GUEST: Bill Keller
AIR DATE: 05/18/2013
VTR: 04/11/13

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And for years and years I have been reading what today’s guest has written, assigned, edited or had edited for The New York Times long before I had the temerity to ask him to join us here.

Bill Keller became the Times Executive Editor a decade ago. He had joined the paper in 1984 in the Washington bureau, was a Times correspondent in Moscow from 1986 to 1991, the last three years as its bureau chief, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his coverage of the USSR.

He then became The Times bureau chief in Johannesburg, then the paper’s Foreign News Editor, then its Managing Editor, then its top newsman as Executive Editor.

Now Bill Keller is a much-read Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, truly a man for all times.

Yet it was his intriguing column last month on “Smart Drones” that immediately occasioned my request that he join us here, and in preparing for today’s conversation I’ve read a good many pieces that Bill Keller has written, and I hope that he and you will bear with me if I skip from one to another today. But let’s go to the Drone piece …

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: What, what really lay behind that in your thinking?

KELLER: Mmm, I have a kind of long-standing fascination with the geekier aspects of our military. I spent a little bit of time as a Pentagon correspondent way back in the Caspar Weinberger years. And have from time to time written about one aspect or another of it and, and the technology and how it affects the ways of war, I just find fascinating.

Drones have been in the news a lot and there’s been a lot written about the kind of questions of how we use them now, whether … how much license a President should have to direct assassinations, whether there’s something sort of unsavory and antiseptic about this long distance way of, of killing bad guys. And certainly about the … those questions about the collateral damage, so called …the death of civilians in these attacks.

That’s been written about pretty well, but the one thing that had not really been touched on in, in what I was reading was the fact that the drones we have today are on a continuum and the continuum leads towards autonomy … is what they call it in the, in the military field.

That is to say, at this point there is a man in a control room … usually a man, but sometimes a woman in a control room directing the drone, firing the weapon, deciding whether or not this is the, the person that they want to get and firing it off.

We are not all that far away from a day when the machine itself decides, when it would … and in fact there are a couple of deployed systems that come sort of close. In, in the military they refer to “human in the loop”, which is basically what the drones are now … the ones that are operating over Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and elsewhere …

HEFFNER: Where there is a human …

KELLER: … where there is a human in the loop. There’s “human on the loop” where the machine has an assignment and can go out and has a measure of autonomy, but its … it has a human watching over its shoulders, so to speak, who can abort the mission at any time.

And then you have “human out of the loop”, which is not the kind of fantasy of Terminator, you know, the robot killer coming back from the future, but is the closest thing that I could find to something that actually exists is a weapon that the Israelis have deployed.

And what it does, it flies around on its own, flies these sort of lazy patterns and it reads radar signals, the signals that come off of radar and it has in its … mmm, mmm … electronic …

HEFFNER: Mind.

KELLER: … memory … (laugh) I almost said “mind” … in its electronic memory a database of friendly radar signals. And when it encounters a radar signal that is not friendly, it presumes that that is probably some anti-aircraft installation that’s hostile and it can immediately transform itself into a dive bomb and strike that weapon … that, that radar installation. You know that’s about as … I think there are a number of people who are critical of, of this tendency in weaponry, who would say “that one already crosses a line.”

But certainly there are things on the drawing boards that you know, take this farther and farther. And it sounds futuristic, but once you get … you know, on that slippery slope, there are a lot of things that kind of keep the tendency going.

The military wants it because it wants to have the best weapons possible, and they particularly like this because it means they’re not putting troops at risk and, and that’s, of course, the commander’s … the highest price an army pays.

There are commercial pressures to keep this thing going because people manufacture them and sell them. There are 70 some countries that have the regular piloted drones that, that we operate. They don’t all make them.

There are some countries that make them and sell them and they’re a good business.

HEFFNER: Has Israel made them and sold them?

KELLER: Yes. I don’t think they have sold this weapon that I was referring to before, but they, but they, they do make and sell drones. And then there’s just the pressure of science.

I mean my youngest daughter who’s now 10 is in a robotics club and it is a, a huge thing in, in schools around the world. Sponsored by Lego and companies like that which provide the kind of ingredients for the first robot makers.

And I went to one of the competitions …the regional competition at the Javits Center in New York with my daughter because her team made the finals, or semi-finals, I guess they were.

And it’s very sweet and it’s …and this is a great thing. I mean these, these kids are learning how and what’s especially sweet about it, I think, is that there are a lot of girls doing it. So its, you know, the, the notion that technology …the future of technology is in the hands of boys is going to be disproven.

But science doesn’t like to say “We’ll only go this far and then we’ll stop discovering stuff”. So, there’s, you know, there’s military, commercial and scientific research pressures for these things to develop all the capabilities they can.

HEFFNER: Isn’t this the place where we just shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, that’s the way it’s going to be. How do you stop that?” … you talk about slippery slope.

KELLER: It’s very hard to stop it, there are a number of organizations, including some of the people who are involved in getting land mines banned … which was … although the United States has not signed on to that ban …

HEFFNER: Indeed.

KELLER: … we, we don’t deploy land mines, however. We, we follow the spirit of the, of the agreement without having actually signed it. To our shame I think.

But some of the people who are involved in, in getting that enacted are on the case of, of fully … what they call “fully autonomous weapons”.

HEFFNER: Are you betting on the success of that effort?

KELLER: No. I’m not. I mean, I mean I hope for the success of that effort, but I … no I would not, I’m not terribly optimistic, but I applaud them for trying. And I will probably applaud them again from time to time in a column.

HEFFNER: Does this make you, as some people have accused you of being a Luddite?

KELLER: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: You mentioned that before we went on the program and, indeed, there was a piece that you had done … I’ll find it here … the one on the twitter …

KELLER: “The Twitter Trap” it was called … yeah.

HEFFNER: Yeah, talking about your daughter and it … that was eight years ago … how’s she done with …

KELLER: No, it was only … it wasn’t eight years ago …

HEFFNER: Wasn’t it?

KELLER: I think three maybe … two or three …

HEFFNER: Was it that?

KELLER: … two or three …

HEFFNER: … well, I’ll find it.

KELLER: … it was … it was right in the closing days of my time as Executive Editor, when I writing a column occasionally for the Magazine …

HEFFNER: … you’re right, it was 2011.

KELLER: Yeah.

HEFFNER: … but you say, “I don’t mean to be a spoil sport and I don’t think I’m a Luddite (laugh) …

KELLER: Right. And just …

HEFFNER: But are you or aren’t you?

KELLER: Well, you know I had eight years as Executive Editor of The Times and the last five or six of those were spent helping to transform The New York Times into a digital news operation.

With considerable success, both in terms of reaching a much broader audience, but also using the technology in innovative ways to gather news and to tell stories.

I mean I walk through … I’m still allowed, even though I’m up on the Opinion Floor now, I still have an “All Access” pass and I do walk through the newsroom from time to time.

And it’s, you know, people still refer to it as the “grey lady” which implies a kind of hidebound aversion to change … small “c” conservative attitude towards everything.

I tell you The New York Times newsroom now is like a laboratory and, and they tried all sorts of innovative things with interactive graphics and with audio and with data … number crunching as a way of, of supplying content for stories.

And I think that’s a good thing. So no, I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I think I have … I’ve certainly embraced the fact that we … that my business now lives in a digital world, even though that’s sometimes unsettling.

But, I guess I would say I recoil a little bit from people who tend to treat technology as a dogma or a religion. It’s a tool … an extremely useful tool that can be used for good things and can be used for bad things.

And, and there is something of a tendency among, you know, sort of young people who have incorporated so much of the social media and the new world into their lives to say, you know, “If you’re not with it, you’re not cool, you’re, you’re backwards, you’re a Luddite, or a techno-phobe”.

You know I use social media, my children use social media, much more than I do, but, you know, throughout history new technologies have always been absorbed at a cost.

I said in that column that, you know, my father who was an MIT chemical engineer and a, a slide rule generation guy … used to complain that, that since everybody had pocket calculators, nobody knew how to do arithmetic any more. And he was kind of right. A lot of those math skills, you know, have atrophied as we depend on the new technology.

HEFFNER: What then, what skills do you think are going to go “by the board”? Maybe, indeed, have gone by the board in terms of our new technology? Skills or human approaches to …

KELLER: Well, some of … some of both. I mean, you know, I find … it’s just … in the category of skills, I used to know how to drive myself around Los Angeles. I went to school not far from there (laugh). Now when I go to Los Angeles, I rent a car with a GPS system and the machine tells me when to turn right and when to turn left. And I’ve completely lost my sense of direction in, in a city that I once, you know thought that I knew. There’s, there’s a lot of that sort of thing.

The part of the column that produced the, the loudest kind of moans of indignation from the, from the true believers … I’m using loaded language, I know …

HEFFNER: Indeed.

KELLER: But I’m a columnist, so I guess I’m allowed to. But the, the loudest complaints came when, when I talked about social media. And I said a couple things about social media.

First of all that at least some … the very kind of quick response … Twitter … in particular … which is designed for, you know, wise-cracking exchanges and sharing links to other things … is not a great place to have a discussion.

The title of the column came from a little experiment that I conducted where I tweeted … Twitter makes you stupid … discuss.

And everybody reacted to the “Twitter makes you stupid”, but not to …

HEFFNER: But not …

KELLER: … to the “discuss”. (Laugh) And in fact it is not a very good place to have a civil discussion. It’s good for other things, it’s just not very good for that.

I worry, you know, to some extent that if all of your social life exists online, you miss something. If, if your idea of a friend is somebody that you “friended” on Facebook, you maybe missing out on the kind of experience that comes from having friends that you go out for coffee with and, and, you know, share your secrets with … not in a way that’s been written down or, or photoed … photographed and posted … but that just sort of emerges from, from real human contact. I worry a bit about that.

I’m not apocalyptic about that we’re going to lose our ability to love, but, but I worry that it is a … that something may be lost.

HEFFNER: But doesn’t that fit in to your first concern about drones that are self-driven? Isn’t there a parallel, isn’t there a similarity there?

KELLER: Yeah, there’s … you know, they’re both examples of the fact that, that these are tools and you … tools are to be used and tools should be controlled. And when the tools begin to control you … that’s a little scary.

HEFFNER: And you think we have reason to be scared?

KELLER: I think we have reason to be anxious, let’s say … I’m, I’m somewhere on the continuum between a little nervous and, and panicked. I’m closer to the “a little nervous”.

HEFFNER: Well, I’m much older than you … so that I’m very nervous …

KELLER: So you can panic (laugh) …

HEFFNER: … and I’m panicked about them.

KELLER: I’m reassured by the fact that I have kids who use social media as a kind of mainstay of their social lives. The older one does, anyway. The younger one’s still 10 and she doesn’t do much … we don’t let her do that much. But, but my daughters are still quite wonderful … nearly perfect.

HEFFNER: That’s great. And I’m sure when they hear that they’ll not think of you as …

KELLER: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: … “there goes Dad again”.

KELLER: (laugh)

HEFFNER: You know there were so many things I said at the beginning that I wanted to ask you about having to do with the press and other things.

One had to do with a, a piece you wrote … “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate”.

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: And that does seem to me … it seemed to me that it was such an important thing to worry about.

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: But I sort of find it reflected in the “Grey Lady” herself with the emphasis so much now on opinion. And aggregating opinions …

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … and publishing them.

KELLER: Well, we all, all aggregate … you know, if you use the term broadly and, and always have. I mean a newspaper story is an aggregation of facts and opinions that you didn’t originate or invent. You collected from other people …

HEFFNER: But you went out to collect them.

KELLER: You went out to collect them and you usually attributed the information to the, you know, to the, to the experts or individuals that you, that you interviewed and, and to the documents that you cited.

But … but … so aggregation, per se, is not a … is not evil.

HEFFNER: What is?

KELLER: Well … I have two, two things that I would say about aggregation which is, which is … you know, you’re right that The New York Times does a lot more of the kind a, the kind of aggregating that is not just going out and interviewing people and putting their quotes into a newspaper article.

We post … people’s comments after our articles and opinion pieces and, and columns … sometimes hundreds of them. We have a blog called “The Lead” which is very heavily aggregation and what it serves to do on, on occasions when we don’t have a reporter somewhere is to kind of sort through what other media have said or what individual, sort of civilians, tweeting and posting things to You Tube have said.

It, it’s first great accomplishment, I think, was during the 2009 upheavals in Iran when I was there for part of that and then they kicked all the foreign reporters out. And our aggregator blog “The Lead” put together information coming, mostly thorough social media and, and occasionally from other journalists who had found other ways to gather information and assembled it all and tried to make sense of it.

So we aggregate all the time. The, the two points that I try to make about aggregation are … first of all it’s no substitute for going there. And going there is expensive, sometimes risky, it’s often inconvenient. But going and actually bearing witness is, is not something that you can replace with just aggregating the opinion of others.

And the second thing is, there’s a line between sighting … recommending that readers go look at somebody else’s work and just stealing it. And some of the aggregators …

HEFFNER: Aggregators …

KELLER: … some of the aggregators published so much of other people’s work and at the end they may put a link, but, by the time you’re done, you’re read so much of somebody else’s work that you have no need to actually go there and maybe generate the few cents of income that your visit would, would generate through … you know, by, by clicking on an ad.

I mean it costs money to, to do the “going there” and bearing witness.

HEFFNER: But I don’t think it’s only a matter of dollars that you’re concerned about … is it?

KELLER: No, I think it’s … there’s, there’s an ethical question here, too. You know, we’re still trying to figure out where that line is. I mean the latest case is, is this new television software that promises to … if you pay them a fee, they will fish out of the airwaves all of the broadcast signals from the networks and give you, give you their stuff … live, if you want, or stored if you want on your cell phone.

Needless to say the TV producers are up in arms and, and on this one, my hearts are with them. Not that I particularly love everything that, that appears on television. But it’s hard, expensive stuff to produce. And, and it’s hard for me to justify swiping it and re-selling it, you know, with no reimbursement to the people who produced it.

HEFFNER: You know, turning to something very, very different … I told you before we began our program that my wife insisted, knowing who was going to be my guest today, that I’ve got to ask you about this. This, this is a quote from you from somewhere because I didn’t identify it as I wrote it down … “We have sometimes”, talking about the press in general, “we have sometimes been too even-handed, giving equal time to arguments that fail a simple fact-check”. So that …

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … The New York Times, for instance, will report something outrageous …

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … that someone has said and as I look at it, I’m going to be 88 … for 80 of those years I’ve been reading The New York Times …

KELLER: Mmmm.

HEFFNER: … and I, by and large … believe what I read in The New York Times or at least I think that old symbol up at the top “All the News That’s Fit to Print” means it wouldn’t be there if it weren’t fit to print.

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: What’s your fix on printing a statement to charge an item that you know ….

KELLER: Yeah. When I wrote that I didn’t have in mind a particular offense. It’s more of a chronic problem.

HEFFNER: Makes it worse.

KELLER: It, it does. I should say up front that I believe in trying to be even-handed. I, I … you know, there is a school of thought that journalists should just abandon any pretense to objectivity …

HEFFNER: Right.

KELLER: … declare your politics and your ideology and all your views up front. I think that’s a mistake. I, I mean I know that it’s part of the culture of some places. I have friends who work for The Guardian … in fact I have a wife who works for The Guardian … the English paper …and their culture is much more kind of overtly partisan.

But ours is not and I think there’s a real advantage to withholding your opinion. Partly because once you’ve spoken it, you feel some sort of impulse to defend it. And that makes you automatically less open-minded to, to the other point of view.

So, I, I am a believer in trying to be fair and balanced in presenting the news. But, you know, at …

HEFFNER: Presenting the news ….

KELLER: Yes.

HEFFNER: … the news or the views?

KELLER: Presenting the, the news … well, the news is … often consists of views. I mean if you’re writing about the politics of the budget debate, you know, you want to hear from the Republicans and the Democrats. Maybe nothing happened. Maybe the news is nothing but warring views.

But, you know, for a long time my paper, everybody’s paper treated climate science as if it were a theory … the, the notion that there’s global warming and that human conduct contributes to it.

And I think probably out of an excess of … a sorted of distorted sense of fair play … well beyond the point when the consensus of science was clear, we all sort of continued to tip our hats to the, to the denialist view. We don’t really do that any more, certainly The Times doesn’t … I don’t speak for, for the entire business.

But my sense as a reader is that it has now become … nobody now feels obliged when writing about the latest dispute over “cap and trade” or carbon taxing or whatever … to pretend that it’s an unresolved question … whether or not the climate is changing.

I’m sure there are lots of other things out there, you know, where we are still leaning a little too hard on the, on the tradition of even-handedness and, and probably giving one side more than it’s due.

HEFFNER: You see I didn’t mean even-handedness, because I’d certainly go along with that. But I meant where you know in, in this quote that fail a simply fact check.

KELLER: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: But this is for us to continue if you’re willing to stay here and do a second program, because believe it or not, we’ve come to the end …

KELLER: I’m happy to stay.

HEFFNER: … of our time here. Good.

KELLER: Yeah.

HEFFNER: And thank you so much for joining me today, Bill Keller and we’ll come back in about five minutes … meaning next week.

KELLER: (laughter) Okay.

HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile, as an old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

And do visit the Open Mind Website at thirteen.org/openmind to reprise this program online right now or to draw upon our Archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org/openmind.

THE OPEN MIND
GUEST: Steven Brill
VTR: 04/11/13

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And our conversation today centers on a highly publicized and controversial Time Magazine cover story from earlier this year…an extraordinarily long piece about the American medical marketplace titled “Bitter Pill – Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us”.

Its author, also highly publicized and controversial investigative journalist-lawyer-businessman Steven Brill, is my guest today.

And I would note that 30 years ago – almost to the day – when he first joined me here on The Open Mind as the editor and publisher of The American Lawyer, many lawyers thought of IT then as “muckraking”, because in it Steve was revealing so much about what one might have called our American legal marketplace.

Of course, it’s hard to believe my guest is against the very idea of a marketplace … because he has succeeded so well in and at it himself … with The American Lawyer, with Court TV and with his various other business enterprises.

Yet in reading his Time Magazine article – “Bitter Pill – Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us” – I get the strong feeling that ultimately it is negative only about dollars, not sense, only about what medicine in America costs us because of all the greedy fingers in the pie – and not about how much good sense it makes, how good American medicine really is.

And I would ask Steve Brill if in thinking this I’m on the right track.

BRILL: Ah, yeah, I guess you’re sort of on the right track. I think the problem with medicine, with healthcare, unlike the legal marketplace or the, you know, the marketplace for shoes or for clothing or housing, or anything else, is that you really can’t have a free market because the, the buyer never has any leverage and never has any power over the seller.

The most extreme example would be if, if God forbid one of us slipped and fell as we came out of the studio … we’d be taken to the Emergency Room.

It’s not like we woke up this morning and said, “Gee, I wonder what’s on sale at the Emergency Room today?” I think I’ll go take a look.”

And if I don’t like their prices I’ll go to the next Emergency Room, or the one after that. We’re going to get taken to the Emergency Room.

Typically we won’t care what it costs if we have really good insurance. But these days most people don’t have really, really good insurance the way they used. But the market place does not work.

And what this article is all about is why and how the marketplace doesn’t work and it was borne out of the basic curiosity I had that … whereas the debate over Obamacare and everything else really seems to be over who should pay medical bills. It’s never been, yet, about why are the bills so high?

HEFFNER; But, in a, in a … not a word, but a sentence … why are the bills so high?

BRILL: Because the people doing the buying have no market power. And the people doing the selling have been able to set the prices at wherever they want, you know. And, and, you know, we’ve made a decision as a country, unlike every other country in the free world and in the not-so-free world that it’s perfectly okay for a, a drug company CEO to make, you know, $20 million dollars this year as a salary and $25 million dollars next year … while someone who needs the cancer drug that they make isn’t going to get it unless he can fork over, you know, $13,000 dollars, as I say in the article, for one … you know, for one treatment of that drug, when it costs that drug company $300 to make that drug.

We’ve made that decision that we’ll let the marketplace decide that when everybody knows, I mean it just stands logic on its head … everybody knows that if I need a cancer drug to keep living, I don’t have very much market power when it comes to how much I’m going to pay for the drug.

HEFFNER: Steve, does that mean that many people are not getting the drugs they need to extend their lives?

BRILL: It means many people aren’t getting the drugs or the treatment or the tests that they need. But it also means that when they do, they or the rest of us, through our insurance premiums, or through the government programs that supply people with, with healthcare, such as Medicaid or Medicare … it’s bankrupting everybody else.

It’s almost as if in this country in the last half decade, or decade we live in two universes. There’s, there’s the universe you and I live in, which is a place where the economy hasn’t been so good, in case you haven’t noticed. There’s, there’s been high unemployment. People are squeezed on their incomes and they’re really … you know, we’re all sort of, you know, worried about the economy.

Then there’s this alternate universe of the medical economy where everybody just keeps making more and more money, employment is high and getting higher. You can make $150,000, $200,000 with very little experience if you want to sell … you know … CAT scan equipment for GE.

And that’s an alternate universe. Those people haven’t gotten the memo that, that there’s something wrong with the economy.

And the reason that this is really so troubling is that, that alternate universe of the medical economy is really what is … exploiting and sapping the real economy.

HEFFNER: And your solution, sir?

BRILL: My solution is that we have to treat medical care really differently than we treat every other kind of product that is bought in a marketplace. Because what we have demonstrated with our experiment, and our experiment alone … by leaving it to the free market is that the free market doesn’t work. The prices are way too high.

I’m not saying that, you know, the CEO of a drug company shouldn’t make a lot of money. But it really necessary to have a salary of $ 15 or $20 million dollars? Is it really necessary for the CEO of your, you know, your local hospital in, you know, Bridgeport, Connecticut, to have a salary of a million eight ($1,800,000) at year at a supposedly non-profit institution? Is that the way we really need to reward those people?

HEFFNER: Steve, you say, “is it really necessary?”. That sounds like talk from the far Left. And yet I don’t identify you with the far Left.

BRILL: It’s not … well, you don’t have to be on the far Left or, or any place … I mean if you believe in free markets, as I do … than what you believe in …

HEFFNER: But not for medicine.

BRILL: No. You can believe in free markets for medicine, but if you’re going to believe in that, then you have to, you have to demonstrate that it is a free market. That it’s not a stacked deck.

Nobody believes in a marketplace … at least I don’t think anybody should believe in a marketplace, where the buyer has all … has none of the power vis-à-vis the seller. And that’s what we have here. And the way to fix that is to give the seller more leverage in that marketplace.

Now one way to do that is to have what everybody calls the “single-payer” system, where the buyer … in this case, you know, it would, you know, be allowing everybody to enroll in something like a Medicare program … would have lots of power because they’d be doing, you know, so much of the buying.

