In this great age of communication, there a lot of people you can't actually understand. I know everyone tweets, and twits and texts and all that, but actually we've all got voices, and it is awfully nice to hear them and if you can understand what people are saying.
That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything - people want to be appreciated for what they have done.
For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.