Playboy Interview: Andrew Young

Shortly after the 1976 Democratic Convention had nominated Jimmy Carter, the President-to-be was asked if he felt he owed any political debts to anyone. Carter mentioned only one name: "Andy Young."

Andrew Jackson Young was at the time hardly a household name, at least to white Americans. Some knew him as an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others may have remembered that in 1972 Atlanta had elected him as the first black Congressman from the South since Reconstruction. There were also articles last summer billing Young as the most powerful black man in America, because his standing in the black community made it possible to help deliver 83 percent of the all-important black vote to his friend from Georgia, Jimmy Carter.

By now, however, Andy Young is known to many more as the handsome, outspoken and somewhat brash U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. His off-the-cuff remarks on developments in Africa, on the U. S. position toward Vietnam, on the role of the press in reporting terrorism and on racism in Britain have caused controversy and have brought him notoriety. Yet, as this interview reveals, when President Carter addressed the United Nations this spring, his first comments to Young were not critical; instead, he asked him to keep speaking out, to take the heat and stay on the job.

Young is an unlikely kingmaker. Born 45 years ago into lower-middle-class comfort in New Orleans, his future appeared limited to the route of professional life--his father and brother are dentists--followed in those days by many educated blacks. But then came Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement of the Sixties. By then, Young had become a preacher and pastor of a small church in south Georgia; he then went to New York as one of three black executives on the National Council of Churches. On a television set in his comfortable home in Queens, he watched student-led black resisters start the sit-in movement. Growing uneasy over his absence from the place "where things were happening," Young returned South in 1961 to run a leadership-training project and become Dr. King's administrative assistant at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. By the time of King's assassination in 1968, which he witnessed on a motel balcony in Memphis, Young was executive director of the SCLC, the driving engine of the civil rights movement.

By the end of the Sixties, the antiwar movement had eclipsed civil rights as a popular cause and the SCLC was in disarray. Young sensed that the next phase of progress for minorities lay not in noisy mass movements, which no longer inspired the popular imagination, but in long-term political action. He became chairman of the Community Relations Commission in Atlanta and found himself mediating labor disputes, negotiating with the U. S. Army on behalf of civilian employees, forging lines of communication between the races. It was during that period that he found himself swapping favors and tips with a man who often seemed a spokesman for Georgia conservatives--Governor Jimmy Carter.

This broadening of Young's political base did not hurt him in the years to come. Despite an initial loss in 1970, he subsequently won Atlanta's seat in Congress; he won two more terms by increasingly wide margins. Last year, Carter himself won only 3000 more votes than Young did in Atlanta.

When word leaked out in late December 1976 that Young was about to be appointed to what many viewed as a dead-end political post as Ambassador to the United Nations, most of his mail from Atlanta read like the telegram from state senator Julian Bond: "Don't do it, Andy." His constituents did not want to lose one of the most popular Congressmen the Fifth District of Georgia had ever had. Consistent with his habit of confounding even his closest friends, Young took the UN job anyway. In what must be record time, he has catapulted the Ambassadorship into one of the most visible posts in Government today. On an all-points, anything-goes run through southern Africa during his first month on the job, Young appeared to many to be committing a number of unforgivable diplomatic sins, such as saying he felt Cuban forces in Angola had a "stabilizing" influence. For that and other comments, he quickly earned a reputation as a hip-shooter, though he refers to his style more simply as "open diplomacy."

To explore the background and the thinking of this unusual Ambassador and Presidential counselor, we sent Senior Articles Editor Peter Ross Range to interview him. The two had known each other since Young's first, unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1970, when Range was Time's Southeastern correspondent. Our house Southerner and an activist himself in the civil rights movement, Range also has a long-standing interest in foreign affairs: He served as Time's correspondent in Germany and as its bureau chief in Vietnam. He co-reported its first cover story on then-governor Carter and watched his relationship with Young grow and develop. Range's report:

"One thing that has not changed about Andrew Young since I met him in 1970 is his schedule, except that it's probably more hectic today. He comes from a family of early risers and considers every waking hour a chance for work--with an occasional recess for tennis. Our first interview session had to be scheduled for 6:45 A.M. in the dining room of the ambassadorial suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York. That session continued into the locker room of a tennis club where we played afterward. Young, a lifelong swimmer and runner, took up tennis only recently. Although ten years my senior, he has mastered the game well enough to beat me every time we have played during the past four years. Young's personality is perfectly suited to tennis and his game reflects his politics: steady, concentrating on the point of contact more than on the form, and unflappable. Rather than throw a racket, he laughs at his mistakes. Tennis loosened us both up and led to convivial chats that were more like conversations than formal interviews, except that my tape recorder was always running. The only time I was forced to leave it behind was when we decided after one tennis match to jog the 18 blocks from Central Park back to the hotel. Besides being the first Ambassador who is black, Young is probably the first Ambassador ever seen jogging through the streets of New York on a Sunday afternoon.

"Because Young and I have become friends over the years, he feared at the outset that he might tell me 'things I shouldn't talk about.' I, in turn, was afraid I might not be insistent enough on some topics. Fortunately, Young followed his habit of full disclosure and I felt comfortable enough to be able to press him hard on a number of points. The only moment of tension was the session that followed his public remarks about passing a law to restrict the press in its live-TV coverage of terrorist acts, such as the Hanafi Muslim attacks on public buildings in Washington. After a storm of criticism, Young felt the press was out to burn him--and to try to hurt the Carter Administration. But, as I expected, he met with me for several more candid sessions.

"One reason I tend to suspend early judgment on Young's statements is that he often turns out to be right. I'll never forget one chilly night in early April 1974, two and a half years before the Presidential election. We were sitting together in Atlanta Stadium, waiting for Hank Aaron to break Babe Ruth's record by hitting his 715th home run. Before the game, a group of celebrities had stood near home plate to shake Aaron's hand. Young, Mayor Maynard Jackson and Governor Jimmy Carter had been among them. They all wore suits and ties, as befits politicians, save one. Young leaned over and said, 'Did you notice how Jimmy was dressed?' I answered, 'You mean the open shirt and cardigan sweater? So what?' 'Well,' he said, 'I think he's going to run for President as the down-home candidate. And I'm going to support him.'

"Of course, I thought Andy was as crazy as Carter. It's almost painful to think of the odds I'd have gotten on Carter if I'd bet on him back then.

"Talking foreign policy with Andy was more like discussing how to get two squabbling neighbors to compromise on trimming the hedge than on where to move armies or shape the destiny of the West. In 15 years of international life, I've never met anyone so capable of reducing international conflict to human terms. This spring, bets were taken in Washington on how long Young would last before Carter would be forced to fire him. Even though I'm writing this ten weeks before publication date, I expect to collect on this bet from my friends who gambled that Andy Young would be gone by summer. Still, he has caused waves in his new job and it was on this topic that our conversations began."

[Q] Playboy: Let's start with the waves you've been making. Some of your comments on foreign policy have raised a lot of controversy and you've been called President Carter's "unguided missile." How are things between you and the President?

[A] Young: My relationship with him has always been one of mutual trust. I mean, I didn't clear anything with him during the campaign and I've cleared almost nothing with him since then. I really get very few guidelines from Washington. But as long as the President and the Secretary of State are satisfied with my performance, the criticism doesn't really matter.

[A] Just before that trip of mine to Africa earlier this year, I told the President that if he ever thought I was saying things that would embarrass the Administration, I hoped he would pick up the phone and call me. He said, "I wouldn't hesitate." I pressed the point, saying that I didn't want to take advantage of our friendship in any way and wanted to be treated like anybody else in the Administration, and he said, "Oh, I assure you, I will." So far, I haven't heard a word of criticism from him or even guidance. In fact, I've had to tell some of the guys around the President--Jody Powell, Hamilton Jordan, Tim Kraft--that I'm counting on them to let me know if they hear any rumblings. Jody's called once, and that was to encourage me.

[Q] Playboy: So nothing you've said publicly thus far has embarrassed the President?

[A] Young: No. In fact, we drove up to the UN Building together on the evening he made his first big foreign-policy speech in the General Assembly hall. We were talking about how he and I have been criticized for discussing foreign policy in public, instead of observing all the old diplomatic conventions of secrecy. It really shocked me the way he approached it. The President said, "I hope you're going to stick with me." I said, "What do you mean?" and he replied, "It seems like you and I are the only ones who want to talk foreign policy with the American people. And I think we just have to keep it up." That was right after he'd been to Clinton, Massachusetts, and he told me he'd been almost embarrassed by the thunderous applause he'd gotten when he said that the American people had a right to know in advance what kinds of commitments and decisions were being considered, since they would affect their lives and their children's lives. President Carter and I talk openly in public because that's what people have been looking for in Government: freshness and candor, even in foreign policy. The alternative is secrecy, which very easily leads to deceit and foreign policy conducted solely by experts, which closes out the American people.

[Q] Playboy: What did you say to Carter that day?

[A] Young: I told the President that I certainly wouldn't stop discussing our policy with the people but that perhaps I was getting caught up in too many battles; maybe I was going to have to learn not to take on more than one fight at a time. He said, "People tell me I should be more sensitive to that, too."

