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Episode Guide 1966-1999

Scope and Contents note

The Episode Guide is arranged by show number. Numbers that are followed by an "R" are repeat broadcasts of the same program, while numbers followed by an "E" are edited repeat broadcasts. Guests are listed with the program title, using Library of Congress name authorities, in a last name, first name sequence.
When applicable, links for purchasing full-length episodes and the availability of special order DVDs are also included. The Episode Guide also includes links to Hoover's digital collections website for each program and information about the three types of program research materials: background files, publicity files, and transcripts.
Background files include materials such as clippings, correspondence, transcripts, histories, press summaries, and printed matter, as well as other collected materials on speakers and their appearances on Firing Line.
Publicity files are available for public television shows produced by SECA and contain materials such as photographs, negatives, slides, transcripts, newsletters, and other materials, The types of materials available for each show vary.
Transcripts of Firing Line are both typewritten and printed. Also included among transcripts are two productions hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. that were not Firing Line programs. The shows have been designated as 000a and 000b. These programs are included in the Episode Guide, and the transcripts are located in box 159. Downloadable transcripts for most Firing Line programs are available on Hoover's digital collections website and can be accessed through the links that accompany each program entry in the Episode Guide.
item Program Number 1

"Poverty: Hopeful or Hopeless?"

Guests: Harrington, Michael, 1928-

4 April 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 4
Program details: President Johnson had just declared war on poverty, and Mr. Harrington, an avowed socialist who had started out on the staff of Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker, had been among the first to enlist. On this show (the first Firing Line taped, though not the first aired), Mr. Harrington begins by describing the despair and consequent lack of initiative engendered by poverty; WFB engages him on the issue of whether we can hope to alleviate either material or emotional poverty through government action. MH: "Being kicked around and being pushed down, living in dense, miserable housing, and dealing with cockroaches and rats are not the kinds of things that make one a balanced, content, normal, and adjusted healthy personality." WFB: "I couldn't agree with you more. But I'm trying to raise the following question: To what extent... can we count on [a poverty program] to alleviate all these concomitant miseries?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSD6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5935
item Program Number 2

"Prayer in the Public Schools"

Guests: Pike, James A. (James Albert), 1913-1969.

6 April 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 5
Program details: Bishop Pike was thought of as the wild man of the Episcopal Church (by this time he had been put on trial for heresy, though he had emerged still wearing the Episcopal purple), but on this show he is genial and persuasive on the subject of school prayer specifically and the First Amendment generally. JAP: "I think [the Supreme Court Justices] use the First Amendment in a way it was never intended to be used. [The Founding Fathers] talked about establishment of religion. And they meant, really, establishment like the Church of England is. ... It was forbidding the federal agency, the Congress, from interfering with the existing states' establishment." ... "I personally do not see the value of state-prescribed prayer or of the reading of the Bible, for instance, without study of the background, the context, the thoughtful criticism of the passages, in school. And I think it's a disservice to the Church, too, because it gives parents the illusion that this side of life is being covered by the public agency when, in fact, it's very trivial and perfunctory."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.2
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001N0LEII
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5936
item Program Number 3

"Vietnam: Pull Out? Stay In? Escalate?"

Guests: Thomas, Norman, 1884-1968.

8 April 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 6
Program details: Mr. Thomas--the grand old man of the American Left, six-time Socialist Party candidate for President--was by this point focusing all his energies on opposition to America's involvement in the Vietnam War. This often fierce exchange, which places both men on the firing line, begins with WFB's asking why his guest supported the Korean War but opposes the Vietnam War and goes on to explore whether it is realistic even to aspire to contain Communism. NT: "Mr. Buckley, you seem to believe in cruelty as a necessary adjunct to this kind of war. Your main point is that somehow we're going to contain Communism this way, and we aren't. We may delay certain events in Communism. We're not going to contain it. We-" WFB: "Excuse me, was the war in Greece cruel? Did we contain the Communists in Greece?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.3
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSE0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5937
item Program Number 4

"Capital Punishment"

Guests: Allen, Steve, 1921-

11 April 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 7
Program details: The death penalty was under heavy attack in the courts and in public forums, and polls indicated that it was the issue that most sharply divided liberals from conservatives. Messrs. Buckley and Allen begin by discussing why this should be a touchstone issue, and progress to considerations of whether the death penalty in fact deters, and whether, even if it does, it can be morally defended. SA: I think there are probably various reasons why conservatives generally favor capital punishment. I think one of them maybe so obvious there is the traditional risk of overlooking it, and that is simply that it exists and that it has existed for a long time."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.4
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSEK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5938
item Program Number 5

"Where Does the Civil-Rights Movement Go Now?"

Guests: Farmer, James, 1920-

18 April 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 8
Program details: "Two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, Mr. Farmer was arguing for what he called affirmative action," WFB suggests, and Mr. Farmer denies hotly and cogently--though not, as it would turn out, presciently--that affirmative action would almost certainly turn into numerical quotas. One sample: JF: "President Kennedy, incidentally, adopted the same idea. It's said that he stepped off a plane in Washington. There was an honor guard there to meet him. He saw no Negroes. He called an officer, and said, 'I see no Negroes here.' The officer said, 'Mr. President, no Negroes have applied.' He said, 'Go out and find some.'" WFB: "Well, one hopes he will find more productive jobs for Negroes than simply to make them stand parade for dignitaries."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.5
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5939
item Program Number 6

"Should the House Committee on Un-American Activities Be Abolished?"

Guests: Faulk, John Henry.

21 April 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 9
Program details: "Mr. Faulk is primarily known," WFB begins, "as a certified victim of an anti-Communist organization called Aware," which had brought him to the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Mr. Faulk had sued Aware and been awarded "the most colossal judgment in libel history"; he was now seeking the abolition of the committee. On this show, Mr. Faulk begins, in his down-home sort of voice, by quoting the then-Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan as having said that "the committee's program so closely parallels the program of the Ku Klux Klan that there is no distinguishable difference between them," and we're off to the races.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.6
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSF4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5940
item Program Number 7

"The Prevailing Bias"

Guests: Susskind, David, 1920-

2 May 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 10
Program details: The tone is set in the first few minutes, when Mr. Susskind responds to the introduction (in which WFB had said, among other things, "Mr. Susskind is a staunch liberal. If there were a contest for the title Mr. Eleanor Roosevelt, he would unquestionably win it") by saying: "I must say that I regard that introduction as somewhat rude and insulting, Mr. Buckley. I had hoped, on the occasion of your having your own television program, you would abandon your traditional penchant for personal bitchiness and stick to facts and issues; but evidently your rude behavior is congenital and compulsive. And so I forgive you." But among the billingsgate there is serious discussion of the current offerings on the airwaves, the tendency of the Jewish community to resist the anti-Communist movement, and more.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.7
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RQ2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5941
item Program Number 8

"The New Frontier: The Great Society"

Guests: Goodwin, Richard N.

6 May 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 11
Program details: Mr. Goodwin was present at the creation--as WFB reminds us, "he is credited with supplying that ominous phrase, 'The Great Society' "--and he defends the Johnson program ably in this good-tempered session. RG: "Well, I think the Great Society ...represents a change or a breaking point from the ideas of the New Deal. I think the essential idea behind the New Deal was that rising prosperity, more equitably distributed among the people, would solve most of the problems of the country. . . . Now, having succeeded-not completely, but to quite a degree-in that effort ... we find it doesn't solve the major problems, the kinds of problems you talked about in your campaign [for Mayor of New York] ...and that now we have to turn our attention, not only ... to relief of the poor or dispossessed, but to the quality of life of every American ..."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.8
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSFO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5942
item Program Number 9

"Civil Disobedience: How Far Can It Go?"

Guests: Gregory, Dick.

16 May 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 12
Program details: Mr. Gregory had been arrested many times for his civil disobedience, and he had been shot during the Watts riots. As conversation, this show never quite clicks: Mr. Buckley is trying to clarify the line between peaceful protest and civil disobedience, while Mr. Gregory is engaged in blurring it. Still, a fascinating glimpse of the worldview of an inveterate protestor. DG: When these people [the Nuremberg defendants] pleaded that they were only obeying the law ... the world's justices declared that they were guilty and that man has a duty to disobey laws that are contrary to great moral laws. One day we might have another trial, be it in Heaven, be it in Asia--I don't know if we'll be judged by the Chinese or by the angels--but I want to be able to plead not guilty."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.9
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5943
item Program Number 10

"McCarthyism: Past, Present, Future"

Guests: Cherne, Leo, 1912-

16 May 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 13
Program details: Mr. Buckley seeks, with his old friend and adversary Mr. Cherne, to explore, as he puts it, why Joseph McCarthy's oversimplifications were judged to be almost unique and highly damaging ... whereas the contemporary oversimplifications of, say, a Harry Truman, or, before that, of a Franklin Roosevelt, or subsequently of a Lyndon Johnson, are not seen as that offensive." A rich conversation, full of detail. LC: "Well, to suggest, for example, that General Marshall lied about his whereabouts on the morning of Pearl Harbor, and to suggest, as Senator McCarthy did, that in fact he was meeting Maksim Litvinov at the Washington airport when in fact this was not true--this is not oversimplification in the normal language of political discourse."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.10
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSG8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5944
item Program Number 11

"Vietnam: What Next?"

Guests: Lynd, Staughton.

23 May 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 14
Program details: "Mr. Lynd had recently visited Hanoi--to propagandize for the Vietcong," Mr. Buckley suggests; to "clarify, if we could, the approach to peace negotiations from the other side," Mr. Lynd insists. A spirited exchange with a scholar whose specialty is "the Radical Tradition in America before 1900." WFB: "Listen, Professor, let's stop dropping these little statistical gems around the place. What Eisenhower said when he used the term 80 per cent was that 80 per cent of the [Vietnamese] people would have joined in any war against the French. He didn't say that 80 per cent were in favor of Ho Chi Minh. . . ." SL: "Well, what President Eisenhower said, in fact, ... is that at the time of the end of the war against the French, in 1954, ... 80 per cent of the people of Vietnam as a whole would have voted for Ho Chi Minh in an election." WFB: "As an alternative to Bao Dai. Ho Chi Minh had not started his rather systematic euthanasia of people who disagreed with him, however, as of 1954. He was considered the George Washington of that area."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.11
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSH2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5945
item Program Number 12

"The Future of States' Rights"

Guests: Golden, Harry, 1902-

23 May 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 15
Program details: A lively discussion that begins with the states' rights movement in Mr. Golden's adopted South and deepens to cover the origins of our federal system and the way it has evolved. WFB: "Aren't you going to acknowledge at least this much tonight: that there are people who bear no ill will whatsoever to the Negro, who nevertheless believe that Jefferson and Madison ... had something interesting to say when they devised the federal system? ..." HG: "... The Founding Fathers could be forgiven, Mr. Buckley, for not having known that we would ... turn an agricultural society into an industrial society ..." WFB: "They can be forgiven for not predicting Earl Warren, for that matter." HG: "But, however, they were wonderful men ... because the Constitution they devised was not statutes, it was a pattern of behavior. And a pattern which in their tremendous wisdom they figured that maybe things will come about that will require constant change."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.12
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E53T1C
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5946
item Program Number 13

"The Future of the Republican Party"

Guests: Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987.

26 May 1966

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 16
Program details: The first of several Firing Line appearances by the sharp-tongued Mrs. Luce, who here takes on the party she has served in many capacities--as keynoter at the 1948 National Convention, as legislator and diplomat, as Co-Chairman of the National Citizens' Committee for Goldwater. The crackling conversation ranges back to Thomas Jefferson and forward to the next election. CBL: "Well, the Whigs went out of existence on the slavery issue. And I don't think that parties make issues. Issues make parties. And the Republican Party seems to be fresh out of issues, fresh out of programs, fresh out of ideas, after a period of almost sixty years as the dominant party [from 1861 to 1932].... I don't care who the Republicans nominate [in 1968]: unless there is a war, a wounding war, or a depression, the Democrats are going to win."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.13
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5947
item Program Number 14

"The Future of the American Theater"

Guests: Merrick, David, 1911-

6 June 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 17
Program details: Mr. Merrick is not just any producer but, as WFB puts it, "the most successful producer on Broadway"--and one whom the critics have accused of "inveigling audiences into going to [his shows] ... and the audiences are thereupon so ashamed of their gullibility in succumbing to Mr. Merrick's publicity, they will laugh at bad jokes, allow their hearts to break at the sight of a valentine, and leave the theater humming untuneful songs." (Mr. Merrick asks to correct the record: "I can't recall that I've ever had a bad joke in one of my plays, or an untuneful song, or that I've ever produced a bad play.") The conversation, rich with anecdote, winds up being less about the future of the theater than about the relation of the critic, on the one hand, to the theater company and, on the other hand, to the audience--"sort of a necessary evil," says Mr. Merrick. "... So, I bark at the critics and snipe at them, that's part of the game, because I think I have the right to criticize them if they have the right to criticize my product."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.14
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U26
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5948
item Program Number 15

"Bobby Kennedy and Other Mixed Blessings"

Guests: Kempton, Murray, 1917-

6 June 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 18
Program details: The first Firing Line appearance of Mr. Kempton, of whom WFB says that "he is the finest writer in the newspaper profession," but "his specialty is not, in this critic's opinion, logic." On the subject of Bobby Kennedy's motivations in attacking Lyndon Johnson, however (Johnson "cannot win with Robert Kennedy because he's William of Orange"), these two old friends and adversaries see pretty much eye to eye. As Mr. Kempton puts it, "[RFK] lacks his brother's real appreciation for people who were a little older than he was and a little more stable and a little more serious. It seems to me that his radicalism is a total hangup on the young.... And what his brother would have regarded as nonsense in conduct, he refuses to regard as nonsense as long as it isn't done by somebody who is older than 25 years of age."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.15
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSHW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5949
item Program Number 16

"The Future of Conservatism"

Guests: Goldwater, Barry M. (Barry Morris), 1909-1998.

