Seeing Daylight

[Q] You've theorized that American politics is cyclical--moving from conservatism to liberalism and back, decades at a time. If so, where are we now"? Will the Reagan Presidency give way to something like the Camelot days of the early Sixties? Are the times a-changin' once again?

[A] Yes. The new generation's time is coming--in the Nineties. And it will defy the Reagan period. If this rhythm holds, the conservative cycle will come to an end soon and herald a new mood of idealism and reform. You've got a lot of people like that in the Senate right now--people who grew up during the Kennedy years, who are quite able. So I don't mean we're going to get a lot of hippies. But in the sense that the generation of the Sixties believed in racial justice, in equality for women, in treating other countries decently, in limiting nuclear weapons, in hopes for peace--in that sense, those ideals will return with new force in the Nineties.

[Q] How can you be sure?

[A] There is an identifiable rhythm in our politics about every 30 years. Essentially, it's an alternation between periods dominated by action, passion, idealism, reform, a sense of public purpose--periods you might call "liberal" periods or "progressive reform" periods--and periods dominated by a sense of private interest, which would be the conservative periods. Obviously, the period we live in today, the Eighties, is a time when private interest (continued on page 134)Seeing Daylight(continued from page 67) has been the dominant ethos of the country, when we feel we can best deal with our problems through private means, through the deregulated market, and so on. In this regard, the Eighties are evidently a re-enactment of the Eisenhower Fifties, as the Fifties were a re-enactment of the Twenties, the Harding, Coolidge, Hoover years.

These periods in which private interest is the dominant value tend to run on for a while, and then they're replaced by periods in which public purpose becomes predominant. These, too, come in 30-year intervals. Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, John Kennedy in 1961. What happens is that each of these phases of the cycle runs its natural course. A time of reform, idealism, and so on, is very exhilarating for a while. But the Presidents are rather demanding--Presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy. They call upon the people to think about public affairs, to get involved as they support actions of one sort or another. They call for change. All of this, after being exciting for a time, begins to pall. It begins to wear people out. They get exhausted by the process and somewhat disillusioned by the results. So, after a time, they're ready for a change in a more conservative direction, and they're very responsive to leaders who come along and say, "You don't have to worry about politics; you don't have to worry about public affairs. You can concentrate on the private aspects of life. Turn everything over to the free market. The free market will take care of your problems. Your problems will solve themselves." For exhausted people, this has an attractive appeal. So then we enter periods of private interest, in which everyone is told that he serves the commonwealth best by serving his own interest, and in which self-interest becomes the general modus vivendi.

These periods go on for a while, and then they, too, run their natural course, because the problems neglected during these times become acute and threaten to become intolerable. At the same time, people begin to get increasingly frustrated by the vistas of life held out by self-interest and materialism. They want some larger meaning than chasing a fast buck. After a time, they begin to ask not what their country can do for them but what they can do for their country. When they get to that point, they're ready for a new phase.

[Q] Is that where you think we are now--ready to chuck Reagan conservatism?

[A] Reaganism is finished. Whoever is elected in 1988 will not be a Reaganite, even if a Republican wins. Neither Robert Dole nor George Bush is a true-blue ideological Reaganite. So I think Reaganism is an episode of the American past.

But this conservative cycle really began with Jimmy Carter--not with Ronald Reagan. Carter was the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland. After the national traumas of the Sixties and Seventies--the assassinations, the Vietnam war, the riots in the cities, the student demonstrations, Watergate--people got tired and disillusioned: The citizenry began to welcome the idea that they might not have to think about the public sphere. People became eager for a period of respite, and Carter, in a way, was a reflection of that mood. But even though Carter's appointments were a good deal better than Reagan's, his policies were not dissimilar to Reagan's.

[Q] Still, the country ultimately became disillusioned with Carter.

