| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Haynes Johnson interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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You're a man who has observed presidents from Eisenhower to the current President Bush. Before I talk about that, I wanted to ask you whether you think understanding a president requires understanding his times. You refer to Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday. Talk a little about that, that understanding a president is embedding him in his time.
Frederick Lewis Allen was a great social historian, chronicler of the 1920s and 30s. I admire his work tremendously. It was pioneering, and to take those decades, those epochs, which had a beginning and an end, the Roaring Twenties ending in the Crash, leading to the Depression, ushering in the period of World War II, and so forth. So I took that as a canvas, and I try to capture the tapestry of the times.
You can't explain any of us without understanding the times in which we live. That's a truism, it's a clich?. There's no great insight or binding wisdom in that, but it is true. And so you want to put the people in the times that they're going through, and how the times influence those living through them. If you're a child of the Depression, that stamps you as one thing. If you're of the "Greatest Generation" of World War II, those are definable. You can't understand the people who go through that without understanding that. If you grew up after that, in the Vietnam period and in a stand against the war and so forth, that is definable in who you are -- whether you were for it or against it. If you are in the nineties, in the time in which there's no standing army, there's no draft, you have no sense of threat, you go through that. So that's what you want to try to do for each president.
People look back at Jack Kennedy, and they say, "What a Cold Warrior," but at the time, he was thought of as dangerously liberal. So you can't understand that without the specter of nuclear incineration, World War II, five years after the end of the war and what happened by 1950, 1955, 1960. It was a different and more ominous world. So you have to put it in the context of that time. Fear of McCarthyism, "enemies within," attacks on civil liberties -- I think with all presidents, you have to put it in context. You can't look at Franklin Roosevelt without the Depression and then the war. And the same way with poor Herbert Hoover -- a tragic, smart, progressive man, the great public servant of his time, who admired Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations -- became tagged with the Depression. You can't understand Herbert Hoover without understanding that and the contrasts of it, and the tragedy, that whether he was able to deal with the Depression or not, it's unfair to think of him as just this right-wing moss-bag. He's not. So you have to try to understand the times.
Looking at Clinton, I think one can conclude from your book that at one level, it's a problem of character. But at another level, you're saying that changes in our institutions had created problems -- whether it was the bubble in the market, or the scandal-mongering that came to define what a journalist does.
That's exactly right, a convergence of forces that create the special climate through which you're going to pass into history. It was Clinton's fate to come to power at a time of unparalleled opportunities for the United States -- the Cold War is over; we have no enemies, foreign or domestic. We now know that we do have, but none like the Soviet Union and the war or the bomb, Hitler, Tojo, Ho Chi Minh. The isms -- communism, fascism -- had gone. The United States standing alone. And then you have this enormous boom taking off. At the same time, you have this diversion of the scandal culture, and we're allowing ourselves through the red light up there, looking at that television camera. That tells us who we are, that puts us into the place. We allowed ourselves to be entertained and diverted, and we allowed ourselves, also, to be quickly fragmented by the time.
Clinton is a superbly talented person, with as great natural gifts as any political person I've seen. Smart. Knowledgeable. Fully informed. It's not a matter of briefing, he's read, he's thought; he's ambitious, hungry. But he comes afoul of the forces of the time, the rapaciousness and the scandal, and this drug culture, and his own character flaws. In the end, about Bill Clinton, I don't think he should ever have been impeached. I think it was a disaster for the country; he didn't deserve to be impeached. He maybe should have been censured or whatever, or people could have voted him out after one term. And they didn't do that, they reelected him overwhelmingly. But Bill Clinton, with all the forces arrayed against him in the end, just like Richard Nixon, he was the agent of his own destruction. He has no one really to blame but himself for that. And I suspect -- I'm not in his head, I don't know -- he'll go to his grave tormented with this "What if? What if?" I don't know, but that's what I think. That's how I feel about it.
