Playboy Interview: David Halberstam

a candid conversation with the pulitzer prize--winning vietnam journalist and best-selling author of "the best and the brightest"

At 39, David Halberstam may be--to use seriously the ironic title of his book on the power elite that embroiled America in Southeast Asia--"the best and the brightest" reporter in the business. By any reckoning, he is the most outspoken and influential of the Vietnam war correspondents. "The Best and the Brightest," which is riding high on the bestseller lists, has been acclaimed by one reviewer as "the most important book on public policy to appear in the last decade." Part social criticism, part political analysis, it indicts senior officials of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations as variously vain, foolish, arrogant, ignorant and deceptive. It's a controversial book--both for what it says and for how it's said. To critics and supporters alike, Halberstam is the apotheosis of the new journalism.

His background is diverse. After a middle-class Jewish boyhood in Winsted, Connecticut (where one of his elementary school classmates was Ralph Nader), he went to Harvard and the managing editorship of the Crimson; thence to West Point, Mississippi's Daily Times Leader, The Nashville Tennessean, The New York Times and Harper's magazine, and finally into self-employment. He is fiercely proud of his years in the tense and often tumultuous South of the late Fifties. "I've paid my bills," he says, meaning that he's covered Kiwanis Club meetings in Mississippi and watched blacks being shoved around in Tennessee. After a brief (and not very happy) tour in Kennedy Washington in 1961, the Times sent him to cover the fighting in the Congo, where his efforts to explain the chaos earned him a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1962, he was dispatched to Vietnam, where he finally did win the Pulitzer two years later.

Halberstam's Vietnam reporting, together with that of Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, Bernard Fall and a handful of others, established the pattern for literally hundreds of successors. Halberstam was in Vietnam during the critical period when the Viet Cong seized the initiative in the countryside and the excesses of the Ngo family led to the assassination of President Diem. Because of his platform (the prestigious Times), his intelligence (formidable) and his own personal style (fearless and fanatically energetic), Halberstam became the star Vietnam correspondent--the man John Kennedy tried to persuade the publisher of the Times to reassign, the man whose reporting itself (which often contradicted the sanguine and self-serving views of the Pentagon) became one of the issues of the war. Ten years later, his reporting on Vietnam--which was attacked at the time even by some of his senior colleagues as unpatriotic, if not treasonous--stands as an ornament of the craft.

Even after leaving Vietnam, Halberstam was unable to purge it from his system. Like the persistence of memory for Marcel Proust and the corruption of the very rich for F. Scott Fitzgerald, the swamp of Vietnam has been the great theme for Halberstam. Three of his first five books ("The Making of a Quagmire," the novel "One Very Hot Day" and "Ho," a biography of Ho Chi Minh) concern the war. Four years ago, Halberstam pronounced it a major journalistic scandal that no reporter had pieced together a history of the disaster from the perspective of Washington, where the decisions were being made. He then proceeded to do it himself, and what emerged was "The Best and the Brightest," a genuinely magisterial book, often imperious in its assessment of men and events, all of it carried along by a swift and passionate literary style. It's a flawed book--prolix, unfootnoted, filled with jarring leaps backward and forward through time--but still impressive, on a difficult and demanding subject.

The four years he spent working on "The Best" were lean ones for Halberstam and his Polish-born wife, the former Elzbieta Czyzewska, a film actress when he met her in Warsaw--from which he was finally expelled for his vigorous political reporting. Now, with his book a best seller in hardcover and a $700,000 contract for the paperback version (due from Fawcett this fall) offering financial security, the Halberstams have moved into a handsome town house on East 48th Street in New York. The apartment, he points out with obvious pleasure, once belonged to E. B. White. Upstairs, he has his study--a small room heavy with Vietnam memories, old photographs of a boyish Halberstam in sea-green fatigues, with Sheehan and Browne at a forgotten outpost in the Mekong Delta, with military advisor John Paul Vann running for a helicopter in a rice field. The photographs are old and grainy, and their edges are curling. It is here that Halberstam works. He has no secretary, and he thinks that keeps him in touch with reality: "I still have to deal with all the dirly details of the business myself."

Those who have been interviewed by Halberstam have described the experience as something between Freud's couch and Torquemada's rack. A dark, saturnine, heavily muscled man of 6'3", he exudes a massive physical presence that's enhanced by the deep baritone and the juggernaut self-assurance with which he asks questions--and answers them, at length and without hesitation--on almost any given subject. known for being generous to friends, he is equally contemptuous of those he defines as enemies--and there are plenty of them. As a journalist, he sees himself as an adversary, as a man born to pierce the veil of lies with which he feels the rich and the powerful--who both repel and fascinate him--surround themselves.

Our own interview with Halberstam was conducted over a period of several arduous days and nights in the living room of his town house. He spoke scornfully, sarcastically and sometimes with relish when discussing a particularly entrancing bit of official villainy. It's a theme that runs through his books as well as his conversation, and it cropped up in response to our first question.

[Q] Playboy: You spent four years researching and writing The Best and the Brightest. After all that study, what would you say is the greatest single lesson we should learn from Vietnam?

[A] Halberstam: We should learn the folly of the arrogance of power. When we went into Vietnam, we thought the world was ours, that we were supermanagers in a supercentury, that America could do no evil, that American soldiers always gave away chewing gum. And that the rest of the world--even Vietnamese peasants--wanted our values, wanted our protection. But not only did we fail to export our democracy, we aborted our own society's democratic procedures. Our duly appointed leaders ignored the constitutional way of going to war; they lied at every level about what we were doing, how many men we were sending in and for what cause they were really fighting; they attempted to discredit reporters who were trying to tell the truth; they lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I mean, you name it, they did it.

When Kosygin came over to confer with Johnson at Glassboro a couple of years after we went into Vietnam, he got into a conversation with an American Senator about how we had gotten into the war. When the Senator finished explaining it, Kosygin said--Kosygin, mind you--that he couldn't believe any one executive in any country had the almost kinglike power to go to war that Johnson had shown in Vietnam. He behaved like an emperor. But that's not surprising. It was an imperial moment for America. We all thought it was the American century.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think we've learned how wrong we were?

[A] Halberstam: Oh, I think to a degree we've been involuntarily tempered by battlefield defeat. But I don't think we've learned much, in a really direct way, about humility, about the fact that you can't export your own values to Saigon if they barely work in your own society. I don't think that's come through. What has come through, though, is the fact that if you make a miscalculation of the proportion evidenced in Vietnam, a President of the United States tends to be driven out of office and ends up in Austin, Texas, as curator of the Lyndon Johnson Library. That lesson comes through rather more directly. I think another President would ponder a long time before he went into anything comparable to Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: Have there been any recent temptations along that line?

[A] Halberstam: Yes--two things have come up since Vietnam. One is Chile. Despite all his old bombast about anticommunism, Nixon has tried to lower the profile of Chile as an issue. I don't mean to minimize the grotesquerie of the president of I. T. T. meeting with CIA agents in Washington hotel rooms. But the White House had the capacity to make Chile a great political and psychological testing point, and it didn't do so.

[Q] Playboy: What was the other temptation?

[A] Halberstam: Cambodia. Obviously, Nixon blundered badly in going after the Cambodian base camps in 1970. But now we're being very low-key about Cambodia. We're putting some pressure on Lon Nol to get out, looking for a government that would be somewhat satisfactory to everybody. Without really admitting it, we're trying to get out of Cambodia with about five percent of our face saved.

[Q] Playboy: What made us think we could succeed in Vietnam in the first place?

[A] Halberstam: We were the can-do society, and when some experts tried to warn that the French had failed at the same task in Vietnam, there was this American arrogance that said if the French failed, it was because they were a decadent European nation that had lost too many wars, drunk too much wine. We thought, when the first white American soldier puts his foot down there, and the first American bomber flies overhead, those little yellow people will know the game is up. God, have we lost our innocence.

[Q] Playboy: Then it's a fallacy to believe a superpower can fight--and win--a limited war in a small country?

[A] Halberstam: Yes. Our leaders in Vietnam, those architects of limited war, could never get the equation right. Here we had a society of 200,000,000 people, with all this muscle and all this armament, fighting a limited war against a tiny nation of 14,000,000 people who were fighting a total war. It was total war in terms of psychological and political commitment, and this stalemated us and finally defeated us. In that sense we've learned something. We have begun to learn our limits. Yes, America is powerful. Yes, it can defend its own interests. Yes, it probably does have a genuine sphere of interest. But extension of that sphere into the old kind of gunboat diplomacy--the capacity to send the Marines to Nicaragua--is coming to an end. Our omnipotence is gone. The mouse can tweak the lion's whiskers and get away with it.

