Interview with Christopher Landau
Christopher Landau is an American lawyer and diplomat. He was the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico from 2019 to 2021. He is currently Of Counsel at Ellis George Cipollone O’Brien Annaguey LLP in Washington, DC.
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Max Raskin: Someone looking at you would think you were the classic gringo who didn’t know a word of Spanish. Have you ever had any funny experiences where someone didn't realize that you could speak Spanish fluently?
Chris Landau: Oh sure. It happens all the time and it's one of the great advantages of speaking a language that people don't expect you to speak. It's become rarer now in the United States, as so many people do speak Spanish now. But for me it's always been a party trick and I always get a kick out of the double-take I get from people when a torrent of Spanish comes gushing out of my mouth.
MR: And you don't just speak Spanish, you speak Spanish better than I speak English.
CL: Now you're being way too kind.
MR: I remember we went to that tv show and the host said you spoke Spanish better than he did.
CL: It's one of the great benefits of learning a language as a child. And certainly I encourage parents out there to try to teach their kids a foreign language, particularly if they speak one, before the kids hit puberty. Because I think something happens in the brain. And I don't want to go beyond my area of expertise here, but certainly from my own life — I can tell you that Spanish, which I learned when I was eight years-old is a totally different story than French, which I began studying when I was about 13, and I even lived in Paris for a year. My French is okay, but my Spanish is always like a native Spanish speaker, because I think I just learned it at exactly the right age.
MR: Did you teach your children languages?
CL: So of course I'm here giving advice that I didn't personally take myself. My wife is always reproaching me for not having spoken Spanish to our two children.
MR: Have you taken on any hobbies in your adult life?
CL: Not really. I'm always perplexed when people have major hobbies, because I feel like my life has been so full with my job, and raising two kids, and just paying my bills, and living life. I enjoy reading in my spare time, but I really don’t think that reading counts as a hobby.
MR: What is the first Mexican history book that comes to your mind right now?
CL: Well, the classic is Bernal Díaz del Castillo's book, The Conquest of New Spain, which is actually written by one of the guys who was with Cortés when he conquered the Aztec Empire. And to me that all was one of the most fascinating moments in human history, when this group of Spaniards basically arrived in Mexico and found this fairly advanced civilization. With an amazing city built on a lake with causeways and bridges and the emperor there resplendent feathers, Emperor Montezuma. And the meeting between Montezuma and Cortés is just one of the most incredible clashes ever between two completely unknown worlds. And basically all of Mexican history arose out of that encounter.
Old World, New World
MR: Your father and your mother were from Austria, correct?
CL: That's right.
MR: You and your father both served as diplomats — do you see that clash of worlds being replicated in you?
CL: It’s interesting that you say that, because I've always thought that one of the things that makes me, me, is that I have an expatriate mentality. My father was in the Foreign Service. I was born in Spain when he was serving in the US Embassy there. Then we lived in the States for a while when I was a little boy, but when I was eight years-old, he became the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, and we lived there for five years. I went to the American School there, and then I came back to the States for high school to go to boarding school and college. But my parents continued living in South America until the time I graduated from college. My dad went on to be the U.S. ambassador to Chile and Venezuela.
MR: Did he speak fluent Spanish?
CL: He did. So he fled Austria after Hitler came in, in the Anschluss in 1938, and made his way to Colombia, South America, where there was some distant family friend or relation who had a business, who said he would employ him, which allowed him to get the visa. But that never really panned out. So he made his own way in life, starting at age 18.
Imagine arriving as a Jewish kid from Vienna in tropical Colombia without speaking a word of Spanish. And he made it happen. So that's a whole other story — as you know I admire my father very much.
But I think in a sense I like the experience of being an American abroad. After practicing law for 30 years, I was very eager to take the job in Mexico, because I was very eager just to have that great opportunity to live abroad again. I love being an American, but I think there is definitely an expatriate sensibility that is just part of my essence.
MR: I’m going to ask you two yes-or-no questions that you are going to protest but I’m still going to ask them.
CL: Well, then you'll never get a yes-or-no answer.
MR: Do you think of yourself as an insider looking out, or an outsider looking in?
CL: Well, that's not a yes or no answer.