[A] Yes. So we got a Republican ex-movie star who said, "Don't worry. We're going to stand tall and our problems will solve themselves." And luck was with Reagan for a considerable period. And as long as luck was with him, the people forgave him almost anything and the press overlooked what it knew about his deficiencies as a manager of events. But that time is over. Too many things have happened. Problems are not solving themselves, they are compounding. The public is beginning to be ready for something else.

When Presidents overreach, as Reagan has done, they set in motion corrective forces to redress the balance of the Constitution. Let me give you an example. Some say that the growth of the evangelical right is a sign that the country is moving further to the right and that the cycle will remain with the Republicans. But in terms of the Republicans, what are seen as strengths are really the source of their undoing. The fact is, the stronger the right wing and the stronger the evangelical right becomes, the more it splits the Republican Party itself.

[Q] Why is that?

[A] Because the Republican Party is an unstable alliance between big business and a bunch of zealots from the Bible Belt, to oversimplify. What businessmen who support Reagan care about is reducing regulation and taxes. They couldn't care less about school prayer. As for abortion, they make use of it all the time. Some of their best friends are homosexuals. And so on. So that whole agenda of the evangelicals is antithetical to mainstream Republicans. Yuppies don't like it; big business doesn't like it. That's why the more powerful the zealots become, the more they split the Reagan coalition. I'm not worried about the right. I think the Republicans would be likely to face a tough time in 1988 even if the Iran/Contra scandal, which first weakened Reagan, had never happened.

[Q] In your book "The Cycles of American History," written two years ago, you predicted very accurately when things would begin to unravel for the Reagan Presidency--about the time the Iran/Contra scandals broke. What did you know that the rest of us didn't?

[A] Well, I thought that Reaganism was running out of steam. Of course, no one could have predicted the Iran/Contra scandals, but they were an added benefit that speeded up the end of the Reagan cycle. However, in the months before the scandal broke, you could see that Reaganism was coming apart--the debacle at Reykjavík, and so on. This culminated in the Democrats' taking the Senate in the November 1986 election, a certain sign of change. By then, there was a general realization of what people had unconsciously known for a long time: that Reagan was a negligent Chief Executive who really didn't know what was going on a lot of the time. Then the scandals broke and here we are--Bedtime for Bonzo.

[Q] There has been a lot of talk about the mental state of the President. Do you think he is losing his grasp?

[A] He seems as competent to me as he ever did. He doesn't seem to me any dopier than he did in 1981.

[Q] Then do you think that people are noticing his mental lapses more?

[A] No, people are writing about them; I think they've always noticed them. The fact is, the press covered up for Reagan. The press knew perfectly well how he spun along, and he got things wrong, he invented things and he couldn't remember anything. Nothing new about any of this.

The press covered up for him. The reason it covered up is that it discovered when it wrote honestly about Reagan that his popularity was such that it got into trouble. The press has such great paranoia anyway--it's always afraid of being unpopular. So it just gave up trying to tell the truth about a popular President.

Now that his popularity is considerably less, the press is prepared to tell the truth. But I find it hard to believe that there has been any marked deterioration. He seems to me the same old fellow. If you read David Stockman's book on Reagan--The Triumph of Politics--the man he describes in 1981 and 1982 was pretty much the same guy.

[Q] Do you feel that the Iran/Contra scandal was as serious historically as Watergate?

[A] I think it was different from Watergate in that Watergate was purely domestic. Iran/Contra had the effect of restraining this Administration from taking more reckless, mindless initiatives in foreign affairs. And I think that's very good. People talk about "the horrors" of a crippled Presidency--but when a President is the kind to do stupid things, it's much better to have him crippled. I think that the best situation would be to have this Administration in a state of passivity for the last year, rather like the last two years of the Eisenhower Administration.

But, to answer your question, yes, historically, Iran/Contra will be seen as more serious, because Watergate was a kind of dirty trick in domestic politics, while this affair was an effort to manipulate foreign policy. It was characterized by secrecy and duplicity, carried to inordinate and probably illegal lengths. And it affected our relations with other countries. It'll be a long time before other countries are going to take seriously anything that the President of the United States or the Secretary of State says to them.