HEFFNER: The buyer would be the government.

BRILL: Yeah. Now you could, you could take that view or you could say “Well, let’s have nobody have insurance, but let’s have the government, you know, be on the hook to provide all kinds of subsidies for people who can’t afford healthcare on the premise that, you know, we want to live in a society where everybody can get healthcare.

The problem with that is, that again the individual buyer … you going out to buy a CAT scan … you don’t have very much leverage and your leverage is diminished still more as hospitals consolidate all around the country. They keep buying each other up.

And worse is they buy all the doctor’s practices in the communities where the hospital is, so that when you look across the landscape in a typical community, you know, you might only be able to go to one hospital.

So, the government has to intervene, regulators have to intervene. This is what regulation is for when a marketplace is not working.

And if we haven’t done anything else in the last few decades, we have demonstrated that the medical marketplace doesn’t work.

How have we demonstrated it? We pay two or three times as much per capita for healthcare in this country than any other developed country. And that’s adjusting for the relative wealth of the countries. And yet our results are no better. And in, in many respects our results are worse, if you look at life expectancy, infant mortality and all those kinds of things … our results are worse.

HEFFNER: Now, there have been those who’ve picked you up on that end of things. And that’s why I began the program …

BRILL: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … by saying that my sense was that you really weren’t poor mouthing American medicine in terms of its results. That you were concerned, essentially, primarily, with the matter of …

BRILL: What …

HEFFNER: … what it is doing to our pocketbooks.

BRILL: … I feel more comfortable and I think it’s, it’s less distracting to this discussion if you just concede and say, “our results are no better”. Because …

HEFFNER: Yeah. But you didn’t stop there.

BRILL: Well, because … well because, because the data is that the results in many respects are worse.

HEFFNER: There you go again.

BRILL: But, but you can, you can ascribe that data to life style habits in this country … you know … obesity … things like that.

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

BRILL: … As an excuse for the results being worse. But the, the way I can win my argument most easily, is just to say that, you know, we’re spending, you know … lots more and not getting a better result.

HEFFNER: Well, that’s …

BRILL: It’s sort of like the public education system, which is something that I wrote about last time, I think, when I talked to you. And, where … you know, there again we spend much more per capita on, on our K to 12 education system, and there we know the results are worse than …

HEFFNER: But, Steve, I’m glad you brought education up because I was going to, too, and ask whether it, too, falls under the … your rubric of “this is too important to leave it to the marketplace.”

BRILL: No, actually, education is quite the opposite. Education is one place where the marketplace would work. The problem with public education … it’s almost a flip of the problem with healthcare.

The problem with public education is it’s a monopoly foisted on us by the government. And that if you allow that, that anti-trust issue to go away, by allowing people to sponsor, you know, charter schools, as, as we now have, in so many communities around the country … that work, and you monitor them to make sure they work.

They don’t all work, but, but, you know, the majority of them do. You break the monopoly. You know, we’re on Manhattan Island. For people who live on the east side of Central Park and the west side of Central Park … a lot of them have plenty of school choice because they have the money to send their kids to private school.

For the people who live on the north side of Central Park … hmmm, until the Bloomberg Administration … they didn’t have any choice. They had to send their kids to “the” public school and “the” public school in their community is in Harlem … was pretty much always a failure. They didn’t have any choice. I mean charter schools gave them the choice.

Now coming back to healthcare. The problem is that the private marketplace doesn’t allow any choice because at the point in which the consumer is buying, the consumer has no leverage. So it’s actually the same kind of problem, but it’s a different kind of solution.

HEFFNER: What’s been the reaction … and that’s a, you know, a “laugh into my pocket” …

BRILL: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: … question. What’s been the reaction on the part …

BRILL: Well …

HEFFNER: … of your medical friends … in hospitals, in their medical practices … you have a lot of doctor friends …

BRILL: The doctors … you know, doctors are pretty much … are you know, cheering this on. They say … you know, they work in a system that they know is broken. And as I try to point out in the article … the, the irony … the other sort of misfire in the whole system … is that for all the money that I just described, for all the alternate universe of all the people getting rich in the healthcare economy versus all the rest of us …the ones who haven’t gotten that rich … are the people who actually do the care.

The nurses and the doctors, they’re the ones who are getting squeezed by, you know, all these bureaucratic rules, they’re getting squeezed by hospitals who are buying up their practices.

Now, there are lots of doctors who make a lot of money. But if you show me a doctor who’s making, you know, even as much as, you know, a million or a million and a half dollars a year, which, you know, there are a few who do … and I’m not talking about the doctors who own, you know, clinics or other things where they make money on the side … I’m talking about making the money just for practicing.

If you show me a doctor that’s so good that, that he or she is making a million and a half dollars a year … you know, I can show you hundreds and hundreds of thousands of partners at corporate law firms who are making that much and more. And, you know, for my money, you know, before I would attack a doctor for making that much money, I’d say, you know, for what they do, you know, that’s sort of okay.

The bigger problem to me is that you have … you know, you can have a marketing director at a, at a nothing hospital who’s making that much money … let alone the CEO.

You can have, you know, salesmen who, you know, win a regional contest for one of the CAT scan companies who can make that much money. That’s a real issue. And it’s a … it’s a misallocation of our resources.

HEFFNER: Okay, you write this article for … whoever you wrote it for … it’s published by Time magazine …

BRILL: Yeah.

HEFFNER: … tremendous fuss made about it. I mean I’ve … I know of few cover stories that have had the impact or I should say ….

BRILL: Let’s hope.

HEFFNER: … garnered the attention that yours has.

BRILL: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: But then let’s go to impact. What do you think will happen as a result?

BRILL: Well, I think this article may be, be part of or the, the starting point for, or one of the, the points of encouragement for a real opening up of, of, of the process, you know, to real transparency.

And when I say the starting point or one of , or one of the starting points … you know, what’s going on as this article is being talked about is that people are focusing on their healthcare costs in a way that they never did.

For a lot of reasons. One of them is that its gotten so expensive that its rare that anyone now has an insurance policy where they really don’t care what the stuff costs, because the co-pays are so high, the deductibles are so high, the limits are so high, so, you know pretty much everybody’s focused on it. And certainly, you know, every, every employer in America is focused on it … because they’re looking at, you know, their share of the insurance premium skyrocketing.

As taxpayers we’re focused on it because it’s become such a huge part of the Federal budget and all of that is going to just be accelerated by the opening of the insurance exchanges that come, you know, this fall with … you know, with the coming of the healthcare reforms of the Obama Administration.

So everybody is really thinking about this. And you could argue that, you know, this article that, you know, lit a match and, you know, into a really combustible situation to start with.

So, I think the first part of dealing with any kind of market problem or institutional problem is, you know, the kind of awareness that forces a transparency.

I will predict to you that, you know, a year from now, it will be too embarrassing and just impossible for, you know, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to charge, you know $77 for a box of gauze pads.

There’s just, there’s just no way that you can hold a microphone in front of the … whoever runs that hospital, you know, and have him explain that with a straight face.

HEFFNER: But we don’t very often … hold microphones …

BRILL: Well, I think the, the … there are all kinds of reporters now, all over the country as a result of this … looking at their local hospital.

There are legislators … I saw some news clip the other day where some legislator in some town has proposed that the CEO of a hospital can’t make more than x times a doctor at the hospital. Or that a hospital that pays a CEO more than this, loses its tax exemption.

I mean there’s all this stuff sort of bubbling and it would have bubbled up anyway. I mean this is not something where, where I sort of, you know, created an awareness and a problem.

I think I spurred … I spurred it by using real stories, real money, instead of just writing, you know, another policy polemic about the problem.

HEFFNER: And reproducing real bills.

BRILL: Yeah. I mean that’s what really did it. Because everybody has seen bills like that.

Everybody’s gotten an explanation of benefits from their insurance company and they’ve looked and said, “Oh my god, I was just in the hospital for a day and a half … and it was, you know, $58,000, but thank god for my insurance company because they got, they got a discount down to $11,000 and my co-pay is only, you know, $1,100. What a deal”.

Until they say, “Wait a minute … I have to pay $1,100 for this? It was, you know, it was a stomach ache. And I was in the hospital for a day and a half. How did that happen?”

Everybody has seen that. And this, I think, really struck a nerve because it explained to them that they’re not stupid … the fact that they didn’t understand the bills or the discount, or the codes or the, you know, the gobbledygook in the bills … they’re just like everybody else. And it’s really hard to understand and the reason it’s hard to understand is that the people writing the bills don’t want you to understand it.

HEFFNER: Steve, I, I understand what you’re saying and, and as I read the piece and re-read it, I think I knew what your motive was … and that your reasoning ….

BRILL: What was that?

HEFFNER: …that your reasoning would be that you were going to change a structure that needed to be changed because of what it was doing.

BRILL: Well, I didn’t start out … no, no … I mean you, you give me either, you know, too much credit … or …

HEFFNER: I would never do that, Steve.

BRILL: … but I started out on this because I was just curious. Which is the way any good journalist should … should think about what a good story is. What are you really curious about?

And I, you know, when I listened to all the debates over Obamacare and all this stuff and at the same time … a relative of a relative of mine … had a … had gotten a huge hospital bill which was totally covered by, by insurance so it wasn’t a hassle for him … but it was $158,000 bill … and he showed it to me and I said “How could it be that much? What’s going on here?”

So my curiosity was “why does healthcare cost so much?”. So I thought well, maybe it costs so much because we’re so meticulous and we’re so good … so much better than any other country … that that’s the cost of really good healthcare. That turned out not to be true.

Maybe … I thought … it’s because, you know, the culprit that I saw when I wrote about the public education system in the United States which is largely union contracts which makes the workers, you know, unaccountable and very expensive and load all these pension costs and everything on.

That’s not the case here. The case is that the prices are just way too high for all the services. And why is that? It’s because it’s not a real marketplace. And nobody, until recently, has cared much about the prices, except the insurance companies and insurance isn’t a terribly competitive industry, anyway, so they really didn’t care and they’re not terribly competent, so they just, you know, they paid what they had to pay and they would just raise their premiums ever year.

HEFFNER: Of course …

BRILL: So I was just curious about … how does something become $158,000 … why does it cost $900,000 or a million dollars if you get cancer?

And the other thing I was curious about or that made me angry, was … all these debates about, you know, end of life care.

And the debate usually goes like this. You know, if someone has a terminal illness and to keep that person alive for an extra six months is going to cost a half a million dollars. Should we spend the half a million dollars to keep that person alive for six months. Now that is an agonizing debate. Right? We could sit here for five shows and talk about that. But …

HEFFNER: Until I die.

BRILL: … when you start that debate … but when you start that debate, you’ve already given in on something which is “why does it cost $500,000?” It would be a different debate … it would be the same debate, but slightly different …the terms would be different if it was … you know, $42,000 for six months. It’s, it’s a different dimension of a debate. And no one ever was asking that question.

HEFFNER: But you know, Steve, what, what puzzles me here is that I would never accuse you of naiveté. But you’re saying that you think holding a mirror up to this marketplace … with all of its gross salaries is going to lead us to bring about change …

BRILL: That isn’t what I said.

HEFFNER: Well, then put it in your own terms.

BRILL: What I believe about in journalism in general …

HEFFNER: Yeah.

BRILL: … is that it can be a real important factor in that, but the first way to change a, an institution, a system, whether its education, legal system, healthcare or just … you know, whether the, the … you know, the supermarket down the road is, you know, screwing it’s customers. The first way to start to change that is to shine a light on it.

HEFFNER: Okay.

BRILL: And then you get people aware and that’s the beginning of a process. I’m not an advocate, I’m not going to go testify in Congress about “Here’s what we should do with the healthcare system”. But what journalists do, when they’re doing their job well is … they shine light on things, they answer questions and in this case, the, the story was just hiding in plain sight.

Everybody in America has bills. When I first started, you know, some of my doctor friends and other people said, “Well, how are you going to get real bills?”

Now, I’ve always operated under the assumption that, you know, if 20 people know something, any good reporter can know it.

Here, there must be 200,000 million people in this country who have a medical bill, so I figured I’d get half a dozen.

HEFFNER: Alright … I didn’t, I didn’t put it correctly. You have put it correctly because you’re talking about your motivation.

I’m puzzled that at the end of a period of time, a quite considerable period of time in which we have learned, thanks to journalism …

BRILL: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: …to a large extent … about a parallel land of greed, not in a life giving profession, not in medicine … but in Wall Street … when we have learned about amazing incomes, amazing salaries, amazing bonuses … if what I read today is correct, they’re going back up again, even further than they were five years ago.

BRILL: Well, you know, you’re, you’re talking about really, you know, metaphysical issue which is “Have we reached the point in our country … and this applies to Wall Street and it applies to healthcare, where the special interests have so taken over, you know, the making of public policy that, you know, that democracy … you know, it just ain’t working.”

One of the things I point out, you know, if you want to get still more depressed, is that compared to the financial services industry, the healthcare lobby spends six or seven times as much as financial services, four times as much the, the feared military/industrial complex when, when, you know, when it comes to throwing money around Washington.

You know, the, you know the financial services industry is a bunch of homeless people compared to the healthcare industry. Plus they have another big political chip that is the opposite of what happens with financial services … which is … in every community in America, people think of their local hospital as a great institution … which it is … because it does due the sick. It’s the largest employer, they cure sick people and it doesn’t have, you know, the, you know, the demonology associated with it, that, you know, that Wall Street does. I will quarrel with one thing you said, though …

HEFFNER; In a half minute.

BRILL: I don’t think it’s really greed here. I think people tend to fall into maximizing their profit and their incomes when there’s no opposition to it. It just sort of happens. I don’t think people at, at, you know, Sloan Kettering wake up every morning … you know the Administrators saying, “I’m just going to go make as much money as I can today.”

They wake up in the morning saying “I am helping to organize an institution that is saving people’s lives”.

But gradually it just becomes so easy and people are telling you, “Well, you know, the guy at the other hospital’s making $2 million dollars a year? What about you? What are you chopped liver? Why don’t you make $2 million.” And, and it just, it just sort of builds up because there’s no accountability.

HEFFNER: Steve, we’ve come to the end of our time. And I’m shocked to find that you’re so … I’ll have the last word … naïve. I’m glad that you are.

BRILL: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: Thanks for joining me today.

BRILL: Happy to do it.

HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us next time. And meanwhile, as another old friend used to say “Good night and good luck”.

And do visit the Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind to reprise this program online right now, or to draw upon our Archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org/openmind.

Guest: Mike Wallace
Title: In Memoriam: Mike Wallace, 1918 – 2012
Original VTR Date: 9/29/84

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind, where occasionally we interrupt our regular weekly schedule of contemporary on-air conversations to present – In Memoriam – a past program with a distinguished guest who has passed.

Today we celebrate the much honored broadcast journalist Mike Wallace, who died in April, 2012 at 93 … always to be remembered as the legendary brazen and tough-minded CBS news interviewer most closely associated with the extraordinarily successful Sixty Minutes.

My own Thirty Minutes With Mike Wallace, shown now in its entirety, was broadcast first in 1984.

*******

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And my guest today is Mike Wallace, who really needs no introduction beyond the fact that with Gary Paul Gates, he’s just authored Close Encounters, a truly terrific William Morrow book. Now, “terrific” isn’t exactly the most artful of gracious comment that one can make about this riveting account of one particularly intriguing broadcaster’s odyssey through the rise, and then the continuing rise of electronic journalist since the 1950s.

But for me, the experience of reading Close Encounters was just that, terrific, for I lived through it all. In fact, The Open Mind first went on the air just five months before Mike Wallace began his famous – or infamous, if you’re so inclined – Night Beat series, late in 1958. So this is geriatric time.

But I’m going to ask Mike’s indulgence not to spend too much time now on just how tough an interviewer he is on the air, whose toes he has mangled, et cetera, not just because by contrast I’m such a pussycat. I won’t ask him either about the nonsense of identifying 60 Minutes as entertainment, not journalism, just because it is television’s top-rated series. And since the Westmoreland case is in the courts, we’ll leave it there.

But I do want to ask Mike Wallace about media power, about faction, that damned elusive mingling of fact and fiction, and about a revealing 60 Minutes interview with European journalist Ariana Fallaci. Let me quote Close Encounters.

Here, some of the points Wallace made because this is a book that enables Mike and his colleague to comment on him and his programming:

“Some of the points Wallace made about Fallaci were clearly evocative of his own career and interviewing style. He noted that when she began plying her craft, it was mainly actors and entertainers. But today, she prefers heads of state.

He then named a few, all of whom, coincidentally, had also been interviewed by Mike Wallace. And, in what easily could have served as a self-appraisal, he contended that Fallaci turns her interviews into morality dramas. She plays the role of judge. The interviewee is on trial. And few are found innocent”.

And here’s the exchange:

“Wallace: Power. Do you have power?

Fallaci: Oh, no. I have not power. How can you say?

Wallace: None whatsoever?

Fallaci: We are not one of those who think that we journalists have power.

Wallace: No?

Fallaci: Nah. We are like dogs. Bow-wow-wow. Nobody listens to us.

Wallace: You’re an entertainer?

Fallaci: I’m a historian.

Wallace: You’re not a historian.

Fallaci: Yes, I am.

Wallace: You’re a journalist.

Fallaci: No, sir. A journalist is a historian.”

And Mike Wallace says: “No. Now, wait”.

Mike, I wondered why you want her to wait. Isn’t a journalist a historian?

WALLACE: No, because it’s instant history, and you don’t have the opportunity to know what might have gone on in other corners of that episode or other corners of the world while that episode was taking place. So, what you’re doing is getting a quick take. Today’s take or this month’s take, but you’re not putting it into the context of other events.

HEFFNER: But I think you think that I’m asking whether Mike Wallace, historian Mike Wallace, Professor Mike Wallace, whether I would endow you with too much power, maybe. Indeed, I’m asking whether you don’t have the responsibilities of the historian. And I wonder what your answer is to that question.

WALLACE: The responsibilities of the historian are to, it seems to me, are to sit back, after the event, five years, ten years, 20, 25 years, and taking into account various accounts of what have taken place. Then, it seems to me, you try to put it into a sensible, historical context. When I do an interview with a Yasser Arafat, or an Anwar Sadat, or Menachim Begin, or the Shah of Iran, or Nixon, or Kennedy, or a Reagan, you’re doing it, really, only in the context, in a discrete hour, two hours, at a discrete time. You may find out later on that things were not what they were perceived to be at that moment, so that it doesn’t make it history, it makes it commentary on something that’s going on.

HEFFNER: Yes, but Mike, as I read “Close Encounters”, and as I read your involvements in interviews with Nixon all the way back, and then Nixon a little more recently, with the Reagans earlier on and the Reagans more recently, I know that you can, if you will, set your interviews into a certain perspective. And the question I’m asking is whether you don’t have an obligation to do so?

WALLACE: You look back at what has gone before in framing your question. Of course you do. And you try to have the interviewee do the same thing. But I’m not sure that I fully understand, Dick, what you’re after here.

HEFFNER: Well, I guess what I’m after is the question of what the responsibilities of the news person are, and what his responsibility is to go as far behind the scenes as he possibly can, today.

WALLACE: Look, Yasser Arafat, second time I had interviewed him, his headquarters, Beirut, we had just gotten through with a chicken dinner. It was the day, I believe, in which the father of Waly Jumblat, Gamal Jumblat…I believe it was the first anniversary of his death. Don’t hold me to it, but I think that’s what it was. And he, Arafat, like you today, had a cold, and was not feeling very good. But he came in and he was jovial, and we had a chicken dinner, and then we sat down to do the interview.

And in the course of the interview, there had been a little piece about so big in The New York Times, which I had just stuck in my notes, and wasn’t sure that I was going to use it or not. But he brought up the subject of human rights. Human rights, obviously, struck a nerve with me, as it does with people around the world, particularly as far as this item in the Times was concerned.

It turned out that a PLO military training mission had gone to Uganda and was working with Idi Amin, under the direction of Idi Amin. PLO/Idi Amin. And so, I said to myself, “Wait a minute. Human rights, Idi Amin, Yasser Arafat.

Mr. Arafat, do you really…” It’s in Close Encounters.“ …do you really … man you respect?” “Yes.” “But you talk about human rights. The butcher Amin is a man you respect?”

Now, suddenly, you can see this fellow out beyond the cliff and looking down and you can see what’s going on in his head right now, that he doesn’t want to be faced with that. In any case, we went through this for a period of about a minute, a minute and a half, and he finally said, “Yes. Idi Amin is a man with whom I can work. He is for me; therefore, I am for him. And forget human rights”.

He got through doing the interview, the whole long interview, and Machmud Labadi, who was his press secretary, who has now going over to the rebel side, that is, the Syrian PLO side, said, “Well, of course, you’re not going to use that, Mike”. I said, “What?” He said, “You’re not going to use that”. I said, “Machmud, what you’ve done really now, probably is reconfirm the fact that we have to use it by your asking that we don’t”. He said, “But that’s not fair”. I said, “Why isn’t it fair? Here is the chairman. He is a man in charge of himself. He told me what he felt”. In any case, Barry Landover, the producer, and I went back to London over the weekend, put the piece together. It was on Sunday night, and obviously it was on the air. Question: Journalism? History? Power? Heat for heat’s sake? Heat for light sake? Understanding of Arafat?

HEFFNER: Or all of the above?

WALLACE: Or all of the above? I think probably a little of all of the above.

HEFFNER: Power? You mentioned power.

WALLACE: Well, power, in this respect, Richard. The PLO – and I must say, I was brought to an understanding of the Palestinian cause by a man whom I admired, indeed loved, the late Faez Saig. I grew up in a Jewish family which was traditionally Zionist. Franklin Roosevelt was the hero of the family, and Israel, which was not then in existence when I was a kid, was something, the dream.

And the story of the Palestinian was something that was totally unknown to me. And during the time of Night Beat, in 1956-57, I interviewed a man by the name of Faez Saig. Palestinian, Christian, with whom I became friends, and my late partner, Ted Gates, and I, and we spent a lot of time together. And little by little I began to understand the Palestinian cause.

Now, the PLO, it seems to me, in some of its activities surely, over the last 20 years, has been less than admirable in the way that it has gone about its work. Terrorists. By the same token, there were activities undertaken by the Jews in their fight for a homeland, in their fight for independence, which were, face it, terrorist.

There was a letter in 1948 to The New York Times written by, as I remember it, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, and so forth, saying that if Menachim Begin ever came to power in Israel, fascism would have taken a big step forward. I’m paraphrasing, but that letter was in the letters to the editor column of The New York Times. We had the power – I’m going on at great length here – We had the power, if you will, to expose the hypocrisy, or the self-serving quality of Yasser Arafat in a very specific way when we pointed out his respect or friendship for Idi Amin. You call that power? I call it simply the job of the journalist.

