What About Foreign Interference In The 2024 Election?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. In these final days before Election Day, how much do we know about foreign efforts to influence voters and the outcome of the election? How many bots and deep fakes and fake news stories planted by Russia, Iran, or other countries have been seen by voters who believed they were authentic?

This is the first presidential campaign since the creation of a new group within the intelligence community that's responsible for discovering and defeating foreign efforts to influence voters and to warn voters and lessen the effectiveness of foreign influence. It's called the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and it was created in 2022. My

My guest, David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written a long article about the center and the role of the larger intelligence community and the Justice Department in determining what voters get to know and when they get to know it. The article is also about what we've learned so far about foreign influence in this presidential campaign and lessons learned from the past. The article is titled, The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference.

David Kirkpatrick, welcome back to Fresh Air. You know, after the 2016 election, there was a special counsel appointed, Robert Mueller, to investigate Russian attempts to influence voters and have an impact on the results of the elections. But the Russians didn't say, OK, you got me, we're done. But this time around, like, as far as I can tell, not that much attention is being paid to foreign influence. Am I wrong about that? And if there's not as much attention, why is that?

Well, you know, yes and no. I think quite a bit of attention is being paid. It gets covered by The New York Times, you know, every little while, every few weeks. And some of the tech companies are producing voluminous reports on what foreign governments are doing through social media and online to try to influence people, Microsoft in particular. But in a way, at this point, there's almost too much of it.

We're kind of drowning in different foreign interference schemes. It appears that several foreign adversaries, Russia and Iran foremost among them, have been putting out quite a bit of disinformation online to try to influence voters in one direction or another. And the tech companies call this out from time to time, but

None of it really rises to the level of having changed an election. And the other thing about it is that now that there's more than one player, right, in 2016, the story was Russia is trying to get Trump elected or Russia did try to get Trump elected.

And now the story is more complicated because we see Russia once again doing its best to help now former President Trump, but also Iran trying to hurt former President Trump. At the very least, it's critical, which is what those adversaries want. What all the intelligence that's put out about this says in its top line is that these adversaries want to sow discord and they want to discredit the democratic process.

So in a way, from a Russian or Iranian or Chinese point of view, this is a kind of heads we win, tails you lose situation, right? Because even if they fail, they can succeed at making us suspect everything that we read and hear and suspect our own democratic process. After your article was published, you found out about some new intelligence about what Russia has been up to. Would you tell us about that?

Yeah. So the people at the Foreign Malign Intelligence Center, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,

put out periodic public updates or briefings. And they said two things that I think were quite striking. The first was in their last sort of general briefing for journalists covering this stuff, their 15 days out briefing, they said that they had detected efforts by Russia and other foreign governments to sow discord and possibly try to foment violence against

between the election and the inauguration. And when they said that, they actually took the quite unusual step of releasing a redacted public version of an internal assessment dated October 8th. And that's quite a fast turnaround for the intelligence agencies. They really don't declassify things that quickly. So right there, they're saying this is a big deal, right?

And in that briefing for the short text that they put out to reporters and in the longer, partially redacted intelligence assessment, they used the word violence several times. They talked in some...

You know, I won't say detail because they never really talk in detail, but they talked at least voluminously about Russian and foreign efforts to try to get Americans to quarrel with each other, to sow protest, to sow possibly violence.

and to try to interrupt the process. The gist of this was that having watched the way 2020 went down, and especially January 6th of 2021, these foreign adversaries are much more attuned to

to the different steps along the road. You know, the moments when the states have to make a statement about who won their election, the moments when they have to send electors to electoral college, the moments when Congress has to certify those results, all of which are potential pressure points that foreign spies might

target to try to disrupt the process. And the intelligence assessment says basically that these foreign governments, Russia foremost among them, might do that just to discredit the process, right? Just to play havoc with democracy and make democracy look bad. But they're more inclined to do that if their preferred candidate loses, they're more inclined to try to make trouble.