9 June 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 19
Program details: Under Arizona law, Mr. Goldwater had had to give up his Senate seat to run for the Presidency, and so at the moment he was a private citizen--though still, even after his disastrous defeat, the acknowledged leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. This rich conversation ranges from the specific and immediate (Medicare, the prospects for the 1968 election) to the general (Has too much power accrued to the Presidency? How can it be curbed?). BG: "I think the country has become pretty much a two-term country. So I think it's pretty much up to the President. If he decides to run again, the chances of the Republicans beating him are not excellent. However, if he keeps on with his lack of success in Vietnam, the downfall of NATO, ... the growing cost of living in our country, the chances get better. But we don't like to win on those kinds of chances."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.16
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U2G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5950
item Program Number 17

"Public Power vs. Private Power"

Guests: Gore, Albert, 1907-

9 June 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 70 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 20
Program details: Mr. Buckley describes his guest as "a tough and knowledgeable controversialist," and Senator Gore sets about proving him right with his passionate defense of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which Barry Goldwater, in 1964, had proposed selling to private enterprise. WFB: "Why, Senator Gore, shouldn't parts of the TVA be sold to privately owned companies?" AG: "... I'll ask you: Why should it? I know of no reason why it should." WFB: "Well, the presumption is, isn't it, that that which can be owned privately ought to be, in a non-socialist society?" AG: "Well, is there any reason why any part of the TVA should be owned privately? It seems to me that this is an integrated, successfully operating utility, one of the greatest successes of the world ...Unless we want to sell all of it, why do we wish to dismember it?" WFB: "Well, it seems to me that it breaks down rather naturally into component parts. I can't imagine anybody..." AG: "Well, so does your hand, but why would you sell one finger?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.17
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5951
item Program Number 18

"Communists and Civil Liberties"

Guests: Rauh, Joseph L., 1911-

10 June 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 21
Program details: After a bristly beginning (JLR: "I won't say thank you for that insulting introduction"), guest and host settle down for a serious debate on the best way to protect our national security. JLR: "The method of checking on everybody in the hope of getting the spies doesn't work. A Harvard professor, a physicist, said it better than I can.... He said, 'When you watch diamond rings and toothbrushes with the same intensity, it's true that you lose less toothbrushes, but you lose a lot more diamond rings.' ... Let's take the Rosenbergs. There's a perfectly good case. [J. Edgar] Hoover had leads that would have led him to the Rosenbergs years earlier, but [the FBI] had so much material,they could never get to it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.18
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5952
item Program Number 19

"The Role of the Church Militant"

Guests: Coffin, William Sloane.

27 June 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 22
Program details: WFB and his guest--an old friend and adversary from undergraduate days and now a Presbyterian minister--agree that the Christian Church in all its denominations is in trouble, increasingly ignored by the young and regarded as irrelevant. Mr. Coffin, however, argues that this is largely because the churches have not taken up the cause of civil rights for black Americans; Mr. Buckley maintains that it has more to do with their ignoring the oppression behind the Iron Curtain. One sample: WSC: "I'll tell you, Bill, why James Baldwin is down on the Church. And Louis Lomax and also many of the rest of [the black leaders]. Because they have told me, 'Every time we see that cross we think, There's a place where they call us niggers.' The primary problem of the Church in our time is not that people don't believe in God, it's that the prosperous Church in our time has failed to make common cause with the sufferers of this world."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.19
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RQW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5953
item Program Number 20

"Why Are the Students Unhappy?"

Guests: Bikel, Theodore.

27 June 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 23
Program details: Student unrest was not yet at its most virulent, but many campuses had seen sit-ins and other disruptions. WFB posits that a chief cause of the problems is adult unwillingness to enforce discipline. Mr. Bikel, who had grown up in a kibbutz in Israel but quickly rebelled against its strictures, posits that the younger generation must be left free to develop its own values, even if these do not include what the older generation would call civility. TB: "Do you really think that we live in the kind of an age where ... a parent can obstinately cling to the belief that the values of today are not substantially different from the values of yesterday?" WFB: "But the parents are right." TB: "I knew that you would say that."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.20
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RR6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5954
item Program Number 21

"Senator Dodd and General Klein"

Guests: Dodd, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph), 1907-1971.

22 August 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 24
Program details: Senator Dodd had been accused by the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson of having had improper dealings with one General Julius Klein, an agent of the West German government--as WFB paraphrases the Pearson charge, "instead of serving his constituents in Connecticut and the nation as a whole, Senator Dodd has been primarily concerned to serve the interests of General Julius Klein." This old controversy doesn't wear as well as some, but along the way we get interesting insights into the propriety of Americans representing foreign countries (as WFB points out, John Foster Dulles and Dean Acheson each did at one time or another) and into how a newspaper columnist with an axe to grind and a Senate investigating committee can work hand in hand. TD: "Unfortunately, the terminology 'foreign agent' has an ugly connotation, I think, for most people-the two-peaked-hat character who's spying on Washington. The truth of the matter is that there are many distinguished, celebrated lawyers and citizens who are representatives of foreign governments, and they serve a very useful purpose."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.21
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U30
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5955
item Program Number 22

"Extremism"

Guests: Schary, Dore.

22 August 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 25
Program details: A crackling debate on political extremism, Right and Left. It is our host's contention that Mr. Schary and his organization are rather more alert to the former than to the latter: "It's awfully hard to discuss these questions, Mr. Schary, because you have been, I think, so amiable and so reasonable and so soft-spoken; but when you get on the typewriter, it sort of comes out different." Why, for instance, do Mr. Schary and the ADL regularly attack the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan (and point out that some of their members actively supported Barry Goldwater's campaign) but not attack the equal and opposite extremism of Women's Strike for Peace or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? DS: "Nobody's ever asked me to write anything about it ... Not everything I say, you see, gets into print."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.22
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U3A
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5956
item Program Number 23

"Civil Rights and Foreign Policy"

Guests: McKissick, Floyd B. (Floyd Bixler), 1922-

22 August 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 1
Program details: Mr. McKissick had taken over the leadership of CORE from James Farmer (see Firing Line 005) and had led the organization in a more militant direction, and not only concerning race relations within the United States. As WFB puts it, his guest "proceeds on the assumption that there is a nexus between" civil rights and America's foreign policy. Hence, for example, Mr. McKissick had visited Cambodia and had determined that American bombing there was unjustified. This often heated exchange begins with the Henry Wallace movement of 1948 and goes on from there. WFB: "The point is whether you are going to exercise the kind of prudence that will keep CORE from perhaps becoming what the Progressive Party of 1948 became, which is simply a pawn of the Soviet Union." FM: "Well, I know a lot of people who worked in that campaign for Wallace who were not Communists, and ... there were many good people. I think to put a label on people, I've never been one who wanted to put a label on people ..."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.23
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U3K
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5957
item Program Number 24

"The President and the Press"

Guests: Salinger, Pierre.

12 September 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 2
Program details: A masterly performance from Mr. Salinger, who reacts smoothly, very smoothly, to Mr. Buckley's attempts to get him to admit that the press generally gave President Kennedy a free ride. PS: "The objective of a Presidential Press Conference is not, in my opinion, for reporters to have the opportunity to embarrass and harass the President, but rather to elicit from him the information which is of value to the country." ... "I'm getting a new vision on my ability at the White House, and I must say that I'm indebted to you for it, because if I was as successful as you say I was, then, obviously, my services should be sought by others who have not quite come around to see me since the days of the '64 debacle [when he lost his Senate seat to George Murphy]."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.24
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RRG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5958
item Program Number 25

"Are Public Schools Necessary?"

Guests: Goodman, Paul, 1911-1972.

12 September 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 3
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins by saying of his guest, "Where he stands, ideologically, in conventional terms, it is hard to say. Probably no one would wish either to claim him altogether, or to disclaim him altogether." And we soon see why, in this exhilarating discussion of education, poverty, and American society. PG: "Now if we mean by literacy, knowing the art of reading and writing, where the objects of the art are imagination and truth, then, of course, to be literate is, you know, importantly to be fulfilling yourself as a human being; but if we mean by literacy, being processed so that you can understand the code in order to buy products, or obey orders, or the rest, then it's a question whether most people wouldn't be freer if they weren't quite so caught in this code."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.25
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707G2W
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5959
item Program Number 26

"The Playboy Philosophy"

Guests: Hefner, Hugh M. (Hugh Marston), 1926-

12 September 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 4
Program details: Between these two antagonists one might have expected a heated debate, but what we get instead is a serious discussion of sexual ethics in the latter part of the 20th century. HH: "The philosophy really I think is an anti-Puritanism, a response really to the puritan part of our culture...." WFB: "I'm not worrying about whether you reject Cotton Mather's accretions on the Mosaic Law, but whether you reject the Mosaic Law. Do you reject, for instance, monogamy? Do you reject the notion of sexual continence before marriage? ..." HH: "Well, I think what it really comes down to is an attempt to establish a ... new morality, and I really think that's what the American ... sexual revolution's really all about. It's an attempt to replace the old legalism. It's certainly not a rejection of monogamy as such, but very much an attempt- In the case of premarital sex, there really hasn't been any moral code in the past except simply that thou shalt not. And-" WFB: "Well, that's a code, isn't it?" HH: "Well, perhaps. I don't think it's a very realistic one."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.26
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U44
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5960
item Program Number 27

"Do Liberals Make Good Republicans?"

Guests: Chafee, John H., 1922-

15 September 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 5
Program details: A sparkling exchange with a very successful liberal Republican, who, unlike some other liberal Republicans, backed his party's presidential candidate in 1964. Messrs. Buckley and Chafee address policy issues (taxation, federal subsidies) and also intra-party relations. WFB: "Suppose you were to run for President, and somebody started calling you a fascist. Presumably, you are no more a fascist than Senator Goldwater is, but are we up against here something which suggests the special difficulty of the Republican Party ... because of the excesses which the opposition feels free to use? ..." JC: "I agree with you that the Republicans just cannot spend their time chopping up Republicans, and I think this so-called eleventh commandment that they adopted out there in California, which was that a Republican shall not say an evil word about another Republican, is something we've just got to have...." WFB: "Well, what about an evil Republican? What do you say about him?" JC: "I find that rather a contradiction in terms. I haven't yet found an evil Republican."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.27
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5961
item Program Number 28

"Should Labor Power Be Reduced?"

Guests: Riesel, Victor.

19 September 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 6
Program details: Mr. Riesel, as Mr. Buckley recounts in his introduction, "considers himself... a militant unionist"; despite, or because of, this, he is relentless in his exposure of union corruption, which is what led one of the corrupted, in 1956, to throw acid in his face, blinding him but by no means putting him out of action. An illuminating discussion of the history and present of trade unionism in this country. VR: "Bill, the whole business of using the word 'metaphysical' with George Meany has so discombobulated me, I'm going to have to recollect all my thoughts. But no, seriously, the fact is that when you're talking about new laws, I mean the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act ..., you're going back 85 years to an era when ... the robber baron had the power ... Sure, you have a parallel now, there's enormous industrial power in the trade-union movement, but we have laws, and I say, enforce those laws."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.28
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U4E
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5962
item Program Number 29

"Communist China and the United Nations"

Guests: Lerner, Max, 1902-

19 September 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 7
Program details: Should Red China be admitted to the United Nations, at the expense of expelling Nationalist China? Mr. Lerner has come to believe it should: "It would help a good deal if we can show them [the up-and-coming generation in the Third World] that we're not fighting men. We're not a fighting nation. We do not depend upon the exclusion of Communist China from the UN in order to really show what we stand for and what we're about." To Mr. Buckley, the problem is less the admission than the expulsion: "I'm simply saying that as a pragmatic fact I don't think anybody thinks that we are 'afraid' to bring Red China in except to the extent that we are afraid of doing something wrong....And also that we are afraid of, for instance, the fate of fifteen million overseas Chinese, that we are afraid of the fate of twelve million Chinese in Taiwan, and we're afraid of the collapse of morale in the free sectors of Asia."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.29
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5963
item Program Number 30

"National Priorities and Disarmament"

Guests: Melman, Seymour.

3 October 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 8
Program details: Mr. Melman was a prominent opponent of our part in the arms race--it was he who coined the term "overkill." His opposition is based partly on an opposition to the arms race per se, partly on the assertion that "embedded in the activity that is paid for out of these defense funds is about two-thirds, or perhaps even a bit more, of the prime skilled talent of the country, research engineers and scientists of the nation." WFB takes issue with his numbers, and we're off and running.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.30
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5964
item Program Number 31

"LBJ and Evans and Novak"

Guests: Evans, Rowland, 1921-

3 October 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 9
Program details: We eventually get to LBJ, but first Mr. Buckley leads his guest into a lively though cautious discussion of how a journalist's own politics affect his writing and, specifically, whether Evans and Novak give equal treatment to liberals and conservatives. WFB: "It may sound like rather a personal question, but I think it's objectively interesting. You wrote in your column a few months ago that you had heard Nixon say that the, quotes, Buckleyites were more dangerous to the Republican Party than the Birchites...." RE: "I think that what Nixon meant was that the Buckleyites are very persuasive, they're very able, they have an outlet in the National Review and other publications, they are extremely intelligent ... whereas ... the Birchers are rather ..." WFB: "Does all that make it anti-Republican? To be intelligent and persuasive?" RN: "... I think he probably felt you should ask Mr. Nixon this ... that the Buckleyites are to the right of the mainstream of the Republican Party and because they do have this forensic and persuasive ability ... that they represent a greater threat. But I beg you to ask Mr. Nixon that question...."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.31
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5965
item Program Number 32

"Civilian Review Board: Yes or No?"

Guests: Kheel, Theodore Woodrow.

7 October 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 10
Program details: The hottest of many hot issues in New York City in the first year of the Lindsay administration--and in a period when the major cities of America were erupting with race riots--was whether there should be a civilian-dominated review board overseeing the police. Mayor Lindsay had made establishing such a board an important part of his mayoral campaign and had instituted it in July; Mr. Kheel ably defends it as affording protection (especially for minorities) against police brutality without hampering their legitimate law-enforcement capability. Mr. Buckley, who had made opposition to the board an important part of his campaign against Mr. Lindsay, quotes J. Edgar Hoover as saying of Rochester, N.Y., a city with a civilian review board, that "the police were so careful to avoid accusations of improper conduct that they were virtually paralyzed." Note: A month after this show, New York City's voters rejected the board 2 to 1.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.32
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E53T26
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5966
item Program Number 33

"Criminals and the Supreme Court"

Guests: Neier, Aryeh, 1937-

7 November 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 11
Program details: Was the Supreme Court "coddling criminals," as the common accusation had it? Or was it properly securing rights frequently trampled on by jaded police, even if this meant that some criminals went free? An illuminating discussion in which useful distinctions are made, e.g., between search-and-seizure cases, where the only people helped by the exclusionary rule are those found with incriminating evidence, and right-to-counsel cases, in some of which--Mr. Neier asserts, referring to recent incidents in New York City--"district attorneys, of all people, had to move for dismissal of indictments ...after murder confessions were secured, after between 10 and 26 hours of police questioning. In none of those cases is it clear that police used actual physical coercion. In each of those cases it is clear that police engaged in standard forms of questioning designed to, on the one hand, terrify the person; on the other hand, to make him think he's confessing to a buddy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.33
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5967
item Program Number 34

"Open Housing"

Guests: Morsell, John A.

7 November 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 71 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 12
Program details: A civil and illuminating exchange on a potentially explosive question, raised by a proposed Federal Open Housing Law that would ban racial discrimination in the sale of housing. JM: "The ways in which people learn are also very, very diverse. I happen to believe very implicitly that the force of law is in itself an educative force, and that if it is illegal for your man who wants to be with Irishmen to exercise that preference at the expense of someone else's right to live in a decent home, then the second right, it seems to me, prevails; and in the course of time, as behavior conforms to law, people's attitudes and views will also tend to change."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.34
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5968
item Program Number 35

"The Failure of Organized Religion"

Guests: Weiss, Paul, 1901-

14 November 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 13
Program details: When Mr. Buckley meets his old philosophy teacher on Firing Line, it's thrust and parry from the start: WFB: "Tonight, Professor Weiss seeks to inform God that it was a mistake to organize religion. Organized religion, he will argue, has failed." PW: "I don't remember when God organized religion. Is there any time when God organized religion?" WFB: "Well, the situation was like this: There was God and there was Peter, you see-" PW: "I thought they were distinct." WFB: "They were." PW: "Oh, good! Now-then what?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.35
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RS0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5969
item Program Number 36

"What to Do with the American Teenager?"

