GUEST: Hendrik Hertzberg
AIR DATE: 02/18/2012
VTR: 10/12/2011

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And I don’t know why I’ve let today’s guest off the hook for quite so long now.

Hendrik Hertzberg, who writes “Comment” for The New Yorker, and has delighted us in and with its “Talk of the Town” for many years, joined us in 2002, 2003 and 2004…but then sort of disappeared from our table. Perhaps because his negative comments about George Bush, the Second – never mean ones, of course, because my guest is really such a sweet guy that he never could be mean – perhaps because those comments grew quite so familiar.

Perhaps, too, because his “take” on Barack Obama seems – to me at least – to have turned a bit sour, as well.

“Whatever”, as the kids say, you should know that Senior Editor Hertzberg was early on a staff writer at The New Yorker, became Jimmy Carter’s Chief Speech Writer – memorably taking the rap for the President’s much maligned “malaise” speech.

He was at the Liberal/Conservative or Conservative/Liberal New Republic for more than a decade, serving two terms as its Editor, then returned to The New Yorker, where – unless, of course, we’re in the White House – we so much enjoy reading him today.

But let me not put words in Rick Hertzberg’s mouth – of course – or even thoughts in his mind. Instead, let me just ask outright what his “take” on Barack Obama is these days. I’ll, I’ll … Rick … I’ll pass over this week’s comment that, that I just noted last night … talking about the “Occupy Wall Street” people and talking about the point that they may embolden Democrats … you write much including President Obama who lately and belatedly has begun to show signs of fight. What’s your “fix” on the President?

HERTZBERG: Well, the, the thing about … one of the things I most admired and do still admire about Barack Obama and I am still a Barack Obama supporter … is that temperament of his, which he showed during the campaign when the financial crisis first hit … his calm under fire. His deliberateness, his rationality … what has surprised me about his Presidency and I guess disappointed me, you might say … although I don’t count myself among the disillusioned … is …

HEFFNER: Just the disappointed.

HERTZBERG: Well, but my disappointment really is not in, in Obama … I’ll get back to the point I was making in a moment. But … for me the Obama Presidency has been kind of a controlled experiment.

I’ve always … for years I’ve been harping on the idea that our political system, or the hydraulics of our political system are a grave, grave problem that is eventually going to catch up with us.

With Barack Obama we have had a kind of a controlled experiment. I don’t expect to … there to be a better President than Barack Obama in my lifetime. In many ways he’s as good a President as we’ve had since World War II … I’d make that argument … in terms of just talent, rationality … a lot of, of values, intelligence.

So we’ve and we had a more or less Democratic Congress. Well that should have made the system work … if the system’s workable. The disappointments of the Obama Administration have been largely due to, to the perversities of the political system.

Where I fault him is that the kind of emotion that he evoked in the campaign and the kind of emotional satisfaction that voters who voted for him got … he has neglected, I think.

He focused so strongly on the inside game in that first year, year and a half … on, on getting the legislation. And he, he did not … he, he didn’t … he didn’t really … he just … he just hasn’t … he just hasn’t evoked the kind of emotion that he should have and feeling and satisfaction. And that has caused a lot of Progressives … a lot of the supporters to get depressed, to lose hope.

And it doesn’t take that much to brighten them up. As I, as I say in that piece and I guess the last one I did … he’s starting to show signs of fight. Which, by which I mean kind of say … getting back to first principles … saying what his values are … saying what he … the direction he wants to take the country in and not just focusing on kind of bi-partisanship and agreement and compromising.

HEFFNER: You reject, then, the notion that perhaps what this is all about is … his basic political philosophy and that, indeed, we may have misread him to begin with and that his choice of Geithner and Summers and others indicated his political philosophy, his economic philosophy. That he wasn’t and isn’t as much to the Left of Center as many of us thought.

HERTZBERG: That may be, but … but in fact, if, if the government, by which I mean the whole government … the, the Congress had adopted the policies recommended by Geithner and Larry Summers, particularly Larry Summers … Progressives would be pretty happy right now.

In fact, what, what … what Obama has proposed all along under the … with the advice of Geithner and Summers initially had to be and was watered down, truncated, turned into something much weaker than it would have been.

Now you can say that if he’d picked a different economic team, and I think he should have … and I put that down to some extent to inexperience … and, ah … that he didn’t … it might have turned out differently, it might not have. Its … it probably would have turned out differently … politically … it might not have turned out different substantively. You might not have gotten a bigger stimulus … but he probably would have proposed a bigger stimulus then the one that passed instead of presenting as a kind of victory that would make everything okay, he might have made it clear that this was just a first step, it wasn’t enough … there are still hard times ahead. And in that sense it would have been better.

HEFFNER: You put a lot of emphasis on the emotional make-up, the personality of the man in the White House. Should we have known more about that?

You know, I think back, and I’m sure you do, too, Rick, to the times when the attack on him by the Know Nothings was focused on “We don’t know this man” … I mean the implication was that he was an agent of a foreign country …

HERTZBERG: Hmmmph.

HEFFNER: … but we didn’t know him.

HERTZBERG: Well, I think if we read, if we, if we read Dreams From My Father, as I did … then we did know him. I felt, and still feel that I … that when Barack Obama took office I knew him better than I’ve known any President at the beginning of his first term … in my lifetime.

HEFFNER: But you’ve been surprised.

HERTZBERG: I, I think my surprise has more to do with circumstances than with a, with a … with a misapprehension of Barack Obama’s personality. The, the viciousness and bitterness of, of the Republicans, the seriousness of this economic horror that we’re in the midst of, which I don’t think anyone except a few … except perhaps a few prophets like Paul Krugman even tentatively predicted … that is … I think that is really at the root of all this disappointment.

Obama had great luck in becoming President. He got break after break after break and it was as if God had plucked him from nowhere to be President.

HEFFNER: Maybe she did.

HERTZBERG: (Laugh) But he’s had … but he had one very bad piece of luck and that is, that … unlike FDR … who took office three years after the Depression began … Obama took office just as it was beginning … just as the Great Recession was beginning before its effects had really hit big time. So it’s … it’s … so it’s very easy for people to get confused about who’s, who’s to blame …

HEFFNER: Who owns it?

HERTZBERG: Who owns it. Exactly. And I think that’s, that’s kind of the worst piece of luck he’s had personally.

HEFFNER: Wouldn’t you think that the American people would know better or would you think … what you’ve come to know about the American people in your years of observation that, that’s just about what we could expect.

HERTZBERG: Well …

HEFFNER: … level of sophistication, of knowledge, of understanding.

HERTZBERG: I think that even very well informed people have … have had kind of … ah … pounded into them a sort of magical belief in, in the Presidency. People think the President is the government. And, and of course … and of course he’s not.

The Presidential campaigns inevitably feed this fantasy. You can’t run for President … if Barack Obama had run for President saying, “If elected, I promise to propose a probably inadequate stimulus program because I’ll calculate something bigger … won’t be able to get through Congress. It won’t help that much, but it might prevent us from going into another great Depression. We’re still going to have really high unemployment, but this I pledge to you.” You can’t campaign that way …

HEFFNER: Wouldn’t work.

HERTZBERG: … you campaign … every Presidential candidate campaigns on a kind of vision, on a fantasy of what he’d like to do and where he wants the country to go. That’s why they always break their promises … these visions are taken as promises. They never come true and I’m … and, and that’s true of all the great Presidents as well as all the bad ones … they never come true, people are always disappointed. That’s built in to this peculiar system we have.

Now I realize this may sound like I’m making excuses for Obama that I wouldn’t make for Bush.

HEFFNER: That’s true, isn’t it … you wouldn’t make for Bush excuses you would make for Obama … let’s face it.

HERTZBERG: Well, I’d have to think about that a little bit. I make some excuses for, for … well, let me give you an example of an excuse I, I did make for Reagan.

And maybe I’d make it for Bush a little bit, too … and that’s the, the … when, when Presidents behave in foreign policy in ways that seem to be, seem to kind of traduce the Constitution … that kind of thing.

For instance, when Reagan gave aid to the Contras. He … it, it turned out to be unlawful, it was all done in kind of quasi-legal/illegal way. But was it criminal? Was it criminal or, or was it just … was it just the frustration that’s built into the system, where a President can’t really conduct … even in foreign policy where he has the freer … freest hand of all … ah, he can’t conduct … he can’t conduct his own policy.

And so, I, I would make … I would make excuses … sometimes you’re saved from your worst impulses. I mean the original Reagan tax cuts that he proposed, were much bigger than the ones that, that were finally passed. Same with, with Bush. That’s the checks and balances that everybody loves. But the check and balance we don’t have is that … is really, really meaningful elections that can, that can change the government, give a new government a change to enact it’s program and be judged accordingly. That’s what we don’t have.

HEFFNER: The wonderful thing about this table is that it enables conversations to go on that bring up ideas that perhaps one … this one would never have thought of before. And you mentioned Reagan and you mentioned the Nicaragua business.

What about the Obama business. Leave out Bush II when it came to what you do by way of torture and the rest. What about Obama’s Administration and its targeting of American citizens and the feeling that I have, at least, that we’re once again back to the expansion of the President’s power through his view of what’s needed.

That’s what you’re saying Reagan needed. After all, every President finds that he needs to do certain things that can’t be accomplished within traditional frameworks. What’s your feeling about this Administration? And its expansion of power?

HERTZBERG: I think that this Administration has actually, has actually pursued its foreign policy in a lawful manner. This … what you’re talking about is the particular drone attack on this … al Qaeda leader spokesman in Yemen.

HEFFNER: Or drone attacks generally.

HERTZBERG: Well drone attacks generally … if … what seems to be so awful, I guess to a lot of people about the drone attacks is that they’re directed at a particular person or group of people

Now, if you’re in a war or a quasi-war people get killed. The, the … there don’t seem to be terribly many objections to bombing enemy soldiers. Or bombing cities of countries that we’re at war with. I think you can make an argument that it is more humane to, to, to choose who you’re going to kill and to kill not … and to kill not just random draftees or soldiers who are in the fight for … because they’ve been made to be or because they want to be soldiers and be heroes. But to go after the … to go after the heart of the, the enemy,

Drone attacks, drone attacks kill people. It’s objectionable, of course, when they kill … the collateral damage … as it’s … as it’s … as it’s so delicately put.

If an important al Qaeda leader is killed and five other people who are in the same house are killed, it’s morally troubling. All war is morally troubling. All, all … it’s always morally troubling.

I’m not sure it’s more morally troubling when you, when you kill … when you kill the guilty, as it were … rather than, rather then just killing everybody who’s in your way.

HEFFNER: I have the feeling that somehow or other, the present Administration is giving you more trouble rationalizing and justifying than the previous Administrations … two administrations have. Is that, that fair?

HERTZBERG: Well, of course, it’s, it’s a bit like … it’s a bit like the, the Israeli/Arab dispute. One has a double standard. I personally … I always expect more from the Israelis generally.

HEFFNER: Better.

HERTZBERG: Better. Better. I hold them to a higher standard. And, of course, a lot of people who are critical of, of the current Israeli government are accused of having a double standard. And of course, they do have a double standard and the people who defend it also have a double standard.

Yes, I have a higher standard for, for this Administration than I did for the last one. And in what I do, it’s my, it’s my job, it’s my duty to be honest … as honest as I can possibly be given my … given my still … my still strong love and admiration for Barack Obama to be, to be critical of him where I really think he’s going wrong.

HEFFNER: Let me, let me ask …

HERTZBERG: So I’ll criticize him for things that wouldn’t even make the top 10 of what I criticized for …

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

HERTZBERG: … George Bush.

HEFFNER: Let me ask you about something that I realize I haven’t had the, the wit, the intelligence … the nerve to ask anyone else in the last few years. What role do you think race has played in the unfortunate position that Obama has found himself in? How much of the … I would say … and I think you would say “dirty opposition”, or at least the determined opposition … he’s going to be a one term President, and that’s my objective … that sort of thing. How much do you think race has played in this?

HERTZBERG: Well, it has to have …

HEFFNER: Just between us …

HERTZBERG: … yeah …

HEFFNER: … we wouldn’t talk about it in public.

HERTZBERG: (Laugh) That is such a complicated question. ‘Cause Obama is such a unique figure racially as, as, as he is in so many other ways.

I don’t know … I, I think it’s played, it’s played a role, maybe a smaller role than you would expect from the, from … during the Presidency of the first Black President.

And it’s a curiously … it’s a different role. It’s about otherness and Obama’s otherness is partly racial, it’s partly cultural, it’s partly kind of Ivy League educated professor.

I don’t know that his, his race was at least … at worst a wash … in the general election campaign. I’d argue that in some ways it might … it was an advantage.

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

HERTZBERG: Ahemm, but the … in the opposition to Obama and the, the hatred … the vituperativeness of it … I’m not so sure that, that, that race has added anything to what had been there anyway. Remember the vituperation and hatred against Clinton …

HEFFNER: Right.

HERTZBERG: … it was just as strong. Maybe stronger than, than it is against Obama. Obama is still, still has high ratings … 50% higher, higher, higher than that as a person. As an individual. It’s, it’s so complicated and you … Obama … Obama’s background as, as the son of a Black African and a White American.

Yes, he’s the first African American President, but in a literal kind of way. He’s not descended from any enslaved people. These are all kind of under the surface … under the surface subtleties that affect the way people think about him or feel about him unconsciously in terms of race.

So I don’t think, I don’t think that, that it’s a simple, it’s a simple proposition. Race … to the extent that race determines people’s votes, I think that that was … has been … that if you’re a racist … if you’re an outright racist … White racist, White supremist kind of racist … the, the chances that you’re going to vote for a Democratic Presidential candidate are fairly minimal.

I’m not saying that that means, you know, the Republicans are racist. It’s just that when, when we’ve had this great realignment where the former Conservative White Democrats in the South, moved en masse into the Republican Party and the whole … and the Southern strategy in law and order … racism … White Supremist racism, which has declined hugely anyway, in any kind of conscious sense … people who are consciously racist … sort of became a “fixed” quantity. Fixed and declining quantity. And, and that’s what it is … that’s what it is now.

So, yeah, I think it’s, it’s kind of a shorthand, but I … I really don’t think that, that there’s much to be learned from, from, from blaming his troubles and his opposition on race.

HEFFNER: No, I, I certainly wasn’t blaming …but I was asking about the extent to which you think …

HERTZBERG: Hmmm …

HEFFNER: … it’s a, it’s a factor. You seem … when you make the comparison with Clinton … make me bring up a question and that is … do you think the gap … and there certainly was a gap on so many levels between the Clintons and those who were so opposed to them … that it had to do with women’s rights, it had to do with sex … not his …

HERTZBERG: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: … sexual escapade so much … as with Hilary Clinton, and a woman playing the role that she played. The age gap. Do you think we’re coming closer to the time when the old America is going to be gone and they’ll be a kind of new America. Maybe represented by the “Occupy Wall Street” people. But maybe not that far.

Something didn’t change in the nineties. Something was very, very strong here in the nineties with the opposition to the Clintons … no matter what the opposition, and they knew they were bringing it with them.

I think part of that and I think you think part of that is here today. When are we going to roll out of that old America versus New America?

HERTZBERG: Well, part of the, part of the kind of anger and confusion and Tea Party-ism of old America is a … it’s literally reactionary, a lot of it.

It’s a reaction to … it, it’s a change … its emergence as a change, but it’s a change that’s reacting to another change which is, which is America becoming a different kind of country.

America becoming a country where the default position is not middle-aged White male. Where, where there … where we really have a, a rainbow of people. Where, where popular culture reflects it and anticipates it. Where … this is a country where, where there’s … over here there’s a guy with an Indian accent and there’s a couple of Chinese Americans over there and there’s a Black guy over there with dreadlocks, wearing a dashiki and there’s another one over there in a business suit. And there’s five or six different kinds of White people. This is a … this is a … and there’s gay and there’s straight, and there’s, and there’s transgender … and this great big mixture of … is the new America.

And if there’s a hope for kind of progressivism in the future, things are probably going to get worse before they get better. But that America … that America is a different America and a better America. And it scares a lot of people. It scares a lot of people who think of themselves or who are in that, in that old America and who don’t realize that hey, they’re going to be part of the new America, too.

HEFFNER: Doesn’t scare you, does it?

HERTZBERG: That doesn’t scare me, no. (Laughter)

HEFFNER: But things do and …

HERTZBERG: Oh, sure … yeah.

HEFFNER: … you stay at the table now because our time is over … we’ll do another program, we’ll talk about some of the things that scare you. Rick Hertzberg, thank you so much for joining me today.

HERTZBERG: 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.”

Guest: Frances Hesselbein
AIR DATE: 02/11/2012
VTR: 01/19/2012

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And I must say that in this crucial 2012 election year perhaps no choice will be more compelling for American voters to make than which of our candidates for President of the United States possesses more of the qualities that together promise real national leadership in the trying times just ahead.

And if leadership is the overwhelming issue before us, surely one of the best persons to parse it with us today is the head of The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, formerly known as The Leader to Leader Institute and as The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

Frances Hesselbein was CEO and an outstanding leader of the Girl Scouts of the USA for many years, has written wisely and widely on her life in leadership, has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for that wonderfully productive life, and most recently has been teaching at West Point as Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy.

Indeed, it’s the “study of leadership” at West Point that particularly intrigues me with its implication of change. What I think of immediately is “nature” versus “nurture”. And I would begin today by asking my guest whether her experience over these many years really does indicate that leadership can be taught…and acquired? What do you say?

HESSELBEIN: Peter Drucker always said, “Leadership cannot be taught, but it can be learned.

HEFFNER: Aha.

HESSELBEIN: Isn’t that profound?

HEFFNER: But how then learned if not taught?

HESSELBEIN: The best way, the most effective way is through the gift of example of leaders around us. I think when we can observe a leader, we listen carefully. We watch how the leader responds to other people. We watch for that respect for all people … we hope to find. And I think when we have the privilege of being with leaders, real leaders we learn far more than we could reading about them.

But you and I were talking about John Gardner

HEFFNER: Aha …

HESSELBEIN: … John W. Gardner … read John Gardner and it would be hard to avoid being some kind of leader.

HEFFNER: Well I think of his books and I think of the programs John and I did together here on The Open Mind when he wrote about leadership, when he wrote about other themes in life … and you mentioned before watching and having respect for others … and I gather that’s one of your …

HESSELBEIN: Yes.

HEFFNER: The marks of leadership.

HESSELBEIN: Respect for all people, it can’t just be talk.

HEFFNER: But how does that fit in to the notion that politicians today seem to embrace … that leadership needs to be tough and rough and there needs to be hard-boiled opposition to the other guy.

HESSELBEIN: It’s why they’re failing. It’s why they fail. If we really believe that leadership is a matter of “how to be”, not “how to do”, that it’s the quality and character of the leader that determines the performance, the results … then we can understand why these people … very intelligent people, are failing.

HEFFNER: Why do you think they’re failing? I mean, I don’t mean “How do you think they’re failing?”, why do you think they’re not adopting what you’ve learned are the best principles of leadership?

HESSELBEIN: I … for some of them, perhaps, it is failing to learn from the best of leaders and literature. And having a feeling that it’s all about them.

HEFFNER: That’s interesting.

HESSELBEIN: Not about the mission. The organization. The country. The future. Knowing you have a leader who is mission focused, respect for all people … determined that whatever he or she does will help sustain the democracy … that such a healthy focus and they make an enormous difference.

Now the opposite … “Well, it’s all about me. And I know everything and so I will just tell them” … they’ve already failed.

HEFFNER: That’s interesting because there are so many people who feel now … we’re in this Presidential election year … you and I don’t know yet who is going to be chosen as the Republican standard bearer … we can be pretty sure that the Democrats will re-nominate President Obama.

But there has been so much criticism of Obama as, ah, not leading the way we thought he would lead.

Do you feel otherwise? Do you think his restraint, because certainly the criticism that has been made is that he has been too restrained … and that a leader fights and pushes and attacks.

HESSELBEIN: That has not been my observation or my feeling. I am very pleased that he is my President. And I respect … I love my country … and I respect the leader my country has put into office. So all of this … “Oh, he isn’t enough this way or he’s too much that way”. Why don’t we look at the country? Listen to what he’s trying to say and be honest about what he has achieved.

HEFFNER: Do you think we’re capable of doing that?

HESSELBEIN: Yes, I think many of us are.

HEFFNER: But now wait a minute, Frances … I’m … I’m asking … when I say “we” you know I’m talking about America today. I’m not talking about the olden times … as my class would say.

HESSELBEIN: No. But I am saying, right now what some people call “The Millennials” …

HEFFNER: Right.