Did you learn new things about the election itself and interfering with voting itself or with the counting of the ballots? So again and again, the intelligence agencies have said they don't see any signs that any foreign government is going to try to or could interfere with the counting of the ballots.

They have, however, said that some of these foreign governments have obtained fairly detailed information about voter rolls that they might try to use to target voters with disinformation in 2020.

Iran obtained a list of 100,000 or so Democrats and targeted them with specific messages purporting to show that the Proud Boys were threatening them, threatening these Democrats, unless they went to the polls to vote for Donald Trump.

which could have just been Iran trying to sow discord, or it could have been an effort to try to hurt Trump. You know, we'll never know. I should say there's one other suggestive thing that came out from the intelligence agencies recently. They put out a public notification that Russia was behind a specific bit of disinformation, which was an

an online video purporting, a bogus video, purporting to show someone destroying ballots in Pennsylvania.

So what's striking about that to me is why single out this one bit of disinformation? I mean, there's a ton of bogus videos floating around out there. And when I tried to press people at the intelligence agencies about this, what they told me is that we go based on the severity of the intelligence, not the severity of the misinformation. So all of that, the combination of the intelligence agencies'

Singling out this video and suggesting in a way that there's something bigger behind it, following as it did the earlier notification that Russia and other foreign governments are already at work planning to foment violence between the day of the vote and the day of the inauguration. All of that, I thought, was pretty alarming. So what has Iran done that is most alarming that you're aware of?

Well, Iran taking its cue from Russia in 2016 has tried to hack into the campaigns. And they somewhat successfully hacked into Trump's orbit, right?

So they successfully hacked into the email accounts of Roger Stone, a former Trump advisor, and used that to try to get into the Trump campaign itself and managed to pry out some confidential documents, including vetting materials about J.D. Vance, Trump's running mate, as well as Trump's last debate prep materials before his debate with Biden.

And then the Iranians took this or Iranian hackers took this material and sent it anonymously. They sent the debate materials to the Biden camp to try to help him prepare. And they sent the J.D. Vance materials to a variety of people in the news media to try to get it reported on.

Both efforts turn out to have been a swing and a miss. Biden, as we all remember, did not seem especially well prepared and in fact flailed in his debate against Trump. There's no indication that the people inside the Biden campaign opened those emails or studied that material.

And perhaps because the J.D. Vance vetting material wasn't that sexy or interesting, or perhaps because the news media is being very responsible, nobody seems to have bit on the leaks of the J.D. Vance vetting material either. The New York Times in their news report about the Iranian efforts once they were detected and exposed by the government said that their editors found that publication would have served the interest of the adversaries behind the hack, and they didn't want to do that.

Now, what about China? You write that they're not active in the presidential election. They're not actively trying to interfere in that, but they are active in down ballot races. What's behind that choice?

So the information I'm presenting here comes from statements put out by the intelligence agencies. And what they've said is that China believes that both parties are anti-China. What's more, China believes that it could face consequences if it was caught transgressing.

trying to influence the election on a national scale. So China's staying out of the presidential race, but they are opportunistically trying to advance or punish particular candidates in Congress and perhaps elsewhere that are helpful or not helpful to their interests. Do you see anything that strikes you as

important innovations since 2016 when we learned so much about Russian interference in the presidential election? The two big things we've now learned from the intelligence agencies that basically everybody's getting in on the game, right? If you're an authoritarian out there, you having seen Russia's success in 2016, success possibly at helping to elect Trump,

certainly at sort of screwing with our heads. Everybody wants in on it to one extent or another, or is at least experimenting with trying to spread disinformation in the American political system. The other thing, the obvious thing, is the change in technology. We now live in a world with artificial intelligence, which makes it more

much easier and much faster to create a very realistic-looking bogus video of a person or bogus sort of imitation of a website like the Washington Post or Fox News, or even just to translate an article from Farsi or Russian if you want to spread some disinformation in English. Artificial intelligence can help you do all of that much more quickly. And that can be quite sinister because that potentially...

blurs the boundaries of reality. And we've seen that at work around the world. One sort of particular cautionary example that a lot of people in the U.S. intelligence world have seized on was in Slovakia.

in 2023, when right on the eve of the election, someone, presumably Russia, managed to sort of inject into Slovakian social media a couple of quite inflammatory audio clips about the candidate that the Russians opposed, the pro-Western candidate. One of them suggesting that he was going to raise the price of beer. The other one appearing to catch him conspiring with a prominent investigative reporter about rigging the ballots.