[Q] Playboy: You make it sound as if you and Carter are blood brothers in that respect.

[A] Young: Yeah. But you have to remember that in the early months, there were still basically two administrations--the new people who came in with President Carter and the old people who'd been around for a while, the bureaucrats. They're the ones who haven't yet quite understood what we're doing, and that's where some of the criticism has come from. At first, they thought some of the things the President was saying were slip-ups. Now they know it was deliberate on his part and that this is a policy style he is encouraging as part of his Administration.

[Q] Playboy: But there's an impression among some people that Carter hasn't encouraged your particular style--especially after he announced that Vice-President Walter Mondale would be concentrating on African problems. It seemed as if you were being relieved as spokesman.

[A] Young: It was a false impression that I was ever assigned a role as African spokesman. There's always been an African desk in the State Department. I've argued that Africa should be of greater concern to U. S. foreign policy, and it pleased me to see the President and the State Department upgrade the responsibility for Africa to the Vice-Presidential level.

[A] The decision about Mondale was made a month before it was announced. It just happened to become public during a week when I was getting some press criticism. A member of my staff had already been working with Mondale's staff for three weeks.

[Q] Playboy: If that's so, why hasn't it come out in the press?

[A] Young: Because the press thought it had finally found a conflict. The reporting hasn't been interested in policy formulation; it's been interested only in digging in dirt.

[Q] Playboy: Still, it's fair to criticize you for having been careless in some of your statements.

[A] Young: Oh, I guess I've been--I don't know if I'd use that term; I'd rather say I've not been very careful. At times, I've allowed a reporter to phrase a question for me, rather than rephrase it in my own words. So, in that sense, I've been careless. But nobody has refuted or quarreled with the substance of what I've said.

[Q] Playboy: You really seem to be singling out the press, rather than any critics you might have in Government, as the reason you're seen as too brash.

[A] Young: Well, you get a lot of old Cold Warriors in the press. A lot of the big boys are fairly well isolated; they talk to one another, they read one another's writing and very seldom do they really get out and become exposed to trends in American thinking. That's why they were so slow in anticipating the success of Carter's campaign. The criticism doesn't bother me, because it helps people face the issues--and that's one of the roles I agreed to play.

[Q] Playboy: The day the President spoke at the UN, you flew back to Washington with him aboard Air Force One. Did you continue talking with him about your candor problem?

[A] Young: No. I had a choice of sitting up front with him or staying with my wife, Jean, and my son Bo--whom I hadn't seen in nearly two weeks. It was a significant experience for them, so I stayed with my family.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't it your first trip on Air Force One?

[A] Young: Yeah. In fact, it was Jimmy's first trip on it as well, come to think of it.

[Q] Playboy: Does it beat the shuttle?

[A] Young: As Bo, who's four years old, said as he got aboard: "Golleee, this is the bestest plane in the whole world!" I mean, the guys back in the press section were complaining that the floors were so well carpeted you couldn't hear the beer cans roll down the aisles. In that respect, it's no different from Jimmy's campaign--all the noise comes from the back of the bus.

[A] Actually, the person I got a chance to talk to that day was Zbigniew Brzezinski. We exchanged some personal conversation about the human aspects of the posts we hold. I remember hearing about all the divorces and neglected children in previous administrations. It's very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day pressures of the job, and you've got to find a way to keep body and soul together. Brzezinski and I talked about the problems we have sleeping. You just get so keyed up, you stay so turned on to the job that you wake up automatically at six every morning--no matter how late you go to bed.

[A] You know, it's more important to the foreign policy of the nation that people like us get it together in some human way. We can't just constantly discuss foreign policy and stay sane. Brzezinski and I talked about our kids and sports. I think the Swedish government has a rule that no government official can do business on the same day he crosses the Atlantic: He must take a day off and relax.

[Q] Playboy: While we're talking about the informal aspects of your role, what about your personal relationship with President Carter? He has called you his best friend in public life. How did that friendship develop?

[A] Young: Well, at first, I was very skeptical of him. In the period that I met him--when he'd just become governor of Georgia and I was the chairman of the Atlanta Community Relations Commission--I almost refused to be impressed. He was doing good things, but you didn't want to believe the guy was as straight as he seemed; you were still cynical about it. It was hard for a black civil rights leader to feel close to a Georgia governor. Black people have been hurt by white people for so long that they tend to keep testing a relationship, like a dog that's been kicked a whole lot.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel cynical when Carter hung Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, portrait in the Georgia state capitol?

[A] Young:Especially that. That was the kind of symbolic gesture about which you could very easily feel cynical. But my cynicism was just gradually worn down. For us blacks, it may not have seemed like any great gesture for Carter to have hung Martin's picture in the state capitol--until we stopped to realize that there isn't a single black man's picture hanging in the U. S. Capitol.

[Q] Playboy: To this day?

[A] Young: To this day. That reminds you of how controversial it was in 1974 when Carter did it in Georgia. In any case, I'd seen good signs earlier than that, when I met his mother, Miss Lillian, in 1970. I realized then she was really free of racism.

[Q] Playboy: How could you tell?

[A] Young: I met her with a group of black welfare mothers, and there she was, just very comfortable--nothing pretentious, nothing paternalistic. It's remarkable for a lifelong Southerner to be comfortable in a totally black environment.

[Q] Playboy: When did you really warm to Carter?

[A] Young: When I realized that he had hung Martin's picture not merely as a political gesture but because he thought it was right. And then, later, when he'd announced for the Presidency and I realized that, of the Democratic candidates, he wasn't just as good as anybody else running, he was the best on race. I mean, he had grown up with the problem and had overcome his own past. John Kennedy read about racism and poverty in a sociology class at Harvard, but Jimmy Carter lived with it. I think one of the things that made it possible for us to understand each other so easily, and be friends without actually seeing each other that much, is the way we grew up. I grew up in New Orleans in a white neighborhood, playing with white kids but going to schools with only black kids. Jimmy Carter grew up surrounded by black playmates but went to schools with only white kids.

[Q] Playboy: Aside from Carter, the person in the Administration most people wonder about in relationship to you is Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. How do you get along with him?

[A] Young: Before I took this job, I talked with him about my willingness to take on some unpopular issues and go out front on them and help create a discussion of these issues. I said I didn't expect him to back me up. I just didn't want him to feel threatened by it, or upset, or to conclude that I was trying to usurp his policy function. So there's been no problem.

[Q] Playboy: Then any reports that he resents your role

[A] Young: No, he's been very encouraging. What I don't like is that the press has tried to create tension between us that isn't there.

[Q] Playboy: You must have expected the press to speculate about it.

[A] Young: Well, I guess I was really naïve about how much coverage I would get. I didn't know my trip to Africa in February would attract so much attention, for instance. The instructions I got from the President were simply that we needed to communicate with the African leaders. When we were asked if we wanted a military plane, I said, "No, let's keep this trip very low key and not go charging in as a big, powerful nation with a big Air Force plane. We'll just fly commercial and move around in a relaxed way." My press secretary was not even planning to go along.

[Q] Playboy: Then what happened?

[A] Young: Well, the Los Angeles Times called and said it wanted to send a reporter along. It was Grayson Mitchell, a journalist I've known for a long time, so I said, "Sure, that'll be OK." And the next thing you knew, we had a press party of 22 people on that trip.

[Q] Playboy: How could you imagine that a brand-new Administration could send its UN Ambassador halfway around the world and that the press would be uninterested?

[A] Young: Again, I was naïve. Coverage is not really what I need right now. And my problem is with the headline writers. I've always been very open and candid, but now that I'm some kind of celebrity, the press picks up everything I say as if it were big news--even if it's just a speech to a high school class having a mock UN assembly. Everything I say is not newsworthy.

[A] I guess I find it almost impossible to say "No comment." Especially to some young reporter who is just starting out and needs encouragement. But now they've got me paranoid. I hate to, but maybe I'll just have to be rude. I was even getting chicken about this interview, but since it won't appear until this summer, I guess it's OK. All this fuss should have settled down by then.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of this interview, a lot of people will be curious about your reasons for granting it.

[A] Young: It fits in with my idea that the American people are entitled to a full picture of just who they have representing them. I see Playboy as a magazine that probably reaches more young opinion makers of this nation than almost any other magazine; and I think the Playboy Interview is a very good forum for revealing as much of yourself as you want to reveal.

[Q] Playboy: Some would say your boss revealed a bit too much in his interview with us.

[A] Young: I was always a believer that Jimmy's Playboy Interview was one of the things that helped him win the election. You know, I think every American has some pious relative who's a kind of moralistic godfather. Most of us have rebelled in one way or another against our neopuritan environments. And I don't think we wanted a President who seemed to be a self-righteous judge of other people's actions. Jimmy Carter's problem before the election, especially in the big cities, was his religion. The Playboy Interview balanced that out very nicely.

[Q] Playboy: Did you clear your decision to do the Playboy Interview with the President?

[A] Young: No.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned Carter's image as a judge of other people's actions. Has that image been cleared up? His stand on human rights has been applauded, but it has also been blamed for the breakdown in disarmament talks with the Russians.