HEFFNER: Mike, have you ever not played something because someone didn’t want you to? Asked you not to?

WALLACE: Nothing comes to mind.

HEFFNER: Would you?

WALLACE: I can’t see the circumstances under which I would. I myself, in the case of Haiti, asked my colleague, Morley Safer, please not to do a piece, because my wife’s family is Haitian. My wife’s family, her cousin is married to a Haitian. And her husband’s father had been a political prisoner under Papa Doc Duvalier for two years. I had done a piece in 1971. There had been no repercussions, but the family said, “Okay, you’ve done it; please lay off”. And there were three boys in the family. They were afraid. And so, when it was suggested that maybe Morley was going to undertake that – and I shouldn’t have done this – I walked in and said, “I’d rather that you didn’t do this”. Inappropriate … (laugh) … but I wanted to make my wife content.

HEFFNER: Why shouldn’t you have done it for that reason?

WALLACE: Because if you presume to tell the audience that you let the chips fall where they may – and I don’t know that I would necessarily do that for somebody else – why should I ask somebody to do it for me?

HEFFNER: You didn’t ask him, as I understand form the time of the story, and from rereading the story, you didn’t ask him to change anything. You didn’t ask him to modify anything.

WALLACE: No.

HEFFNER: You raised a question about doing the story, if I remember correctly.

WALLACE: That’s correct. That is correct.

HEFFNER: Well, now, what in the world was wrong with that very human action?

WALLACE: I’m not suggesting that we reporters should not be human.

HEFFNER: Then what are you suggesting?

WALLACE: What I am suggesting is that probably – No, not probably – I shouldn’t have asked. And he should have gone ahead and done the story.

HEFFNER: You mean Mike Wallace should’ve been above all that? Concern…

WALLACE: You’re putting it in that context. It’s not that I should’ve been above all that, Dick. It’s that I, particularly, who am perceived as, I am perceived as being, how can I say this adequately without sounding like a darned fool? As being straightforward and honorable, and let the chips fall where they may. You should not ask for special privileges.

HEFFNER: Okay. We’ll pursue that further.

WALLACE: Okay.

HEFFNER: Mike, a question that I did want to ask. You and I were talking about 60 Minutes. I wondered always why does a guy, or a gal, who knows that there is such a huge possibility that he or she is going to be skewered, not because you’re mean of spirit, but because of their own background, what there is to report on, why do they come?

WALLACE: Well, it’s apparent that we don’t have subpoena power. So they have to agree.

HEFFNER: Right.

WALLACE: And those who don’t agree, you know, back maybe five, six, seven, ten years ago, we used to stop them on the street after we had sent them letters and made telephone calls and sent telegrams and tried every way to get to do the piece, but if they simply said no, or didn’t answer, then sometimes we used to stop them in the street. And all that did, really, oh, on one or two or three occasions you really did get something unexpected and revealing, but by and large, what you get is embarrassment. And if it turns out to be embarrassment for embarrassment sake, what’s the point of doing it? Because you can stand in front of their place of business or place of employment and simply say, “Look, he didn’t want to talk to us, but these are the questions that we intended to ask”, and let it go at that, and say he declined.
Why do they do it? Because, I think, I mean, we’re 16 years old now, the broadcast. I think people know that they’re going to be treated fairly, they’re going to get an opportunity to get their message across to our audience. They are on their own home turf. They don’t know what kind of material that we have. And then, finally, and, you know, Safer said this once and I think he may be right, “There are some crooks who don’t feel that they are properly confirmed as crooks until they’ve been on 60 Minutes”.

HEFFNER: That’s a very funny…You know when I watched Big John Connolly on 60 Minutes…

WALLACE: I remember that one very well.

HEFFNER: …and the next day received a telephone call from someone we both know, a Texan, said, “You know, what are those guys doing?” And my only response was, “How in the world did he get himself there?” Why, as you suggest, didn’t have subpoena power. That’s the sort of thing I’m asking.

WALLACE: Well, that is perfectly understandable. We had done a profile of John Connolly before, some years before. He had been treated absolutely fairly. He was treated fairly in the interview that we did. He was treated fairly. There was not any question that he should not have been prepared to answer, except that this time he was running for the presidency.

He wanted the exposure on 60 Minutes. There is a quid pro quo. We’ll give you, if we are fortunate, perhaps 50 million people to look at you; but, by the same token, what we ask from you is that you, unrehearsed, answer our questions. And what we were able to do is to suggest that perhaps he had an anti-labor background. Perhaps that he wasn’t all of that devoted to issues of civil rights. Perhaps he had said some indiscreet things about Mr. Kennedy and Senator Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And you put all of these things together in one piece; he was not expecting this kind of approach. And he was uncomfortable with it. There was certainly nothing the least bit unfair in that.

HEFFNER: Mike, about how many years before had you done the first show?

WALLACE: About five, as I remember it. Maybe six or seven.

HEFFNER: Did you do the same kinds of digging and the same kinds of asking then?

WALLACE: No, as a matter of fact, because he wasn’t running for president the first time around.

HEFFNER: But the questions would have been just as germane. Civil rights?

WALLACE: Could have been just as germane, but when a man is running for President, you treat your interview in a totally different way, really, because you are trying to go to the nub of the character and how he might respond, and to put him under some pressure so that an audience can, you’re proxy for an audience who wants to know some of these things.

For instance, Ronald Reagan. His wife and I are dear friends from 40 years; her mother before, in Chicago. And I had done a couple of interviews with Ronald Reagan before. And they were calculated to be interesting, useful. But he wasn’t really a presidential candidate in either of those two. He was a major political figure.

Now he was going to be nominated for the Presidency of the United States. And a week before the presidential convention, the Republican Convention in Detroit four years ago, I interviewed him and Mrs. Reagan and their daughter Patty. And, in the case of Ronald Reagan, there were certain questions, it seemed to me, that I had not asked before that needed to be asked of a president about the perception of him as a Neanderthal Conservative who was quoted during the Vietnam War as “Why don’t we bomb the North, and we could make it a parking lot, paint parking stripes on it and be home for Christmas”. Tell me, Mr. Reagan, what was it that you had in mind back then? Or the fact of whether he had Blacks, any Blacks, on his staff. And it turned out that he really was incapable of answering whether he had, either on top staff or below. What I was trying to do was to run a gamut of half a dozen or eight or ten questions which would, perhaps, help him draw a profile of himself.

HEFFNER: Two questions, then. Would your advice to Presidential candidates be “Stay away from 60 Minutes?”

WALLACE: It certainly didn’t hurt Ronald Reagan. He was nominated. Some of his pals were mad at me for having done it for a period of a year or so.

HEFFNER: Was he happy with it?

WALLACE: I don’t think that he was particularly happy, but I have seen him since, and he has been cordial since, and he and his wife and I – I mean, and his wife and I – remain very good friends, despite…Look, they’re realists. Politicians are realists, and they know that there are tough questions that are going to be asked. He wanted the presidency at that time. Now he has the presidency. How many one-on-one interviews has he held within the last whatever time?

HEFFNER: Not with Mike Wallace.

WALLACE: With whom?

HEFFNER: Okay. Do you think he is a Neanderthal man?

WALLACE: No. no. I think he’s – I was about to say a simple man, but that’s not, he is not by any means a simple man – he’s a complex man. I think that he’s learned an immense amount in the presidency. I think he’s a much more intelligent man that a good many people give him credit for. He is not the captive of those three-by-five cards that we hear so much about. A man does not get to be elected Governor of California and reelected Governor of California, and go after the presidency, once mildly, second time hard, third time again and get elected – and he’s going to be, apparently, reelected. A stupid man, or an unqualified man does not get that.

HEFFNER: Then why do so many people talk about the three-by-five cards?

WALLACE: Because that is a stereotype, and that is part of the frustration. They’ve been saying that about Ronald Reagan for the last 15, 20 years that I know of. I used to cover the governors. I covered the governors’ conferences, and so I saw him at work. And I’ll never forget the first news conference that he held, when there was a governors’ conference, as I remember it, I think, out of the Century Plaza Hotel. And the whole crowd, the eastern crowd, came out. I remember, Mark Child and David Broder, and so forth. And how surprised they were at the man’s remarkable capacity to take whatever question and answer it sensibly. Look, he’s…His first wife, Jane Wyman, said that one of the reasons they got divorced was because he was always studying and thinking and reading the paper and wanted to talk ideas at the breakfast table. He’s obviously a very thoughtful man. And he made his change from Democrat to Republican. Why is he…

HEFFNER: As an indication of how thoughtful he is?

WALLACE: (Laughter) No.

HEFFNER: No. Okay.

WALLACE: Thank you for being gentle with that. No, no, no. And I’ve made not change from one to the other. I’m, myself, an independent. And I don’t speak, I speak with some affection of his wife – I want to make this perfectly clear –

HEFFNER: It’s perfectly clear, Mike.

WALLACE: I speak with some affection of his wife and my friend, and with respect for him, but not necessarily because I’m going to vote for him. I’m not necessarily going to vote for Fritz Mondale, either.

HEFFNER: But you know, let’s get back to the image of the stereotype of the three-by-five cards. What does that tell us about the media generally? The eastern establishment? Agnew’s friends and enemies?

WALLACE: Well, I plead guilty to having been one of Ted Agnew’s friends.

HEFFNER: Yes, I note in the book you have a very interesting group of people you did or do admire.

WALLACE: Well, admiration, I don’t think, I think is probably too strong a word for my feeling for Spiro Agnew. What happened was that he was, of all things, a kind of liberal Republican, running against a conservative Democrat for the Governorship of Maryland. There was a third man in the race by the name of Hyman Pressman, who was an in-between. And George Mahoney, I believe is the name of the Democratic candidate, whose slogan was to the tune of the Bells of St. Mary, “Your home is your castle; vote to protect it”.

Agnew was a kind of liberal Republican, and a lot of the people, the civil servants from Washington, who lived across the border in Maryland, voted for him. A lot of Democrats voted for him. And suddenly, and suddenly, this man who was really not prepared to be the Vice President of the United States, and conceivably the president, was propelled into a job for which, in my estimation, he was totally unprepared. What I liked about Ted Agnew is the fact that in those governors’ conferences he was a superb source. Because I had been with him at the beginning. We had gone to small rallies together, and I was the only guy there. And he and his wife, Judy, naturally liked a reporter who spends some time and learns. At that time I was covering the eastern states for CBS news on election night on the governors. And so I got to know him; liked him, didn’t know that he was, how shall I say?

HEFFNER: I don’t know how you should say.

WALLACE: Subject to…

HEFFNER: Later disciplinary action.

WALLACE: That’s correct.

HEFFNER: Right? But, Mike, I want to come back to the question, and it’s a pointed question: President Reagan, the three-by-five cards, the picture of him as a rather vague and unknowing old man. You say that’s not an accurate picture?

WALLACE: Well, I don’t…My boy, Chris, my son, Chris, covers him. I don’t have that much first-hand knowledge of what goes on inside the White House.

HEFFNER: Okay, but you have enough of a negative thing about that picture of him to state it here, that it really isn’t true?

WALLACE: Right.

HEFFNER: Question again: Do we have a corps of people in the electronic and print press who are given to skewering the President?

WALLACE: Given to skewering the president?

HEFFNER: Yes. Given to…

WALLACE: You mean the three-by-five card business?

HEFFNER: Yes.

WALLACE: No, I don’t. As a matter of fact, I think he’s had a remarkably good press, all things considered. I get the feeling…I don’t know when this is actually going to be played on the air. We’re doing this in…

HEFFNER: Probably after the election, Mike.

WALLACE: Not ‘til after the election?

HEFFNER: Yeah. So you can predict now. And we can hold you to it.

WALLACE: Well, I would think then that if this is going to be played after the election, that in the last six weeks of the election campaign, that there is going to be much more serious scrutiny of Ronald Reagan, a much colder scrutiny of Ronald Reagan, than there has been during the first three years, three-and-a-half years of what they call the Teflon Presidency, that nothing sticks to. I sense that the press is getting fed up with the cocoon around the President.

HEFFNER: Okay. It’s the very end of September now. Maybe we will be on the air with this before the election. But, your perception is my perception, and it scares the hell out of me.

WALLACE: What scares the hell out of you?

HEFFNER: The fact that, at a certain point, the press begins to examine more carefully, and perhaps more critically, the President of the United States. My concern is not that they’re doing it now; but that they haven’t done it.

WALLACE: What they do, or what we do, doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference. Look, were Jimmy Carter or Fritz Mondale in the Presidency right now, and 260 marines were killed, if the building in East Beirut was blown, do you really believe that they would’ve gotten away with it the way Ronald Reagan has gotten away with it?

It isn’t because he hasn’t been called to account by the press. There is something in the man’s personality. There is something in the fact that the country feels itself prosperous. There is something in the Olympic rings. And I know this sounds asinine on its face, but, and there are probably a lot of our Americans who don’t feel this way, undoubtedly a lot of Americans who don’t feel this way, but there are a huge number of Americans who feel that they have it, we have it pretty good right now, and he is the steward to which they look, to whom they look.

HEFFNER: Yes, but what I’m talking about is what the press does with him, not how they react to what the press does. You said the press is changing now.

WALLACE: I sense that the press is going after him harder now, yes.

HEFFNER: That’s an interesting phrase. And I’m getting the cut sign, with which you are very, very familiar. Maybe I can get you back here before or after the election. Thanks for joining me today, Mike Wallace.

WALLACE: Thank you, Richard.

HEFFNER: Thank you for joining us today … in Memoriam. I hope you’ll be with us again next time. Meanwhile, as another old friend used to say, “Good night, and good luck.”

For other past programs, do visit The Open Mind website at www.thirteen.org/openmind.

GUEST: Tom Wicker
AIR DATE: 04/27/2013
Original Air: 2/18/84

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind, where occasionally we interrupt our regular weekly schedule of contemporary on-air conversations to present – In Memoriam – a past program with a distinguished guest who has passed.

Today we celebrate the New York Times late, great reporter, editor and columnist Tom Wicker, who died in November, 2011 at age 85.
The following Open Mind about his Civil War novel, Unto This Hour, was first broadcast in 1984.

*********************

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. A good many weekends over the past two and a half years I’ve particularly delighted in producing another program, From the Editor’s Desk, always when one of my editors has been Tom Wicker, Associate Editor of The New York Times, and one of its great columnists. Now Tom Wicker writes novels too. Viking has just published Unto This Hour, a giant, awesome in its way book about the Civil War, about its humanity and inhumanity, about the leadership, Lincoln’s and the generals’ that impacts upon us even today.

And since I’ve always thought of Wicker as a most present–minded journalist, I want to ask him to begin with whether essentially Unto This Hour is scarcely veiled fiction, or scarcely veiled history. Tom?

WICKER: Well, I hope it’s neither. It’s a novel. And it’s a novel of people in the Civil War and what happens to them during the Civil War in the same sense that one might write a novel about people during the Depression or people living through World War II. It’s very narrowly focused on five days, and therefore the history plays a particularly prominent part in it. But I hope that it’s first, and I think that it’s first and foremost a novel in which the historical aspects are accurately presented.

HEFFNER: But you’re, obviously you pick the subject for your novel in terms of the larger framework of your interests in contemporary affairs.

WICKER: Well, that’ true. I wondered if, when I began the research on this, the specific research, whether it would be illuminating about contemporary affairs. I think it is. But I found that sort of thing difficult to work into fiction, particularly since I had limited my time scheme to five days. And so it’s very hard to have a kind of century-long, bird’s eye view saying because of that then we have a certain kind of politics today. But I think the Civil War does have a great impact upon American life today.

HEFFNER: What is that impact?

WICKER: Well, there are any number of traces that you could make from the Civil War. I think probably the most obvious one is that that war certainly decided the development of this nation as a great industrial power.

Now, in all probability even had there been some peace between the two sides and the Southern nation and slavery existed somewhat longer, then we still would have developed as a great industrial nation.

But I think the Civil War not only speeded that development but it really settled that question for all time. And I think it also left us with a sense that national power is fundamentally based on industry and on armed force.

And the military historians will tell you, or some will at least, that American army doctrine today is still based on the fact that Grant with his massed armies and massed fire power defeated Lee with his army of maneuver and finesse, based on the fact that he had smaller manpower.

Lincoln’s early actions in developing the Northern power were the prototype. They practically formed war powers that all presidents depend upon today. We don’t think it very strange in this country – some of us are very critical of it – but we don’t think it very strange at this time that President Reagan could send the Marines to Lebanon without the support of Congress, which he did in September of ’82, without the specific support of Congress. Well, when Lincoln did things like that in 1860, 1861, it was startling. It was just the beginning of the president’s war powers.

HEFFNER: Do you think that…Well, I know that you’ve written that “The nation’s just-under-the surface militarism may not be based entirely on the Civil War experience, but I think our quick resort to military solutions for political problems is influenced by that experience.” Now, that’s, I wondered what you meant about “just-under-the-surface militarism.”

WICKER: Well, because I think that – and I think readers of my articles in The New York Times wouldn’t be surprised by this – I think that we are too quick in this country to resort to armed force. And I think that’s been particularly so since World War II when we emerged on the world scene as one of the, or as then the only superpower, now as one of the two superpowers. I think we’ve been too quick to resort to force in our national experience, or to the threat of force, to the implication that we would use it unless we have our way on something.

HEFFNER: More so than others?

WICKER: No, I didn’t say that. I’m talking about the United States. We like to congratulate ourselves in this country too much, in my judgment, on being absolutely peace-loving. You know, we like to think that we will only resort to force if somebody’s really been kicking us around. But if you look at the history since the end of World War II, that isn’t true.

And I think that willingness to resort to force to settle political matters has its roots in the national experience, that the gravest single political matter that ever came before the people of this country was disunion, based on slavery and the other issues that brought on the Civil War. And we handled the issue of disunion ultimately with force. And in my own judgment not only, while it may be arguable as to whether or not there was any alternative, in my own judgment there was an alternative rather than the resort to force.

There could have been, there should have been. But I think that is something that’s embedded in the national consciousness now. Admittedly that’s the sort of national psychoanalysis end. But I think that if you study these things, you’re entitled to make judgments like that.

HEFFNER: Would your judgment also be that Lincoln’s defense at Fort Sumter led us into a war, the war that you seem to feel we needn’t have fought? That his active concern that this last great hope of mankind needed to be held together and that the union was going to be preserved with force if necessary?

WICKER: No, I think by the time the question appeared before Lincoln as to the resupply of Fort Sumter, which indeed was, that brought on the first shot so to speak in the Civil War, by that time I think the opportunity for alternatives had passed.

I didn’t mean to imply and I don’t imply that Lincoln was wrong in pursuing the trying to hold the Union together as he did, even to the extent of war. I’m simply saying that in the long history of that conflict, 30 years or more in which it was specifically before the American public as a major issue in the national consciousness. That is when I think many opportunities were missed, on both sides.

HEFFNER: But Tom, do I understand you correctly that you just said that you would not second-guess Lincoln in going to war to preserve the Union? Was the experience not that harrowing? As I read your book I can’t imagine any other description than “harrowing” for that national experience.

WICKER: All war is harrowing. And that war was particularly harrowing, you’re quite right, because the tactics were outmoded by the technological developments. For example, the rifle barrel had made the defense infinitely superior over the offense. Yet most of the generals of that war learned their tactics in the Mexican War just a little over a decade earlier, at which time they didn’t have rifle barrels and the frontal charge of the offense was the basic tactic. So that resulted in just untold slaughter in the Civil War, and all that took place just before the modern flowering of medicine.

So the medical treatment of these excessive number of wounded was very primitive. I think the figure somewhere is if we had suffered, the entire United States had suffered casualties in World War II the equivalent of the Confederate casualties in the Civil War, instead of having about 300,000 men killed we would have had something like six million men killed.

So you’re quite right. The word “harrowing” is right. I would say however that by the time Lincoln came to office he, and even despite his appeals to the South in his Inaugural message, his first Inaugural, to try to, still to try to settle this issue peaceably. When the question arose at Fort Sumter, I don’t really think that he had found an alternative to the re-supply of the fort. Now remember, he didn’t go down and start a war; he re-supplied the fort. Now, that had the effect of starting a war. But what I mean is he didn’t send troops down to fire on the Southerners, and they still didn’t have to do it. So I think the issue at that time of maintaining the Union, which was always Lincoln’s overriding aim, not to free the slaves, not do a lot of other things, but to maintain the union, I think that issue was the overriding issue, and by April 1861 I think he had very little choice. I would almost say no choice but to do what he did, which was to maintain the nation’s, that is the United States’ forts.

HEFFNER: Tom, I have the feeling – stop me if I’m wrong – that today you would be less generous in your interpretation of Ronald Reagan’s alternatives. I doubt that you would say he had no choice, he had no alternative. The scene had been set 30 years before. His hands were tied. If he were going to meet the principles that this nation subscribed to, war was necessary.

WICKER: On what issue are you referring to…

HEFFNER: Well, pick your issue.

WICKER: Well, if there were some issues that had been festering on the national consciousness for 30 years, the size of the issue of disunion, and Ronald Reagan were faced with it, why, depending on what he did I certainly think that the 30 years controversy should be taken into account in doing whatever he did.

I don’t see today that Ronald Reagan faces any such thing. And I mentioned Lebanon for example. I think he had lots of choices rather than leaving the Marines in Lebanon in the circumstances they were in. I still think he has choices.

When he sent the Marines to Lebanon in September 1982 you will recall it was to supervise the departure of the PLO forces from Beirut. I think that was perfectly supportable. And in fact the PLO was evacuated and, I’ve forgotten the exact time, it was only a matter of weeks. The Marines withdrew.

Then there followed the massacre of Palestinians in the camps around Beirut and he sent the Marines back in. When he sent them back in the mission was less clear. And as time goes along it’s become even less clear. Until now the president is in the position of not really being able to explain in a way that Americans rather unquestionably accept. He can’t explain what it is that 1,600 Marines are supposed to do there. And so I don’t see that the issue of having no choice really arises there.

HEFFNER: Well, then let me go back again. Are you suggesting that the issue of union was what carried us into war? You’ve said that. I read your book. I couldn’t help but think of All Quiet on the Western Front. I couldn’t help but think of Johnny Got His Gun. I couldn’t help but think of all those other descriptions of war is hell. And I wondered whether you weren’t saying that and whether you weren’t saying, and gather from what you’ve just noted that you weren’t, that was an unnecessary war.

WICKER: Yes, I think, what I hope you’re saying is my book is apolitical in that sense. It’s a book about war and about people living in war and trying to cope with the conditions of war. And I don’t particularly, other than when certain characters voice their views in here, I don’t try to tilt the scales one way or the other in that sense.