You actually knew Bill Clinton when he was a student, a kid. Tell us about that.
I was doing a biography of Bill Fulbright. Senator J. William Fulbright was a towering figure in our political life; today, recognized only as a common noun, the "Fulbright programs," the exchange programs.
Which he initiated as a legislator.
Bill Fulbright was a senator from Arkansas, the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, a Rhodes scholar, President of the University of Arkansas, the youngest president of a college in the country at that time. Comes to Washington in the thirties, works in the Justice Department. A New Dealer, a wonderful figure. And Bill Clinton comes to work on his staff as a nineteen-year-old college student going to Georgetown from Arkansas. I was working out of Fulbright's staff, not for him, I was doing a biography of Fulbright because he was just leading the dissent against the Vietnam War, which had great consequence in our history. Had Fulbright not, with his great power of the establishment and reputation -- he was not a bomb-thrower, but he was an iconoclast and independent -- had he not led that, I think the history of the Vietnam War might have been different.
In any event, I was there in the office, working, and Fulbright opened up all his files to me. And they brought one day a chubby-faced kid, and said, "Haynes, we want you to meet Bill Clinton. He's just joined the staff. We think his has great promise." So I saw Clinton -- he was nineteen years-old -- every day for a year and a half while I was doing the research on the book. We know each other, on a different level, but it goes back a long way. So I watched him along the way. When he became governor and they named the college Fulbright College of Arts, they had me down to be a speaker at the dedication; he was the governor that introduced me. That's where that I met Hillary Clinton. She didn't look like Hillary Clinton of later; she was dark-haired, had big bubble glasses and so forth, a very different figure. So I've watched him over the years, and then I saw him, of course, during the presidency.
Do I detect in your writing -- and this may be unfair, but let me run it by you -- a kind of an anguish, a concern about the decline in the standards in many of our institutions, whether you're talking about the politicians, whether you're talking about the journalists? You just mentioned Fulbright. There don't seem to be as many Fulbrights around. Talk a little about that.
You're absolutely right, I do think there's not only a decline, but a diminution or destruction of standards. It permeates society, this search-and-destroy mentality, the rapaciousness of the press; I've already talked about it. We've always had a critical press, and sometimes there's scandal in the press, but it's reached new dimensions in recent years, and it's been progressive. And a distrust of public figures and no appreciation for public service as a concept. All of those things were building and building and building, and they were part of the time that Clinton became president, too. I think in the long run, all that hurts is us. Because -- here's a clich? -- the only thing in a democracy is trust. Trust is the coin of the realm. If you lose that, if you become so cynical that you don't believe in anybody or anything; or you think it's irrelevant, then you're going to have anarchy and you're going to fall apart from within. You're right, I do have a great concern about that.
It goes way beyond any one person or event, and it's been cumulative. Some of it is grounded for good reasons. Vietnam was a terrible dissolution, and [caused] a sense of betrayal of trust. Watergate was the same way, with Richard Nixon, and so you had this combination. I hope that in the time that we're now passing through, after the events of September 11, 2001, with the World Trade Center and the age of terrorism, I hope now we realize an appreciation for public service. We can't allow ourselves to destroy ourselves. That doesn't mean you shouldn't debate and argue and take issue and fight for issues and have ideological and political viewpoints, but you should do so with a larger sense of the common purpose in the country. That's what was missing, and I hope that's what we find now.
Since you've written about so many presidents and thought about them, I wonder if you might give us your insights, a comparison, say, of Clinton and Reagan. How would you compare them? In what ways were they alike and in what ways different?
That's a good question. Ronald Reagan is the oldest figure to be President of the United States in our history, by far; Clinton is the third youngest ever to be President of the United States. So there's that difference -- they're from different places and different times and different generations. But they had one thing in common: they both were able to touch and move people.
