The Age of Anxiety

Tonight's speaker is Haynes Johnson. He is the best selling author, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and national television commentator. As a reporter, editor and columnist for both "The Washington Star" and "The Washington Post," he has been the eye witness for the great domestic and international events of the past two generations. The Columbia Jornalism Review has called him, "As fine of a reporter and writer as the craft knows." Haynes Johnson has written, co-authored or edited 14 books. Five of them have become national best sellers. Some of my favorites are the Best of Times, which was written about the Clinton years; Sleepwalking Through History, which was written about the Reagan years; The System a joint effort with a long time colleage David Broder; and of course, The Landing, which is of course a WWII novel of mystery and espionage. He is the son of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Malcom Johnson, so he's got it in his blood. He was at, as I said, "The Washington Star" for twelve years, covering events both here and abroad. In 1969, he joined the staff of the "Washington Post" as a national correspondent, and later served as assistant managing editor, and editor of the Sunday Editorial Page during the Watergate Crisis, and then finally he served as a columnist, until he left full time journalism in 1994 to devote his time to writing these terrific books, appearing on television, and fortunately for us, doing national lectures. In 1966 he won the Pulitzer National Prize for distinguished national reporting of the Civil Rights struggle in Soma Alabama, and this award marked the first time, that both a father and son each had received a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. He is the weekly commentator on NBC's Today Show, on The News Hour with Jim Lerher, and as a member of its historian's panel. He is a native of New York. He served in the army during the Korean War. He holds a Masters in American History, from the University of Wisconsin. He has taught at Princeton University. He has been a guest scholar at Brookings's Institute. He has taught also, at UC Berkeley, and has been a fellow at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is now the night chair in journalism at the University of Maryland where he teaches, advises students, and continues his writing and his television career. Please join me in welcoming Haynes Johnson. Thank you Jane, I appreciate that introduction to no end. And I also want to say, I made a note here. You said, "These forums are to engage the public on contemporary issues." And I really have to say---I have been on a book tour all over the country, and if my voice is a little raspy that's why-- ---but when you come to a room like this on a beautiful city where you can do so many other things and see a full room, that's why you write books. You want to engage. I really mean that, so I salute you for being here, thank you. This is aI want to be very personal about this latest project of mine. It is, you have alluded to some of the things in my own life that bear on why I did this book, and I want and I want to explain them so you know where I am coming from. The McCarthy story on its own, I always thought I would go back and retell the story of Joe McCarthy for its relevance to today, so it isn't forgotten in American life, and I never had gotten around to it. When 9/11 happened I had just finished my last book---literally publication date was 9/11---and I remember I raced up to New York from Washington. Planes weren'tall grounded as you remember, and I just had to be there. I had to be a witness to what had happened. And I hailed a cab, as soon I got to Penn Station and I said, "Take me down to the West Side Highway." The smoke was still rising in the sky, beautiful blue day. And I'll never forget the scene, just watching, as we walked, as we made our way down the West Side Highway. There were these fire fighters, rescue workers sitting slumped over, grime and so forth all over them. And on the other side were a group of endless young Americans, they had bottles of water, they had signs that said "Our angels, our heroes." And I was so incredibly moved by that sight. I thought that out of this tragedy, it may well be that we are turning a page the American life and entering into a tougher, more realistic, more mature period, where we don't allow ourselves to be seduced by foolish television, non-stop adventures and scandals and cheap and so forth. And that maybe wethe final illusion of the 90's had been pierced. I know that you are all dot com billionaires here in the room. It only goes up. It never goes down. Andbutbut it was the9/11 was one of those shocks. There is no need to dwell on it. We all know it. It was the end of sense of our invulnerability, that we were no longer invulnerable from events here or abroad, and that we didn't really have any problems. And I actually harbored the idea--- when Mr. Bush finally seized on the moment, and his popularity soared to the highest ever any president has received--- it was an enormous sense of bringing the