[A] Young: The talks have not broken down. They're continuing, but the initial Russian rejection of our position was, in some ways, a foregone conclusion. You see, there never have been really serious arms talks--until now, they've all been cosmetic. The Vladivostok agreement, which Ford signed after Nixon resigned, created arms ceilings so high we couldn't possibly reach them, anyway. It merely sanctified the arms race. It was the Russians and the Nixon Administration conspiring to deceive the American people.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by conspiring?

[A] Young: The Nixon Administration bent over backward for the Russians and, in a sense, it sold out to the Soviet Union. The Nixon Administration gave away wheat. This Administration is going to sell wheat. And I think the President has decided he's not going to play disarmament games: Either we'll have a real ceiling on the arms race and serious arms reductions or we'll realize the Russians are not willing to do that.

[Q] Playboy: So what, in your opinion, happened in Moscow this spring?

[A] Young: We had been given indications from a number of sources that Brezhnev wanted a real arms agreement as one of his final, significant acts. The Administration took him at his word. The President proposed a serious arms cutback, but the Russians just weren't ready for it. They've just used the human-rights issue as an excuse not to face up to serious disarmament proposals. They couldn't admit that, however, by announcing, "We're not ready to disarm that much."

[Q] Playboy: But you're admitting that the human-rights statements at least played a part, if only by giving the Soviets an excuse. Is support of Soviet dissidents worth even the possibility that arms talks could become derailed?

[A] Young: The human-rights emphasis by this Administration was never really set down, thought out and planned. Frankly, I've said almost nothing about Soviet dissidents, because I don't know that it helps anything. Now, the focus has largely been on Soviet human rights, but the truth is that the President has included a number of Latin-American countries in his statements and has had private conversations with the South Koreans. To be credible, the thrust of the human-rights issue has to be universal; it has to be applied to friend and foe alike. On that basis, I think it is a legitimate instrument of U. S. foreign policy.

[A] But I must admit that I never anticipated such a strong policy on human rights. The commitment and determination President Carter feels came as quite a surprise to me. But I've always trusted his instincts. You know, the only reason millions of people around the world look to us is that we do have this basic commitment to human rights. That's what America's all about.

[Q] Playboy: But we were talking about Carter's old image of self-righteousness; don't you think his moralizing to other nations confirms his critics' fears?

[A] Young: Everybody thinks it's the Sunday-school teacher in Carter when he lectures the Russians on their human rights. The truth of it is that it is in the pragmatic, long-range interests of the nation that he speak out. Chaos occurs when human rights are not respected. Once, we took the short-range view of human rights in Greece and encouraged the take-over by the Greek junta. In the end, we weakened the underbelly of NATO, because a government that doesn't govern with the consent of its people is always going to be a confused and weak government. The problem is that Americans would like to be independent of the rest of the world. In the wake of Watergate, there's an isolationist tendency that's very comfortable for Americans. Except the world ain't that way. Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide.

[Q] Playboy: We'll return to the subject of morality in foreign policy, but let's talk some more about how you've been presented in the press. One example of your putting your foot in your mouth was when you were quoted as having told a British interviewer that the British "invented racism."

[A] Young: Well, that came at the end of a long television interview on the BBC, when the interviewer was implying that racism was an essentially American phenomenon, and he seemed to be exempting the British. I kind of came back at him more in humor than in condemnation. At first, there wasn't any reaction at all in the British press, because people who watched it on television could see that it was said in the context of good humor. It was only when it appeared in print here in the States that the British began to react.

[Q] Playboy: Do you stand behind the thought you were trying to convey?

[A] Young: Well, I thought it was just generally taken for granted. If you remember the Dred Scott decision on slavery before the Civil War, the judges, in their written opinion on the origins of slavery in the U. S., held that racism was most firmly established in England. As far as I'm concerned, the patterns of class and race in the British colonies were much more rigid than in the Portuguese or French colonies. To me, that's not an argument or a judgment; it's just an acceptance of what was.

[Q] Playboy: Another foot-in-mouth incident as far as the press was concerned was your reference to Cuban troops in Angola as a "stabilizing influence" in Africa. Looking back at it, did you think you were putting your foot in your mouth?

[A] Young: No, I thought it was a legitimate policy function, coming out of my role at the United Nations, to try to help the American people understand what the new international reality is. I condemn the Cuban military presence in Angola. But in terms of its technical assistance, the Cuban presence can also be a force for stability. Look: When the Portuguese decolonized Angola, they simply picked up and left. They had 19,000 trucks in the country and took 18,000 with them. They left a phone system without operators, hospitals without doctors. They weren't honorable in their decolonization, not compared with the British or even the French. They were more like the Belgians. They took home everything that wasn't nailed down.

[A] When the Cubans arrived, they filled a gap. They provided order where there was essentially an undisciplined guerrilla army that wasn't ready to govern. So I'm not trying to defend the Cuban presence. I'm just trying to get people to be rational about it. I would rather see the Cubans in there than the South Africans, and that was the choice. The American people are afraid of Cuba. And it's ridiculous for the strongest nation in the world to panic every time it hears 1000 Cubans have gone somewhere. A thousand Cubans, or 20,000 Cubans or even 100,000 Cubans anywhere in the world are no threat to the United States of America. There's nothing the Cubans can do that we cannot thwart.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that all former colonies need some sort of Western-imposed order?

[A] Young: I think they need order. They need a rational transition period.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that neocolonialism?

[A] Young: Yes. I've got no problem with that. I believe in neocolonialism when it's moving in the right direction. I don't think that the Western powers that took over a continent in past centuries, cut up nations, divided and disrupted tribal life, can just pick up their marbles and go home. I'm a product of a kind of neocolonialism in the sense that my education was provided by the people who enslaved my ancestors. I had to fight for my rights, but I was able to get some support from the neocolonial authority in Washington--shall we say the Kennedy Administration.

[Q] Playboy: It's surprising to hear a man whose public life was once based on civil disobedience sing the praises of stabilizing influences. It sounds more like George Wallace.

[A] Young: No, we in the civil rights movement created order. In those days, it was George Wallace who was advocating bombings--of black folk.

[Q] Playboy: But he did that only after you'd tampered with the comfortable status quo of white people.

[A] Young: No, we were the forces of order--the kind of order spelled out by the Constitution. We made the courts live up to the Constitution. If Martin Luther King hadn't used an aggressive nonviolent approach, the South could easily have become another Lebanon or Northern Ireland.

[Q] Playboy: Still, you made progress by destabilizing the order that existed then.

[A] Young: It was a controlled destabilization. We could call off our demonstrations.

[Q] Playboy: We started out talking about foreign policy; here we are, discussing civil rights in the South. Some traditional diplomats must be surprised at how often you interpret world events through your own civil rights experience.

[A] Young: It's true. I mean, it's all I got. Everybody is determined by his own experience. But my involvement with civil rights--and with churches--is a broader experience than you'd think. There are certain things you learn in the movement that you don't learn at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy.

[A] For instance, the other day, a senior American diplomat began shaking his finger in the face of a foreign diplomat to make his point. He had had a couple of drinks and I kept nudging him, because where I come from, you just don't do that, see. You point your finger in someone's face, you're lecturing him, and that's not the way to get anything done. Finally, I just walked away. So even though we have a Foreign Service that's extremely well trained academically, there hasn't been much sensitivity training.

[Q] Playboy: What about your academic training? There's been some criticism leveled at you for not being adequately qualified for the post.

[A] Young: While my academic training in foreign affairs is limited, my background in the civil rights movement and my travels abroad are extensive. Almost anywhere I go in the world, there's someone I knew and worked with before I became Ambassador. For instance, one of the guys who was in church youth work with me is now the Swedish minister of education. Just as I'm moving into the Government of our country, people I met around the world as students are moving into government in their countries. It's a different channel from having gone to a foreign-policy school, but I think it's made me extremely sensitive to the human factors in diplomacy.

[Q] Playboy: How does this bear on the great international issues of the day?

[A] Young: Well, I think one of the big weaknesses in Henry Kissinger's equation was that he couldn't understand something that W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1903: that the problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line. And that racism is one of the most powerful dynamics in the world today.

[Q] Playboy: As a German Jew who was persecuted by the Nazis, Kissinger surely knows something about racism.

[A] Young: James Baldwin wrote that people who have suffered from racism for a long time try to ignore it and deny it. This was true of Ralph Bunche, the first black American Undersecretary General of the UN. A lot of his energy went into not being black and trying to assimilate. I think that the horrors of racism in Kissinger's childhood were so terrible that in order to function, he had to put it behind him. Otherwise, he would have been so bitter and filled with hate that he never could have done anything. This is not a criticism, just an acceptance of reality. I take racism in small doses. I didn't read Richard Wright until I was mature enough to begin to deal with him. I read Baldwin, I looked at Roots, but I don't pore through things that are going to make me bitter beyond my control.

[Q] Playboy: How did Kissinger's lack of understanding of racism affect his foreign policy, in your opinion?

[A] Young: Not just Kissinger but Nixon and Ford, too. They did not face racism in their lives and tended to rule it out. Nixon and Ford did not face it, because they were, in fact, racists.

[Q] Playboy: That's a pretty strong charge.