It is an anti-war novel, and it is meant to be an anti-war novel in the sense that you’ve already stated: that war is harrowing and terrible, and before it should be resorted to – and I’m only talking about conventional war now; we haven’t even got to the nuclear question – before it should be resorted to for anything I think that you have to have a really overriding issue of enormous importance even to the life of a nation, and one in which politics, whether it should have been the case or not, has obviously failed. Now, I’m inclined to think that that was the case by April 1861 on the issue of disunion and the maintenance of the American Union. I’m not inclined to think that that was the case or is the case in Lebanon. I don’t think it’s the case in Nicaragua. I didn’t think it was the case in Vietnam. So I think the parallels are fair enough.

HEFFNER: That’s why I wonder whether you aren’t being more generous to President Lincoln than you were to the presidents who took us into Vietnam, who are taking us into Lebanon and so on.

WICKER: Well, I’ve tried to explain that I don’t think that the issues upon which they took us into Vietnam let us say were anything like the issues, anything like the overriding importance to the fundamental life of the nation, to the existence of this nation that were faced by Lincoln, as were faced by Lincoln in 1861.

HEFFNER: All right. Then let me ask Commentator Wicker, writing in 1860-61, is this a war that should be fought?

WICKER: The war of, the American Civil War?

HEFFNER: The War Between the States as we’ve called it occasionally.

WICKER: Well, if I transported myself whole in my present…

HEFFNER: Right.

WICKER: …experience and everything back to 1861 I would like to think that I would have been a fervent supporter of Mr. Lincoln’s inaugural address in which he clearly called for conciliation and peace. I would also believe however that, assuming I had been in the commentary business for some time, as long as I have been now, at that time, I would have thought that while that was a salutary and justified call with very little likelihood of its, in fact, being accepted, and indeed it wasn’t.

HEFFNER: But might you not have said nothing is worth what Tom Wicker a hundred and more years from now is going to describe as that harrowing nature?

WICKER: No.

HEFFNER: No?

WICKER: No, I wouldn’t say that nothing is worth maintaining the Union.

HEFFNER: But maintaining the Union?

WICKER: Maintaining the Union in my judgment was an issue that justified going to war, even though President Lincoln right to the last moment tried to avert that. And as I said, when he re-supplied Fort Sumter that wasn’t an act of war. That was an American fort, a U.S. national fort. And he was re-supplying his troops on his own territory. That’s not an act of war. It was unquestionably an act, seen as a provocation, and it brought on acts of war.

HEFFNER: Lincoln did not have to reinforce Sumter. When he did he knew what the result was going to be. War.

WICKER: Well, I think he had a pretty solid idea, yes.

HEFFNER: So that strategy of his, that strategy of defending Sumter was his way of declaring war.

WICKER: Yes, but it was also a necessity because American forces were surrounded. He could’ve, I suppose, as at least I counsel President Reagan to do today, he could have withdrawn those forces. But in that case you have to understand what in fact he would have been doing. He would have been surrendering a national property, a fort, to an insurgent nation which I don’t believe you can draw that parallel to Lebanon.

HEFFNER: I didn’t know you were such a nationalist. I mean, I’ve been reading Wicker all these years. I never would have dreamed that, particularly having described the hell of war…

WICKER: I’m an American and a patriot, and I believe in the American Union, and I believe that the United States of America, when it’s true to its fundamental nature and to its constitutional nature is a valued force in the affairs of men. And I think that it would have been tragic and greatly dissipating even to the potential force of this country had we drifted into disunion, separate nations in the middle of the nineteenth century.

HEFFNER: So better dead than separate?

WICKER: Well, you can put slogans like that to it if you want to, Richard. I’ve never used the slogan, “Better dead than red.” I‘ve never used that slogan. I don’t believe in, I don’t much believe in slogans, and I certainly don’t believe in these absolutes. What I believe is in, what I believe in most is in trying to work things out. And I think things can be worked out if people have a will to work them out. And what’s right, quite clear it seems to me when you look back over the history of the period preceding the Civil War, is that there was not sufficient will, particularly in the Southern states, there was not sufficient will to work that problem out.

HEFFNER: Then why not let them go?

WICKER: Well, because that would have meant disunion, and it would have meant the dissipation of the strength and the hope that men had for this nation.

HEFFNER: And that strength and that hope were worth what you describe in your book?

WICKER: I think so. I think so. In the more than a century now following that, and particularly in the nearly a half-century following World War II, I think we have many times essentially failed to live up to the hope. We have certainly shown the potential of the strength.

HEFFNER: You know, I’m not going to stand corrected with the business about you’ve never used slogans like that. I wasn’t talking about the slogan; I was talking about what…

WICKER: The idea?

HEFFNER: …you had described as your feelings about the inevitability once the 30 years had gone by, neither part of the country had accepted the negotiations, the real negotiations that would have to go on, and…

WICKER: Yes. Well, in the current era George Kennon, I believe, has said, and I thoroughly agree, that nothing, and he used the flat word “nothing,” and he went on to describe a great list of things that most of us think are valuable. But he said, “Nothing is worth a nuclear war.”

And I subscribe to that for the reason that that’s a fundamentally different order of things from the Civil War or World War I or World War II. Because I am persuaded, I’m convinced by people who I think have solid scientific knowledge of these matters that nuclear war cannot be held to some small regional or limited conflict. That nuclear war would be a worldwide disaster, a disaster for mankind. It would mean not the development of the strength and hope of some country or the possible development of the strength and hope of some country; it would mean the end of civilization as we know it. And I quite agree with George Kennon that nothing is worth that, to the Soviets or to us.

HEFFNER: I want to get onto something else because I’m getting the signal that time is going. In this note I made, one of many, you say, talking about the ordeal of the Union.

WICKER: Yes.

HEFFNER: That description of the Civil War: “Terrible as it was, it is nevertheless the most dramatic and fascinating story I know. I think it tells much about what we are as a people and how we came to be that way.”

And then I was thinking about your, not disclaimer, you say this is, or as we began the program, it’s not history, it’s not fiction; it is a nice combination of both. Does this mean that you generally accept the notion that, you say it’s not faction in your book, you indicate it’s not faction. Do you generally accept the notion of docudramas that one can not just legitimately but successfully, accurately mix the modes, trying to set the scene, trying to give your reader or your viewer an understanding of what has happened in the past and still fictionalize, use quotations that you don’t know wherever?

WICKER: Well, I think docudrama in the television sense…

HEFFNER: Yeah.

WICKER: …of the docudramas that we’ve seen, I think that’s a very difficult form because you are, if you’re going to use that phrase about it, a “documentary drama,’ in effect, then I think you’re pretty well obligated to stick to the documentary side of it. You may be having actors play, let’s say, President Lincoln or someone of that sort, but you’re pretty well obligated to stick right to fact, because you’re doing a documentary as well as a drama. And that gets very difficult because fact doesn’t always unfold itself in the properly dramatic ways. It doesn’t build to a climax just when you want it or how right the characters do it.

On the other hand, if you’re going to do the historical fiction, I think you’re quite obligated to really do a novel. I mean, you can’t just stack up historical facts and say, “Gee, isn’t this interesting,” to the reader. I mean, you’re writing about characters. You’re writing about people who live and hope and who dream and die. And so you have to make that real or try to make that real.

I think that the, what I try to do in my historical fiction here, if that’s the proper phrase for it, I did not, I try to avoid a historical romance. I did not invent, for example, any scenes for real life persons, President Lincoln or General Jackson or General Lee. Every place in which they appear in the novel is to the best of my ability documented as historical fact. So that in that sense it’s sort of a documentary.

On the other hand, I don’t try to make dramatic fictional characters out of General Lee or someone of that sort. I merely have him as a presence in the novel because he was a presence in the lives of the characters to whom I do try to develop. So I think it’s possible, and that’s what I wanted to do was to write a novel with a historical setting in which real-life personages would appear but which would be first and foremost a novel and which would focus primarily on the lives and the feelings and the sentiments of those fictitious characters.

HEFFNER: The tragedians, we hear, always want to be comedians; and the comedians tragedians. Why does the Commentator Wicker want to be the novelist?

WICKER: Well, it’s really the other way around. I started out as a novelist first. This is, I think, the seventh novel that I’ve published over the years. And I’ve written a couple of non-fiction books too. But my original intention was to devote my life to writing fiction. And while I, when I began needing to put bread on the table, why I took newspaper work as a sideline, took…

HEFFNER: You went bad?

WICKER: (Laughter) Well, no, I wouldn’t say that. I went into journalism as a sideline and unfortunately for me in that sense, I mean, not unfortunately perhaps otherwise, I found that for a good many years I did better as a journalist than as a novelist. But I’ve never lost the desire to do that. And the feeling that there are many things that one can do in fiction that you can’t do in journalism. That’s not to say that journalism is bad or anything of that sort. I have relished my life in journalism and I hope I have done will in it. But there are things that you can do in fiction that journalism simply doesn’t permit or won’t expand to encompass. And I’ve tried to do those things and it’s added a great deal of satisfaction to my life, and I’m glad.

HEFFNER: What are those things? Can’t let that go by.

WICKER: Well, because journalism, as I said about the docudrama before, you are largely restricted if you try to do an honest job. You’re largely restricted to the reportage of fact, to what people said and did at a given time as best you can find that out. And that may tell you something about, a good deal in fact about national affairs, but it doesn’t tell you much about the human heart. It doesn’t tell you much about what makes people do the things that they do. It doesn’t tell you much about how people react. And I think in fiction you’re not studying events; you’re studying people. And in journalism all too often, despite the idea of feature stories and all that, that kind of thing, you’re basically dealing with events. And that’s a great limitation.

HEFFNER: In the short time we have left, let’s go back to this business of the docudrama. Do you think we’re being poorly served, we as a people, being poorly served by television’s penchant for docudrama?

WICKER: Well, a docudrama in a sense was made from one of my books, a non-fiction book that I wrote about the Attica prison riot. And I felt that they, within the limits of a 90-minute presentation, that they did about as well as they could in that sense with it. And I didn’t feel it was a major transgression against the actual facts. I still think, and I thought then, and I wish devoutly that it could have been done, that presentations could have been expanded and it could have been made into a really neutrally factual documentary, because that did happen to have an unfolding drama that built just as, I mean the event itself, the Attica prison riot, that built just as any drama would.

And I think that could have been done, and I think it would have been better. Some docudramas I have thought have been really seriously culpable. I recall one some years back in which, it wasn’t just an implication, the allegation was made that President Johnson had been responsible for the murder of President Kennedy. I think that’s outrageous when that sort of thing is done. Truly outrageous. And when you just invent or speculate about historical events, when you invent episodes and dialogue or speculate about what might have happened and then present that as fact, I think that’s outrageous too.

HEFFNER: Do you think that that is particularly true of areas where one assumes that journalistic ethics are in place? In print, not in novels, but in necessarily in paper, in journalism, and in television where you basically think…

WICKER: Yes.

HEFFNER: …either of entertainment or of news? And anything that’s not pure entertainment is news.

WICKER: Yes. I resist very strongly the idea that in fiction, historical or otherwise, you can attribute to real-life persons fictional episodes and invented dialogue and that sort of thing. I think if you’re going to depict in any kind of fiction, if you’re going to depict historical personages you owe it to them to do it accurately. If you just, if you want to write a novel about a certain epoch in our public life and you invent all sorts of things that you think President Nixon, let’s say, might have done, but there’s no documentary proof or even any suggestion that he did it, I think that’s reprehensible. I think it’s outrageous to do that. And I work very hard in this book not to present the actual historical personages doing anything or saying anything that I didn’t know for sure that in fact they did do and did say.

There are one or two places, and I acknowledge them in an author’s word there, where you simply cannot establish with any certainty precisely what was said. Perhaps at a meeting that you know took place but you don’t have a record of what was said. You know the record of why the meeting took place and what the outcome was; therefore you can reasonably, I think, infer what must have been said. But even that sort of thing I think you have to keep, you should keep to a minimum, because even characters who have been dead a century or more can be libeled, in my judgment.

HEFFNER: Thank you for joining me today on The Open Mind.

WICKER: Thank you.

HEFFNER: Thank you for joining us today … in Memoriam. I hope you’ll be with us again next time. Meanwhile, as another old friend used to say, “Good night, and good luck.”
For other past programs, do visit The Open Mind website at www.thirteen.org/openmind.

GUEST: Lynn Povich
AIR DATE: 04/20/2013
VTR: 01/10/2013

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And my guest today is journalist Lynn Povich, whose 2012 Public Affairs book, “The Good Girls Revolt” is one of the best written and most attractive examples of what I think of as contemporary history that I’ve had the pleasure of reading in years.

Now, its subtitle tells its story of forty years ago plus quite simply and directly – How The Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses And Changed The Workplace.

And when Gloria Steinem says “The Good Girls Revolt” is “as compelling as any novel” … she’s right on.

So that aside from the fact that she is such a darn good writer, I would ask my guest just what she thinks makes her story such an irresistible one for us today. Why, Lynn? You’re a great writer and it’s a great book.

POVICH: Thank you, Dick.

HEFFNER: But why does this story grip us so?

POVICH: Well, you know, I think it’s two things. One, it’s a great story. I mean it is the story of this transitional generation of women who come of age in the sixties and have to challenge everything they’ve been taught … that what a woman should be and what her role should be in society.

And, and it’s also this lawsuit which unfolds in an amazing way, as you know. And I think the characters which always make a good story are compelling as well.

HEFFNER: The Wallendas?

POVICH: Well, you have the Wallendas, which are the … our, our name for the Editors, the top editors at Newsweek. You have these young women, most of us were between the ages of 24 and 32.

And then you have our lawyer, Eleanor Holmes Norton who’s now the Representative from the District of Columbia, seven months pregnant, 5’7” feet with an Afro out to here (makes gesture). And you have Katherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post which owned Newsweek at the time.

HEFFNER: And put together, do you think they accomplished what you wanted to accomplish?

POVICH: As you know from the book, it took a while. (Laugh) We didn’t hit it out of the park the first time around. But I think in the end we won almost everything we had asked for.

Osborn Elliott, the editor and Chief of Newsweek, said that our lawsuit made Newsweek a better magazine and a better place to work. And I think being the first in the media to file a gender discrimination suit in 1970 … it opened the door for women all over the media and in the media to begin to do the same thing.

And so after we sued at Newsweek, the women at Time, Inc. sued Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated. The women at the Reader’s Digest, at NBC, at The New York Times, which used our lawyer … our second lawyer to represent them.

And so, suddenly, not only were women opening the doors within their own shops, more or less, but the fact that women were getting promoted into writing and, and even editing meant that the kinds of stories, the kinds of voices, the kinds of people quoted changed the media.

And my, you know, feeling is that … if the media is a reflection of our society, then suddenly it was a much more equal, accurate view of what our society looked like.

HEFFNER: But that’s what I, I want really to ask you about. How did it change? The impact wasn’t just on these women at Newsweek, you’re saying it had to do with something much more extensive, much more important.

POVICH: Well, as you know, we were lucky enough to have a Women’s Movement behind us and supporting us. And that was just becoming news as our consciousnesses were being raised and realizing that this affected us personally … women were hired only as researchers at Newsweek and rarely promoted beyond that.

Men were hired … men with equal qualifications or even less … were hired as writers or reporters. So … but we were supported by a very exciting, energetic and moral Women’s Movement.

And I think that the times, from the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement and then the Women’s Movement … you know, began to question all these things in society. And because the media is the media and has a voice, suddenly it began covering the Women’s Movement, as we were changing the media inside … it began to cover the movement on the outside.

And, and I think the, the coverage of the Women’s Movement, when women and men began reading about all the things that were going on, not only professionally, but personally … consciousness raising groups, women questioning things, it began to sort of feed into the questioning era that all those social movements were part of.

HEFFNER: It was extraordinarily ironic that Newsweek was covering the Women’s Movement just as you people were getting together in the women’s room, in the Ladies room, surreptitiously banding together to do your thing. How do you explain that? You were talking about good guys …

POVICH: (Laughter)

HEFFNER: Oz Elliott was certainly …

POVICH: Yes. Yes.

HEFFNER: … a good, good guy.

POVICH: … yeah … the Editors of Newsweek were very progressive. They spoke out on Civil Rights, they were way ahead of time than many other publications … they were against the war earlier than many publications.

They were progressive, liberal men. And yet, under their noses, as Osborn Elliott later said to me there was a whole cast of women who were basically being oppressed. They weren’t being promoted, they, they were being treated paternally, is a nice way to say that. And many of their careers basically faltered because they couldn’t get ahead. And so the day that Newsweek … you know, Newsweek decided to publish a cover story on the Women’s Movement …

HEFFNER: Yeah.

POVICH: … because it was so important and yet they had no women to write it. And so, for the first time in its 30 year history, it went outside the magazine and hired a very good writer at the New York Post, Helen Dudar to come and freelance the piece.

And, of course, being good journalists, the women inside who had been organizing realized this is a fabulous news peg. So the day that Newsweek appeared on the stands, on March 16th, 1970 with a cover story that said, “Women in Revolt” … 46 of us announced we were suing for sex discrimination.

And, as you well know, it was an irresistible story. I mean here were these young, attractive women … saying … suing Newsweek on the day it’s, you know, covering a Women’s Movement.

And so it was picked up not only around the country, but around the world and my favorite headline is from the Daily News, of course, which said, “News hens sue Newsweek” … this was 1970 and the first sentence was “46 Newsweek women, most of them young and most of them pretty sued Newsweek magazine (laughter) today.”

HEFFNER: And “most of them pretty” had to get in there, didn’t it?

POVICH: Yes, it was like … they weren’t those ugly feminists, or those, you know, combat wearing boot feminists. (Laughter)

HEFFNER: Do you think you had to go to law … to the law?

POVICH: You know a lot of the women on staff when we were organizing said, you know, let’s just go to the Editors and just tell them, you know, our problems, and tell them that this is illegal … which it was by the 1964 Civil Right Act … and they’ll change.

And the real reason we didn’t do that was that about six weeks earlier … six months earlier a group of top writers who were very unhappy with various things at Newsweek, their stories were being too edited, they wanted more voice in their stories, they wanted more freedom … decided to organize.

And when the Editors found out about it, they took each of the writers, one by one out to lunch … listened to them, said, “You’re absolutely right, of course we will change”. And nothing happened.

And we thought, you know, if they’re not going to do that for the top writers of the magazine, who get it out every week, they’re certainly not going to change for the lowest level employees, because they’ll just … as one Editor said, after we sued, “Let’s just fire them all, we’ll just get other researchers.”

So we felt we didn’t have the leverage and we felt that once we knew it was illegal and against the law, that we had every right, as any civil rights case did, to take it to court.

HEFFNER: Did it work that way with the others, too, that it was the legal action that led to the changes?

POVICH: Yes. I, I always say I’m an Affirmative Action baby and I believe that if that law … the Civil Rights law of, you know … banning discrimination based on many, you know, religion, gender, race … if that had not been the law, I don’t think these companies would have changed and changed as quickly as they had to.

And suddenly they had to open up and recruit, promote, hire people they never had before. Just as, and you know this well, the FCC decision of having to have diversity in order to get their licenses renewed. If they didn’t have to have diversity, they wouldn’t have hired African Americans and women to become anchors on local news and things like that.

HEFFNER: We have moved forward in one area, not in another. Do you think we’ve continued the move forward in the press, print journalism?

POVICH: Well, if you mean the status of women in the media …

HEFFNER: I mean the status of women in the media …

POVICH: … you can look now at the media and I’m talking about mainstream media at the moment. And, you know, there are women everywhere now that, that didn’t used to … we have women covering wars in Syria and Iraq … if you turn on the television or NPR … we have women covering the President and not just the First Lady. We have women in the business sections, in the foreign and national sections where they used to be in the women’s pages.

We have women in middle to senior management. And the glass ceiling is still at the very top. There are very few women at the top of news organizations.

The New York Times for the first time has a woman Editor, Jill Abramson … who was promoted to that position last year, so that’s 2012. And, and did have a woman publisher for a long time. The Washington Post has a woman publisher who’s related to the Graham family.

But there’s not a woman head of a network news or cable news station. And, you know, every moment is a picture in time. You know it ebbs and flows. There was a period, you’ll remember, where there were women Editors of the Chicago Tribune, the Oregonian, the Des Moines Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer … major newspapers. There aren’t now.

HEFFNER: Making what difference?

POVICH: Well, I think when you have a woman and, and, you know, I hate to generalize because you have to have the right woman and you can certainly have the right man.

And there are many men who have promoted women, who have diversified the kinds of voices and stories in their newspapers. So it’s not just that all men are bad and all women are good, you have to have the right kind of people.

But certainly women are more attuned to the kinds of stories, voices, mix of stories on the front page … I think that a lot of these newspapers, when you look at them … have changed the mix of stories. And certainly that was true at Newsweek.

Once I became a Senior Editor, we started covering women and work issues. We started covering the women’s movement, we had always covered fashion. But it was just a little bit different to have a woman in the meeting.

HEFFNER: So you do feel that there is a sensibility that enters journalism when you do have more than women as researchers.

POVICH: Definitely. And I think that’s true for all minorities, basically. I, I think everybody brings a different and therefore stronger and more accurate reflection of the society we live in.

HEFFNER: And let’s carry it further, to the American corporate world … outside of journalism, what do we find there?

POVICH: Well, (laugh) … we … I think it’s … of the corporate suites … those are the senior officers, I think it’s about somewhere between 14% and 16% and according to Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of FaceBook, it’s been that way for the last ten years.

So what does that tell us … that there’s something that happens above that level, where even women who are in the pipeline and have been, and have the experience, aren’t getting up there.

HEFFNER: What do you think it is?

POVICH: You know, I think, it’s probably, you know, many things. I think that many corporate cultures … I, I believe the corporate culture comes from the top. And I think men who respect women and like to work with women promote women. I think men who like to hang out with men, feel more comfortable with men, talk to men … that’s their sources of information … their records are not as good in terms of getting more diverse people into their management.

And I think so a lot it … a lot of companies are still “old boys clubs”, or macho cultures, and this is certainly true in the “tech” world … we see as well as just regular corporate America.

HEFFNER: Doesn’t that surprise you … in the tech world?

POVICH: No, because the tech world … much of the tech world has come out of engineering and computer science, where there are very few women. And there’s a big push now to get women into what they call “STEM” careers … science, technology, engineering and math, simply because those are growing careers, they’re very well paid careers, and women have not been encouraged to do that.

HEFFNER: Do you think that you could see in business, in the corporate world, the kind of reflection of the entrance of women in journalism in better and higher paying and more responsible positions?

POVICH: I think a lot of this has to do with the work/family issues, which I don’t consider “women’s” issues. I consider societal issues. It is very hard for a lot of women who are skilled and talented and could easily have those jobs to feel that they could be both a good boss and a good parent.