[Q] Playboy: Is the superpower concept equally dead for other major nations?

[A] Halberstam: Yes. I think the Soviet Union, for example, has learned a lot in Cuba about what it can't do there. In China, too. The Chinese experience has been a very shocking one for the Soviet Union--to find out that China wants to be China, not a cardboard copy of Russia. And the Chinese will learn this, too, as they try to determine too much the fate of their proxies in Southeast Asia.

[Q] Playboy: Is the United States finished as an Asian power?

[A] Halberstam: I'm not sure that the United States ever was an Asian power. But we're obviously in decline out there. I would suspect that our real power in the world is economic and technological, anyway, and thus our pre-Vietnam power was something of a fraud. We are threatened economically now by the fact that we're incapable of producing goods as cheaply as Japan. It's an irony: By righting a war to keep Asia free from communism, we sent our own economy into a spiral of inflation that raised the price of goods and made us less competitive in world markets. Thus, while we were holding up this enormous and expensive military umbrella, the Japanese were planting economic seeds. It seems to me that the Chinese have the physical and demographic power in Asia and the Japanese have the economic power. They are dominant there, and they have every right to be.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Chinese dominance was a determining factor in Vietnam?

[A] Halberstam: No, it was Vietnamese nationalism--which is, by the way, traditionally anti-Chinese. But the men who were making the decisions were obsessed by great-power chess games. You know, one of the things I learned in doing my book was that men like McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, Dean Rusk all used the Cuban Missile Crisis as a test run for Vietnam. They thought it set the pattern: Use just so much force, but not too much; keep the phone line open to the Soviet Union; and squeeze, but not too hard. The only problem was that they didn't understand that it wasn't the Cubans they bluffed out in the Missile Crisis. It was the Soviet Union, a technological society comparable to ours, with big industrialized cities and a lot to lose. We never bluffed the Cubans. The Cubans would have fought.

[Q] Playboy: What's the parallel to Vietnam?

[A] Halberstam: When we went into Vietnam, those same leaders thought, "Well, we can make some kind of deal with the Soviet Union or even with the Chinese. We can bluff them out." But we could never bluff out the Vietnamese, because they had invested 25 years of struggle, of their resources, of their blood in this thing. Insurgency was deeply rooted in the society and they were not about to get frightened out by an air raid or two, particularly in a society that was essentially peasant and thus invulnerable to bombing. And they weren't about to be stopped by the coming of 100,000 American troops--or 200,000 or 500,000--because they knew that every time we sent one American soldier there, we made it easier for them to recruit one more Vietnamese peasant to their side. And they always knew that one day we would tire of the war and have to go home--after which it would still be their country.

[Q] Playboy: What do the decisions that involved us in Vietnam tell us about our own country, our own leaders?

[A] Halberstam: That America had grown too big, too powerful, too materialistic. That its Government was no longer responsive to its own citizens' needs. These were essentially isolated men, deciding what was good for the society--with a kind of imperial sense that what was good for them and good for their careers was good for the American empire--and thus good for the American people. The simple common-sense questions--about whether it really did the Vietnamese or the American people any damn good to get into a protracted, bloody foot-soldier war on the Asian mainland--were never considered. These men were insulated, removed from reality.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Halberstam: Their lives weren't our lives. The men who made decisions on Vietnam, with such self-assurance about exporting our values there, were men who didn't have any sense at all of whether our values were working in America itself, as I suggested earlier. Our cities were dying; our urban transportation was impossible. Going into a New York subway train was like entering the Black Hole of Calcutta. But this didn't bother them. Their lives didn't touch it. They lived in Washington. There were limousines to take them in and out of the White House, special 707s that awaited their arrival. They didn't circle above Kennedy Airport on a Friday afternoon for two hours like the rest of us. They never got caught in traffic; helicopters whisked them downtown. They didn't know the amount of daily failure in American life that touched not just the very poor but the average citizen.

[Q] Playboy: Considering the decisions--and the deceptions--for which they were responsible, would you call them war criminals?

[A] Halberstam: No. This seems to me to be a national tragedy with quite enough responsibility to go around. We're all involved. You'll have a hard time, looking through the pages of many American journals in the mid-Sixties, finding much serious criticism of our course. I think they were bad politicians and they were very unwise. But I don't think they were war criminals.

I do feel, however, that the architects of the war--the Bundys and the McNamaras, the Rusks and the Rostows--should be willing to come to terms with their own responsibility. McNamara and Bundy, particularly, because by 1969 they had turned on the war and yet remained silent. It would have been much harder for Nixon to continue the bombing if they had spoken out, admitted their culpability. They allowed Nixon to invoke, in effect, their names and their decisions--decisions they had already turned against in private. It seems to me that they are guilty of the crime of silence. I would love to see them held accountable for that. I would love to see them taken once a month from their plush offices at the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to some veterans' hospital to work as orderlies there. If they'd been the men one expected them to be, perhaps they would. Maybe that's why they're not the men we expected them to be.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think they lied to themselves as well as to the rest of us?

[A] Halberstam: Oh, yeah. The only people they finally fooled were themselves. The amount of self-deception was really extraordinary.

[Q] Playboy: Why did they lie?

[A] Halberstam: Because, I think, the alternative was looking with great clarity and courage at a very dark course; putting your career on the line, having to voice particularly unpopular opinions that would put you out of step with the main current in Washington, make you seem a little kookie, probably cost you your real influence at a high level. You would no longer be considered "tough" or "realistic." Being a hard-nosed pragmatist was very much in fashion in the early and mid-Sixties. I think the combination of Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Stalin had driven liberals into a kind of corner. They didn't want to be thought soft in any way; the range of what kind of dissent was acceptable became very narrow.

[Q] Playboy: The American people have since found out they've been lied to; what do you think the consequences have been?

[A] Halberstam: The old-fashioned American belief that something good will come out of politics was severely damaged during the war in Vietnam. Thanks to Vietnam--and now Watergate--we have become a good deal more skeptical about our politicians and what they say.

[Q] Playboy: Or perhaps cynical?

[A] Halberstam: It's hard to say. My own generation--people in their late 30s and early 40s--is a good deal more skeptical than it was ten years ago. I know I am. We had a belief in American life that was some-what positive; the country we knew was the one that fought World War Two, that had generals like Eisenhower and Bradley and Marshall. So we remember another America. But I sometimes wonder about a generation that's grown up entirely on the lies of Vietnam, the sense of racial failure, now facing something like Watergate. That generation may be a good deal more cynical than mine. I just can't speak for this generation.

[Q] Playboy: In The Best and the Brightest, you claim that the people who came into the Kennedy Administration said, or believed, that they were going to restore a style and sanity to the Government--and they weren't able to, partly because of their own weaknesses and partly because of events that overtook them. Now we have the spectacle of the Nixon people, who came in with a lot of pious noise about restoring law and order, mixed up in what one publication has called "the most pervasive instance of top-level misconduct in the nation's history." How would you compare the Kennedy and Nixon Administrations?

[A] Halberstam: What the Kennedys finally accomplished, I think, was precious little. The famous Kennedy style was vastly overrated. What it really meant was wearing narrow-cut Ivy League suits and buttondown shirts instead of wide lapels and puffed-up shoulders. It was very attractive and very handsome, but too much of it, I'm afraid, was like a Chinese meal--the substance gone before you realize it. But I think there was, in the Kennedy Administration, a sense of a beginning, of a kind of new candor and a new honesty in Government. All that was wiped out by the lies about Vietnam.

And then we had the Nixon Administration: These were hard, mechanistic, functional manipulators. I think they had very little belief in the democratic process as we think of it--of responding to and caring about the electorate or raising an issue to its highest level. They thought that people were something to manipulate--and they were contemptuous not just of the Congress but of the President's Cabinet itself. And they were constantly congratulating themselves on how hard they worked when, as Hugh Sidey pointed out in Time, most of their hard work consisted of covering up their own mistakes. I think what Nixon's people really cared about was what was in it for them, and whether they could get away with it. I think that's why Watergate became such a scandal. You know, why not bug? They had a lot of money; they had a couple of ex-CIA guys around, so why not? They were so goddamn sure of their own course. John Mitchell, in all his statements now, is trying to rationalize his conduct. He says he didn't do it; he talked to them against it. Well, of course, what he should have said the moment they brought up the idea while he was present--and he now admits that he was present--was: "Well, gentlemen, your ideas for the Watergate are really very interesting. I just want to tell you one thing. I'm chief law-enforcement officer of this country, and if you do what you say you're going to do, I'm going to bust every one of your asses into a thousand pieces." And that would have been the end of Watergate.