So again, we don't know how much of an effect this had, but it was timed so that it may well have helped the Russian candidate win, and he did win. I want to emphasize those clips were bogus. Those were created with artificial intelligence and were not real. One of the things that's changed with this election is that Elon Musk...

owns X, a huge social media platform, and he is all in with Trump. He's contributed millions and millions and millions through a PAC that he created, a pro-Trump PAC. And he appears at Trump campaign rallies. And he has tweeted or retweeted conspiracy theories and falsehoods pertaining to the election. And then also, Trump has his own social media platform, Truth Social, which

So how is that changing or is that changing the ability of foreign adversaries to plant information that is false?

Well, from the foreign adversaries' point of view, things are just getting better and better and better. You know, you and I can remember the day when we all depended on a handful of major media outlets for our news, you know, when there were three or maybe four networks doing broadcast news, and those organizations could play a kind of a gatekeeper role. That's long gone. Right now, it's very easy to inject information into the

public conversation over social media, over a proliferating number of websites, and now over a proliferating number of platforms. Because not only is there Twitter and Facebook, and as you mentioned, Truth Social, there's Gab, there's

Reddit, you know, you can set up WhatsApp groups. There's some indications from the intelligence community that Russia has been setting up WhatsApp groups to try to spread disinformation. They can spread information over Telegram and Telegram channels. So there's lots and lots of ways to get the stuff out there. It's more and more difficult to police people.

And even if the social media companies, the big ones, want to do a job of moderating or trying to suss out suspicious behavior or content, they can only do so much because they're a smaller and smaller part of the whole ecosystem. In particular, the changes at Twitter, now known as X, have been striking. That was called to my attention.

by an internal Russian planning document that was released through Justice Department action that showed the Russians conspiring among themselves over how they were going to try to influence the election. And they say in that document that really the one major platform that allows them freedom of operation right now is X.

So that's the best possible evidence that whatever moderation Twitter was doing before Musk took over has now gone away from the Russian point of view. The same document suggests that they find Truth Social, President Trump's online network, to be even more favorable for their operations. But, of course, that's much smaller. David, you know, in terms of when to notify Trump,

voters about foreign influence in the election. It's a difficult decision. And I think before this new center, the Foreign Malign Influence Center was created, that, you know, presidents, the Justice Department decided what to release and when. And you talk about Obama's dilemma. He knew about Russian influence.

interference in the election before we knew about it, but he didn't make it public until after the election. Can you describe the dilemma he faced and what you know of why he made the decision he did?

President Obama's decisions in 2016 about the Russian influence operation now look like kind of the original sin behind all of this. You know, what happened was in the summer of 2016, the president was briefed by the head of the CIA about the scale of the Russian effort to try to help elect President Donald Trump.

And some of that information came out during the campaign. There was hints that Russia had tried to hack into the DNC. There was widespread suspicion. President Trump, in one press conference, famously asked Russia to try to come up with Hillary's missing emails. But

But the Obama administration didn't really come out with the full extent of what they knew about Russia, about the scale of Russia's efforts until after the election.

And the best understanding I have is that President Obama and people around him were worried that if they did speak very forcefully and clearly about the Russian efforts to try to help Trump, it would look like President Obama was himself interfering on behalf of Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

You know, at that time, as you probably remember, most people thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. So why rock the boat? You know, why undermine the credibility of her victory by appearing to meddle himself? You know, and that's the problem that has hovered over all of this. You know, for one thing, once during the post-election period, the administration or the intelligence agencies did come out with a very robust statement about what Russia had done.