[A] Young: They were racists not in the aggressive sense but in that they had no understanding of the problems of colored peoples anywhere. There's a sense in which every American, black or white, is affected by racism. You cannot grow up in the United States of America in the 20th Century and not be tainted by it. We've got to start talking about racism without putting moral categories on it so we can understand it.

[Q] Playboy: How do you talk about it?

[A] Young: I demoralize racism and call it ethnocentrism. On my first visit to Chinatown in San Francisco, in about 1959, I was looking in the shopwindows for a mandarin dress to buy for Jean. I went into one of the stores, but I just began to feel very uncomfortable and I left. I went into three different stores in Chinatown and walked out of each one before anybody could even wait on me. Back at the hotel, I realized that I was so anxious and insecure in the presence of the Chinese that I couldn't conduct a simple business transaction. All of my knowledge of Orientals was from movies, those Charlie Chan films that portrayed them as inscrutable personalities who could not be trusted. I'd get in there and feel that somebody was going to put opium in my tea or snatch me through a curtain and put me on a boat to China. I'd been programed by this society to respond in a racist way to Orientals. It's much easier for people who come in contact with Orientals or with blacks to deal with their feelings than it is for people who never have to deal with their anxieties. Southerners have had to do that.

[Q] Playboy: What difference does all this make in foreign affairs when it comes to such issues as money and arms?

[A] Young: Well, as an example, Kissinger didn't like to deal with Nigeria, because Nigerians are arrogant, powerful black folk. They demand the same respect that the Russians demand or the West Germans demand. They are not going to tolerate any paternalism, they're not looking for anything. They're hard for white folk to deal with. They're not hard for me to deal with, because I know that they are powerful, arrogant black folk. I have a great deal of respect for them and know they are important to the United States' national interests. You can't do anything in Africa without consulting them.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying it takes one to know one? Can only blacks function as our diplomats in black Africa?

[A] Young: Not at all. I think Don Easum, our current Ambassador to Nigeria, who is white, gets along with the Nigerians even better than the black Ambassador who was there before him. He has coped with race in his own life, like Carter has. On the other hand, the Russians in Africa are all racists and that's why they won't have any influence.

[Q] Playboy: How do you know?

[A] Young: Russians are very isolated from cultural differences. They're terribly uncomfortable and insecure around blacks, and every African knows it.

[Q] Playboy: How much of an advantage is it for you to be black when you go to Africa?

[A] Young: In my opinion, being black is not totally a plus in the eyes of the Africans. At first, there was a lot of cynicism in the African press about my appointment. They felt I was simply being used, that the Carter Administration was thinking a black man could sell bad policies better than a white man could. To them, my being black did not signify a change in policy. They would say, well, the President has made some nice pious comments on human rights, but what are you going to do about the Byrd Amendment, which allowed us to import Rhodesian chrome in violation of the UN sanctions against Rhodesia? Fortunately, I knew that the Byrd Amendment would be repealed. I had been working on it, trying to push it in the Rules Committee, and I introduced the bill before I left Congress. That became a kind of test of American sincerity on southern Africa. The irony of it is that a lot of other folk broke the boycott, too. Russia, Japan, a number of African states, like Zaire. But we did it openly.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't that give you a certain credibility with them?

[A] Young: That's the only time being black helped me. I'm comfortable with them, so I can shoot straight. I don't have any hesitation to be very frank and blunt with them. I'm very open about our relations with South Africa. I don't give the black African nations a bill of goods and tell them we're about to turn our back on South Africa and break off relations. I tell them we have many economic ties with South Africa, but that doesn't mean we approve of apartheid. I also don't try to soft-pedal the Africans on Israel. When I was asked about relations between the U. S. and Israel, I said very frankly that in the U. S., the Jewish community is part of the liberal coalition. When you divide blacks and Jews, you're not helping anybody, you're not helping Africans, you're not helping black Americans, you're not helping forward-moving politics. When you're reasonable and open with people, they respond the same way.

[Q] Playboy: Which sounds like something you might have learned in the civil rights movement.

[A] Young: That's right. I remember once when I was down in Albany, Georgia, visiting Martin in jail. There was this really big cracker cop at the desk. When I asked to speak to Dr. King, the scowled at me and announced, "There's a little nigger out here who wants to see that big nigger back there."

[A] I had to go in and out of that jail twice a day, so before I left, I noticed his name tag. The next day. I went back and, before he looked up, I said, "Good morning, Sergeant Hamilton. How are you today?" He replied, "All right." Then he looked up and became almost angry that he'd spoken in a friendly way. Well, I kept working on him: Every day, I'd stop and talk to him and make him talk to me. I'd ask about his children and his home. In a week's time, we were good friends. People will respond to courtesy and decency.

[Q] Playboy: When did your involvement with civil rights begin? Let's go back to your earliest days.

[A] Young: My father was a dentist in New Orleans, but we lived in a poor-white neighborhood. We were the ones who had the football, the roller skates and the basketball hoop in our yard. All our playmates were white, but some of the white parents paid their kids not to play with us. We were also taught to fight if anybody called us nigger. My grandmother told me, "If anybody calls you nigger and you don't hit him, don't come home unless you want a spanking." I fought a lot.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't that a little dangerous for a black kid in the South?

[A] Young: Well, I guess I became a pretty good bluff artist, too.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like when you attended Howard University in Washington, which is pretty much a training ground for black professionals?

[A] Young: You know, even at Howard, Northern blacks discriminated against Southern blacks, 25 years ago. Almost everybody in the black elite went to Howard; it was the home of the black bourgeoisie. People coming out of Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York and Washington dominated the school. And no matter how well off you were, there was a certain stigma attached to being a Southerner. Because you were so obviously a second-class citizen where you came from, you were always the object of the down-home nigger jokes. You weren't taken seriously.

[Q] Playboy: How did that lead you into civil rights?

[A] Young: In my last year in college, I was influenced by a young minister who had come to live in my parents' home. I mean, he was getting up to study and work when I was just coming in--about five in the morning. That presented a challenge to my lifestyle and values. And then I began reading the classics--Plato, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

[Q] Playboy: That changed your life?

[A] Young: Well, after I graduated from Howard, we were driving home to New Orleans and spent the night at a church conference at Lincoln Academy in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Blacks couldn't stay at motels in the South in those days, so we always spent the night with other friends or church groups. That night, I had a white roommate who was on his way to Rhodesia as a missionary. It really bugged me that he was going to Africa. Here was this white guy sacrificing material comforts to go help Africans.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have a sense of having African roots?

[A] Young: Not at all. I had a sense of having Louisiana roots. I was taught to be proud of being black, but it was at the time when most black folk were still trying to say they were one fourth Indian, or something--anything but all black.

[Q] Playboy: What did that do to you?

[A] Young: Well, the next day, a bunch of us decided to race up Kings Mountain. I had just come out of track season, so I must have got there 15 minutes ahead of everybody else. I was exhausted and it was about 90 degrees, so I took off all my clothes except my underwear and hung them on a tree. And looking out over that valley, it was a kind of natural religious experience. You had to be aware that someone had created the world like this, that it was done for some purpose, and I felt that I had something to do in it. That's the time from which I date my religious awakening.

[Q] Playboy: And you decided to go into the ministry?

[A] Young: There was another incident that was one of the most influential in my life. Once, in the third grade, another kid and I got put out of school for cutting up in the back of the room. I got a spanking and went back the next day. But he never went back. Then, after my junior year in college, I was lifeguard at a swimming pool in New Orleans. A guy dove in and went straight to the bottom. When I pulled him out, I realized it was the same kid who had been put out of school with me. He was in a heroin stupor, but when he slept it off, we got to talking. He was very intelligent. He would come around the swimming pool regularly when he was sober and we'd sit around and philosophize. He wanted me to hurry up and finish school so I could help him write a book. It would be the story of the life of the poor, how he had been in and out of reform schools and the state penitentiary. And the title of his book was going to be Junk.

[Q] Playboy: What did that teach you?

[A] Young: That poor people are not poor because they're dumb or because they're lazy but because the society has not provided opportunity. I also realized that there but for the grace of God went I.

[Q] Playboy: Then you attended Hartford Theological Seminary and after a few years with a church in south Georgia, you became one of only three black executives with the National Council of Churches in New York.

[A] Young: Right. That's when I went through my black consciousness. I was on the verge of being absorbed by the white community. So I totally rebelled culturally. I didn't listen to any music except Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, Ray Charles, old Bessie Smith blues. All the reading I did then was about Africa. And that's when I decided I could be black in the midst of the white world. I've taken it for granted ever since.

[Q] Playboy: Were you married by then?

[A] Young: Yes. Actually, I almost didn't get married. For almost a year, when I was reading Gandhi and the lives of the saints, I seriously considered a life of celibacy. I felt guilty about my college days. I had met many, many beautiful, beautiful women

[Q] Playboy: Say, are you announcing you've lusted in your heart?

[A] Young:(laughs): No. I don't lust in my heart. My views of women are strictly Biblical. I say, Great, O Lord, are Thy works. Thou hast created them just a little lower than the angels. Eighth Psalm, I think. Anyway, of all the women I went out with in college, I never met one who was dedicated to the things I was. Frankly, until I met Jean, I didn't think there were enough black women who had gone through the kinds of experiences I had. And I didn't want to marry anybody white, because I wanted to go back South.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get back South?