It’s a good question. Max, one of the things about me, is that I'm a little bit of both, which is not a very satisfying answer to you. You know me well enough to know that, in a lot of ways, I have a very insider background. I grew up as a son of an ambassador, and I was very blessed and privileged, and had wonderful opportunities. I went to a great high school, I went to great college, I had a great education. I had a lot of advantages in life, in our elite institutions. But I have to say, having been in those elite insider places, I always felt a little bit like the outsider on the inside. I always felt like I was a little bit different. I certainly never adopted the insider's attitude. I mean, I was the first generation in my family, for instance, to go to college.
My father completed night school and got his university degree just a couple of years before he became an ambassador in his late 40s. He finished college, got an associate degree at GW at night, and he's an immigrant. My family's very recent here. So in a sense I feel like I have a foot in both the insider and outsider camp in life. I think we've had this conversation, that I often feel quite alienated from the elites of our time. And maybe I'm just a natural contrarian, but I certainly have to say, politically now, I feel very alienated from elite institutions.
It makes me feel politically like an outsider.
Punk Rock Conservative?
MR: You dress very conservatively and carry yourself that way — do you do anything wacky?
CL: Oh my gosh, nothing is jumping to my mind, Max. I think I'm actually a fairly conventional person.
MR: What about in high school or college?
CL: No. It’s interesting — I never really had a rebellious streak in my life. I was born in 1963, and I have an older brother who's 11 years older than I am. He was the tail end of the '60s generation. So he came of age when Vietnam was still raging — and he definitely grew up with that whole counter-cultural vibe.
And I think I was part of the reaction to that. I would see my parents horrified by some of the things he wanted to do. He wanted to take a semester in college studying in Europe, and that caused great consternation in my family. My father was very much a straight and narrow path kind of guy. I think having come to the United States, he wanted to see his sons very much as establishment people. And so I was raised with my parents not liking all the rock and roll music.
MR: What did they listen to?
CL: They listened to classical music. I mean, very much old school, European, they enjoyed Strauss and Brahms.
MR: Did they get that from Vienna? I’m imagining one of those salons-type houses.
CL: Yes, very much so. I think my father was always aspiring to that a little bit. I mean, he was born in Vienna, but his own father and his mother came from the east. They came from the Bukovina. And I think, I don't think they were really part of the Viennese salon scene.
MR: Another outsider looking in?
CL: I think so, yes. My grandfather was a lawyer — I don't know that he was a tremendously successful one. I think part of what fueled my father was a feeling that his own father should have gone further.
My father and frankly most of his classmates at the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna — they kicked out all their Jewish students in 1938 — but almost all of them emigrated and survived. I went back with him in 2008 to Vienna, and we looked at what had happened, and I think that school was a real meritocracy, and I think it was a very rigorous place and the Jewish kids got kicked out.
MR: What was his relationship to Judaism?
CL: Very complicated. I didn't know about my Jewish roots until I was probably about college age, or maybe late high school, when the pieces began to fall together. This was before the internet, before 23andme. We never discussed that. I was raised Catholic, and I had no questions in my mind about my identity or anything like that. My father went to church every Sunday. He was actually a more faithful church-goer than my mother, who was born and raised Catholic.
But, as I ultimately found out, my father left Vienna when he was 18 on his own, and got to Colombia, South America. And then his big mission then was to get his parents out of Austria, which was getting more complicated by the day. And he was successful.
To honest with you, I don’t know all the details, but I do know that he enlisted the help of the Catholic Church. I think there were some strings attached. I'm not sure at whose suggestion this happened, or if this was just a wink-wink, but he and some other friends of his basically got the Catholic Church to help them bring their families out of Austria. And in return — “in return” sounds too transactional — but as part of that same process, they also converted to Catholicism.
The Israeli Landaus
MR: Did you know your grandparents?
CL: My paternal grandfather died before I was born. My paternal grandmother died when I was about 10, so I met her a few times, but I don't really have any memories of her.
MR: Did your dad’s parents convert to Catholicism?
CL: I don't believe that they converted. They're buried in the Jewish cemetery outside of Bogotá, Colombia. And I tried to go there on my last visit to Bogotá, and it was closed, unfortunately, I think for security reasons, they have it locked up, and you need a special permit to get in, which I couldn't get.
MR: People are dying to get in.
CL: Literally, that's the only way.
I will say that my father told me that his family was not religious at all. I don't think he ever had a Bar Mitzvah. I asked him about that, and they never went to Temple. I mean, I think this was one of the ironies of the whole rise of Nazism, that these were people who felt very much part of Austria-Hungary…loyal subjects of the emperor.