country together, uniting in a common purpose, and not just to fight terrorism, but to deal with real problems that faced the society. And I really hoped that this was a new more mature, sober, serious period. That lasted about a year. And the process since then has been not at all what I had hoped for, and I am sure that you did too. So that was one of the background. I wrote the prologue to this book as we were invading Iraq, in March of 2003. And I haven't changed a word in that prologue that I wrote then. And I wrote it that way, because I thought that we had entered another new period where the events could be calamitous, and at the very least would be echoing in our history maybe for decades to come. Because the consequence of Iraq, unlike the consequences to going into Afghanistan to fight terrorism, and by the way where is that Bin Laden? Is he around? Did we ever get him? I mean, but that was seriously, that was the nexus of our approach. And I supported that, very much. But the going into Iraq struck me as extremely rash and potentially fraught with peril for the county in long term down the road. Anybody who knows the history of Iraq, shouldn't be surprised that there is dissent, hatred, barbarism, warfare, civil warfare between the same groups. And the British learned this in 1920 with the partition. So in any event that initial prologue still stands, and I have tried to update the epilogue in that. And the more I went onto watching the events that began to unfold, after 9/11, the fraying of the unity, the problems in Iraq, the distancing, and then the old ugly thing of McCarthyism arose again. Attacking our enemies, attacking political enemies, using the same phrases, guilt bythe guilt by association tactics which is what McCarthyism represented. And we saw it over and over again, and it was at that point that I started actually the research for the book, and I started writing of this project. It is a narrative history. And it's also in some way a personal history. Jane mentioned my own background. I came to Washington in 1957, when Eisenhower was just starting his second term, after three years in the army during the Korean War, and after graduate school in Madison where I got my Masters in History. And I remember vividly what it was like to be in the army. I'm sure that there are maybe some in this room who remember too, during the Army/McCarthy hearings, when McCarthy was attacking the army, and upbraiding them and assaulting them, bullying them, attacking generals who had bled in three wars, withwere meadled and so forth as being communists and subversives. "General, how dare you wear that uniform. You are not fit to have that uniform," and so forth, and all this stuff. And I remember how our moral was so ravished lowered at that period, that all around us we were surrounded with communists and subversives. And it wasn't just the generals who were leading, and our officers and so forth, it was the people, revered figures like George Marshal and a whole series of people, including the Secretary of the Army, who had served in two World Wars, the First World War and the Second World War, Buck or Bob Stevens. So I remember that period quite well. And I remember also, in my graduate school days in Madison. Joe McCarthy never dared attack the University of Wisconsin. He attacked all other universities across the country as being nests of subversives and dangerous people. This was what he did. He always was making attacks. But he gave one speech when I was in graduate school and I remember it quite well. He said, "Even our great University of Wisconsin, boasts that it has the largest collection of communists literature and documents, and are actually using them as material so the students can study it and learn from it," in this kind of sneering, ominous way that he had of saying that. The very next day, the reporters surrounded the Chancellor of the university, and asked him, "What about this? Is that true?" And he said something very simple: "Yes, and we intend to increase it." And I thought that I was in the right place, that standing up, independence expressing academic freedom, free enquiry and so forth, and I was very proud. One other aspect of my life I just want---bearing on the McCarthy story---I want to share with you, you were nice to allude to my father and the fact that we had both won Pulitzer Prizes. I was lucky. He deserved it, I must say. But I was in high school, when he writing his "Crime on the Waterfront" articles in the old New York Sun. And these were the first articles that exposed the reign of terror that he called the syndicate. We now call them mafia: murders, corruption, a corrupt or racket union. And he named the people Lucky Luciano, Anastasio, Frank Costello, later that spawned the Keiforver hearings 3 years later. But when the stories just began to appear, our home phone began ringing. We got these threatening phone calls, threatening my mother and father, that we'd be killed if he didn't stop the work. Terrified my mother and my father tried to pretend that he wasn't worried. He said, "Ah they'd never kill a reporter." But we had