Guests: Kaufman, Murray.

14 November 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 14
Program details: A culture clash of the first order between a host who believes in the accumulated wisdom of the ages and a guest ("the Fifth Beatle, as he has been called by one of the original four") who believes that people under 25 are more honest and more perceptive than their elders-with the exception of Mr. Kaufman, whose new book was called: Murray the K Tells It like It Is, Baby. MK: "The commentary [in today's lyrics] is not on the life of the teenager. It is on Vietnam, it is on the double facades of the so-called establishment ... and I will admit that there are times that you have to dig kind of deep, beyond the maze or, as maybe you would say, the cacophony of sound ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.36
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5970
item Program Number 37

"Elections 1966 and 1968"

Guests: Novak, Robert D.

21 November 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 15
Program details: We recently heard from Mr. Novak's partner in column--and book--writing, Rowland Evans (Firing Line 031); this time it is Mr. Novak's turn to talk about the political scene--and to give an unintended cautionary lesson to would-be prognosticators. WFB: "I'd like to begin by asking Mr. Novak whether he thinks it likely that Mr. Nixon will be nominated in 1968." RN: "I think it's very unlikely. I think ... [the Republicans] think now, with good reason, they have a chance of beating Mr. Johnson in 1968. So this is not a throwaway election, this is a serious election. They want a winner, and Mr. Nixon is a loser. So I think they'll look primarily to George Romney."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.37
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5971
item Program Number 38

"Sports, Persecution, and Christians"

Guests: Lunn, Arnold Henry Moore, Sir, 1888-1974.

28 November 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 16
Program details: Sir Arnold was campaigning to persuade the Western world to stop engaging in sports contests (principally the Olympic Games) with Communist countries. This deep and rich conversation engages Christians' failure of nerve, as Sir Arnold sees it, in confronting what we would come to know as the Evil Empire. WFB: "Sir Arnold, the saying is that sports and politics don't mix. Do you agree?" AL: "Well, it depends what you mean by politics. The old classical Olympic Games were restricted, in the words of Herodotus, to those of common temples and sacrifices and like ways of life. The barbarians were excluded. The classical Greeks didn't regard that as a political difference, but the difference between civilized people and barbarians. When I broke off relations with the Nazis in skiing, I didn't consider the difference between myself and Hitler was a political difference. It was a difference between a civilized man and an assassin."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.38
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RSA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5972
item Program Number 39

"The Warren Report: Fact or Fiction?"

Guests: Lane, Mark.

1 December 1966

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 17
Program details: While many people had been skeptical of the Warren Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy, Mr. Lane's book was the first to lay out the argument seriously. He defends himself ably in this spirited exchange. ML: "I take really the same position Alfreda Scoby, one of the lawyers for the Warren Commission, takes, and that is, had Oswald lived, he could not have been proven guilty, had he faced trial, based upon the evidence the Commission was able to secure." WFB: "And of course Warren says that he was a practicing district attorney for ten or twelve years and he could have gotten a conviction in 48 hours with the evidence. You simply disagree with him professionally." ML: "That's nonsense. It would take longer than that to pick a jury, of course." WFB: "Do you think Warren should be impeached?" ML: "I don't think he should be impeached. I think the report should be impeached."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.39
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RSK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5973
item Program Number 40

"Rhodesia, the UN, and Southern Africa"

Guests: O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 1917-

12 January 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 18
Program details: The gloves are off in this debate on the role of the West in general and America in particular in post-colonial Africa. Specifically, how should we react to the Rhodesian government's Unilateral Declaration of Independence? CCO: "Would you please allow me to proceed without interruption as I allowed you? ... The [United Nations] Security Council has decided certain actions which you know of. Are you in favor of your country carrying out its obligations?" WFB: "Absolutely not, under those circumstances where the United Nations is clearly acting illegally and against the best interests of the United States." Note: The transcript lists the title of this episode as: "Discussion with Conor Cruse O'Brien."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.40
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5974
item Program Number 41

"LBJ and the Intellectuals"

Guests: Morgenthau, Hans Joachim, 1904-

12 January 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 19
Program details: A rich discussion of our political culture, starting with the Johnson Administration's confused objectives in Vietnam (HM: "Does it want self-determination for South Vietnam at the risk of a Communist takeover, or does it want to stop Communism at any price, even at the price of self-determination?") and ranging far and wide. WFB: "Well, then, how do you account for the enthusiasm of the intellectuals for Mr. Kennedy, when in fact it could be demonstrated that his own rhetoric and actions were at least as schizophrenic as President Johnson's?" HM: "It's a very good question. I addressed myself to that question in '61.... The intellectuals ... had been in the wilderness for eight years and all of a sudden, here comes Mr. Kennedy, Harvard-educated, surrounded by members of the Harvard faculty-there were a few from Yale, in order to satisfy you, but very few, so you were not very much satisfied. And of course many intellectuals, not myself included, thought this was the golden Augustan age for intellectuals."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.41
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U4Y
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5975
item Program Number 42

"Academic Freedom and Berkeley"

Guests: Taylor, Harold, 1914-

16 January 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 20
Program details: We eventually get to Berkeley-where the Free Speech Movement and associated radicalisms had completely broken down academic discipline--but before that, we have a never-the-twain-shall-meet discussion of which views might and which might not, under the tenets of academic freedom, disqualify a scholar from being hired by a university. WFB: "You, despising racism as much as I do, are prepared to assert that no one who is a racist actually would get into a college of which you were president, but that in fact people can be well-qualified Communists." HT: "... there is a sharp distinction to be made between a philosophy of racism, affirming the notion that there is one race superior to another, ... and a political philosophy which one identifies as Communism. I think you have to talk about those in different categories."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.42
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U58
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5976
item Program Number 43

"Presidential Politics"

Guests: White, F. Clifton.

16 January 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 21
Program details: WFB and a fellow conservative Republican focus on the Democratic scene, where already--nearly two years before the presidential election-it was clear that LBJ was in serious trouble. WFB: "But then aren't you really saying this: that Lyndon Johnson could force his own renomination? But mightn't Bobby Kennedy make it almost psychologically impossible for him to do so?" FCW: "Yes, he could conceivably do that, and of course ... from a Republican point of view this would be delightful and highly desirable, because I think under those circumstances it would make it almost assured that the Republican nominee would win the general election." WFB: "Why do you say that? If Lyndon Johnson stepped down in favor of Kennedy, ... why wouldn't Kennedy go on to win the election?" FCW: "Do you really think that Lyndon Johnson would step down charitably, for a Bobby Kennedy?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.43
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5977
item Program Number 44

"The Role of the Advocate"

Guests: Bailey, F. Lee (Francis Lee), 1933-

19 January 1967

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 22
Program details: An often surprising exploration of criminal jurisprudence with a guest who, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "if any of you should commit a murder ... is your man." WFB: "Do you believe that the right to refuse to testify is a right that is integral to the whole process of the presumption of innocence?" FB: "Yes, it's as integral as it is illogical." WFB: "... And why is it illogical?" FLB: "The most efficient way to try a man is to put him on the stand first and ask him what he knows about the case; then if more evidence is needed, put that on, too. The defendant always knows, except in very rare cases of clear insanity, whether or not he is guilty or at least whether or not he committed the acts charged. His degree of guilt may be fixed with some inference or some judgment by the jury, but he would be the easiest source of information, and in some countries he's called first." WFB: "Well, do you understand yourself to be an advocate of the cause of defendants?" FLB: "Just an advocate. I could try a case from either side of the fence."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.44
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RSU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5978
item Program Number 45

"The Future of the UN"

Guests: Plimpton, Francis T. P. (Francis Taylor Pearsons), 1900-1983.

19 January 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 23
Program details: The United Nations had been energetically debating the right of Rhodesia to declare independence unilaterally and the right of South Africa to continue to exercise its League of Nations mandate over South West Africa. But was anybody listening? A serious discussion with a man whose public career began with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932. FP: "In the case of South West Africa you have that very unfortunate decision of the International Court of Justice, which after six years of deliberation, decided that it didn't have jurisdiction over the South West Africa case." WFB: "Rather, the plaintiff didn't have standing." FP: That's right. They once held four or five years ago that there were very fine distinctions here. One has to dance on the point of a pin to get them entirely."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.45
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RT4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5979
item Program Number 46

"Do the States Have a Chance?"

Guests: Unruh, Jesse, 1922-1987.

6 March 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 24
Program details: Do the states have a chance, that is, to carve out some freedom of action vis-a-vis the Federal Government? "Big Daddy" Jesse Unruh was, since Ronald Reagan's defeat of Governor Pat Brown, the leading Democrat in California. Unfortunately, Mr. Buckley is unable to coax him down from a high level of generality. One sample, re states' rights: "Well, I think that's what's been happening in a great respect and I think that too much Federal Government is attuned to your Eastern establishment and the problems of the Southern states and the reluctance of the Southern states so that many times those of us who feel we have earned the right to handle our own problems are simply ignored in an overall position that is designed to fit the desires of the Eastern establishment or the problems of the Southern states."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.46
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5980
item Program Number 47

"LBJ and Vietnam"

Guests: Hartke, Vance. : Williams, C. Dickerman

6 March 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 25
Program details: As WFB introduces him, "Senator Hartke is perhaps best known, at this point in his career, as one of the leaders in the growing army of former friends and admirers of Lyndon Johnson." This crackling exchange focuses on the main source of his and the others' disaffection, Vietnam. VH: "I don't know whether you can say that or not [about the previous November's elections in Vietnam].... If you have some special information source that I do not have available to me-" WFB: "You have the U.S. Government." VH: "The government's been wrong on so many things it's hard to tell. The colossal blunder that they made in the cost of this war, for example, when they tried to ridicule my statement in front of the Finance Committee ... Well, they come back to this in January and they admit that this is true." Note: The transcript lists the title for this episode as: "Vietnam."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.47
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U5I
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5981
item Program Number 48

"Politics and the President"

Guests: Wicker, Tom.

7 March 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 72 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 26
Program details: A colorful discussion of that already old topic, bias in the media, in this case starting with the question, "Would the New York Times ever refer to an 'ultra-liberal Republican'?" TW: " 'Ultra-liberal Republican'? I doubt it, since there are very few such animals, but I don't know if there's any particular ban against this in the New York Times. We have some bans on certain words but that's not one of them so far as I know." WFB: "Yeah. But aren't those bans most interesting which are sort of self-enforcing and inexplicit? ... It's easy for the New York Times to refer to ultra-conservative Republicans, but for some reason you'd have to get a sort of special dispensation, the typewriters would reject it, if you referred to an ultra-liberal Republican." TW: "Well, I think so. Typewriters have a high regard for the facts." WFB: "OK. Now you're saying that there's no such thing as an ultra-liberal Republican." TW: "Well, only if you consider them in the Republican spectrum."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.48
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9Q4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5982
item Program Number 49

"Black Power"

Guests: Hentoff, Nat.

7 March 1967

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 27
Program details: Mr. Hentoff had, Mr. Buckley tells us, written that "We must have black power to overcome white power." What exactly is meant by black power? Does it matter whether the person talking about it is the Harlem teacher who is the subject of Mr. Hentoff's book, or Elijah Muhammad? And why are the New York Times and the New York Post so chary of it? NH: "I suppose they think of the doctrine as a racist doctrine and the corollary concern seems to be that thereby the Negroes will alienate their good white friends and make things much more difficult for the coalition--that luminous coalition of labor, the Church, and civil-rights groups and the like which is apparently about to end the final verse of 'We Shall Overcome'." In fact, suggests Mr. Hentoff, what black power is properly about is the power of blacks to have some say in the running of their own neighborhoods and their own children's schools.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.49
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSIG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5983
item Program Number 50

"Is There a Role for a Third Party?"

Guests: Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1914-1988.

8 March 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 160 : 28
Program details: Despite his own defeat, Mr. Roosevelt answers the title question with an emphatic "Yes. I think that the role of the third party has been, especially the Liberal Party- It has been often said in jest that its role in New York politics has been to keep the Democratic Party honest and the Republican Party more liberal. Now, I suppose you could turn that to say that the Conservative Party, on whose line you ran for Mayor a year and a half ago-their role, I suppose, would be to make the Republican Party more the party of McKinley, or Adam Smith, and-" WFB: "Are you against Adam Smith?" FDR: "I think that he's a bit out of date."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.50
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RTE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5984
item Program Number 51

"U.S. Policy in Southeast Asia"

Guests: Fritchey, Clayton.

8 March 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 1
Program details: Mr. Fritchey was a devoted Democrat who had become more and more dubious about President Johnson as our involvement in Vietnam had escalated. He demonstrates here that there is nothing reflexive about his dubiety, as the conversation ranges across wars cold and hot. WFB: "For instance, Paul Henri Spaak, who was so much admired by Adlai Stevenson, ... said, 'I think there is a real parallel between the United States policy in 1949 and the situation in Asia now. It seems to me the same policy.' He went on to say that the United States believes that they have to defend people against Communism when they refuse to adopt Communism.... Then he says, 'I see no contradiction between what the United States did in Europe in 1949 and what they did in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.' But you do." CF: "Well, if I could be sure from day to day what the government's principal justification for being in South Vietnam was, I would be in a better position to discuss it. But, as you know, it changes from day to day."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.51
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5985
item Program Number 52

"Do We Have Anything Left to Fear from Socialism?"

Guests: Hook, Sidney, 1902-1989.

9 March 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 2
Program details: Mr. Hook answers the title question, as he answers every question, forthrightly: "Well, that depends upon what you mean by socialism. In one sense there was a great deal to fear from dogmatic socialism.... But on the whole, if one doesn't take a dogmatic position, I would say there never was anything to fear from socialism.... The... real issue that separates the Communist countries from the free Western democratic countries is not socialism or capitalism as economic systems, but the freedom to choose between them or among other economic forms of life. As a democratic socialist, I have been opposed to Communism because I believe in freedom." A rousing discussion of how best that freedom can actually be fostered.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.52
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5986
item Program Number 53

"The World of LSD"

Guests: Leary, Timothy Francis, 1920-

10 April 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 3
Program details: We all remember Dr. Leary as a proselytizer for LSD; we've mostly forgotten that he had started out as a doctor of clinical psychology and that he had made LSD the basis of a "new religion." On this show, he makes his opening statement before he ever says a word, by appearing not in a business suit but in a flower child get-up-ruffled shirt, no jacket or tie. He argues that WFB is confusing psychedelic drugs, which Dr. Leary says "intensify consciousness," with opiates and alcohol, "something that is an escape, something that takes you away from reality." WFB: "Let's go ahead and agree that LSD seems to be in some particulars different from other opiates or drugs or chemicals, at the same time agreeing that LSD is a departure from the normal world-" TL: "But what do you mean by 'normal world'? You mean Harry Truman! Is that normal?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.53
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RTO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5987
item Program Number 54

"Censorship and the Production Code"

Guests: Preminger, Otto.