MR: Is there anything your dad wouldn't talk about?
CL: I mean, he didn't talk a lot about this. He would answer questions, but it was not really a subject he relished. And I think I respected his privacy on these issues. These were tough times for him.
Once when we were over in Vienna, he alluded to having been forced to get on his hands and knees and scrub the streets when the Nazis came in. This was a phenomenon that people would do then. And I think it was very painful.
MR: What do mean he alluded to it?
CL: He mentioned it, but it was not something that he just would bring up in conversation. I think in one conversation, when I asked him about life under the Nazis in Vienna, he said, "Well there was this episode where this guy forced me to get on my hands and knees and scrub the street with a brush." It was a traumatic episode. I probably should have pushed further, but I got the sense that that was not a direction he wanted to go in. And I respected that.
MR: Did he have family that died?
CL: Not much, to be honest with you. I think he had maybe one uncle or aunt that died, and I think his father had five or six siblings. I have a genealogy of the family, and unfortunately, I don't understand a lot of it, because some of it is in Hebrew. It comes from the side of the family that's now in Israel. So maybe the next time we get together, you can help me decipher some of that.
MR: Aren’t you related to an Israeli artist?
CL: Oh yeah, Sigalit Landau. A pretty avant-garde performance artist. People think maybe I'm super boring, but I actually have a very cool, artsy second cousin, or first cousin once removed, I'm not sure.
Jerry Garcia and F.A. Hayek
MR: So I have this theory that if you scratch people who are at the upper echelons of the American conservative world, you will find people who are avant-garde and hippie and willing to question things. Whether it’s Justice Thomas as a radical in college or Tucker Carlson as a Deadhead. So my question is: what do you think about my theory?
CL: I may be the exception that proves the rule — or maybe I'm not in the upper echelons of the conservative movement…
MR: No, you are.
CL: …but I have always been just a naturally conservative person. I never tried any drugs, and I was growing up in the late '70s.
MR: Was there ever a part of you that wanted to let your freak flag fly?
CL: No, never. I never had a moment of rebellion.
MR: Did you ever get into any trouble?
CL: Never.
MR: Not once? You've never gotten into trouble?
CL: Seriously.
CL: I mean, I don't smoke, I don't drink.
MR: Do you even know what trouble is?
CL: That sounds like that should be the title of a blues song or something.
MR: Have you ever cut a line?
CL: I’m just instinctually a rule-follower and I see this in my daughter, and I actually started to wonder if this is a genetic trait. Whereas my wife is different — she'll come to a situation, and she'll try to figure out the angle, and I'm just not like that. I'm a little bit of a stick in the mud that way.
CL on CT
MR: So you clerked for Justice Thomas — he’s obviously not a rule-breaking guy, but he’s an independent thinker and I think that makes him a rebel.
CL: I agree with that, and I respect him greatly for that. I think it would've been very easy for him to follow a path. The elites have certain paths that you can follow, and everybody throws roses in your path. And if he had talked a lot about systemic racism and how he's a victim, ironically, his life would've been easier, because I think that's the narrative that our society wants to hear and pushes. And I admire his just pursuit of the truth. And he doesn't really care about what people have to say or think.
The first President Bush said he was the most highly-qualified person for the job and I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that because he’s not only smart, but he's also not worried about what people think about him. And I think the framers gave our federal judges and justices life tenure for a reason, because they didn't want people to worry about what people are going to say about them at cocktail parties.
MR: What’s the best piece of advice you ever got from him?
CL: He's very wise. He encouraged me to take the job in Mexico, which was a fairly dramatic break with my past professional life. But I always had this bug — a real interest in foreign affairs — that I had sublimated for all those many years.
MR: What kind of advice would you give your son? You’ve trodded down this fairly conventional path that you were able to succeed at. Would you have done it again?
CL: I would've done it differently, I think. I think it’s a generational thing. I felt compelled almost by an invisible force field to live the life my father wanted. I think he wanted me to be a part of the American establishment, sent me to great establishment schools. I think it was important to him that I went to Harvard. That was something that gave him a great deal of satisfaction, and I knew that, and it was important to me. But sometimes you wonder what are you doing for yourself versus doing to please other people? I do believe you shouldn't live your life to please other people. Although I'm somewhat hypocritical saying that, because I think, in some measure, I live my life driven to try to fulfill my father's expectations.
¿Papá lo sabe todo?
MR: What's your own style of parenting?