an unlisted phone number for the rest of their lives, in that home. But that isn't the partthere was that kind of fear at the time. The other part started the day the articles began running. When Joe Ryan the corrupt head of the International Longshoreman's Association, who later went to jail based on the revelations in the articles, and his union was the first and only still to this day to be expelled from the FLCAO for racketeering. He started attacking my father as a communist, and the articles were pro-communist propaganda and every day from that time on. And it wasI remember this, in high school and then all into college, and on into the army---because he had sold the rights to Hollywood which went on to be the movie "On the waterfront"---five years later, and there was this continual attack that this was communist propaganda, and so forth, and so on. And that was when McCarthy was at the peak of his era, really in those five years, in the 1950's. So I just want you to know that there is sort of a personal background that I bring to the story of Joe McCarthy. When I started in Washington as a young reporter, I knew many or most of the people who were dealt with Senator McCarthy. He had been dead only three months when I arrived. Tragically drank himself to death. He had been strapped down at the Ferson Naval Hospital suffering from the DTs, collapsed. Really a sort of a tragic ending in his life career, but people really didn't want to talk about McCarthyism, because it was such an ugly period. You wanted to close that book on the time. I became very close to Bill Fulbright, and next to my father he was one of the most important adult male in my life. And I later wrote a biography of him, when he was leading the dissent on the Vietnam War. And Fulbright was one of those people---sort of a hero of mine I guess, if I had heroes then, as a young reporter---but he he was the only senator that refused to appropriate, voted to give Joe McCarthy zero money for his witch hunt investigations and McCarthy would respond everyday, when he saw Fulbright on the senate floor. He'd say, "Come here Senator Halfbright, the communist, the subversive. Senator Halfbright," and so forth, "the liberal," and so forth. That was what McCarthy did. He did these attacks, as you know under the cloak of immunity because you couldn't be sued for slander if you wrote something as a senator. Immunity from liable suits was part of the tactics of McCarthyism. So that's the background. TheI thought when I began this story, this tale, this narrative history, that I knew the essentials of Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism. I found that as I got into it, that McCarthy was infinitely complex, and more powerful, and more threatening, and more ominous than I had believed. He was an original. He had a genius as a matter of fact. Self taught, he wasn't very thoughtful, he didn't read books, except one thing. I learned this in the 30's, astonishing nobody ever wrote about this. In the 30's he was a young democrat, ardently for FDR and The New Deal--- and later of course he accused FDR and The New Deal of being a nest of communist spies and so forth---but when he became a young judge in Appleton, Wisconsin he shocked a fellow judge one day when he pulled out a copy of a book. And said, "This is the source of my political philosophy." It was Mien Kampf. I'm not making this up. It was never written about. It was true. And people later would say, "Oh, Joe he wasn't a Nazi" etc. etc. "But he only used that as an example of how you used political gains to gain power." Well, it seems to me, not too far from the real thing, but that was one thing about McCarthy. Then of course he went into the service and came out, and he was actually failing, and it arose, and it's important. I want you to try to bear with me. It's important to understand why McCarthy succeeded in terrifying the country. Why in just literally a period of a few weeks McCarthyism became what is now a common noun in the dictionary: false charges, on charges of subversion, and treason, and treachery leveled by a public official. Guilt by association, thosethat's what McCarthyism means. McCarthy, actually was failing. He had been elected a Freshman Senator in 1946 and by the time 1950 came around he was in danger of being defeated for his reelection in 1952. And he set out on February 9,1950 to fly alone from Washington National Airport to Wheeling, West Virginia where he was to deliver a Lincoln Day address. One of many, many republican leaders sent around the country to address the memory of Lincoln. McCarthy then ranked so low in the hierarchy of the Republican Party, that he wasn't even invited to go, with the Republicans. He had to beg to get a place on the lecture, and even then they sent him to way out of the way places like Wheeling, West Virginia; Reno; Huron, South Dakota and so forth. The others were of course, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston. You name it. They were all the big hitters at the party. But he goes out alone, no media mavens, no spin doctors, no aids with him, carrying only a bulging