[Q] Playboy: But he didn't say that.

[A] Halberstam: No, he didn't. And that's Mitchell for you. He thought they could get away with it.

[Q] Playboy: It looked at first as if they would. McGovern and the other Democrats tried to make an issue of Watergate in the 1972 elections, but it never really caught on. Why?

[A] Halberstam: At first it didn't really project. The sheer darkness and implications of what it meant for the democratic society--that the Government itself, the state, would actually commit crime, bug the opposition party, bug the Democratic National Committee, play games with Muskie, McGovern and people like that--didn't come through to a lot of citizens out there in what is now called middle America. They didn't realize what a quantum jump it was from your average political abuses to Watergate. I think it was because the excesses of the war had numbed the moral sensitivity of the country. I think a bad war begets so much social protest that the people are just numb.

And there's another point--something that I think has happened to us as a country. We've been involved in this great Cold War thing for 20 years, and there has developed a kind of mentality--particularly evident in the CIA--that rationalized that if the Communists were doing something, we had to do it as well. Match force with force, their dirty tricks with our dirty tricks. No matter how bad we are, we told ourselves, the Soviets and the Chinese are worse. If that goes on long enough, not only do you become morally indistinguishable from what you're fighting but antidemocratic actions become acceptable here at home, too. A man like E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA agent, sees himself as a heroic figure.

It's a legacy of this whole goddamn Cold War. The same mentality was evident in the planning for Vietnam in 1964 and 1965, when otherwise quite moral and intelligent and rational men allowed themselves to do all kinds of devious and dubious things. Mac Bundy is a better man than either Haldeman or Ehrlich-man; he only rationalized going into Vietnam from the Tonkin Gulf. But sooner or later you get a guy a notch down from Bundy, and in a couple of years we have Ehrlichman saying to Hunt and Liddy, "OK, go break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office--on your own, of course." It really has come full circle. What is astonishing is the mentality behind it all: how small and how narrow, how insensitive to people's rights--and at a sheer pragmatic level, how stupid to risk so much to learn so little.

[Q] Playboy: Some of those "games" that the Committee for the Re-election of the President played with McGovern and Muskie were really rather serious. How about things like the phony "gays for McGovern" and the smutty-letter campaign in Florida?

[A] Halberstam: This is a very important point, because what you really had with the coming of Hunt and Liddy and those Cubans underneath them was the first instance, at least to my knowledge, of the use of the CIA in the domestic society. Ex-CIA agents--if there is such a thing as an ex-CIA agent--and the people beneath them have perpetrated such outrages as beating up Ellsberg, bugging the Democratic National Committee. All these dirty tricks--classic CIA gimmicks for use in little countries throughout the world--have now been employed against American citizens here at home. How dare they? What was this half-FBI, half-CIA, extralegal elite corps of mercenaries with Ehrlichman and Haldeman as members? Who were they? Where did they come from? Is Gordon Liddy or Dan Ellsberg the greater threat to our liberty? I don't think Ellsberg is very much of a threat to anybody's liberty. But, by God, I think the people who burglarized his psychiatrist's office are sure as hell a threat to our liberty.

The idea of using the muscles of Government, of the Executive Branch, to harass, to commit violations of personal liberty against either an individual or another party is absolutely chilling. It's not the way it's supposed to be. And there are more and more tricks with which to work, a lot of electronic gimmicks they can use now. God knows what they can do; a tiny button can probably pick up things a hundred miles away now or some damned thing like that. And they have enough money to do absolutely whatever they want. If they don't have an ethical sense--which they clearly do not have--we're in grave danger.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of guarantee can we have that people in Government will have such an ethical sense?

[A] Halberstam: Quite clearly, there is none. There are always going to be threats to liberty, and by and large they are posed by men who are always claiming that they're in the vanguard of liberty--and law and order. Hunt and Liddy and Ehrlichman and Haldeman thought they were great professional patriots, and that made it all right to do whatever they damn well pleased. What is that Samuel Johnson line? "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." It's really true.

[Q] Playboy: Given Nixon's record in political campaigns--going back to the telephone innuendoes against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 and to the 1962 campaign for the governorship of California, when Nixon's staff, headed by Haldeman, was found guilty of having sent out falsified letters with Nixon's personal knowledge and authorization--should we have been surprised by Watergate?

[A] Halberstam: Only its extent is a surprise, and its extent is frightening. But the fact that you had men like Mitchell and Haldeman and Ehrlichman in a Government like this, and that they would acquiesce so readily to a plot, isn't really surprising, because I think they were an extension of Nixon. And Nixon himself has always embodied a kind of ethic that the end justifies the means.

You know, Nixon doesn't understand why reporters and intellectuals and liberals don't like him. Well, there's a very good reason why they don't like him and why people--even those who voted for him, God help them--are always a little uneasy with him. It's something going back all the way in his career, a kind of excessive partisanship that's just beyond the crossover point. He's always gone too far. He has always been willing to use things that somehow should be beyond the bounds of decency--and it hasn't bothered him. Very few high-level politicians have demonstrated the kind of superpartisanship that has been a constant in Nixon's career. You just knew, even as he was going to China--which was a very good thing, and I'll give him high marks for it--that if Hubert Humphrey had beaten him in 1968, and if Humphrey had had the guts to do the same thing, Nixon would have attacked him in the most partisan way possible for doing it.

[Q] Playboy: Nixon is often accused of working both sides of the street. Do you think he's hypocritical or just pragmatic?

[A] Halberstam: I think he thinks he's pragmatic. He's always been extraordinarily manipulative, and he's always had a kind of false piety to him. I think when Nixon starts telling you all the good things he's doing for you, you'd better check your wallet.

[Q] Playboy: What makes him the way he is?

[A] Halberstam: Oh, Lord, you'd have to read Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes, or break into a few psychiatrists' offices yourself, to find that out. I think there's an enormous insecurity to the man. I don't think he knows who he is or what he is. He's been a manipulative politician for so long that that's all he is. There's no other Richard Nixon. The self-creation has become the man.

[Q] Playboy: Nixon is supposed to have said to Senator Smathers at one time that when he was starting out as a young man, he could just as well have become a liberal Democrat. What does that say about him?

[A] Halberstam: He's always been a man on the make. He's always been a gun for hire. Those wealthy men out in Southern California were looking for a nice young man to run for them, and they found in Nixon the ideal guy. Here was a man who wasn't propelled by the human issues of politics. He was propelled solely by Richard Nixon's self-interest from the very start. His only ideology was his career. And his willingness to do almost anything on behalf of that career makes one wonder if Richard Nixon is really big enough for the job. You have to ask yourself: Can you really believe him? Does he really represent an essential decency in American society?

[Q] Playboy: Does he?

[A] Halberstam: I've always had a feeling that Nixon, throughout his career, has had an instinct for the lowest common denominator of the American electorate. I think he showed it in 1968 when he ran against Humphrey. And in 1972, his strategy was adapted to accommodate the Wallace vote. Nixon is simply not a man to whom you could go over a period of years, knowing what you do about his career, and expect him to be a man of integrity, of character on questions of right and wrong. If he were a man who had a sense of what was right and wrong, I don't think you would have had Watergate. I don't think you would have had people around him who would have tolerated Watergate. I don't think you would have had John Mitchell as Attorney General. I don't think you would have had Ehrlichman authorizing, or at least tacitly approving, burglaries.

[Q] Playboy: But Nixon's background has been public knowledge for many years. How did he get elected President?

[A] Halberstam: He got elected in 1968 because he was running against the turbulence of the late Sixties and the fact that Lyndon Johnson had lost control of the country. In 1972 he was running against George McGovern, who had failed to crystallize himself in a way, and who was on the defensive because of the outrageous way Eagleton had screwed him. There was an enormous fear in the hearts of the American people, produced by crime and the threat of busing. I don't think there was any doubt in people's minds that McGovern was probably a superior man in a moral sense. But I think the people wanted a man who was a little more sympathetic to the cop. The American people know who Nixon is--or they thought they did until Watergate.