[A] Young: Dr. King had asked me to be his administrative assistant at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but I said no. I had a sort of special awe for him. And that's when the sit-ins started, I saw John Lewis, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, on an NBC white paper on Nashville. It really disturbed me that things were happening in the South and I wasn't there. We'd bought a house in Queens and were living pretty good. Then I got a chance to do a leadership-training program in the South, so I went down and sort of doubled as Martin's administrative assistant.

[Q] Playboy: You eventually became executive director of SCLC, which was the driving engine of the civil rights movement. How did you acquire your reputation as a mediator?

[A] Young: I understood the dynamics of Southern racism. I also knew which people to go to. I mean, in any given Episcopal church in America, you're dealing with the people who own the town or have contact with those who do. The church was my back door to the Birmingham Better Business crowd, for instance.

[Q] Playboy: So you were negotiating with the powers behind the scene while others were confronting the police, the dogs and Bull Connor?

[A] Young: That's right. Actually, the movement was on its last legs when Bull Connor called out the dogs. We had 700 people in jail and no money to bail them out. Martin was desperately looking for a way to keep the movement alive. He decided he had to go into jail with the people. And he could get only 55 people to march with him, not because he didn't want more, but that's all that were willing to go. After he was arrested, a big crowd gathered. And that was when Bull Connor, the Birmingham police chief, put the dogs and the fire hoses on the people. Two days later, I led a march of 6000 people.

[Q] Playboy: Did any of these experiences make you hate white people?

[A] Young: Well, I grew up with lynchings and castrations in the newspaper all the time, but my parents taught me that racism was not something that was wrong with me but a sickness in other people. And sickness was to be treated, not hated. The closest I came to hatred was during a rally along the James Meredith march in Mississippi. There were about 500 people singing and praying in a schoolyard in Canton, Mississippi, when the state patrol surrounded us. They shot tear and nausea gas into the crowd. I was on top of a truck with a bullhorn, trying to give directions on which way to run. But the gas came up and I jumped down vomiting. I thought I was really going to the. It was my first experience with tear gas. I did everything wrong. I ran with the wind. I completely lost my cool. I didn't say it, but I thought to myself, "If I had a machine gun, I'd show those motherfuckers!"

[Q] Playboy: It is easy to forget how bad it was in the Sixties.

[A] Young: Not really. We knew it was bad. Homes were being bombed and the Ku Klux Klan was riding through neighborhoods, shooting up people and burning down churches. Nonviolence was an attempt to overcome that sickness by getting it all out in the open.

[Q] Playboy: Were you ever in serious danger?

[A] Young: In St. Augustine, I got beaten. The police turned the mob loose on me. Somebody caught me across the jaw and I went unconscious. I didn't even know what had happened until I saw it on a newsreel several years later. They just sort of stomped all over me and kicked me. The only kick that worried me was the one that missed my balls by about three inches.

[Q] Playboy: Were you ever afraid of being killed?

[A] Young: Oh, we figured we'd be killed somewhere along the line. Martin used to talk about it all the time, to make us think about it. He would say, "If it's you, Andy, I sure will preach you a great eulogy," and then he'd start preaching it in advance, so we would all end up laughing.

[Q] Playboy: But you weren't worried?

[A] Young: The only time I got kind of afraid was the day Medgar Evers was shot in Jackson, Mississippi. We got word that some of our folk who used the white rest room at the bus station were jailed and beaten in Winona, Mississippi. And the people who tried to bail them out got arrested and beaten, too. James Bevel and I decided that, as Southerners, we could probably get them out. But we were scared. I mean, with Medgar shot down in cold blood, Mississippi could just go crazy.

[A] We were in Birmingham and wanted to borrow Dorothy Cotton's car. She was one of the civil rights workers. And she was really an early women's libber. She insisted on going with us. I think she really wanted to go to jail. She said, "If Anell and Mrs. Hamer got beat up, I can get beat up, too." We told her we weren't going to Mississippi to get beat up but to stop people from getting beat up. I said, "We don't want you to go, not because you're a woman but because you're a masochist!" Well, she got in her car and started the engine, so Bevel and I just jumped in. She was furious and was driving about 90 miles an hour. We came around this curve and there was a big Mack truck staring us in the face. She just barely got off the road and back on. I decided on the spot that it's a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing. I was afraid to go to Mississippi, but that truck made me realize that death is always with you, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: You said you thought that as Southerners, you could get people out of jail. Why was that?

[A] Young: Most of the SNCC folk were Northerners who were basically afraid of white folk. They got thrown in jail all the time. Bevel was in Mississippi for three years in the middle of every conflict and never got put in jail.

[A] Stokely Carmichael and the others from the North would pull into a gas station and ask for five dollars' worth of gas and roll up the window and sit there scared to death. Well, the white man running the station would pick up the phone and call the sheriff and say. "Some more agitators coming your way." We knew you had to get out of the car, talk about the weather, buy an RC and a moon pie and just relax. I remember one time, after we'd been working all day without food, Dr. King and a bunch of us stopped at this old country store. And Martin just walked in and saw one of those two-gallon jugs of pigs' feet; he bought the whole jug. He got a stack of paper towels and passed them out to us. That was dinner: a pig's foot and a big RC.

[Q] Playboy: You were present at the death of Dr. King; in fact, you were standing a few feet away from him on the motel balcony in Memphis when he was shot. What went through your mind?

[A] Young: That he was very fortunate--really, that it was a blessing. I know that sounds strange, but we've always viewed death as a blessing. That's been the basis of my life since early childhood, since my grandmother prayed for death. Martin had done about all that he could. He was misunderstood. He was being abused by black and white. The burdens of this nation were weighing so heavy on him, God decided Martin had had enough. It was time to go on home and claim his reward.

[A] My other reaction was that I was mad. I really got angry at Martin for leaving us in all of that mess.

[Q] Playboy: Do you support the reopening of an assassination investigation? Did James Earl Ray act alone?

[A] Young: I am convinced it was not a one-man assassination. I understand that when James Earl Ray was caught, he had two passports and he used the wrong one. Both contained pictures of people who looked like him. If he had just gone and used that wrong passport, he might be free today. But when he gave them the wrong passport and realized it, he took it back and said, "Oh, no, I have given you the wrong one." He let the people know he had two passports. I'm saying that a guy who's not smart enough to handle two passports is not smart enough to get two of them by himself. In Congress, I didn't want to be on the assassination investigating committee, because I'm much too emotionally involved. We said from the very beginning that finding Dr. King's murderers would not bring him back and that the most important thing for us who were closest to him to do is to keep his work alive.

[Q] Playboy: In view of the vendetta that J. Edgar Hoover conducted against King, did you ever think his shooting might have been a Government act?

[A] Young: It was inconceivable to us that the Government was capable of doing anything to hurt us. We were really never anti-Government. It hurt Dr. King to have to criticize Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam and he never would do that when he was abroad. The motto of the SCLC was to redeem the soul of America and that we were trying to make America live up to its Constitution and to its courts.

[Q] Playboy: When did you realize that Hoover personally had it in for King?

[A] Young: Back in 1964, after Martin won the Nobel Prize.

[Q] Playboy: That was when the FBI director made available tape recordings for reporters that purported to involve King's sex life in motel rooms. How did you find out about it?

[A] Young: It leaked out here and there. When we went to the FBI, they just denied it. We kept asking reporters to give us a name or a place. I know that what I was told about the tapes was inaccurate in almost every situation I was familiar with. I don't have any idea of what kind of tapes they have on me.

[Q] Playboy: You're certainly in a position to find out now.

[A] Young: I'm not even sure I'm interested. I'm not ashamed of anything I did. In those days, we were sort of struggling to change the nation. Whatever happened to us personally, well, we thought we'd be killed somewhere along the line, so a matter of taped phone conversations seemed unimportant. I couldn't figure what the angle was. It sounded sort of perverted.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you want to fight back?

[A] Young: We couldn't possibly take on the FBI with its 6000 agents and millions of dollars. The way to deal with that problem was to get black folk the right to vote in Selma. You deal with a problem you can deal with. We had a pretty sound sense of priorities. We had a meeting with Hoover, but, as Dr. King said, it was a completely nonfunctional meeting. Hoover talked at us, not to us. He talked for 50 minutes of our hour and never once brought up anything about communism or rumors of sex. Martin used to say that when you went to see President Kennedy, he listened for an hour and asked questions. When you went to see Lyndon Johnson, he talked for an hour. Hoover was more like Johnson.

[Q] Playboy: After King's death, you headed the Atlanta Community Relations Commission and won a seat in Congress in 1972. What made you decide to throw in with Carter four years later?

[A] Young: At first, I was just glad to see a Southerner run against Wallace in the primaries. For so long, Wallace had been the spokesman for the South, and it finally seemed as if we might get a spokesman who was progressive. I knew Carter would need the black vote in the key primaries of Florida and North Carolina; but I'd intended to support Humphrey after that.

[Q] Playboy: When did you finally decide to go all the way with Carter?