briefcase, stocked with, stuffed with papers. And he strolls into the ballroom of the McClure Hotel to address the Republican women of Ohio County, which was part of West Virginia, at their annual dinner, 200 women, in Wheeling, West Virginia. And he waves his sheath of papers. He says, "I have here in my hands a list of 205 communists, known communists who are at this moment active members of a communist spy ring, directing and shaping the policy of the United States from the State Department." That was how it began. That wasfrom that point on, for the next five years he was off and running, because his technique and the genius of McCarthy was his ability to manipulate the press. He would make the charge and it would get on the head line and the attribution, the back up would never quite get into the headline, and he would then escalate the charges, and escalate and escalate them, and so forth. By the time he left Wheelingthe first stop he made on his leg, was just a stop over in Denver airport---Stapleton Airport still there--- and at this time the State Department had issued an instant rebuttal, "It's not true. There's not a word of truth in Senator McCarthy's charges" demanding that he come forth with the documentation, and a list of the names. And the reporters---no different then than now, they were pesky and obstreperous and probably nosey--- they surrounded McCarthy on the tarmac of the airport, and they said, "Senator, we want the names on the list. What's the list? Where is the list? Show us the list. Who are these traitors?" McCarthy had this--- he did this for five years, he always had a bulging briefcase filled with supposedly secret, classified documents, and he sort of rummaging through them and then he said: "I left it on the baggage on the plane." The only humorous moment in the entire Joe McCarthy story occurred the next morning, when the Denver Post ran a photograph of McCarthy, surrounded by the reporters, the plane on there and the tarmac, he's rummaging through his papers, and the caption in the Denver Post page one picture said, "Left Commie List on Bag on Plane." But what'swhat's absolutely fascinating, there was no list. It was all made upthere was no communists; there was no communist spy ring, no documentation of it. What he had was a Chicago Tribune reporter had slipped him a letter, that a Secretary of State in 1946 had submitted to, written, replied from a congressman in Illinois asking about the possible loyalty of Americans right after the war, and they some how came up with a figure 205, but they weren't sure, and they were going to investigate. And by the time McCarthy went off on his trip, four years later, most of the people who were on that list, weren't even working for the government. But also McCarthy would always claim he just had this new information. Actually the letter was submitted and printed in the congressional record---four years old. So hebut that triggered and tapped into the prevailing fear of the country at the time. He would not have succeeded had there not been a genuine backdrop of real fear. And so for a lot of circumstances, just a few days before Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury in that famous spy trial. The FBI had arrested someone in London named Claus Putes who worked on the atomic bomb for us in the Manhattan Project, and who had given information to the Russians, to the Soviets. Yes, there were spies ladies and gentlemen. We had some too. And they turned over the documents of the atomic bomb to the Russians. In China, the mainland Chinese had been driven out by Mao's Forces, Chan kai-shek, to the island of, what is now Taiwan it was then Formosa, and the Russians and Chinese had just signed a huge defense alignment pact. So the two great powers were together. In Berlin, it was still a tinderbox for Berlin air lift just two years before had saved the Berliners from starvation, but it had not ended the prospect of nuclear confrontation. And in the process of all this, spies and traitors and so forth and suspicions and fear, there was the specter of the bomb. It's interesting that literally a couple of days before that, before McCarthy got on the plane alone, Albert Einstein went on television, then in its infancy and on a black and white he looked into the lens of the camera and he said, "We have reached a moment in human history where all life has the capacity to be extinguished." And then he beckoned into the camera and he said, "Incendiary extinction beckons." So there was this real kind of fear, and the Korean War was three months away, and later the Vietnam War, fighting the communists. And so forth. And McCarthy, from that moment on used that kind of fear employed it put it together explosively and escalated his charges and charges. By the time he reached his next stop, he was no longer about the state department; he was attacking Dean Atchison, the Secretary of State, as The Red Dean. Then he was attacking Harry Truman and George Marshal, 20 years of treason by these people. So all of theseand the public which was fearful at that time, some---the young people will not remember---some