[Q] Playboy: By his own admission, Nixon didn't do anything about Watergate after he'd known about it for a good long time. Why?

[A] Halberstam: Probably because he was in a terrible position for a politician. I think he kept looking for something marvelous to happen. Maybe he thought there would be such a ground swell in his favor that he could ride it out. Either alternative--to get rid of his closest aides or to keep them--was so terrible that he was just immobilized.

[Q] Playboy: Quite a bit has been made of the fact that a number of Nixon's advisors came from Southern California, went to UCLA together, and so on. Do you think that's significant--as you thought the fact that many of Kennedy's people were Ivy Leaguers was important?

[A] Halberstam: No, I think he could have found the same type anywhere. He doesn't have many lasting friendships, as you may know, because he doesn't like to reveal himself in the kind of give and take that friendship requires. And in post-1960, he was a more isolated and lonely man than ever. He picked up a new crew, and he happened to pick them up while he was in California. Don't think that only Southern California produces men like that. Nixon could have walked down Madison Avenue here in New York and picked up five or six of the same mechanistic, functional men. It wasn't so much where they were from but the kind of men they were that recommended them to him.

[Q] Playboy: Mitchell, who did come from New York, was at least less faceless than the rest of them, wasn't he?

[A] Halberstam: He was less faceless because he was an Attorney General, and he was a campaign manager--but Mitchell is one of your real political primitives. He was the man behind the Haynsworth and Carswell nominations. He was one of the people who pushed very hard for the illfated Cambodian invasion. He was the architect of the 1968 campaign that turned a landslide into a cliff-hanger. I always thought it was a great loss for the Democrats when Mitchell had to be moved out of the campaign managership in 1972.

I think Mitchell was a bond salesman before he went into politics. I think he talks only to other bond salesmen. I think he really believes the world is the way it is as you hear the talk at, say, the Westport Country Club. He's a narrow man living in a narrow world, having dinner with other narrow people. I don't think he has much sense of what the 20th Century is really about. If you really want to know what Mitchell feels, listen to Martha, because he learned after a while to keep his mouth shut. I think it was during one of the moratoriums, early in the Administration, that Martha compared the demonstrators to Russian revolutionaries--virtually said they ought to be shot or run out of the country. That's revealing.

[Q] Playboy: In spite of all the dreadful things she'd said, she seems to be becoming--at least at this point--almost a sympathetic figure.

[A] Halberstam: She's simply one of the very few people who seem to have any kind of human juice at all in an Administration with so little in the way of human juices. You have a feeling that if you cut Haldeman and Ehrlichman, they just wouldn't bleed. When you have men of as little humanity as Nixon and the men around him running the Government, you're really in trouble. Lyndon Johnson, for all his weaknesses and faults, was a man of overwhelming humanity. Even when he lashed out at the press or did something egregious, it lasted for 24 hours. He was just too human not to recant the next day. But these men are really mean and narrow, and they're haters. These are men who almost pride themselves on the fact that they don't smoke and don't drink and don't have any faults, any flaws, any frailties. You can't even caricature them, because there's so little to caricature, but you do have the sense of their being indistinguishable from those who run the bureaucracies, the Politburos in other countries. You could take these men and program a little computer into the back of their heads to teach them how to speak Polish or French, and they'd be interchangeable with the guys around Gierek in Poland or Pompidou in France.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the system--the judicial system, the press--worked very well in the Watergate case?

[A] Halberstam: No. I notice that some people, including the President of the United States, have said what a great victory for the system it was. But it really wasn't. The system is corroded and overloaded, like a river that's turned to a dry creek. First of all, if the system had worked the way it should have in Watergate, it would have been the President himself, through his own investigatory powers in the FBI and the Justice Department, who would have within weeks stripped Watergate down. But the very people who were charged by the system itself to get to the bottom of the matter tried to cover it up. By the purest chance, we had an irascible, crusty, courageous judge. By chance, in a journalistic profession in which 80 to 90 percent of the papers care nothing at all about civil liberties--or, if the truth were to be told, about freedom of speech--one newspaper, The Washington Post, and a couple of marvelous young police reporters, Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein, dug in and stayed with the story. This country owes them a debt of gratitude to an extraordinary degree.

It's even interesting that the reporters who cracked it open weren't the big, powerful guys. They happened to be a couple of young kids who broke the story--to the great credit of the executives of the Post, who gave them their heads. But the men in the profession who were best equipped to do it, the experienced Washington hands, didn't unearth the story--and didn't pick it up even when it stank to high heaven. So I don't think we ought to go around and do too much self-congratulating on how well the system worked. I think we were pretty goddamn lucky. A couple of people--by chance and by coincidence--connected, and McCord got scared. He suddenly found out that there were, in fact, prisons--and he didn't want to go into one.

[Q] Playboy: What would have happened if McCord hadn't opened up?

[A] Halberstam: If he hadn't, I doubt that the others would have. And what would have happened if the judge had been just an average laissez-faire judge, if he hadn't somehow gotten his back up? I think the odds against getting a judge like Sirica, a good tough judge who really hated what they were doing, were about four to one. How many judges in America really hate abuse of the weak by the powerful? Damned few!

[Q] Playboy: Have you any comment on the farcical aspects of the various White House denials--ending with Ron Ziegler's saying that previous statements were "inoperative"?

[A] Halberstam: Marvelous. Disneyland's own Ron Ziegler. How sweet it is. I guess maybe an Administration that does this sort of thing deserves a Ziegler as its spokesman. But I keep thinking about these two young kids. They scored such an enormous victory for the free press that they've turned the whole thing around, from where the press was almost cowering--totally on the defensive against Administration attacks and Ziegler doublethink--to a point at which the Administration is now on the defensive. There is an enormous sort of rebirth of belief in what a free journalistic profession can do and how valuable it is. It's been years since this profession--and the country--has owed so much to so few.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that in this sense Watergate will turn out to have been a good thing?

[A] Halberstam: No, because we're all corruptible, and the people at high levels of the journalistic profession who were fallible before will continue to be that way. Or do you mean in the sense that it strips the Presidency down?

[Q] Playboy: In the sense that there may be a turnaround in public opinion, which before was stacked in favor of the Administration.

[A] Halberstam: I think that's a positive thing about it. Everybody says, "What a terrible thing; it hurts the Presidency." Well, I think the Presidency was so inflated and so arrogant that this is a healthy turn of events. The power of the Executive Branch of the Government overwhelms everything. Nixon's White House staff dominated the Congress, dominated the judiciary, dominated even his own Cabinet. They had too much power and too little accountability. Our Presidents have learned how to exploit modern science and modern communications for their own advantage, thus leaving the Congress far behind. I saw a story in the Times the other day about Nixon's getting 30 new helicopters. When Nixon goes to Paris or London, 40 or 50 technicians go with him just to handle television, to assure that the camera angles are right when he gets off Air Force One.

[Q] Playboy: Congressional leaders obviously don't have those resources, that kind of exposure. How, then, does the Legislative Branch exercise its balance of power?

[A] Halberstam: I think the only way you can counterbalance the Executive Branch anymore is through a combination of the press and the Congress interacting with each other. The press alone wasn't effective on the Vietnam war, and the Senate alone was impotent in opposing it. But the combination of the press and the Senate--in Fulbright's hearings, for example--was a potent one, and one that enraged the Executive Branch.

You know, this puffing up of the Presidency--the Executive Branch thinking only of the perpetuation of its own power--goes beyond party politics. It's interesting that Nixon was enraged by what Ellsberg did. He's not enraged by the war. He's not enraged by General Lavelle, who violated the Constitution and violated his commander-in-chief's orders and authorized illegal bombings. He's not enraged by Lieutenant Calley. He's enraged by Dan Ellsberg, because Dan Ellsberg cast doubt on the wisdom and might and majesty of two previous Presidents. The United States is no longer your traditional republic--it's an awesome thing, a great expanding state with an unchecked, single, monarchic executive.

Go back and read George Orwell's 1984. It seems like a very different book now from when we read it 20 years ago. Then it seemed to be a parable on the coming of communism. But if you read it now, it seems applicable to today's society--the coming of the total central state, in which the manipulators have learned to adapt modern technology to their means. Watergate, thank God, is taking some of the air out of the President and the Presidency. It shows once again how few clothes the emperor has and how, indeed, the emperor can, from time to time, screw his own subjects, and in that sense it's a good thing. And it has restored a kind of credibility to a free press. People who didn't know why we needed a free press now have a pretty goddamn good illustration of why we do.