[A] Young: I almost hate to tell it, because I have to criticize my liberal friends. During the debate on whether we should send money and supplies to support the National Front for Liberation in Angola, which was being backed by South Africa, several of the liberal candidates were very wishy-washy. And Jimmy, who knew a lot less about Africa than they did, understood very clearly why we couldn't side with the South Africans. That's when I realized that the others were incapable of getting beyond the Cold War view of the world. And the clincher is the worst part: Somebody asked me to lobby the liberal candidates on this and I told him they should let some of their black staff members explain it to them. And, you know, the guy said, "They don't have any black staff." So there you are. Jimmy already had 26 blacks on his campaign staff, and most of the other liberal candidates had either no black staff members or only one or two. Also, Jimmy Carter got the black vote not just because of my endorsement but because he really worked at it. He campaigned in the black community.

[Q] Playboy: So, to you, the Carter Administration is the civil rights movement come of age?

[A] Young: That's right. Carter realizes he never could have become President had it not been for the civil rights movement. In his 1964 Nobel Prize address, Dr. King talked about putting an end to racism, poverty and war. And, in a sense, that's what this Administration is doing. We've kind of redeemed the soul of America from the moral lethargy of the Nixon years. And because Jimmy Carter is himself free of racism, because he struggled throughout his life in an environment that was infected by racism, he has the capacity as President of the United States to do more to put an end to racism than anybody since Martin Luther King.

[Q] Playboy: Was it this respect and admiration for Carter that made you take the UN job against the advice of most black leaders?

[A] Young: Well, I really did have the UN in the back of my mind for a long time. That's because of Ralph Bunche. He was the first black man in public life that I identified with as a kid. Still, I always figured this was something you did at the end of your career. The UN and the Foreign Service had the image of being reserved for elder statesmen. Now I'm finding out this job requires a young man's energy, almost a 15-to-18-hour day, running back and forth between New York and Washington, attending breakfasts, receptions, consultations and dinners in the evening.

[Q] Playboy: When did you know you would take the job?

[A] Young: Just after I got back from Africa on a Congressional mission in November. I was on my way to a television interview and I told Tom Offenburger, my press secretary, "You'd better get used to calling me Your Excellency."

[Q] Playboy: You mean President-Elect Carter had already offered you the UN post?

[A] Young: No. But it had somehow come to me during my trip that maybe that was what I ought to be doing next. I went to see the President-Elect in Atlanta and, after breakfast, we went into a little upstairs room at the governor's mansion, where he was working, and he told me, "I've been feeling for a long time that the UN is going to become important again. We're going to make it important in foreign policy and, though I respect your wish to stay in Congress, I'd really like for you to take the position."

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction, considering that you'd already been thinking you should be in the post?

[A] Young: Like a kid who hadn't even sent Santa a letter and got what he wanted for Christmas anyway. I hadn't really spoken about it to anyone before that. I told him then that I wanted to do it but that I would have to talk to Jean first. If she had said no, I wouldn't have done it--she has her own career to think about, too. I suggested to the President-Elect that he ask Jean what she thought, since I really wanted him to be offering us the job. So that's what he did.

[Q] Playboy: How did you overcome some critics' perception of the UN as an ineffectual school for infant nations, filled with meaningless ritual and jargon?

[A] Young: That sounds like racist ignorance. It always seemed to me the jargon was worth it if you kept people shouting at one another instead of dropping bombs on one another. Being a member nation of the UN is like an individual going to a psychiatrist. We take the problems we get emotional over to the UN. By getting our emotions out there, it enables us to take rational actions.

[Q] Playboy: That's an unusual definition of the UN, just as your style as a diplomat seems to be unusual. Incidentally, didn't the United States mission to the UN used to have two Cadillac limousines?

[A] Young: Yeah, the Cadillacs had to go. I really felt uncomfortable sitting in them. It's so associated with class and status and all that kind of bullshit. There's all this protocol you're supposed to follow in the Foreign Service--like, the Ambassador is supposed to sit in the right-rear seat, because it's the status seat, all that crap.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you sit in the Ford you ordered?

[A] Young: I sit up front with my driver. You know, Vernon Jordan, the director of the National Urban League in New York, saw me riding up front the other day. He called one of my aides and said, "He's the Ambassador now. You tell that nigger he can't be runnin' around town ridin' shotgun!"

[Q] Playboy: We've noticed you have invited your driver into your home and to some meals with you.

[A] Young: You work with me, you gotta be part of the family.

[Q] Playboy: Let's go back to some of the foreign-policy questions we touched on earlier. What is your long-range view of what the U. S. role ought to be in world affairs?

[A] Young: My main interest is in developing for the United States a coherent foreign policy and humane world economic order. How do we make a shift from military confrontation to economic competition in the world? We have to learn to be competitors and still find broad areas of agreement. We need an order in which India and West Germany and Italy can have wholesome competition. If Britain goes bankrupt, so does the whole of NATO and our European defense system. Here's what I mean: Britain's economic security is in many ways dependent on her relationship with Nigeria. But it is also heavily tied in economically with South Africa. So Britain has to work closely with two countries in Africa that are on a collision course. If that's not resolved diplomatically, it will begin to pull apart British politics, which weakens the whole Common Market apparatus and directly affects us. We have to explore the lines of economic interdependence.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think the U. S. attitude should be toward the spread of socialist and Marxist regimes in Africa?

[A] Young: Well, I'm certainly not defending any military take-overs by Marxist groups. But my feeling is that the U. S. should not simply condemn and isolate such regimes. When I was in Congress, some representatives of Marxist governments in Africa talked to me and said, "Don't force us into the Russian camp as you did with Cuba. We want to be non-aligned. We want relations with East and West." What I resent is our reacting emotionally to the presence of Communists. For instance, in Somalia, I understand that there are 15,000 east European technicians. There's also a Soviet naval base, even though the Russians deny it. They have all kinds of projects there that may be a challenge to us but not a threat. Those countries can reach only a certain stage of development before they require American technology and American consumer goods and capital and know-how. When China built the Tan-Zam Railroad between Tanzania and Zambia, a lot of people got very upset about the Chinese presence in Africa. But there was no need for us to feel threatened. The Chinese built that railroad and left. They had some impact on the Tanzanian political style, but ultimately that railroad is going to haul American goods. It was in our interest, no matter who built it.

[Q] Playboy: What about Angola?

[A] Young: With the Cubans in control of Angola, change can literally be negotiated. If you had a civil war going on, there would be nobody to negotiate with. There would be sheer chaos and bloodshed. There's got to be a process whereby Angola is going to be united into one Angola or Cuba will be in exactly the same position we were in in Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: Would Agostinho Neto, the president of the Angola MPLA, get mad if he heard you say that the Cubans were in control of the country?

[A] Young: He would probably get mad.

[Q] Playboy: When you surprised everyone by meeting him during your African trip, despite the fact that the U. S. has no diplomatic relations with Angola, did you talk of his country in terms of being a Cuban satellite?

[A] Young: No. Neither did he. But the fact remains that if the Cubans pulled out, he would not be in power. Neto is a physician, trained in Portugal, he's a poet, he's a very cultured and genteel man who happens intellectually to be a Marxist.

[Q] Playboy: You make that sound like an afterthought.

[A] Young: It is an afterthought.

[Q] Playboy: It determines the social system under which people live.

[A] Young: There's nothing wrong with their deciding to live under a socialist system. It's a decision that does not interfere with us in any way. In spite of the fact that he's a Marxist, Neto's relationship with Gulf Oil is what keeps the revenues coming in that make it possible for the Cubans to run the country. The Cubans could not run it by themselves. Neither could the Cubans get the oil out of the ground if Gulf dismantled its offshore rigs. The oil is about 12 miles offshore.

[Q] Playboy: What are your feelings about the role of multinational corporations?

[A] Young: The multinational corporation has a very positive role to play. Let's take two examples from my own Congressional district, Coca-Cola and Lockheed. I used to say we had the best and the worst. Coca-Cola probably has as good a foreign policy as and more sensitive relationships in more places in the world than any other multinational corporation.

[Q] Playboy: If you're selling candy in a bottle, that should be easy.

[A] Young: But it wasn't easy to get there. They very gradually indigenized their own corporations. Coca-Cola companies all over the world are owned and managed by nationals. Coke evolved policies that did not interfere with the culture and politics of other countries. Lockheed went in like a bull in a china shop. But I compare the two because Lockheed has a much more valuable product to sell. The C-130 Hercules aircraft is a tremendous development tool that can make a much greater contribution to a country than can Coca-Cola. Yet, in a way, Lockheed's foreign policy was terrible. I think that roughly it contributed in one way or another to disrupting at least four democratic governments--those of Japan, Italy, Holland and Nigeria. There were scandals and reverberations and bad foreign policy with a good foreign product. Companies that work well and want to stay in a foreign country and get a return on their investment really ought to make it a 40-year proposition and not a five-year proposition.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like a very pragmatic view of what's going on. It doesn't sound like the old moral leader--

[A] Young: I've never been a moral leader. That is a term people used to try to sanctify the civil rights movement once we got successful. Before that, we were considered Communists and agitators and the lowest kind of American citizen. People were afraid of us. They reacted emotionally and wouldn't see us as we really were.

[Q] Playboy: The most volatile spot in Africa at present is the Katangese uprising in Zaire. During your trip to Africa, did you see Zairian president Mobutu Sese Seko?