people may remember. If you were in grammar school or grade school huddling under your desks when the bombprotecting you from the bomb. So the country was awashed in a specter, a period of fear, and all of that formed the process for which McCarthy could actually use, exploit brilliantly, demagogically and with great pain for the United States. And he kept on, and kept on, and by two years later he was the single most powerful political figure in the United States. And certainly the most feared. The Republicans who didn't start out liking McCarthy, and in fact he had hardly any friends---not personal friends, but admirers at all in either party at that time. They thought he was a loud mouth, they thought he was reckless. and they thought that he was this and that, but he had shown that his tactics were working. Eight Republican senators owed their seats to Joe McCarthy campaigning for them in 1952. Democrats lost those eight seats, including their Senate Majority Leader, when McCarthy would go in on the Communists and so forth. It was McCarthy who attacked the press as being a nest of communists. He would use the word liberal over and over again, the same kind of phrases. Echo from now to then. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy. That's what John Kerry was accused of, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I've covered every presidential campaign since Eisenhower's time, and those kind of phrases and techniques are embedded in our divisive attack kind of politics. Turning neighbor against neighbor in suspicion and disloyalty. You're un-American, you're godless, communist, or you're soft on terrorism, or you're soft on communism, you aren'tyour values aren't those of real Americans etc. etc. And those were the talismans, the backdrop for McCarthyism. I learned on thing that I found to my, and I have to make a confession, when I started out as a young reporter I guess I was quite brash, and thought that I was pretty hot. I don't know, smart and all of that, and I wasn't going to be had. And I thought Eisenhower who had started his second term I made my first presidential trip with Ike of a president. I thought he was kind of a boob, thought of a doddering old man, you know. Now I look back, he looks terrific to me. And I say this, it's really...I want you to understand, because when you look at the Eisenhower histhe way he would use or not use power, he would never have gotten us into Vietnam. Talking about the military industrial elite, the scientific technological connection, the business connection with the military, all of these things and he had a decency about absolutely bedrock American values, and I found he looks terrific. But I now think of Eisenhower as a great president, who was tragic. And the tragedy was Joe McCarthy. From the daywhen McCarthy was no longer attacking just Harry Truman and the Democrats, he was attacked Eisenhower's people, his aides, his nominees, he attacked the CIA, he called Alan Douglas the people that Ike nominated to be ambassador to Germany, and so forth around the world. And he launched these investigations of Eisenhower's administration. Looking for communists within, lurking within. And Ike despised---I didn't realize this. he despised Joe McCarthy. His brother Milton, whom Ike admired more than anybody, a brilliant man, and his younger brother Milton, and he would urge him, and he listened to him more than anybody he urged him again and again, "You've got to take on Joe McCarthy. You've got to stop him. He's ruining the United States. He's hurting us in the world. He's ruining your presidency." And Ike would always say, "I will not get down in the gutter with that guy. He will self destruct himself when the public sees him." And that was his response, and Milton and others were pushing Ike all this way. And what I had found really interesting is, Ike would dictate to his secretary Ann Whiteman in the Oval Office about his rage at McCarthy. Said, "He wants to be President. He will never be President if I have anything to do about it." At one point he was so angry that he said, "If they continue for McCarthy to continue to attack the way that he's been doing, I will leave the Republican Party, and try to form a new party in the great moderate center of American life." And I thought, wow. Yes, we need that right now. And this was his appeal, not for divisive, not for extreme, not for hate and so forth. And he said this at least three times. Also he said, if theyif the right wing extremist continue to attack my nominee Earl Barn I will leave the Republican Party and But he never would take on Joe McCarthy, because he thought he would implode. One of the people I interviewed was an absolutely great man. General Goodpaster, was a very close aide to Ike. And he died just as the book was being published, at age 90, remarkable guy. Had worked for Marshal revered both Marshal and and Eisenhower. He would describe to me about how Eisenhower would talk to him in the White House about McCarthy. Eisenhower had a fierce temper, carefully hidden. And he said as he would talk about McCarthy, the blood would rise up