And because parenting still falls primarily on women, many women who have … many have been asked to go into those jobs … have had a hard time deciding not to do that.

And now you have a young … a generation of young men who are much more involved with raising their children than my parent’s generation. And, you know, I think this is an issue for the young men and women in the corporate culture today. Which is that if you have children, if you are two working parents and you have two kids, it’s very, very difficult and I think that what’s going to have to happen is that companies are going to have to figure out how to be more flexible, how to be more open in terms of providing some public and private supports for daycare … whether it’s for your children or your parents.

And making life a little easier for people who are very skilled, who they’ve trained and what we’re now finding … is something called the leaky pipeline, where women who are skilled and in mid to senior management are dropping out, because they can’t do it all.

HEFFNER: You mean you can have it all … but you can’t do it all. Or you can’t have it all, either.

POVICH: Well, you know … I have to say that the women’s movement never said, you can have it all …

HEFFNER: It was Helen Gurley Brown who said it …

POVICH: (Laugher) Yeah, I was going to say … thank you … you know, we just said we wanted an equal shot at everything … and, and to be equal.

So, no one has it all. Let’s face it, men don’t have it all. I mean men may do very well at their work life, but they’ve sacrificed a lot of their personal life. That’s not having it all.

They’re not stigmatized for not being at home with their children, or not being involved with their children, the way women are. But the fact is they have lost, you know, 50% of their lives, as well.

HEFFNER: Well what about the leak … with women that you referred to. How strong is that?

POVICH: You know I think … you know, Anne-Marie Slaughter just wrote this piece in the Atlantic about women can’t have it all and how she … at the State Department decided to leave because she had a teen-age son and she felt she had to be home with him.

Those jobs are … you know … nobody has a life if you work for the White House or the State Department. Those are 24/7 jobs. And you take those jobs knowing that … you might take them because you want the experience, it’s great on your resume, but both men and women leave those jobs because they never see their families.

I think the challenge will be figuring out how we can retain skilled and talented people and yet … and the technology should work for this because you don’t have to be in the office. The problem is that the technology is also killing us because everything is now 24/7 and there are no boundaries.

Just because you can answer email and be online, somehow if they feel … the bosses feel, the clients feel … you should be.

And I think one of the issues we have to deal with is, is putting some boundaries around, you know, the fact that you’re going to go home and you’re going to be off-line from eight … six to eight at night. And you’re not going to answer emails or anything unless it’s really urgent.

HEFFNER: Do you know somebody who does that?

POVICH: You know, I know …I know women who say that, you know, that they’re not available at dinner time. Or certain times. They then get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to do their email …

HEFFNER: To answer …

POVICH: … but this is not a solution, either.

HEFFNER: If that is not a solution, either … what then is the solution? For men and women in the world of technology?

POVICH: Well, I think that, you know, the issue is can you be effective at work doing it however you do it? You know, I, I know … do you really have to be at the end of every phone call? Do you really have to be in every single meeting? I mean I think there has to be some discipline here. We talk about waste and fraud in the government.

Look at all the wasted time in these companies with these meetings. And how much of that is really necessary. And I think if we went back to the fifties idea of time management … committees, if you remember that … you know, somebody should do some time management now with this technology. Because I don’t know that we’re working more efficiently. It’s true that there’s more demand on people because the work force has been reduced, and so with fewer people the employees are being asked to do more.

But I still think there is an efficiency thing that’s missing here.

HEFFNER: Where would Lynn Povich have gone if it hadn’t been that you “good girls” revolted.

POVICH: That’s a good question. I mean I certainly love journalism and I probably would have left, as many women … you know many women who came to Newsweek and knew they wanted to be journalists like Nora Efron, Ellen Goodman, Jane Bryant Quinn … they saw the lay of the land at Newsweek and they left pretty quickly to have very successful careers.

So I think most of us who decided we wanted to be journalists and writers would have had to leave if we weren’t going to get promoted.

HEFFNER: You know it’s funny, you said “Those … many of us who decided wanted to be journalists and writers … when you just listed all of those who left, and you do in the book, I thought to myself ‘but they didn’t leave’ …I thought of all of you as journalists and writers.” How do you … where do you draw that line? I thought of all of them as continuing to be writers.

POVICH: Well, it’s interesting, you know I, I didn’t know and many young women at Newsweek, didn’t know when we got out of college what we wanted to do.

I got a job at Newsweek and then discovered in doing the job that I really liked it and that’s what I wanted to do. But Nora and Ellen and, and Jane had been writing for their college paper … I mean they sort of knew that that’s what they wanted to do. Most of the women in the book just were happy to have a really good job in a really interesting place.

And then in the course of researching and going out and reporting, they realized they actually wanted to do this and wanted to have a career.

But, for women raised in the forties and fifties, nobody mentioned the word “career” to them. I mean a couple of women, like Nora’s mother was working and told her she was certainly going to have a career. But many of us, even at women’s colleges and I went to a women’s college which had a very feminist background, nobody said anything about a career. You got a job until you got married and had children. But careers were not something that they thought young women should have.

HEFFNER: Lynn has anyone said about this wonderful book, “You’re talking about a handful of people. You’re talking about a very, very fortunate, upper middle class group. Had nothing really to do with most American women.” Have you heard that?

POVICH: I certainly know that we were very privileged women. And White women and highly educated women. And I think I can only say that many social movements begin with the more privileged class where you are … where there are a lot of you together, so that if you’re … you won’t get picked off … you can band together as a group. If you’re only three or four people in a company, you’re much more threatened than if you are 46 or 60 of us.

HEFFNER: Sure.

POVICH: But, yes, it’s true that we were of a very privileged class. On the other hand that’s who was working in the media in those days. The media had begun to change from a sort of craft of a lot of working people who went into the media, to a much more highly educated group. And now even more so, I think.

But yes, I, I think that each group had to do what it has to do. So whether you’re in a company in a union … a longshore … whatever it is … you have to deal with your own circumstances.

These were the cards we had and we played them. And the, the ripple effect was because we were in the media. If we had just been in the AT&T … and in fact the women at AT&T brought a suit that was a very important suit, to get women into more line jobs, into becoming linemen, into getting better pay. They did it for their industry.

HEFFNER: If you were to … we just have two minutes left … if you were to take journalism’s condition today … moving from print to god knows where … what would you say has been the impact upon women, men in this field?

POVICH: Well, I think the original beginnings of online journalism, which was the Internet and sort of big hubs like MSNBC and AOL and things like that. It was still … there were some, certainly some women involved, but it was still sort of male dominated.

I think what’s happening now is that … two things, one is that social media, I believe, is a much more conducive media for what women like to do … we’re networked, we have large networks, we like the social aspect of media and I think women will do better in social media than they did in just traditional online stuff.

But now you have a lot of women who are also commentators online. I mean most of the online publications have very, very good women writing for them. So it’s opened up in a way, probably faster, than certainly print and television.

HEFFNER: Do you think largely because it is commentary?

POVICH: I think so. I mean I think that although, you know, there should be more in the print media … more commentary, but certainly online I think women have a good writer … it’s, it’s easier to do it … you have many more voices, you have a lot more space.

HEFFNER: Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt is a wonderful book, thank you for writing it and thank you for joining me today.

POVICH: Thank you, Dick.

HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile, as another old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

And do visit the Open Mind Website at thirteen.org/openmind to reprise this program online right now or to draw upon our Archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org/openmind.

GUEST: Max Frankel
AIR DATE: 04/13/2013
VTR: 01/10/2013

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And I determined to do this program earlier in the year when I read Scott Shane’s totally intriguing major above-the-fold front page New York Times story headlined “From Spy to Source to Convict”, about a former CIA. officer facing prison for a leak to a reporter.

In it, Shane quoted from newsman Max Frankel’s famous 1971 affidavit on how American reporters and Washington officials actually do exchange secrets.

Then the New York Times Washington Bureau Chief – and my guest today – Max Frankel would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, to be the Times’ Sunday Editor, the Editor of its Editorial Page, and ultimately its Executive Editor.

Of course, when he wrote his now classic affidavit, it was in opposition to the Nixon Administration’s infamous motion for an injunction barring the Times from printing further documents relating to its series on the Vietnam War, the historic “Pentagon Papers”.

As always, Max was direct: “The Government’s unprecedented challenge to the Times” … he wrote … “cannot be understood, or decided, without an appreciation of the manner in which a specialized corps of reporters and a few hundred American officials regularly make use of so-called classified, secret, and top secret information and documentation.

“It is a cooperative,” he wrote, “a cooperative, competitive, antagonistic and arcane relationship…it mystifies even experienced government professionals…including the most astute politicians and attorneys.”

But now I’ve asked my guest himself to read his affidavit’s next four points…concluding, of course, with, quote, “This is why the press has been wisely and correctly called The Fourth Branch of Government”. Max, go ahead, read.

FRANKEL: Well, I said that without the use of secrets there could be no adequate diplomatic, military and political reporting of the kind that our people take for granted either abroad or in Washington. And there could be no mature system of communication between the government and the people.

That’s one reason why the sudden complaint by one party, namely the government, to these regular dealings struck us as monstrous and hypocritical.

Unless it was essentially meant to be perfunctory for the purpose of retaining some discipline over the Federal bureaucracy.

I know how strange all this must sound I wrote, we have been taught, particularly in the generation of spy scares and cold war to think of secrets as really secrets, varying in their sensitivity, perhaps, but uniformly essential to the private conduct of diplomatic and military affairs. And as detrimental to the national interest if prematurely disclosed.

By the standards of official Washington, government and press alike, this is an antiquated, quaint, romantic view. For practically everything that our government does, plans, thinks, hears and even contemplates in the realms of foreign policy is stamped as secret and treated as secret. And then it’s unraveled by that same government, by the Congress and by the press in one continuing round of professional and social contacts and cooperative and competitive exchanges of information.

The governmental, political and personal interests of the participants are inseparable in this process. Presidents make secret decisions, only to reveal them for the purposes of frightening an adversary nation, wooing a friendly electorate, protecting their own reputations.

The military services conduct secret research in weaponry or to reveal it for the purpose of enhancing their budgets.

Appearing superior or inferior to a foreign army. Gaining the vote of a Congressman or the favor of a contractor.

The Navy uses secret information to run down the weaponry of the Air Force. The Army passes on secret information to prove its superiority to the Marine Corps.

High officials of government reveal secrets in the search for support of their policies or to sabotage the plans and policies of a rival department.

Middle range officials of government reveal secrets so as to attract the attention of their superiors or to lobby against the orders of those superiors.

Though not only … though not the only vehicle for this traffic in secrets, Congress is always eager to provide a forum, the press is probably the most important.

And in the field of foreign affairs, only rarely does our government give full information to the press for the purpose of simply informing the people. For the most part, the press obtains significant information bearing on foreign policy only because it has managed to make itself a party to confidential materials … transmitting these materials from government to other branches of government as well as to the public at large.

And that’s why the press has been wisely and correctly called the Fourth Branch of Government.

HEFFNER: So, does it all mean that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

FRANKEL: Well, it’s frankly shocking that something I wrote forty-some odd years ago should be so highly relevant and, and still quoted now because the process is ill-understood.

People think of secrets, secrets being secret. And worthy of being kept secret. And are alarmed when they learn that people are loosely trafficking in these secrets … in and out of Washington and abroad.

HEFFNER: Yes, but now you’re talking about innocent readers …

FRANKEL: Right.

HEFFNER: … like myself, you’re not talking about Richard Nixon or Barack Obama.

FRANKEL: No, they know. In fact, they’re among the principal leakers (laughter).

HEFFNER: So, how do you account for this? I mean how do you account for …when I said “the more things change, the more they stay the same” … Nixon …

FRANKEL: Why do they prosecute …

HEFFNER: … or Obama … Yeah.

FRANKEL: … the people who traffic in these … or who occasionally leak secrets? Well … understand that anyone in executive authority wants some discipline with information. You don’t want it prematurely known that you’re thinking of appointing so and so to this or that job, and you certainly don’t want highly classified, important weapons information or strategy in a negotiation prematurely disclosed. So you need some sense of discipline among this vast bureaucracy in, in government.

HEFFNER: The threat of prison?

FRANKEL: And it, and it’s very … the threat of prison when it comes to so-called national security interest is the one thing that they have. Oddly enough, you know, there is no law that governs the whole absurd classification process.

There are millions and millions of new secrets stamped each week in government. And there is no organized legal system by which the people who traffic in this stuff can be held accountable for how they, how they deal with it.

The only law on the books, aside from the Espionage Act, which has been used once or twice in an effort to silence the press or some, some whistle blower … there is only one law, passed in the 1980’s that explicitly forbids the publication of the name of secret agent, of a CIA operative on the ground that disclosure of some of those people would risk their lives.

And that’s the law that’s been invoked in the case that you’re citing … that the Times has been writing about and that occasionally has been used, even though in this case this fellow … Kiriakou who, who is being prosecuted by the Obama Administration, he inadvertently let slip the name of an agent but it was never published.

He’s being prosecuted because he took a position rather publicly against water-boarding and used his CIA credentials and past employment in the government to campaign against his fellow operatives.

And those fellows who, who participated in torture and conducted water boarding are, understandably, sensitive about this former colleague going on the war path against them and they, I think, have encouraged the Justice Department to go after him on the pretext of disclosing the name of an agent. But there’s no law otherwise that could be fairly used.

HEFFNER: Max, you mean then that when I go out to Rutgers to teach my students, I’ve got to believe and I guess to say that there’s really no difference between Nixon and Obama when it comes to these issues?

FRANKEL: It’s worse under Obama, but in fairness to him the, the problem is worse. The Internet has made the dumping of secrets possible.

When we got the Pentagon Papers in Nixon’s case we thought it was a lot. We got about 5,000, 6,000 pages of material that we had to laboriously mimeograph in order to edit it properly and, and grasp what was going on.

More recently in the famous Wikileaks case and this Private Manning, they’re just dumping stuff by, by the millions of words on the Internet. You don’t even need the Xerox machine anymore to, to copy materials and to send them around the world and … so that Osama bin Laden sitting in Pakistan was a faithful reader of a lot of our secrets. And in fact that’s one of the charges being used against this Manning fellow in, in the Army. So as, so that they can invoke the, the Espionage Act because he was helping an enemy.

It, it gets that absurd. But the problem is terrible from the point of view of people sitting inside the government. How do we protect the few really legitimate secrets that we do want to keep and how do we exert some discipline over the bureaucracy and there’s no law with which we can really deal.

And the answer, of course, as the late Senator Moynihan used say is “declassify, open up everything and get rid of this whole concept of, of secret, top secret and even above that … Q clearance for so-called nuclear secrets”. And then find out the few precious, really important secrets that are not, that are not secret because you’re embarrassed to have the public read what’s happened, or because you’ve screwed up and you don’t want the public to know that you’ve screwed up.

But really legitimate secrets that can be defended by a board and put a date on when they will cease to be secret, unless somebody comes and appeals the matter, etc. Unless they revolutionize the whole process, we’ll never have a rational system.

HEFFNER: You say “unless” … and let ask you …

FRANKEL: (Laughter)

HEFFNER: … will we ever?

FRANKEL: I don’t think so. There’s no sign that, that anyone truly sensitive to the, to the nature of the problem and truly committed to informing the public and truly desirous of not covering their rear ends, but really just protecting the handful of few legitimate secrets that a government should have … there is no one who’s going take the time and have the credibility to re-organize the whole system and get the support of either a sitting President or the Congress to …

HEFFNER: What do you mean “have the credibility”? Not from a newsman’s point of view, or a bureaucrats point of view?

FRANKEL: Well, they’ll never trust Max Frankel or any of my successors who are editors and journalists, to come in and tell them … although when we get secrets … they have to trust us when they start arguing with us … “Please don’t publish this, but don’t publish that” and we listen to them and sometimes we actually accept their arguments.

But most of the time we don’t … so when, when a secret flows away from government, when they lose a secret, they really do have to trust us.

But they would never dare call in a journalist and say … “Rationalize the system for us and tell us what really ought to be secret”.

And nobody in government is willing to, to take that responsibility. It is … when a government official gets a piece of paper and he faces the question of “Is this going to be secret or not?”, he’ll never get in trouble for declaring it … a secret.

He might well get in trouble for letting it loose and letting the public see what’s really going on.

So the system is forever distorted in favor of what it has become … millions and millions and millions of file cabinets full of these so-called secrets and the press and the public is at the mercy of an occasional leak and this process that I described, when for their own reasons officials begin to unravel the secrets.

HEFFNER: Are we better informed today, Max? For that? Or against that? Or with it? Or without it?

FRANKEL: I think we are better informed by the few publications that invest in the talent and the staffs that have the ability to make the contacts and to sift … take the time to delve into important events and to find out what’s really going on and, and how did this happen?

I mean take any situation … how … monitoring what Iran is up to with nuclear weapons … how come some of their leading nuclear scientists have miraculously dropped dead? How come their computers have been gagged and, and failed in this nuclear program?

It doesn’t take much for a reporter to smell a rat. (Cough) But then he has to go out and find out “Well, who’s killing these guys? Is it the Israeli’s, is it we, etc.”

How come … who, who’s sabotaging their computers? Well, you need to go to certain people and ask certain questions and here and there somebody might tell you because he thinks it’s important that the world understand it, or because he wants to defend the policy of his, of his CIA operation. Or whatever reason. Or because he’s against the policy and wants to sabotage the policy. For one reason or another, he’ll begin to inform the reporter and the reporter will have a little bit of information through that contact. Now he has something to trade. Now he has something to invoke with another source, and say, “Look I know all about what you’re doing with the computers. Now, tell me, when’s the last time this was done?” And he begins to trade on this knowledge. And so cumulatively he … cumulatively he builds up a story and sooner or later a story appears in the press (cough) very few publications are left with the size of staff and the expertise in Washington to understand these things.

The few that are there, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post … less so than before, but still active in this … some of the networks occasionally … especially in the Pentagon, ABC does a good job. To that extent we are extremely well informed … in those few quarters.

But are there enough people asking enough questions and making enough contacts and, and making themselves available for the massive leaks from government. I fear not.

HEFFNER: Pretty, pretty unhappy situation. And you’re predicting that it will get worse.

FRANKEL: Yes, but … there’s one thing that’s changed since, since my day and it started in my day … the press in the Cold War was too often complicit rather than challenging of government policy. We too, too quickly assumed that what we were doing is virtuous, what the Soviets were doing is terrible and wrong. And maybe some of that has re-appeared now that we have the, the enemy of, of, of terrorists … nameless and, and a threat that has raised legitimate fears in American society.

But to the extent that, that sophisticated journalists are, are still at work in Washington and abroad … very few abroad … they are most skeptical of government. And, and to that extent I think they’re, they’re serving us extremely well.

HEFFNER: When you say “very few abroad” … are you referring to American journalists abroad?

FRANKEL: Yes. Alas and alack … the villain here is not only the Internet, but the jet plane. It’s made it impossible … (cough) most, most journalistic operations don’t maintain significant foreign staffs anymore.

They figure if there’s an earthquake somewhere we, we’ll just fly people in. Or, or we, we’ll send the anchor man to Afghanistan and he’ll parachute down and have himself photographed in front of the troops while he is somberly announcing the news from there for a night or two.

But how many people are on the ground? How many people are driving around in, in armor plated cars protecting themselves in Iraq or in Afghanistan? How many people have bureaus of the sort it would take to cover a billion and a half people in China? And, and what they represent, either understanding their economy or their culture or their secretive, they’re even more secretive government than ours. Very few organizations left to cover that.

HEFFNER: So what’s the picture that you have to paint for a decade from now?

FRANKEL: Ahh, I, I can’t paint it … I … the whole journalism business is in upheaval as are most American enterprises and ventures. The computer and the Internet and all that the digital revolution represents is, is, is turning every business upside down and there is now no reliable profitable formula for pursuing journalism in a way that is reliably profitable to protect the independence of the journalistic organization.

The New York Times is making a heroic effort to transition from paper to digital. But the advertising is bleeding out of the paper edition and the amount that’s flowing in to the Internet is not compensating, therefore they’re reaching out and charging the readers a lot more.

Today, the readers, I think account for about 55% of the revenue that The New York Times is receiving. They used to represent about 20%, compared to the advertisers. There’s an enormous shift. Well, how much longer will people be willing to pay for the kind of information that the Times supplies?

And I don’t mean to single out the Times, the question is how many other enterprises will find a formula by which they can sustain themselves? And without profit they’ll either have to go running hat in hand, the way, say public radio does and, and beg the readers to make voluntary contributions or they will have to rely on money bags … a Soros here, a Bloomberg there who’s willing to lose some money to have fun with an organization.

But none of those are formulas for what I would call true independence for journalistic pursuit. We have to find new economic models and when you say “ten years”, I think somebody will find one, or more than one … they will be found … but I can’t now predict what form they will take.

HEFFNER: When you say “economic models” you’re referring to “for profit” models.

FRANKEL: Yes. Although, you know, the New York Times for many of its years got along with a very minimal profit. It had a … fortunately it had a family that was committed to a, a … in effect a public service. But yes, they had no private fortune to fall back on the way a Bloomberg or, or even a Murdoch has … he’s got his films and other and television to support the Wall Street Journal. The Times was uniquely a family enterprise and they felt that they had to make a profit in order to be able to preserve their independence from government.

There would be no Pentagon Papers or any of the kind of coverage you talked about last … in, in this most recent case, if they weren’t financially independent and if the support of the readers were not broad enough so that no single ideology or ethnic value or whatever could shape the nature of the enterprise.

HEFFNER: So, why aren’t you willing to shrug your shoulders and say “the game is over”, because you’re clearly not.

FRANKEL: No. I don’t think the game is over. Well, I’ll tell you … I, I, I was … a stupid faith. One hundred and fifty years ago, nobody sat down and said, “If I get Macy’s and Gimbel’s to give me what I would rudely have called their “girdle” ads, then I can send a correspondent to Cambodia. That was the nature of the business of The New York Times.

It took the department stores of New York and somehow, because they had a sale on this and a sale on that and they bought pages and pages of advertising, they built up a staff that earned credibility and that put out a, a centrist and independent and, and courageous newspaper that progressively got better and better and better and better in, in journalistic terms.

Nobody sat down an invented that system. It happened. Or back in Benjamin Franklin’s day when the, the press was created by the fact that … he was a printer like so many other people in Boston and, and Virginia … the government had to place ads, notices, legal notices for judicial purposes … to settle suits and arguments.

And the printers who got a’hold of that government advertising turned it into newspapers and then became independent commentators on a political scene. Nobody sat down and invented that structure of, of independent business.

So I have blind faith that some how, somewhere journalism will, will find a new way of supporting its own independence and courage.

HEFFNER: Even in the midst of all the so-called “new journalism”?