CL: I have tried not to be the parent that says, "This is what I want you to do." I've tried to basically recognize that my children are very different than I am. I was a bookworm. You couldn't get me away from the World Book Encyclopedia when I was 10 years-old. I would just spend hours there pouring over the different countries of the world. I'd memorized all the capitals of the countries of the world by the time I was nine years-old. And that gave me a lot of pleasure. So before my children were born, I ordered on eBay and Amazon, all the books I remembered from when I was a kid, like Babar, and Edward Eager, and the Sasek “This Is” series.
MR: This is totally gratuitous, but check out my Babar hat.
CL: That is a very cool Babar hat.
MR: Isn't it cool?
CL: So yes, those things were meaningful to me. And I tell you, my son would not sit still in my lap when I was trying to read them. Most kids love to be read to, but he was squirmy, and just didn't cotton to that. My daughter was more tranquil, but reading just didn't come naturally for either of them. I think as a parent, you have to realize that your kids are hardwired in certain ways, and I think you have to accept that.
I think I gave my son the trait of ambition, which he has in spades. I actually now think ambition may be genetic, because I was probably the world's most ambitious teenager, and my son is also super ambitious.
May it please the cable company…
MR: Do you have any advice for people arguing in real life? You’ve obviously one of the country’s most prominent Supreme Court litigators — does that help you when you’re arguing with your wife?
CL: I think law has taught me to be a pretty analytical person, and break problems down into their component parts. I think a lot of us naturally tend to blur a lot of stuff together. If we have grievances, we throw them all together. And I try to break things down into separate issues.
MR: What about when you’re on the phone with the cable company — can you win?
CL: It's interesting that you say that. I actually think my wife, who is not a lawyer, is much better than I am at those kinds of things. Whenever there's a problem, she's always the one to deal with it, not me. She’s wonderful on the telephone, and I tend to get a little bit excited, and my voice takes on an unduly antagonistic tone. And she has a wonderful way of bringing a smile to it, and just defusing the situation, and getting her way that way. I think the best way to win an argument is usually not to have one.
MR: Whenever you're arguing with someone, have you ever pulled the “Listen, I have argued nine cases in the Supreme Court — I think I know how to argue a point.”
CL: Not really. That seems super ineffective. It’s like trying to pull the, "Don't you know who I am?" card. If you're persuasive, then persuade somebody. Don't just say, "Well, many people say that I'm extremely persuasive."
Sometimes I do get frustrated when I help my daughter on a paper, and I have a sense of how she should structure it. And I do try to say, "Honey, I have a lot of experience on this…this is my sweet spot that I’ve been doing for 40 years."
It doesn't tend to go over very well. It's not very persuasive.
MR: What’s that picture behind you?
CL: That picture is a power picture — that’s me in my first Supreme Court argument: Buckeye Check Cashing, Inc. v. Cardegna.
MR: Did you win?
CL: We won that case.
My wife commissioned the portrait…usually they’re horizontal. But she got this vertical one that I think is cool, because it shows the splendor of the courtroom. And one cool thing is that the artist put my family into the audience. My father, my mother, my wife — they were all there in the audience, and that was actually a wonderful thing. And my father used to go to all my oral arguments in the Supreme Court. I think he went to all them except the last one, when he was getting quite old.
Corte de Apelaciones de Estados Unidos para el Primer Circuito
MR: Let me ask you this, if you could have clerked for any judge in US Supreme Court history, who would it be?
CL: Oh gosh. I find it hard to top the experiences I had with Justices Scalia and Thomas.
I mean I love Justice Robert Jackson — I think he's a fabulous writer. I have no idea how he would have been to clerk for.
MR: What about if you had to clerk for a circuit judge today?
CL: When I graduated from law school back in 1989, what everybody wanted was to go clerk on the DC Circuit. And I don't know if it's still that way, but it was considered that was the place to go if you wanted to go on to clerk on the Supreme Court, because the DC Circuit judges had a reputation as “feeders” of clerks to the Supreme Court Justices. To be honest with you, I think that was really overblown.
I think in a lot of ways the conventional wisdom is wrong. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy — a lot of those feeder judges became feeders because they got a lot of a lot of the kids who probably would've gotten Supreme Court clerkships anyway.
So actually I've always told people find a good judge in another part of the country and go work there for a year. I think it would've been really fun to clerk in Puerto Rico, where there's an Article III appellate judge…it was Judge Torruella for many years.