Reagan's gift was as the speechmaker, the set performer on the stage. He wasn't really good with people. He didn't connect personally so much with people. He could ring the bell and he could make you cry when the Challenger went up in smoke. He could say things like, " ... when you bring bodies home in a calamity" and so forth. He said things that touched me. I don't mean that to diminish that, that's very important.
Clinton was the best figure at moving and touching people I've ever seen. A lot of it was the "I feel your pain," as we now say. But he did have that ability [to touch people]. Reagan was scripted, everything he did was carefully arranged, the candlelight and so forth. Clinton cared much about that too, but Clinton could be extemporaneous, magnificently, and just take off. You didn't see Reagan do that.
Reagan was, in private, a very good joke-teller. A lot of it was locker room jokes, sort of bawdy jokes. But Clinton has this ability to touch. With all of his foibles, which were nakedly on view, all of his character flaws, people saw in him someone that had a gift and an empathy. I think he was the most empathetic of all of our presidents. Reagan, in reality, was quite distant -- distant with his family, distant with friends. He didn't really have friends. And so they're very different. But they both were able to move the country in a way.
What about Nixon and Johnson? Compare them.
Nixon was the most impulsively consuming, analytical, looking-at-his-innards president, and riveting in the way he would analyze himself and his calculating strategy and process. Lyndon Johnson was not the figure that Americans saw as the president. In private, Lyndon Johnson was a torrent of energy and rawness and vulgarity, and greatness too. They both were talented men. Both terribly flawed. Both were not able to live up to the crises of their times, and both were destroyed by them.
Johnson's great hubris was that even though he knew that Vietnam (as we know from his administration's tapes) was a losing proposition, he couldn't bring himself to say, "We don't have to do this." And it destroyed him. Richard Nixon was so consumed by the enemies that he felt were all around him, the paranoia that existed, that he was going to do anything to bring them down. And, of course, what it did was destroy himself.
One of the pieces that's implicit in your book is the way in the Clinton period there was an abdication of our responsibility and relations with the world. That's quite different from the sense of responsibility that was there at the beginning of your career when you were covering Eisenhower. Talk about the erosion of that.
Well, we are in a different America. There's no way you can explain what happened and why we got that way. When I first came to Washington, Eisenhower was beginning his second term, and the feeling was then, even though the press can be critical and so forth, that people were confident and they believed in the American system and in their leaders. You didn't have this mistrust or disbelief. In some ways, it was naïve. But there was a basic respect for the system.
Part of that was born from the World War II triumph, and the country coming back, and the good times of the fifties and the early sixties, and the sense of possibilities. But it eroded very dramatically. I was a witness to a part of that, as a matter of fact. The civil rights riots; Martin Luther King ringing the bell of the conscience of the country, being killed; Bob Kennedy, whom I knew so well, taking up the lance from his brother, being killed. And Vietnam and Watergate and all that. And then the press turning, and the country turning. We voted less and less, became more and more disbelieving, and to a point where you had this situation. You could lose yourself in entertainment, and not pay attention to the world around you. And if you didn't belief in government, it didn't matter who was in the White House. Of course, it does matter. You could lose yourself. And that was part of the times upon which Clinton became president. That's the backdrop of the times.
And his not taking the foreign policy mantel, is that a reflection of the times?
Absolutely.
But it was also political choice?
Yes, sure it was. Clinton came to office during a recession, one forgets, at the beginning of the nineties. The clich? of his people at the time was, "It's the economy, stupid." "We're not going to worry about Afghanistan or foreign questions, or the nexus between NATO and all that. That will take care of itself. We supported them; we still do. But we're going to focus on the domestic agenda, and we're going to be successful practitioners of the times." He did pay attention to the world, but the focus was always on, "It's the economy, stupid." And we saw the outcome of that. The economy did take off. He doesn't deserve all the credit for the boom; some credit, but not all of it, by any means. But there was a turning away [from foreign policy issues] in the country, by and large.