[Q] Playboy: Would we be better off now if someone like you, or another investigative reporter, had done a job on Nixon's men like the one you did on Kennedy's?

[A] Halberstam: It wouldn't have made any difference. People instinctively knew what they were. To the degree that they cared what Nixon was, as I said before, they knew what he was. The country opted for him knowing full well what the pros and cons were. But if Watergate had broken a year earlier--say when it happened, in June of 1972--I think it could have affected the election. Particularly if Muskie had been the candidate. Muskie--who comes across as ethical. Lincoln-esque, a man above scandal--would have been very effective running against a tarnished Nixon.

[Q] Playboy: Agnew said not too long ago, before Watergate broke wide open, that he could win the Presidency in 1976. Could he?

[A] Halberstam: I thought he was a little bit more modest than that.

[Q] Playboy: Has he been damaged by Watergate?

[A] Halberstam: I think he's reasonably clean. He's probably got a much higher ethical sense than Nixon. But he may be more of a true believer, which is possibly a more dangerous quality. Obviously, though, he will take on the indirect stain of having been part of the Nixon years in the White House. He cannot dissociate himself from it.

[Q] Playboy: What about John Connally? Will he be a major rival for Agnew?

[A] Halberstam: Connally--smooth. self-assured, believing that just about the best thing in the world is to be John Connally--obviously makes an enormous impression on somebody as unsure of himself as Richard Nixon. But whether he can impress the Republican rank and file now that he's parachuted into that party is quite another question. I just wonder if, every time they hear that voice, they won't think of Lyndon Johnson.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see Teddy Kennedy running in 1976?

[A] Halberstam: You have to assume that he is the prime Democratic possibility. I always have a feeling about Teddy that the only person who can beat him is himself. I think Chappaquiddick is quite in the background; if he pulls anything like it again, of course, that would be too much for him to take into a campaign. But if you were looking for a Democratic candidate who is acceptable to the new forces but can shift over to the more traditional political center of the party, then you would have to invent Edward Kennedy. And there he is. He's attractive. He's a hard worker. He's thoughtful. He's a better Senator than either of his brothers was.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any other Democratic possibilities?

[A] Halberstam: I think Ed Muskie has been a genuine beneficiary of Watergate. It's become obvious that, partly because of the machinations of C.R.E.E.P., he was caught in the cross fire in 1972. If Teddy falters, I'd look to Muskie.

[Q] Playboy: If you were going to pick the worst dirty trick of all those played in C.R.E.E.P.'s campaign of sabotage and espionage, which would you choose?

[A] Halberstam: Jesus, I've never been to a psychiatrist, so I couldn't tell what it would be like to have my psychiatric records stolen. But I think--assuming we know the worst yet--that bugging the opposition is the worst thing. Can you imagine what this means? The opposition party in a free society is supposed to protect the citizen, to protect free speech. But this shows it can barely protect itself. Anybody in this society who decides to be a critic of the Government has to assume his phone is bugged, his income-tax records pored over.

[Q] Playboy: Walter Cronkite said in June's Playboy Interview that he figures his own phone is bugged.

[A] Halberstam: Sure. Every once in a while I'll call somebody like Neil Sheehan, the reporter who got the Pentagon papers from Ellsberg, and it sounds as if we're talking in a wind tunnel. It's the same sound we used to get on the phone in Saigon in 1962, when we were both young reporters there.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think C.R.E.E.P. bugged the Watergate? What did they hope to get out of it?

[A] Halberstam: Well, I like what Frank Mankiewicz said right after McCord broke. Somebody asked Mankiewicz, who had been McGovern's campaign manager, "Did you think Mitchell was behind it?" He said, "Oh, yeah, I always thought so. He's the only man dumb enough to think he could learn anything from bugging the Democratic National Committee." I think the kind of mentality that engages in bugging is a titillation mentality. They're gossip hungry. They think they might find out who's screwing whom. All those famous J. Edgar Hoover bugs on Martin Luther King were gossip bugs. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, loved those FBI reports, loved to read them aloud to friends. The people who bug believe that if you know a little bit of gossip about somebody, you've got some power over him. Maybe it makes them feel a little stronger and a little more righteous.

[Q] Playboy: Is it possible they were worried that the Democrats might have had some information on them?

[A] Halberstam: Possible, possible. They may have been worried about their own excesses. But essentially, I think these men just didn't have a high enough ethical sense to say, "My God, we can't do that. That's undemocratic. That's wrong."

[Q] Playboy: One of the questions many people have asked is why Nixon's people should have thought espionage or sabotage necessary, since their man seemed to be on the way to a landslide.

[A] Halberstam: Well, I think the original Watergate planning--not the June break-in but the planning--goes back quite a few months to a point at which Nixon's star wasn't as high as it later became. So they were looking for every little thing they could get. And also, they had too damned much money. They had to throw it around a little bit.

[Q] Playboy: What does that say about the way we finance campaigns?

[A] Halberstam: It's a scandal. One of our great priorities is to do something about the spending in American politics. It's really obscene. You can't run for Senator or governor in a state like New York or Illinois or California without a couple of million dollars. That great American Nelson Rockefeller, in his last run for the governorship of New York, spent, I think, $6,700,000. If some poor son of a bitch breaks into Woolworth's, he gets sent up for five or ten years or something like that. But a Nelson Rockefeller spending $7,000,000 of ill-gotten gains on a campaign is OK. His morality is praised. He is considered a positive figure in public life. Universities give him honorary degrees. If he speaks to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, they all stand up and applaud when he walks in. Until we start to turn it around, until we become really upset by how we're getting screwed by big money in our electoral processes, we're going to encourage abuse. Many good men can't afford to run for office. They consider making a race for the Senate, or a governorship, and when they realize the kind of accommodations they're going to have to make to people with money, they decide not to do it.

[Q] Playboy: Rockefeller is a quintessential establishment figure. Your book makes a good deal of the fact that the Kennedy men were also part of that elitist structure. Would you say the Nixon men were establishment figures, too?

[A] Halberstam: No. I don't think they have been men of the establishment, with the possible exception of Kissinger and, more recently, Elliot Richardson. Richardson, of course, is 120 percent establishment--a kind of poor man's Mac Bundy, I guess. Kissinger is an immigrant who's been adopted by the establishment, given to us by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family. If the establishment spoke with a European accent, it would speak like Henry Kissinger. Nixon's other men, though, were in their own funny way rather anti-establishment. They didn't have the old traditions, the morals, the belief that the right people know the right things, that characterize the establishment. It was a new, cold-eyed group that learned to master technology. They were functional men who came from the manipulative professions--a lot of them from J. Walter Thompson, which is an advertising agency.

Some of them were really linked to Goldwater, and one of the things one must remember about the 1964 Goldwater campaign is that it was an assault by the new money of the Southwest and the West against the old money of the East and the Rockefellers. Wall Street doesn't very much like Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman and Mr. Ziegler. Wall Street would think that they might be all right in a nice semiclerical job, but they aren't the kind of men you would really want to have in high positions.

[Q] Playboy: Mitchell was widely quoted as having said, when he was in the Administration, "Watch what we do, not what we say." What did that really mean?

[A] Halberstam: It meant simply that they'll say one thing and do another. Now we're judging them by both, and they're equally unattractive. I think having somebody like Mitchell at a place called Justice is Orwellian. It's like Orwell's device of having a "ministry of peace" in charge of war and a "ministry of truth" in charge of lying. Take the law-and-order issue. Obviously, everybody who lives in any city in America is concerned about crime. There should be a basic right to walk the streets of your city freely. But the way this Administration has exploited it as an issue--making it appear that the Democratic Party was the party of the Black Panthers and of crime in the streets--is just outrageous. And dangerous.

[Q] Playboy: Some observers have seen Orwellian overtones in the so-called Nixon style as well. They claim that when Nixon goes on television, he tries to convince the public that something bad is really good, or vice versa--just because he says so.

[A] Halberstam: Yes, he is very Orwellian. For example, when he says--as he did in his major Watergate speech, when his aides were let go--that the Presidency must be above partisanship, right then you knew this was going to be a partisan speech. And, sure enough, a couple of minutes later he starts talking as though the Democrats were somehow guilty, too. The Democrats had done nothing, other than being bugged. Then he went on, saying, "I take the responsibility," and in the next breath started putting the blame everywhere else. Very Orwellian.

