barrett, tell us about the first time you met Sandra Day O'Connor.

Barbara Barrett
Meeting Sandra Day O'Connor was one of those life-changing occasions. But I never, I didn't know it then, but what a big impact this woman has had on me. I was a student at Arizona State University. I was in my senior year, and they started some new program that year for university students, mostly graduate students to work as interns at the Arizona State Legislature. It was an experiment, and I wasn't sure if it was going to continue or not. I was working at the time, I had, had a summer internship at the highway department. Back then there wasn't a transportation department. And they had asked me to apply for the internship. And when I was accepted in the internship, I continued on the payroll of the highway department, and they asked me to go to watch a topic. Most interns work for a person. I was asked to work for a topic. The topic was the possible creation of a Department of Transportation, taking what had been the highway department, moving buses and trucks and cars to a transportation department. Moving people and packages and, and the product being not cars but packages and people.

And so I was asked to manage the legislation on the creation of a Department of Transportation. So, I was accepted into the legislative internship program. I was assigned to both the Senate and the House, which normally you'd be assigned to an individual, a chairman within the Senate or in the House, and I was assigned the topic of transportation. At the time, there was this senator who was the first [woman] in the history of the United States, I believe, to be the majority leader of any state House or Senate in the United States. It was this woman named Sandra Day O'Connor, and I knew that there was a reputation for her being accurate, precise, hard working, effective, interactive and willing to make, take a point and present that point. That became a great lesson to me, that women could achieve, could excel, could do great things. But maybe they needed to be a little more hard-working, a little more capable, a little more studious, a little more accurate, but that there were opportunities for women. I had not seen that ever before. But I saw it and admired it when I saw it in Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, then Senator Sandra Day O'Connor. So that's how I first got to see and interact and meet the woman we now admire and whose career path continued in an upward direction.

O'Connor House
So what were your interactions like with her and your impressions as you continued to work with her, how did...?

Barbara Barrett
Well, she was, she was on top of things, she was aware of what was going on. She was very practical. And, "How do we get things done?" I won't forget at the time there was something called the Bingo Bill. And this was a bill that was going to, there was a sheriff who was enforcing the law against gaming. And bingo, he said, that was gaming. And so he was closing down Catholic churches, bingo games in the basements of Catholic Catholic, churches across the country, across the state. And so, that, there was legislation to allow low-level game, gaming, playing bingo, in modest, with modest stakes. And one of the advancers, one of the opponents to the bill was someone who was thinking about running for congress, who made very little secret of the fact that he was probably going to run for Congress. And this was a very practical, this is, it was a very practical solution. And Justice O'Connor was able to be quite persuasive by suggesting that, making it known that this sen--this current, at that time, state senator, was going to be opposing the bingo bill, because he thought that they were immoral to be playing bingo. She was very practical. She carried the day. He and the few votes that he met, that he managed, all went in favor of allowing low-level bingo to be played in Arizona. So one of the early occasions was to see her use the, "If that's how you feel about something, let's make sure it's public information" as a way of modifying what might otherwise have been a quiet, behind-the-scenes fight of, an opposition to, a public policy position that would have otherwise allowed low-level bingo playing across the state.

O'Connor House
Well, interesting. And so in your estimation and understanding that you were an intern at the time, but what what in your estimation, was the catalyst for Sandra Day O'Connor to be elected majority leader in the senate? What attributes or what qualities, it was so unique and rare for a woman, so how do you think that came about?

Barbara Barrett
You know, Justice O'Connor's membership in the Arizona State Senate, all sort of happened by coincidence. She didn't run for that office initially. It, the post, that senate seat was held by another woman, Isabel Burgess, and Isabel Burgess was appointed by President Nixon to be the first woman on the National Transportation Safety Board. She accepted. Isabel Burgess accepted that post, moved to Washington, and left a vacancy in the Arizona State Senate. Because of, it had been a woman in that role, in that seat, they looked around for who should be appointed to that seat. And they found a woman who had moved here, a long-time Arizonan who had studied at Stanford, had moved back to Arizona, was practicing law in a little storefront legal operation on the west side of the Valley near Maryvale. And they asked her if she would be willing to consider taking a seat in the State Senate. Once she got there, when I don't know that she would have run, but once she was appointed, she so impressed everyone with her intellect and her willingness to work and her practical solutions that she quickly became a leader, a committee chair and a leader on the, in the Arizona State Senate. In addition to being the majority leader, which often is the only job, the only leadership role that a member would play. As I recall, she was also the chairman of the State, County, and Municipal Affairs Committee, one of the leading committees in the Arizona State Senate. So she quickly earned significant leadership roles because she was a natural leader.

O'Connor House
So, as the years go on, you obviously remained in touch, connected, interactive. Tell us, walk us through that segment of the years after that. Your own leadership, clearly, took you to Washington. But bring us back to Arizona and tell us the story of your involvement with the House itself.

Barbara Barrett
Ah. One day I was asked by Gay Wray to come to her home for lunch. I was, of course, honored to have that invitation and quickly accepted, and found that Gay, who had, who, partly guided by Justice O'Connor, was the first woman to be the chairman of the Smithsonian National Board, the National Board of the, of the Smithsonian. Gay had the secretary, the head of the Smithsonian in town here in Arizona, and was hosting a small lunch for him and his staff, and for Justice O'Connor and and John O'Connor. And so, I was asked to come. And I, when I was asked to come to lunch, I was assuming it would be a larger group. But when I got to lunch, it was only the small gathering of us, I guess, six of us at the table. And before we sat down, there was a portrait of Gay, a portrait of mother and child by the piano at Gay's home. And we looked at that and commented about how beautiful that was. And beauty, absolutely lovely mother and child. And Gay, it was assumed that Gay was the mother in that picture, but Gay reported to us that, no, she's the daughter in the photo, in the portrait that was above her piano, and that it was painted during their time in Rhode Island at the cottages in, in Rhode Island.