President Trump began to denounce the intelligence agencies. And now around Trump, there is a flourishing conspiracy theory that this whole deep state is conspiring against him. On the other side, the Democrats seized on that to try to delegitimate Trump's election. So both sides have

politicized that bit of intelligence. And now we're in a world where, here we are in 2024, the intelligence agencies are trying to warn us that Russia is actively trying to help President Trump and spread disinformation. At the same time, Iran is actively trying to hurt President Trump and help Kamala Harris and spread disinformation, that both sides want to just discredit the democratic process.

But when you go to Capitol Hill, all you hear is Democrats talking only Russia, Russia, Russia, and Republicans talking only Iran, Iran, Iran. And so all of the news, all of the information that's being put out by the intelligence agencies to try to sort of forewarn and pre-bunk what these foreign powers are doing is being refracted through various different partisan lenses.

So who you are and who you're listening to and who you sympathize with is going to play a big role in which of these warnings you take seriously and which of them you brush off as conspiracy theories.

Okay, before we talk some more, we need to take a short break here. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer David Kirkpatrick. And the article that he wrote that we're talking about is called The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference. We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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Truth, independence, fairness, transparency, respect, excellence. This is NPR. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer for The New Yorker. We're talking about his article about attempts by other countries, including Russia and Iran, to influence American voters and the outcome of the presidential election.

This is the first presidential election since the creation of a new group within the intelligence community that's responsible for discovering and defeating foreign efforts to influence voters and to warn voters and lessen the effectiveness of foreign influence. It's called the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and it was created in 2022. The article is also about the role of the larger intelligence community and the Justice Department in determining what voters get to know about foreign influence and when they get to know it.

Kirkpatrick sums up what we've learned so far about foreign influence in this presidential election and lessons learned from the past. The article is titled The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference. You know, so much of your article is focused on the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which is handling the release of information about, you know, foreign interference in the election.

And you've been critical of how little specific information they've been releasing. But give us a larger summary of how effective you think they're being in trying to prevent interference and trying to, you know, notify the public about it.

Well, as I say, from my point of view as a journalist, there's no such thing as too much information, and I wish they would release more. At the same time, I am somewhat sympathetic. You know, they are releasing a lot more information than we had in 2016 or in 2020. You know, the fact that they're doing these periodic public briefings for the press is a great step forward in terms of transparency and really quite radical for the intelligence agencies.

And I think I'm very sympathetic to the people inside these intelligence agencies who I think are quite earnestly trying to do their job in a context where almost anything they say is immediately twisted to partisan ends by either side. And I think they're aware that their statements are very much at risk of being kind of drowned out by the partisan buzz from either side.

You offer as like so far the best case scenario in dealing with foreign interference is in France during the Macron presidential campaign and the leaking that was found. Can you describe what you think France did right?

Yes. Well, France had the advantage of coming after the 2016 election in the U.S. So they saw what Russia had done there. They may also have had some help from U.S. intelligence agencies at sussing out what Russia was trying to do in Ukraine.

But Russian hackers hacked into the Macron campaign and tried to release a bunch of internal emails and other documents to try to discredit it, to try to influence that election just as they had pretty successfully in 2016 in the U.S.,

But in that case, a number of French government agencies were able to forewarn the public in a credibly nonpartisan way, you know, that this was going to be coming out and that it was the operation of a foreign power and that they shouldn't pay attention to it.

And a nonpartisan French electoral commission was able to instruct the mainstream French media, when you get these hacks, don't publish them. They're the work of a foreign adversary, and they might have, you know, false information or bogus documents tucked inside of them. And all of that worked.

Right. So France is kind of the model. And the key there is that the government, through these national security agencies and through their nonpartisan electoral commission, was able to speak in a credibly nonpartisan way to try to forewarn the public and the media so that it wouldn't work. And it didn't work. And it didn't work. Right.