FRANKEL: Absolutely. Absolutely. The, the more the merrier. The very fact that we can all talk back, that we can look up anything on Google … the very fact that information has … is being multiplied daily to a factor of millions is, is … means that the information business is, is prospering and it has to find legs with which to then sustain itself. And I think it will do so.

HEFFNER: Max Frankel, we have 20 seconds left … just enough for me to thank you for your optimism and your expertise and make sure that you come back another time.

FRANKEL: Be delighted.

HEFFNER: Thank you. And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile, as another old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

And do visit the Open Mind Website at thirteen.org/openmind to reprise this program online right now or to draw upon our Archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org/openmind.

GUEST: Dr. Elaine Heffner
AIR DATE: 04/06/2013
VTR: 01/10/13

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind…have been for almost 57 years now, a long time.

My guest today is a psychotherapist and parent educator in private practice here in New York and a Senior Lecturer of Education in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She was the Co-Founder and long-time Director of the distinguished Nursery School Treatment Center at Payne-Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital.

The author of “MOTHERING: The Emotional Experience of Motherhood After Freud and Feminism”, published by Doubleday and Anchor Press some years back, I find my guest’s new book, “goodenoughmothering: The Best of the Blog” – based on the blog that she posts online each week – particularly touching in its dedication, “To all the parents who have taught me so much”.

Touching, too – and in keeping with full disclosure – is the fact that Dr. Elaine Heffner is my wife … has been for almost 63 years now, also a long time.

Now, my guest writes that the message she intends for parents in “goodenoughmothering: The Best of the Blog” is that “There is no ‘perfect’. Good enough is good enough.”

And I think I should ask Dr. Heffner just what she means. Greetings.

ELAINE HEFFNER: I’m so glad that you asked me that question because I get very interesting reactions to that statement.

Some people think that it’s just an obvious truism. But a number of mothers have told me they feel as though it’s a put-down because they don’t want to be “just good enough”, they want to be perfect.

And that is really the basis of a lot of what I’m trying to do in, in this book is help them understand the concept of “good enough”.

The idea of a “good enough” mother really is due to a famous pediatrician and psychiatrist, D. W. Winnicott and he wrote and worked in the late forties and fifties. And he came up with this idea of the “good enough mother”.

And what he really meant by it was that the idea of the perfect mother which he felt many of his colleagues … you know this was the era of Freud and psychoanalysis and of big influence of psychoanalytic theory on the whole idea of child rearing. And mothers came in for a lot of scrutiny.

And Winnicott thought they should not be setting such standards of perfection. He talked about the “average”, the “ordinary devoted mother”. So his idea of “good enough” was a mother who really was not going to just be there and jump at every one of her child’s wishes and requests. Because that would not really be that helpful., would not be growth producing.

But “good enough” meant that she would help him, nurture him, help him or her grow and develop. And so that was his message.

But it’s kind of ironic because Winnicott wrote during the period after the Second World War when the … your ordinary devoted mother … was his phrase … was a mother, housewife primarily who was with her child pretty much 24/7 and so the kind of devoted, ordinary mother he was talking about really doesn’t have too much to do with today’s world.

RICHARD HEFFNER: What do you mean?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Well, because the role of women has changed. And I think that many women grow up now with a different set of ideas about what life can and should hold for them. They … I mean in, in Winnicott’s day many women felt that that was their primary goal … was to be a wife and mother.

I don’t know that women start out feeling that way. I think eventually many of them do want to become mothers. But they also have a different set of expectations. That they should be out in the world, that they should be able to work at a career or a job and that conflict between this old idea of, of motherhood and today’s reality is something that women today are really struggling with. And I think it is a major burden that they face

RICHARD HEFFNER: But, Elaine, how does, how does this lead to this problem with the concept of “good enough”?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Well, the … because the … what I have discovered is that women today, many of them are really struggling to achieve the very thing that Winnicott was trying to dissuade them from.

The difference is that the standards that he set, his definition of the “good enough mother” I think many women today would consider perfection.

I know I kind of smile when I read it because I think he sets a pretty high bar. So, what I’ve tried to do is re-define the concept of “good enough” and show that, that maybe we need to think about what, what mothering and parenting is, in a slightly different way.

Because the kind of mothering that I think has been handed down through a lot of research, developmental research and especially a lot of the writings of that whole psychoanalytic influence is, is an idea about motherhood which first of all may or may not really be appropriate at any time, but certainly does not fit the life that women today want to lead.

And that, that standard was possible only when women were ready to devote themselves in a certain way to child rearing which I, I’m not sure that many women are today.

And even though who are, they get really very invested in doing it perfectly. And, and they have an idea of perfection which is, is not realistic.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Well, when our kids were born … this is a long, long time ago …

ELAINE HEFFNER: (Laugh) Don’t make it sound so long ago.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Well, but it was … I remember getting a second copy of Dr. Spock …

ELAINE HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

RICHARD HEFFNER: …and you used Dr. Spock pretty much as a guide …

ELAINE HEFFNER: Absolutely. And Dr. Spock has gone through … in fact … my first book Mothering … I have a chapter in which I show the various editions that he went through … various printings, in which he changed his mind about a lot of things. Because he, he also realized that he … he … Dr. Spock was very much influenced by psychoanalytic theory … he, he had a lot of psychoanalytic training. In fact, he had a training at Payne Whitney and I’m not supposed to say this, but I actually saw some of his records when I was … years ago when they still had paper records that you could read and didn’t have to go and look at on a computer.

And he, he was trying to translate psychoanalytic theory into child rearing practices. And so he, he said a lot of things about parenting that he changed his mind about.

In fact … this is just an aside, but I don’t know if you remember that somebody gave us a present of a book that said, “What Dr. Spock Never Told Us” … (laugh)

RICHARD HEFFNER: I do, indeed.

ELAINE HEFFNER: And he had things like Arcaro’s disease … I don’t know if anybody remembers who Arcaro was anymore, a famous jockey. And he talked about children who rocked back and forth.

But the one I love is the one he called “Traitor’s Throat”, when a child, a baby cries loud enough to wake his father, but not loud enough to wake his mother. And, and that is really a made-up category because I, I don’t know babies like that. (Laugh) The mothers always wake up.

RICHARD HEFFNER: But, look … a) that’s not true. As the father I can testify it’s not true. But b) I know from over the years that you’ve always been very much concerned with the negative impact upon mothers of “expert” advice. What, what always raises your hackles …

ELAINE HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

RICHARD HEFFNER: … about the experts?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Well, I’m often considered an expert myself so I, I have to be … I’m always trying to disabuse people of that, that idea. I, I think what I’m talking about is a prescriptive approach …

RICHARD HEFFNER: Prescriptive?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Yeah, prescriptive. In other words, if you do this and this and this … then, then everything is going to be wonderful.

RICHARD HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

ELAINE HEFFNER: And the idea that if you don’t do it exactly as you’ve been told to do it, something, you know, you’re going to have pathology, you’re going to have all kinds of things going wrong.

RICHARD HEFFNER: And you think mothers have been misled by that?

ELAINE HEFFNER: I know they have. And they … but they don’t feel secure about what they’re doing. It’s interesting because you know I, I participate in a seminar at Cornell … a training seminar for, for Fellows in Child Psychiatry.

And yesterday at the seminar we were discussing siblings. And the whole … as background there was readings in some of the psychoanalytic theory, some of Freud’s theory about siblings and so forth.

And it was an interesting discussion because much of what was discussed was what parents today … how they react to that and, and I know my own experience is that parents tend to think of sibling rivalry … they, they know about it intellectually, but they get really nervous when they see any sign of children being angry or, or fighting.

Aside from the fact that it’s not too pleasant to live with. But it, its … and what I find is that they think if they do everything just right. If they prepare the older child in, in just the right way, if they don’t take away the crib to give it to the baby, too soon. If they don’t take the bottle away from the older one in too close proximity to when they’re going to have the baby … a whole bunch of things like that, then they’re not going to have any sibling rivalry, everything will be perfect.

And that’s what I mean about thinking that you can make something perfect, or that it’s even desirable. And in that I agree with Winnicott completely, because one of my main messages to parents is that even if you could be this perfect mother that you somehow idealize, it would not be good for your children, because they would never grow up.

(Laugh) If somebody is, is taking care of you and, and, you know, making you totally dependent, well … you’re not going to be a very strong individual.

So there has to be frustration and things not going the way you like. And one of the things about (clears throat) … sorry … about our culture is that we, we don’t deal very well with negative feelings.

Negative feelings are suspect, you’re not supposed to feel bad. We have pills for everything. And all the commercials tell you that. You know, everything that … anything that’s bothering you … well, we have a … something to cure that.

So we don’t accept the idea that adversity is part of life. And, and this is how people get … this is how children get strong by facing things as they grow.

Not … obviously we don’t want to give them more than they can handle. But neither do we want to try to create a bed of roses.

RICHARD HEFFNER: You know … I … if I think back on our 63 years … no bed or roses …

ELAINE HEFFNER: (Laugh)

RICHARD HEFFNER: If I think back on those years, I know that what you have always been concerned about was the bad rap that mothers get.

ELAINE HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

RICHARD HEFFNER: I remember when … in your first book on Mothering … you, you … Philip Wylie figured in that, in the Generation of Vipers …

ELAINE HEFFNER: I quoted him as saying “Mama’s a jerk”.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Yeah, and a) do you feel that now in the 13th year of this century, that we’re still involved in getting after mother, blaming mother?

ELAINE HEFFNER: I absolutely do and I, I think … I have my own theory of … well, I don’t know if it’s … only my theory … but I think that everybody has an idealized image of, of what mother should be …who mother should be.

We all wish our own mothers had been this, that or the other thing. I mean either people idealize their mothers and make … you know … try to persuade themselves that everything was wonderful.

Or they, they tell me … the one thing I don’t want to be .. the kind of mother my mother was. And they try studiously to avoid with their children some of the mistakes that they think that their mother made with them.

So, I do think that that’s a kind of … if you forgive me … an unconscious thing that goes on …

RICHARD HEFFNER: Hostility toward ma?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Sort of … or … yeah … a feeling that mother is not as good as she should be, and a wish that she be something different than she is.

And so I think there are a lot of fantasies about who a mother should be.

But there’s also something else that is … I … I’m very interested in …which is that … we have, in our society a history of what I call social engineering through child rearing and education.

In other words, if there’s a problem that we see in society, we want to fix it by the way people raise their children. And we blame parents and mothers in particular.

And these days mother gets a lot of blame because there’s a whole segment of our culture that believes if women would just go back to the home, do what they’re supposed to do … stay barefoot and pregnant … then we wouldn’t have all these social problems.

And to a certain extent that is correct. That when women took that responsibility and life was very tidy and men went to work and women stayed home and took care of the children, that life was a lot more orderly.

But this was all being done on the backs of one, one sex. And I think that women rebelled against that and they, they really don’t want to be the carriers of the sole problem of how, how to be an active member of society and at the same time raise children.

So we really have not solved that problem. That is a, a social problem, a cultural problem that is very active … right now, that women in particular experience it. They feel very conflicted … I find often that mothers who are working, if any … what I call “bump in the road”, because you can’t raise children without having bumps in the road …they attribute it to the fact that they’re working.

And that they think that that’s somehow responsible for what’s happening.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Why have we … American mothers been attacked so in terms of other peoples … Chinese, French …

ELAINE HEFFNER: (Laugh)

RICHARD HEFFNER: … you name them.

ELAINE HEFFNER: Well … what, what … it seems to me as I’ve looked at this … is that what’s really going on is a struggle about an authoritarian approach to child rearing versus the more permissive … I’ll say democratic approach that we have adopted in this country.

And we’ve gone through an evolution … (cough) … I’m sure … you’re a historian you are very well aware of what child rearing was like in the Puritan era and then (cough) in the years that followed.

There was … you know … “children should be seen and not heard” … “respect your elders” … the … the whole idea that … you know … I always … I always quote that old joke about … “When I was a child my parents got the white meat of the chicken. Now that I’m a parent, my children get the white meat of the chicken. When is it going to be my turn?”

So, not that everybody loves the, the white meat of the chicken, but the idea being that at one point children were supposed to defer to parents. And now it seems to have gotten turned around in which parents defer to their children … a great deal. And, and I think that if you read things like the Chinese type of mother or Raising Bebe … or some of the other stuff that has come out, you’ll see that what they’re admiring is the authoritarian … “I’m the boss” approach.

RICHARD HEFFNER: And I know, I know from our Sunday night discussions when you send out your … when you post …

ELAINE HEFFNER: (Laugh)

RICHARD HEFFNER: … your blog … I must use the right language … I know that you address yourself to so many of these questions, problems. Two parents, two mothers … in particular, but not only to mothers … I’m always delighted when father …

ELAINE HEFFNER: … when father …

RICHARD HEFFNER: … sneaks in to one of your, one of your posts. Do you find that as you write these blogs that the response to them indicates that there is a continuing hunger on the part of mothers … young and not-so-young … for information and for orientation, perhaps the orientation that you offer most of all, and that has to do with “nobody’s perfect”.

ELAINE HEFFNER: Well I do try … I try to be reassuring and supportive (clears throat) that, that is a primary goal that I have because I think that, that mothers and fathers get enough criticism.

They … every magazine article that you pick up tells you what some latest research finding is that indicates some problem that is coming out of parenting.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Really? Is that the pattern?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Ah, there’s, there’s a great deal … yes. Because this is … as I say … there’s, there’s an idea that somehow if you fix this … then we’ll get rid of this problem.

RICHARD HEFFNER: You mean if you fix mothering …

ELAINE HEFFNER: Yeah … if you fix what the writer has identified as the particular issue that they think is destructive or what-have-you and just, just somebody … actually a member of our family recommended a book on … about narcissistic mothers and what they … how they damage their children. Well, that is so typical. I mean … to … people come up with these labels … they … you know ways of … it, it … well, it sells books for one thing.

But it is very destructive and I think that women and mothers take … do take a lot of this seriously. And I, I know that any, any time I’ve written about any of those articles … and indicated … kind of supported the parents’ viewpoint or role … that I get a lot of positive response because I think, I think women … and men, too … are hungry for a, a feeling of validation.

RICHARD HEFFNER: What do you mean “validation”?

ELAINE HEFFNER: That, they they’re doing a good job … and that … you know … (laugh) what was that movie … “The Kids Are Alright”?

And, and I think that we’re, we are in such a competitive society and the educational system is broken, as everybody is aware, so there’s such a competition for good spots in schools.

And I, I think so much of raising your children is really a matter of values. I mean, what’s important to you?

When somebody says to me “I, I want to be perfect. I want to be a perfect mother”. Well, does that mean that you want to raise a perfect child?

So, who is this perfect child? Is this a child who gets a straight grade A? Is this a child who excels at sports? Is this a child who is an outstanding musician? A creative genius … what, what is this child? Who is this child who’s going to make you feel like a perfect mother?

So the … we’re demanding something impossible of our children, that they should turn out in a way that help us feel like perfect parents. And that’s just not going to happen.

So, my philosophy and my outlook is that children … there are … they are going to be … what … influenced much more by who you are than by what you do.

Who you are as people. What your values are. What’s important to you. How you treat each other. How you, how you treat your children in that sense of … you know … mutual respect … I think in the end is much more important than, you know, whether, whether you’ve done exactly the right thing about weaning, or exactly the thing about toilet training or all these things, that you know, mothers worry about with their little children.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Talking about all the things they worry about. You have a blog here “No Fault Mothering”.

ELAINE HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

RICHARD HEFFNER: What do you mean?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Well, that … it was very interesting actually. Because a mother wrote to me and she told me that somehow the feeling that something is your fault is empowering because then you can do something about.

Whereas if it’s, if it’s something genetic or, you know, some …something is terribly wrong with your child then, you know, maybe … you’re helpless to do anything.

But, but if you can believe that it’s your fault, then you can fix it. And I … (laugh) … that’s quite a burden.

And I, you know, I’ve seen this working, working in the hospital with parents who really … they really would prefer to see a child’s problem as something they caused than as something inherently in the child that can’t be fixed.

RICHARD HEFFNER: One minute we have left. What do you mean?

ELAINE HEFFNER: Well, sadly there are some very unhappy disorders that, that children have … and … but … which a limited amount can be done about.

And the parents would, would prefer to see … feel that they … that whatever is wrong … they can fix it. And so, that … you know that’s a great burden to carry around.

And you know we, we’ve also …we used to think that mothers were … we used to blame them psychologically, but now with all this brain research and all this biological research, the whole idea of what you’ve contributed genetically and every other way … is just …the burden is really, too much.

RICHARD HEFFNER: I get the signal, our time is up. Maybe we’ll have a chance to talk again and maybe you’ll even come back and we’ll continue this discussion. Meanwhile, thank you Dr. Heffner for joining me today.

ELAINE HEFFNER: Thank you for having me, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you … (laugh)

RICHARD HEFFNER: For this long. And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile, as another old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

And do visit the Open Mind Website at thirteen.org/openmind to reprise this program online right now or to draw upon our Archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org/openmind.

GUEST: John Sexton
AIR DATE: 03/30/2013
VTR: 11/08/2012

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And again this week I have the pleasure of talking with New York University’s global minded President, my good friend and frequent guest John Sexton. Last time, of course, we did something of an exegesis of his splendid new Penguin Group book, Baseball as a Road to God.

But now I want to hark back to a perfectly masterful exchange my guest had on the air several years ago with our mutual friend Bill Moyers. I watched it again the other evening, heard my guest talk about there being “no serious conversation” in America these days, about what he called our growing “allergy to nuance and complexity”, about our “Coliseum Culture”.

And it all made me think about NYU’s own “Dialogues On a Global Civil Society” and about questions I’ve meant to put more directly to my guest than ever before when John Sexton has joined me so frequently in the past.

These questions have to do with fairness and decency and concern for others – am I my brother’s keeper, for instance – have to do with what seems to me to be a growing INcivility in our society, with an ever increasing “I’m alright Jack, and the Devil take the hindmost” element in our dealing with others, indeed, have to do with an ever more pronounced refusal to regard others than ourselves and our private connections, with a greater and greater willingness to trim and cut corners in just about every endeavor, public or private.

John Sexton approaches life as a historian, a theologian, a legal philosopher…above all else as a teacher. And I wonder if he sees this same decline in concern for others, for a civil society, for a shared moral sense, that I see. John? What do you think. Where are we going to hell in a bread basket?

SEXTON: Well, look, look … I like you am an optimist. I’m, I’m, I’m at base what I call a Teihardian progressive. So I, I believe as Teihard de Chardin taught me when I was a student at Fordham … first for my Bachelor’s degree and then for my Ph.D. in religion … I, I, I believe humankind is progressing.

But much like … as Teihard used evolution, much like evolution is a metaphor. There are fits and starts and we work our way, but ultimately, I think, I, I have optimism that humankind will, will, will come out of this on an even higher plane. The evidence is overwhelming to the contrary, of course, and it’s easy to, to, to feel like the great Don Quixote … you know (laugh) that one is titling at windmills in, in this battle.

But I, I, I do … I certainly am not going to bet against that. You know it’s kind of Pascal’s wager … and, and I do believe fundamentally that, that, that we will overcome and that, that humankind will rise to a higher plane.

What are the, the signs that trouble you and me, however? We, we’ve just come through a, a, a Presidential period where there was no respect for truth. No respect for fact, let alone respect for one’s dialogic partner in the process.

In, increasingly we, in America, especially, but it’s not simply in America, I just know America best … but we, we in America have developed a deep allergy to complexity and to nuance. And, and we, we want simple answers. And, and, and then we compound our desire for simple answers with an impatience that requires simple and immediate answers. And, and, and answers that give us immediate gratification.

So you know, one can trace virtually all of the, the vexing problems we face to, to this fundamental character flaw in the American character at this point. You know, whether, whether it be the budget deficit or Social Society or Medicare or climate change, the debt … whatever you want to discuss, it’s, it’s all a product of … first of all, don’t present me with complexity, give me a simple answer and an answer that produces immediate gratification for me.

The word “sacrifice” never comes into the picture at all, let alone sacrifice for others … people aren’t even willing to make short term sacrifice for their own good, let alone for their children’s good or, or for the good of their grandchildren.

So … when one sees that working itself out, one gets very worried. But, but then something happens … you know, for me it’s being with, with my colleagues and especially my students and, and, and seeing in them a real attention for the common weal.

The, the experience, for example at NYU when our community gathered together in, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy was quite remarkable. It was evocative for me of the way … especially New York City, south of 14th Street gathered together in the wake of 9/11. And, and you could feel a moral surge, you could feel that, that, that … extraordinary acts of generosity.

I’ll just give you one example. Okay. So, we, we … we were fortunate at NYU that, that … because we had built an independent co-generation plant that, that 40 of our buildings had power. But many of them did not. This in a way made all the more torturous the experience of those that were in the buildings that had no power … because they could look out on colleagues, friends that were across the street, literally … literally across the street … they would be seen out of their dark windows and there they were living normally.

Now, happily, one of the first things that happened was the people that had power, the students that were in dorms that had power, or the faculty that were living with their families in, in buildings that had power … began to invite people in. And share. So that was, that was the first thing.

But, of course, not everybody was mobile and, and some people would just rather stay in their own space, for better or worse, especially of your family, you don’t want to impose … the week started going on.

And there was one building … cause you’ll recall the Marathon was, was postponed and there was one building in which there was a young man that was going to run in the marathon. And he was all trained up for it … and of course he had that disappointment. But what he did, instead, was he put on a miner’s hat with a light … because the stairwell’s were black … and, and he would, would … acted as a runner up the stairs … with water for people that were unable to leave their apartments.

Or he would take orders for food and groceries and when it was delivered he would be the delivery guy and he would get it up the stairs.

Now you know, you see something like that. You know, or I’d walk into an NYU classroom … this particular classroom has to be … happens to be one of the classes I teach at NYU Abu Dhabi and there in the second row is a young man named Theo. Freshman. Saw his mother, his father and seven of his siblings slaughtered in front of him in the Rwandan genocide.

He and his brother were left for dead. Three days before they got to a UN refugee camp. A couple of years before he got to a Kenyan high school, which is where we found him … top of the class … and here is in my, my course, my freshman course on religion and government because he would not be stopped. He was going to move out of that lowest of the low position and use education to empower himself, to go back to Rwanda … that’s his goal.

To go back to Rwanda to try to elevate that society. You see examples like that and you say, “Well, this … we, we, this is what we’ve got to emulate. And the more of us that can emulate it, you know, as Confucius said, “You start with the innermost circle and you work out and you can change all of society.”

HEFFNER: John, we began this program with your saying and I was going to interrupt you … your saying you’re an optimist … you said as I am … and I was going to say “Stop right there, don’t tar me with that brush. And you went on and I’m fascinated by what you said, you described civil society that is becoming less civil and less civil as we move along.