10 April 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 4
Program details: A discussion of artistic freedom and censorship with a leading producer, one of whose films (The Moon Is Blue) had run into trouble with the Motion Picture Production Code. A spirited discussion with a man who, despite the modern-Americanness of his films (including Anatomy of a Murder and The Man with the Golden Arm), retains, however unpresciently, an Old World sense of the order of things: "I have said that an immoral film could not be successful. I think there is morality built into any dramatic medium, whether it's a play or a television show. You cannot mention one successful play or film where the bad principle won."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.54
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U5S
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5988
item Program Number 55

"The Regular in Politics"

Guests: De Sapio, Carmine.

1 May 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 5
Program details: Mr. De Sapio was the "Tammany Hall boss" defeated in 1963 by a young "reform Democrat" named Edward Koch. WFB attempts in this hour to explore how party leaders actually wield their power, but Mr. De Sapio is wary and can't be drawn. WFB: "Suppose I had been a district leader and said, 'Mr. De Sapio, I love you like a brother, but, in fact, I want Adlai Stevenson nominated [as opposed to JFK].' What happens to me? Do I get thrown in the East River?" CDS: "You are applauded for your candor." WFB: "You are not suggesting that you wouldn't put-pressure on me? Unless you were in a position to put pressure on me, Mr. Kennedy wouldn't be so concerned to get your support-isn't that the way it works?" CDS: "Not necessarily." WFB: "I'm not necessarily against pressure, I just want to know more about the mechanics-" CDS: "I don't think that's the proper word; I think that a better word would be an understanding."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.55
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U62
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5989
item Program Number 56

"How to Protest"

Guests: Macdonald, Dwight.

1 May 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 6
Program details: Mr. Macdonald had recently been an organizer of the "Step Out Movement"-i.e., to step out of a hall where Vice President Humphrey would be speaking, in protest against the Vietnam War. This show offers a fast-paced duel between two longtime adversaries. WFB: "Well, Mr. Macdonald, why don't we try to isolate those forms of protest that you disagree with? You would disagree with, let's say, shooting the President?" DM: "Yes." WFB: "Would you disagree with forming the equivalent of an Abraham Lincoln Brigade to go to North Vietnam to fight on the side of the Vietcong?" DM: "Yes, I would." WFB: "Would you disapprove of discounting from your income tax that sum of money we have roughly spent on defense?" DM: "I approve of that. I haven't done it, however, because it occurred to me that the net result would be that they would get the money anyway plus a certain amount of penalties, which in effect would amount to more." Note: The title on the transcript is: "Dwight Macdonald."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.56
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E55X8O
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5990
item Program Number 57

"The Liberals and LBJ"

Guests: Roche, John Pearson, 1923-

15 May 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 7
Program details: Mr. Roche had incurred the wrath of many of his former associates by going to work for Lyndon Johnson. As WFB puts it, "One of [his colleagues in ADA] has said that President Johnson picked Mr. Roche as his intellectual-in-residence simply because he was the only ADA-er around who approved of Vietnam, and that if Mr. Johnson had found one other ... he'd have made him Secretary of State." A delicious hour with a guest who comes out swinging and never stops: "As far as the inner life of ADA, it's something which it must be very difficult for someone from a conservative background to understand because they're used to monolithicism and the leader blows the whistle, everybody lines up? ADA is an organization that is made up of strong-minded people who have been for twenty years engaged in all kinds of internecine and intestine brawls."... "A while ago a fellow named Chomsky wanted to organize an International Brigade to go fight in Vietnam. I'll be glad to help. My feeling about it was I'll go over to the State Department and help get his passport cleared for North Vietnam, if necessary, and even contribute to his passage."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.57
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5991
item Program Number 58

"The Poverty Problem"

Guests: Clark, Joseph S.

15 May 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 8
Program details: Senator Clark was one of the generals in President Johnson's War on Poverty. This serious discussion of what causes poverty and which remedies are least likely to be counterproductive starts with a smooth thrust and parry. WFB: "Do you believe that poverty is something that especially happens in a free-enterprise system?" JC: "... Of course I don't think that we could do better with poverty under a socialist system. The free-enterprise system is much the best way to deal with poverty. Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed that out when he really initiated the war on poverty back in 1937. You remember he said he found one-third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, and ill fed.... We hope that it is now only one-fifth of a nation. We hope, Bill, that by the time you and I have gone to our ultimate reward, it will be one-tenth of a nation ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.58
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5992
item Program Number 59

"Is Ramparts Magazine Un-American?"

Guests: Scheer, Robert.

26 June 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 9
Program details: Ramparts was one of the leading organs of the New Left, primarily known at this time for its attacks on the CIA and on American foreign policy generally. Messrs. Buckley and Scheer wrangle amusingly, though not always productively. WFB: "[Why don't you just say], "Sure, Bertrand Russell's anti-American, but he has a damn good right to be anti-American because during the 1960s we became a highly unlovely country and anybody who was pro-American at that point has an addled wit, to say nothing of an unserviceable moral sense?" Now why don't you say, "Yes, I too am anti-American?" RS: "Because you still haven't defined the term. And the reason I used the term is not because it is a term of my choosing but rather because Russell's critics accused him of being systematically anti-American."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.59
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5993
item Program Number 60

"Vietnam Protests"

Guests: Spock, Benjamin, 1903-

26 June 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 10
Program details: Dr. Spock, Mr. Buckley begins by recounting, "has said that the threat to our children from nuclear annihilation" is "a thousand times greater than all the dangers from the usual children's diseases." So, "I'd like to begin by asking Dr. Spock whether he carries in his head a comparison of the number of people who have died during this century from disease in contrast to those who have died, not from war, but from persecution, for instance the 6 million Jewish dead in Nazi Germany." (The answer is, No, he doesn't.) There is sometimes more heat than light generated here, but whether one views Dr. Spock as specimen or hero, the exchanges are fascinating. BS: "I don't know Bettina Aptheker but I have met Stokely Carmichael on a number of occasions, and I got the feeling he is a very sincere and America-loving person, even though he says things that distress some people from time to time." WFB: "He'd be incensed if you called him an America-lover. I mean that quite seriously. For the last two years he's been going around the country begging people to believe that he hates America, and here you are accusing me of taking him seriously."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.60
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U6C
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5994
item Program Number 61

"The Mideast Crisis"

Guests: Lilienthal, Alfred M.

29 June 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 11
Program details: Mr. Lilienthal, himself Jewish, had antagonized many Jews by arguing forcefully that the existence of Israel posed a threat to world peace. This hour offers a serious discussion of the history of the state of Israel, its present behavior towards its neighbors and towards the Arabs within its borders, and America's role in all of this. AL: "I feel that the whole problem today is not so much Israel's existence in the Middle East, but the kind of a state which Israel is and has become since its foundation.... Israel was set up... [as] a haven to the oppressed, as a small refugee state. In fact, Israel is a Zionist state, an expanding state, and were Israel only to promulgate the nationalism of the Israelis, rather than a worldwide Jewish nationalism ... we would not have the problems we have today."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.61
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5995
item Program Number 62

"The Decline of Anti-Communism [1967]"

Guests: Schwarz, Fred, 1913-

29 June 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 73 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 12
Program details: WFB introduces his guest as a "full-time anti-Communist who has never made it easy for his critics. He is infuriatingly sober and ... he has shown an understanding of the humorous dimension of it all." This show offers a rich discussion between two deep students of the subject, starting with Dr. Schwarz's brilliant account of Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956. FS: "What it revealed about Khrushchev and his allegiance to Communist doctrine is possibly more significant than what it revealed about Stalin.... Now, how did [Khrushchev] discuss their [Stalin's victims'] guilt or innocence? He didn't mention one of them by name ... He got right to basic Communist fundamentals: he said, I investigated their class of social origin, and 60 per cent were working class ... therefore it is inconceivable that there could have been 70 per cent treasonable.... And in that one statement, Khrushchev revealed that he was a fundamental Marxist-Leninist in exactly the same mold as Stalin ..."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.62
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U6M
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5996
item Program Number 63

"Is It Possible to Be a Good Governor? [1967]"

Guests: Reagan, Ronald.

6 July 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 13
Program details: This first appearance of Ronald Reagan on Firing Line took place six months after he had been sworn in as governor. "There is much speculation," WFB begins, "on the subject of his future, speculation which I intend to avoid, because the purpose of this program is to ask whether it is possible to be a good governor. By that I mean this: Are we now so dependent on the Federal Government that the individual state is left without the scope to make its own crucial decisions?" A meaty discussion ranging from the way the states in turn squeeze the local communities, to comparative welfare payments in different states, to a favorite subject of WFB's: as Mr. Reagan puts it, "I know I'm accused of oversimplifying, but it doesn't make sense to me for the Federal Government to ... insist that the only solution to our local problems is for them to take the money and then dispense it back to you in grants in which they tell you how to spend it from Washington, D.C. And of course, like an agent for a Hollywood actor, there's a certain carrying charge that's deducted in Washington before you get it back again."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.63
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RUS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5997
item Program Number 64

"Is the World Funny?"

Guests: Marx, Groucho, 1891-1977.

7 July 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 14
Program details: The exchanges are frustrating at times, Mr. Marx being so relentlessly, well,Groucho. But it's fun and sometimes illuminating to see this mythic figure on someone else's turf. (The answer to the title question, by the way is: "No, it's damned sad.") GM: "I have said the things that no one else has dared to say." WFB: "Why? Why?" GM: "Because the audience loves it." WFB: "All right." GM: "If you have a general, like I had General Bradley on the quiz show--nice man, very nice man; might even conceivably be a good general--well, I kidded him all through the show and the audience loves that because they don't get a chance to do that to mayors or politicians or bank presidents..." WFB: "But it's very healthy, isn't it?" GM: "Yes, it is. There's not enough of it."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.64
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9QE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5998
item Program Number 65

"Vietnam"

Guests: Vaughn, Robert, 1932-

8 July 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 15
Program details: Mr. Vaughn--who in his best-known TV role, Napoleon Solo on The Man from UNCLE, hunted bad guys on behalf of the United Nations--was on record as saying that "the war in Vietnam cannot be rationalized by moral man." His reasons go back to the Geneva accord of 1954 and the ways in which the United States abetted Ngo Dinh Diem in avoiding elections in 1956. RV: "I don't believe that we can stop the spread of Communism by sacrificing the principles of democracy." An often heated discussion that helps us focus on the whole background to the late-Sixties divisions.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.65
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707OJW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/5999
item Program Number 66

"The Ghetto"

Guests: Clark, Kenneth Bancroft, 1914-

28 August 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 16
Program details: Kenneth Clark's work had been cited by Earl Warren in a decision outlawing segregated schools, but on the basis of something Mr. Clark had recently said, WFB wonders whether integration is no longer his main priority. KC: "I think that what has become increasingly clear to me is the limitation of the American people in terms of concern for human beings. I think there is now clear evidence that the vast majority of Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of children who are brown on the altar of race. I think that it is clear that de facto segregated schools in the North are as damaging and detrimental to the human spirit and human potential as the segregated schools which we fought so valiantly against in the South." A sometimes-depressing show, but one that gives real insight into how our country's efforts at integration look from the ghetto.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.66
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6000
item Program Number 67

"Municipal Government"

Guests: Yorty, Sam, 1909-

28 August 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 17
Program details: It was two years since the Watts riots, and Mayor Yorty was regularly attacked by his fellow Democrats for the way he handled that situation. But, as Mr. Buckley says, "he is well equipped to fight back." WFB: "Do you consider yourself actively, or negligibly, responsible for the Watts crisis?" SY: "... I wouldn't want to consider myself responsible for the explosion, and neither will I consider myself responsible for the two summers during which Los Angeles has not had an explosion while other cities have had it." The discussion ranges productively from the vagaries of our judicial system, to the possible effects of television in stirring up racial animosities, to the details of how the LAPD handled Watts.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.67
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6001
item Program Number 68

"A Foreign Policy for the GOP"

Guests: Percy, Charles H., 1919-

11 September 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 18
Program details: Senator Percy is a bit given to the stump-speech mode ("I truly believe that we will fight Communism just as effectively, if not more so, [by not] fighting it just in Havana and in Hanoi. We have to fight Communism in Watts; we have to fight it in Newark, and we have to fight it in Harlem; and we have to fight it by building a better America there, and not giving any chance for a Communist society to point to the hypocrisy of America and say that the American dream is only available to some people"), but we do come down to earth periodically, with concrete observations about, e.g., Yugoslavia, Poland,and Red China.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.68
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9QO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6002
item Program Number 69

"The Future of the GOP"

Guests: Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994.

14 September 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 19
Program details: Mr. Nixon, attempting to come back after losing the presidential election in 1960 and the California gubernatorial election in 1962, casts his remarks so as to hold onto conservatives who had voted for Goldwater without losing the many Americans who had not voted for Goldwater. The result is mostly bland, but there is considerable historical interest in encountering the pre-presidential Nixon: "Naturally I'm a prejudiced witness... But I believe that as this campaign in 1968 unfolds, that the nation will see that the new Republican Party is one which advocates change, but advocates change in a different way from the irresponsibles. And I mean by that, that in changing those things that are wrong in America, we must not destroy the things that are right. That to me is the essence of true conservatism."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.69
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U6W
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6003
item Program Number 70

"Vietnam and the GOP"

Guests: Morton, Thruston B. (Thruston Ballard), 1907-1982.

25 September 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 20
Program details: Senator Morton had been known, WFB reminds us, as "a middle-of-the-roader with perhaps a little granitic anti-Communism." Then suddenly he had come out for various measures, including increasing trade with the Soviet Union and disengaging from Vietnam, that had dismayed many Republicans, not least because they wondered if this was a harbinger of the 1968 Republican platform. One may sometimes feel during this hour that Senator Morton is hedging his bets, but the conversation does bring out some of the ways in which the scene changed during the mid Sixties. TM: "When Mr. Eisenhower left office there were six hundred men in uniform. He thought, as I thought then, that if we helped these people to offset aggression--if we helped them to resist--they would do the job themselves. Now we've Americanized the war, and in my book it's an entirely different premise. They're not fighting for themselves."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.70
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6004
item Program Number 71

"Medicare"

Guests: Cohen, Wilbur J. (Wilbur Joseph), 1913-1987.

25 September 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 21
Program details: Mr. Cohen's public career had begun, as WFB reminds us, in the Roosevelt Administration, where he was research head of the Committee on Economic Security, which drafted the original Social Security Act. In this return engagement in Washington, he was largely responsible for the recently enacted Medicare. Mr. Cohen speaks compellingly of the needs of our country, although in ways that lead his host to ask, "Have you arrived in your mind at a point beyond which you wouldn't, for instance, want a tax--on the grounds that you were interfering with the free function of human beings?" WJC: "I think there is such a point. I don't know exactly where it is." WFB: "Maybe you could think of it on this program and make headlines." WJC: "Yes. It really would, wouldn't it?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.71
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9QY
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6005
item Program Number 72

"Is There a New God?"

Guests: Robinson, John A. T. (John Arthur Thomas), 1919-1983.