Right. So that's basically precisely opposite of what we've got going on. Since 2016, we're in a situation where the out party at the moment, the Republicans in 2020, the Democrats, is quite suspicious that whatever the intelligence officials are saying about foreign efforts to influence the election might itself be an effort to try to influence the election. And that short circuits the warning process.

So I want to talk a little about the Tenet Media case. And, you know, I want you to describe the case. But one of the things that's so interesting about this case is that this is the first election, I think, the first presidential election in which influencers like social media influencers have as much power and influence as they do now. And, you know, Russia seems to know how to take advantage of that for its own goals.

So can you elaborate on what the Tenet Media scandal was about? So in the Tenet Media scandal, what we learned is the Justice Department filed an indictment against a couple of Russian government officials, people who work for the Russian state media organization. And it was revealed that Russia had been funneling a lot of money to this organization, Tenet Media, conservative group of influencers, $10 million, and

And variously trying to influence their content, playing a role in their editorial operations, and seeding some of their postings with links to its own media efforts, its own disinformation that was spreading online. And two things about that that were troubling to me. One is, you know, the Justice Department takes its time.

It takes a while for them to collect information in a usable way through subpoenas, you know, to try to interview different sources and see what they can get. An indictment doesn't just happen overnight, especially a long and sophisticated indictment like that. So Tenet Media was allowed to do its work for quite a while, for months and months. And millions and millions of people took that in before we knew that Russia was behind it.

The other thing that was alarming about the indictment of these Russian officials who were behind Tenet Media is...

You couldn't help but suspect that Tenet Media may have been comically inept, but it was not alone, right? The strings that they were pulling to manipulate Tenet Media were pretty obvious, but it looked very much from the whole set of documents that the Justice Department released that this was probably only one small part of a much larger Russian operation that may have included other influencers as

As well. And we don't really know about the rest of that. So we don't know, of course, how much damage those influencers have caused. Yeah. And the answer might be none. Right. Because if you're tuning in to one of the tenant media personalities, you're probably already a Trump voter.

So, you know, there's a view that a lot of the money that foreign adversaries are spending to try to influence American elections is not money well spent on their part because our electorate is so big and so complicated and so already disinformed by our own politicians that they really can't do that much. Right.

The problem is when you head into a really close election, like in 2016 or like the one we're about to have now, then afterwards, it's impossible to rule out the possibility that some foreign government's misinformation changed the outcome. Right. So let's leap forward a few weeks. Maybe one of these crucial swing states is decided by a few thousand votes.

In that case, is it ever going to be possible to rule out the possibility that Russia, by amplifying certain voices internally, made the difference? If Russia is putting money behind even just turning up the volume on certain authentic American voices that it finds useful, will we be able to say that didn't decide the election?

Okay, before we talk some more, we need to take a short break here. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer David Kirkpatrick. And the article that he wrote that we're talking about is called The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference. We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with David Kirkpatrick that we recorded yesterday. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker. We're talking about his article, The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference. And the article is about Russian, Iranian, and other countries' attempts to influence American voters and to influence the outcome of the election. And we're talking about the new U.S.

center that's part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence called the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was created two years ago. And Kirkpatrick describes that as the command hub of the battle to protect the presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. I think maybe one of the new innovations in

Russian influence campaigns is that Russia has been embedding messages, and you write about this in your article, Russia has been embedding messages in the responses to the original message on social media. So they're not originating it, they just look like, oh, one of the many people who responds, but the response will often also have links to misinformation.

Right. One of the things that came out in these Justice Department indictments of certain Russian actors is that they, you know, having learned from the experience of the last two elections, they're wise to the fact that the big social media platforms are out there trying to police inauthentic behavior, trying to snuff out, you know, accounts that appear to be foreign controlled. And so to try to evade detection, they focused on using the replies. Right.