[Q] Playboy: Was there anything about that Watergate speech that reminded you of an earlier Nixon address--the Checkers speech?

[A] Halberstam: Yes. Both were characterized by essential self-pity and an attempt to take your eye off the main theme. If Nixon had said, "Look, this is a terrible thing and it grew out of the White House and we weren't aggressive enough in trying to stop it, and I take the responsibility, and the buck stops here," and gotten off in 12 minutes, he would have had a good speech. But he went on and on, talking about peace in our time with that kind of fake humility, that slight dash of Uriah Heep, that has always been part of Nixon's style.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think he inserted in that speech a passage about what a terrible personal ordeal it had been for him to bomb Vietnam on Christmas Eve?

[A] Halberstam: He was saying, "Everybody was against me when I bombed Vietnam at Christmastime. But look, we have peace, therefore the people who were against me were wrong and I was right. Trust me." Of course, his bombing of Vietnam at Christmas had no effect at all. The peace they got after the bombing was more or less the same thing they would have had before Christmas.

[Q] Playboy: Or four years before?

[A] Halberstam: Yes. I think we could have had pretty much the same settlement earlier.

[Q] Playboy: If it was an ordeal for anyone, wasn't it more of an ordeal for the people in Haiphong?

[A] Halberstam: I think they had a little harder time of it that week, yes. But you must remember one thing about this country: Of all the developed societies in the world, it has never been bombed. Therefore, the impact of bombing upon Americans is really quite marginal. My wife is Polish, and her earliest memory is of being a young girl in Warsaw with bombers flying overhead. She watched the television coverage of the P.O.W.s coming back and talking about how badly they were treated in Hanoi and she was enraged--as most of the world would be.

[Q] Playboy: You don't sympathize with the P.O.W.s?

[A] Halberstam: Yes, of course I do. They've suffered; they've paid a very special price when so few others in this society paid any price at all. There's a very natural human instinct of sympathy. Though it makes me uneasy, one can even understand the fatuous coverage of their return. What TV reporter is going to interview those prisoners toughly, when the reporter hasn't been in prison--indeed, has been making $50,000 a year for the six years they've been in prison? Is he going to ask those prisoners, "What the hell do you think the Special Forces were doing to V.C.Prisoners for all those years?" You're not going to get balanced reporting. You're going to get emotional outpourings. No, the P.O.W.s paid their bills. But the idea they project is that somehow, in their own minds, they were over there as Pan Am or TWA pilots, not as bombers.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say the orchestration of the P.O.W.s' return is an example of Nixonian PR?

[A] Halberstam: Oh, sure. So is the slogan "Peace with honor." Honor? In that war? Where we aborted every democratic procedure in declaring the war--or in not declaring it? Where we sent poor blacks and rural whites to die for the richest nation in the world? Where we brought the heaviest armament in the history of mankind to a society where the water buffalo is still the prime beast? Nixon may call it peace with honor, to give it an aura of victory--as though the release of the prisoners of war were the counterpart of the 101st Airborne Division marching down Fifth Avenue. Really, the motto of this war should be "Lest we forget." The Administration tried to push us very quickly to a position of "Lest we remember."

[Q] Playboy: Why was Nixon able to come so close to succeeding in that effort--in manipulating the media?

[A] Halberstam: Obviously, Nixon knew something about the press when he look over in 1968. Two things: one, that the press is the sworn enemy of any powerful executive. Or should be. The other thing he knew--and he's got a good instinct on this, I'm afraid--was that the press was in a kind of disrepute because for ten years we had been messengers who'd had bad breath. For a decade, we had been bringing the public news of failure in Vietnam, racial failure, domestic protest and a hell of a lot of other stuff--challenging most nice, quiet middle-American people's assumptions about their own country. They had been talking it and taking it and they hadn't liked it. We were vulnerable. Everybody likes to slay the bearer of bad news. Nixon saw that and he took advantage of it. His particular target was the television correspondent.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Halberstam: Because Nixon and his people were really interested in mass manipulation, and television was the key medium there. So the guy they had to get wasn't Scotty Reston or Tom Wicker of The New York Times, it was Walter Cronkite of CBS and John Chancellor of NBC, and that's what the battle has been all about.

[Q] Playboy: Is it over?

[A] Halberstam: It's never over. But the pendulum has taken a long swing in the other direction--against Nixon and in favor of Cronkite.

[Q] Playboy: While it was still riding high, the Nixon Administration threatened other essential liberties--civil liberties of nearly every kind. Was that an expression of Nixon's basic ideology?

[A] Halberstam: He's sensitive to votes, not to civil liberties. By and large, nobody cares about civil liberties other than his own. Nixon smelled this, and he smelled that if people are against draft evaders and war protesters, his Administration could get away with violations of doves' civil liberties. Remember that time a bunch of kids were protesting the war in New York City and a bunch of hard-hats working down on Wall Street beat them up in the cruelest way. It was a very ugly scene, reminiscent of Germany in the Thirties, and the police just stood by. What did Nixon do? He immediately invited the heads of the construction workers' union to the White House. Because there were votes in it.

[Q] Playboy: Was he also catering to the same element when he repudiated a number of Presidential commission reports--on drugs, on population, on pornography--whose conclusions might seem objectionable to middle America?

[A] Halberstam: I think we live in an extraordinary time of change; we're really changing our morality, our culture, our ethic. Science has transformed us, by sort of a headlong jump, almost into another world. The birth-control pill, the coming of television as the main means of communication, these things have had a profound impact upon us. In one generation, much of our society has come to feel quite differently about a lot of issues, a lot of traditional old American values. Yet for everybody who likes change, there are an awful lot of Americans who feel very threatened by longer hair, by disrespect for traditional patriotism, by a desire for liberal abortion laws, by the idea of amnesty for those who went to Canada. And Nixon is shrewd enough to know that the real numbers are still on the side of those who are made uneasy by change. I'm also convinced that he himself believes pornography is bad, that liberalized abortion laws are bad for the moral fiber of the country. He's convinced himself that he's strong and must stand firm.

[Q] Playboy: Then he does have morals?

[A] Halberstam: Oh, I think he does. I think he believes that he's a moral force. All men convince themselves of their own mythology.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't Nixon's domestic views in striking contrast to the rather enlightened innovations that have taken place in the sphere of foreign policy? He was slow in stopping the Vietnam war but not slow in going to Moscow and Peking--which nobody had dared do before.

[A] Halberstam: I think there was a very real target of opportunity in the world scene--changes that were long overdue, away from the most rigid period of the Cold War, of a world divided between communism and anticommunism. The world as it existed in 1972 didn't fit that definition.

[Q] Playboy: But wasn't it surprising that Nixon should be the man to break the log jam?

[A] Halberstam: He was particularly able to. A lot of other Presidents who might have tried would have been afraid that Nixon or somebody like him would jump out of the wings and accuse them of selling out Chiang Kai-shek. One of the great advantages Kissinger had, as advisor to Nixon, was that he was dealing with a President who couldn't be blackmailed by Richard Nixon.

[Q] Playboy: What about Kissinger? Apart from being something of an establishment figure, as you said earlier, he seems to be a man from a different mold than the rest of the Nixon gang.

[A] Halberstam: He's a fascinating man. He's seen a lot in his life; he's an immigrant from Germany--an escapee, really. He knows, more than Bundy ever did, the difference between what the history books tell you and what really is. I think it's crucial to Kissinger's outlook that he knows firsthand what happened to the Weimar Republic, the terrible excesses of the German left and the coming of a government far harsher. That gives him a sympathy for Nixon that very few American liberals would have. Since Watergate, however, I hear Kissinger has been going around telling friends that he's very upset by what happened. He fears this Administration will be so stained that when history comes to judge them, they will be remembered for Watergate and not for the positive things.

[Q] Playboy: Is he right?

[A] Halberstam: It's still too early to tell. But the judgment on Kissinger himself is going to be very complicated, because here is a man who has had in many ways a profound positive impact upon American foreign policy--who's been an architect of enlightened policies toward China and the Soviet Union, who has taken ideas from the drawing board of Harvard, in effect, and helped implant them in the foreign policy of this nation. At the same time, he was also one of the architects of a policy on Vietnam that continued a terrible and cruel war four years longer than it should have gone. I think historians will be very harsh on him for that.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Watergate will have a noticeable influence on America's reputation abroad?