from his face, to his hair roots with McCarthy. And he would always say, "I will not get down in the gutter with that guy." And the tragedy was, and I say in the book, had Ike---and I use this analogy---had Ike given an Edward R. Murrow kind of speech to the country, talking about the dangers of McCarthyism, I think that he would have ended it right then. And the tragedy was that he didn't. He was correct, in the end that McCarthy imploded and so forth. But Eisenhower never took him on. He did negotiate and maneuver people toward the end to oppose McCarthy, but I just foundthat was one thing, and otherwise what I think was a very great president and a tragedy because he didn't do that. And I might have to say, that I don't know if you've seen---I'll make the little spiel brief---there is a new movie out, the George Clooney movie, about Murrow and McCarthy. And if you haven't seen it I urge you to see it. Because it is a powerful, absolutely brilliant document, and the genius of it is that rather than have someone play Joe McCarthy, he uses the actual footage. So you will see, particularly those who have no memory, and if you see McCarthy with this sneering attacking, bullying, that's all you need to know. You understand it. You get it, what was there. And I was very proud two or three weeks ago on a Friday night in New York, the Council of Foreign Relations, had Clooney to premier his movie to a group, and I was asked because they knew the book was coming out. Would I be willing to come and appear with Clooney, and talk about my little book? And I said, yeah you know I might do it. And so Clooney did the movie, and so forth, and then we came up on the podium, and Jeff Greenfeild of CNN interviewed the two of us for about an hour. And you know it was a huge standing room only. They turned away people. They came to see the celebrity, me. I was touched. But it is a great movie. It's a seriousin fact I told Clooney that night I saidit was wonderful, Ed Murrow was a hero of mine, and all that, and I don't want to take anything away from Ed Murrow, because it was an eloquent and marvelous, but you've created a great myth. The myth is that that broadcast is what brought down Joe McCarthy. Joe McCarthy would have been brought at that point had there been no broadcast. Because it was just a month before the Army/McCarthy hearings on television, by then McCarthy was falling in popularity around the country. People were beginning to catch on. The Democrats finally they were cowed and afraid of him to take him on, Eisenhower was moving people behind the scenes, and McCarthy was about to meet someone named Joe Welsh, who would say, "At long last Senator, have you no shame? Have you no standards of decency?" And that's what brought him down, when you saw him in the living room. The Murrow broadcast however, to me is far more powerful and important today, because that's what journalism should do. They should hold up absolutely fearlessly accountable to any public officials, false hoods, challenge them, whatever the time or place. And that's the example that I would like to---we didn't do it for a long, long period during the Iraq situation. We allowed ourselves, as in McCarthy's time, to be manipulated. At the end of the book I try to link the two periods, parallels, lessons, civil rights abuses, The Patriot Act, some horrific prisoner abuses which I find particularly, horrendously offensive. The most un-American thing I can possibly image, of anybody who ever wore the uniform, or didn't. This is not what the United States stands for torturing and abusing prisoners, and then no one is held accountable. So there are a lot of similarities between then and now. Thewhen I write these books, I always try to find one quote that expresses the theme of the book. And here is the one that I put on the first page of the book; it is from Mr. Lincoln who is rather quotable always. And this is what Lincoln said: "Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its exisistance?" I thought, when I found that quote that expresses the quintessential democratic dilemma that has been with our experiment in democracy. We absolutely need to have security. We need to be strong, to protect ourselves from enemies, foreign and domestic. And we need a government to protect us from calamities like floods, with effective people. I mean this is whatthis is whatthat's being security. But at the same time the delicate balance we have, absolutely have to stand for not jeopardizing our liberties and our freedoms, because that is what we really represent in the world. So there is nothing new about that challenge. It echoes throughout our history: the Alien Sedition Acts, the Red Scare after WWI, the McCarthy period. Now I suggest now same kind of fear that exists and so forth. And you see a threat to liberties and a sense overwhelming security or manipulation. And I think those are the lessons. So my whole point of this, if there is a lesson it is you have to stand up and not let demagogues exploit fear, and wherever they come from. And that isn't just the press. We've done a lousy job, frankly. Not the job we should