Also sometimes the judges with the best reputations are not the best to clerk for — sometimes those judges can be very difficult, and have very fraught relations with their clerks. I was very blessed. Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas were both wonderful to clerk for, and I respected them a lot. They really appreciated their clerks’ input. Their clerks played an important role, but the justices also played an important role in teaching us a lot.
MR: Where’s your favorite Mexican food in the US?
CL: I like the little places that you can find in almost every city or town that aren’t fancy but serve authentic food – sometimes just tacos with fresh cilantro and lime, like you might find at the markets in Mexico. The fancy restaurants generally try too hard and offer things that you’d never see down there.
I just had a great experience in New York City. A guy who has followed me on Twitter since my days at the Embassy let me know a few months ago that he’d opened a Mexican restaurant up in Washington Heights. I said I’d like to check it out on my next visit to New York, and that’s exactly what I did. My family and I went to the restaurant and enjoyed a memorable evening with him and his family, and shared a terrific meal. Just simple food, but perfectly done like in Mexico.
But listen, I’m not a huge restaurant guy in general. I enjoy street food much more. There are few things that I dislike more than sitting in a restaurant for two hours. I get really antsy.
MR: I remember when we walked around that sugar festival in Mexico.
CL: Yes, la Feria del Alfeñique in Toluca, outside of Mexico City.
MR: You must have looked at every grain of sugar in a thousand-yard radius.
CL: See, that's what I enjoy. I enjoy going to markets, and I enjoy eating street food from stalls. I'm not a fancy restaurant guy in the least.
MR: Where would be a place in Mexico that you would take people?
CL: I can't remember if we went there, but my favorite place in Mexico City was the Mercado de Jamaica. It's spelled like Jamaica, the island, which means, "Hibiscus," in Spanish. And that's the City’s traditional fruit and vegetable and flower market. It's just an incredible array of stalls with incredible seasonal fruits. Obviously it varies all year long, but you just get whatever's come in from the countryside that day. I enjoy the entire sensory overload of that experience. I mean, there's piñatas hanging everywhere. You get the people making the tacos in their little stalls. To me that is Heaven. You couldn't pay me to go to a Michelin star restaurant instead of that.
I've realized that one of the things about getting older, is you do get to know yourself better, and what you really enjoy. A lot of people get a lot of pleasure out of finding a great restaurant and that's great. But for me personally, I enjoy just being out and about and grabbing food. I mean, I love cities where there's a lot of street food. I mean Bangkok for me is like cuisine heaven, because you can just buy it, and knock on wood, I think I have an ironclad stomach.
When I was in Mexico, I think one of the things people liked, is that I would go to popular places like that. I think it comes off fake if you're doing it as a token, but if you really enjoy it, it resonates.
“Can I At Least Have a Sidearm?”
MR: How many followers on Twitter do you have?
CL: Well, it's nothing compared to a pop star, but I think it's about 172,000.
MR: You are the most popular American thing in Mexico since, I don't even know.
CL: Well, it was fun. But I think it was because people knew I was authentic. I think it was a real surprise for people to see, "Whoa, the American ambassador is doing this and that." And I just think that's not traditionally a thing. And for the American ambassador just to go to the market, I mean, I asked my bodyguards like, "Gee, have any of my predecessors ever come here before?" And they said no.
MR: Before I came to visit you, I asked if I had anything to worry about, and you're like, "No, no, it’s totally safe." And then you show up on the tarmac with three black Suburbans and like five Jeeps with machine guns in the back. They’re clearing traffic like it’s a scene from Sicario, and you're like, "Oh yeah, everything's totally fine." I’m sitting there asking if I can at least have a sidearm.
CL: "Nothing to see here folks. Just move right along."
Look, it's one of the realities of diplomatic life nowadays, that there are security concerns.
MR: When I left the compound I asked the security guys, "How do I get to the city center?" And I was expecting them to be like, "Oh, we'll take you in one of the Suburbans." They said, "Oh, you can totally get a cab down the street." I'm like, “Okay.”
CL: I mean now I go back to Mexico and I take cabs and Ubers. And again, I feel comfortable there, partly because I speak Spanish, and I know the city pretty well. I don't necessarily encourage everybody to do this. But I respected the advice of my security officials when I was there as ambassador.
MR: Okay, this has been awesome. I'm going to stop the recording, but I just want to be on the record saying that you should be President of the United States.