[A] Young: Yeah. I like Mobutu a lot, but I think he gave me a snow job. If he had done the things he told me he was doing, he would not have this problem in Katanga province. He told me that he was stopping the attacks and that he had told the guerrilla leaders that they couldn't operate from bases in Zaïre against Angola, and that he was moving to cement relations with Angola, and that he wanted them to live together in peace. But evidently he didn't patrol the borders. Another thing is that a lot of equipment left Angola through Zaïre--trucks and airplanes and all kinds of stuff. Angola expected them to be returned. Angola has always felt that the Portuguese kind of raped them. They figured that as part and parcel of a new relationship with Zai're, some of that stuff should have been returned. There were all kinds of little problems like that that should not have been sufficient to start a war between two nations that have to live together.

[Q] Playboy: Let's discuss South Africa. You got into yet more trouble by calling the government in Pretoria "illegitimate." In fact, that was the one occasion on which President Carter contradicted you publicly. But did you ever really reverse your stand on the subject?

[A] Young: Well, I was asked if I thought the South African government was illegitimate and I was quoted as saying, "Yeah." Actually, it was more of a grunt. But it didn't just slip out. You can define legitimacy in a variety of ways. I wouldn't question the legality of the South African government; but in terms of its being a moral or legitimate representative of the nation as a whole--I mean, it's ridiculous to argue that it's an expression of the will of the 20,000,000 inhabitants of South Africa.

[Q] Playboy: The South African foreign minister said some pretty harsh things about that statement.

[A] Young: Well, he had an election coming up and obviously decided that the best way to come off as a tough Afrikaner was by jumping on me. As a politician myself, I'm not at all offended by that, because when I was in Congress, guys would tell me, "Let me know how I can help you--I'll blast you or endorse you, whichever is better for you."

[Q] Playboy: But as an Ambassador, rather than a Congressman, doesn't it undermine your effectiveness when a foreign minister says that you're a man who can't be worked with?

[A] Young: No, no, indeed. It gives me greater credibility in Africa.

[Q] Playboy: With the black nations in Africa.

[A] Young: Well, that's 44 out of 45.

[Q] Playboy: But haven't you said that part of your appeal to black Africans is that you can talk with the other side, the whites?

[A] Young: Yeah, but, you see, I don't need South Africa. My contention is that they need me. They need all the reasonable black voices they can find.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel any sympathy for the white position there?

[A] Young: I feel a great deal of sympathy for the white position. The last thing I want to see is the white community destroyed or pushed into the sea. And I don't think there's any independent African nation or liberation movement that advocates that. Nor do any of the presidents of the front-line countries immediately surrounding South Africa.

[Q] Playboy: But you support majority rule without qualification?

[A] Young: Yes. But the whites can survive if they allow their economic system to serve the needs of all their people. Capitalism has got to separate itself from racism and demonstrate that it's not dependent on racism. I think we demonstrated that to some measure in the South. The enfranchisement of blacks did not hurt the economy. In fact, it created an economic boom. The only way the whites can survive is if they are willing and able to modify their system to involve blacks in the decision making and in economic participation.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds paternalistic.

[A] Young: It's a give-and-take operation. Right now, frankly, that's all there is. Nobody's got an army on the continent, except Nigeria, that's capable of coping with South Africa. The best the whites can hope for is a situation where blacks may control the politics but whites still run the economy. If it's worked out without violence and massive bloodshed, I think that it is possible.

[Q] Playboy: Are you sympathetic with the whites for pragmatic or humane reasons?

[A] Young: My sympathy with them is strictly as human beings. They remind me very much of white Southerners in the U. S. They're stubborn, but they're also very sensitive, religious people. The church has the same role in South Africa that it had in the U. S. South. The average congregation is extremely conservative, but the church leadership is way, way out front, literally suffering alongside the blacks. And there's the Rand Daily Mail, which is actually much more progressive than The Atlanta Constitution and the Arkansas Gazette were in the Sixties.

[A] But, you know, South African whites use the same language that U. S. Southerners used. They use all the same Biblical stories to justify separation. And they're afraid that having blacks vote will mean the blacks will completely take over and marry their daughters. They assume the worst possible consequences and don't allow themselves any room in between. That's exactly what the South was doing 25 years ago.

[Q] Playboy: What were your own experiences like in South Africa?

[A] Young: On my first trip to South Africa, I was driving around the countryside with Arthur Ashe and Mike Cardozo, who is white, and we ran out of film in a little country town. We were nervous about whether we should go into the drugstore to buy more film.

[Q] Playboy: Well, you had Mike along.

[A] Young: Yeah, but knowing the South, that doesn't help. An integrated group was treated more hostilely than an all-black group. So I said, "Let me go in." Once I got inside, I began talking to people about the weather, how things were goin', told 'em where we were from. But I didn't say I was a Congressman.

[A] My real surprise was that I did not sense any overt racial hostility on the streets. One day, this white man in a big, pretty Mercedes had just pulled up to back into a parking space. And we had a little Toyota or something and our black driver pulled right in there, stole his space. And I said, "Oh, hell, now we're going to get it!" The guy just shook his head and drove off. Now, in the South, 20 years ago, you'd have somebody calling the police to get that nigger out of his space. I asked the driver about it and he didn't see any problem at all. I'm not trying to say that South Africa's better, I'm just saying that it's not a hopeless situation.

[Q] Playboy: Where does it lead next?

[A] Young: In this day and age, the more violent the South African government becomes, the more hostility there will be from the international community. So, in a sense, my taking a hard line on South Africa is in that government's interest. Just like I'm convinced that the President's promoting of human rights in Russia helps the government there.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds contradictory.

[A] Young: No. Human rights are the natural outgrowth of people becoming culturally and economically secure. As you become secure, you want to be freer. See, the Soviet human-rights movement is a rebellion by their elite, who have tasted a little freedom and want more. As they advance economically and culturally, the Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion that will be not unlike our civil rights movement. As soon as they expand national television, no matter how they censor it, the weaknesses of the Soviet system will be exposed. You'll have literally hundreds of thousands of dissidents rather than a few hundred, as you have now. The Jews and Baptists there are starting it, but it won't necessarily be a racial thing. There will be more and more mass action for freedom.

[Q] Playboy: That's a bold prediction. What do you base it on?

[A] Young: You see, the Soviets and the South Africans are in a similar situation. Remember, in the Fifties, every aspiration for freedom in the U. S. was considered Communist inspired. In South Africa, every aspiration for freedom is also considered Communist inspired, while in the Soviet Union, it is labeled capitalist inspired. Just as we finally quit blaming other people and started looking at our own situation, the United States is now helping the Soviet Union look at its situation.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that one reason Moscow will nip dissidence in the bud?

[A] Young: Yeah, but that totalitarian way of nipping it in the bud only makes it grow. There's an old Christian statement that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Every time they killed somebody in the civil rights movement, they created an expansion of the movement. The killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi just made people more determined. The same thing will happen in Russia.

[Q] Playboy: Looking at a map of the world based on civil liberties, it would not seem to support what you say. Most people live under regimes with a relative lack of civil liberties.

[A] Young: I'm talking about the inevitability of the technological revolution. With that revolution comes resistance. In 1973, I predicted that within two years of establishing television in South Africa, there would be uprisings. Everyone said I was crazy, because television there would be censored. My reply was that television cannot really be censored; it inevitably raises people's aspirations. The South African uprisings occurred within one year.

[Q] Playboy: The spread of Western technology in the Soviet Union hasn't necessarily helped its dissidents; in fact, a case can be made that the Helsinki Accords precipitated a crackdown on Soviet dissenters.

[A] Young: Dissent in the U.S.S.R. has become a political issue, because we've sort of adopted the dissenters. There have always been artists and writers who continually, subtly press against that system. When it gets too repressive, it will break. The system that repressed the Jews has already broken, and Jews aren't even a large political force in the Soviet Union. They've gotten some help from the United States, but it was largely their determination that strained the system.

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying that pressure from the U. S. in the form of political messages to dissidents doesn't really have much of an effect on U. S.-Soviet relations?

[A] Young: Yes. I don't think the Soviet government is, in fact, very concerned about its dissidents. Of far more importance are its satellite countries in eastern Europe. More than President Carter's statements on human rights, Soviet leaders are worried about such things as increases in the budgets of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty--which they do interpret as real attacks on their system and sphere of influence. In fact, however, we are not trying to foment an overthrow of any government--either in eastern Europe or elsewhere. Our policy is just to try to get existing systems to reform to the extent that they protect human rights and freedoms.

[Q] Playboy: Sorry to persist, but it still seems to us that the Soviets don't necessarily interpret things the way we do. To them, moralizing about human rights must seem like interference.

[A] Young: I think we haven't yet communicated at all levels. We haven't learned what kinds of messages they're sending and they have been misreading our messages. If they think President Carter's ultimate aim is to overthrow eastern Europe, they've misread his messages on human rights. I played tennis with the Soviet ambassador to the UN recently and he said, "It's too bad your Administration has done nearly everything wrong in its first three months--at least insofar as dealing with our country is concerned." I said, "Well, I'm not sure. I think it's just that we haven't learned to understand each other. But we've got to understand each other or neither of us will survive." And he said, "Yes, that's right."