6 October 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 22
Program details: Many of Bishop Robinson's fellow Anglicans would subscribe to WFB's assertion that "if this were an age in which it was fashionable to go after heresy, I would be addressing tonight the former Bishop of Woolwich," although it would be hard to either substantiate or refute that assertion on the basis of this exchange, in which His Grace is relentlessly bland and benevolent. JATR: "Christians like myself ... feel in their bones that so much of this traditional language is not wrong if it makes God real for people, well and good, but for a good many it makes him remote and unreal. It's not basically any new scientific discovery but simply catching up on the fact that the traditional set of answers is rather like the set of answers that you got in medieval Christianity, which no longer corresponded to questions people were really asking."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.72
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6006
item Program Number 73

"The English Conservatives"

Guests: Worsthorne, Peregrine.

6 October 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 23
Program details: A bracing discussion of British politics in particular and politics in general--e.g., the degree to which a candidate, once elected, can or cannot carry out the platform on which he campaigned. PW: "And I think where I would disagree with Mr. Buckley, primarily, is that he is a great doctrinaire, a great dogmatist--passionately believes in certain things, passionately disbelieves in certain things, and thinks it's very important to send out anathemas against certain kinds of politicians and be very enthusiastic in favor of others. I don't see it like that; ... the essence of my kind of conservatism really is that it is rather pragmatic and judges by results.... It's rather an 18th-century attitude; yours is essentially a modern one."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.73
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6007
item Program Number 74

"The Union in Modern Society"

Guests: Jenkins, Clive.

7 October 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 24
Program details: Mr. Jenkins's white-collar union, 50,000 strong, had lined up with Britain's militant Left, frequently finding Harold Wilson's Labour government too soft on capitalism. To Mr. Buckley's opening question--"In a class-conscious society are there grounds for thinking of the monopoly labor unions as a class enemy?"--he replies: "But of course there's no such thing as a monopoly labor union. This is one of the favorite tricks of the anti-working-class publicists. After all, the true monopolies are those who manufacture exclusively or market exclusively. And labor unions are perhaps an ineffective but certainly the best kind of weapon the worker's got against the kind of monopolies Mr. Buckley adores," and we're off to the races.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.74
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6008
item Program Number 75

"Is Socialism the Answer?"

Guests: Foot, Michael, 1913-

7 October 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 74 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 161 : 25
Program details: Mr. Foot was known as a leader of the leftward most wing of his generally left-wing party. Even so, the degree of his commitment to socialism, as brought out by his host's questioning, is breathtaking. WFB: "... Do I understand that you would pass laws that would forbid him [a hypothetical retired candy-store owner] from taking his savings out of the country?" MF: "I'm in favor of the right of people to move to other countries and take what belongings they've got, and I would like to see a world in which people could move freely across all these frontiers, and indeed I would like to see the frontiers abolished. But I do not believe that you can do that until you have established a full-employment society over many years in different parts of the world." WFB: "In other words, you wouldn't permit it." MF: "No, I wouldn't permit it at the present time."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.75
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6009
item Program Number 76

"War Crimes"

Guests: Schoenman, Ralph.

13 November 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 1
Program details: We get the flavor of this show from Mr. Schoenman's reply the fourth time Mr. Buckley asks his opening question (to which our guest had yet to give an answer, even a dismissive one). WFB asks: "When last did you notice a war crime committed by a Communist nation?" RS replies: "Now, the reasons for the tribunal and the reason for the bringing together of the members of the tribunal were the enormous, overwhelming prima-facie case documented largely in the Western media concerning the crimes of the United States in Vietnam. I don't think that it is sufficiently understood that the sole object of this war is that of devastation of a small people, occupation of their land, and the rape of their resources."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.76
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6010
item Program Number 77

"The Struggle for Democracy in Brazil"

Guests: Lacerda, Carlos.

13 November 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 2
Program details: Mr. Lacerda had been known for decades as a vigorous opponent of most of Brazil's political class. Today's discussion focuses on the difficulties of establishing democracy in a region traditionally ruled by an oligopoly and on the limitations of democracy per se: CL: "In Latin America you cannot speak of freedom in an abstract sense. Freedom is connected with lots of things such as food, such as education. And such as real freedom for all-not only for those who are in power. In other words, we are a little tired of just the juridical aspects of democracy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.77
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6011
item Program Number 78

"Do We Need Public Schools?"

Guests: Van den Haag, Ernest.

11 December 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 3
Program details: As Mr. Buckley rephrases the title question, "I'd like to begin by asking you whether the abolition of the public schools is in effect something of a laboratory discussion or whether you think it likely to emerge as a genuine public issue." The latter, replies Professor van den Haag; "However, Bill, I wouldn't call it abolition." Instead, what he is advocating--and he was one of the first to do so--is vouchers, permitting parents to exercise a choice of schools. This would eventually become a staple of national discussion, but Professor van den Haag was admirably prescient, as well as informative on the question of what was wrong with the public schools."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.78
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6012
item Program Number 79

"Mobilizing the Poor"

Guests: Alinsky, Saul David, 1909-1972.

11 December 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 4
Program details: The common aim of all Mr. Alinsky's organizations is to mobilize the poor--mobilize them by whatever mean comes to hand (marches, sit-ins)--to demand decent housing conditions or whatever the local need may be. This one is a knock-down, drag-out from start to finish. SA: "I refuse to debate with him [David Riesman], which only came up recently ... I made the remark that any time I see any of his stuff, it sort of makes me feel like a grizzled, battle-scarred dog going down the street while way back, say, six blocks back or so, this little whining Pekingese comes out sniffing, yipping, and licking and growling at my leavings. And I'm not going to waste my time turning around."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.79
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQHO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6013
item Program Number 80

"Is There a Need for Intelligence?"

Guests: Dulles, Allen Welsh, 1893-1969.

14 December 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 5
Program details: Why is the CIA so widely derogated? Is it merely an expression of Vietnam-era anti-Americanism, or does it have to do with a (possibly naive) perception of dishonesty? Mr. Dulles was a legendary figure: his activity on the world stage had begun when, as a very young man, he attended the Versailles Conference; he had organized the CIA, on the foundation of the wartime OSS, and had given it its shape as its first director. However, this show suffers from the degree to which, although four years retired from active duty, Mr. Dulles was imbued with the ethos of secrecy. WFB: "What is it that gave the CIA its bad name? Is it the fact that you have to lie?" AD: "No, I don't think- Let me say as to that, how do you mean 'lie'? ..." WFB: "Well, for instance, the President of the United States lied about the U-2 plane, and he was thought to have done so at the suggestion of the CIA ..." AD: "Well, that was a decision made at a very high level, by the President himself. And I don't think the mere fact you don't admit everything, that doesn't mean you're lying all the time." Note: Title on transcript is "Is There a Need for Central Intelligence."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.80
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6014
item Program Number 81

"Was Goldwater a Mistake?"

Guests: Hatfield, Mark O., 1922-

14 December 1967

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 6
Program details: Senator Hatfield, from the liberal side of the Republican Party, positions himself perfectly in his opening answer: "Goldwater wasn't a mistake in a parliamentary sense, because the Republican Party deliberately nominated [him] in open convention," after primaries and state conventions made it clear he was grass-roots Republicans' choice. However, "I don't think Senator Goldwater as a person was rejected so much as was Senator Goldwater's basic approach to problems. He tended to evoke fear." Much is discussed--from the leadership qualities a President needs, to the different factions within the Republican Party--but Senator Hatfield, who attributes much of Goldwater's fear-evoking to his "off-the-cuff types of responses," never says anything that could disqualify him as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1968.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.81
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VGGY40
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6015
item Program Number 82

"The John Birch Society"

Guests: Draskovich, Slobodan M., 1910-

8 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 7
Program details: As Mr. Buckley recounts, Slobodan Draskovich--who had spent four years in a Nazi concentration camp during the War and, two decades before that, had seen a band of Communist assassins kill his father--had in 1958 become a charter member of the John Birch Society. Then in 1966 he publicly resigned from the Society, on the grounds of dissatisfaction with Robert Welch's leadership. This proves to be (as one might expect from Mr. Draskovich's background) a rich discussion of how a person judges whether a flawed organization is still doing more good than harm. SD: "I thought, and I was free to take that view, that beyond the National Review there was need for an organization which would reach not only the intellectuals [and] fight the Communists -- on a philosophical level and a literary level -- but would reach many more people."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.82
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6016
item Program Number 83

"The Economic Crisis"

Guests: Friedman, Milton, 1912-

8 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 :7
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 8
Program details: Perhaps the economy had not yet truly reached the point of crisis, but it was beginning to feel the strain of President Johnson's attempts to keep the guns and butter coming at ever faster rates. This splendid economics lesson from one of the country's leading teachers begins with a little historical biography (MF: "Keynes, himself, was very much of a scientist. I think he was wrong on various things, but he certainly had a scientific approach. And indeed, I've always regarded it as a great tragedy that Keynes died when he did. Because one of his great capacities was flexibility"), and then goes onto the importance of monetary policy, how we might better handle taxation and welfare, and much else.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.83
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQL0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6017
item Program Number 84

"Was the Civil-Rights Crusade a Mistake?"

Guests: Cambridge, Godfrey, 1929-1976.

15 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 9
Program details: Mr. Cambridge was sometimes accused of being too unwilling to put himself forward as a civil-rights leader ("I have a phrase where I say, 'A Negro leader is anybody with $5 and a suit.' It's true, white people will listen to anybody; they'll stop a guy in the street: 'What do you feel?' 'Whitney Young, you're on today, say something nice.'' No, you didn't say it. OK, we'll go to Martin tomorrow?' "). But it's clear from this conversation--sometimes rambling, but always full of interesting detail--that while Mr. Cambridge admits that the civil-rights movement has made mistakes, he cannot agree that it was a mistake.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.84
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQN8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6018
item Program Number 85

"Student Power"

Guests: Theobald, Robert.

15 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 10
Program details: Campus disruptions, some of them violent, had been going on for a full three years and were about to escalate. Students were demanding not only an end to the Vietnam War but also significant roles in deciding what should be in the college curriculum and who should teach it. Host and guest sometimes talk at cross-purposes, but mostly this is a productive exploration of what might usefully be changed and what are the limits of change. RT: "I approve of student power in certain definitions. I very deeply disapprove of some of the definitions of student power ... I think that some of the statements of student power have essentially said, 'We have the right not only to live our own lives, but to take over everybody else's life as well.' And this seems to me to be a very dangerous thing."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.85
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6019
item Program Number 86

"The Ghost of the Army-McCarthy Hearings: Part I"

Guests: St. Clair, James. : Cohn, Roy M. : Cherne, Leo, 1912- : De Antonio, Emile.

19 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 11
Program details: We begin each half of this two-part Firing Line by viewing a clip from Mr. de Antonio's film, which was an edited version of the Army-McCarthy hearings: first the passage known as The Cropped Photograph (which had been cropped, Joseph Welch argued, to make it appear that Army Secretary Stevens was talking alone with Roy Cohn's friend David Schine, when in fact other people were present), and then the passage that includes Mr. Welch's coup de grace, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Not surprisingly, the participants frequently reach the shouting stage, and they frequently rehash what they or their friends had said 14 years earlier; but for anyone who did not see the hearings at the time, or who has forgotten the details, this show gives us another chance to make up our own minds. RC: "The fact is, Joe Welch, whom I admired very much, at that point was not somebody rising to protect Mr. Fisher. He was a good, professional lawyer coming in for the kill...." JSC: "I couldn't disagree with you more, Roy. He was a good trial lawyer, and this was a serious tactical mistake on Senator McCarthy's part ... [but] there was a deal made between you and Mr. Welch ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.86
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6020
item Program Number 87

"The Ghost of the Army-McCarthy Hearings: Part II"

Guests: Cohn, Roy M. : St. Clair, James. : Cherne, Leo, 1912- : De Antonio, Emile.

19 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 12
Program details: We begin each half of this two-part Firing Line by viewing a clip from Mr. de Antonio's film, which was an edited version of the Army-McCarthy hearings: first the passage known as The Cropped Photograph (which had been cropped, Joseph Welch argued, to make it appear that Army Secretary Stevens was talking alone with Roy Cohn's friend David Schine, when in fact other people were present), and then the passage that includes Mr. Welch's coup de grace, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Not surprisingly, the participants frequently reach the shouting stage, and they frequently rehash what they or their friends had said 14 years earlier; but for anyone who did not see the hearings at the time, or who has forgotten the details, this show gives us another chance to make up our own minds. RC: "The fact is, Joe Welch, whom I admired very much, at that point was not somebody rising to protect Mr. Fisher. He was a good, professional lawyer coming in for the kill...." JSC: "I couldn't disagree with you more, Roy. He was a good trial lawyer, and this was a serious tactical mistake on Senator McCarthy's part ... [but] there was a deal made between you and Mr. Welch ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.87
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6021
item Program Number 88

"The Wallace Crusade"

Guests: Wallace, George C. (George Corley), 1919-1998.

24 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 13
Program details: WFB had sharply criticized Mr. Wallace in print, both for his once-adamant attachment to segregation and for his New Deal statism, and Mr. Wallace came on Firing Line determined not to give an inch. GW: "Name one thing in Alabama that I have supported on the governmental level that you are against." WFB: "You want the state to take care of hospitalization, you want the state to take care of old people, you want the state to take care of the poor." GW: "Are you against caring for the poor and the old? ... I might say that no conservative in this country who comes out against looking after destitute elderly people ought to be elected to anything." WFB: "You call yourself a populist, right?" GW: "If you mean by a populist a man of the people, yes, I'm a populist. Let's get back to the old-age pension. Let's see, you're against Alabama's looking after the elderly destitute citizens of the state?" (The following month, Mr. Wallace would declare his third-party candidacy for President.)
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.88
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSJ0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6022
item Program Number 89

"Wiretapping--Electronic Bugging"

Guests: Long, Edward V., 1908-

24 January 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 14
Program details: Senator Long, as WFB introduces him, "is regarded as the principal custodian of individual privacy in Washington.... Hardly a week goes by that Senator Long doesn't rise from his seat to demonstrate the latest use of American ingenuity against American privacy." But he proves not to be totalist in his objections, and from the discussion emerges a clear picture of the points at issue. As Mr. Buckley phrases it, "As a practical matter, I would like to know how much more certain it is that you and I can finish our lives peacefully, rather than at the business end of a mugging ... assuming that certain characteristically inclined criminals are bugged." Senator Long makes the point that many police chiefs "don't use it; they say that it's a dirty business"; his answer: only for"national security," and then "only under court order."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.89
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQO2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6023
item Program Number 90

"Philby and Treason"

Guests: West, Rebecca, Dame, 1892-

26 February 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 15
Program details: Dame Rebecca, who had recently published The New Meaning of Treason, was invited on Firing Line to discuss Kim Philby and his spectacular defection to the Soviet Union. For connoisseurs of a certain sort of British intellectual, this show is hard to beat. RW: "... you see, it is historically interesting that he wasn't really of a very important family. He was of a very charming family. But he wasn't of a very important family." WFB: "If he had been important, he wouldn't have been discovered yet, do you mean?" RW: "No. What I mean is that Philby had all the slight thrill that his father gave people. You see, his father was pro-Arab. And the British Establishment, the British upper class, has always been pro-Arab-I think because the British upper class has always been very fond of horses-" WFB: "No, come on." RW: "-and it all works together. Yes, that's quite true.... A great many of the English upper-class people approved of Philby because he was on the right side with those Bedouin chaps."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.90
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RV2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6024
item Program Number 91

"The Culture of the Left"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

26 February 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 16
Program details: "He calls himself," says WFB in his introduction to the first of Mr. Muggeridge's several appearances on Firing Line, "a man of the Left... His apostasies from the Left are, however, so numerous as to leave him a member of the Left in the same sense that, say, Bishop Pike is a member of the Episcopal Church." But let Mr. Muggeridge speak for himself: "Well, Bill, I think you must distinguish between being a member of the Left and being a liberal. I regard liberalism as the great disease of our society, and when I said that people like Mrs. Roosevelt, admirable though they were in intentions, would be seen to have done more damage than people like Hitler and Stalin, I meant precisely that. Hitler and Stalin got a lot of people killed and precipitated the great war, but they are now discredited. But liberalism, which has been the dominant philosophy in the most influential and powerful nations of the West, continues to thrive despite the fact that every time it's been applied, the consequences have been disastrous."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.91
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U7G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6025
item Program Number 92

"The Anti-Communist Left"

Guests: Lasky, Melvin J.