And then you pick examples and they’re notable examples … I realize … of noble activities on the part during the black out here or during the storm after Sandy, of individuals who have done splendid things. The young man who was going to race in the marathon, etc.

Doesn’t that beg the question as to the direction we’re going in? And I ask you that because you’re the scholar, you’re the historian, you’re the theologian, you’re seen and thought about all of this.

Think about Henry Adams Education …the famous place in which he talks about “evolution from lower to higher? I look at a portrait of George Washington and then I look at Ulysses S. Grant, evolution from lower to higher?” And I’m really asking …

SEXTON: Grant has followed Lincoln …

HEFFNER: Absolutely followed him, John … let’s under … let’s understand that. Are you concerned that if you don’t express the optimism that in part we all must feel if we’re to survive … go on from day to day … that this will not seem appropriate for the leader of a great institution? Why?

SEXTON: No, no … I’m not playing a role here and you’re not the kind of interviewer that elicits role-playing in any case. Your great genius is to get inside a person … and, and you know very well that I’m not playing a role here.

The, the … the first question, if I were to analyze it, is …the first question is … are there solutions? And, and not a single issue that I raised … not a single issue that you could raise … is beyond solution.

And, and one of the … one of the tragedies of the, the contemporary evolution of American politics is that, you know, you, you can sit in a room with people who are deeply mersed in any of the issues I talked about … you know, Social Security, Medicare, the debt, the deficit … even climate change. And, and the solutions are evident.

And so, so … okay that’s a pretty good place to start. These, these issues we face that we view as so horrible … are, are, are susceptible to solution. So what’s missing?

What’s, what’s missing is leadership. What is the cause of that leadership vacuum? Part of it is courage. But part of it is structural and, and you could do an analysis of the, the American political system at this point …

HEFFNER: Structural?

SEXTON: Yeah. I mean I, I … I … you know … if you gerrymander districts so that the single most important election is the predicate election that occurs in, in a primary which is dominated by an extreme of a party, you’re going to produce two candidates that, that play to the extreme and, and, and that becomes a necessity in order to get through Stage 1 and if it’s been gerrymandered there’s a free pass into, let’s say the House of Representatives.

So now what has happened is that, that … the, the mediating center has disappeared. And, and you know we talk about the, the electorate writ large as, as being dominated and you know, most people that work hard in elections, like my friend Bob Shrum for example, would, would say to you that the election is going to be decided by some relatively small percentage of the voters.

That, you know, you go into it … it’s like, it’s like baseball … we love to talk about baseball and in baseball at the beginning of the season, the worst team in baseball, you know, is going to win one game out of three. And the best team in baseball is going to lose one game out of three.

The key question is what happens in the middle third games? Well, in our elections the key question is what happens with … you know, it could be 6% … quote … “swing voters” … close quote, or it could be on the outside 16% … quote … “swing voters” … close quote.

All right, well those swing voters, you know, by and large are in this society we talked about where they’re relatively uninformed and they want simple answers and immediate solutions because they’ve allowed as participants in the polity to be in that place and they’re encouraged by the way we speak to them in political ads and even in debates where we just talking points and don’t engage each other and push the conversation on.

But in addition to that they’re, they’re just frustrated by the, by the dysfunction of government and the inability of these two extremes that are set by virtue of this past … I’m using the House of Representatives here as the example, but you could say the same thing in the Senate because we’re created a super-majority requirement …

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

SEXTON: … in the Senate. But there’s a bi-polarity which is designed no matter how the swing voter votes to frustrate the swing voter if the swing voter is genuinely in the middle because there are not candidates in the middle.

And the result of that then is that the swing voter continues to swing. Because there’s constant dissatisfaction. So there, there … these are all structural game theory problems that my colleagues at NYU could solve for us if, if we had leadership that would be willing to take it on.

And, and, you know … so, you know … if you’re a university President and you believe in thought then, then even though in, in the short term and look, you deal with this inside a university and outside the university.

Even, even though it is the, the normal state of being these days for people to think only in terms of the short term and the selfish short term at that … you have confidence in the power of thought ultimately to prevail.

Now, look, I’m an issue-spotter. I’m a lawyer, right, so I, I spot the issue, I see it and I’ll tell you this … the world is miniaturizing … we’re becoming more and more a fluid society. And, and the question is going to be, for this century, how are we going to handle this miniaturization?

Now, now we can respond to it by objectivizing and demonizing those that are different from us. And, and treating, you know, the evolution of humankind as if it were a flag game at a camp between the blues and the reds.

HEFFNER: The gladiator spirit.

SEXTON: Yeah. Or we can capture the wondrous way of looking at the world that in my church, we were taught by Pope John the 23rd which is that you can learn more about yourself through the gift of the seeing things through a different set of experiences and eyes. And, and I … we, we have no choice but to bet on the latter.

HEFFNER: John, you have another church … your other church is the university. Have the leaders of the universities in this country and in other countries been playing their proper roles? Their necessary roles?

SEXTON: You know, I, I have to say I’ve been enough to be put in, in this position at NYU that gives me a vantage point and view into that world. And, and I, I’m able to observe both the elite research universities because we gather as a group of about 60 … twice a year … and we speak regularly.

I’ve been lucky enough to be the head of American Council … the Chairman of the American Council on Education, which is all … the entire diversity from the great community colleges to the comprehensive colleges and the research universities.

And then I’m more and more in conversations outside the United States. And I would say … you cannot be in those conversations and leave without being impressed with the dedication of the men and women that are leading the universities in the world … by and large … at the, you know, at the meeting.

I’m not talking about, obviously, all of them … at the top … it’s extraordinary, I look at them as my heroes. And they are typically scholars of the first rank themselves … that could have lived a life of the professor and scholar and, and member of the academy and all of the great blandishments that come with that and, and it’s a very enriching, rewarding life … with your students … I mean this is … in my view … the greatest life that one could have.

But they’ve made the choice to, to sacrifice that … or at least significant elements of it … to enable the common enterprise of the university to work. Every single one of them is “common enterprise”, “common weal” dedicated.

Now … and, and I have to say I have a lot of faith in … especially at a place like NYU the common enterprise dedication of my colleagues.

So, listen, if, if, if our country or the world writ large were operating at the level of, of, of common weal attention that our universities are working at … we would be in very, very good shape.

HEFFNER: But are the universities helping the rest of the world work at that level?

SEXTON: The universities in my view are, are the last harbinger of, of, of … dedicated to the genuine advancement of thought.

HEFFNER: And providing the leadership? I don’t see it, John.

SEXTON: Well, I don’t know what … in what direction you’ve been looking. I mean …

HEFFNER: Not inside … I haven’t been looking inside the circles you’re talking about. What I’m talking about comes from my role as a citizen … just as a plain citizen looking to see whether the university leadership is providing me and the rest of our polity with that leadership.

SEXTON: Okay. Well, well, first of all … most of the advancements in, in your life … you know, scientific and otherwise … are being birthed now inside universities.

So, so, there’s all kinds of enhancements to your life that you may not associate with universities, but which come from universities. But more importantly … okay …the, the world of thought in which you live … is, is being advanced by the inculcation in young people of an attitude of learning and by the advancement of knowledge in the various areas that you’re interested in discussing.

So, I, I … I’m astonished that a person like you could … given the guests I know that you bring through … could, could be … we were just talking about several professors before we went on air … that, that, that … you, you were … and these people brought delight to you and important thoughts to you and advancements to society.

HEFFNER: John, John I’m not talking about that and I’m not talking about the scientific advancements, I’m talking about the role they play in leading, providing the leadership that you, yourself, said was so badly needed at this time.

Are universities doing what they once did? They did provide … they were perhaps only an occasional such leader. Do you think that the American Academy is doing what needs to be done by providing that leadership?

SEXTON: Look …first, I, I’ll point out gently the very contradiction in what you’re saying because you, you’re saying as you look at a University President who is providing a critique of society and calling it to a higher plane … why aren’t university presidents providing a critique of society and calling it to a higher plane …

HEFFNER: But you know I’m not talking about you.

SEXTON: Now, you might, you might want, you know, a Woodrow Wilson to emerge to run for President. I remind you that so also Dwight Eisenhower … and we could debate, you know, individuals.

The, the fact of the matter is that, that the universities, I, I believe are giving all kinds of leadership to our society.

Some of it is formal in the sense of moving into government. Others of … are doing it in a more indirect but very, very important way.

And I think our critical role is call society to the higher plane. And I see university presidents doing that around this country. The, the place where it’s most important, by the way, is in education itself. Because education is more and more the key to unlocking all the problems that we’ve just been talking about.

You cannot have a nuanced idea unless you’ve really been taught the skills of critical thinking, for example. And, and you can’t address complex issues unless you’ve got education to bring out all the potentials of your mind.

And the universities are where that’s going on and, and, and the product of universities and how well the universities do their job, and believe me, American universities are doing their job very well. And universities around the world are more and more emulating American universities and therefore doing their job better and better and the, the universities are the ones that give us the hope that this allergy to complexity and nuance will be reversed. Because we inoculate against that.

HEFFNER: John, are we going to see more scholars in politics? You mentioned Wilson.

SEXTON: I think we’re in danger … not only of losing scholars to politics or losing virtuous people to politics. Because …

HEFFNER: Oh, I didn’t say “to” … I meant can we cheer because we’ll see more scholars in politics.

SEXTON: No, no. I understand and I’m saying I think you’re in danger not only of losing scholars … and therefore answering your question negatively, but of losing virtuous people because if we put a tax on moving into the public sphere … this Coliseum society in which anyone who moves into the public sphere is immediately desiccated then I, I think you’re going to find that the only people that will move into that sphere are people that have an inordinate thirst for power or inordinate egos.

I, I think what we, we have to do and look there’s a way in which at least I … since you accused me earlier on of putting words in your mouth … I won’t put words in your mouth, although I’ll note for your …

HEFFNER: In a half minute, John …

SEXTON: Where, where, where … rarer and rarer in that we believe in institutions and we trust other humans. And, and if America doesn’t restore some kind of faith in institutions … and the institutions have to work on that such that we can have trust … and we have to work at that …then the chances of reversing this are, are minimized.

HEFFNER: And unless you and your colleagues provide leadership, I doubt that you’ll … we’ll achieve what you know we need to achieve.

SEXTON: On that … we agree.

HEFFNER: And on that note, thank you for joining me today on the Open Mind, John Sexton.

HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile, as another old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

And do visit the Open Mind Website at thirteen.org/openmind to reprise this program online right now or to draw upon our Archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org/openmind.

GUEST: John Sexton
AIR DATE: 03/23/2013
VTR: 11/08/2012

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And though we’re recording it in November, 2012, when this program actually makes its public television debut, it will be near that time of year again when The Boys of Spring once more loom large, larger, largest for so many Americans, and when my guest’s new book, “Baseball As A Road To God – Seeing Beyond the Game”, will bring them such ineffable pleasure.

John Sexton is the President of New York University, an old friend who has joined me here many, many times before. And our mutual friend Bill Moyers says that “In the church of baseball, John Sexton is one of the preeminent theologians”.

Well, that’s putting it mildly, of course, for as his publisher, the Penguin Group notes, “Applying to the secular activity of baseball a form of inquiry usually reserved for the study of religion, Sexton reveals a surprising amount of common ground between the game and what we all recognize as religion: sacred places and times, faith and doubt, blessings and curses, and more.”

Yet both you, dear viewers, and my guest John Sexton will forgive me for the sacrilege, I trust, if I tell you that I for one don’t give a damn any more about the national pastime, and haven’t since 1957 when that villainous Walter O’Malley took his Brooklyn Dodgers, the team my Brooklyn-born wife had worshipped since childhood … out to Los Angeles … and co-conspirator Horace Stoneham took his New York Giants – my holier-than-holy team – to San Francisco.

No more ineffable pleasures for us. And John, as I begin I wonder why I came across this word … ineffable … so many times in your new book.

SEXTON: Well, well, there’s a way in which that word … ineffable … is the, is the essence of the book. Because I hope there, there are stories that will remind even stone-souls like yours of the, the great joys of the national pastime and it’s special ability to, to touch so deeply.

So deeply I should point out that, that, that you would react precisely as you’ve just described. That, that, that having, having been disappointed in this, this core area of your being … you, you just … you couldn’t even go near the space anymore.

And I hope there are stories there that, that, that might call forth your soul again. Or at least remind you of how beautiful the game is.

But the real message of the book is around that word “ineffable”. Because my fear is that we, we’ve become a society of quantification, of numerization …

HEFFNER: Three balls, two strikes?

SEXTON: No, no … not so much that. Because the, the essence you see of what goes on as the count moves from two balls and two strikes to three balls and two strikes … is, is a changing of the prism of the observant fan. You know, as we look at the detail of the game and the strategy that it involves … but, but my, my point is … society generally has become susceptible to the measurers.

Now, now I love all that goes on in the production of knowledge and evidence. I, I mean my life, my vocation is dedicated to the university.

And evidence based decision-making is extremely important, but there is danger if we begin to think that all that is important can be measured. That all that is important can be quantified. Indeed, that all that is important can be known in the cognitive sense of knowing and reduction to, to be a dogma or words of description.

And of course “ineffable” is the word we use to describe that which, which can’t be reduced to those cognitive categories. So that the, the thesis of the book, if there’s a thesis, is that there is the known … you know that which the brightest among us and in each of the disciplines the most advanced and the disciplined knows, in this moment, and there is the know-able, but not yet known.

To which those people will lead us as humankind progresses and the important enterprise of advancing science and knowledge generally, but there is the unknowable.

Unknowable in these cognitive terms … that, that … the “ineffable” that which we, no matter how advanced our tools of, of cognition become … we’ll, we’ll not be able to reduce to the categories of cognition.

It’s, it’s the way that you know, after your wonderful decades of being married … that you and Elaine love each other. It’s the way I know that Lisa and I love each other. Elaine didn’t reason you to that, Lisa didn’t reason me to that. We experience it.

And, and by the way that knowledge, as you know, ‘cause in our friendship we’ve shared our marriages and the, the love that each of us have for our spouses. And we’ve shared that time together.

That knowledge is the most important knowledge in our lives, but it’s utterly ineffable.

And, and it’s that which I’m trying to awaken and it’s that to which I’m trying to call my students attention. So I use the device of baseball and the stories of baseball and especially the stories of old men, like us, about the halcyon days of baseball in New York in the forties and fifties … before that …and you’re far too generous … before that man (spits on the floor) O’Malley …

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

SEXTON: … wrenched out the heart of Brooklyn.

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

SEXTON: The loss of the Giants, that was incidental.

HEFFNER: Oh, come on, come on. You’re still thinking about Bobby Thompson.

SEXTON: Oh, god … a dagger to my heart (laughter). Will I ever forget that day? Will you ever forget that day?

HEFFNER: Never. Never. Never.

SEXTON: And will you ever recant the victory in light of the subsequent learning that your team was stealing signs from the centerfield.

HEFFNER: What about that, John, what do you think about that? Just between us.

SEXTON: It’s interesting because … the one of the wonderful things that baseball teaches is the wonder of gray …

HEFFNER: Shades … as in shades of …

SEXTON: As in shades of gray. You know baseball was, to situation ethics, long before the theologians got there.

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

SEXTON: You know I … I have frequently said to people … because, as you know, I grew up in, in, in the Irish Catholic Brooklyn church. Where, where we knew, in black and white, what we had to do to merit salvation and to … you know … if you went to mass on Sunday and you refrained from eating meat on Friday and you never went anywhere near in thought or act anything that had to do with s-e-x … you were pretty well off, you know.

And then along came Pope John the 23rd and the Vatican Council and situation ethics and the gray area and life became very difficult, because we became more responsible.

Well baseball got there long before that. So, I will argue the case that though it is considered intrinsic to the game and quite acceptable … for a runner on second base to try to steal the catcher’s signs and transmit them somehow to the batter, giving the batter that edge or advantage … that to do so with a telescope or binoculars, with a person that’s not on either team … from the center field’s scoreboard and to ring a bell in the dugout to warn the batter what was doing … is beyond that gray area to the darkness of depravity.

And the fact that a man named Branca … a good man named Branca … and Thompson himself was a good man … and as you know, they became friends … but a good man named Ralph Branca had to carry that yoke, that Thompson having been part of what today could be prosecuted under RICO … I say facetiously …

HEFFNER: Yeah, I hope facetiously …

SEXTON: … a conspiracy, having been part of a conspiracy of crooks … for me it goes beyond the pale. Now I know you’ll make the argument “Well, if you can steal signs from second, why not from center field and if a person on the team can do it, why not a fan …”

HEFFNER: No, I don’t have to, you just did. Obviously you’re endowing those arguments with credibility.

SEXTON: No, I’m endowing myself with credibility …

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

SEXTON: … because I’m advancing even the counter-case and I’m willing to rest on the record and your viewers can decide who has the better side of the argument.

HEFFNER: All I know is that I was sick at home that day and Elaine stayed home to take care of me. She didn’t go to work …

SEXTON: Elaine has taken care of you every day …

HEFFNER: … she has for 62 years …

SEXTON: … that’s why she’ll get into heaven on a scholarship.

HEFFNER: … ah … I’ve heard that before, John … and all I can tell you is that nothing made me so well, so quickly …

SEXTON: He stood and he threw his crutches away!

HEFFNER: (Laughter) John, what about that aspect of the game? We’re not just talking about telescopes and a pitch by Ralph Branca and a hit by Bobby Thompson. We’re talking about a considerable amount of hanky-panky in your game. No?

SEXTON: And, and there are areas that aren’t gray. And the use of steroids …

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

SEXTON: … or gambling on the game have always been considered worthy of opprobrium … at, at least by those of us who love the game. And I’m sickened by what’s going on with steroids. And it, it, it challenges one’s capacity to, to see baseball as “A Road To God” … to have the ineffable experiences.

But, but then you come back to the game in its pure form. And you put aside those sins … and they are sins and they are mortal sins … and, and they are condemnable and should be condemned and I condemn them here.

But there’s still a capacity for the ineffable and the beauty within the game. So, when … when I watch and I’ll grant now that I was mistaken … but, but I watch a Yankee second baseman named Soriano in his rookie year and I see him dangling his hands as he’s hands off … as he’s off … the first time I saw him … in part I’m sure because he was a second baseman … but I said to my son Jed … who has shared the Church of Baseball with me since his birth in, in 1969 … the Mets “miracle year”, where, where I had to make the fundamental choice for him.

Because fathers give to sons in this area and I, I knew the fundamental choice I would give him … was the choice of his baseball team. Even more than the choice of his formal religion … because yes, he was baptized … but later bar mitzvahed. And today he’s Jewish and his family is Jewish. But he’s still a Yankee fan. And I had to make that …

HEFFNER: You want to say that again …

SEXTON: He’s still a Yankee fan.

HEFFNER: And you, John?

SEXTON: And I’m a Yankee fan … but I’ll come back to that … because we, were ripened Yankee fans … by the time this Soriano began to dangle his hands off of first base … you know dangerously threatening to bolt for second.

And I said early in the season to Jed … “He’s the first player in a long time that reminds me of the greatest player of all time … in, in my view … Jackie Robinson”.

Now I think you know that on my academic gown I have a, a small little circle with the number 42, for Jackie. And I’m very proud that Rachel Robinson is a graduate of NYU Nursing School. And I was proud to give her an honorary degree and be with her just a couple of months ago to celebrate her 90th birthday.

But I said he reminds me of Jackie. And then to flash forward into the play-offs and to have Soriano at the plate and, and, and to have had things happened earlier in the game that at a certain moment I turned to my son, the Yankees behind … Soriano at the plate … and I said, “You know, Jed, after watching this game I no longer think he reminds me of Jackie Robinson. I think he is Jackie Robinson”.

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

SEXTON: Almost a reincarnated Robinson. Now I was wrong … okay … I misjudged the man. But Jed turned to me and said, “Dad if he’s Jackie Robinson, he’ll hit a home run here.” Because the Yankee’s desperately needed that to charge them. And on the next pitch … he hit a home run.

And my son and I embraced and kissed each other on the lips. Now, steroids not withstanding, that ineffable moment of love between father and son that impelled us into a plane we hadn’t been in and wouldn’t have been in but for the, the, the gestalt of that moment, that was created by this wonderful game. And, and two people who watched it with great attention.

Now I’m not claiming … notice, the title of the book is not “Baseball As The Road To God”, it’s “Baseball As A Road …” and there are many other. But what we’re losing in our society is the appreciation of the ineffable and the importance of observing with intensity the small things.

HEFFNER: John, you … you teach this seminar at NYU … few University Presidents do that. Is that where the, the book came from?

SEXTON: So, so … there, there was a wonderful event in Florence that I, I and the team at NYU Law School ran in the Fall of 1999. With, with the wonderful generosity of President Clinton and then the First Lady … Hillary Clinton … we had convened for three days in Florence. Seven heads of state for a conference which was attended only by 150 people … each of them got nine others from their delegation … including, for example, the Secretary of State, the Chief of Staff of the White House and so on … so, there were 70 people out of 150 that were … the, the, the … probably the most powerful group of political leaders gathered anywhere in the world because you had President Clinton, you had Tony Blair, you had Jospin of France, Cardozo of Brazil … the 70 … and the other 80 were NYU Law Professors and students and faculty.

And they were talking about the evolution of global civil society. And, and what global civil society could look like. And it was an intense … as you might imagine I was responsible for this and NYU has a villa in Florence and it was this on this 55 acre villa and it was a very intense two and a half days.

And then finally the last head of state left and we got word from the airport “wheels up”, they call it in politics, as you know. “Wheels up” … seven wheels up … so we gave big party in the villa for the 80 people and the people that had worked on the event and a young man came up to me and he said, “I understand you’re a devotee of baseball … he said, I’ve never been able to understand that game. It appears, you know, nearly as slow as cricket, for god’s sake … and I don’t see much excitement in it … let alone any meaning of the sort that people think you see in it.”

So, I invoked … you know … we, on, on other shows have talked about our great teachers and my great teacher was Charlie …

HEFFNER: Good ole Charlie …

SEXTON: Yeah, and I kind of channeled Charlie … Charlie had a phrase … he would sometimes look at us and say “You’re among the unwashed”.

Meaning, you know, you, you don’t … you’re not sufficiently knowledgeable. So I said to this young man, jokingly, literally almost putting my voice at the … I said, “You’re among the unwashed”. I said, “But there’s hope … Charlie would always offer you hope … there’s hope for your soul”.

If you will agree to do a directed research with me next semester, and read 12 books that I assign … and write 12 papers on those books … I guarantee by the time you end the process … you’ll see … and that’s when the phrase came to me that “baseball is a road to God”. You know I was speaking … you know … as Charlie did and frankly, as the book does … it’s, it’s, there is this kind of facetious quality to it as you transpose … you know, things that are usually associated by people with religion into the game of baseball. And it’s deliberate, to try to catalyze a way of looking at the world.