[Q] Did you also predict the stock-market crash?

[A] One had to assume that the various bubbles would burst--the budget deficit, the trade deficit, public and private debt. The illusion of Reagan prosperity was bound to go. I didn't know when, but I wasn't surprised.

The curious thing about this present situation is that where a President such as Hoover inherited a mess and couldn't really be blamed for it, Reagan created this one. This is a needless, gratuitous economic mess the country is in. He created it by this folly of supply-side economics--the notion that the more you lower taxes, the greater the revenue will be--which George Bush properly called voodoo economics in the 1980 campaign. And so what Reagan did was cut taxes for the rich, cut social programs for the poor and increase spending for defense. And it was those policies, not some ineluctable natural law, that created the present mess.

I was talking with Felix Rohatyn--he is the man who rescued New York City from bankruptcy--and he remarked that Reagan has done to the United States what Juan Perón did to Argentina, except where Perón turned the country over to the unions, Reagan has turned it over to the speculators. And that's what the notion of greed as the prime motive in life inevitably produced.

[Q] What kind of peril are we in now?

[A] I'm no economist, but judging by what happened in 1929, we'll have a time of stabilization, then the market will fall again, then a time of stabilization, and then the market will fall again, until things will begin to reach more natural values--not pumped up by speculator fever, by leveraged buy-outs and by all this nonsense.

The problem is whether we can pursue a policy that won't tip us into a depression.

[Q] So when historians look back on the Eighties, will they interpret the Reagan era as a time in which content was divorced from form--in which style became everything?

[A] Yes. And why should we be surprised? This is a President whose years as a young man were marked by his experiences as a movie actor--and I don't think that can be overestimated in understanding him. The result is that you get this tenuous sense of reality where life is defined by scripts--where the script requires you, in the course of the day, to have the world destroyed by nuclear war, and then you go home and have a swim, have a drink, and life goes on. I don't think Reagan has that kind of vivid sense of reality that other Presidents had. It's almost suggested by the fact that he doesn't seem to age. He's been in office for six years, he's quite old, and he's still the youngest, best-looking man of his age in the country, especially among those who've been operated on for cancer and shot in the chest. Everybody ages under the pressure of responsibility. Franklin Roosevelt was 13 years younger than Reagan when he died, and he had aged terribly. Kennedy aged in his short time in office. But Reagan doesn't age! If you don't feel the responsibility, it doesn't age you.

[Q] You talk about Reagan's being an actor. Do you think his success was all packaging?

[A] No. I think Reagan is the triumph of a man who earnestly believed in something. And he believed in it in bad times as well as good. He went up and down the country expounding his gospel, and eventually the cycle turned from public purpose to private purpose, and it was his time. I don't think it was a triumph of packaging; I think it was a triumph of commitment. Substantive commitment.

Reagan, whatever he did, got where he is by not compromising on his convictions, whatever the polls said. I think that Reagan is proof of the power of conviction politics. Nothing has been more damaging than the notion that to succeed in politics, you must move toward the center. The two most successful politicians in the United States in the past 50 years have been Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. And both of them were conviction politicians--they stood for what they believed. This struggle right now within the Democratic Party to move toward the center is wrong. There's a feeling among Democratic leaders that, damaged or not, Reagan had a secret, and if we Democrats could only learn that secret, we could succeed, too. That secret was, essentially, to be promilitary, probusiness, antilabor, anti-black--in other words, for the Democrats to become as much like the Republicans as possible.

The last thing this country needs is two Republican Parties. It's a disastrous direction for the Democrats to take, because if the country is in a conservative mood, if it's in the conservative phase of the cycle, it's going to choose the real thing every time, not a pallid, unconvincing Democratic imitation. The Democratic Leadership Council, essentially, as I read its statement, stands for Reaganism with a human face. And when you look at people such as Bill Bradley, who was for aid to the Contras, who's for Star Wars, well, I don't see what relationship these people have to the Democratic Party. If the Democratic Party is going to succeed, it's going to succeed the same way Ronald Reagan succeeded, and that is by believing in something in bad times as well as good, and standing for it.