27 February 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 17
Program details: The gaff had been blown on Encounter magazine: this splendid journal, which, as WFB puts it, "served for a vital period as the principal link between English and American intellectuals," had been funded by the CIA. "There was a near universal dismay, and editors and writers fled from Encounter as from an earthquake or a flood. Mr. Lasky stayed on." In this illuminating discussion, Mr. Lasky defends his journal ("anybody who has looked through any one single issue and thinks that anybody pulled any strings ... has three more guesses coming") and argues that "what was terribly important," in the ashes of World War II, and with the Soviet Union just over there on the other side of that Iron Curtain, "was that liberals, democrats, and socialists ... were to come to grips with the experience of what had happened to socialism in their time."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.92
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6026
item Program Number 93

"English Youth and Vietnam"

Guests: Martin, Ian. : Sears, Hilary. : Johnson, Gerry. : Mathews, Bob.

27 February 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 18
Program details: Our four guests-all left of center, all thoughtful and well spoken-give us a good perspective, by way of comparison, on our own student activism. One sample, from Mr. Martin: "When I look at the Vietnam War, for instance, I tend to think of it probably more in political terms than some of the Americans ... They tend to think of it very much in moral terms, I think, and if I had moral judgments I would make them. But the decisions I would come to on the Vietnam War would be far more objective, I think, than an American would make. I think it comes back to the fact that an American young lad of 18, 19, is going to have to fight there. I'm not."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.93
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6027
item Program Number 94

"Robert F. Kennedy"

Guests: Carter, Hodding, 1907-1972.

15 April 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 19
Program details: This discussion of Senator Kennedy and his prospects comes to us without the blurring of hindsight that would settle in two months later. Mr. Buckley reminds us of how Bobby was viewed in those days, even by many liberals: a ruthless tactician, a cynical exploiter of his dead brother, a master of political expediency. Mr. Carter (who had come to prominence in the Thirties and Forties attacking the likes of Governor Huey Long and Senator Theodore Bilbo) defends Senator Kennedy ably-but without softening the edges of this picture. One sample: WFB: "Under the circumstances, the burden is on you to find some cosmic consistency in [someone who] has taken every position there is to take on Vietnam, on Lyndon Johnson, on Joe McCarthy, on liberalism, on Chiang Kai-shek. For all I know, on you." HC: "I'm afraid to get cosmic, but I think he has been consistent in his reaction against labor racketeering, his reaction against the Mafia. They've gone underground, Hoffa went to jail, and Ross Barnett went back to private life. And I think in every case it has been in great part because of his unswerving determination to-uh-to do these people in."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.94
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6028
item Program Number 95

"The Wallace Movement"

Guests: Perez, Leander, 1891-1969.

15 April 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 20
Program details: We met George Wallace himself a few weeks ago (Firing Line 088); now that he has officially declared his candidacy, we meet one of his leading supporters. Listening to Judge Perez, born in Louisiana in 1891 and a specimen of one strain of the Old South, helps us, if we can stand it, to understand what men like Hodding Carter had been fighting against. LP: "First I would like to make a comment on Mr. Buckley's introduction, because there are a couple of notable errors. In the first place, I am not a racist. I might mention I am against the Federal Government using its coercive power to force racial integration upon an unwilling free people... " WFB: "Well, ... have you been widely misquoted? For instance, you're quoted as having said, 'Yes, the Negro is inherently immoral-yes, I think it's the brain capacity.' Is that a misquotation?" LP: "It's not a misquotation. It's the truth." WFB: "Uh-huh" LP: "Because I know Negroes. We have a number of Negroes in our community, and I know that basically and mentally they are immoral."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.95
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6029
item Program Number 96

"The New Left"

Guests: Dellinger, David T., 1915-

25 April 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 21
Program details: Some of us have forgotten that Mr. Dellinger was not "one of the Kids": he was old enough to have been jailed for refusing to register for the draft in World War II. At the time of this show he was best known as the organizer of the big march on the Pentagon; in a few months' time he would become one of the Chicago 8 (later known as the Chicago 7, after Bobby Seale was separated from the other defendants), prosecuted for their disruption of the Democratic National Convention. Today, guest and host come out swinging and stop only at the final bell: DD: "But anyway, I think it's very important in terms of the New Left to realize that there are no 'foremost peaceniks.' Now, ... for one reason or another, the press focuses more on me than on some other people. But the strength, the heart, the guts of the movement comes not from leaders but from people who are fed up with ... American society in many of its manifestations ..." WFB: "Well, doesn't everybody say that? You know: It wasn't really I-it was all the people who provided all the work and inspiration. That's sort of an after-dinner affectation, isn't it?" DD: "No, it's not an affectation. You know, that's one of the problems-that we can't sort of take people seriously in their sincerity."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.96
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6030
item Program Number 97

"The Middle East [1968]"

Guests: Utley, Freda, 1898-

25 April 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 75 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 22
Program details: In this crackling discussion, Miss Utley takes a position vis-a-vis the Middle East not unlike that of many British and American foreign-service professionals-but with a special twist born of her study of Communism. WFB: "She feels the United States is committing a great error by its apparent hostility to the Arab world. I should like to begin by asking Miss Utley whether she believes that that hostility, if that is the word for it, is primarily a reaction to the Communist support of the Arabs." FU: "No, I put it the other way around. The Arabs only turned to Moscow when they could not get any help or any fulfillment of their national aspirations from the West. The analogy I'm always making [is to] ... the Far East.... In 1923, after the First World War, when the West would not give up its imperialist privileges in China, Sun Yat-sen turned to Moscow for aid. This collaboration between the Nationalists in China and Moscow didn't last long ... but this was the beginning of the roots of Communism in China."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.97
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6031
item Program Number 98

"Can We Win in Vietnam?"

Guests: Kahn, Herman, 1922-

7 May 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 23
Program details: The short answer to the title question is: "Yes, if we don't lose the war here at home. Mr. Kahn, a veteran student of military affairs, points out in this informative discussion that the Tet Offensive seriously demoralized our own leaders even though we wound up winning that engagement-because they had not believed that North Vietnam could, at that stage, mobilize an attack of that magnitude. As for the press, it is reflecting the culture it lives in. HK: We don't live in an heroic culture, so you can't report heroism... We don't live in a religious culture, so you can't report it as an anti-Communist crusade-that looks indecent. So you have to report it at the human level-the tired Marine, the child-mother, and so on ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.98
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6032
item Program Number 99

"The Avant Garde"

Guests: Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-

7 May 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 24
Program details: Some installments of Firing Line would not lose much if the video faded out, but this one is an exception: Mr. Ginsberg's hair (as WFB puts it, "he will wear his hair long until everybody else does; then he will cut it"), his glittering eyes, and the little harmonium with which he accompanies his chant of Ommm are half the story. But, agree with him or not, the words are worth hearing too, as an encapsulation of this time: "One of the problems is, critically speaking, no one can understand the problem of police brutality in America, or the police-state we are going through as I see it, without understanding the language of the police. The language that the police use on hippies or Negroes is such that I can't pronounce it to the middle-class audience. So the middle-class audience doesn't have the data or some portion of the data to judge the situation between the Negroes and the police."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.99
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RVC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6033
item Program Number 100

"Governing the Cities"

Guests: Stokes, Carl.

24 May 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 162 : 25
Program details: Mr. Stokes was the first black mayor of a major American city, and he had inherited an explosive situation-due partly, as he tells us here, to the patterns of migration from the rural South to the large Northern cities; partly to the general discontent in America in the Sixties. CS: "So much of the reason I got the kind of vote I got from the Negro community-close to 96 per cent-... was because of a great investment of hope in me ... Now, however, the great burden upon me is to produce ... If I don't produce and start showing where you can touch the foundation of a new house going up or a new business within the black community that's going to produce jobs right there, then the reaction toward me, at the minimum, would be the same as toward anybody else, any other mayor whatever his color, and maybe-" WFB: "Even worse." CS: "Even worse, because, of course, of the level of hope to which I had raised the community."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.100
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6034
item Program Number 101

"The Republicans and the Cities"

Guests: Taft, Seth Chase, 1922-

24 May 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 1
Program details: This leisurely and productive discussion with a nephew of Robert A. Taft starts with the question: "Is there a 'Republican' as distinct from a 'Democratic' approach to the problem of the cities?" Mr. Taft is inclined to think there is, and that it has to do with "the individual doing things for himself: "After you're sure they care, then you can start talking about what help do you have to give them to make it worth while for them to care; what kind of elements of discrimination do you have to get rid of; what kind of historical inadequate education, so that a guy doesn't know how to use a hammer or a paintbrush to fix up his own property ... You'd be amazed at what happens if you talk somebody into growing some grass in front of where they live, or slapping some paint on a porch in front of their house-this makes a tremendous difference."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.101
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6035
item Program Number 102

"Armies of the Night"

Guests: Mailer, Norman.

28 May 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 2
Program details: This surprisingly genial conversation starts with the subject of Norman Mailer-a-s most conversations with Norman Mailer do--and goes on from there. WFB: "Oh, sure, I'm very anxious to discuss [Mr. Mailer's latest book, Armies of the Night]... [which] I think everyone should read, because I think it's an extremely interesting and enjoyable book, if that's the right word for it." NM: "Well, I wish someone on the right wing would write a book that would be as good, because it would be a great help to us on the Left. I wanted to help the right wing understand-" WFB: "You wouldn't notice it if it were written." NM: "No, I would notice it. You know I'm a lover of literature." WFB: "Yes." NM: "I think Evelyn Waugh is a marvelous writer.... Unfortunately, he's not an American." WFB: "Yeah. Unfortunately, he's dead." NM: "That too."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.102
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSJK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6036
item Program Number 103

"Journals of News and Opinion"

Guests: Fuerbringer, Otto.

28 May 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 3
Program details: Shop talk at a high level between the man who had run the week-to-week operations of Time for two decades and the man who founded and has the final say at National Review. Time does not, as we're reminded on this show, maintain the fiction that most of our daily newspapers do-the fiction of reporting the news "straight" and commenting only in editorials or "news analyses." As for National Review, it used to bill itself on every cover as "a journal of fact and opinion." WFB: "At some point, the brass at Time magazine will decide, will it not, whether it desires the election of Nixon or let's say Humphrey ... How will that communicate itself to the readers-or am I being terribly naive?" OF: "Oh, I would say you're fairly naive, yeah. I think there's never been any doubt as to whom Time was for in any election."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.103
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6037
item Program Number 104

"Unrest on the Campus"

Guests: Boles, Allan. : Rapoport, Roger. : Kramer, Joel.

20 June 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 4
Program details: "Unrest" was becoming a euphemism for vandalism, hostage-taking, and outright rebellion-Columbia being, as WFB puts it, "the goriest recent example-I thought it charitable not to invite the editor of the Columbia Spectator to discuss the question." Our student guests place the problem squarely on the shoulders of the college administrations-and, while we're at it, the Judaeo-Christian tradition. RR: "You can start right down the line starting with Columbia and Grayson Kirk, whose idea of running a university is to start out by putting a $450,000 Rembrandt on your office wall to let everybody in Harlem know that you're there."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.104
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6038
item Program Number 105

"Violence"

Guests: Wertham, Fredric, 1895-1981.

20 June 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 5
Program details: Martin Luther King had been killed in April, Bobby Kennedy the first week in June. Dr. Wertham, a practicing psychiatrist, was a longtime clinical student of violence, and in this rich discussion he helps us cut through the rhetorical excesses. FW: "After the killing of Dr. King and after the killing of Robert Kennedy many, many people ... gave their opinions, and I would like to tell you first that everybody seems to know where violence comes from-they know where the riots come from, where the wars come from, where murder comes from. I'm the only one who doesn't know, so I'm considered an expert-at least I know one should find it out. But this particular notion that everybody's responsible, that everybody's guilty, I consider not only wrong but very pernicious. Because if everybody is responsible, nobody is responsible. If everybody is guilty, nobody's guilty. And this is just one of the great evasions."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.105
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6039
item Program Number 106

"The Rib Uncaged: Women and the Church"

Guests: Ruether, Rosemary Radford. : Daly, Mary, 1928- : Callahan, Sidney Cornelia.

24 June 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 6
Program details: This show proves to be less of a bare-knuckle battle and more of a conversation than one might have expected, ranging back and forth from the historical development of Christianity--especially Catholic Christianity--to the effect of women's changing roles in the secular world. One sample: RR: "I am more interested in this, sort of, threatening the Church with women; it's mostly a way of breaking up the clerical bag, because I don't think you can put that into it without the bag breaking." MD: "Luckily the clerical bag is falling apart. Both forces are working at the same time." WFB: "When you refer to 'the clerical bag' do you mean the series of perquisites that they uniquely enjoy?" MD: "Yeah. I think the whole concept of ministry, a special state of life ... I think that we will have much more community ministry, part of each other." SC: "That whole rectory culture. You know, Christian gentlemen-there's a whole thing that goes with it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.106
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6040
item Program Number 107

"Obscenity and the Supreme Court"

Guests: Rembar, Charles. : Kuh, Richard H.

24 June 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 7
Program details: Our guests have both spent more time with pornography than either might have liked. As WFB introduces them, "Mr. Rembar is uniquely situated to write about those trials [listed in the subtitle to his book], since he was in all cases counsel for the defense and the author of the triumphant legal strategy." Mr. Kuh, meanwhile, "observed the anti-obscenity laws being shot down one after the other and elaborated a theory on how to write statutes that would control the traffic of smut in such a way as to get them by the Supreme Court." Mr. Rembar proves not to be a First Amendment absolutist (although he maintains that, "so far as books are concerned-the printed word-the government ought to stay out of things"), and he is willing to entertain Mr. Kuh's arguments, e.g., regarding books with highly explicit pictures, and regarding sales to children. At one point, indeed, Mr. Buckley is moved to say, "We're making progress here (we're not used to that)."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.107
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6041
item Program Number 108

"Has the Republican Party Anything to Offer?"