So, he said, “Okay, I’ll take up that challenge”. And we did and we had a great time together. And the next Fall there was a line of students at my door wanting to … for me to do directed research with each of them. Among them was Peter Schwartz, the young man …

HEFFNER: Right.

SEXTON: … who finally persuaded me to do this book and, and so I said “Well, let’s collectivize this…” and that’s how the seminar was born, it will be …when I teach it this coming Spring … it will be 12 years that I’ve been teaching it. It’s, it’s extremely demanding … the students have to read at least one book a week … sometimes two. They have to write a paper every week. Some of them say it’s the hardest course they, they, they take. But it, it’s an interesting category.

And what’s very interesting is that I always teach it in the same classroom, the same … I teach it on Tuesday nights. And it’s always from 6 to 9. And it … I … rarely a week goes by that there aren’t visitors that come back from previous classes to see how the course is going. So they kind of view it as something they cherish.

HEFFNER: I think there are some wonderful, wonderful stories here. To me, as a teacher I guess one of the most interesting is the fact they came back to you at the end of the first seminar … given in the Spring then … and you agreed to go through the summer with them to continue, you said, “Nobody let’s go.”

SEXTON: Well, they, they didn’t … they, they got the idea then … this is 12 years ago … that … they, they said, we have to do a book coming out of this … and they said, “Let’s keep meeting during the summer”. And … they thought during summer they’d write the book. But we just couldn’t …

They wanted the book to be a memoir, they wanted it to be kind of centered on me and that, that … you know, I enjoy telling the stories and trying to evoke a response with students from, from them …but that wasn’t appealing to me.

About five or six years in some friends began to come regularly … usually for the last two classes, because the way the course works … they, they read books on phenomenology of religion, like Eliot and Otto and James and the like. So that gives them the tools of observing religion or, or human activity that we call religious. And then they read baseball novels.

But in the last two weeks we read about baseball in New York in that archetypical period and Doris Kearns Goodwin began to come because we read her great book … Wait ‘Til Next Year and Tom Oliphant began to come because we read his great book Praying for Gil Hodges and Pete Hamil began to come because we read his novel Snow in August.

And then the heavyweights began to press me to write this which finally I agreed to do.

HEFFNER: John, we just have a few minutes left. I’d like to talk about where the road takes us … not about baseball in America, but about that path to God in America. Where is religion … what is religion in our lives as Americans?

SEXTON: Well, I, I think we have to sort things out. First of all, as, as … just as an observation … as an empirical matter … it’s clear that although one can trace a great deal of activity and almost a surge of religious activity among religions, it tends to be non-denominational.

So, the, the … even as American identify as religious, a larger and larger portion of those who identify as religious, do not identity as denominational.

HEFFNER: But there’s a third element here that I wondered about …and that’s God. I don’t mean denominations and I don’t mean …

SEXTON: Yes.

HEFFNER: … organized religion …

SEXTON: So, so … this, this word “god” is a problematic word because for some people it’s just … it, it just stops the conversation, you know.

And, of course, when, when we were younger, in the 1960’s …

HEFFNER: Speak about yourself, John.

SEXTON: … people, people like Altizer led a movement which was called “The Death of God” movement and I used to teach this. But, even a theologian like Paul Tillich said, “Look, if, if the word ‘God’ is a problem with you … put it aside”. What God is meant to connote … not … certainly not the anthropomorphic God that becomes the, the attack object for people like Richard Dawkins and others in a fairly kind of … in my view … simplistic conversation … but not an anthropomorphic God … you know, not a God who is up there or out there. But Tillich would say, “If you have to put the word God aside altogether, fine, what we’re talking about is that which is ultimate and transcendent in your being. The ground of your being. The essence of your being, that which ultimately gives meaning to you.

Now, that, that’s where this notion that I try to introduce in the book of, of living slow, living intensely becomes important.

So as you know I, I go regularly … this coming summer I will take the oldest of my grandchildren … because she’ll be the first to “come of age” … with my son and daughter and his wife and her fiancé and we will go with a group … we always take a group of 18 people from different parts of our lives … but we’re always the core … down into the Grand Canyon and we will spend 9 days navigating the river and the side canyons and so forth. And in, in the presence of the wonderful two billion year old geological clock and we will, we will heighten our sensitivity to the small things … to noticing. Living slow … you actually get on what the guides call and if you’ve ever done river rafting or canyon hiking … whatever it’s called … “river time”. The whole biology of being on the river is different.

And, and in a way what, what I’m urging is that we … if the students can come or the readers of this book can come to understand that, that there is this category … even as we pay all the attention we should and must to the expansion of knowledge and science and knowledge of all kinds … even as we do that there is this category that is very, very important … the ineffable … that is not knowable in the ways of quantification.

And this is a call to that. And, and when you break through to that plane, you have broken through to a plane … if you want to call it God or not … that’s up to you. Just don’t get caught up in the intellectualized, dogmatic versions that divide us.

HEFFNER: Slowness and I get the signal … over. John Sexton thanks so much for joining me today.

And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile, as an old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

And do visit the Open Mind Website at thirteen.org/openmind to reprise this program online right now or to draw upon our Archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org/openmind.

GUEST: Robert A. Caro
AIR DATE: 02/23/2013
VTR: 12/13/2012

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind and this is the third in our series of programs with prize-winning historian-biographer Robert Caro about “The Passage of Power” the fourth volume of his triumphant “The Years of Lyndon Johnson”.

You know, Bob, I’m so glad we could do these program seriatim and I’m glad we can talk together this way. There’s so many things that come up in reading a massive, massive book such as your own.

Massive, but so entertaining, so compelling. I don’t know that you believed me when I told you that several times Elaine came in the room when I was reading it and found me crying, because it is so wonderfully evocative of my life … the things that I remember.

One of the things that I’ve wanted to ask you about … ah, there’s so many more I want to ask you about. The Congress then because you make such reference to the relationship between Johnson’s successes and the nature of the Congress of the United States.

But one of the things I wanted ask you, too, was about Bobby Baker …

CARO: Yeah.

HEFFNER: … and about … that name … that probably not known …

CARO: No.

HEFFNER: … to most of the people who are watching us today. But how do you … how do you deal with Bobby Baker in your evaluation of Lyndon Johnson? In your description of the role he played.

CARO: Well, you know, it’s not remembered today, but the Bobby Baker scandal was the great scandal of 1963. He was Lyndon Johnson’s protégé … Johnson had raised him to the Secretary to the Senate Majority, and in 1963 … this huge scandal erupted involving call girls, campaign pay-offs … just about anything, you know … I’m not sure I can remember all the other things now.

But he was on the cover of every magazine. And Johnson, you know … said … “I … he wasn’t my protégé”, you know.

HEFFNER: But he was.

CARO: Yes. And at the moment that President Kennedy’s motorcade was winding through Dallas, at that very moment the witness … there hasn’t been … it’s been the Bobby Baker scandal. There have been a lot of hints bringing it closer and closer to Lyndon Johnson.

But it hasn’t really … the link has not been made. But at the very moment that the motorcade is winding its way through Dallas, Bobby Baker … ah, a witness is testifying … is, is appearing in a small room in the Senate Office Building, before investigators from the Senate Rules Committee.

And he’s pushing across the table to them … the documents … cancelled checks and invoices that will tie Lyndon Johnson to the Bobby Baker scandal. And that’s happening at the same time that the motorcade is going through, through Dallas.

Then, of course, with the assassination … the investigation is cut off for a while. It’s going to come back again in, in the next book.

HEFFNER: Doggone it … again … the next book.

CARO: (Laughter)

HEFFNER: Ah, because I read there, I read not only about what was going on in that room in the Congress as the papers are being …

CARO: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … passed across. And I gather at one point when the word comes through … the lawyer reaches out to take back the …

CARO: Yes.

HEFFNER: … papers, but can’t get them.

CARO: He said, “He’s President of the United States, you won’t want these” and this Senate Investigators says, basically, “Yes, we will, they belong to the Senate Rules Committee now.”

HEFFNER: What was Time magazine about to …

CARO: Life magazine.

HEFFNER: Life magazine.

CARO: Well, Life magazine … you know all these things were converging on Lyndon Johnson. Among the incredible drama … you say … what … you know … why is so much happening. This … why is the book really going into these … you say, “Not only was the Bobby Baker thing about to explode … at that, that very day, you know.

Life magazine had had … I believe the number is nine reporters investigating Lyndon Johnson’s finances. You know when Lyndon Johnson was young, he was very poor … and he’s now amassed a great fortune. And Life magazine has been looking into what they called the story of Lyndon’s money.

And, in fact, the first story in that series has been written and is about to run in the magazine. And they’re having a meeting in … and they want to expand the investigation further.

So in the Time Life building in New York, in the office of the Managing Editor, there are a group of reporters and editors gathering to divide up the areas that Life is going to look into of Lyndon Johnson’s finances in more detail. They’re going to send … the reporters have been in Texas, they found a lot … now they’re dividing … going to divide up, for further investigation … when a secretary runs into the room and says, “The President’s been shot” and of course, they all run back to their desks. And … there’s no room in the magazine for this story.

They are going to run, nine months later, in August of 1964, there are going to be two articles on Lyndon Johnson’s finances, which will show that he’s become a millionaire.

The other … I mean, the, the lawyer that you’re talking about is … in the Senate Rules Committee … is pushing these documents … the invoices and cancelled checks which tie Johnson to Baker … across the table.

Nobody remembers that they’re meeting in this room in the Senate Office Building, so they don’t know what happens until 2:30 that afternoon. I mean it’s really something to … I mean I’m reading the testimony, this has never … no one’s ever written about this.

And I didn’t know … you know, I knew about the Bobby Baker investigation and I’m reading all the later transcripts from 1964 and someone’s questioning this witness, a man named … a Senator in open session … is now questioning this witness, Don B. Reynolds.

And he says, “You know something … so you were testifying all day?” And I said, “Wait a minute, what do you mean all day? What day?” And you look back and it was November 22nd, 1963 and then you look to find out when, when the … when the … it isn’t testimony, but when the … when he started talking to the investigators … it was 10:30 in the morning and you could date about when this was …

This was all happening … Lyndon Johnson’s career was about to enter its greatest crisis during that motorcade … the day of the motorcade.

HEFFNER: Okay, now I know well enough that you’re not going to talk about the next volume … but I’ve got to ask you because I wondered as I read this volume … when I read about those wonderful parties that Lyndon Johnson used to give as Vice President for visiting dignitaries and others.

How did Johnson go from that from that poor boy who was so humiliated by his father’s poverty to a man who had quite so much money to have the kind of spread he had in Texas.

CARO: Well, you don’t have to wait for the next volume because in volume 2, Means of Ascent, there is … as you’ll remember because I know you know that book very well … a Chapter called “Buying and Selling” …

HEFFNER: Right … I want you to talk about it.

CARO: Well, what … so … basically with Lady Bird’s money …

HEFFNER: The stations, you mean.

CARO: Yes. Well, they buy one radio station in Texas. That has later become several radio stations, television stations, quite an empire.

But at the beginning John … Johnson, from the early days … if you wanted to secure influence with Lyndon Johnson, one way was to buy advertising on his radio stations and then on his television stations.

HEFFNER: Excuse me … when you say “influence” you mean in getting legislation passed?

CARO: Well, what I … it’s very … I’m trying to remember what specific things … that’s a book that came out 22 years ago. So I don’t want to … I remember there’s a case of contracts to supply army bases, military bases around Austin. I really can’t … you know as much as I like to answer all your questions … I am going to write about that in detail, you know, because it’s going to become a big issue in 1964 because Life is going to run this two part series.

HEFFNER: I gather it had not surfaced during the Vice Presidential years …

CARO: No.

HEFFNER: … until that very last moment.

CARO: Well, it didn’t really surface then, you know.

HEFFNER: Until the moment he was President.

CARO: Yeah.

HEFFNER: How do you account for that?

CARO: Well, investigative reporter … I, I don’t …

HEFFNER: Hell’s bells, you were an investigative reporter.

CARO: Well, there had … you know there were many hints about it. You know, but the fact is, as you say … that it hadn’t really surfaced.

There were a lot of … you know a lot of things were happening … that’s one of the … a lot of things were happening at the time of President Kennedy’s trip to Texas.

Life magazine had been investigating Lyndon Johnson’s finances for months. It was about to surface. The Bobby Baker scandal had not been linked to Lyndon Johnson … firmly linked to Lyndon Johnson … it was about to be linked to Lyndon Johnson.

I try to write these books as things happen. And that’s, that’s why I feel that the proper place to discuss them is as they happen in, in the next book.

And when you take … what I tried to … I mean when you try to take these things out of context, you know, as you know … that’s sort of, in my view, a mistake, you know.

HEFFNER: Okay, I, I can certainly understand that, but putting things in context certainly enables us to go back to this question of Lyndon Johnson’s own power …

CARO: Yes.

HEFFNER: … as a legislative leader. I mean you’ve spoken about it before. Do you have any sense of why Mr. Sam related as he did to …

CARO: Lyndon Johnson?

HEFFNER: … they … he considered them his children almost?

CARO: Yes. Well, Sam Rayburn you know was a very powerful figure … we’re … it’s almost … it’s hard for America to imagine … a person like … a figure like Sam Rayburn, who was Speaker of the House, you know … for longer than any other man in history then. Served in Congress, I think for 48 years … was this figure of such integrity that when he died … you know … his whole, his entire estate beside the farm that he owned … was $15,000. People said “Nobody can buy Sam Rayburn. And nobody can cross Sam Rayburn”.

He was the toughest figure … you know he was this short man with massive shoulders … this really big head, completely bald which he was very ashamed of … he was always … he hated television because he said the lights were shining off his bald pate.

But the thing about him was he was lonely. He was married once, a very brief period. Marriage didn’t last. He lived alone in Washington. When he was young he said he wrote his sister a letter … he said “God what I would give for a tow-headed boy to take fishing”.

Some years later he writes a letter, he says, “Loneliness is what breaks a man, loneliness is what breaks the spirit.”

So Lyndon Johnson … he was a friend … at least an acquaintance of Lyndon Johnson’s father in the Texas legislature. Lyndon Johnson’s father was a Representative from the Hill country.

And Lyndon Johnson when he … Rayburn never went to people’s houses for dinner. He hated so … then … he hated social events. He used to say, “Once I tried to tell a joke and before I finished, I was the joke”. You know.

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

CARO: But when Lyndon Johnson comes to Washington and he marries Lady Bird, the year is 1934 … he invites Rayburn to dinner. Rayburn comes once because of the acquaintance with Lyndon Johnson’s father. But Lady Bird makes him feel at home. She has this wonderful gift … I mean I, I myself witnessed it … it’s … an unbelievably gracious woman. When she says “You all come back now …” And he does come back to their house and he comes every Sunday. And he has nothing to do on Sundays, so she will make for dinner his favorite peach ice cream, very hot chili … really hot chili, the way Mr. Sam liked it, and he’ll sit there and read the Sunday papers with Lyndon.

So they really become, in a way, his children. And so the year is now 1935 … Lyndon Johnson is a Congressman’s assistant. I mean think of this, he’s never presided over anything except maybe another secretary in the Congressman’s office.

And Franklin Roosevelt creates the National Youth Administration. They’re going to have 48 separate state directors. Lyndon Johnson wants to be the State Director for Texas. Why would anyone give him the job? He has … he’s somebody’s assistant.

There’s a very dramatic scene in the Memoirs of the old Senator Tom Connally from Texas who was a great power in Washington because he was Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with him.

Connally writes in his memoirs … “An amazing thing happened yesterday. Everybody knows that Sam Rayburn never asks a favor from any man. But Sam Rayburn came to my office yesterday and asked a favor … begged a favor and would not leave my office until I granted it.” And the favor was to make Lyndon Johnson the State Director of the National Youth Administration. And Johnson’s career is on its way.

I mean the story of Rayburn and Johnson is … I mean is filled with scenes … the year … before this incident, when Johnson is still a secretary … a Congressman’s assistant … secretary they called them then … he gets pneumonia … which, of course, was very serious then.

Rayburn comes and sits in a straight backed wooden chair beside Johnson’s bed all night in the hospital. Rayburn was a chain smoker, but he was afraid to get up and brush the ashes off his vest because he was afraid he’s wake Lyndon up.

So Lyndon remembers getting up in the morning and there was Rayburn sitting with his lapels and his vest completely covered with cigarette ashes. And Johnson also tells us that as soon as Rayburn saw he was awake … he got up and came over to the bed … and says, “Lyndon, never worry about anything. If you need anything come to me”.

And that was really the story of the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s rise … until the day of Rayburn’s death.

HEFFNER: You know, the, the stories that you tell about the Congress also … again, I … I’m not going to ask you to comment upon the Congress of the United States in 2012, 2013 … I’m not. But as I read The Passage of Power and particularly learned more about those earlier years when Johnson exercised so much power over the, the Senate … I wondered whether we have any idea of what the Congress was like …

CARO: Then?

HEFFNER: … before our own times.

CARO: That’s a terrific question. And I happen to think the answer is “No”. And every time people say, today, “Oh, things have never been this bad”, I think “Well, you know, from 1937 to 1963, the Congress of the United States did not pass a single major domestic piece of social welfare legislation.”

HEFFNER: With Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Presidency.

CARO: And Truman … I mean … Congress is completely controlled by the Committee Chairmen and I forget in what year the exact number, but there were some … it was some year that I write about in here … there’s 16 …

HEFFNER: Right.

CARO: … standing committees and 11 of them are chaired by Southerners or their allies. And these people are implacably opposed to Civil Rights. They have learned that if they unite with the Midwest Republican Conservatives who are their blood … you see it’s not like today … you have the Republicans and the Democrats … then you had two parties and you had Liberal Democrats, but you also had half … the Democrats were Southern Democrats and you had the … the Republican Party … similarly you had the Liberal Rockefeller Northeast Wing and you had the Midwest Conservatives.

When Roosevelt is defeated … when they defeat Roosevelt on the Court packing fight in 1937 they realized “If we … if the Midwest Republican Conservatives and the Southern Democrats stand together, they control Congress”. And they controlled Congress for 25 years. That’s …

HEFFNER: It’s, it’s fascinating because one looks at the paper today and thinks …”Where are we, how did we get here?”, but …

CARO: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … you make the point in, in the book and your simple statement of history here … that we were there … we were there in that gridlock.

Ah, what was the nature of Lyndon Johnson’s magic. And I know you’re written about this before, but here … I’m so puzzled about how he lost the magic … or gave it up … or I have to conclude that the Kennedy’s simply stripped him of it.

CARO: The Kennedy’s wouldn’t let him … he once said, “The Kennedy’s legislative director … liaison … was Larry O’Brien. Lyndon Johnson once said, “Larry O’Brien hasn’t asked me for a piece of advice in two years.”

They let it be known … if you want something from the Administration … the man to see is not Lyndon Johnson … it’s Larry O’Brien. So Johnson was stripped of his power, we see him here … you see his magic … I mean Kennedy has two Bills that are important. One is the Civil Rights Bill, for which there was a desperate need. I mean if you … forget about justice and fairness … I … we don’t want to forget about that … but if you just say, “What was the state of the United States?” You had the Civil Rights Movement boiling up on the streets of the South. They had to have some sort of legis … they had to know that there was some legislative way to achieve justice.

The Civil Rights bill, the Senate is going to stop it because the Southern Democrats control the Senate, they have enough votes … Richard Russell, the Southern leader has enough votes to prevent closure. But the Bill isn’t even in the South … I’m going on too long.

HEFFNER: No, you’re not at all.

CARO: (Laughter)

HEFFNER: It’s, it’s back there in the House.

CARO: Well, it’s in the House Rules Committee and the Chairman of the House Rules Committee won’t even set a date for hearings, where it could be heard in the House before it gets over to the Senate.

Johnson comes into office and we hear it in the tapes, there’s only one way to get it out of that Rules Committee … Johnson … one, one lever … Johnson realizes this … and I wrote in there, “If there was only one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to pull it.” And he was … he throws his weight into it and gets the Civil Rights Bill moving.

HEFFNER: You know, as we near the end of our, our discussion, I want to ask those questions that you’re not going to answer until …

CARO: (Laughter)

HEFFNER: … we near the end of the discussion of your final book. But Johnson is such a puzzle to me as a urban New Yorker. Wasn’t he to you as an Urban New Yorker?

CARO: Oh, yes. You know, when I started these books, Dick, I thought I didn’t have to do much research into his youth because there were any number of Johnson biographies … had been written already.

And I didn’t think they’d get … went into enough detail and color … so I, I would go … the Johnson Library was then open from 9 to 5 … so every day I worked there from 9 to 5 and then at 5 I’d drive out to the Hill country and try to interview one person. See he died so young … died at 63 … 64 rather … that all the people who went to high school with him, when to college with him, formed his first political machine were still alive.

And I’m talking to them, and I came back and say to “Ina, you know, I don’t understand these people, they’re so different from me. I said, we’re going to have to move there. And, of course Ina said (laughter) You know … right …

HEFFNER: Not to Texas …

CARO: No, well first she said, “Well, why don’t you do a biography of Napoleon”. (laughter)

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

CARO: So I said, “Why don’t you write your own book”, so she has …

HEFFNER: She did.

CARO: … written two on France. (Laughter) But we rented a house in the Hill country and for three years … I think each year we were there 8 or 9 months … we lived there. And you have to spend, you have to go to these farms and ranches and talk to these people who had lived these lives of loneliness, which is so different from our life. And … they have their own … really wonderful brand of integrity and honesty, but it’s very different from New York. I had to learn them before I could learn Lyndon Johnson.

HEFFNER: You think that was the key to your … seriously … to the great success of these volumes? That you learned them, you learned him.

CARO: Well, to whatever extent that I did … I think that had, that was, was a very important part of it because when you first move there you l think that the things that they’re telling you are just … you know … some sort out of a Western movie, a grade B Western … you know, they used to say, “You don’t understand Lyndon because you don’t understand the land, you’re a city boy, you know.” I … you know … if you don’t understand the land … but then one day, his cousin Ava said to me, “Let me show you something,” and she drives me out to the Johnson ranch and she says … “Stick your fingers into the soil … there is no soil on top of the rock … it’s just a couple of inches.”

She said, “Lyndon Johnson’s father couldn’t face facts, so he went broke. That’s how the … Lyndon always looked facts in the eye.”

HEFFNER: Bob Caro, thank you so much for talking with me again about The Years of Lyndon Johnson, this time The Passage of Power. I look forward to the final volume or volumes, who knows and our discussions then. Thanks a lot.

CARO: Thank you.

HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile, as an old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”

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