HESSELBEIN: … the 18 to 28 or 30 … right now … and there is scientific research to support what I am saying … right now … that generation is more like the 1930’s and ‘40’s generation that we now call “the Greatest Generation”.

So I have enormous hope that this … the Millennials, or Warren Bennis calls them The Crucible Generation … I have great hope.

HEFFNER: That’s so interesting because I, I was going to quote your remarks about that from, from your comments on what you call “The Seasons and Generations of Leadership” and that’s from the, the Winter edition of Leader to Leader …

HESSELBEIN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … you, you do say that. Why … why this generation, why this younger generation now?

HESSELBEIN: Well, if we pick up Warren Bennis term … the country, all the generations have been though a crucible … we are now in 2012 and facing … sometimes in speeches I say, “I think right now, at times, we are at the lowest level of trust and the highest level of cynicism”.

Now you can’t sustain a democracy with that balance … or imbalance. So I look for … who are the people … speaking or doing something about it? It’s this generation.

And a Pew Center Study of that generation … and indeed, this isn’t just observation … scientific research … the generation right now is more like the 1930’s and ‘40’s.

And it is so disturbing to most Americans, I believe … to hear this kind of language, the lack of respect. The ugliness, the not quite honest statements. Our country deserves better.

HEFFNER: That’s so interesting … yes, surely our country deserves better. Survival requires it. I’m certain you feel that way.

Our generation … my wife and I have certainly always felt we were blessed. And as I read you biographical materials, it’s clear you were too. Blessed …

HESSELBEIN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … by struggle. Blessed by …

HESSELBEIN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … hard times, blessed by Depression and by war.

HESSELBEIN: That’s right.

HEFFNER: And it sounds so darn strange to say that.

HESSELBEIN: No. When you … if you read by stuff, you’ll find my Grandmother there …

HEFFNER: Indeed.

HESSELBEIN: … her family … seven Pringle brothers, 19 to 28 when Lincoln called for volunteers … they didn’t’ say, “Three will go and four will stay home with wives and babies”. They all went.

So my family had a long history from the Revolution … both sides … War of 1812, both sides … the Civil War and my family kept letters and it’s heartbreaking sometimes when you read the letters from husbands and wives … the Battle of the Wilderness … but they loved their country. And when called, they served.

Today, I’m very inspired with the young men and women at West Point, the young men and women … and the older ones … in the United States Army … because I do a lot work with both. And I have enormous hope for the future because of the generation right now … the Millennials. And wherever I go … I find people serving.

HEFFNER: How did you become involved in the, in the larger theme of leadership. I know you acted it out in your work … all through your life you have … certainly with the Girl Scouts … you didn’t expect to end up as “The Leader” …

HESSELBEIN: Well, I must say, reluctantly … I never planned … I was going to write poetry all of my life and just be quiet in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania. Obviously I know nothing about career planning, because my life has been totally different.

I never said, “I will be a leader”. I was never a leader in high school or junior college. I wrote a lot, thought a lot, loved it. But, there’s something called providence.

One day, three men in this little Johnstown, Pennsylvania calling me to inform me they have now found the leader for the United Way campaign … they’d never had a woman before.

Well, I, I can tell you … a month later … I’m called upon to become … the new CEO of the Girl Scouts of the US … of … pardon me … of Talus Rock Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvania … and I explained to them … I’m sorry, but I can’t. I was a Troop leader, Troop 17 with 30 little ten year olds … but finally they pushed hard enough and I said, “Yes.”

And that year, instead of having my Co-Chair, my Vice Chairman … a distinguished business leader as always … before they had this women, I asked the president of the United Steel Workers to be my Vice-Chairman .

It was the only time organized labor had a leadership role, and he was wonderful and that year we had the highest per capita giving in any … of United Way … because we engaged the whole community.

And the women worked very hard because they were sure … maybe the men would not support me, as they should. Well, they did. And the women and the steel workers … everyone in the marvelous big-hearted town came together.

HEFFNER: And I gather you feel that some of the reasons why they did and why you succeeded, was adherence to those principles … the most impressive one that I can think of is … that respect for others.

HESSELBEIN: And appreciation of and then involvement … engagement. You don’t just use part of the community, you bring everyone together. And when you engage people, and they own it, it’s amazing how they grow … to whatever the wonderful challenge is … they make it their own.

HEFFNER: Switching … in a sense, but not really switching back to this question of where we are today …

HESSELBEIN: Sneeze.

HEFFNER: … you’re unhappy with the viciousness and the partisanship of our contemporary political scene.

HESSELBEIN: I love my country and we don’t behave that way.

HEFFNER: But we do behave that way.

HESSELBEIN: We should not. We should not.

HEFFNER: Do you think Americans will make those who do pay a price?

HESSELBEIN: Eventually … plainly we’re going to say, “I’m sorry, but enough of this”.

HEFFNER: Do you think we’re going to say that in 2012?

HESSELBEIN: Well, even my blood type is B-positive. So I hope so. If not … people of our country will find a way. This … no one is happy with this kind language, behavior, lack of respect.

I think of the other countries around the world. They have taken us as their model and they’re looking at us and saying “What happened? How could they do this?”

HEFFNER: And yet, Frances, the, the fact of the matter is …you turn on the television set … we’re taping this program mid-January, 2012. You and I go home this evening to our respective television sets and turn on the last of the South Carolina debates …

HESSELBEIN: Yup.

HEFFNER: … a pretty good bet … safe bet … that we might make is that the same attack, attack, attack … will mar … I was going to say “mark”, but “mar” the event, and more is promised for the actual Presidential race itself. Your prediction is that we’ll tire of it.

HESSELBEIN: I think enough of us … and you and I have to be two of them … enough of us will say, “This is not the way our country deserves …

HEFFNER: Well, do you think … let, let me be very specific … and I certainly … I can appreciate if you say, “Look that’s political, I don’t want to do that.

Going back to the way that the President … Obama … has comported himself and the constant, carping criticism … he should have been tougher, he should have been tougher instead of compromising, instead of compromising here and then compromising from the compromise that you’ve already made. What do you think about that criticism, that that’s not leadership. Compromise is not leadership.

HESSELBEIN: I think some of the criticism is based on the racism in our country.

HEFFNER: You know you’re the first person who sat here to say that … even though I’ve certainly felt that.

HESSELBEIN: Well, no one wants to say it, but there are studies about the rising racism and classism in the United States. And I think we should judge our President, as I’m sure his actions, what he is doing, how … and we do not let racism creep into it.

HEFFNER: You’ve seen that, you’ve observed that. That’s your sense of what’s happening.

HESSELBEIN: Yes. Yes. And in our country we have the greatest institutions in the world. We have some of the greatest leaders in the world. And we all need to get together and say, “That’s not good enough”.

HEFFNER: You know, four years ago … I certainly knew it had happened election day because we sat up, as everyone did and watched …

HESSELBEIN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … the next morning though, when I opened the door and there was The New York Times with its headline of “Obama Elected”, I swear I cried because I thought, “Thank god my country has done the right thing”. And I wasn’t talking about Obama versus McCain …

HESSELBEIN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … I was talking about the question of being able …

HESSELBEIN: Yup. The right person at the right time.

HEFFNER: And without consideration of, of race. But now you feel we are backing away from …

HESSELBEIN: Some, some of us are. Not the country … but enough of us are that it is obvious and right out in our faces and that’s why I think if you’re a newspaper magazine, you’re very careful about what you print and how you print it, because you could be used …

HEFFNER: Tell me what you mean.

HESSELBEIN: Well, suppose I write a letter to the editor, or maybe I’m asked to write observations and these pieces are not what you would want to share … they’re very personal and vituperative and nothing that should be in … not that we’re censoring, which is the limit …. And I just think our people deserve the best editorials, the most objective reporting.

The other night I saw something … Monday night I was trying to find a program of PBS and it stopped at C-SPAN. And there was General Martin Dempsey, Chief of Staff, speaking at Duke.

It caught me. I, I stayed there and for the first time I can remember, I sat there with a pad and took copious notes. It was the most objective … I felt as an American citizen I was just so lucky to have caught General Dempsey. And he talked about the Army and the citizens of this country, but he was talking about how the Army used to be and now it leads from the bottom up, not the top down.

And … but the way he talked about his country. I was just wishing, I made notes until he finished. The next morning I called a staff meeting of our Institute and I said, “I want to share with you something that happened last night”, so I shared the major points he made … it was a great learning experience for our people.

So when someone like that, in a leadership position, speaks, how do we share it? Now that was a very small, tiny, act of mine … but every time there’s something positive and healing … I think you and I have to be healers and unifiers.

HEFFNER: Accent the positive, eliminate the negative?

HESSELBEIN: All right.

HEFFNER: You’re the kind of person who always believes that the glass is half full. I’m afraid …

HESSELBEIN: No. No. Pardon me … I believe it’s flowing over.

HEFFNER: Ah. (Laughter) Better yet.

HESSELBEIN: None of this half full business.

HEFFNER: Better yet. Maybe that’s why you’ve been so successful as a leader and if, as you’ll forgive me … as a teacher of leading. It can be learned by observation.

HESSELBEIN: And together.

HEFFNER: That’s why, I guess, you’ve been so impressed with your experience with the West Point … at West Point.

HESSELBEIN: Yes. Yes. When I step on those grounds … I’ll say it … I say to myself … “I am on hallowed ground”. Now in 1802 … the first classes were held at West Point …

HEFFNER: … and you, do you want to believe that the first classes were held then and I’m being given the signal that I’ve got to say “Good bye to you now because our time is up”.

HESSELBEIN: Well, I hate to say … I’m not saying “good bye to you … I’m saying … thank you very much and I hope we meet again.

HEFFNER: And I hope and trust we’ll meet again at this table. Thank you, Frances Hesselbein.

HESSELBEIN: I’m deeply honored … thank you.

HEFFNER: And thanks 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

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Alexander Heffner
AIR DATE: 02/04/2012
VTR: 01/19/2012

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind…and as a college teacher during every Presidential campaign since 1948, when “Give ‘em Hell” Democrat Harry Truman beat the betting odds, fooled the pollsters, and made mockery of the Chicago Tribune’s infamous headline wrongly proclaiming Republican candidate Tom Dewey’s election as President, I’ve taken particular note of younger Americans’ attitudes towards our quadrennial Presidential sweepstakes.

Remember that until they were 21, younger Americans couldn’t actually vote at that time…not until the 26th Amendment to the Constitution nearly a quarter century later could 18-to-21-year-olds vote …while now the role they play in actually choosing our Presidents can be of major, transformative importance.

Surely it was four years ago, when Barack Obama mobilized younger voters with a vengeance, and quite decisively won their support at the ballot box. 53 per cent of all voters chose the Democratic Presidential candidate in 2008, while voters under age 30 gave him 66 per cent of their vote.

This year, then, it’s obvious that what we learn about younger voters’ leanings in the Presidential campaign will be crucially significant.

And for this reason we’ll look at them today, again when the party candidates have been chosen, and perhaps once more after Americans’ 2012 Presidential ballots have been counted.

To help me do so I’ll turn now to one of those younger voters…who as a Harvard history student and freelance journalist has over the past four years researched and written scads of commentaries on the subject.

A founder and the Editor of the national student outlet Scoop08, Alexander Heffner also closely covered the last Presidential campaign.

The niceties of full disclosure would have me add that Alexander is my grandson and worked with me in producing the 8th Revised and Expanded Edition of A Documentary History of the United States. So, welcome, Alexander.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Thank you for having me.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Well, I’m glad you’re here and ’m glad to be able to “pump” you for your feelings, your attitudes and your knowledge as a researcher of what young people are thinking and doing in this Presidential campaign.

First, I suppose … a statistic I should mention is one that comes in terms of the fallout between 2008 and 2010. Young voter turnout fell 60% from 2008 to 2010. Democrats won’t win in 2012 if the trend continues. That’s what that press headline says. Do you think it’s true?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: I think that’s true, but at the same time in mid-term elections in the past, young people have not come out. They tend to only come out for the Presidential contest when they see candidates for Commander-in-Chief.

So that has been true of multiple Congressional elections over time.

In 2008, you saw an up-tick for the Presidential race. Not since 1992 had you see such an outpouring of young people involved in a campaign and that ultimately translating into an electoral output that put President Obama over the edge. So I would not look exclusively at the mid-terms results to dictate the … how you feel or how we should report on young people in 2012.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Yeah, but the other day or the other week I couldn’t help but note, I wanted to note … that in the online OpEd New York Times … you and a number of your age group said some rather negative things about Obama that would lead me to think you’re not going to come out and vote. What do you think about that?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well, that’s true. There has been disappointment, even dejection. There’s been disengagement as a result of missed opportunities.

I think the President had the opportunity, for instance, during the college debt crisis, not just the economic crisis, but during the college debt crisis of ’09 and 2010 … all the way through to presently … he had a opportunity to go to state schools and campuses and, and campaign on behalf of young people, lobby for their cause.

And then and now the issue of debt and amassing large amounts of it, is a pressing one for, for young people. The most jarring MIA (missing in action) Obama … for young people, I think, was his absence on the campaign trail in 2010 in which he didn’t go to college campuses to advocate specifically on behalf of young people. And attack administrators for yet again raising tuition costs.

And as long as young people have this substantial degree of red ink, they’re not going to be motivated to vote.

That was the most pressing issue. In the New York Times forum that you eluded to, there are other sources of dissatisfaction with President Obama, but the fiscal one … the idea that young people are still getting a raw deal in terms of the economy, that’s the most looming one.

RICHARD HEFFNER: You mean I’ve got to believe that young people who I want to think of as idealist … we’re … really were responding to the economic situation?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: In 2008? In, in … now?

RICHARD HEFFNER: Now. Now. In what you and your colleagues were saying in the Times the other day.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well, I think that’s part of it. Pocketbook issues are of particular consequence, when it’s a matter of make or break. If you’re a college student or if you’re a graduate student and you’re looking for a career in a particular discipline, that is a very decisive issue.

You know, I think young people have been concerned for some time that after the healthcare passage … legislation, which was a landmark achievement in which more young people are covered now, but since then they have felt that Obama has not adequately had that punch on defending his policies or a more progressive agenda than President Clinton, for instance.

So there is a laundry list of complaints that extend beyond the pocketbook issue of the economy, but that’s the most important for now, I think.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Look, you covered the White House for Scoop44, Scoop08 became Scoop44 when the 44th President went into the White House. You know more about it than I do, how do you explain his failure, knowing the role that young people played in 2008 and he had to know it. Whey didn’t the White House follow up?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well, from reporting in DC and continuing to correspond with Obama press aficionados and people who represent the President, I can say that President Obama and his team will say that they continue to mobilize young voters on campuses with email alerts, text messages to inform them of progress. Championing causes like healthcare.

So there, there continues to be on-going communication between the President and young people. But it’s not direct. It’s not explicit. I think a lot of people would like to see President Obama in this campaign cycle envision a cost-free college education.

So many secondary schools and private universities, particularly ones with huge endowments are able to offer admission free of charge to so many young people who are well qualified.

That’s, that’s something big, bold, beautiful to young people, particularly if you’re disenfranchised … particularly if you’re at a socio-economic disadvantage.

Ahem, there, there is a sense of dejection in certain cycles. But the President has an opportunity to once again cater to this millennial demographic. Some of that energy we might discuss as being channeled through Ron Paul’s candidacy. The Texas Republican who advocates America First … let’s pull out of our international commitments overseas and free the government and free the American people of regulation.

And that message is resonating because there is a sense that in the past eight years of the Bush Administration and now in the Obama Administration, there is still more emphasis and more of a priority on international measures than on domestic ones.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Now, you make the point about Ron Paul’s young followers. Is that, again, a … and hell’s bells, I’m sounding very holier than thou in saying this and I, I don’t really mean to, but I ask you about the issues and you bring up the matter of cost of going to college.

You continue by talking about young people involvements in an isolationist campaign on the Ron Paul side. That’s where they’re being stuck. That’s where they’re being hurt. Is that what we’re talking about? Catering … again, a poor word … taking note of the immediate personal interests of a part of the electorate … young people are concerned about indebtedness, thanks to the cost of college. Young people are concerned about the fact that they’re the ones who go to war, they’re the ones who lay down their lives …

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well …

RICHARD HEFFNER: … is that what we’re talking about?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Right. And they assume the brunt of financial hardship … in particular … when they’re jobless or out of school or could not enroll in school or could not pay for school.

But let me make a broader point here. The support for Ron Paul and his very dedicated, loyalists in their twenties represents something else in the political process. A desire for a third party movement … a desire for a new Ross Perot, a reform-oriented ethos in which there is just this dissatisfaction … and I’ll use that word again … with the politics as usual atmosphere in Washington, DC. With a campaign that stretches over a year and some say would … some would argue the day after Inauguration … the Republicans camped out and decided Mitt Romney is going to be our, our choice. And there’s been some debate about that, but at this point, it looks like the former Governor will be the Republican nominee.

But the point here is that if young people can channel their energy and fuel a … an insurgent candidacy … that’s a positive thing for our democracy. Whether it’s Ron Paul or someone who might be more in the center … if it’s a unity effort with a person like John Huntsman, who just bowed out of the campaign, the former Governor of Utah, and perhaps a Democrat who is more moderate or an independent like Mayor Mike Bloomberg here in New York City … young people are craving a break from partisan politics.

And unfortunately the Congress and President Obama, too, were not able to collaborate in the last three years. I mean we’ve gone through debt crisis and impasse after debt crisis and impasse … and the result has been “Wow, is this … is this our political system?”.

And, and the campaign’s length … I mean it requires so much endurance for the candidates and for the, for the people and for young people who have a very notoriously short attention span.

So, you know, there’s a larger issue here, it’s not just about bread and butter issues for young people. It’s about their empowerment in a political system that is frankly inoperable, it’s so bad.

RICHARD HEFFNER: You know, you mentioned John Huntsman and we know … we’re taping this program middle of January and we know he’s dropped out of the Republican race.

But I’m interested, as I note … a long time ago you brought Huntsman into it. In the first place you used to tell me that you thought he was a very viable candidate for the, for the Republicans.

But I’m thinking now back … as long ago as six months ago … July 13th, when you wrote a piece for the Tampa Bay Times and you wanted us to image if Obama assembled the team of Hillary Clinton for Vice President, John Huntsman for Secretary of State and you were going to take poor old Joe Biden and let him retire in honor of Huntsman and Clinton. You think that has any … if not urgency … any meaning today? Others have picked up the idea of certainly adding Hillary Clinton.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well, I think it would have been a worthwhile call from President Obama if he saw that Huntsman had resigned … which he did … and was possibly gearing up for an exploratory committee. We don’t know if he made that call, but it would have been worth his time to call the former Ambassador and Governor and say, “Well, let’s, let’s make this happen”.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Because of the bi-partisan notion?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Right. Right. And young people, I think would have responded enthusiastically to that prop … to, to that proposition of a bi-partisan ticket or Cabinet, in this case with Huntsman as Secretary of State.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Do you have any sense that among young people now … in, in the researches that you’ve been doing … have you seen it popping up? The notion of a Democratic, Republican ticket?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: The, the notion of that has emerged through Unity08 efforts. There was a campaign that failed in 2008 to nominate a bi-partisan ticket.

Now there … they have some corporate backing and if you read The New York Times recently there, there is an effort to enlist a Democrat and Republican or two Independents to run and there will be a virtual Primary online.

And they are trying to get this proposal sanctioned by the folks in … state by state where they have to register for the general election. So the primary, in effect, takes place online.

And this segues into an important point for young people. Young people thrive on the web … we operated three websites on the web … Scoop08, Scoop44, ScoopDaily.

And one friend, who’s a fellow journalist, and I are planning a Scoop2012, to cover this campaign.

Young people would respond well to the, the idea that they could make their selection online. And the whole possibility in the future and promise of e-balloting in which you register online … I mean right now you can register online, but the idea that you could vote online and the security apparatus would be implemented adequately so that it couldn’t be high-jacked.

I mean we know that there have been accusations of, of ballot boxes being high-jacked, in effect at polling stations. I mean I think you would see the number of caucus goers or primary goers triple, quadruple, expand infinitely if it all happened online. I mean it’s a scary proposition for you, perhaps … people are not going to …

RICHARD HEFFNER: For us old people you mean?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: (Laughter) For, for people who are accustomed to going to the ballot box and pulling a lever and that’s the way it should be done.

But, you know … communications should be done via letter, but it’s done via email today.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Well, listen … let’s …

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: And, and the numbers in this primary cycle were particularly disappointing for Republicans. Young people came out in Iowa, among, among their share … of 3%. In, in 2008 … with the Obama/Clinton rivalry and that campaign in full force, that was essentially quadrupled … 12%.