Right. Some authentic person starts a thread and then a Russian bogus account or or troll will will pipe in and the replies and say, oh, yeah, here, I've got some more about that. Why don't you go check out this Web site? And then you go to that Web site and it's a spoof of Fox News or it's a spoof of The Washington Post. And it's full of Russian disinformation created with artificial intelligence technology.

to try to fool you. And that's the way that they were doing their work. So it's getting much more sophisticated than it has been in previous years. Well, the whole idea of spoofing journalism sites is very frightening because you think you're getting the information from a source that you always use and that you trust, and it's really just a Russian spoof of that site.

Yeah. I mean, you know, those spoof sites are not foolproof, right? You can click around and determine what's a spoof site and what's a real site, you know, and if it doesn't read like the Washington Post, it's probably not the Washington Post. But yeah, that is scary. I mean, I was, you know, I was certainly pleased to see the Justice Department take action to strike down 30 or so of those accounts, an agency responsible for cyber security, and

put out a list recently of bogus online web addresses that it believes to be tools of foreign influence operations. But who knows how many people already saw those bogus sites before the Justice Department took them down. Is the process of deciding what information from the intelligence community should be made public to voters...

Is that a political process at all? Can it even be accused of being politicized? So there's been an effort inside the intelligence agencies to remedy concerns about the appearance of being political. That obviously held back the Obama administration. It overshadowed statements by the Trump administration. So now there's a process put in place that's designed to remedy that. The gist of it, it really turns on a group of people

career intelligence officials, right? So political appointees are excluded from this group. A group of career intelligence officials from across the intelligence agencies meet, and they have five specific criteria about any bit of intelligence related to the election, right? Is it credible? Is it specific? Is it a foreign effort? Is it malign, meaning sneaky or underhanded? And is it severe? That's the tricky one.

And if it meets all those criteria, then this group of nonpartisan career civil servant intelligence officials makes a recommendation. You know, this is something that we think the public should know about, a recommendation for a public notification.

And then it goes for final approval to a political group, the leaders group who are the heads of all the agencies, as well as the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. It looks a lot like the National Security Council in the White House. And that group has to approve any actual public notification. I was told that at least in the last two years, there's never been a case where the political leaders have in any way altered or significantly changed a recommendation from the experts and

And that process, were it known, is designed to insulate the public notifications about foreign malign influence operations from the appearance of a partisan motive. But if they're all people who were appointed by the current president, there's room for politicization of the process.

Well, the experts... In these partisan times. In these partisan times. Well, that's, you know, the people inside the intelligence agency would say, look, the crux of the decision-making here is happening at the experts group. And the experts are all career civil servants. None of them are politically appointed. They'll be here under the next president and ideally the president after that.

But yes, right. If you're a voter, you see, okay, well, whatever the experts say goes through the leaders who are politically appointed. And by the way, there's nothing that says that the director of national intelligence who's presidentially appointed can't go out and give interviews. You know, John Ratcliffe, when he had that job was giving interviews on Fox news on the eve of the election. So there's a process to insulate those statements and those public notifications from the appearance of a partisan agenda. I don't,

I don't think it's airtight. What are you watching for in these final days leading up to the election? You know, that's a very good question. I think we're all on the edge of our seats. I know that the people inside the Malign Foreign Influence Center, the experts group, is now meeting at least four times a week. They're in constant contact. I think that everyone expects that the foreign adversaries who are trying to influence the election will be escalating their efforts.

Those could come in the form of hacks and leaks. The intelligence agencies have put out statements that they expect foreign adversaries might try to take over news organization websites, make fakes of news organization websites, take over local election websites, make fakes of those websites to try to spread disinformation.

And the recent reports of continued efforts to mess with the process after the vote and through the inauguration, I find quite disturbing. So I really don't know what to expect. And it's definitely making me anxious. Well, join the rest of the country. David Kirkpatrick, thank you so much for coming back to the show. It's always a pleasure to talk with you and always really interesting. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to talk with you as well.

David Kirkpatrick is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His article that we've been discussing is called The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference. After we take a short break, guest jazz critic Morton Johnson will have a tribute to jazz composer and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson. He died last month. This is Fresh Air.