[Q] What do you think of the current crop of Democratic candidates?

[A] I think they're a pretty capable group. As the old joke goes, one friend asks another, "How's your wife?" And the other says, "Compared with what?" So, compared with Ronald Reagan? Any of them. Even a Republican. I think Bush and Dole are pretty capable people. The value of the primary process is to sort things out, let people show their qualities, and I don't think it's too bad a situation.

[Q] Whom do you like in your own party?

[A] Among the declared candidates, Paul Simon and Mike Dukakis are the ones who interest me the most.

[Q] And Simon wears bow ties, as you do.

[A] Any man who wears bow ties inspires confidence.

[Q] What do you see happening on the Republican side?

[A] I don't think either Bush or Dole would have the capacity, or perhaps even the desire, to replicate Reaganism. It's hard to tell about Bush. He's a decent man, a civilized man, but I think the Vice-Presidency is a destructive office. I have a chapter in Cycles arguing for the abolition of the Vice-Presidency. It's not only pointless but, far from equipping people for the Presidency, it handicaps them. I think Hubert Humphrey would have made a much better President in 1964 than he would have after four years of Vice-Presidency. The reason is that the Vice-President has nothing to do except echo the President, wait around for the President to die. And after a time, if he's Vice-President long enough--and a loyal one, as modern Vice-Presidents feel they have to be--he begins to lose his sense of his own identity. If you keep spending all your time defending someone else's views automatically, after a while, it's destructive of your own convictions. The only reason Harry Truman was such an effective President was that he was Vice-President for such a short time.

[Q] And your prediction?

[A] Politics is totally unpredictable. In 1940, if anyone had predicted that the next President of the United States after Franklin Roosevelt would be a back-bench Senator from Missouri, that the President after that would be an unknown major in the Army and that the President after that would be a kid then in college, no one would have believed it. And yet Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy were the next three Presidents.

[Q] How do you feel about such campaign issues as adultery and marijuana?

[A] I think they're ridiculous--American politics has reached a new low when a reporter asks a candidate for President whether he ever committed adultery. When private behavior affects public behavior, that's a different matter. If a man's likely to get drunk when he's making decisions, then that's something the public has a right to know about. But I don't think marijuana and adultery are issues.

At the time that the Gary Hart case was breaking, I was attending the ceremony for the Robert Kennedy Book Awards. The award was made to David Garrow for his biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. The runner-up was a book about Cambodia by Elizabeth Becker of The Washington Post. I was chatting with Garrow and Becker and we discussed the fact that King, like Hart, was a man of convulsive and disorderly sexual habits. Yet King was a very noble fellow and did great things for the republic.

Pol Pot of Cambodia, on the other hand, was a man of exemplary behavior, a model of fidelity. No one ever accused him of even having lust in his heart. Perfect on the adultery standard. All he did was murder 3,000,000 of his countrymen.

[Q] Talking about disorderly sex habits, you were in the White House while J.F.K. was presumably having his flings. If everyone knew about it, why wasn't it reported?

[A] You say everyone knew about it; I didn't know about it. Look, if all the women who claimed to have slept with John Kennedy had done so, he wouldn't have had any time for anything else. All I can tell you is that during the entire period I worked in the White House, I was not aware of any goings on or of any interruptions of his public responsibilities because of them.

[Q] Do you think that the taint surrounding Ted Kennedy's personal life--including Chappaquiddick--will ever disappear?

[A] In the year 2000, Teddy Kennedy will be younger than Ronald Reagan is today. He's been an excellent Senator and has strong and clear views. I think the Nineties will be much more congenial for Ted Kennedy.