[A] Halberstam: I don't think so. Those speeches Nixon makes once in a while--when he comes back and says he has been to X number of countries, and the Presidency of the United States is admired there because of its great moral fiber--those are silly. Whatever he's done that's positive in his foreign policy--and there's been a very considerable amount--he's done because it's been (A) in the interest of the United States of America and (B) in the interest of the other great power involved. I'm sure when Nixon sits down with Chou En-lai, he doesn't lecture him on the spiritual fiber of America. It may even be that he could get more done now if he would devote less time to sermonizing and simply function as a good technical President.

[Q] Playboy: Haldeman, in a rare television interview given before leaving the Administration, recalled a statement by Nixon to his staff that he was glad the people who worked for him were pragmatists rather than idealists. In the light of events, wouldn't Nixon have been better off if he'd had a few idealists around him?

[A] Halberstam: A certain amount of idealism in everybody's life is not a bad thing. But it ought to be tough-minded idealism, idealism that knows how many points there are on the compass and that institutions have very big walls, and if you ram your head against those walls, you're going to bounce back a few times. That kind of idealism is a very healthy thing. What are we without our idealism, our belief that there's a possibility of a better world and a better life? God, I hate giving speeches like that; Nixon's the one who's always giving those.

[Q] Playboy: One thing about which Nixon's manipulators haven't been able to con the public is inflation; it would appear that they've tried to juggle statistics about the economy. How well have Nixon's public-relations functionaries served him there?

[A] Halberstam: The whole base of opinion manipulation is predicated on the theory that the citizen's memory span is short. He's preoccupied with his own problems and he'll take the President's word on major, yet distant issues. The President knows best. Therefore, you can say one thing one year--say in 1970 what a great thing it is to go into Cambodia, because it will shorten the war--and three years later, when you can't get out of the war because you're still in Cambodia, people will have forgotten. But you can't fool people about prices. You can't tell people what a great job you're doing on inflation when they're going to the store and getting beaten over the head every day.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any indication that Nixon will be able to do anything about inflation?

[A] Halberstam: Who knows? Inflation, among other things, is a product of that damned war. It began as a Johnson-McNamara inflation, because they lied to us, tried to get both the Great Society and the war in at the same time without increasing taxes. What they got us instead was a roaring inflation. Remember all that propaganda about Americans' not spending so much overseas? The real inflation we've faced in the last couple of years didn't come because a bunch of schoolteachers spent too much money on French pastry. It came because we were spending billions and billions and billions of dollars in Vietnam, and because of a lot of other questions about whether we're competitive with our goods anymore. You can turn on American television today and see Japanese automobiles advertised. The one thing in the world that used to be ours was the automobile.

[Q] Playboy: You have lived through--and observed more closely than most of us--the past 15 or 20 frantic years. What do you think the sit-ins and the marches and the riots and the war and the assassinations and the scandals and the inflations and the devaluations have done to the mood of the country?

[A] Halberstam: We started the Sixties with enormous hope for what could be accomplished, for what Government could do. That was the coming of the sit-ins, those marvelous young black kids sitting down and getting their hamburgers at Woolworth's and standing up to red-neck assaults. There was a sense of what could be done in this society. I think in a lot of ways we're just learning how difficult social change really is. You can change the law and let people have hamburgers and voting rights and make enormous differences in their lives--and yet some of the underlying problems, particularly those of bad housing, bad education, bad jobs, what Martin King called "slumism," remain. We started out the Sixties also with a sense of what America could do in the world, with all its goodness and its handsome young President, its Peace Corps and all those great things. We ended with the ashes of Vietnam in our mouths. I would call it a decade of loss of innocence.

[Q] Playboy: And how about the Seventies?

[A] Halberstam: This seems to me to be a decade of redefinition of values--of who we are and what we want. Old authorities and truisms are breaking down, some simply because they cannot stand the test of new exposure, new challenge. Change is hurtling at us, dividing us socially, economically and politically. But the great thing about America today, if you compare it with the Fifties or even the early Sixties, is the excitement of what's going on--the expansion of possibilities in politics, journalism, criticism, the arts. In almost every area, the centrist view of American politics and journalism and culture that existed in the Fifties has somehow been shattered. There's a breaking, a thawing. I think we're a much more interesting country now.

And although under Nixon and that awful Justice Department, people talk about repression--my God, we're the least repressed society in the world. Had Ellsberg tried to do what he did in the Fifties, he'd probably be hanging from an apple tree. Now, every time the Justice Department brings one of the conspiracy cases to trial, it loses. Trial after trial: the Harrisburg Seven, Angela Davis, whatever. In the Fifties, the Times wouldn't have printed the Pentagon papers. We're changing. We're opening up; there's a new consciousness of what people's rights in the society are, of what they can do with their lives--a belief in their own prerogatives as human beings. But we've gone from a kind of optimism and belief in what Government can do to a kind of skepticism, a knowledge of the limits of American goodness. I don't think people believe anymore that they'll get their solutions through politics.

[Q] Playboy: Is there a danger that people will simply lose interest in the political system altogether, that they won't care whom they elect as their leaders?

[A] Halberstam: That's an interesting question. I think politics is far less important in people's lives than it once was. What's really happening, as I started to say a moment ago, is the extraordinary velocity of change, particularly technological change, and its impact on mores and attitudes. People's aspirations and expectations have accelerated. Government can't respond quickly enough. And the problems many people face simply have nothing to do with the Government. If you're in your mid-30s, the chances are that your marriage is under very great pressure. Many shatter. The questions of how to adapt to changes in sexual standards--women's rights and so forth--these are things you have to work out for yourself, and these are the things that are really preoccupying people. What the hell can a government do for a father whose 17-year-old son won't listen to him anymore? Nothing. The idea that somehow you could find all the answers to your life by going to work for Dick Daley in the Cook County Courthouse is a thing of the past.

[Q] Playboy: Do you recognize any bond with the conservatives who feel that pornography on Times Square, the drug culture, and so on, are evidence that the nation is on the decline?

[A] Halberstam: I don't quite know yet. Call me in five years and I'll tell you. For the moment, no. I don't think pubic hair here and there or a dirty song in a Broadway musical--or the fact that movies now treat the Indian and the settling of the West in a more realistic way--means that we are on the decline as a society. In fact, you could make a very good case that these are symbols of the maturity of a society that is now secure enough, sophisticated enough and educated enough to get away from its own mythology.

[Q] Playboy: What about the so-Called decline of the work ethic?

[A] Halberstam: In a way, I agree with Nixon on that one. I grew up in a generation in which you worked very hard; jobs were scarce. I was too young for the Depression, but the sense of the Depression hung heavily over our family. Being Jewish--an out American as opposed to an in American--I always had a sense that my purchase on and leverage in society were quite limited. Things were going to be difficult, and one should work very hard. To be any good as a journalist, you have to work hard. I'm made wary by a generation coming along that thinks you don't have to pay a price for your goals and ideals.

[Q] Playboy: So you subscribe to the puritan ethic, after all?

[A] Halberstam: I like the idea of a society in which people believe in things and are willing to work for them. I'm made uneasy by kids who think that it's all shit and you can't do anything about it. That's why I find Ralph Nader such an admirable figure.

[Q] Playboy: Because he thinks there is something we can do?

[A] Halberstam: He thinks of it as a citizen's responsibility to make this country what it's supposed to be. The Nixon Administration hates him, and yet if they really believed in their own ethic, they'd be giving him the Freedom Medal--because he is the epitome of the citizen as a participant in the society. He's a man who believes the system can work. He doesn't find that it works. He doesn't find that it works terribly well now, but he believes the can be made to work.

[Q] Playboy: Can you think of any other praiseworthy public figures?

[A] Halberstam: There aren't many. Maybe that's a part of our coming of age, too. Maybe we used to be too gullible. Perhaps that's something television has brought us; we know so much more about our leaders now. No man is a hero to his valet.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see a new intolerance of being misgoverned?

[A] Halberstam: Well, I would like to think we're more wary of our Caesars than we were ten years ago. With very good reason: We haven't had a particularly good run of Caesars lately. Lyndon Johnson had many attractive qualities, but anybody assaying his Presidency has to come away with considerable reservations; and anybody who is enthusiastic over how well the democratic processes work would wonder how Richard Nixon ever got to be President.

[Q] Playboy: On the local and state levels as well as in Washington, there's been a recent spate of investigations and trials of public officials. Don't you find that significant and heartening?