As Election Day approaches, NPR's Consider This podcast is zooming in on six states that could determine who wins the White House. Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. We'll ask voters in these swing states what matters to them and which way they want the country to go. Follow along with new episodes this week on the Consider This podcast from NPR.

With more electoral college votes than any other swing state, Pennsylvania is largely seen as the make or break battleground. Getting those last couple yards in the red zone in Pennsylvania is really, really tough. The presidential candidates have their eyes on it, and so do we. All this week on the Consider This podcast from NPR. Come along. This is Fresh Air.

The great composer and saxophonist Benny Golson died last month at the age of 95. Many of his works became almost instant jazz classics in the late 50s, and he composed internal music for hit TV shows, including The Mod Squad, and even appeared as himself in a Steven Spielberg movie. Guest jazz critic Martin Johnson takes a look back and suggests that Golson's music is still very much with us. ♪

That's Killer Joe, one of the many classics from the pen of composer and saxophonist Benny Golson, a master of capturing the sunny optimism of America in the late 50s and early 60s. The song could be a soundtrack for cruising in a convertible on a sunny day. Golson wrote a lot of music that felt both emblematic of its time, yet simultaneously timeless. And he recorded these songs with some of the best musicians of the era. ♪

Here's another Golson classic, Along Came Betty. Golson on tenor, with Art Blakey and the Chaz Messengers, recorded in 1958. The Betty of the title was a woman of interest for Golson, and the tune, with its relaxed, almost nonchalant groove, is sophisticated and restrained. It savors the potential affection in the relationship rather than just blaring lust. Golson's work is identified as hard bop, but he knew a soft side, too. ♪

Golson's genius for melody made his music cool and approachable for the listener, yet these songs were full of challenges for the player. His tune, Whisper Not, starts in one key and ends in another, kind of like a conversational scene in a movie that changes setting without losing the thread. ♪

Whisper Knot has a great march-like shout chorus, a flourish Golson picked up from the big bands. He began his career playing in orchestras led by legends like Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie. ♪

Benny Golson was born in Philadelphia and grew up in a hotbed of jazz activity. His peers included greats like trumpeter Lee Morgan, the Heath Brothers, saxophonist Jimmy and bassist Percy, as well as many others from nearby locales, including Clifford Brown, who was from Delaware and died tragically in an automobile accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when he was only 25.

Golson's best-known piece, I Remember Clifford, is a trinity, a brooding lament for Brown. ♪♪♪

When the jazz economy contracted severely in the mid and late 60s, Golson went to Hollywood, like his colleagues Oliver Delson and Lalo Schifrin, who composed the famous theme for the show Mission Impossible. Golson composed internal music for that show, as well as hits like Room 222 and The Partridge Family. Ironically, it was the rise of rock that diminished opportunities for musicians like Golson, and

Yet he rebounded by writing music for a show that featured rock. Years later, Golson appeared as himself in the 2004 Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones movie, The Terminal. By this time, Golson had returned to the bandstand. He reunited his group, the Jazz Tet, and recorded several fine records, most notably Moment to Moment in 1983.

As he aged, Golson's saxophone style didn't mellow. It became more gruff and acerbic, as if he was reaching further back toward his early idols, the raucous rhythm and blues stylings of Arnett Cobb, whose music first enraptured Golson as a youth. Here's the title track from Moment to Moment. ♪♪

According to the Lord Discography, Golson's songs have been covered more than a thousand times.

The range includes classic performances of Whisper Not by Ella Fitzgerald and Al Jarreau, to newcomers like the collective trio Thumbscrew, whose avant-garde approach and stylings are a perfect fit for Golson's stablemates, proving that his music, though emblematic of an era, is also timeless. ♪

Golson wrote that tune in 1955, and Miles Davis recorded it shortly afterward. But it's easy to hear the connection between versions done more than 60 years later and the original, done here by Golson in 1958. It's a connection that musicians will be drawing again and again for a long, long time. ♪

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Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Seaworth. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. ♪

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