Guests: Ford, Gerald R., 1913-

8 July 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 8
Program details: Gerald Ford had been in the unenviable position of becoming the House Republicans' leader following the 1964 debacle, in which his troops were reduced to a minority of 140, as against 295 Democrats. Then again, as Mr. Buckley suggests, "there was nowhere to go but up, and the GOP had rebounded nicely in 1966. Mr. Ford--as the nation would learn more extensively a few years later on--is not the liveliest speaker, but he does a good job of explaining what he and his colleagues mean by constructive alternatives" to the Democrats' initiatives, and there are some good exchanges-e.g., on the minimum wage, and on Hubert Humphrey. WFB: "And [Humphrey] may have an interesting future." GF: "Well, not as interesting as he would like, but it is going to be interesting."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.108
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6042
item Program Number 109

"The Washington Press"

Guests: Means, Marianne. : Kraslow, David. : Broder, David S.

8 July 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 9
Program details: "The idea," WFB begins, "is to discuss the Washington press and see if we can throw more light on it than it sometimes seems to throw on Washington." Not much of what he and his guests go on to say is a scoop (reporters tend to be liberal; the press helps bring candidates to prominence), but they say it so well. DB: "The last four years, it seems to me, the Republicans have received more sympathetic treatment in the Washington press than their performance deserves." WFB: "Is it because of the growing probity of the press or the contribution of Lyndon Johnson?" DB: "Probably more of the latter than the former. Also, I think there is always an interest in the out party and what it's doing. They stir up the fights, and we are in the business of ... being fight promoters."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.109
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6043
item Program Number 110

"Liberalism and the Intellectuals"

Guests: Mannes, Marya.

10 July 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 10
Program details: Another go at the often-asked question, "Why do intellectuals tend to be liberal? Miss Mannes's answer may not be especially startling, but she and her host strike sparks off each other in delightful ways. And, in retrospect, an exchange like the following illuminates what would be different about the Reagan Presidency. MM: "You know, there's been awfully little fun in conservative and Republican politics, terribly little fun." WFB: "You don't think Herbert Hoover was fun, huh?" MM: "Not riotously, no....I think that the gaiety, the fun, the vitality, the feeling of adventure has resided far more, certainly in the last decades, in the Democratic end of things than in the Republican."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.110
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6044
item Program Number 111

"The Socialist Workers' Party and American Politics"

Guests: Halstead, Fred. : Boutelle, Paul.

10 July 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 11
Program details: WFB starts off by reminding us that "the Socialist Workers are the principal political heirs of Leon Trotsky in this country," and one might expect a certain amount of acrimony to follow. In fact, while the ideological edge is always there, many of the exchanges are great fun. FH: "I don't know that it's the obligation of any militant to be rude. I wish the capitalists would be gentlemanly toward us." WFB: "Yeah." FH: "Occasionally, they throw us in jail, and things like that." WFB: "Well, considering that you want to sort of, you know, do away with capitalists-" FH: "... Not with the individual human beings-with the system. I suspect that even you would find a place in the socialist system." WFB: "Well, sure. I'm a very good typist, and I'm sure you'd have a lot of forms." FH: "Maybe lectures, on the past...."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.111
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6045
item Program Number 112

"Capital Punishment"

Guests: Capote, Truman, 1924-

3 September 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 12
Program details: Some of Mr. Capote's suggestions seem more interesting than practical (never let a psychopathic killer out of prison, but never let him know you're not going to let him out), but in the course of researching his book he acquired a deep knowledge of the homicidal mind and the implications for deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation. "I'd known this boy was a psychopathic murderer, and I had known that if he went back into the prison population that it was inevitable that he would kill somebody again. So, I mean, there he is loose in the prison population still, and, of course, cannot be returned to death row and cannot be executed, having got a commutation. So what is the answer to this problem, where you have compulsive homicidal minds who are incapable of controlling this violence of theirs?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.112
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQRE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6046
item Program Number 113

"The Hippies"

Guests: Yablonsky, Lewis. : Sanders, Ed. : Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.

3 September 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 13
Program details: Hold onto your hat for this free-for-all among four men who aren't simply coming from different directions--they're in different universes. ES: "The problem with terms like 'hippie' is that they have a definition forced on them by the media . . . And you know, you can't rely on the name 'hippie' to include a human being, you know, everything about a particular human being. You know? . . ." LY: "I kinda disagree with that. I spent last year traveling around the country, various communes and various- Haight-Ashbury, Lower East Side, various city scenes, and there was an identifiable . . . people trying, searching for some loving solutions to society's ills, trying to tune in to the cosmos, whatever that means." ... WFB: "To what extent do you believe the Beat Generation is related to the hippies ... ?" JK: "I'm 46 years old, these kids are 18, but it's the same movement, which is apparently some kind of Dionysian movement, in late civilization, which I did not intend, any more than, I suppose, Dionysus did, or whatever, his name was. Although I'm not Dionysus to your Euripides, I should have been."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.113
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/product/B001MBTSK4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6047
item Program Number 114

"Money Troubles"

Guests: Barr, Joseph. : Burns, Arthur Edward, 1908-1986.

9 September 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 76 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 14
Program details: The federal deficits were becoming a matter of serious worry, and not only to Republicans. Although Mr. Barr is a member of the Johnson Administration and Mr. Burns is a lifelong Democrat, both agree--and give compelling supporting evidence--that we need either to cut expenditures or to raise taxes (although Mr. Barr also explains cogently why, with our system of congressional appropriations, a decision to reduce expenditures may not reduce next year's expenditures very much). One sample: JB: "You're not going to get me in a partisan whipsaw right at the start. It [the failure to raise taxes] was the fault of the American people.... Every leader in the society-business, finance, academic, you name it-every leader said we were right, but the American people didn't agree with them. Sixty per cent of the American people said, No, you're wrong, we're gonna be worse off if we pay more taxes."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.114
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6048
item Program Number 115

"The McCarthy Phenomenon"

Guests: Lowenstein, Allard K.

9 September 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 15
Program details: The Eugene McCarthy Phenomenon, that is. Mr. Lowenstein, a vigorous opponent of our involvement in Vietnam, had spearheaded the anti-LBJ campaign, persuading Senator McCarthy to enter the Democratic primaries (having gone first, as WFB recalls, "to Senator Robert Kennedy, but was turned down, then Senator McGovern, ditto"). This lively duel with a man who would become a favorite Firing Line guest starts with Mr. Lowenstein's reluctance to back the Humphrey-Muskie ticket. WFB: "No, but they won't withdraw your nomination from the Democratic Party, surely. That's yours, correct?" AL: "Well ... The problem is that the possibility of running an alternative Democrat to split the vote among Democrats exists and [may not be] accompanied by massive defections from the Republicans who appreciate my public-spiritedness ..."WFB: "You mean, do I understand you?, that there would still be time for somebody to run on a pro-Humphrey ticket?" AL: "Yes." WFB: "But your name, however, would appear, geographically, under Humphrey's, wouldn't it?" AL: "Uh, I think it's geographically right of Humphrey's, which is perhaps more sinister than it seems.""
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.115
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6049
item Program Number 116

"The Cold War"

Guests: Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1928-

23 September 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 16
Program details: A splendid discussion of the Cold War with a man whose views are informed by his Polish upbringing, his academic studies, and his experience at the Policy Planning Council of the State Department. One sample: WFB: "I should like to begin by asking Mr. Brzezinski whether he anticipated the Soviet Union's crushing of Czechoslovakia." ZB: "... Back in June, I thought they would invade ... I thought at that time that the Soviet Union could not afford to let Czechoslovakia go the way it was going. By August I was inclined to feel that ... the Soviet Union had developed certain internal incapacities for deliberate brutal action.... On the eve of the actual invasion ... I thought that rather there would be a change of leadership, rather than an invasion...." WFB: "Now, might a careful student of your writings infer that [the invasion] took you by surprise as a result of your own apparent recent addiction to a thesis of deideologization which in fact history isn't validating?" ZB: "A sloppy reader might infer that." WFB: "Well, would the careful reader of your writing be careful not to read certain of your books?" ZB: "No, but a sloppy reader might skip passages, and just find the ones that confirm his view."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.116
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6050
item Program Number 117

"Some Problems of the Freshman Senator"

Guests: Goodell, Charles E. (Charles Ellsworth), 1926-1987.

23 September 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 17
Program details: "When Governor Rockefeller appointed Charles Goodell to the vacancy left in the Senate on the death of Senator Robert Kennedy," WFB recalls, "observers struggled to situate him in the ideological spectrum. On the one hand his [American Conservative Union] rating was very high; on the other hand, his biography handout appears to qualify him for the presidency of the ADA." On this show, Senator Goodell adroitly sidesteps any attempt so to situate him. (Two years later, Mr. Buckley's brother James, running on the Conservative line, unseated Mr. Goodell.) WFB: "I should like to begin by asking Senator Goodell whether he feels any sense of ideological obligation either to his predecessor, Senator Kennedy, or to his benefactor, Governor Rockefeller." CG: "I think my sense of ideological identification is with the things I believe in very deeply....They call me Mr. Constructive Alternative in the Republican Party, because I did feel that it was not enough to say 'No' to programs that were offered that were deficient; that we should offer a better answer."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.117
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6051
item Program Number 118

"Korean War Defectors"

Guests: Wills, Morris R., 1933- : Tenneson, Richard. : Pasley, Virginia, 1905-

7 October 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 18
Program details: Messrs. Tenneson and Wills were, as WFB relates, "captured by the North Koreans 15 years ago, and after a long period in prisoner-of-war camps, elected to abandon the United States and go to live in China. Mr. Tenneson stayed for only a few years, Mr. Wills for a much longer time, returning only in 1965." Neither Mr. Tenneson nor Mr. Wills proves to be madly articulate, but perhaps for that very reason we get something of a sense of how the ordinary GI was likely to react. One factor in Mr. Tenneson's defection was Joe McCarthy ("That doesn't make [America] that much better a place to come back to than where you're at"); in Mr. Wills's case, it was "complete, total dissatisfaction with our own side, with the way they were running things ... In fact, I was caught during one marvelous confusing event, you see, one that lasted three days, and we didn't know where the front line was and where our rear was, or anything."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.118
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6052
item Program Number 119

"Politics and Show Biz"

Guests: Bean, Orson.

7 October 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 19
Program details: Another look, deliciously offbeat, at artists' tendency to go left. One sample from Mr. Bean: "The principle of love is one thing, and love is another. Anyone who is capable of loving has to be capable of hating. And most liberals would deny that they really hate anybody in principle, although they act very hateful. A liberal is someone who will fight to the death for your right to agree with him. He is always very intolerant compared to most conservatives I know, and that's always been the case even back in my liberal days." And on to the movies' current tendency toward anti-heroes, to whether Paul Newman deserves his salary, and to farmers and the meaning of life.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.119
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6053
item Program Number 120

"Why Do So Many Canadians Hate America?"

Guests: Zolf, Larry. : Lee, Dennis, 1939- : Purdy, Al, 1918-

21 October 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 20
Program details: Mr. Purdy, WFB begins by explaining, is "the editor of the best-seller The New Romans, in which forty Canadians, including the gentlemen present, discuss America's shortcomings in prose and in verse." As they proceed to do on this show, starting, of course, with Vietnam (one of Mr. Lee's poems goes: "For a man who fries the skin of kids with burning jelly is a criminal, even though he loves children, he is a criminal, even though his money pumps your oil, he is a criminal"), going on to Americans owning industrial plants in Canada, but also to something more fundamental. LZ: "I'm going to say something that perhaps might shock you, that if you take Mr. William Buckley with his conservative views and make him live in Canada, he would be an anti-American." WFB: "All right, why?" LZ: "... Because the whole point of the conservative tradition in Canada was that we were not to duplicate the republican experiment. We wanted to have a constitutional monarchy, we wanted to evolve slowly into responsible government."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.120
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6054
item Program Number 121

"Is South Africa Everybody's Business?"

Guests: Steyn, Stephanus. : Houser, George M.

4 November 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 21
Program details: Some wrangling, some genuine and illuminating debate among Mr. Steyn, who loves his country but sees a great need to bring all its people into real participation; Mr. Houser, who favors a policy of U.S. "disengagement" from South Africa unless petty apartheid is abolished and black workers are paid the same as white; and Mr. Buckley, who objects to the "tendentious hostilities" of people who "feel a considerable passion towards the policies of, let's say, South Africa, which [they] do not feel towards the policies of, oh, any of a number of ... countries in Africa, which are also racist, and which also are imperialistic, or towards the policies of, let's say, Israel ... or towards parts of Pakistan or India ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.121
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6055
item Program Number 122

"The Influence of TV on American Politics"

Guests: Cooke, Alistair, 1908- : MacNeil, Robert, 1931- : White, F. Clifton.

4 November 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 22
Program details: An entertaining and informative discussion among four old pros, at a time when television as a political medium was comparatively new. A highlight, especially in retrospect, is the discussion of Ronald Reagan. Mr. White had spearheaded the effort to get Governor Reagan the 1968 Republican nomination. Although it failed, it helped make Mr. Reagan a national figure. AC: "I saw that Reagan-Kennedy debate [on the Vietnam War] and changed dramatically my feelings about Mr. Reagan ... First, I think Bobby Kennedy was unprepared, unbriefed, but that's a sort of inside view. I think the average viewer looks at it and says, He's just all over the place, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Reagan is in complete command, and he's a natural man. Now, I think this came from his training as an actor, because you have to learn to be natural [on camera]."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.122
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6056
item Program Number 123

"Cracking the Cities' Problem"

Guests: Alioto, Joseph L.

13 November 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 23
Program details: A crackling exchange with a guest who, before he went into politics, had been one of the country's leading litigators. Although on the left side of the Democratic Party, Mayor Alioto is forthright in asserting the need for order (in the face, specifically, of student disruptions). He will not budge from his unconditional support for labor unions,but the level of discourse is not what one hears every day from politicians: JA: "... if you give people enough time to talk about their differences, enough time to know the facts, all of those things happen, I think ..." WFB: "Your faith is of Platonic interest tome, and I would say ..." JA: "This is a very realistic, Aristotelian type of faith that I'm talking about--not a faith in ideas, but a faith in the realities of things."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.123
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6057
item Program Number 124

"The Black Panthers"

Guests: Cleaver, Eldridge, 1935-

13 November 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 24
Program details: Ten years earlier, Mr. Cleaver had been convicted of assault with intent to rape. While out on parole, he had been involved in a shootout in which one Black Panther was killed and two policemen were wounded. This violated the terms of his parole, and he was about to be returned to jail. Just a few days after this show was filmed, he fled the United States for Havana and then Algiers. On the show itself, Mr. Cleaver is surprisingly low-key in manner, though relentless in his rhetorical style--e.g., about whether encouraging the assassination of Richard Nixon would be consistent with the Panther ideology: "Mr. Nixon is at this moment the pig waiting in the wings to take the place of the other pig that is on his way out. I would say that if Richard Nixon was assassinated it would only result in having another pig in line who possibly would need to be assassinated. I don't see any reason for having Richard Nixon alive today."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.124
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6058
item Program Number 125

"Jerusalem and the Middle East"

Guests: Kollek, Teddy, 1911-

18 November 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 163 : 25
Program details: "Mr. Teddy Kollek," WFB begins, "is the Mayor of Jerusalem, the city with the longest recorded history in the world ... and at this moment [following the Six-Day War] the principal point of contact between the Arab and the Israeli populations in perhaps the most combustible area in the world." This serious conversation begins with the United Nations proposal that Jerusalem be made an international city. TK: "Well, I don't think there is a country or a city in the world who would rely on the defense of the United Nations against aggressive power from the outside, nor shall we." WFB: "Well, now, suppose that you made the government of Jerusalem conditional on great-power guarantees of defense. Would that be sufficient?" TK: "I wouldn't sleep, if I would have to depend on that." WFB: "Well, I understand you don't sleep anyway. You work all the time." TK: "Well, I would be very nervous if I would have to rely on great powers. It is a small country, and before the great powers would come to our assistance, as has been proven in the past, you wouldn't exist any more."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.125
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6059
item Program Number 126

"The Republic of New Africa"

Guests: Henry, Milton.