have done, and it'sthe politicians have been cowering, particularly the Democrats, god help them. That's a whole other subject, but afraid to take on, afraid to stand up, afraid to But in the end it's a matter of the public and the system, not letting it happen. Don't let it happen. Thank you. It's your choice. And the first question is, "What kind of mail do you get, and is there a revival of McCarthyism out there? You know it's very interesting, even before---long before this book was even written, and it had been announced, I started getting a lot of hits and attacks from the right wing side. That this book was going to come out and liberal, sort of propaganda. And there had beenoneoneone of the first reviews was from someone who wrote a biography defending Joe McCarthy and supporting him. He said I had written the worse book of the decade. I thought that's pretty good. But there is a concertedthere is a kind ofwhat's interesting is the tensions, the emotions are still there. So instead of having civil disagreements, and understanding what you said is the idea of the forum, is to engage the public, but instead we are attacking each other. The same kinds of things. When Anne Coulter wrote the book a couple of years ago called Treason, it's not only 20 years of treason, now it's 50 years of treason. And Joe McCarthy is the hero of her book, the most misunderstood, benighted and the idea that it's all exaggerated. See the movie. Look at the face. Listen to the words; you'll see it wasn't exaggerated. You describe in your book, four periods in which these kinds of abuses occurred. And I am wondering, have we learned from these experiences? I wish I could say that we've learned from the experiences. I think that my own sense of what our experiment and our democracy is that we don't pay too much attention when things seem to be going well, then we allow ourselves to be seized by periods of fear, then there is repression and then there is a reaction and reform. It goes in cycles. And I really believe this, for instance the McCarthy story in Wisconsin is particularly apt in this. It was in Wisconsin that was the forefront of the greatest reforms of the last century. The morphala era, the progressive era Theodore Roosevelt said, "That is the example, it is the test tube for democracy and reform." William Allen White, a republican said that, ____the original put a stamp on American life, more than any American of his time, and it carried on until Joe McCarthy's defeated _____ son, and then the son tragically committed suicide, because he felt that he had let his father down in the legacy. Sobut in those periods of reform, come after periods of great crisis and fear, and I happen to believe that we are now at one of these moments, what the Post has called a hinge moment. Where people are just disgusted with our politics, and disgusted with the attack and smear, and they want people who are authentic, not spin doctors and liars and so forth, and they want people who are strait, and challenge you and ask for sacrifice if sacrifice is needed. And don't pretend it's all and well, mission accomplished, but say that it's going to be long and hard. I went back a long time ago and reread all of Roosevelt's Fireside Chats, and they and Lincoln'sand the Lincoln Douglass debates were all so interesting in that respect. They actually have stenographic records of them in the Library of Congress. But the Roosevelt Fireside Chats, both during the Depression and the War are marked by a singular, practical he never says it's going to be easy, he always says it's going to be hard and tough, before it gets better, but here's what we're going to do. And of course Churchill in the greatest example of the last century, of eloquence of summoning the English people in the spirit, said it's going to get worse, "We have nothing to offer you except the blood, toil, tears and sweat." But you challenge the country and it seems to me that we are at a moment where I think that we're in looking for a period of reform, the war, Iraq, the economy, suspicions, corruption, indictments, nominationsall of these things taking---the calamity of natural disaster, seems to suggest that we defiantly want something different and better. Now don't ask me who---and I know the question will come---who is going to lead that? Starts from the bottom up, not the top down. You have to reach a crisis before you get political action. There have been several questions about the rise of the moderate middle, and asking whether our primary system is such that it encourages the middle to be given real political expression. The primary political system does not do it. That's one of the problems of our I have long advocated, for what it's worth, I think that we ought to abolish that, this individual primary system because it does exactly what you are suggesting. It puts a premium on people who are successful at attacking, and we ought to have regional primaries, in various parts of the country, so that not one place has a disproportionate power, like a little state like Iowa setting the whole tone for the election. And I think that we als