You had four times the amount of energy in the Democratic primary. In this case it was a caucus in Iowa. But in, in the primary contest so far young people have not come out.

RICHARD HEFFNER: You know, I … I … we tape a lot of shows on one day and I don’t know whether you heard Ms. Hesselbein who is an expert on leadership, whose Institute now and all through her life has focused on leadership. And you may have heard her say that she has great faith and confidence in this generation … well, your generation … that it will pick up where the best generation, so called … my generation … the war, the Second World War generation, left off.

Do you think there’s anything different about people in your age group and other young groups of people … other groups of young people in the past.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: I think that … the answer to your question is unknown so far. I think that young people have not proven themselves in the way that the “greatest generation” did. Or the “great generation” I mean depending on how far you go back.

But that’s a difficult question to answer at this juncture. I think Obama represented a transformational Presidency in which young people would be incorporated into the governing process. And that has not really happened. Or at least to the extent that it’s apparent enough to say “This is a generation that takes political power seriously and is truly invested in its democracy”.

So I’m, I’m sorry to disappoint you … it’s not that I’m not enthusiastic or upbeat about this generation. I think the potential is vast and the promise is there. But this is an opportunity in this election cycle to democratically assert yourself. And, as of yet, that hasn’t been established.

We should note that President Obama has probably the most young aides out of any President in recent history, including his Chief Speech Writer … not just someone who came along and is aiding a Deputy … this is someone who he identified during the campaign as a true wordsmith and someone who would represent his vision. And he’s still the Acting Chief Speechwriter and he’s in his twenties.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Okay, you’re talking about words and if I remember correctly, in this New York Times group of comments by young people, the headline is, right above your name: “Obama is all words, no action”.

How come, seriously, in your estimation, with that cadre of young people in the White House … why hasn’t the President acted differently? His words make me cry … his actions … shrug …

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Right.

RICHARD HEFFNER: … you answer.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well, that’s, that’s true … and he was enigmatic during the campaign … I mean he, he appealed to a lot of different forces within the electorate. I mean we … a lot of people say now, and it’s true … we saw him and made of his political prowess what we wanted and his message … what we wanted. And, and so young people have been disappointed, both on the Left and on the Right of the political spectrum, depending upon what they viewed as his potential, or what policies he would institute.

But we have to remember this is not an FDR in, in … personality-wise … in terms of the kind of action that comes along side the forceful rhetoric.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Well, it’s interesting … Frances Hesselbein is saying that the nature of real leadership is not to be quite as aggressive as I think your age group and even old fogies like me wanted him to be, but to compromise, to compromise, to walk in the other guys shoes. Now that’s what we’re criticizing … the President for doing overly much.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well, I was about to say that also in that political climate … in which President Roosevelt was able to institute so many reforms of his alphabet program … the New Deal … he had a Congress that was Democratic … I mean for the most part … and it’s not … we, we shouldn’t suggest necessarily all of the product should come out of Congress in terms of that action.

A lot of it ultimately does because they have the authority to legislate and make new laws … new laws. But in, in … I think there’s, there’s a disconnect as a result of a hyper-toxic partisan atmosphere. And that’s why we come back to the idea of a third party candidate.

I think if in 2012 there is a third party candidate, even if it’s someone who is out of the mainstream, like Ron Paul … if he is on the stage with President Obama and Governor Romney that will be a healthy thing for our democracy.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Fascinating to think of. Really fascinating to think of.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Ah … and all words … right … all words … and just as an extension of President Obama’s efforts this cycle … you’re right … in, in 2008 there was such upset over the Bush Administration … and his conduct abroad and at home and the Bush Administration to young people resembled the ultimate 1% … right … if we talk about the 99% in the “occupy” element of the political discourse today.

But he could simply arrive on college campuses and generate huge audiences. And this cycle is going to be more challenging for him. He will have to strategize both about the message and the substance of the policy he’s putting forth.

It’s not going to be a cake walk, it’s going to be much more difficult especially if you have rowdy college kids on these campuses and, and it’s already happened to Republican candidate Rich Santorum … it will happen to President Obama … in which they interrogate you, literally.

So, it, it’s going to be interesting to see how he responds to young people who are concerned and in many cases, loud about it.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Which leads me to ask you a question about something quite different. You’re talking about the President on the campus. You’re talking about the candidates coming to the campuses. You’re talking about the possibility of a third party.

I go back to the fact that you reveal yourself in a number of places and you wrote for the New York Daily News an opinion piece and you called it “A Tale of Two Harvards” … Romney and Obama offer two contrasting visions of an elite education.

And you Harvard guys … I mean … Theodore Roosevelt, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the two people who seem they’re about to be the candidates this year … and maybe a third.

Ah … what did you mean about contrasting visions of an elite education?

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Well, I think that to connect with young people, you’ll have to be a true populist in this cycle. Because every financial piece of news that we see is, is about a bank or about a major corporation and I wrote this piece because the two candidates, the likely candidates on the Republican, Democratic side … they embody elitism … purely as being products of Harvard.

And they have the opportunity to extend a helping hand. Or to be the 1%, in effect, in the way they govern, in the way they view the nation … envision young people’s role.

And … I mean … I should say, overall there are two visions … one is, is President Obama who’s trying now, since his Kansas speech to embody that populist … and Mitt Romney is probably not going to be able to escape the 1% … the fact that he was at Bain Capital and made millions of dollars off firing people … in essence what he would argue is reconsolidating companies.

But that’s not what young people are going to want to hear. They’re going to want to see someone on the campaign trail who feels their pain, and is willing to be a little bit more specific policy-wise on how they’re going to fix, or help young people fix their economic quandary.

RICHARD HEFFNER: Feel their pain. That may be the key to your third party candidate, presumed.

Alexander Heffner thank you for joining me today … it’s been a real pleasure and I’ll try to get you back here when we know who those candidates are … maybe a third one among them. Thank you.

ALEXANDER HEFFNER: Thank you.

RICHARD HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience, I hope you join us again next time. Meanwhile … I’ll say it a different way … as another old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck”. And do visit The Open Mind website at thirteen.org/open mind to reprise this program on line right now. Or to draw upon our archive of 1,500 or so other Open Mind and related programs. That’s thirteen.org./open mind.

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Edward Rothstein
AIR DATE: 01/28/2011
VTR: 09/21/2011

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And I’ll repeat what I said last week in introducing my guest … that just a quarter century ago the professional assignments of the guest journalist sitting at this table then elicited an introduction from me filled with admiration and more than a bit tinged with envy.

And so it is today as it was last week.

Then, of course, so long ago, it was the New York Times’ Daniel Goleman, whose “beat” was the behavioral sciences and who reported regularly on some of the most interesting psychological themes one could imagine … from the uses and misuses of memory to individuals’ changing patterns of personality to the roles that aging and a growing sense of our own mortality play in diminishing our anxieties in middle age.

Well, now my guest is the New York Times’ Cultural Critic-at-Large Edward Rothstein, whose “beat” strenuously but happily is ideas and the arts, museums and notions about war and slavery and justice and religion and all those wonderful things that make one envy Mr. Rothstein his journalistic tasks.

Of course, my guest is well prepared academically for his assignment … as he was for his previous position as Chief Music Critic of The Times.

A graduate of Yale, he holds a doctorate from the famed Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, has done graduate work in mathematics at Brandeis, and earned a Master’s Degree in English literature from Columbia University.

In short, ideas seem all to be grist for my guest’s mill. And I’d like to pick up this time with some of the other pieces that you’ve written over the years that astound me so.

And I, I think I should ask first … where do these assignments come from? Your own head?

ROTHSTEIN: Ah, sometimes … there’s, there was a period where I was doing regularly … a column every two weeks, where I would be sort of taking a look at books or exhibitions or events and inventing the subject.

When I’m covering exhibitions now … in a sense … I’m presented with this array of exhibitions around the country and some have to be covered because they’re major exhibition openings in major places.

But others can be selected or others discovered. I mean one of the adventurous aspects of covering museum exhibitions is that when I travel I like to search … I have a rental car and I will drive one or two hours outside whatever city I’m in to see other things that might sound interesting, if I’ve looked them up on the Internet.

I mean one of the most remarkable, odd things, for example, was a … an exhibition about the history of ventriloquism that I stumbled on …

HEFFNER: That I didn’t read.

ROTHSTEIN: … outside of Cincinnati where a collector had several thousand ventriloquist dummies lined up in various rooms with his telling the history of ventriloquism. So, you know, one never knows exactly what is going to happen. And that’s one of the exciting things about the job. Some things … so some things are discovered, some invented and some presented.

HEFFNER: So the Internet plays some sort of roll here.

ROTHSTEIN: Yes. I mean actually, it’s a, it’s a fantastic resource also for getting background on a particular subject because it, it won’t … it doesn’t replace the books, books and research, but one can get a sense of a range of opinions or how people have reacted to various things at various times.

So it’s … I never go without checking things out on the Internet in one way or another.

HEFFNER: You wrote a piece about the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington. Were you considered hostile at that time? Were there some people who thought that it was a negative … too negative a review if that’s the word?

ROTHSTEIN: You know I think … I, I didn’t like this memorial at all …

HEFFNER: You made that clear.

ROTHSTEIN: (Laugh) … and I … this is an example of one of these pieces where I got a tremendous amount of mail and almost all of it agreeing with me. And I was surprised by that. Because the Memorial, as I said in the review has tremendous importance and significance, the fact that Martin Luther King was being honored in a Memorial and that this dissident preacher would be taking his sort of place among the greatest of the nation’s sort of leaders seems to me entirely right and is a … is something that is, is to be applauded.

And I think that made the sort of inadequacies of this Memorial all the more sort of painful to actually have to look at. And I … I think there are certain things that have such historical importance, like this Memorial, or similarly, like the plans for the African American Museum on the mall opening in 2015. That there’s a responsibility that goes along with it because the subject is so important and it’s a chance to sort of set people’s perspective for the next 50 years as they go and, and look and experience these things.

I mean the effect of the design of the mall was really was really a sort of a post … as it now is … was almost a post Civil War sort of creation … that is you have the Lincoln Memorial on one end at the other end near the Capitol … you have the Grant Memorial, which no one really pays that much attention to now because Grant no longer has that sort of symbolic significance.

But you go into the Lincoln Memorial, I don’t know anybody who’s not moved by it. Even, even though this is so … the statue of Lincoln is just so gargantuan in, in a way … that verges on kitsch itself … you stand there and, and it’s sort of slightly dark, but you, you are obviously in the presence of something that’s bigger than you … and then deservedly bigger … because you have the complete text of the Gettysburg Address or the … is it the Second Inaugural … on the, the two opposing walls with the statue in the center.

And you can just read this text … stand there and, you know, sort of look up and read it and just … it’s, it’s as much the place … as much Lincoln’s words as the place.

And this … so that Memorial becomes a sort of touchstone for our understanding of this nation and its best and greatest achievements. That kind …

HEFFNER: You felt that wasn’t true …

ROTHSTEIN: I felt that was not true of, of King. And, and it’s a shame, but that’s … anyway, that was my take on it.

I think people … when, when I was there since I, I see many people going to the Memorial and I think many people, particularly … one day I was there and many African Americans are, are legitimately moved by this … the fact of the Memorial.

Whether or not they would be moved more if the Memorial itself would be better, I can’t say. But I can say I would be moved more if the Memorial were different.

HEFFNER: Going from Dr. King I, I, I … I, I … going back to what you had written about … now this was this year … 2011 … “Emancipating History” … you had visited the old slave mart museum in Charleston and had written so touchingly about the experience, which is not given to very many people. I mean slavery, touching it, seeing it, understanding it is not given to many of us and I, I was impressed when the piece appear and then the great historian Annette Gordon Reed wrote a letter to the Editor, “Thereafter, Edward Rothstein and his fascinating look at Charleston’s new efforts to highlight slavery writes correctly, Most White Southerners didn’t even own slaves, but slavery’s presence was widely accepted.

And she goes on to write, “Passive acquiescence, however, was not the only way non-slave holders participated in slavery, the South was a slave society in the same way that we are a nation that promotes home ownership. One does not have to own a home to get the benefits and burdens of the housing market.”

“Moreover,”, she concluded, “individuals who cannot afford to own slaves rented them as needed. Finally racially based slavery handed every White person in the South a measure of power over Blacks whether they owned slaves or not.’”

So, your piece was sort of two-fold, what you wrote and what she wrote to the Editor thereafter.

ROTHSTEIN: I, I think that letter’s, you know, absolutely correct. I mean I didn’t … whatever I did say, the review was not meant to be exclusive of others.

And I think what, what the case is, is that I don’t think we yet fully recognize in the way the extent to which slavery has sort of shaped the United States. And this sort of primal sort of sin of the United States is something that’s still … is a historical burden.

When I, when I was in the South for this piece, I also went around to various museums in Charleston area and to plantations in the area. And aside from the fact that slavery is only now becoming part of the sort of narrative that is told at plantation homes or in histories … I mean, when I say “part of the narrative” I mean a full recognition of slavery as, as that peculiar institution and what it meant … and yet there is something still very strange about all this, because here we’re talking about … since the Civil War, one would think that certain issues, or certain perspectives about American history and its past have sort of been turned into sort of common places so that we all, sort of, basically agree that it is … except that if there is a way in which … take a look at the Civil War through the eyes of the South and through the museums of the South.

You have a sense of a parallel, alternate universe in a way. And I’m not saying that this is some Jim Crow sort of exaggeration, but I’m saying that the assumption that the issue of national unity and that the victory of the North was in some sense the victory of the nation as a whole, something that we assume … that Gettysburg sort of Memorial sort of assumes that this is … you know, this war was fought, the South was wrong, and lost. The North won, but in this North winning, the Union won. And the Union incorporates the South.

Well, to a great extent in museums in the South this is not quite the way things still feel, that is … that the South still portrays itself as having been invaded and still as the victim of this war. And in many cases the issue … the issues that created the grounds for the Civil War are not fully engaged … they are sort of dealt with in euphemism or the idea that there were … that are other ways of seeing things.

There’s a Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia, that has labels on every … on many of its panels where it will say, “Here’s … I forget what abbreviation they use, but they’ll essentially say, “This is the Northern point of view, this is the Southern point of view, this is the African American point of view of particular events that happened.”

What you can’t do in this case is end, end up getting a, a unification of the sense of “Well, what was resolved? What did happen? What were the issues?” If they aren’t fully recognized then is, in some way, this war still an open sore for the South?

Is the issue of its relationship to slavery and the North’s sort of association with slavery because of the importance of establishing the Union from the very start with the Constitutional Convention … is that something that we can fully understand?

HEFFNER: Why … I, I’m puzzled … why does this surprise you after all that the “South shall rise again” is a cry we’ve heard so often, that the Confederate flag is flown in so many places, at so many times, that indeed it seemed as though Southern inspired historians won the war of the text books for our schools.

I guess as an historian I’m terribly much aware of that fact. And as you are, very much aware of how that issue remains in our lives.

ROTHSTEIN: Well, I think one reason why I expected something different is that …

HEFFNER: In the museums?

ROTHSTEIN: … in, in the museums and, and … is that, to a great extent in the last 50 years things have transformed in an amazing way with …that the … there are all through the South these Civil War Memorial … I mean not “Civil War” … I mean civil rights commemorations. There are sort of … there are plenty … there are plenty … there’s plenty of evidence that major aspects of this past have been sort of sloughed off.

And there is … there, there is a sort … there has been a political transformation, I think, in the South that … the South … that they’re replacing the South where it’s so clear … you can go to some of the cities of the South now and there are almost like immigrant cities because you have new waves of immigration coming from Asia and from Mexico and from … and, and some … Africa … from Europe … so that in some ways you had … particularly when the economy was in better shape … the idea that, say, some of these cities were becoming cosmopolitan. And that we in the North were, in some ways, sort of a little bit more constricted in our perspective.

So there is counter wave and, and that has been, I think, strong in Southern politics as well. So I don’t, I don’t … I guess this accounts for some of my sort of amazement that this … the Civil War is still an issue that is being fought.

HEFFNER: Well, fought and in so many books … won again, but by the South, rather than the North.

ROTHSTEIN: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: Which, of course, makes me turn to the piece you wrote in 2009 … “One Man’s Crusade Against Slavery Seen From Two Angles” … in Richmond … you wrote from Richmond … you wrote about John Brown’s body lying … moldering in the grave. What, what is our fix and what was your fix on, on this?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, there were … there were two simultaneous exhibitions about John Brown. One was at the New York Historical Society and one was at the Virginia Historical Society. And the, the Virginia … the New York Historical Society Exhibition was essentially championing John Brown as a sort of precursor to the Civil Rights Movement.

The Virginia Historical Society exhibition raised all of these questions that … whether or … it sort of surveyed the extent to which John Brown’s sort of encouragement of slave rebellion and his, his actions were … well they caused controversy at the time … they divided the political public in the North as well … maybe less in the South … but, but certainly there were … even the Liberal politicians of the North were divided over his tactics and what it meant for the possibilities of, of abolitionism.

But also raising these questions about “Well, was John Brown essentially any different from a terrorist?” Because there are these horrific accounts, actually, of John Brown and his men coming upon a cabin and slaying people inside, who had nothing whatsoever … did not own slaves themselves, had no personal connection to the slavery economy and the idea was in, in a sense to create the sense of terror and outrage that would eventually lead to abolition which was not quite what happened.

So the question is … so the question I raise is “Well, okay, how are we to look at this now?”

Now, how are we to interpret it … John Brown? We’d like to … we think of slavery as so horrific that anything was justified in this … in this … in the attempt to undo it.

Well, if we look closely at John Brown can we say that this is the case? I mean there was on display in Virginia this huge six foot pike with a blade on it that was used as an assault weapon. Is this something that we would say if somebody has a strong moral conviction about what they believe that they should be able to wield this weapon in the service of whatever that cause happens to be?

I didn’t come … end this with any conclusion … but I actually thought that there were aspects of this because the Virginia Historical Society had … was playing against these … the split that we were just talking about and because they … part of their constituency is far, far to the Right of what I’m talking about … they ended up raising questions which were not really the issue here in New York.

But at the same time I think are interesting to think about. That at what point are we willing to say this kind of act … and, and the reason … the other reason why this came up is because this the justification for terror or the understanding of terror has been a theme that has been with us for the last ten years since 9/11.

HEFFNER: You wrote about that … in your comments on the Spielberg movie about terrorists …

ROTHSTEIN: Munich.

HEFFNER: … how did you, how did you end up feeling about that?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, I haven’t thought about that movie in a while. But the thing is … the Spielberg movie Munich, if I’m remembering all this correctly … was a sort of dramatization of the Israeli response to the massacre of its athletes at the …

HEFFNER: At the Olympics.

ROTHSTEIN: … the Olympics. And the report is that the, the Israeli’s sent assassins into Europe to essentially eliminate anybody who had anything to do with this Black September attack on … in, in Munich.

I felt this movie was … say, duplicitous … or distorting of history because it was based on a memoir or, or a couple of books … but in particular a book by one of the members of this team in which … the way the movie portrays it is that the, the … these Mossad agents were racked by remorse and guilt over what they had done.

And the implication of the movie … particularly in the closing scene where you see this sort of disillusioned Mossad agent standing, I think, in Queens with the image of the World Trade Center in the background … remember this is after the World Trade Center’s gone …

HEFFNER: Right.

ROTHSTEIN: … the implication is that in some way what we … what has happened is a sort of wave of sort of tit-for-tat and that the, the amplification of terrorism was in some way connected with the decision to respond to the Munich terror attack in this way.

The actual book by the Mossad agent is not wracked with guilt at all. That was something completely imposed on the story by its current authors. So this already is something that is worth taking a look at. Why this sort of sense … why does the story have to be told so that thee is this guilt and then, is this an accurate portrayal of how terrorism works?

HEFFNER: Did you … do you feel that in raising those questions you were reflecting your own attitudes toward Israel?

ROTHSTEIN: Oh, ahemm, yes … I mean in the sense that if, if … if I do not accept the fact that … let me see how to, how to put this … the only way the argument makes sense to say that there’s this cycle of violence … is if one accepts that there is a sort of symmetry of positions.

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

ROTHSTEIN: ….and, and this is something that’s kind of an argument that was made very much around 9/11, as well. That is … there’s a sort of symmetry … that is … essentially it goes back to the line about one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

If one accepts that and that perspective on the world than there are all kinds of things that … consequences of one’s understanding that fall into place.

If one questions that then there are other ways of looking at these things. One has to understand terrorism in a different way and, and one responds to it in a different way. So in that sense … I think when … I think it, it’s not dealing with the particulars of a particular issue, but more a perspective on what one considers to be the nature of terrorism and the people and why the people who conduct, who do such things do them.