[Q] And by then, he will be old enough that his sex life is no longer an issue?

[A] I hope one never gets too old. I say that having just passed my 70th birthday.

[Q] Given the state of this Presidency, do you think Reagan might do what embattled leaders historically do--look for foreign adventure as a diversion, especially in the closing days of his Presidency?

[A] I don't think so. I know people have that fear. People such as Colonel North might like to do just that. But others, such as Secretary of State George Shultz and Treasury Secretary Jim Baker, are going to urge restraint. I think Reagan must have enough sense of reality to know that this would be something that would horrify Congress and the people. And in general, also, he's been rather cautious and effusive. He pulled the Armed Forces out of Lebanon rather quickly. True, he invaded Grenada shortly thereafter, an island of 100,000 with no army, navy and air force. But against more consequential opposition, I don't think he'll do much--for instance, in Nicaragua. Anything's possible, but that's not a high-priority worry of mine.

[Q] You were one of Kennedy's top advisors during the Bay of Pigs invasion. What are the parallels between American policy toward Cuba in the Sixties and American policy toward Nicaragua in the Eighties?

[A] I think there are many parallels. The Bay of Pigs, of course, was an operation the Kennedy Administration inherited from the Eisenhower Administration. It is something I doubt would have originated with President Kennedy himself. It was already in an advanced stage of training. More than 1200 Cubans had been assembled in Guatemala. Something had to be done with them. The choice was between disbanding them, which would have caused problems, or letting them go ahead. The problems caused by disbanding them might have been less serious than the problems caused by going ahead. At any rate, I opposed things, and my view did not prevail. We did go ahead.

There are many illusions that guided the planning of that operation and that exist with the current conduct of the Central American policy today. The Bay of Pigs was based on the assumption that an invasion would cause uprisings behind the lines in Cuba, defections from Cuban militia, and this was to strike a great responsive chord in the country. No one thought that 1200 exiles could overthrow Castro. But the 1200 exiles and the support that they would presumably ignite inside the country were thought to be enough to do it. It's the same illusion here: that the Contras have all sorts of support within Nicaragua itself. Obviously, the Sandinistas have probably very much narrowed their support in recent times. But still, they've armed a lot of people in the country. They don't seem to fear the populace's having arms--they are not likely to arm people who will turn against them. What's more, there is no indication that the Contras are more popular in Nicaragua than the Sandinistas. So the notion that a Contra invasion of Nicaragua is going to set off great anti-Sandinista uprisings behind the line is as wrong, I'd imagine, as the notion that the CIA had about Cuba in 1961.

[Q] What are the other parallels?

[A] We are seeing a dependence on the CIA to make foreign policy--which was certainly the case in 1961. I don't know what the situation is today, but I wouldn't be surprised if the covert-action people had sought assessments from the intelligence branch of the CIA as to the probability of the Contras' defeating the Sandinistas--and been spectacularly wrong.

[Q] What are the dangers of covert action?

[A] Well, the short-run dangers of covert action are that you make mistakes by involving yourself in the internal affairs of other countries you don't know well enough. You choose the wrong people. You place the credibility and reputation of the United States in the hands of a lot of con men and do not achieve the results you expect. The long-run danger is that you might achieve those results, in which case you interrupt the normal political evolution of the country.

Guatemala, for example: In 1954, the CIA intervened successfully to overthrow the regime. They got, in consequence, a dictatorship of the right that is far worse than the earlier regime. Iran: The CIA intervened successfully to overthrow Mossadegh in 1953. We first got the shah, and now we have Khomeini. Today, we'd be so happy to settle for Mossadegh. But by preventing a sort of almost secular nationalist like Mossadegh from staying in power and by restoring the shah, we created the situation where the reaction went all the way to the mullahs. Chile--the same thing. It's very difficult for me to see that Pinochet is an improvement over Allende. So, on the whole, we're better off not trying to decide the destinies of other countries.