He bears a blame, in my view, not because we were diverted and because we liked entertainment and scandal and celebrities, but the leader has to try to focus the country on the important issues that maybe people don't want to pay attention to. Now, maybe you're unsuccessful as a leader if you do that, but that's what great leaders do. That's what Lincoln could do; he could say things that we still look back and say, "Wow, don't you want a president like that?" Theodore Roosevelt could do it. Franklin Roosevelt could do it. Kennedy at his best. And Truman. There hasn't been much of that in recent time.
Why is that? Because there's a focus on the polls, on responding to public opinion as opposed to shaping it?
We now have all these poll-driven politicians, they all practice the polls. They read overnight polls; they get them every day in the White House -- every day. Every day. They look at them and study them. Congressmen look at the polls every day, and they have "message meetings" on what the message is going to be. They follow that, rather than saying, "This is what we need to do." So the country hungers for authenticity, for vigor, or independence of thought and action, and very seldom gets it.
People in politics think, "Well, I can't go against the norm in politics because I'll be destroyed." I think that's wrong, and I think that people [are ready now for leaders]. The great example of that is Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, who had scandal problems as bad as Clinton. His was in disfavor in New York City. But when the World Trade Center disasters occurred, he instantly went down into the pit and became a leader, and the country and the people responded to him. That's leadership. You can disagree with his policy and so forth, but that's an instinctive thing. It wasn't following the polls.
There are too many political consultants for hire, the cynical image-makers. I hate the term "spin." "Spin" didn't exist until just a few years except as spinning a top. Now it means deceiving or trying to change the attitudes of the people by conning them. The politicians do that, and the media merchants do it, and you have all this stuff on television that nobody wants to watch because you can't believe any of it. I feel that way myself.
This harkens back to the earlier discussion of your growing up years. Because in those days, one could be excited, and you were, by the images that were created, the realities that were opened up. So much of it now, partly because of technology, becomes a way to deceive as opposed to understanding.
Yes. I don't think it has to be that way, but that's the way it's evolved. I go back to my father, not to repeat that sort of thing, but he was capable of enormous rage and indignation about injustice. Later on, when I was a newspaperman, he was watching me, and angry about Nixon and "those crooks in the White House," and so forth, angry about injustice against blacks in the South, and furious at his own native country. But, also, deeply, absolutely passionately a believer in America, and pride in all that. Well, I don't think we've lost that, but it's harder, it has been harder until recently to find that.
Do you think that 9/11 will turn us around, will be a big push in that direction?
I hope so. I think it creates an opportunity for the country to be more realistic, to be more honest, to try to sort out what's really in our interest, and what we must pay attention to, and change, of necessity, to deal with very different conditions -- threatening, in a sense of obvious terrorism, life-or-death threatening; or economically threatening, all those disparities in the world. It's not a matter of romance or nobility or any of that, but it's in our interest to do so.
Politics is self-interest, and that's not a bad thing. Self-interest for our country ought to be what's the best thing for us to do as a people. That's the test, not just of the political people we elect, but of the citizens who either vote or don't, who pay attention and are informed or are not, and of the media which reports on and gives you information or doesn't. I think that's the test.
So in a way, life in a bubble makes us irresponsible, but life under pressure, as we now are, may enhance our ability to respond in a way that's ...
I think it has. I think it is an opportunity. I don't know if it's going to last. I am hopeful it will. It's a great opportunity for the country and the future.
It seems that your profession, journalism, is meeting that challenge in the aftermath.
I'm very proud of what I see in my business, the news business, since 9/11. Not all, obviously. But there's been some of the best journalism in my lifetime -- courageous, enterprising, absolutely; and helping [the public] understand the forces that exist in the Islamic world, what the conditions are, what the challenges are, what the realities are, under great difficulty. I think that's wonderful. We didn't see much of that before, and we're now paying more attention to that, and the country wants that. So the respect for the news media, at least for now, has risen, along with that of public service in the government. That says to me, again, those are opportunities for us to build on, if we're up to seizing that change.
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