[Q] Playboy: If signals are being misinterpreted, isn't that reason enough to return to the older forms of diplomacy--communicating through more private channels than press conferences?

[A] Young: No. It's reason enough to explain to the Russians what we mean. I'm not going to let you press folks push us back into the Dark Ages, and that's exactly what the press is trying to do. You want us to go back to the days when you could get news through leaks and sneaky sources.

[Q] Playboy: We're not talking about sneaky sources. We're talking about communicating with other governments on certain sensitive subjects through less than public channels.

[A] Young: You can't pull back. The reason isn't foreign-policy considerations but the Xerox machine. Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's no such thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly. Kissinger tried to use the old diplomacy, but it didn't work for him, either, so he tried selective leaking. Instead of doing that and talking about "unnamed sources," I simply say that I'm speaking on the record. If you say something, you ought to be man enough to take the consequences for it. If you're not man enough, you shouldn't say it in the first place, see. I just don't believe in being sneaky or double-dealing with either the press or the American people.

[A] As for the specific example of the human-rights question, well, I think it should be a combination of symbolic acts and cold, hard political thinking. The President's letter to Andrei Sakharov gave him so much international visibility that it protected him. But it is the kind of thing you can do only once, like the raid on Entebbe. You don't try it again. My own feeling, in sum, is that it's time to let up on the Soviet Union in this respect.

[Q] Playboy: OK, we'll move on to another subject. You spoke of Entebbe. How do you feel about events in Uganda, where massive political exterminations reportedly took place?

[A] Young: Death in Uganda seems to be a matter of government policy on specific groups of people. It's like Hitler's pogrom of the Jews. I really believe in meeting with anybody and everybody. But the only person I'd be reticent about meeting with is Idi Amin. My faith is that all men can be saved, but I didn't want Hitler to be saved and I don't want Idi Amin to be saved.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever talked to him?

[A] Young: No. But he's putting up a 14-story building on the vacant lot right behind the U. S. Mission to the United Nations. Ours is only 12 stories high. I can just see him now coming over here and, you know, pissing on the American Embassy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you want him to disappear from politics?

[A] Young: I want him to disappear from the face of the earth. Go on home and claim his reward.

[Q] Playboy: You sound considerably more antagonistic toward him than toward South African leaders.

[A] Young: There's a difference between murder, as has happened in South Africa, and genocide, as has happened in Uganda. There is a family of men and nations and national boundaries are artificial boundaries. What happens in one country will inevitably have an impact on another. But I am concerned about South Africa. If there is a race war in South Africa, there will be a race conflict in the United States. That's the frightening thing about Rhodesia and that's why a columnist like Joseph Kraft is terribly mistaken when he writes that we don't have any interests there. If you have 200,000 whites slaughtered in Rhodesia, South Africa will go in there. Then you'll have American volunteers running over there and getting involved. If you have a race war in Africa, there's no way we won't be affected. I think racial tensions in this country are always just below the surface.

[Q] Playboy: That is, on the premise that blacks overrun the whites in Africa?

[A] Young: Yes. Whites here will begin to panic.

[Q] Playboy: Give us a scenario. What happens in Detroit, in Atlanta?

[A] Young: You start getting white reactions against blacks. You get the American Nazi Party predicting the same thing will happen here as is happening in Africa. It would start with whites' attacking blacks.

[Q] Playboy: Where would it start?

[A] Young: Probably in the Northern cities. Probably least in the South.

[Q] Playboy: Let's go back to the topic of morality in foreign policy. As a minister as well as an Ambassador, what is a moral foreign policy?

[A] Young: Morality for me is thinking clearly through the alternatives and making a decision that is best for the largest number of people.

[Q] Playboy: You can call that morality; it could also be called Kissinger's Realpolitik.

[A] Young: Exactly. I had no problem with Kissinger's Realpolitik, except that it was based on only one part of the world. Kissinger's Realpolitik was essentially looking at the world strictly from an East-West equation. I learned my foreign policy in theology class, not in the church. I was reading Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Now, they were much more like Kissinger than like Billy Graham. The problem we're having is that you're trying to make me a Billy Graham-type moralist and I never have been that. My understanding of Jesus Christ is that he came to fulfill the law. And you're trying to talk in terms of a moral law. And I don't believe in it.

[Q] Playboy: We're trying to find out at what point you make foreign-policy judgments based on your theology and not on your pragmatic understanding of a situation.

[A] Young: Very seldom. But I don't think they're in conflict. My theology is not in conflict with Realpolitik. It would be an enlightened Realpolitik. My theology does give me an extra sensitivity to the rest of the world. It gives me an additional dimension in which to look at a situation: not just from my point of view but also from the point of view of my enemy, who is also my brother. And that's perhaps the only moral difference I would have with Kissinger. But I don't know that Kissinger did not do the same thing.

[Q] Playboy:Should foreign aid be tied to the human-rights question?

[A] Young: Well, I don't believe in buying friends and buying votes in the UN. That's insulting. But there's a difference between tying aid to human rights and saying you're not going to finance pulling out people's fingernails and applying electroshock to their genitals. It's another thing to say you are not going to give aid because there's a clear disagreement in principle. Tanzania probably has voted with us less than anybody else in the UN, and yet it was our biggest aid recipient in Africa--because Tanzania is probably our most valuable ally, in spite of its refusal to be our puppet. It's Tanzania's influence that has kept the Cubans and the Russians out of Mozambique and Rhodesia. Tanzania's disagreements with us in the UN are honest disagreements and on many of them, we were wrong, such as when Tanzania refused to vote with us on resolutions condemning the U. S. role in Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: If you support the Cubans' providing order for Angola, why not support America's providing order in Vietnam, say in 1954? How is that any different from what the Cubans did in Angola?

[A] Young: I don't know that it was when it started. But if we had gone into Vietnam in 1954 and abided by the Geneva Accords, held an election and turned the situation over to the rightful elected leadership, which in everybody's opinion would have been Ho Chi Minh, I think that would have been the right thing to do. I think the people who dominate have a responsibility to a smooth transition. I've said the same thing about Ian Smith in Rhodesia. You can't just throw Ian Smith out. Ian Smith has power in Rhodesia. There's got to be some negotiated settlement that reasonably transfers power. If Ian Smith falls and runs out and all the whites run with him, you're going to have the very chaos in Rhodesia that we're trying to avoid.

[Q] Playboy: To wrap up, could you summarize what you're trying to do with your unorthodox approach as Ambassador to the UN?

[A] Young: Well, for the past eight years, our policy at the UN has tended to ignore basic questions. Too often in the past, we've taken no strategic initiatives. We've sat back and used our veto to reject other people's strategies, and whatever our strategy was, we've kept to ourselves. President Carter's and my approach is to be more up front. We're going to tell other delegates beforehand what our interests are and where we're willing to compromise--before it even gets to the voting stage. We've started to do this with the core group of the 15 nations that make up the Security Council, and it's working. By talking it out beforehand, we're finding that differences in language that might have bothered other representatives at a more formal stage aren't really differences in our positions at all. It's important to say things out front. If people feel like you're being sneaky or trying to trick them, they act very defensively. I've simply shared everything I know.

[Q] Playboy: What's beyond the UN for you? Will you ever return to the South?

[A] Young: I could go back to Atlanta and run for mayor in 1980, at the end of Maynard Jackson's second term.

[Q] Playboy: What about the U. S. Senate?

[A] Young: If I were going to deal with the Senate, I should have stayed in the House of Representatives. But I kind of gave that one up.

[Q] Playboy: Another snap decision. Like running up that mountain when you were young?

[A] Young: Yeah. But, you know, if this job ain't for me, I'm going back to Atlanta and get me a church and take over Martin Luther King's assignment. Become a teacher, a prophet.

[Q] Playboy: Should we bet on it?

[A] Young: I wouldn't bet on it. But I wouldn't discount it, either.

"I didn't clear anything with Carter during the campaign and I've cleared almost nothing with him since then."

"Carter and I talk openly in public because that's what people have been looking for in Government: freshness and candor, even in foreign policy."

"I guess I find it impossible to say 'No comment.'... But now the press has got me paranoid. I hate to, but maybe I'll just have to be rude."

"A thousand Cubans, or 20,000 Cubans or even 100,000 Cubans anywhere in the world are no threat to the United States."

"Nixon and Ford were racists not in the aggressive sense but in that they had no understanding of the problems of colored peoples anywhere."

"The civil rights movement was on its last legs when Bull Connor called out the dogs....Martin Luther King was desperately looking for a way to keep the movement alive."

"Near Birmingham, I decided on the spot that it's a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing."

"There's all this protocol in the Foreign Service--like, the Ambassador is supposed to sit in the right-rear seat, because it's the status seat, all that crap."

"I've never been a moral leader. That is a term people used to try to sanctify the civil rights movement once we got successful."

"My sympathy with white South Africans is strictly as human beings. They remind me very much of white Southerners in the U.S. They're stubborn, but they're also very sensitive, religious people."

"If you say something, you ought to be man enough to take the consequences for it. If you're not man enough, you shouldn't say it in the first place."