[Q] Isn't there also a question as to what this sort of meddling does to us as a country?

[A] I think the notion that we have the divine right to try to shape the destinies of other countries is bad for us. And on a more mundane level, the kind of people who benefit from this sort of activity--this whole shadowy world of Bay of Pigs survivors, secret agents, arms dealers, and so on--are not good for the country, either. Theirs is a corrupt world. You get a lot of nuts, fanatics, adventurers, war lovers, violence lovers. I don't mean to say that all people involved in covert action are like that. But it is inevitably bound to attract a certain type of person. They're hard people to control, so that the CIA officers in Langley often can't really control what their agents in the field are doing. Even with precise warnings from President Kennedy that there would be no use of U. S. forces in the Bay of Pigs invasion, some in the CIA let the invading forces believe that U. S. forces would back them. It's that kind of miscalculation I mean.

[Q] In 1986, you traveled twice to Cuba, where you finally met the nemesis of the Kennedy White House: Fidel Castro. What was that like after so many years?

[A] It was a very interesting experience. I went to Cuba with Kathleen Kennedy and Robert White, our former Ambassador to El Salvador. The ostensible reason we went was to try to do something to get out some political prisoners, but of course we did get to meet Castro. He is a great performer. He's got this kind of cascade of jokes and rhetoric and historical analyses and impersonations of people and more jokes--it goes on and on.

On the other hand, he does listen if you penetrate, punctuate this flow, and he even will take notes on occasion, and he responds to questions. Bob and Kathleen and I drove out and saw the Bay of Pigs. We swam in the Bay of Pigs, in fact. Later, we talked with Castro about that experience. But Castro's not much interested in the past. He's much more interested at this point in the question of Latin America's external debt. And what I felt was that Castro's great problem is that he has always been too big a man for a small country--too big in his ideas and his energies and his aspirations. What he would like to do is run the world. Failing that, he would like to run the Third World. He tried to do that for a while. But I think that with time, his ambitions have contracted.

I did, however, get to talk a bit about those years with Carlos Rafael Rodriquez, the Cuban vice-president.

[Q] Castro and his vice-president were men you were once committed to kill, right?

[A] I didn't want to kill them. I opposed them.

[Q] You wanted them out of power and, by sending an invasion force to their country, hoped to kill them.

[A] I was opposed to them, as they knew. I wrote the once-notorious white paper about how Castro had betrayed the Cuban revolution. But Castro's a professional. Times change.

[Q] Then you have changed, too, because Castro was the main obsession of the Kennedy Administration.

[A] That's overdoing it. The Administration had other things on its mind, too. In fact, the Kennedy brothers were opposed to the invasion of Cuba. It was their actions that preserved Castro. If he had been their obsession, the installation of nuclear missiles would have given them an excuse that everyone in the world would have understood to invade and overthrow Castro.

[Q] Except that it might have precipitated World War Three.

[A] No. It couldn't have precipitated World War Three. The Russians were in Cuba because they knew their nuclear inferiority was so great. They weren't going to commit suicide. They could never conceivably have gone to war. They were so far behind in warheads in that period, there was no chance of war's coming as a result of a deliberate decision. The thing that concerned Kennedy and probably concerned Khrushchev was a war by accident somewhere down the line. That's why Kennedy insisted on getting the command and control. He was afraid that somebody stopping a Russian tanker might do something or that some local commander might get out of control. I suppose Khrushchev had that same concern. But it would have been suicide for the Russians to start a war.

[Q] Since we're on the subject of the Bay of Pigs, it has become known that you gave out false figures on the numbers involved in the invasion force there. That's now called disinformation. In light of that, do you think you were any different from the Reagan people whom you now criticize?