HEFFNER: So, when you write you criticism, we’ve got all of Ed Rothstein there … his politics, his esthetics, we don’t separate them out.

ROTHSTEIN: Right. I mean what I tried to do is … I don’t assume that my readers are going to agree with me or have the same perspective that I do. What I would like to be … to do … in, in essays is to, to really argue something as clearly as I can and to raise questions that if they’re answered differently from the way I raised them, the fact that I’ve made the argument is at least something that has to be responded to, or a question that has to be answered.

So I’m sort of … I’m, I’m in a way engaged in a dialogue or trying to engage in a dialogue through the article.

HEFFNER: Well, you succeed and I know that I’m going to be the other part of that dialogue as I read you for years to come. And I want to thank you so much for joining us here on The Open Mind.

ROTHSTEIN: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

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 www.theopenmind.tv

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Edward Rothstein
AIR DATE: 01/21/2011
VTR: 09/21/2011

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And just a quarter century ago the professional assignments of the guest journalist sitting at this table then elicited an introduction from me filled with admiration and more than a bit tinged with envy.

So it is today.

Then, of course, it was the New York Times’ Daniel Goleman, whose “beat” was the behavioral sciences and who reported regularly on some of the most interesting psychological themes one could imagine … from the uses and misuses of memory to individuals’ changing patterns of personality to the roles that aging and a growing sense of our mortality play in diminishing our anxieties in middle age.

Well, now my guest is the New York Times’ Cultural Critic-at-Large Edward Rothstein, whose “beat” strenuously but happily is ideas and the arts, museums and notions about war and slavery and justice and religion and all those wonderful things that make one envy Mr. Rothstein his journalistic tasks.

My guest is very well prepared academically for his assignment, to be sure…as he was for his previous position as Chief Music Critic of the Times.

A graduate of Yale, he holds a doctorate from the famed Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, has done graduate work in mathematics at Brandeis, and earned a Master’s Degree in English literature from Columbia University.

In short, ideas seem all to be grist for my guest’s mill. And as I thought, Mr. Rothstein about how I was going to begin our program today, I wondered, “How do I select from all of those essays that you’ve written over the years, packed with interesting ideas and I picked ‘Connections, Myths About Genius. Does Genius Exist’?”.

And you wrote here, “Genius has been judged to be little more than a product of good marketing or good politicking. It has been seen as a form of intellectual imperialism”.

How do you see it? How do you see it as you write about all the geniuses you’ve covered?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, I think there was in the Academy, in particular, for a while, a tendency to think of the idea of human greatness as some sort of “put-on” as if this was something that was being sort of ideologically sold to those of us who didn’t know better.

And your great human figures, whoever they may be in whatever field, there certainly is a tendency to idolize and to eliminate the sort of “feet of clay” that even the greatest of people have.

But this always seemed to me really to miss the … it, it’s an inescapable feeling when you come in contact a mind or an achievement that is of a different order.

Not a matter of oh, you know, there’s this … there’s this famous line that Johan Sebastian Bach apparently said, or is reported to have said, that, you know … “Anybody who worked as hard as I had would be able to do the same thing.”

Now, I mean this … to me this sort of just shows his genius that at a certain point he didn’t think, he didn’t think that this was something that was of another order.

But it’s so clearly a matter or not just working hard. It’s … it requires working hard, it requires that 90% perspiration and, and … but the nature of the achievement is so objectively overwhelming that I think it, it needs to be recognized for what its, that there is a phenomenon that, that we should recognize, assess, judge, put in context, all the rest … but also have great respect for.

HEFFNER: Does that put you even more in awe of many of the geniuses you’ve dealt with in your writings?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, I … yes, actually … I mean it’s … you know … I … there is a certain point where you sort of come to understand say a particular figure or a piece of music, or a composer or a novel, or whatever it is … an argument or an insight … and it changes the way you see the world, the way you perceive other things … that this way of putting things together may be, may have a … debts to many other kinds of influences, but something about the particular simplicity and elegance and concentration of this expression is so powerful, that you find that other things that you experience are felt in … as if it’s being seen through the eyes of this work or this achievement.

HEFFNER: What does it do to you to be a … I was going to say to play the role of … but you don’t play the role of critic, you are a critic. What, what over the years do you feel has changed in you because of this … these assignments.

ROTHSTEIN: Well, I think … it’s a little bit strange, actually, that in some ways I became a newspaper critic.

HEFFNER: Why?

ROTHSTEIN: Ahemm, I guess because maybe connected a little bit to what I was just describing about this sort of sense that … of, I guess, intellectual awe that I have with respect to sort of works of genius, that I feel that there is something about them first that is of such a different level and nature than the things we come in contact with every day. That’s it’s very hard, that you can’t review and write about daily life always having these as the sort of archetypes and modes of what things should be.

You don’t review a play and say, “Well, it’s, it’s not King Lear”. You don’t listen to a new composition and say, “Well, it’s not Beethoven”. And yet those models have to always be there in your mind as a critic because there is a great tendency when you’re doing daily journalism, a daily criticism, a weekly criticism, to start to think that … you lose the bigger perspective and your memory sort of becomes constrained by your constant sort of feeding input of experience of contemporary life.

And you start to say, “Well, this is not bad, this is pretty good because … you know … I’ve been … for six months I’ve been going around to X, Y or Z and I’ve seen all these different things and this stands up pretty well, and it’s not bad.

And then you step back and say, “Now wait a minute what about … if I look … take a bigger perspective and I look at things that have gone on in the last 50 or a 100 years, or take an even bigger perspective and say, What about the … what’s my … what, what are my standards here, what am I using for judgment?”

And I think it’s too easy to, veer in either direction … that is to say, Well, you look at the ancient Greeks and that becomes the sort of model for everything. Or you say, you know, anything that is sort of a popular hit and something that’s in popular culture right now that seems so vital, that becomes the standard or that there’s no distinction to be made between them.

So these are all, sort of, I think critical traps in a way that it, it’s very easy just in the force of experience to get into … and I, I think what I try to do is to somehow keep in mind, even in the midst of enthusiasm for current things, something of this sense of scale. And that’s, that’s very difficult to do.

HEFFNER: Well, you say you try to keep in mind something of the sense (clears throat) … excuse me … of scale. Do you have an obligation as a critic to communicate to your readers what that scale is?

ROTHSTEIN: I think so, or I think it sometimes can come off implicitly in, in the way in which you write about something or express something.

That is you, you can be extremely enthusiastic, but use words that indicate that what you’re … that your enthusiasm is of a certain kind.

I’m trying … let me think of an example. I mean I’ve heard … let, let me take a musical performance. I’ve heard performances where at … when I was doing daily criticism … where I just did not even want to take notes. I didn’t want to think, I was just totally mesmerized intellectually, emotionally, on every level, by what was being performed.

And those performances are very rare. And, and … and actually it’s rare in any art … to come across something like that. And when I’ve written about those experiences I want to make sure that it’s clear both that it’s rare and that this is in someway a touchstone, that this is, after all, what everybody is sort … who’s experienced it … sort of yearns for, or strains at or hopes to find.

And that the pleasures of sort of daily cultural life or intellectual life are one thing and this is something else. And it’s good to keep those things … it’s good to keep both in mind.

HEFFNER: Well, you know, I went back … you’ll forgive me if I went beyond the New York Times and I’ll talk about another essay you wrote for a non-New York Times publication.

But this, of course, was about you and it was from the University of Chicago, talking … the title was “Everybody’s A Critic” and this was about you.

And the section on being a critic quotes you, “I don’t know too many critics who go out for team sports,” Rothstein confessed in a 1998 Slate electronic journal entry.

“We spend too much time determined to figure out everything for ourselves”, talking about you critics, “shunning the dangers of group think, opposing the forces of fashion, the pressures of indebtedness, the obsequies of fandom.

“Whatever drummer this critic mass marches to, it is not often compatible with notions of team work, self-sacrifice and submission to the will of a coach.

“We march to the spastic beats of self-conscious individualism, a perverse conformity”. You bragging about that?

ROTHSTEIN: Hmmm.

HEFFNER: There you are …

ROTHSTEIN: Well I …

HEFFNER: … off by yourself.

ROTHSTEIN: (Laugh) Yeah. You know there was a, there was an essay that Hal Rosenberg the art critic wrote, probably about 60 years ago, called us, I think “the herd of independent minds”. In my more cynical moments this is what I think of that, that … in a way … takes the culture of criticism is this, these independent minds sort of struggling to work things out on their own.

You know, don’t tell me about what X, Y or Z is … or what so and so said, you know, it’s up to me to come to this assessment or judgment.

And you have hundreds of people saying exactly this same thing. And what’s sometimes surprising is how, how this, I think, urge toward independent individualism, ends up creating its own kind of conformity and its own kind of … set of manners …

HEFFNER: The herd.

ROTHSTEIN: Yes. And, and, and again I’m talking about a struggle that, I think every critic must or probably does go through in … over time … that is how, how exactly am I defining what I like or don’t like or how I react to things? And what is it that I’m missing because … this is a very idiosyncratic way of viewing the world. That is to say, nothing else, no other opinions are going to be as important as, as mine. And that I am marking out a sort of independent path.

I mean the … we would have no sort of notion of community, no social structures, no … no sense of nation or of, of larger purpose, if, if this were really the rule by which people sort of operated.

HEFFNER: But isn’t it … for the critics?

ROTHSTEIN: And it is, it is for the critics and I think it can sometimes lead to this … a pride that is maybe overdone and an insensitivity to other ways of seeing things.

HEFFNER: What about the power that goes with that pride?

ROTHSTEIN: Ahemm, the best thing I can say about this is that The Times has a tremendous amount of power still … not as much as I think it once did … in, in the sort of cultural world because there are now so many different … I mean there was a period when a review from The Times would be of a performer or of a play … could be … could essentially make or break somebody or something.

And when I was starting out as a young music critic I would spend many nights in then Carnegie Recital Hall listening to debut artists play for perhaps several dozen audience members … many of them probably members of the family.

And the purpose of the debut recital was to, essentially, get a review in to The New York Times and this review would then be used as a sort of chit in somebody’s career for an academic position or for students or for another booking or something like this.

So The Times review had this tremendous impact on individual careers. Now that still goes on, but The Times is part of this larger sort of cultural world, it’s not just the Internet and television, etc.

But I don’t think that sort of power still exists. At the same time there are certain things that working for The Times does, that confers an amount of power that very few other publications have the power to do.

And in certain areas that can be quite strong, so that you can become very used to saying, “Ah, this is Edward Rothstein from The Times, can I see X, Y or Z in the next two days. Or I need this and this material”, and it will appear and doors will open.

And the fallacy is in thinking that this is some way a sort of personal power. I mean it’s personal … not … but it, it’s really the institutional power being sort of fed through the individual person.

HEFFNER: Doors open.

ROTHSTEIN: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: But doors close, too.

ROTHSTEIN: Oh, yes.

HEFFNER: Not on The Times, but because of The Times. Have you … have you ever been concerned about that kind of power that you wield, you and your colleagues?

ROTHSTEIN: I think in the … at the moment of writing or thinking about this, the only thing you can do in order to function is to ignore it. And, and to just try to be as honest and knowledgeable as possible about whatever you’re discussing or looking into. Because otherwise you are so in danger of second guessing or modifying or contorting what you say that it, that you end up sort of ruining your act of criticism.

But I mean there are ways in which because something’s is in The Times where it might not be seen as clearly also, that where it might be … I mean there’s a way in which we read newspapers where we pay less attention to certain aspects of something and more attention to others. Or the context of the newspaper creates the ways in which we understand or read.

So it’s possible, too, that this power of The Times can end up clouding some points that you want to make because they’re not … they can’t stand apart from that newspaper context. I’m not sure I’m being clear about this.

HEFFNER: This I don’t quite understand. I think immediately of … oh, I think of Frank Rich when he was a drama critic and of, I kept hearing about the enormous power and kept regretting so many times as much as I came to enjoy him when he left that position and wrote his more general columns for The Times.

I remember a play … what was it … All Good Men … or … it was a play that my friend David Brown was involved with and I remember going to see it opening night and loving it, thinking it was wonderful. And Frank Rich killed it.

ROTHSTEIN: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: He didn’t totally kill it because David and his fellow producers were able to buy space in The New York Times for ads …

ROTHSTEIN: Mmmm.

HEFFNER: … over a considerable period of time. And it got people to go and then …

ROTHSTEIN: Word of mouth.

HEFFNER: Yeah. Now it’s that kind of power. Do you think The Times still has it?

ROTHSTEIN: I don’t think so.

HEFFNER: Because you can turn elsewhere so quickly …

ROTHSTEIN: Yes. And because there are so, so many that the, the sort of newspaper review isn’t, isn’t as supreme as it once was as a sort of marketing tool. That it’s … I mean I don’t want to go too far in that direction, either, because it … obviously there’s still tremendous power in the institution and in, in the way it’s read.

And the assumptions that it, that it presents which is, “Look we have some fantastic writers, we have readers who are intelligent and eager to understand. And there’s a sort of synergy here that is really remarkable, I mean … and I, I remember in being a music critic being struck by … if you go to a concert, a classical concert in Carnegie Hall, say … 99% of the people sitting in that hall will look for The Times review of that concert.

This is not true if you went to a, a Nicks game … this would not be true if you went to … even … well, let’s say a rock concert or it wouldn’t be true, necessarily, even of an art gallery opening. It would be less where there’s a different kind of sort of professional review association.

HEFFNER: How about the people associated with the reviews you write … of museums, of themes, or religion … ah … whatever.

ROTHSTEIN: Well, let’s say if I’m … I review a lot of exhibitions now or new museums … and I think … there … I don’t … there are not a lot of critics who do what I do as far as museums are concerned. I think there’s no other critic in, in newspapers now that has a beat like this. And that’s thanks to The Times sort of deciding that this would be something interesting to, to do.

So, in a sense the … in many of these places that I go to, the only piece of non-sort-of-feature or non-background writing that takes place … the only piece of critical writing may end up being The Times review. I’m not certain about this since it’s not true of the really major openings and events.

But, I don’t … and I know that from having heard from exhibition people that if I’ve written a very positive review of an exhibition that certain kinds of exhibitions can find lines around the block afterwards.

But that that … this is still a matter of like, well what kind of exhibition is it or what kind of event. For example, let’s say when … probably five years ago or so … this, this … let me give you an example from the other end … I … one of the most … I think one of the worst new museums that I have seen in … was the American Indian Museum in Washington.

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

ROTHSTEIN: And I just thought everything about it was sort of intellectually … sort of weak and dishonest and sort of manipulative. And I was kind of shocked about this and I said so in a couple of essays.

Now this has, this is fine … it’s not going to change the fact that that building is there, that hundreds of thousands of people go and that many people end up liking it. So that kind of negative reaction … the only thing I can hope is that the argument that I’m making about this will cause somebody to think about …

HEFFNER: The next …

ROTHSTEIN: … well, yeah, the next time, or modifying something, if they’re convinced that I’m right or it I’m, if I’m not then maybe somebody will try to convince me.

HEFFNER: Well, what about the positive …

ROTHSTEIN: But the, the positive things … there are, there are really gems of exhibitions that might be overlooked that I try to cover. And there I know … and I’m trying to think of a particular example … a couple of years ago at Sotheby’s there was a display of the Hebrew book collection of a particular collector in England which was one of the great world collections of seven centuries of Hebrew printing.

And it was really a remarkable thing and I, I wrote about it in, in the paper. And it was not a kind of exhibition, like in a typical museum … it was … the idea was Sotheby’s was trying to sell this to a major institution or a major collector.

But it was on display, publicly, free for a week. And after my review there were lines to go see it. Because this was something that was where my sort of description of it, or evaluation of it was apparently convincing enough to enough people so that it, it just made it an event.

HEFFNER: What about the …

ROTHSTEIN: But it …

HEFFNER: Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t mean to interrupt.

ROTHSTEIN: But … so, there, there are some things where I, I know things matter and other things where it won’t matter. But my own sort of intention in writing still stays about the same.

HEFFNER: What about the response to you in the, in the paper or at the paper … the “Dear Sir, You cur … “

ROTHSTEIN: Oh, yes.

HEFFNER: … sort of things.

ROTHSTEIN: I tend to get … it is very difficult for me, sometimes to predict what our … what kind of response or what pieces are going to touch a nerve that will lead to responses.

Sometimes something will be posted on the web and I’ll be deluged with letters, almost immediately. Sometimes I, I will think I wrote something that was good or important and it disappears into the ether.

It’s … so since it’s impossible for me to predict, I try not to pay that much attention to it.

HEFFNER: Well, you know I, I there is so much … our, our time is just about up, there’s so much more that I want to ask you about … so many of these exhibits … I, I think of what you wrote about slavery. And the response to it … one letter of which I, I saw that I hope you’ll stay where you are, let us complete this program and then do another one. Okay?

ROTHSTEIN: Be happy to.

HEFFNER: Good. Thank you so much for joining me on this program, Ed Rothstein.

ROTHSTEIN: 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.”

And do visit the Open Mind website at www.theopenmind.tv

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Newton Minow
AIR DATE: 01/15/2012
VTR: 11/11/2011

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

But it is very much in another role long past – as the Founding General Manager of New York’s premier educational television Channel Thirteen in the early 1960’s – that I can testify just how crucial a role today’s Open Mind guest played in making Thirteen possible, in expanding the whole concept of public television in America, and at least for a long, long moment in time making commercial television think hard about its public interest obligations and about the price it might have to pay for ignoring them. Of course, it didn’t.

But a half century ago – as John F. Kennedy’s youthful and wonderfully outspoken Federal Communications Commission Chairman – Newton Minow did put the fear, if not of God, then at least of government into American broadcasters when early on he bearded the lion in its own den, addressing the Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters and telling its fat-cat broadcast license holders that while they had made American television into a “vast wasteland”, he intended to use the FCC’s “power to license, to renew or to fail to renew, or to revoke a license” to get broadcasters to meet their obligation to serve the public interest.

My guest very much put it on the line: “I did not come to Washington to idly observe the squandering of the public’s airwaves”, he told the broadcasters.

“I intend to take the job of chairman of the FCC very seriously.
“There will be times perhaps when you will consider that I take myself or my job too seriously. Frankly, I don’t care if you do.

“For I am convinced that either one takes this job seriously — or one can be seriously taken.”

WOW … one would say today.

So, Mr. Chairman, looking back over the past half century, what do you think has happened to those wonderful words?

MINOW: We changed television totally. We opened public television, which didn’t exist, really … there was no public television station in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles … I had come from Chicago, where we had a station. President Kennedy had come from Boston where there was a station. We thought the whole country had stations.

So we did something about that. We opened up cable, we opened up satellite television … we tried to give the public a greater range of choice. And I think in that we succeeded.

HEFFNER: If you would do … to do the same thing you told the NAB people that you did … if you were to sit down for a day, a week … and watch commercial television … would you be saying the same thing? Would you use that wonderful phrase “vast wasteland” again?

MINOW: I didn’t pay any attention to that phrase at the time.

HEFFNER: You didn’t?

MINOW: No.

HEFFNER: Everyone else did.

MINOW: I … well the press picked it up. I had two other words in mind … the two words I cared about were “public interest … public interest”. Those two words are in the Communications Act some 37 times. But broadcasters have forgotten that their job was not to serve the private interest, but to serve the public interest.

HEFFNER: Do you think … maybe it’s an unfair question … you’re a sweet and generous as well as humorous person … how well has the Commission done in this past half century in observing its own charter to make certain that broadcasting serves in the public interest?

MINOW: It’s spotty. Sometimes it’s been much better than others. When I went to the FCC, it was at a terrible time in the broadcast industry and at the agency. There had been scandals in the business … the payola scandals, there had been bribery scandals … the … President Eisenhower … President Kennedy’s predecessor had to fire the FCC Chairman for improper conduct.

The thing was a mess. So the first thing I wanted to do was clean the joint up and I think we did succeed in that. And then I felt the important thing was to enlarge choice for the viewer and we certainly … today, my God, there’s more choice than you can handle.

HEFFNER: Did you reflect Kennedy’s interest?

MINOW: Yes. I, I didn’t talk to the President about the speech before I gave it. But the night I gave it, I got a phone call … I got two phone calls at home.

First was from the President’s father. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. I got a … I picked up the phone … “the White House is calling. Ambassador Kennedy is calling” … I thought “Oh my God, I’m going to catch hell to this”.

Ambassador Kennedy said, “Newt, I told my son that was the best speech since his Inaugural Address. You stick with it, you do what you’re doing … anybody gives you any trouble … you call me … good-bye” … hung up.

The next call was from Edward R. Murrow, who was then … had left CBS and he was running the US Information Agency for the government. And he called and he said, “Newt, you stole my speech”.