And Justice O'Connor asked if she had gone back to the cottages. And she said yes, but she could never go back. She said she had gone back to her home, where she was, this, the cottage in Rhode Island where she'd grown up, and that it is now eight condominiums, and it was a heartbreak to see what had, what had happened to the place. She remembered so well. And then Justice O'Connor said, "Yes, you can never go back." She said that her home, she had seen her home and that it was going to be bulldozed. That there were new buyers and that they wanted the lot but they didn't want the house. And that this house that she had, as she described, hand mudded those bricks. That she had used conduit to shape the grounding of the bricks, and then had mudded those walls. That that is, dust to dust, it was going to be bulldozed, and a new building, a new house would be put in its place. And she seemed like that was a bit of a heartbreak. And she said, "Arizona just doesn't appreciate our history." And I thought, well, number one, her life has so transformed my life and so many other people's lives in Arizona. She's been good for the state, she's been good for the gender, she's been good for the country, she's been good for the world. For something that matters to her, to be bulldozed seemed just like a an ignoble, ignoble way for the, for the home to end.

So, after the lunch, Gay and I put our heads together to figure out--Gay knew the home very well. And so we took a drive down to see the house. And then we did some research to find out who owns the house. And then we went through several iterations of an effort to buy the house, provide a different lot, urge the owners to incorporate some of the adobe into whatever home they would be designing and building, none of those flew with the owners. Eventually, we determined that, after being told more times than not that it could not be done, we determined that, we found someone who said it could be done to move the home, brick by brick to a new site. And that's what, with the extraordinary help of the community, and especially Elva Coor, and Janie Evans, it was moved brick by brick to this new location. So it was really a special project, and I hoped that it would be something that would take that little bit of sadness out of the voice of Justice O'Connor and have her be proud of the home she built and the home where she raised her three sons and have it convert to be, as is now the tagline, a place where civil talk leads to civic action.

So am I talking too long on these?

O'Connor House
No! I was told when the house was ultimately moved. And that Justice O'Connor was given the tour, she put her hands on her hips and said, "This is wonderful. Well now what?" And that was, that led into the formation of the Friends of O'Connor House, which eventually became a 501(c)(3). What's your sense of the mission vision of O'Connor House? What is the opportunity?

Barbara Barrett
It seems in today's world, in the United States, and a lot of places around the world, we need some help in, guidance for how to have an effective democracy. It is important that we have people view things from different perspectives, that enriches us. But for people to take those different views and sit down and work through problems to come to solutions. That's what makes a democracy work. But we have, it seems, too much shouting and too little problem solving, or mission assurance going on right now. So the idea was, that this could be a place where people from divergent views can sit down and work together to fashion solutions. And it'd be a place also where we can find role models for doing that, as Justice O'Connor herself was maybe the best role model: someone who can walk into a nine-member Supreme Court and find herself way more often than not being the the person who sits down and forms a majority, because she could work with people of divergent views and get them to see a common view upon which they could agree and issue a Supreme Court opinion that represented a majority of the nine. More often than not, she was the one asked to author those opinions. She did that effectively in the legislature. She did that effectively as a court, as a member of the court and in the lower level courts, and at the highest court in the land. She was exemplary at her ability to do that. So as a role model, she might have been among the very best. But there are others around the world who faced intractable challenges in the executive and legislative branch. And to bring people to Arizona and work with public officials here at all levels, to have role models that show how you work through intractable problems.

So the O'Connor House being a place where history is revered , as it was when David McCullough came to speak to the community. And where people who faced intractable problems or thought, maybe what I have been raised to believe, is not really helping my people, as Gorbachev seems to have at one point resolved. And to think about the incorporation of leadership talent from people like the extraordinary, and extraordinarily talented, Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, who spent his entire career as a soldier in military uniform, and then became the top American diplomat, as a secretary of state.

When we see people who can, even at a very senior time in their careers, adjust their thinking, be persuaded to rethink basic precepts. It's really an important part of leadership and governance and civic behavior. So that's, maybe, a part of what the O'Connor House does today. And I think it's an extraordinarily valuable service. And it just happens to be originating here in Arizona, as did that extraordinary leader Sandra Day O'Connor.

O'Connor House
Is there anything else you'd like to say or add?

Barbara Barrett
One of the things that I said a few times about the house is that this house in many ways, is a metaphor. A metaphor for Justice O'Connor. So let's take first Justice O'Connor as a little girl, raised on a ranch in the dusty corner of Arizona, 26 miles as I recall, from the closest neighbor. No power in the house, someone born of the grit and the challenging environment of a cattle ranch in dusty Arizona. Who got, who came to this world with great talent, and mastered that talent, and produced, built upon that talent and brought out through great schooling, that talent to become a great contributor and a great person and a great leader. To some extent this house is like a metaphor of taking the Arizona grit, its mud and straw and water and a little bit of baking by sunshine that goes into the bricks that form this house that really are a great metaphor for the grit of Sandra Day O'Connor. And the value, the form, this is an architected home, this is one great room, as she is one great lady, taken from the grit of the dirt of the earth and developed into an architectural masterpiece. That then serves a purpose of helping other people by better governance. So Arizona is proud to have, be the home of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a little girl from the, from the dusty ranch. Who got a great education. Who learned how to interact with people in the state legislature. In that, taking those skills on to the court, and then to the highest court in the land to become the most powerful woman in the world, according to some magazine assessments. That Arizona girl becoming this great grace of our nation is really a great statement, and this house sort of stands for that.