[A] It was a great mistake. I have no defense. It just shows the corrupting influence of covert operations. There was a cover story, and I gave the cover story to the press, and I've never ceased to regret it. Honest people find themselves in a position of having to repeat the cover story, and that corrupts them, and so on, in a widening circle of corruption, and I don't think it's worth it. I think there's always a certain amount of dissembling involved in government, but I think outright lying should be reserved for only the most critical and exceptional circumstances--only when the life of the republic is at stake. The life of the republic was not at stake in the Bay of Pigs. There was no excuse for it.

[Q] If it's true, as you say, that the generation brought up in the Camelot era will be assuming leadership of the country in the Nineties, how do you explain Kennedy's role in starting the Vietnam war?

[A] I think the Vietnam commitment really went back to Truman and Eisenhower.

[Q] There were only several hundred American advisors over there when Kennedy took office.

[A] Yes, and 16,000 when he left. He did breach the Geneva Accords. But when Kennedy was still a Congressman, in 1951, he and Bobby visited Vietnam. He became persuaded that the French could never win their war against the Vietnamese. So he was resolutely opposed to the commitment of American units. He increased the number of advisors, but these were advisors attached to the South Vietnamese army.

Proposals were made again and again in the Kennedy Administration to Americanize the war by sending combat units. He rejected them every time. He planned to remove the advisors. His plan was adopted by the Department of Defense in March of 1963, and the withdrawal of the first 1000 men was announced in October 1963. That plan was canceled after Kennedy's assassination. Johnson soon replaced the advisors and decided to Americanize the war.

[Q] What did you do in the aftermath of the J.F.K. assassination?

[A] I resigned my White House job. At first, Lyndon Johnson didn't accept my resignation. He was always saying how indispensable all the Kennedy people were to him and how we had to stay, out of patriotic duty. So I said I would stay for the transition. But I said, "I feel very strongly that a President should have his own people around him--people who have worked with him and know him and whom he trusts." This was the end of November; I resigned in January. The second time I offered it, he accepted my resignation with great alacrity.

[Q] Did you just not get along?

[A] I rather liked Johnson. If Mark Twain and Faulkner had collaborated, they would have produced something like Lyndon Johnson. He had this infinite repertoire of old American folk tales and jokes and expressions. He was capable of being very funny, though always at someone else's expense. He was a very good mimic. He had no gift for turning humor on himself, as the Kennedys did. But he was not for me, and I was not for him.

[Q] Did he feel that you were one of the Eastern liberal Harvard guys out to get him?

[A] Yeah.

[Q] What made him feel that way? Differences in personal style?

[A] He had an inferiority complex. He thought that because he came from Texas and had gone to a teachers college, people who had gone to Harvard and places like that looked down on him. The fact of the matter is, people who come from Harvard and places like that love people like Lyndon Johnson. They loved Truman. Truman got along superbly with people like Dean Acheson, who'd gone to Groton and Yale. So Johnson was quite wrong in his geopolitical analysis of snobbery.

[Q] You also clashed with Richard Nixon. But after you were both out of public office, he moved into the town house next to yours in Manhattan. What kind of a neighbor was he? Did he ever come by and borrow a cup of sugar?

[A] No. Never. I'd been on Nixon's enemies list, of course, so our relations were undeveloped. It did not help, probably, when it was announced that Nixon was moving into the neighborhood and I was interviewed on our front steps and was asked what I thought about it and I, ungraciously, replied, "There goes the neighborhood." This was widely repeated and may not have encouraged Nixon. At any rate, my children had been used to climbing on the fence that separated our two houses. Shortly after Nixon and the Secret Service moved in, my children were hounded off the fence. So I got a stepladder and climbed up on the fence and harangued the Secret Service people and said, "This is outrageous. My children have always climbed on this fence."

[Q] Who owned the disputed territory?

[A] The fence was owned, I suppose, in common between us. The fact that someone who, if justice had been done, should have been in the Federal penitentiary was now trying to deprive my children of their historic right to climb the fence was unimpressive to me. The Secret Service replied that when my children climbed the fence, they disturbed certain security systems they had set up. I said that that was their problem. So we had inconclusive conversations. I then wrote to the head of the Secret Service to say how outrageous this was, and eventually, my children were reconfirmed in their right to climb up on the fence.