HEFFNER: (Laughter)

MINOW: I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Don’t you remember the speech I gave in your home town of Chicago two years ago”. And I said, “Ed, I’m sorry … I’m not familiar with it.” He said, “I’ll send it to you. You stole my speech”.

Well, I read his speech and he was right because he gave the same speech, two years earlier to the news directors in television.

HEFFNER: It’s interesting that you spoke to the National Association of Broadcasters … it wasn’t all that many years later … it was in ’68 that Lyndon Johnson spoke to them, too, immediately after he said in a televised address to the nation that he would not seek, nor would he accept the nomination of his party.

He was talking about the great power of the broadcasters. And he was reminding them that with great power goes great responsibility. He was talking about what the living room war had done to our capacity to win a war … rightly or wrongly.

MINOW: Well, you remember, he said, “When I lost Walter Cronkite” … he said, “That was the end of the war”.

Ah, I had an extraordinary experience with Vice President Johnson and President Kennedy … the day I gave the … the day before I gave that speech.

Ahem … America had fallen behind in the space race. The Russians had sent a man into space … we had not. But finally in May of, of 1961 … the United States sent it’s first man into space … Commander Alan Shepard … he arrived home safely and he was in the White House … the President was going to take him to Congress.

And the President asked me to meet him at the Oval Office and to ride with him to the National Association of Broadcasters Convention … where the President was to give a speech.

So I waited outside the Oval Office … President Kennedy came out … and he said, “Newt,” he said, “what about taking the Shepards with us to the Broadcasters …” I said, “That would be terrific”. He said, “Well, let me arrange it”. He went back in the office and he came back out …

He said, “It’s all under … being arranged.” He said, “You come with me I want to change my shirt.”

So he took me upstairs to the living quarters and started to change his shirt. He said, “What do you think I should say to the broadcasters”?

And I said … even though I knew him before he was President … I was scared to death, I was very intimidated. And I said, “Well, Mr. President, you ought to say that in our country when we send a space shot, we invite the press … radio and television … to cover it. Everything is in the open. That’s a free society. When the Russians do it, we never know what happened … if it was a failure or a success, because everything is a secret”.

President didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, “That’s good, that’s bad” … we went downstairs, we started to get in the car and I realized now because of the Shepards I should get in the second car … and the President said, “No, no, no, no.”. He said, “I’ll take the Shepards in the back seat with me and he turned to the Vice President … he said, “Lyndon …

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

MINOW: … you sit in the jump seat … Newt, you sit in the jump seat”. So the two of us are in the jump seat. We’re driving up Rock Creek Park to what was then called the Wardman Park Hotel, it’s now the Sheraton Park Hotel.

The President was in a very ebullient mood. He slaps Lyndon on the back. He said, “Lyndon,” he said, “As Vice President, you are the Chairman of the Space Council, but nobody knows it. But I guarantee you, Lyndon, if that space shot had been a failure, I would have seen to it that everybody would have known.”

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

MINOW: I thought it was pretty funny and a big mouth, so I said, “Mr. President …”, I said, “If that had been a failure, the Vice President would have been the next astronaut”.

And Lyndon looked at me like he’s going to kill me. President got up, gave his two minute, perfect speech about a free society, how we opened up the space shot to radio and television. And left to great cheers.

And the next day I came back to speak and I think the broadcasters wished I had changed my shirt …

HEFFNER: What a double whammy, huh. Newt, you’ve had such a fascinating career and I know that you began in terms of your chairmanship of the FCC and your familiarity with Jack Kennedy through Adlai Stevenson.

MINOW: Yes.

HEFFNER: And I’ve always wanted to ask you … you think he would have made as interesting, as spectacular a President, however short lived his Presidency was, as Jack Kennedy did?

MINOW: I think he would have been very successful, particularly on international affairs. That was his main interest and he was very, very good at it.

He played a critical role in 1962 in the Cuban missile crisis. Where … what he proposed basically was what we ended up doing. We ended up swapping the American missile bases in Turkey and Greece in exchange for the Russians getting out of Cuba. We didn’t talk about it much, but that was Stephenson. Stephenson was … on foreign affairs, you couldn’t do better. I think the Cold War would have ended more quickly if he had been the President.

HEFFNER: Are you suggesting that on the domestic scene that wouldn’t have been the case?

MINOW: I’m not sure. I think … I was in love with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy … the first time I met Jack Kennedy I thought to myself “This, this guy should be President of the United States” and he was, tragically for such a short time.

But they were both … they both believed something that is not really thought of as being true today.

HEFFNER: What’s that?

MINOW: They both believed politics could be an honorable profession. They both believed that.

Stevenson also believed something nobody believes today. Stevenson said, “There are worst things that can happen to a person than losing an election”.

HEFFNER: But he lost twice.

MINOW: He lost twice.

HEFFNER: Do you think if Eleanor Roosevelt had prevailed he would have run the third time and lost again?

MINOW: He had promised her that he’d stay out of it. I, I had urged him … and others had urged him to come out for Kennedy before the nomination occurred. But he resisted and I, I think he had promised Mrs. Roosevelt that he would stay neutral.

HEFFNER: She wanted him, again to be the candidate.

MINOW: Yes, she did. Yes, she did.

HEFFNER: A, a modern day William Jennings Bryant, perhaps.

MINOW: Speaking of Mrs. Roosevelt … she called me when I was at the FCC one day. And she said, “Why haven’t you answered Reverend Smith’s letter to you?”.

And I said, “I’m sorry Mrs. Roosevelt, I don’t know what, what it is.” She said, “Reverend Smith is a minister in Mississippi, he’s a Black man, and he’s running for Congress and he’s trying to get on television there. He’s willing to pay for it and he can’t get on.”

Well, I checked and sure enough, down in the basement at the FCC he letter is sitting on somebody’s desk and I said, “Well, what about this?” and they said, “Well, we checked with his opponent … who was a man … the incumbent … his name was John Bell Williams … and he’s not buying any time and the law requires that the candidates be treated equally. And since the opponent is not buying any time, station says they don’t have to sell any time because they’re not selling any time to the opponent.”

I said, “That’s ridiculous”. At that time we sent telegrams. I send a telegram to the station … I said, “Tell me why it’s in the public interest to have no public discussion of this Congressional race on television?”

Well, they came back and said, “We’re going to put him on.” I said, “Today … the election is three days from now”.

They put him on, he lost the election, but it was the first time a Black candidate in Mississippi had ever been on television.

HEFFNER: Well …

MINOW: Later the FCC took their license away … after I had left … because they continued to discriminate.

HEFFNER: Newt, though you bring up the matter of, of equal time … and you’re very much involved in the Presidential debates …

MINOW: Yes.

HEFFNER: … now. Now, we didn’t have those debates until Jack Kennedy and, and Richard Nixon. And I remember very well when Frank Stanton … testifying before the Senate, asking them to get rid of 315a. Then changed his tune and said “suspend 315 for the Presidential and Vice Presidential election”.

MINOW: And they did it for 1960, the Presidential race only. So it got to be ’64, Congress did not change the law. ’68 did not change the law. ’72 did not change the law. ’76 did not change the law. But the League of Women Voters then petitioned the FCC to re-interpret the law so that a debate would be treated as a news event. And news events are exempt from the equal time law. So that’s what happened.

HEFFNER: Newt, funny question to ask you. Don’t you think we’re playing a national game with the Section 315 … equal time in this way?

MINOW: Oh, I think we should go way beyond 315. I, I think … scandalous, scandalous that we are one of the few free countries that does not provide public service time as a routine to political candidates.

The best systems are in Japan and England, Canada, most of Europe. Where candidates who run for public office are provided time. They don’t have to raise the enormous amounts of money to purchase time on the public airwaves.

HEFFNER: What do you think’s going to happen now? We urged when we worked together on that 20th Century Foundation project that you chaired …

MINOW: Well, and you did …

HEFFNER: … Citizens Time.

MINOW: I have to say, Dick, you did a brilliant job with that. It was the best idea … even though it was not adopted … we testified in Congress about it. It was a great idea and I, I think one day it will still happen.

HEFFNER: One day?

MINOW: One day.

HEFFNER: Do you realize how many years ago that was?

MINOW: (Laughter)

HEFFNER: That was 1968 …

MINOW: You and I may not see it, but I think it’s going to happen. Because this is a scandal.

HEFFNER: What do you think about the debates now?

MINOW: Well, I’ve been watching … I’m a political junkie … I’ve been watching all the Republican debates … there are too many of them. And unfortunately they’ve opened it up to partisan audiences with a lot of reaction and screaming.

But they do give the voters … they do give the voters an opportunity to evaluate the candidates and that’s what counts.

HEFFNER: And that’s what you and, and your commission wanted … voter time.

MINOW: That’s right. I’m still on that Debate Commission, even at my age I’m Vice Chairman of the Debate Commission … we just, within the last week, announced the dates and places for the 2012 debates.

HEFFNER: Please, Newt, none of this … even at my age … we established before that I’m older than you are so that …

MINOW: A few months.

HEFFNER: … all right … let’s, let’s turn, we don’t have much time … let’s, let’s turn to the thing that has interested you so over the years … what we now call “public television”. Where are we with public television?

MINOW: Oh, we failed the most important part of it … which was to find an adequate way to finance it. The original idea that the Carnegie Commission on Public Television proposed was that there would be a $5 excise tax on the sale of every television set and that $5 would go into a trust fund for public broadcasting. Other countries have similar arrangements.

HEFFNER: Much more money, though.

MINOW: Much more money. We failed to fund it. And President Johnson, who wanted public television, but was in the midst of the Vietnam War, did not want to propose any increase in taxes, failed to provide any adequate method of finance.

So the result is that public television and I’ve been the Chairman of our station in Chicago, the Chairman of PBS, we go around with tins cups begging for … public for money … and we succeed to a certain extent. But it is not what it should be.

HEFFNER: But you have also been a major figure in the American foundation world. Chairman of the Board at the Carnegie … do you think it’s about time for the major foundations to fund, to endow public television?

MINOW: I think … that, that would be an excellent choice. I think that the general public also should participate in it. It shouldn’t only foundation money. Foundations do support it … not the way the Ford Foundation was really a principal funder of … the beginning of public television.

And I, I would hope the foundations would do, would do much more in the future.

HEFFNER: I … you’ve been quoted as saying that the public television structure itself needs some changing. Not so many stations, perhaps.

MINOW: There are too many stations. Tragically … take the case of Los Angeles. We had something like five or six television … public television signals coming into the same area.

HEFFNER: Each asking for money.

MINOW: That’s right. Which was … it, it ended up with … tragically the biggest station, KCET, withdrawing from PBS. So there should be fewer stations and there should … there’s an excess of democracy in the public television world … to an excess.

HEFFNER: That’s interesting. Spell that one out.

MINOW: Well …

HEFFNER: Too much localism?

MINOW: Well, each station … the station’s came before the network. The stations came first. And as a result these stations really don’t want a strong national service, as I think they have to have if you want to really be an effective service.

HEFFNER: You think that’s the way we can fund it.

MINOW: The funding is a mess. If you ask any of the public television people here on Channel 13 or the SUNY stations or all of them. They’ll all say “We don’t have enough money”. And it’s true.

HEFFNER: You know … I … I was a small station manager, or a believer in small stations when I ran Channel 13. I admit that since that time … dollar problems have demonstrated to me that we need to consolidate. Doesn’t satellite broadcasting now provide the key to that?

MINOW: It does. And I’m very proud that when I was involved with PBS, we were the first, before commercial broadcasting … we were the first to go to satellite.

HEFFNER: I didn’t know that.

MINOW: Yes. The … public television was the first operator of a satellite system connecting the stations.

HEFFNER: What happens then to local issues? Seriously.

MINOW: Well, we do a very good job in Chicago. We have a nightly program, every night … an hour of local issues. It’s widely watched and I wish every station had the, had the facilities and the money to do it. Because it’s needed.

HEFFNER: Yeah, but the … Chicago, they’ve had you all these years and the moxie you bring and … as in Boston … with the Lowell Foundation. Where else do you find that?

MINOW: Well, I, I think … I think Channel 13 is, is strong. But it needs help. I think we’ve got to find a long term, better way for, for … what we spend on public broadcasting in this country compared to what the British spend or the Japanese spend … it’s infinitesimal.

HEFFNER: You know … spent … I get the signal we have two minutes left and there’s so much I want to ask you about.

I, I want to ask you about Citizens United and I want to ask you about the Fairness Doctrine and so many other things.

The Fairness Doctrine, for instance. Would you, today, endorse …

MINOW: No. I think the Fairness Doctrine was needed when we had few stations. If you had … let’s say … we have citizen … in this country with one television station … it was impossible for one television station to be allowed to present only one point of view. So the government had a … what was called the Fairness Doctrine … said you should deal with controversial issues, but when you do, you must present all sides of it.

Today with the enormous proliferation of stations and with the concern we have about the First Amendment, I think that the Fairness Doctrine’s day is over. But I do think that the public has got to switch channels and get different points of view, not watch only one channel.

HEFFNER: But, Newt, the public doesn’t.

MINOW: Well, we ought to educate the public. I think young people are getting more and more of their news now through sources other than television.

HEFFNER: Yeah. But their news is about who’s twittering me about this, that or the other thing.

MINOW: That’s right.

HEFFNER: Are you sanguine about that?

MINOW: No, and I think what’s happened is the attention span of this country has shortened to such an extent, that any complicated issue … and we’re … our country is confronted with such important, complex questions, and we don’t really grasp the significance of them because our attention span is of … about like a flea.

HEFFNER: Newt Minow, our time is up …

MINOW: Dick, it’s great to be with you.

HEFFNER: Well, it’s great to have you here. And I wish you’ll come back and talk about all these other issues. Meanwhile, thanks for joining me today.

MINOW: Thank you.

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

And do visit the Open Mind website at www.theopenmind.tv

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Floyd Abrams
AIR DATE: 01/07/2012
VTR: 11/04/2011

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And I’m particularly pleased and proud to welcome back today for what over the years must be three dozen times by now … my old friend and often intellectual adversary, the distinguished First Amendment Attorney Floyd Abrams, just honored by Yale Law School’s formation of The Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression.

Now Yale describes the mission of the Abrams Institute as both practical and scholarly.

“It will include a clinic for Yale Law students to engage in litigation, draft model legislation, and give advice to lawmakers and policy makers on issues of media freedom and informational access.

“It will promote scholarship and law reform on emerging questions concerning both traditional and new media.

“And it will hold scholarly conferences and events at Yale on First Amendment issues and on related issues of access to information, Internet and media law, telecommunications, privacy, and intellectual property.”

Well, my guest, well known as a senior partner in the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel, first rose to national prominence 40 years ago when he was co-counsel with Yale Law School’s Alexander Bickel in their successful defense before the Supreme Court of the New York Times resistance to the Nixon Administration’s attempts to suppress the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

In the four decades since then, Floyd Abrams has time and again argued First Amendment cases before the high court.

Most recently and certainly quite controversially, he
successfully represented Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Citizens United case defending the right of corporations and unions to participate in election campaigns with literally unlimited sums of money … a “win” for my guest that those of us who do NOT equate money with speech dread beyond words.

Now, for the last near three decades, of course, Floyd has again and again joined me on The Open Mind for conversations on such varied issues as “Campus protest: what is permissible?”, “Libel law: protecting the individual”, “The adversarial system: an ethical concern”, “Personal privacy vs. public security”, “Taking the Fifth”, “If Jefferson were here”, “Why lawyers lie”, “Look who’s trashing the First Amendment”, “Media violence: is there “reasonable ground” to consider it a “serious evil?”, “Money talks, but must it enjoy free speech?”, “Loosening lawyers’ lips”, “Should the press be privileged?”, “Free speech/bad press”, and “The law: what Americans can learn from those who learned from us”.

Now, that’s quite a list, isn’t it?

And I want to begin our conversation today by asking Floyd Abrams if there are any of these topics and themes on which he’s likely to have changed his mind since we first started parrying and thrusting at one another when the world was so much younger. Floyd?

ABRAMS: Well, first I wish I remember what I had said …

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

ABRAMS: … but, you know, I don’t think I’ve changed my mind on broad legal issues in the sense of giving the press a lot of leeway, assuring that freedom of expression is the rule, not the exception, etc., etc.

I … I’ve probably become … I, I hate to think of it … just with age … but I’ve probably become less assured that speakers, journalists, users of the First Amendment serve the public as often as I once thought they did.

Remember I came of age, in a sense at the sort of “glory time” for the American press, of the 1970s … Pentagon Papers and Watergate and other events where the press was performing what I think, even in retrospect, can be viewed as “heroic” acts.

Now we have a situation where we not only are talking about entities beyond the press, who must, in my view, and I’m sure the court’s view, have all the same protections.

HEFFNER: The New Media …

ABRAMS: The New Media … and cable television … no longer new media, but, but, you know, entities that sometimes comport themselves in a way less attractive and certainly less fulfilling, I think, in terms of public information … then I have …

HEFFNER: You don’t want to regret anything you say now …

ABRAMS: Than I, I once thought … well I, I … you know a time comes when you can tell a little more truth.

So, I, I … as I said … so I, I think where I’m at is, is not so much changing my mind about the level of freedom, but I have to be prepared to deal with, with a Wikileaks world now. When I think about freedom of expression, and I think Wikileaks has been a … has been and has behaved in a deeply reckless manner.

So I am re-thinking not whether there ought to be broad protection for freedom of expression, but I guess I’m re-thinking more the consequences of affording the level of protection that I think ought to exist.

HEFFNER: Is that because we live in a terrorist-ridden world?

ABRAMS: I think it’s partly a terrorist-ridden world, partly it’s a world where … and this is good and bad … you know, we don’t have sort of an elitist … and I don’t mean it in that … especially in a pejorative sense … but we don’t have a, a singularly set out entity of great newspapers that are the great providers of information to the public.

Most people get information from other places now than newspapers and indeed, more and more other than radio or television, too. On computer, online … there is a coarseness, a brutishness to, to the discussion I think now … which did not exist, at all, as much then.

And there is much more … now … a willingness to, to put almost anything out to the public … not talking about fabrications … but I’m talking about rumors … so-and-so said, or sort of said or suggested … is immediately “viral”, as they say.

And, and so the consequences of speech are often more troubling to me because there is far less effort even at responsibility amongst the, the speakers.

HEFFNER: Now, now some time ago, perhaps 30 years ago or whenever our first program was … if I had said something about coarseness …

ABRAMS: Yes.

HEFFNER: … unattractiveness … you would have said to me … immediately … “Well, but that’s the speech we … through the First Amendment, want to protect” …

ABRAMS: Well, I’m still saythat, Dick.

HEFFNER: … not the speech we embrace.

ABRAMS: I’m still saying that, Dick … I’m still saying that, that we should protect it …

HEFFNER: But?

ABRAMS: … I think there’s more of it and it’s … it affects society in a, a more … what should I say … in a manner that, that does positive harm to society …to a greater degree than I had thought. I’m still in favor of, of letting people say it … I think the consequences of suppression of speech are just as bad as I always thought … but I thought the benefits of, of a sort of totally free landscape involved more pain, more misleading qualities to them and maybe less of a … sort of a predominantly beneficent one than I had once thought.

HEFFNER: Well, I, I … you worry me … I’m beginning to think that “My God, I’m not going to last another … what … this program …

ABRAMS: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: … 56 years to …

ABRAMS: Yeah.

HEFFNER: … get you to come back, but if I did …

ABRAMS: It sounds like you …

HEFFNER: … you would almost sound like me …

ABRAMS: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: … you’d be …

ABRAMS: … but the difference, I think …

HEFFNER: Yeah.

ABRAMS: … Dick, is that you have always been more ready to act on those concerns, by being more willing to limit, what I consider to be, the full range of freedom of expression.

HEFFNER: But, Floyd, don’t you think the movement that you’ve made intellectually must, at some point, become a willingness on your part to be limiting, as I am?

ABRAMS: Well, I think of it … I think of it sometimes …

HEFFNER: You worry about it?

ABRAMS: I worry about myself thinking about …

HEFFNER: Yeah.

ABRAMS: … no, no … no, no … again Wikileaks is, is …

HEFFNER: Yeah.

ABRAMS: … really a very good example. Because I’m frequently asked about the talk of an espionage act … prosecution against it …

HEFFNER: Right.

ABRAMS: … and I sort of retreat … I find myself … into saying that if there were such a prosecution, it would … certainly could, but very well might have a very damaging effect on the press and the other free speech users that I think are … serve the public a lot better, than Wikileaks. But what I don’t do is answer the question. Ah, ah …

HEFFNER: Let’s see, somewhere here in the notes that I made … I’m looking through the scads of transcripts of programs we’ve done … had to do with my questioning you about … would you take any case? And you said then “No, I wouldn’t take any case”. Would you feel constrained not to take that position now, particularly in terms of Wikileaks?