[A] Halberstam: There has always been corruption--and investigations of corruption. But I think the combination of the Vietnam war and Watergate has taken a lot of the luster off our leadership. It's a very American belief that once a man gets the Presidency, he has a halo over his head. In Europe, it's traditional to be far more skeptical. They know a man doesn't lose all his faults, have all his sins erased, just because he gets to a high position.

[Q] Playboy: Is there more corruption in government than there used to be?

[A] Halberstam: Probably we're just hearing more about it. That would be my instinct, but who are we to sit here and calibrate against 1910 or 1860 or 1770?

[Q] Playboy: You talked earlier about a feeling we used to have in America that ours was a can-do nation. Certainly there seems to be less faith in that now. Blue-collar workers, for example, appear to be no longer convinced that they're making a good product--or that it matters if they are.

[A] Halberstam: The reason they're not convinced they're making a good product is that they're not. But I think the idea of the can-do society was also a very American thing. You wouldn't find it in Europe, which has gone in this century through two world wars and has learned a lot of lessons about the dangers of ideology and the gods of war. America, with two oceans around it, has been spared those particular horrors, so we have had a sense of what man could accomplish, and even of what war could accomplish. We thought we were the first team. Certainly that illusion has ended in the swamps of Vietnam, and that's a healthy thing.

But other illusions are disappearing, too--like the illusion of progress. One of the great things about the Industrial Revolution was that it gave Americans a standard of living they'd never had before. But now we're beginning to learn some of the problems that development has caused and, in a way, we're rebelling against the 20th Century. We've got all the material benefits and now we're learning their limits. The pollution, the dirty rivers, the mechanical lives in factories--with the fruits of labor now taken for granted--the problems of our crowded cities; all these things are coming home.

[Q] Playboy: In such an atmosphere, what keeps you going?

[A] Halberstam: Well, I'm not at all sure that these problems can be solved, or that the future is bright, or that man is a perfectible beast. But I think there is an obligation to do all you can. The terrible wrong, it seems to me, lies less in failing to achieve a better and more just society than in having failed to try. Besides, I really like what I do. And I like to think I'm getting better at it. But sometimes I wish I had more of a private life. In writing my book, I was hard on people whose only existence was a career--but the same thing could be said about someone like myself.

[Q] Playboy: There's a sort of introduction game, in which people split up into groups of, say, ten, and have to define themselves without any reference to work or family. Could you do that?

[A] Halberstam: It would be hard to do. You would stumble and find yourself describing yourself in words that sound uncommon and rather vague, because you've come to believe you are you because you've done this and that. You have these credentials, this many lines in Who's Who in America. That's who you are. When you take that away, how much of a man are you? There are some areas where even if nobody knew what I had done, I could hold my own. I can think on my feet and I can handle myself physically. But we have come to depend on our Who's Who identity too much, and I wish I could switch it off to a degree. I'm aware that I'm at least slightly a prisoner of it. Obviously, though, I've led a very full and satisfying life because of my work. It means something to me and, I think, to society. There isn't enough hard reporting, so to the degree that I'm a critical reporter, I think that's of some value.

[Q] Playboy: What area of reporting appeals to you most?

[A] Halberstam: Digging into power. I'm fascinated by it. I want to leave behind me a trilogy on power in America. I've done the first leg with The Best and the Brightest; I'm thinking now of doing a book on capitalism, on how we live in a capitalist society. No one writes about the power of money and the corporate ethic. Researching McNamara's years at Ford, I became fascinated by corporate power. These men are interesting, and what they do affects us deeply. So I'll do something on the power of the very rich. I think I'll isolate it, perhaps, to the big oil-and gasmen. Then I may do a third book on the politics of one scientific decision--the money involved, and so forth. The politics of the birth-control pill, for instance. This is an enormous subject, one that affects everybody's life, and nobody knows anything about it. I have a feeling sometimes that 90 percent of American journalists spend their time covering ten percent of the reality--and 90 percent of the reality goes uncovered.

[Q] Playboy: Have you always been fascinated by power?

[A] Halberstam: I guess so. When I left Harvard, I went to a small paper in Mississippi and picked up a lot of techniques of reporting. It's the opportunity to learn about power at the one-cell level. In a small town, you see the local man making his deals, and you come to understand that it really adds up to power. When I went to Tennessee, I had four more years of witnessing that, at a more embryonic level than in New York or Washington. In the police station, the courts, I learned things about Americans. If you're covering the police court in Nashville, your foot is in the mud every day. Every day you go to the darker corners of people's lives. When you watch people being paraded through that court--charged, say, with assault and battery--you realize that most of what they do is exactly what the rich do. But the rich don't get arrested, because they do it at their country clubs. They've got buffers to separate them from the law. For people in the slums, it's just raw nerve working against raw nerve. A guy works all day and comes home and has a couple of drinks, and his wife has a drink, and there's so much tension in those little apartments that he blows up--and a crime results. If he were a rich man, he'd have a safety valve--some way of getting out. He'd go to a motel and have an affair. Seeing all that gives you a sense of the frailty of people's lives. That's something they can't teach in journalism school.

[Q] Playboy: You've been writing about politicians and bureaucrats and others fascinated by power for 18 years. Did you ever consider going over to the other side--becoming a participant rather than an observer?

[A] Halberstam: No, I think that would be a disaster. As a matter of fact, I had some contacts with the people working for Muskie in 1972. I was being wooed to go into Government if everything worked out. Perhaps be assistant secretary of something. I told the man who mentioned it to me that I would end up getting him in a lot of trouble. I told him I was just fine on the outside but not so good on the inside. The first time some young David Halberstam came along, I'd probably turn on him with great ferocity, because he would remind me so much of myself. My insecurities would show. I'd react very badly. I'm of more use to society as a reporter.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Halberstam: I have a pretty good bullshit detector, for one thing. A reporter must have a real hatred of being lied to. You know, I've been lied to by sheriffs in Mississippi and water commissioners in Tennessee and generals in Vietnam and secret police in Poland. When somebody lies to me, I say, "All right. Instead of spending two days on this story, I'm going to spend an extra week."

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever gotten into a reporting situation where you've been tempted to turn tail because of the heat you'd generate by getting at--and telling--the truth?

[A] Halberstam: Not yet, I was physically scared in 1964 in Mississippi, and I was physically scared in the Congo, and I was physically scared in Vietnam--and anybody who says he wasn't is either crazy or a liar. But morally scared? I would like to think I've been very good on that. I have a record of being expelled or ordered out of two of the three countries I've worked in. A lot of reporters will quietly accommodate, without admitting it, when the host government starts putting the screws on. The reporters rationalize it by saying, "I'm so good here and I know the story so well that it's much better to have me here than anybody else. So I'll temper my stories a little." The moment you think that way, they've got you. You have to remember that you're responsible only to yourself and your readers. I'm very wary of self-censorship. And I have a feeling that there's too goddamned much self censorship in the press.

[Q] Playboy: Larry L. King, another writer, once said in an interview that you are the toughest-minded man he knows--and the best journalist. How does that make you feel?

[A] Halberstam: Well, he'll certainly get at least one round of drinks off me for that. I suppose I do have a fairly fierce belief that a reporter ought to be tough--particularly in dealing with the strong and the powerful. I've always had a kind of contempt for the reporter who justifies dubious relationships of intimacy with powerful people by saying he has to keep his sources open. That's crap. You don't learn anything that way. It's a one way street; they'll tell you only what they want to, and you'll be inhibited because you have a personal relationship with them. I'm quite the reverse of that. My nerves are set ajar by being with powerful people. I just respond with an essential antiauthoritarian impulse. I think that's the way reporters should be. If you're a tough reporter, what do you lose? You lose out on a few dinner parties. A reporter shouldn't seek to be popular and he shouldn't seek to be welcomed into the great halls of powerful men.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think this interview will ace you out of any great halls?

[A] Halberstam: No. But I'm not on my way to any great halls, anyway. If you're not going to follow your own instincts, if you're going to be intimidated, why bother being a reporter? Why not go out and do something that makes money instead? You live such a precious short time and have such a marvelous chance to be a free citizen; why accommodate, when the worst thing they can do is throw you out? Or put you in jail?

[Q] Playboy: You're not daunted by the thought of going to jail?

[A] Halberstam: Well, there are stories I'd a lot rather get than an insider's exposé of the prison system.