[Q] How did Nixon respond to that crisis?

[A] One day, I came home and my wife, Alexandra, said to me, "You know, I'm beginning to feel a little sorry for Nixon." I said, "Why would you feel sorry for Nixon?" She said, "Well, I was looking out the window today, and he was in his garden. Robert was climbing the fence. And Nixon gave him a little wave." Robert was then six or seven years old, and it was heart-warming. I asked him about it. I said, "Robert, what's all this about your climbing on the fence and Nixon waving at you?" Robert said, "Yes. He was waving at me to get off the fence."

[Q] On a more serious note, the chaos surrounding Nixon's resignation caused a lot of Americans to feel shaken about their faith in the American system. As a historian, did you feel that way ?

[A] Not then. But I did in 1968. The killing of Robert Kennedy, after the killings of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, just seemed to be too much. I suddenly had a conviction about this potential for violence in the American soul. We became a country by killing red men and enslaving black men. It's just bred into us, a capacity for cruelty and for violence. We deny it, but it exists. There's been this tradition in America, going back to our earliest years, of regeneration through violence. And that's very much part of our lives. It has to be identified and guarded against. The rest of the world recognizes our potential for violence more than we do ourselves.

[Q] What do you recommend we do?

[A] I think that we have a great tendency toward self-righteousness. We think we're a superior race, superior to lesser breeds, outside the law, commissioned by the Almighty to redeem mankind. This conviction that Americans are a chosen people is a great source of mischief in our policy. When we think of ourselves that way, we suppress the unlovely elements in the American character, such as the violent strain. I think we'd be much better if we ended this illusion that we are a chosen people and confronted our own history.

[Q] You've listed your criticisms. What are the things you admire about America?

[A] What I like about America is its historically experimental attitude toward life, its willingness to try things, to measure things by their consequences. It's the attitude that produced the only distinctive American philosophy, which is William James's pragmatism. That, plus the rejection in principle--if not always in practice--of classes. A general belief in social equality and social mobility. And a reserve of idealism that coexists uneasily with the pervasive moneygrubbing and materialism.

How to be an American in a world in which America simultaneously dominates and is vulnerable is very difficult. I think the only answer to it is to have some sense of our own best traditions. That's why the Constitution is important. Although we heard a lot of abstract talk last year on the bicentennial of the Constitution, it is simply the document that codifies what our best traditions are.

[Q] Have you always believed that?

[A] As any American historian had to, of course, I had to know all about the Constitution. But I never really recognized the majesty of that document until it was tested in the Watergate period. That led me to reread, after many years, the Federalist papers and the other writings of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, and so on. I suddenly got a much more vivid sense than I ever had before of the extraordinary intelligence and penetration of these fellows at the beginning of the republic. I suddenly realized how blessed we were to have such a superb founding generation.

[Q] Uniquely blessed?

[A] The longer you examine the frame of government they put together, the more you see that the Constitution is an extraordinarily wise document--which is why it has survived with a minimum of amendments. It has survived the transformation of the United States from 13 predominantly agricultural states straggling along the Eastern Seaboard into a great continental, industrial and now world power. In fact, ours is the oldest Constitution extant in the world. When you think that we've had one Constitution for 200 years, and a relatively enlightened country such as France is now in its fifth constitution in the past century, that suggests the high intelligence of the people who drafted it.

[Q] As we head into the Presidential campaign year, what advice would you give the American people?

[A] Distrust anyone who invokes God. And I would tend also to distrust people who, when The Star-Spangled Banner is played, place their hand over their heart. I think patriotism is a vital emotion, but patriotism that exploits itself--the kind that's worn on the sleeve--is, as Dr. Johnson said, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

"Reaganism is finished, whoever is elected in 1988. It's an episode of the American past."