ABRAMS: No, I think I’d probably … you know … it’s a great case … you know (laugh) … for one thing you like to have a great case now and then.

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

ABRAMS: But the truth is that I couldn’t do that case really well. One of the changes, since we started talking … is that lawyers more and more are playing a PR role, as well as a legal role … out on the steps of the courthouse, on television programs … writing things … and that I couldn’t do … wouldn’t do …

HEFFNER: Yeah.

ABRAMS: … if, if the situation was what it was in the sense that what a lawyer would do … and there are still some lawyers that, that simply, you know, go to court, do their work and say, “I don’t talk out of court”.

In my view that’s not serving the client … anymore … in many types of situations. I, I think client needs now require more and more the lawyer to be willing to, to speak up … outside the courtroom as well as inside. And if you’re not prepared to do that in a high publicity situation, you probably shouldn’t start down the road. And so, to, to that degree, you know, I wouldn’t … because there are things I wouldn’t say … supportive of say, Wikileaks … and by the way, they’ve done some good stuff. But, but that aside, there, there is a lot of stuff that Mr. Assange of Wikileaks would want and have a right to want his lawyer to say about how he was serving the public and that it wasn’t true … what I just said … wasn’t true … when I called him reckless … and so, in a situation like that … the short answer is …someone like me the way I am now, shouldn’t represent someone like him.

HEFFNER: Well, it, it was in …

ABRAMS: You seem like a cross-examining lawyer … with all my transcripts in front of you …

HEFFNER: I’ve always … I’ve always wanted to be …

ABRAMS: … not fair (laugh)

HEFFNER: … a lawyer, Floyd. That’s just the point … (laugh) in January ’95 we did a program on “Why lawyers lie”, which I thought was one of the most fascinating and …

ABRAMS: Yeah.

HEFFNER: … you were talking then about the idiocy of reporters, of newspaper people asking a lawyer …

ABRAMS: Yeah.

HEFFNER: … what do you think?

ABRAMS: Yeah, yeah.

HEFFNER: … because a lawyer is supposed to think what represents the client’s interests.

ABRAMS: Yeah. In, in my view it’s a violation of the lawyers obligation to the client for the lawyer to answer “Do you believe your client’s guilty”. Let’s say he’s acquitted … do, do you really think guilty … what, what are you supposed to say? “Look, I know … (laugh) I know he really did it …

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

ABRAMS: … OJ told me privately … you know you can’t … you’re not allowed to … ought not to be allowed to do that. But what it means then is that you either have to say “No comment”, or you have to be prepared to engage in a level … depending on your tolerance for it … of advocacy divorced from your own reality.

HEFFNER: And you’re talking about public relations, really.

ABRAMS: Yeah. Yeah.

HEFFNER: Yeah.

ABRAMS: And, and … I mean this is not a problem for me, this is where we have come to be as a society I think. But one of the consequences I think that people haven’t thought much about is that if we’re going to ask lawyers to play this role out of court as well as in … then you may have difficulty getting lawyers to take some very unpleasant, difficult cases representing probably guilty people who deserve a full fledged defense if part of that representation now means I’m supposed to get up in front of the camera and then say “What an outrage”.

HEFFNER: Well …

ABRAMS: Ahh …

HEFFNER: … this second great court we’ve created … the court of public opinion.

ABRAMS: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s, that’s one of the things that’s, that’s happened. And I think it’s more likely to persist and expand as time goes on.

HEFFNER: Floyd, one of the ways I always knew that I could annoy the hell out of you was by using the phrase “First Amendment voluptuary” …

ABRAMS: Yeah.

HEFFNER: You know, saying “Here’s Floyd Abrams, my friend, the First Amendment voluptuary”. Why did that bother you so much and does it still?

ABRAMS: Oh, no. It never really bothered me …

HEFFNER: You were just making believe?

ABRAMS: The phrase comes from the telephone call I had with Professor Bickel …

HEFFNER: MmmHmm.

ABRAMS: … who, who you mentioned in your introduction when we first asked him to work on a case involving confidential sources of journalists for the press.

And he said, lightly, but more seriously than that … “You understand I’m not a First Amendment voluptuary”.

The truth is, I’ve never thought I was. I, I … people think of me that way and that’s, that’s all right … but, but … I’ve always thought there was a place for libel law in, in American society … I think the press ought to be given, you know, broad boundaries. But boundaries.

I’ve always thought there was room for privacy law and, and, I mean a whole flock of other limitations. I don’t think the espionage law is, is unconstitutional just because it makes the publication of certain types of information a crime.

I mean the hard calls come, I think, when you get beyond those generalities and, and you’re really addressing the question sort on a quantitative basis … well, yeah, but how often do you really think that speech ought to lead to or, or, or be constitutionally … lead to punishment or restraint.

And yes, for someone like me, given my views … it would be very, very rarely. Much more rarely than, than for most people. But it’s not because of a, an absolute belief that every sort of speech had or indeed, ought to, be protected. And it’s not because of a view that, that every sort of speech serves the public.

HEFFNER: Well, the, the program, of course, and the point of view expressed that I thought “Aha, I’ve got Floyd Abrams”, because I couldn’t believe that you would take a position …

ABRAMS: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: … in opposition … was when we were talking about the media … and violence in particular. And you said the first nice thing you ever said … and the last nice thing you every said about what I was addressing … to you … talking about Constitutional protections … and I said to you, “You seem to be saying as you follow Holmes and Brandeis … that if there is, indeed, demonstration of … proof of serious injury … serious evil, then the First Amendment may have to be re-considered, not as an entity, but in terms of its appropriateness to bring into play”.

And you quote Brandeis. You say, quoting him, “It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify supposition of free speech … suppression of free speech there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent”.

And I put that to you and you said, “First, Dick, you have with your unerring eye picked out the one weakness in Justice Brandeis’ opinion. That’s the use of the word “reasonable”.

ABRAMS: Yeah.

HEFFNER: I have the feeling that now you wouldn’t find that a fault … you’d use the word …

ABRAMS: Oh, I would. Oh, no, but I would …

HEFFNER: You wouldn’t?

ABRAMS: No, to import “reasonableness” into a legal standard is, is to, is to risk all that, that we’ve gained in, in protecting the First Amendment through, through the years.

In a lot of speeches … “unreasonable” or some judge could think it and certainly some jury could think it. If we’re going to limit speech, the limitations have to be really narrow … the likelihood of harm has to be very, very great and proved by the government. Not, not … the reasonable possibility.

I mean there, there are people I occasionally watch on television … on Fox, say … do I think they do harm? Of course given my political views. I think they do, they do harm some of them. I think they distort things. The Left does it also, but, but I happen to be focused (laugh) on Fox for the moment.

I wouldn’t think of suppressing their speech. In my view Rush Limbaugh doesn’t serve the American public by what he does. But it would totally distort the First Amendment for anyone to try to take steps and some, some Democrats by talking about imposing … re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine, were aiming at Limbaugh and the Conservative radio talk show people … that’s, that’s directly, flatly contrary to the core of the First Amendment. They have to be given their rights and their way and their ability to persuade people.

But I have a First Amendment right, too, to feel offended and outraged sometimes by what they say.

HEFFNER: You mention the Fairness Doctrine …

ABRAMS: Yeah.

HEFFNER: And you’re going to continue your, your …

ABRAMS: (Laugh) Yeah.

HEFFNER: … errant opinions …

ABRAMS: (Laugh) Yes, yes, yes.

HEFFNER: … about the Fairness Doctrine.

ABRAMS: Yeah.

HEFFNER: Because you think that fits into the category of using word “reasonable”. Reasonable, fairness …

ABRAMS: I think it fits into the category of allowing the government to make content decisions about speech and particularly so in political, social, cultural areas in which government involvement is the most dangerous of all.

HEFFNER: So that’s where we draw the line.

ABRAMS: Well … yeah … I mean that’s, that’s one of the … one of the places that I draw a line.

But I, I think the distinction that I’m making … which I don’t think you are buying … not for the first time …

HEFFNER: You noticed.

ABRAMS: … is between saying there’s a lot of speech out there that not only offends me, but I think does, does some harm. But I, I wouldn’t think of, of limiting it, let alone banning it. And I’d be deeply offended and I am when there are, there are efforts by subterfuge, usually, to cut back on the speech of people … who, with whom we disagree and who we think is harming the public.

HEFFNER: Well, of course, we just have a couple of minutes left and I haven’t persuaded the first question about where you’ve changed your mind. Other things specifically?

ABRAMS: I don’t think I’ve … I, I would say that … as new media, new technological computer driven website media has come to the fore, I’ve had to re-think … I, I can’t say I’ve changed my mind, I’ve had to re-think some areas of the First Amendment where my view was so affected by the fact that the users of these rights would generally have been professional journalists.

HEFFNER: What are you doing with that? How do you figure that one out?

ABRAMS: I figure it out broadly by saying the rules have to be the same. I mean I’ve been confronted in court some times, when I’ve argued for protection for journalists with respect to confidential sources, in those states that don’t have a shield law or in Federal courts … which doesn’t have a shield law … and I would say … and it’s happened more and more recently, you know, I’d say that First Amendment ought to be read in a way to, to afford this right. And now I’m confronted with … “Well, everybody’s now a publisher”.

Are you saying anybody that has a website … anybody …can hide any secret anybody tells them … and it’s a hard question.

I mean, my answer is “No” not everybody, not all the time … they have to behave in a sort of journalistic way … gather information for dissemination to the public. But it takes a lot of re-thinking is all I’m say.

And, and it leaves me with less sureness … you’ll be glad to hear.

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

ABRAMS: About some of the things that I’m saying.

HEFFNER: Glad to see that you’re in the same position I’m in.

ABRAMS: (Laugh)

HEFFNER: Floyd, thank you so much for joining me today. And I’m sure you’re going to join me many, many, many more times.

ABRAMS: Good to see you, Dick.

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

And do visit the Open Mind website at www.theopenmind.tv

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Andy Rooney
AIR DATE: 12/31/2011
ORIGINAL VTR: 11/13/03

Richard Heffner’s Open Mind occasionally interrupts its regular weekly schedule of contemporary on-air conversations to present — In Memoriam — a past program with a distinguished guest who has recently passed.
Today we celebrate the last CBS newsman/writer Andy Rooney, known best perhaps for his years of delighting us on the network’s “60 Minutes”. Born January 14th, 1919, he died November 4th, 2011.
*******************
I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. And I must say that I’ve watched my guest today just about every Sunday evening as he puts his sly, wry concluding remarks to what, for me, is still, week in and week out the best program on the air … 60 Minutes on CBS.
Well Andy Rooney first joined me here on The Open Mind fifteen years ago to talk about fair play. Both the concept and the book by that title written by our mutual friend Bud Benjamin on how a CBS television documentary, on the Vietnam War, had gone wrong. Our discussion, of course, was about much more than that single documentary.
It was really about whether television news itself often goes wrong; whether it often falls short in the sacred precincts of fairness and balance. And at the time, a long time ago in terms of what has happened since to the then commanding almost exclusive presence of essentially but three main broadcast news outlets … CBS, NBC and ABC … at the time Andy Rooney seemed quite determined that American broadcast journalists were pretty doggone honest and fair.
“Why in the world”, my guest asked, “network news held to these high standards when they were producing so much junk in their entertainment divisions, I don’t know. But they did. And it was a marvelous thing for the United States. The American public did not know what a good deal it was getting.”
And in typical Andy Rooney style he suggested that, “Most journalists are more honest than most businessmen in America. Honesty is a hobby with journalists, it’s what they talk about at lunch, it’s what they think about a lot, and so I just think that they have something going in that respect that most businessmen don’t.”
But that was then, this is now and I wonder whether the incredible growth of so many more so-called news outlets and the presence of so much more entertainment oriented journalism since those halcyon days of CBS, NBC and ABC News, particularly the commercial competition between and among them all since the last time we spoke at this table, whether all of that has at all changed my guest’s viewpoint. Has it? Different point of view now?
ROONEY: I quite enjoyed what I just heard you say, I kept forgetting that [laughter] you were quoting me. That’s probably why I liked it so much. It has changed to some extent. Certainly television news has deteriorated.
It is …does not maintain the same standards it once did; they aren’t spending as much money on it. We don’t have the same number of foreign correspondents at the networks; any three of the networks that we once had. And it’s gotten to be more a matter of money than news.
However, there are some aspects of journalism that are encouraging. I think the people getting …young people getting into the business now are better educated. They are thoroughly familiar with the ethical standards that they … are expected of them. And for the most part they live by them.
I don’t think …I don’t think that individual journalists are any less good than they, then they were when I said that last time I was on … 15 years ago. But I do think the standards for the broadcasts themselves have deteriorated.
HEFFNER: Meaning that the broadcasters, the people … the media moguls, those who own stations and networks … they’ve changed?
ROONEY: They have put more pressure on them to attract broader audiences. You … they have segmented the shows and they put cute names on various segments of the shows that have nothing whatsoever to do with news. And its down … a half hour news broadcast now is down to about 20 minutes. And if you took the junk out of it, all the “thank you, Bill and thank you, Jacks” and all that fluff in there and, and promos for upcoming segments of the broadcasts there would probably be 18 minutes, not a half an hour.
And I think that while people don’t specifically say, “Well, there are too many commercials”, or “there’s too much junk in a news broadcast”, I think at the end of it they feel that it might not have been worth the time and that may be why a lot of people are tuning out.
HEFFNER: Is it true? I mean one hears a lot about people not watching the news so much. But also about people not watching … reading their newspapers so much. Are we losing out on an informed public?
ROONEY: Well I don’t know, gosh, I look at the New York Times … I picked it up this morning and it’s daunting. I feel bad every day of my life because I haven’t read the whole New York Times and it’s, it’s just too much to read.
I once asked Harold Raines, who was editor for a period of time … a couple of years … of the Times … how fast he read. And he told me [laughter] he wasn’t a fast reader. And I said, “how many words are there in The New York Times every day?” Well, if he had tried to read all of the newspaper of which he was Editor, it would have taken him nine days. You know, by which time there would have been nine more editions of paper out. So, he said, “Well, it’s like a buffet, you read what parts of it you want.” But that’s not very satisfying.
I bet, I just had this idea the other day. I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the near future, a year or two somebody didn’t come out with a Readers’ Diges” of The New York Times, or a “daily digest” to the paper. I don’t’ know how they’d pay for it because you’d have to eliminate most of the advertising.
But someone’s going to do that. I don’t think people are satisfied. The Times is even having those fold-outs in that when you pick it up from your driveway, the stuff falls out … the scattered advertising they fold in with the paper. I think people are, are … it’s such an unpleasant experience to feel that you aren’t doing the right thing by the paper that a lot of people probably just aren’t buying it.
HEFFNER: Stop buying it because they feel …
ROONEY: I buy the …
HEFFNER: …too guilty.
ROONEY: I buy the New York Post. Usually Saturday morning I get both The New York Times and the New York Post. I mean if you want a really bad newspaper … everybody ought to read a bad newspaper … and if you want a really bad one … you get the Post. I mean it’s great for bad, bad newspaper. And I find myself reading that for ten minutes and the Times for 45 minutes … but you can’t touch the Times in 45 minutes.
HEFFNER: Okay, but let’s go back to this question. Are you serious when you say you feel that a) the younger people coming into broadcast news are better educated …
ROONEY: Oh, I think they are better educated than the people who came into when you and I were young. Yes. I think they’re better educated and I think they have been indoctrinated in, in the ethics of the news business, they know what’s expected of them. Yes. I, I don’t find any, any deterioration in that at all. I think the young people I see are determined to be good, honest, respected journalists.
HEFFNER: Are you trying to get rid of that “old curmudgeon” …
ROONEY: [Laughter] Yeah.
HEFFNER: … reputation?
ROONEY: Is this too much of a nice guy of me. I just feel that way. I knew an awful lot of newspapermen when I was just starting out in the twenties when I first became exposed to the newspaper business. And there were a lot of them who were not what we think of when we think of the best.
HEFFNER: Well, you know, reading through Years of Minutes, one of the more recent Andy Rooney books and reading through Common Nonsense, one of the other more recent Andy Rooney books, I have the feeling in a couple comments there and something you said when we did our program before … you don’t think so all that highly about those first guys in broadcast news. Am I … did I … am I reading it wrong?
ROONEY: Well, I knew a lot of them. I was in London in 1942, I was with the Army newspaper, The Stars and Stripes and I was young. But I got to mingle with the “big boys”. I got to know Ed Murrow in London in 1942. And I got to know Walter Cronkite, became a great and enduring friend; we’re still best friends. And Dick Hottelite was there and I knew a lot of the good newspaper people and broadcast journalists. And I had great respect for them, but they were the best, the people who were sent to the war or overseas as reporters … were the best we had and I don’t think they were all that good in the United States.
I mean I remember reading my newspaper in Albany, New York. I worked for it one summer. And they were not …the reporters were not as educated as the reporters are today.
HEFFNER: Okay, let me go back to the question of the owners and the fact that we’re talking about making money, rather than reporting news. I gather that’s what the point is. What about the issues, the ethical issues … we talked about this to some extent when we met before … like the Fairness Doctrine. What’s your own fix on that now? We haven’t had a Fairness Doctrine in some years. The FCC did away with it a long time ago at President Reagan’s request. Have we suffered for that?
ROONEY: Well, I think they expect the media … I hate the word “media” … [laughter] … and I hate the word “journalist”, but I’ve decided I have to use it. I used to use the word “newspaperman” and I loved that. But then it came … it was too gender specific and newspaperperson never seemed the same to me. But anyway … so now I use “media”. But I, I don’t think … I’ve lost your question …
HEFFNER: Well, I’m asking about …the, the question of some the … the question I’m raising has to do with some of those older notions, and I mentioned fairness and balance as one …the Fairness Doctrine …and I wonder whether the loss of the Fairness Doctrine has impacted upon you.
ROONEY: Well, I don’t think … I don’t think any law can keep a dishonest newspaperman from being dishonest. And I think … I approved of the Fairness Doctrine, it was too bad that it was ever abandoned. But I don’t know as that has a great affect on, on journalists.
HEFFNER: Did you l think it had a chilling affect … as our friend, the late Fred Friendly said at one point.
ROONEY: Well, it must of …
HEFFNER: He changed his mind.
ROONEY: Yeah. I agree with almost anything that Fred Friendly said about journalism; he was much more of a philosopher about it than I am.
HEFFNER: But the question of fairness …you … do you feel … and I’m really pressing you on this … that with all of the wild comments … for instances … I thought the other night, watching you, listening to you … you titled your … well, the two in a row … “We’re all Americans, and I apologize”. You were taking off at one point on the President, and then you came back the following week and you said, “Hey, this is a, an American …
ROONEY: Well, the first …
HEFFNER: … an American trait that you didn’t find attractive.
ROONEY: The first time I didn’t think I was … I did not deliberately set out to “take off” on the President. I thought it was … I wrote what I hoped was both true and amusing that piece …the first thing I did, to remind anyone who didn’t see it, which must be legend in numbers … I purported to write a speech for President Bush, apologizing for all the mistakes he’s made in relation to Iraq. And I just went through all the things he has said that turned out not to be true. Not that he meant … said … but they just didn’t come out the way he hoped they would. We did not get, we did not capture Saddam Hussein or kill him. And none of the things that he has been saying turned out to be true.
But I was not, it was not a personal … I have no agenda about President Bush as a person. I just thought he was wrong and should admit it. And I …the second week I … I am alert to public opinion in relation to what I do. Not that I give a damn. I mean I …you know, I’ve been on so long now, if I got fired next week, it wouldn’t, wouldn’t kill me.
But I think you have to pay some attention to what the American public thinks. We got a lot of objections and we got a lot of mail that was favorable. And I said what I think. I do think that it … Americans are a little too vociferous in their political opinions. I think they are not very reasoned. They take one side or the other. It’s like a football fan or a baseball fan. You can’t argue logic with a Boston baseball fan. [Laughter]
And you can’t argue any logic with a Republican who has voted Republican for all his or her life. And the same with Democrats. I mean they think they are what they are. And they either hate Bush or the love Bush. Quite aside from what the facts of the matter are/is. And they are not willing to say that sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s wrong.
I just … it, it bothers me that Americans are, are as unpleasant as they are about their political opinions and that’s what I tried to say the second time. It was somewhat in the nature of a apology for what I had done the first week, I suppose.
HEFFNER: You’ve done that before?
ROONEY: Apologized?
HEFFNER: Yes.
ROONEY: Oh, no. I don’t … or I may have, I don’t know. I don’t remember what I did … I don’t remember nine-tenths of the pieces in that book. I looked at that when I was putting that book together, and I said “Gee, I don’t remember doing that. Not bad.” Or, I also said, “Gee, that’s terrible. How did I ever write that?”
HEFFNER: You know David Brooks was here a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about the meanness of spirit that seems to be endemic now in American politics.
ROONEY: Kristoff did it in The New York Times, the other day. Did you see that?
HEFFNER: I have it here. A beautiful statement. A beautiful statement.
ROONEY: I hoped he read, I hoped he heard my remarks the other night and was inspired to do his column from what I said.
HEFFNER: I’ll get him here and ask him.
ROONEY: [Laughter] He’s great. Gosh, he’s good.
HEFFNER: There are a lot of good …
ROONEY: There are some good columnists.
HEFFNER: … people writing. And, but when Brooks was here and other New York Times columnists now, he said, “when you sit down to write, a kind of meanness can creep in and there’s really no one there …
ROONEY: Well, it’s attractive in a column if you’re a little nasty. It’s more readable sometimes if you’re nasty.
HEFFNER: For on the air, too?
ROONEY: Or on the air, yeah.
HEFFNER: You mean you … work it that way?
ROONEY: No, I don’t do it. I don’t’ set out … when I sit down to write something, I don’t have in mind, what influence it’s going to have on anybody or I don’t consider what effect the piece is going to have on people seeing it or listening to it. I’m just a writer at that point.
HEFFNER: Just a writer. That’s were you begin.
ROONEY: I just could be … yeah, I am a writer, yes. But I could be writing just for my own amusement or my family or for anybody else. I do not have in mind the people, all the people who are going to hear it.
HEFFNER: It is Rooney commentary. Or is it CBS commentary?
ROONEY: Oh my God, CBS has got nothing to do with it.
HEFFNER: How about 60 Minutes?
ROONEY: Well, Don Hewitt is the producer of 60 Minutes and he has some effect, but he doesn’t … he doesn’t censor me. He may say something’s wrong with my piece. But he has never … he has never … well, I did one piece last year that was critical of somebody and he thought it was a little rough.
But he doesn’t … I can have whatever opinion I want. He does not ask me what I’m doing before I do it. And he sees it after I’ve finished it … somebody in a responsible position has to, has to look at a piece before it goes on the air. And I can be irresponsible, and he pulls me up short once in a while, or suggests a re-write. But not very often. And it’s …he’s usually right when he does it. But he never, he never stops me from saying something because he thinks I’m wrong.
HEFFNER: Tell me about this “I can be irresponsible”. I’m intrigued by your saying that.
ROONEY: Well, I’m … I’m not an intellectual …
HEFFNER: What do you mean, you’re not an intellectual.
ROONEY: Well, I am not an intellectual. I’m not. And I have a quick turn of mind, but I’m not a great reader of, of heavy tomes. And I make up my mind in a hurry based on too little information sometimes. And I can be wrong too often. But it’s, it’s part of what’s made me popular. [Laughter]
HEFFNER: What … what’s the role you play then at 60 Minutes?
ROONEY: Well, I have a … I would have to say that I have a knack for doing things …we call them in my office …we call them “Hey, yeah” pieces.
HEFFNER: “Hey, yeah”?
ROONEY: Yeah, you know, people look at them and they say, “Hey, yeah!!” … say take the coffee cans and they’re now down to 11 ounces …”Hey, yeah, Mabel, I notice that, too”. It is fun and people like it. If I can point out things to people that they already knew but didn’t realize they knew before I said it. But then they say, “Hey, yeah”.
HEFFNER: But then why recently the political orientation? Maybe that’s not …
ROONEY: No, I understand what you’re saying. It’s okay. I suppose at my age … maybe I’m growing up. I think I have gotten less interested in how difficult it is to get the tops off pill bottles than I used to be. And I think I am more interested in what’s happening in the world and I think people are more interested in that. So that probably is why I’ve gone in that direction.
HEFFNER: What can we expect then?
ROONEY: Oh, gosh, I have no idea. I look at the paper every day and it, it comes out of whatever it is I read. I’m doing a piece this week, whenever this broadcast will be on … I’m doing a piece on computers. And I was … Bill Gates came in my office one day and I said at the time, after he left … if I’d known how rich he was, I would have been nicer to him. But he was, he was a charming guy. And, and he’s done great things. That thing he did for the New York City school system with $50 million dollars. I mean how are you going to hate Bill Gates, even though he’s that rich.
But still somebody screwed up computers when they started and I am angry with him because I used a program called Word Perfect for years. And now because Bill Gates and Microsoft I have to use Word, and it isn’t nearly as good a system. And there are just things about computers that he must have done that are infuriating. And, I’ve done a piece on that for this week.
HEFFNER: Okay, but let’s, let’s stick with this question of … you said something about your age … now what do you want to say about your age?
ROONEY: I don’t want to say anything about my age. I’d like to forget my age.
HEFFNER: Why?
ROONEY: Oh I hate it. God I hate being old. What good is it? Now you’re going to die sooner than anybody else now.
HEFFNER: Yes, you can die sooner than anybody else. But you’re wiser, presumably.
ROONEY: Oh, well. Maybe. I spoke to a … I spoke to a group in Cincinnati last year … a geriatric group, there were a couple of thousand people … older people … in this theater.
HEFFNER: Older than us?
ROONEY: Yeah … well, our age. And so I got to Columbus the night before and I went out to dinner, alone. I prefer to do that when I’m in town. And I got thinking about what I was going to say the next day, speaking to them. So somebody asked me a question about age … and I said, “Well, there’s no doubt you lose something, you lose some memory. But I think you make up for it in experience.” And so I said, for instance, I ate in a restaurant in Columbus last night and I wish I could remember the name of it because if I ever come to Columbus again I want to remember not to go there. [Laughter] But you do, you lose, you lose some things. It’s surprising. Like earlier, when you were talking to me, I got off on something else and I forget what your question was. I don’t’ think that would have happened to me 30 years ago.
HEFFNER: Well, look, you say something about age. You say something about age in terms of becoming … oh, hell, I don’t know whether you mean more serious, but more concerned. So you’re going to address yourself to different kinds of …
ROONEY: Oh, I don’t know how it happened. I really don’t know how it happened. It … I just realized that I could do more serious things and that people will take … but people still think of me … it’s sort of annoying sometimes … people think of me as amusing, even when I do a piece that they don’t like, they tend to think of me as more amusing than they take me seriously. Even if I do a piece about President Bush.
HEFFNER: I guess the question that occurs to me is, are there going to be more pieces like that?
ROONEY: Well, one big problem is we have all summer off and we like to repeat them and you can’t repeat a piece about President Bush and Iraq in August that you did in November.
HEFFNER: So for safety’s sake you stick to bottle tops …
ROONEY: I’m going to do some of them, yes. But I’ll continue to do current events things. It’s … I, I’m more interested in it really now. These other things keep coming to mind. And I have some others in mind that I will do … for instance the computer thing is, is a generic piece, that could re-run any time. And those things will always come to my mind. I mean I, as a writer, when I’m thinking about working, I’m watching carefully. I may not look at everything, and inevitably things come up that repeat themselves. Things that happen. And I say, “well, that’s a piece”. Other people notice the same thing I’m noticing. So, I will be doing those as I always did. But still I, I do enjoy doing the, doing the things that are current events.
HEFFNER: Do you take off … we just have a minute to this program … do you take off after news, after the reporting of news that you’ve watched over the years.
ROONEY: Well, I should do more of that. It’s very difficult for me to be critical, for instance, of CBS News. I work there. And I have done it a few times, and they don’t appreciate it. And you can call me “chicken”, as Bernard Goldberg did, but I … I don’t think you can do that in your own house. I can’t be critical of, of the people in our News Division. I can make some remarks about it, but I, I would confess to being careful about that.
HEFFNER: Okay, you mentioned Bernard Goldberg and we …what we need to do … our time is up … but I hope you’ll stay where you are and let us do another program. We need to get to this business of politics, or political orientation, on the air.
ROONEY: Meanwhile, Andy Rooney, thanks for joining me tonight.
HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you join us again next time, and if you would like a transcript of today’s program, please send $4.00 in check or money order to The Open Mind, P. O. Box 7977, FDR Station, New York, New York 10150.
Meanwhile, as an old friend used to say, “Good night and good luck.”
N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Dr. Vartan Gregorian
AIR DATE: 12/10/2011
VTR: 11/03/2011

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And this is the second of two programs about the very idea – and the uses – of foundations in American life.

It comes as my guest, historian Vartan Gregorian – formerly President of the New York Public Library, then of Brown University, and now of the prestigious Carnegie Corporation of New York, veritably a man for all intellectual seasons – celebrates Andrew Carnegie’s formative foundation gifts of a century ago.

And now I think, what we ought to do is go back to where we left off last time. Vartan, in the period between last week and this week, meaning in the last five minutes … you mentioned something that I, I hadn’t the faintest idea about … that there are so many Carnegie … not foundations … but Carnegie creations …

GREGORIAN: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: How many? What are they?

GREGORIAN: Well, I guess over 22 … 22. You have Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, celebrate its Centennial. You have Carnegie Institution … science, in Washington, DC. You have Carnegie Mellon University. You have Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. You have Carnegie Council on Ethics, which is going to celebrate its Centennial in 2014. You have Carnegie Trust for Scottish universities. Carnegie Trust for UK universities. You have many Carnegie Heroes Funds … because Carnegie was one of the first to recognize that ordinary citizens with great acts of courage should be rewarded or set examples. And then you have … what did I forget … Carnegie Hall …

HEFFNER: Carnegie Hall as well?

GREGORIAN: Yes, yes. Carnegie Hall was created also by Andrew Carnegie. The only paying institution, in order to be self-sufficient. Actually in its inception Mrs. Carnegie has major role to play.

And then … what did I forget? I think we covered most … but most of them are Carnegie Heroes Funds … Carnegie Museum, of course, in Pittsburgh … one of great …

HEFFNER: And all separate institutions.

GREGORIAN: All separate institutions. One of the things we have done during this past 10 years, we celebrate … in order to celebrate the Carnegie Institute … we brought all organizations together … every two years we come together in order to celebrate Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, which now has been given to many prominent philanthropists, both national and international level and this just … almost two weeks ago … time passes fast … we celebrated 10 individuals.

We celebrated Lauder family, we celebrate Pritzker family, we celebrated Crown family, we celebrated Pierre and Pamela Omidyar, founder of E-bay. We celebrated Danforth Foundation, Danforth family and Fiona and Stan Druckenmiller, a young, young couple who have done so much for brain science and so much other thing.

And then, of course, in doing all of this Fred Kavli we did not forget, the great Norwegian immigrant whose based … and one thing occurred to me as I was reading this … it was reinforced by Leonard Lauder … most of them are descendants of immigrants … first or second generation who have brought, again, faith in giving through philanthropy, their foundations reinvesting in America.

So Andrew Carnegie’s creation itself … private wealth … been emulated by many including the spirit … not exactly divide … give away all your wealth … but many are pledged to give at least half of their wealth while they’re alive. Which is remarkable.

As I mentioned in the previous section of this time …there will be $20 trillion dollars intergenerational wealth transfers in America in the next two decades.

HEFFNER: Yes, but now, Vartan, let me, let me … let me come down hard on a question …

GREGORIAN: Yeah.

HEFFNER: … I don’t want to be biting the hand that feeds …

GREGORIAN: Oh, that’s all … nobody’s eating, so don’t worry.

HEFFNER: (Laugh) … but what’s the rationale for however many Carnegie institutions … groups …

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … there are … for it to do all these things that are so important in our society. Aren’t you taking away from the sovereign power of our individual states? Or of the nation? Aren’t you doing things that one might say, “Now, that should be done by the Federal government. That should be done by the state of California or the state of New York.”

GREGORIAN: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you brought issue up, because I’m dying to tell you about … what else that is … As in your book on Alexis de Tocqueville … we’ve gone this route before … when he came to America in 1830’s and published … which is still today, still the classic book on American democracy … 1835 … still is most important book written on American democracy. Voluntarism was considered to be natural … government was considered artificial.

As a matter of fact you can see now whether it’s … “We’re the 99%” or the Tea Party … they all are talking about … not government, but people to being in charge of their own destiny … direct democracy. And that’s part of our tradition … that people have always been interested in solving their problems. Nothing … let government do it.

Of course, as I mentioned previously, two World Wars and being a Cold War and being in wars constantly and being super … only super power now and so forth … is a costly enterprise which we cannot do without either taxing or mobilizing forces.

And also the growth of our population … 300, 350 million now. It’s not “Mom and Pop” operation any more. It’s not a small town anymore. We’ve become urban, very complicated, multi-ethnic, multi-national, global society, is right here, miniature level in the United States.

So, giving is not a substitute for governing anymore. Giving is, in many ways, creating, trying to hold your own … satisfy your own local needs, while allowing government to do national needs … inter-highway and this … and the railways, and so forth. That was the concept of growing federally … opening the West …

One of the things we have discussed in the past … investing in the future was government’s also duty. And next year I hope we’ll have a chance to discuss Morrell Act, 150th anniversary of Morrell Act.

The year after we should discuss the National Academy of Sciences … in the middle of the tragic Civil War in this United States of America … where 650 thousand people, 600 thousand people perished in the 1860s … President Lincoln was thinking about the future of America, investing in land-grant universities, creating a National Academy of Sciences … try that to do any government now … any President to say we have to think in terms of 50 years from now … never mind taxes … never mind, I’m investing in this.

It was forward thinking of local and national governments can work hand-in-hand together by combining the best of America … what has to be national issues and what has to be local.

If the local … local is voluntary and giving … that is the foundation … of not taking away from government, but investing along side the government in order to be able to give the private individuals, private sector, initiatives that could benefit the totality.

HEFFNER: Yeah, but isn’t that idea of being used now … by political candidates to say “small government … not large …

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … our churches …

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … our foundations …

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … our good voluntarism …

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … that we have our voluntary associations can do this …

GREGORIAN: Is not enough. $300 … let’s take $350 billion dollars annually Americans contribute to charity … which is one time. And then philanthropic institution. If you use it as an endowment … let’s say 10% of it would be $35 billion, 5% would be $17.5 billion … it doesn’t make arithmetic error column of Federal budget.

HEFFNER: (Laugh)

GREGORIAN: It sounds nice and some areas … yes. But it’s not a solution, it’s … one is incubator demonstration … the other is, is institutionalizing and pursing it.

So, it’s … what I’m saying is we no longer … I mentioned before “Mom and Pop” local government. That’s why it’s remarkable that these two trends will continue in America. You don’t want to give up your autonomy … your volunteerism, right to volunteer action to government and the government at the same time cannot absorb all of this without eliminating creative elements in our society.

Look at all the orchestra we have. Look at all the museums we have. Most of them, primarily, with the exception of Washington-based, most of them are supported by private philanthropy.

Look, some of the major research done in our hospitals, or our universities … funded by private philanthropy.

Look at great universities we have … Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton …

HEFFNER: Columbia.

GREGORIAN: Columbia … of course, Columbia …

HEFFNER: Please.

GREGORIAN: … Yes, Columbia and Cornell … I have to mention our Brown … all the Ivy League … once you started with … privately, created privately.

But so is MIT which started as land-grant university … people forget that. The MIT of the United States also is beneficiary of Lincoln’s legacy … so I’m saying this alliance or partnership between the private and the public … I hope always will continue because when public makes errors, private wants … can try to repair or demonstrate or pick up. And vice versa.

HEFFNER: Do you … which brings me to the question of the times when … if there are such times … when the government refuses to act or says “this action runs contrary to the public interest in this government’s opinion”.

GREGORIAN: MmmHmm

HEFFNER: Do foundations find themselves in the position of picking up a position that the government refuses?

GREGORIAN: Well … foundations …

HEFFNER: Should they?

GREGORIAN: … yeah, foundations always have done … they’re not there as anti-government forces, they’re there as societal forces.

HEFFNER: I don’t understand that.

GREGORIAN: Well, the point is that foundations have the right to … right of assembly … right under the law … to form their own organizations to do what they think is good. But they’re not independent. We have agencies that are overlooking … the Attorney General in each state is to supervise the fact that you … when you filed for a charitable trust or organization … that you’re going to implement this … it’s not going to be self-serving. There are abuses … yes. We find sometimes certain foundations abuse by having husband as President, daughter as Vice President and so forth, so on.

But those abuses should not obscure the fact what a great role foundations … be it religious foundations, be it secular foundations … are doing to cement or to provide strength to our society’s creative talent.

It’s that creative talent … ideas … that emerge from the private sector. Because public sector can encourage, through National Endowment for Democracy and National Endowment for Health, National Institute of Health, and National Endowment for Arts and Humanities … can create some kind of pool for talent.

But private sector is also contributing alternative way of doing things, challenging. And also creating expertise. You know many of the people now serving in government have come from some of the think tanks that foundations have supported. We have conservative, liberal or independent.

So foundations are not on the margin, but rather are central to provide that kind of critical thought, critical element to come, otherwise all you have to do is have … accept governmental policies as given, without being able to criticize.

HEFFNER: Vartan, what happened to the, the anti-foundation sentiment in the Congress of a decade ago, perhaps?

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: What happened there?

GREGORIAN: Well … well … it was 1969 … that foundations are accountable … they ought to be.

HEFFNER: Right.

GREGORIAN: Keppel, one of Carnegie Presidents said, “Foundations must have glass pockets. Everybody should see what they are doing.” And I adhere to that completely.

Foundations are accountable because they’re tax exempt organizations. Foundations are accountable to their Boards and to supervising organizations, including responsible to the Attorney General of each state in order to implement what their mission is … honorably, honestly … and to be accounted for.

That sentiment is still there. There are abuses, yes, but abuse can be dealt with. But one of the things now in current situation … the one sector that keeps foundations giving … is religious institutions.

If government goes after foundations … it has by the same token to go after all the religious organizations. And they cannot afford to take all religious groups … so secular foundations, side by side with religious foundations are in the same business of trying to do good.

Not because of government alone … they are sanctioned. But because they like to serve the public, the nation and local communities as well as international communities from issues of peace, issues of disease, issues of culture, issues of education … all of this, which we need.

As I mentioned, there are 1.6 million non-profit or independent institutions. One out of 11 Americans now work for non-profits. There are more people working for higher education now than automobile, steel … whatever is left … textile, whatever is left of … all the industries combined.

HEFFNER: Now … this is good?

GREGORIAN: No. I wish more people were, were in the industrial thing. But I’m just saying, under the circumstances, the central globalization, it’s remarkable that we have … we’re investing still in knowledge, we investing still in health and culture and all the other organizations.

HEFFNER: What are the big problems that you see now? You’re celebrating and will be celebrating … for the next couple of years … the, the Centennial of the various Carnegie …

GREGORIAN: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … groups … creations. What do you see as the big problems … or problem areas for foundations in America?

GREGORIAN: Number one problem is we have to collaborate, as I mentioned. Cooperate and collaborate.

HEFFNER: It’s that … is that tough to get?

GREGORIAN: It’s tough to get, but it’s necessary, like everything else. Years ago, it was tough to collaborate one library … libraries. But the Internet has made that an irrelevant issue.

You know, if you don’t’ want to collaborate, the source is available from elsewhere. Second one is needs are growing in America … poverty … we have 50 million poor people.

The fact that we don’t use any … the word “poverty” … poor do not appear in our vocabulary … we all are middle class now. Rich are called there … what … job creators … they’re not rich people.

We have, we have middle class, but we don’t have upper class. We don’t have lower class and therefore we ignore … Appalachia report now … the position about poverty in America now will be equally … we have … we’re a nation in debt. We’re trying to do now do a lot more with less.

And that’s going to be the biggest challenge … foundations are under … how to do more with less. And as long as we don’t run out of less, we’ll do alright. So that’s another challenge.

Then, of course, education … education … education … is our greatest challenge. We cannot lose 50% of our youth to wasted from education system.

HEFFNER: Is that what the figure is?

GREGORIAN: 50% high school drop out. 25%, 25%, 30% college drop out. We need … we’re in the age of knowledge … we need investment in knowledge. And that’s biggest challenge for all the foundations … how to keep the fabric of American democracy vibrant. How to invest in talent in America … how to … not to allow infrastructure of our country to collapse. How to keep infrastructure of higher education alive.

Those are challenges and how to collaborate among institutions, not just foundations, among institutions.

HEFFNER: Would it be remiss of me to say that points the way to being political in your orientation because what you’re talking about is a need that seems to me to be met only on the level of the nation and of the government.

GREGORIAN: Well, nation or government are always there. I mean it’s every, every American is political. To be citizen is to be political. If you don’t care what’s happening to our nation you can be quiet … or I don’t like, by the way, the silent majority.

The silent majority in Ulysses refers to the dead. Dead … we don’t want a nation of non-participants. But we also want people to deal with facts … that’s another challenge for foundations and education institutions.

Facts are not relativistic. Opinions can be made relative … but facts have to be ascertained. We are in the 21st century, age of science … yet we have anti-science sentiments.

We are in an age where people love gadgets and technology, but they don’t like science.

And we have to educate our nation … in fields of science and math … plus English, so we can have the same vocabulary to understand each other. But most importantly, also we have to teach about America as a democracy.

It’s remarkable and I think it’s almost sinful to live in this nation without knowing its institutions, without knowing its Constitution, without knowing what does constitute to be a citizen of the United States.

What rights, but also what obligations one has. I was just last night hearing Matt … what’s … Matthews, Newburg on … Kennedy … that …

HEFFNER: Oh, right.

GREGORIAN: … yeah … well, evidently it’s attributed Kennedy’s famous saying to a headmaster of Choate. I don’t care where the words come … the problem is we have to see this nation not as a giver, but also we have to see ourselves as contributor.

Otherwise Andrew Carnegie’s words that aristocracy is like potatoes … the best part is underground … I don’t want America to become Museum of Capitalism, or Museum “How things were”. I want to always remember America “How things are going to be better for the people of the United States and citizens”.

Debates I don’t mind, arguments I don’t mind. But central issue, which is non-negotiable … is the future of our nation, future our people … with social justice, knowledge, knowledge, learning, learning, curiosity, curiosity, curiosity. And also to love this country for what it is … because of its Constitution and rights it has given to everybody … citizen and immigrant who have come here.

That’s, that’s what the essence is. If you don’t want to contribute, but don’t at least oppose. But when you oppose understand what the ramifications are. I think more than ever we need education of civics, science, as well as mathematics … our schools have to be places we learn, rather than places we store people and train people. It’s not age of training … it’s also going to be age of knowing.

HEFFNER: Vartan, do you think your feelings about this are related to your own status …

GREGORIAN: Absolutely.

HEFFNER: … as some one who came to this country.

GREGORIAN: Absolutely. When I became citizen of United States, I thought I was marrying this country. Really, it was … a religious ceremony where you are taking an oath to abandon and to adhere to, to choose. It was a very moving experience.

And when I went to Montecello to give a speech at Jefferson’s University … I mean … the residence, of house … monument. I was so moved to tears because here is … from all over the world, people are there … taking an oath to United States, with what it represents … you know, liberty, equality, and pursuit of happiness … all of this, plus a Constitution, plus a Bill of Rights … guaranteeing individual …

But individual, as we discussed before … from Alexis de Tocqueville … who coined the term “individualism” to describe American character. That individual … he was not selfishness … egotist … but rather had two components. One was public good … in mind and the other personal good … and trying to reconcile both elements under the cachet of individualism.

Now I find that balance is not right. Self-interest is not enough, but you also have to think of the community … you have to think of society … of … think of nation … not for the present alone, but the future … which everybody’s saying “We don’t’ want our grandchildren to be indebted” … but we don’t want our grandchildren also to be ignorant.

HEFFNER: Vartan I began to teach American history … I grant … 65 years ago. I think what you’ve just said would be un … have been understood by my student then … I don’t think it would be understood … widely … as widely … by my students today.

GREGORIAN: Well, then we as, we as professors, teachers … we’ve done a poor job. Because if the concept of citizen is the concept of what is good in America … that makes people loyal to America and keeps them … I never have stressed the money … making money, or making a living, making a profit … America as a place you become rich … America’s a place where you live free. You live honorably. And … under the law … not because … you’re not a subject, you’re a citizen.

HEFFNER: In the one minute sign I just will you tell me that the Carnegie Corporation of New York is investing its funds in citizenship education?

GREGORIAN: Yes, we’re investing in education, we’re investing in international peace, we’re investing in how to make immigrants who are here as … on a permanent resident to become citizens … because you cannot be spectator, you have to be participant in our democracy, especially now and we also investing in science … knowledge of science and K to 16 in order to educate as many Americans as well as we can, as well as we ought to.

HEFFNER: And that’s the perfect place to say Thank you very much for joining me again on the air.

GREGORIAN: Thank you for having me again.

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

And do visit the Open Mind website at www.theopenmind.tv

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.

GUEST: Dr. Vartan Gregorian
AIR DATE: 12/17/2011
VTR: 11/03/2011

I’m Richard Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

And however over the years I’ve chosen to characterize today’s guest by way of introducing him so many times to our viewers – “A man for all intellectual seasons” may be my favorite.

Yet I couldn’t possibly do better in looking to someone else’s artful phrasing concerning my quest than by going back a quarter century and quoting the very opening sentence of his compelling 1986 New Yorker Profile by that late wonderful writer Philip Hamburger.

“The New York Public Library houses many treasures,” Hamburger wrote, “but few are as colorful, complex and enigmatic, civilized and stimulating as Vartan Gregorian, its President and Chief Executive Officer”.

Now that was then, of course, this is now. And having earlier taught at Stanford, the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania, my guest went on from the New York Public Library to be President of Brown University … and, almost fifteen years ago, to become President of the prestigious Carnegie Corporation of New York … itself now very much into celebrating its centennial as prime among America’s great foundations.

Now I’ve told Vartan Gregorian that in this first of perhaps several programs marking Andrew Carnegie’s formative foundation gifts of a century ago, I would like first to engage him in the very essence and meaning of foundations themselves … somewhat as John Henry Cardinal Newman so very long ago and Clark Kerr not so very long ago, respectively discoursed on the Idea and the Uses of a University.

First, though, full disclosure: over the years, Carnegie Corporation of New York has been quite generous to this program as well as to the very idea of keeping an open mind on the air.

Also, Vartan Gregorian recently added a charming and learned up-to-date Afterword to my 1956 abridged edition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

But now, let me turn to Dr. Gregorian ands ask him why a foundation? What was Andrew Carnegie thinking about in giving all of this money and was he right?

GREGORIAN: Well, what you have … in the 19th century we have for the first time the modern foundation. We’ve had many charitable organizations … church related … but nothing secular … foundation … looking forward to solve problems, to invest in institutions rather than maybe act for charity.

The … comprehend modern foundation … want to understand that there was differentiation made between charity, which all religions demand it, advise it and preach about it … and foundation which planned ways … trying to cope with the solution … provide solutions … that have created misery, illness and other ignorance, which charity tries to cope with or to have a solace.

There’s difference between pity and sympathy and the rational investment in solving societal problems.

That marked the foundation’s concept. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were the first ones to approach it as scientific philanthropy, rather than giving charity.

Philanthropy and foundations go hand in hand because what they try to do is to study, to invest and find solutions, so that the rest of society can emulate … governments can emulate.

When Andrew Carnegie started his foundation, he was involved, he did not do out of guilt. He did not do it out of vanity. He was fortunate enough and most foundations … people who create the modern foundations were from humble origins. So they were not doing it as representatives of capitalist class and they were not doing out of guilt, or out of craving for immortality.

They thought they were fortunate enough to be rich that that would welcome responsibilities … why Bible said “To those much is given, much is expected”.

But instead of giving it as a sympathy … said … well you give to a person … is hungry … give fish … but give a fishing rod … because the purpose of philanthropy is not to make people dependent, but rather independent and pride … models of solutions … rational, scientific … what there was available … commonsensical … idealistic, but commonsensical and practical solutions to many of the problems.

As Andrew Carnegie was fortunate enough to become very rich, also fortunate enough to have ideas how to invest that. In many ways he wanted to be … apply those of reason to those of giving. Hence foundations … modern foundations.

HEFFNER: To laws of giving or to laws of getting?

GREGORIAN: To laws of giving, and after you give, you also get results. And he was a maverick capitalist in many ways.

HEFFNER: What do you mean “a maverick capitalist”?

GREGORIAN: Maverick because his ideas were revolutionary … that such pronouncements, even today, shock people. Aristocracies like potatoes … the best part is underground. Don’t brag about you ancestors … who are you? What do you do? What did you do to deserve your ancestors? What are you doing to become an ancestor in the making? To learn.

Second, that trustees of capitalism … or trustees of public wealth … you have to reinvest, hence the line … those who die rich … the person who dies rich … dies disgraced.

Who did not have the imagination and desire, the humanity … reason … aspiration … ideally to reinvest in society. This … these were … 1890’s … dramatically revolutionary ideas at the time.

HEFFNER: You said Rockefeller and Carnegie.

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: Is this an American phenomenon?

GREGORIAN: Foundation … modern foundations dealing with societal issues is a modern phenomenon.

Several years ago I was asked to give a lecture at NYU to 25, 30 university presidents from Europe and elsewhere about fund raising.

And as I spoke, the President of the University of Amsterdam said, “You’re saying something which is illegal. I cannot go, raise private funding in Amsterdam. It’s against the law. Government’s obligation is to take care of education, culture, health and others. Not private sectors.” So he was telling me something … that not much is left in Europe for private volunteer, local organization … volunteer … civil, civil society … but is governmental obligation.

So similarly, when I went to Mexico to give a talk to Mexican millionaires … I learned for the first time that philanthropy is a bad word in many ways … if public … private sector want to do it … because lover of humanity is the state.

Charity belongs to the private sector, not philanthropy. Because where Mexico and others got rid of Spanish … other countries … got rid of Spanish rule … along with it, the church was downsized and minimized its role, in order not to interfere in state’s affairs.

So philanthropy there is applied to the state’s obligation rather than private sectors … its church.

HEFFNER: Now, now as you tell me this, Vartan, you’re smiling. You’re, you’re telling a good story. But what occurs to me … when I think of health care …

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … and that I’ve learned that health care is better and greater in other parts of the world where, I gather, the state provides it. Is this totally a good thing this notion of “the state is the good guy …”

GREGORIAN: Yes … well, that’s the, that’s the irony of it. You know some of this … the other day I was talking to someone about tenure.

HEFFNER: That awful …

GREGORIAN: That awful word … and I said, you know, we owe it to Bismarck. Said, “What are you talking about?”

Bismarck wanted civil servants of Prussia and in to Germany to be independent, continuing body. So whatever government comes, you don’t replace all the civil servants, and so forth, through patronage.

He wanted a body of people, an institution, which will keep their role independent of government’s coming and going. So he made professors part of civil service. And civil service … also social security. We owe age 65 to Bismarck. Because not too many people lived to be 65 … so we’re guaranteed … I’m being facetious, now … so that was set to provide social security.

So it’s not a radical idea, it’s was a conservative idea to provide cohesion of society together. And, and, so in a sense, what I’m saying …European tradition … coming from French Revolution on … some of the issues that we’re debating were resolved after that. From French Revolution to Napoleon.

When Napoleon came, you can have church … religious schools side by side with secular schools, it does not matter. But you had to pass one examination, state examination, in order to get a degree … in entire France. State was accrediting you.

We could not have … we have all kinds of local and regional accrediting committees and so on … with no national norms. But France resolved, I’m trying to say, religious schools and secular schools, by making state validator of their … quality of their education.

HEFFNER: But the question I would ask you … I, I don’t mean to put you in an uncomfortable position as the President of …

GREGORIAN: Yes?

HEFFNER: … this great foundation. Does it take away, in a sense, the matter of private philanthropy in this country … foundations …

GREGORIAN: Yes.

HEFFNER: … great foundations, with great wealth and great things that they accomplish …

GREGORIAN: MmmHmm.

HEFFNER: … does it mean that the state has to do less than it should be doing? Less than it is doing in other parts of the world …

GREGORIAN: Well, we are … that’s a very good observation. We have been caught in two traditions. When your man, de Tocqueville, visited the United States, the role of Federal state was minimal. Everything was local … and he admired that. The spirit of volunteerism.

Many, many organizations right after the American Revolution there were tens, if not hundreds of local groups, associations and so on … so much so that George Washington, in his Farewell Address … complained about those organizations will not be responsible to any government … ah, they’re working on that.

But we’re not agrarian alone, we’re urban. We’re no longer 13, 20 million … we are 350 million. We fought two World Wars, not to mention others. We became superpower, so the role of State has increased, but so has the, the private sector.

One of the things you were asking about foundations … their centrality. Today we have 1.6 million non-profit institutions in the United States. 1.6 million, which makes Americans still involved locally, regionally, nationally, internationally … in their destiny … one out of 10 Americans have said this before.

If not on this show, in some other interview … one out of 10 or 11 Americans work for non-profit organizations. Annually, $350 billion dollars is given to philanthropy in this country and charity. Half of it, of course, goes to religious organizations and others.

There will be a $20 trillion dollar transfer of intergenerational wealth in the next decade or so. Of which $4 trillion may go to philanthropic purposes. So philanthropy has become primary … its flagship is America.

It has sunk into the ethos of America, encouraging localism, volunteerism, nationalism … everything you want involved in it. So that Andrew Carnegie can give $16,000 to McGill University at the time and result in the discovery of insulin.

Now in Europe you don’t go say, “Look, I’m going to tell the state to … don’t bother anything … I’m going to, to a private philanthropy to do this”. So, but now, Europe is moving toward our direction. In United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy … there are European now foundation centers and so forth.

We are, in many ways, teaching them that when something comes locally, don’t wait for somebody to come … to rescue, but you have to do it … naturally health and others are big issues. Not enough of private wealth can take care of them, except doing some research, which we’re doing … founding universities, which John D. Rockefeller did … University of Chicago, the Rockefeller family … Rockefeller University, which is doing lots of research.

Andrew Carnegie … Carnegie Mellon … so this non-profit sector … or independent sector … it’s more than a non-profit sector … is part and parcel of the American ethos. So much so, that even since we’re entering into Presidential campaign … mark my word … right before election … every Presidential candidate will issue his level of his or her philanthropic giving.

It’s expected of Presidential candidates to show how good an American they are, by indicating the records of their giving … whether to religious organization or charitable organizations … they have to give.

And most of the giving also of these foundations … actually most of giving … comes not from the well-to-do alone, but also some 70% of it comes from people less than $50,000/$60,000 income … because the ethos of giving is part of the American psyche now.

HEFFNER: Now what role does it … do our income tax … does our income tax structure play in this?

GREGORIAN: Well, people in the past speculated that foundations were created in order to avoid taxation or to invest in their egos and so forth.

But most of the people we’re discussing … John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Fisk … many others … did it before there was income tax. They did it, ironically, because we have dismissed some of these people as vain people, as ego-centric people … they may have been.

But they’re also very thoughtful people. They read about America, they read about how a society can be re-organized. Otherwise foundations become mausoleums for them … for glory. But it’s not the case.

Andrew Carnegie was a very well read person. So much so and had such a (laugh) chutzpah, I should use since I’m here in New York … he tried to reform the English language.

Can you imagine? This billionaire wanted to simplify the English language. So whenever we publish something of his, we get corrections as if we were mistaken.

Why should “have” as h-a-v-e … idiot h-a-v … alone. Taught … t-o-o-t … rather than taught … it’s simplifying. He was interested in everything. He was interested in democracy, education being foundation and pillar of democracy and at the same time, democracy being about citizenship rather than a taxpayer.

Taxpayer is not a great thing. Taxpayer is wonderful for you, but you … you’re a taxpayer because you’re a citizen, enjoying the rights of this country and obligations for this country.

So Andrew Carnegie at the same time wanted people to become citizens, conscious citizens and help this democracy to succeed.

HEFFNER: Now, how can you, of all people leave out the question of libraries?

GREGORIAN: Well, libraries were the vehicles for educating public … in addition to libraries which you know very well, some 5,000 around the world … libraries … and 2,600 or so in this country.

He also, believe it or not gave away 7,000 church organs. Because he even went to that level of detail, that people who go to church may not understand, maybe bored … understand subtleties of a sermon … long sermon given by the priest or minister, but they would never miss the importance of organ to life their spirits … masses.

Recently somebody from England told me they have several thousand organs that he also gave in England for the churches and others.

So in the Centennial, I’ve been thinking how, under the aegis of Carnegie Hall we may give an organ recital in one of the largest churches or synagogues, wherever that we can find … and invite people to see how … over 10,000 organs in … every Sunday … if they still play organ in churches or synagogues … they could praise glory to God …

HEFFNER: In the …

GREGORIAN: … thanks to Andrew Carnegie’s munificence.

HEFFNER: Vartan, how weighty is his hand on Carnegie Corporation today and the other Carnegie?

GREGORIAN: That is a wonderful question you asked me because I just had to wrestle with this in another Conference, I came from Phoenix. He said words to this effect:

I believe in perpetual continuation of my foundations … in order to meet the needs of the times. So I trust Trustees to pursue and adapt as long as … they may not be always right, they may be even wrong, but sooner or later, when you have wealth, people may rise to the occasion … people who come in the ranks, to rise to the occasion … to justice, for what wealth will create.

HEFFNER: No dead hand, then?

GREGORIAN: No dead hand. Maybe dead man can get out, but no dead hand to … because he was visionary … he thought of everything. He thought of the fact that you can fail and you learn from your failure.

Unfortunately, many foundations in the past and even the present, they don’t think scientific … scientifically … in a sense … in science you do something … you don’t succeed … that’s a learning process. Failure is a learning process. Not as a … not making a habit of it. But learning not to repeat it.

And Andrew Carnegie was fully cognizant of that. So one of the first … Carnegie is one of the first foundations, if not the first … to have annual reports. Also believed in transparency because foundations have to enjoy the public’s trust. They should know what you’re doing.

HEFFNER: Do you think they do in this country today?

GREGORIAN: To do what?

HEFFNER: Enjoy the public’s trust?

GREGORIAN: Well, during times of crisis … economic crisis, there are three institutions that get attacked or questioned. One is our higher education … they don’t teach well, they don’t teach at all, and … how many hours …they spending in the classroom … until you say, “How many lawyers are in courtroom, how many hours?” They say, “We’re preparing workload”. But one can argue this. But that’s not … you want some targets to criticize for economic times.

Universities are one. Second, foundations .. they’re tax exempt … why can’t we tax all of them? Government can do better job than they’re doing … which is easy way of divert … divert attention from all problems. And the third one is, naturally, how our youth has become indifferent, ignorant and so forth.

Years ago when I was Provost of University of Pennsylvania I welcomed the 50th reunion class. And I read a charge … how this generation is uncaring, lousy and so forth, so on, so on and they were all nodding.

I said “This was editorial 50 years ago in your newspaper about your complaint about modern youth.” Those three forces, or three locations detract attention become good targets. But nobody approached them scientifically. Because governments cannot experiment … no politician will act to be in charge … having authorized something that failed.

Foundations are there to experiment, to, to think head, to demonstrate and then save effort in order to allow government to see which ones they could be able to adopt without possibility of failure.

And that’s why early childhood, for example, our foundation for thirty years … continues the study of early childhood. So it became part of American educational mantras … early childhood and government and every politician bought it.

And as the role is to demonstrate, to prove and then to give it as a gift to the nation or organizations to be able to build around it.

So foundations have an independent mission in many ways that compliments, does not compete with governments.

HEFFNER: Question … we just have two minutes left and then you promised you will sit there and we’ll do another program.

What grade would you give the great foundations of this country today?

GREGORIAN: I would give “B”.

HEFFNER: What happened to the “A”?

GREGORIAN: Well, “A” is individual foundations … I’ll give some of them “A”. Collectively, we have to be able to collaborate. That’s a new phenomenon for foundations to collaborate. And we have to find the ways in which to collaborate.

HEFFNER: You’re saying you haven’t as yet.

GREGORIAN: We have tried. Yes, we have success … we are successful the last couple of years … many foundations collaborating. But it’s not in the nature of the foundation to collaborate. Because you have your own mission, you know … your own Board. You have your own Presidents … they all have to succeed. Somehow, in the past … like universities … very little cooperation among universities in the past. Now they’re trying, some of them compete. Because when you collaborate people think you’re weak, otherwise why would you collaborate? Other is getting … but ironically we’re collaborating more with foreign universities than with each other.

Foreign university are a prestige … that I am … relationship with Beijing. But if I have a relation with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown … and so forth … they would say “I don’t have good English Department, I’m trying to compliment”. I don’t have … but you know, as a professor, you yourself know this.

Collaboration is number one necessity now among foundations. Because it doesn’t matter who does it, who gets credit … what’s to be done is more important because our nation’s needs are a lot and we cannot afford waste.

HEFFNER: And that’s the point at which we end this program and I ask you not to move … so that we can do the next program immediately. Thanks, Vartan Gregorian.

GREGORIAN: You’re welcome. Thank you.

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 www.theopenmind.tv

N.B. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript. It may not, however, be a verbatim copy of the program.