18 November 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 1
Program details: "The Republic of New Africa" is not a new name for, say, South Africa: it refers instead to a proposal by a group of American blacks who "don't believe," as Mr. Henry puts it, "there's ever been any historical example of a successful bi-racial society," and who therefore want to carve out a legally separate nation-formed, probably, from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Agree with him or not, Mr. Henry is well spoken and well traveled (he draws illustrations from, e.g., Kenya, Tanzania, and Cuba, all of which he has visited): "We are a nation, a distinctly separate nation with a different set of humor, myths, way of looking at history, a totally different view of ourselves in this country from I would imagine a view which most white people have, and we are separated ... from most of the good things of American life."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.126
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9RI
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6060
item Program Number 127

"Does Science Emerge Supreme?"

Guests: Barnard, Christiaan, 1922-

9 December 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 2
Program details: In Dr. Barnard's first transplant, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "The operation, as they say,was successful, but the patient died. Not so the second transplant, who is alive today, drinking beer, writing his autobiography, and thinking kind thoughts about the venturesome Dr. Barnard." The conversation is a bit slow getting started, but host and guest eventually engage in a rich discussion touching on what fields of knowledge should inform life-or-death decisions, and what is the scientist's responsibility qua scientist and qua human being. CB: "I'll put it to you this way. Say, for example, that we from the time that we were born, we were used to the idea that when somebody dies, his organs are removed for transplantation. And at this stage, 1968, we've changed this idea now to the idea that when a patient is dead he's buried and his organs will be eaten up by the worms. We would revolt to that new idea, wouldn't we?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.127
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6061
item Program Number 128

"The American Challenge"

Guests: Servan-Schreiber, Jean Jacques. : Galbraith, Evan G.

9 December 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 3
Program details: The "challenge" in question being, as WFB glosses it, whether "France and Europe are permitting America to overtake them by indulging us instead of emulating our extraordinary technological and managerial breakthroughs." Despite occasional impasses (like one at the beginning over whether the differences among various countries are "racial" or "cultural"), this proves to be a fascinating three-way discussion of economic competition, how having a Protestant versus a Catholic culture affects a country's economic development, how companies in different countries in Europe might learn to cooperate. JJSS: "You see, for instance, a very Catholic country, the most Catholic country in the Common Market, is Italy. And Italy was lagging industrially, even under Mussolini--when all Italy geared up for a war effort, he could not bring any industrial results in his country. But now this very Catholic country is the fastest driving country in the Common Market."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.128
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6062
item Program Number 129

"The Uses of Animals"

Guests: Conrad, Barnaby, 1922- : Amory, Cleveland.

12 December 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 ; 4
Program details: Our guests are diametrically opposed on the subject of, as WFB puts it, "the role of the animal on earth." Mr. Conrad is a bull fighting enthusiast, the author of several books on the subject, of which Matador is the latest; Mr. Amory's club advises its members, WFB tells us, "After you have bagged your hunter do not drape him on the automobile or mount him when you get home. Merely the cap or the jacket will suffice." A brilliant three-way duel on a subject where Mr. Amory would challenge many Western traditions, as in this comment after quoting James Michener's account of a bull killed in the ring: "Well, I'm just surprised that Michener could write so feelingly of that animal in its last throes, and yet not feel the way I feel about the animal, which is, Why do it to him? What did he ever do to deserve it? He didn't decide it was an art."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.129
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6063
item Program Number 130

"Muhammad Ali and the Negro Movement"

Guests: Ali, Muhammad, 1942-

12 December 1968

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 5
Program details: When Mr. Clay joined the Black Muslims, his draft board reversed its earlier determination (made in order to keep him out of the Armed Forces so that he could continue to box) that he was not sufficiently intelligent to serve. When he was reclassified, he pleaded conscientious objection, was refused, and was about to begin a term in jail. CC: "I have to be real cool and not savage and radical, because it makes me angry when I think about it--when I see the white boys, who really are the number-one citizens, the future rulers, when I see them, by the hundreds, leaving the country, and I see the white preachers breaking into draft-board houses in Wisconsin and Baltimore, tearing the files out of the walls and making a bonfire out of 45,000 draft cards, pouring blood on them, and I see them go to court and the juries say two years, and I get five years for what's legal?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.130
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSKY
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6064
item Program Number 131

"The Issues in the School Strike"

Guests: Shanker, Albert.

6 January 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 6
Program details: Mr. Shanker's union had gone on strike against the New York City public schools and stayed out most of the fall of 1968. The dispute had begun with, as WFB puts it, "an explosive disagreement between [Mr. Shanker] and the superintendent of a school complex in an area predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican," the main issue being "community control," which various minority groups saw as necessary for their own "empowerment" and which Mr. Shanker saw as directed against his teachers. AS: "Well, I think that a decision has been made, and I think it's been made by the Mayor, I think it's been made by the Ford Foundation, I think it's been made by high executives in businesses, I think it's been made by some liberal reformers, a decision [in favor of] ... community control. The liberals do it perhaps out of a sense of guilt--black people have been slaves and persecuted for years, now let's give them something."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.131
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6065
item Program Number 132

"The Plight of the American Novelist"

Guests: Maclnnes, Helen, 1907- : Auchincloss, Louis.

6 January 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 7
Program details: WFB begins by pointing out that notwithstanding the success of his guests, novels were generally regarded as out of date, and the novelists present (not including our host, who was six years away from joining their ranks) take it from there. LA: "There's a constant demand for forms that are relevant to our age. The screen, painting, and sculpture can change their form. The novel tried to change its form. The French novel carried it to the point where Nathalie Sarraute has eliminated characters.... But it seems to me that the novel is not capable of this adjustment to new forms.... I really don't think Nathalie Sarraute is successful in eliminating characters." HM: "But she isn't writing a novel. Why doesn't she call it something else? People never used to get confused about what the novel was for."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.132
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6066
item Program Number 133

"The Walker Report"

Guests: Zion, Sidney. : Rumsfeld, Donald, 1932-

13 January 1969

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 8
Program details: "The dispute," WFB begins, "over just exactly what happened in Chicago during the Democratic Convention-I mean other than the nomination of Humphrey-was not settled by the so-called Walker Report, which is itself at least as controversial as the Warren Report on Dallas." The dispute on this show is at times nearly as heated as the one in the Chicago streets five months before, the starting point being the Walker Report's comparative figures for hospitalizations of rioters and policemen. WFB: "It occurs to me that this surely would be the first time in history that one talks about excessive police brutality when the figures seem to suggest the reverse [192 policemen reporting to emergency rooms, as opposed to 101 demonstrators]." SZ: "... Except that I think in that situation, most of the demonstrators were being treated by their own little Red Crosses, and probably didn't feel that they should go to the Chicago hospitals...." WFB: "Oh, come on, Mr. Zion, are you saying-" SZ: "Oh no, quite. You know, people were hysterical-" WFB: "-that hospitals were under orders to what?" SZ: "I'm not saying that at all." WFB: "Give them strychnine?" SZ: "No, but their reaction to what might have happened in the hospitals may have been paranoiac."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.133
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6067
item Program Number 134

"The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson"

Guests: Goldman, Eric Frederick, 1915-

13 January 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 9
Program details: A rich discussion ranging from Lyndon Johnson's personality to the behavior of American intellectuals in the 1960s, the link being Mr. Goldman's stint as "intellectual in residence" at the White House: "Actually, that job, and ... my being offered it, is one of the more rococo parts of my period in Washington. The President had asked me to come down. I had never met the President in my life ... The President at that meeting said that he wanted to be a very good President of this country and he needed help and he wanted help from what he called, excuse me, the best minds of our nation. That's a phrase which seems to come easily to men who are just becoming President of the United States. I notice Mr. Nixon, the other day, said he wanted help from the best minds of the United States."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.134
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6068
item Program Number 135

"How Goes It with the Poverty Program?"

Guests: Shiffman, Bernard. : Owens, Major.

27 January 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 77 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 10
Program details: In addition to more philosophical (or ideological) questions over how well the War on Poverty was working, specific questions had been raised by the discovery of, as WFB puts it," enormous graft" in the New York City office. Mitchell Ginsberg had accepted an invitation to appear on Firing Line but had been kept away by an emergency, his place being taken by two of his deputies. Mr. Shiffman begins by asking leave "to correct the record: to date ... to the best of our knowledge, there's been the taking of one-half of one per cent through what is believed to be conspiracy and fraud ... [by] a number of people who have conspired to beat a bookkeeping system, and we are hoping ... that there will be maximum recovery." An often heated discussion that ranges over anti-Jewish (or is it generally anti-white?) sentiment in the ghettoes, the state of public libraries in the inner cities, and other urban ills.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.135
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6069
item Program Number 136

"The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy"

Guests: Halberstam, David. : Toledano, Ralph de, 1916-

27 January 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 11
Program details: Mr. Halberstam's book had been singled out by Russell Baker as a rare thing, "a book on a Kennedy that was free of sycophantic cant"; Mr. Toledano had written a book that was so far from sycophantic as to get him accused of being a John Bircher. A lively conversation at a time, six months before Chappaquiddick, when Teddy Kennedy was seen as his brothers' successor in presidential politics. DH: "Well, I think the Kennedys have been sort of particularly attractive, and romantic--you used the word romantic ...and somehow, there might be a new kind of idealism and a new sort of fresh spirit in America. This sort of myth, I think, began to build, and it has continued. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a fascination about the Kennedys, that they are somehow bigger than life. They are handsome, they are star-crossed, they achieve all and yet can be struck down...." WFB: "And this is something to which, in your judgment,they primarily contribute, or do you find it an expression of the public's hunger for these attributes which they instantly see realized in the Kennedys?" DH: "Well, I think it's probably a combination of both. I think, you know, the Kennedys are very smart politicians, and I think that they, if they see that they have a mystique working for them, that they would probably work on it rather skillfully."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.136
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6070
item Program Number 137

"The Ripon Society"

Guests: Petri, Thomas E. : Auspitz, J. Lee (Josiah Lee)

24 February 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 12
Program details: During the battles for the Republican Party in the 1960s, the Ripon Society was founded in Massachusetts to further liberal ("moderate" in the Society's own terminology) tendencies in the party--the Rockefeller, Scranton, Romney wing, as opposed to the Goldwater, Reagan, and even Nixon wing. Today's conversation changes none of the participants' minds, but it clearly lays out the two wings' current positions. WFB: "The Ripon Society certainly seems to me to have affected most people as an organization that is industriously engaged in trying to persuade the Republican Party to be like the Democratic Party." TEP: "No, it's engaged in persuading the Republican Party to do those things that will enable it to compete with the Democratic Party in states where the Democratic Party is strong. That's a bit different. We try to take Republican ideas and formulate them so that they can embrace the necessary role of government in the last few decades of this century."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.137
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707LZO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6071
item Program Number 138

"The Fifth Amendment"

Guests: Rothwax, Harold J. : Williams, C. Dickerman.

24 February 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 13
Program details: "The rise in the crime rate," WFB begins, "brings us to reconsider existing legal dogma and protocols, and a while ago Thomas Dewey startled the legal profession by recommending the outright repeal of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which has lately been interpreted by the Supreme Court as an absolute guarantee to anybody to be uncooperative." A deeply instructive program, in which Mr. Buckley invites his guests to explain to a lay audience matters such as the different protections granted witnesses in a civil and a criminal trial, the reason why the Fifth Amendment applies to witnesses as well as to the defendant, and how pre-trial discovery works.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.138
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6072
item Program Number 139

"Black Anti-Semitism"

Guests: Galamison, Milton A. (Milton Arthur), 1923-1988. : Perlmutter, Nate.

25 February 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 14
Program details: Mr. Galamison is a supporter of school decentralization in New York City (AKA community control, discussed with Albert Shanker on Firing Line 131) who believes that "black anti-Semitism has been exaggerated all out of proportion to what actually does exist, and, strangely enough, [the charges have] been very well timed ... to disrupt the motion toward school decentralization"--one of the villains, in his view, being Albert Shanker. Mr. Perlmutter strongly disagrees, in a frequently heated but informative exchange: "This question of the timing. Suddenly it's almost as if Mr. Shanker had sat down with the Jewish organizations and determined that this is the moment when this conspiracy must come to bear on New York ... The fact of the matter is that the larger Jewish organizations ... have from time to time endorsed decentralization."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.139
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6073
item Program Number 140

"Restructuring the University"

Guests: Grossman, Allen R., 1932- : Conrad, Alfred H. : Hart, Jeffrey Peter, 1930-

25 February 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 15
Program details: "Probably the steadiest newsmaker these days, more even than the Vietnam War," WFB begins, "is the university. The chaos is widespread, and although all of us write and write and write about it, we are as yet without a crystallized understanding of what is behind it all." Professor Grossman proceeds to offer "the cause of violence at universities." It is this: there have been times in the world's history when social organization, when the business of civilization, promoted the well-being of men as individuals. We live now in a time when social organization, and the business of civilization, is hostile to the well-being of men as individuals. The university, and I include my own, and my own classroom, has ceased to be able to instruct in a credible way, and this has led to a response which is as vivid and as meaningful as every man's ability to care about themselves." To Professor Hart, this is "the merest cliche," and we're off to the races.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.140
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6074
item Program Number 141

"Police Power"

Guests: Heffernan, John J. : Chevigny, Paul, 1935-

26 February 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 16
Program details: To most Americans, Mr. Buckley suggests, "the main concern in matters of law enforcement is the ability of the police, or more accurately the entire court system, to keep down the rate of crime, or to prevent it from growing." To civil-libertarians like Mr. Chevigny, a far greater concern is police going too far, and specifically bending new rules intended to check their power, such as the exclusionary rule. In this discussion rich with anecdote, Mr. Heffernan stoutly defends his colleagues: "I think ... they're doing everything in their power to comply with the laws of the land, as much as we do it sometimes with a frown on our face ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.141
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6075
item Program Number 142

"Black Student Power"

Guests: Felder, John. : Swedan, David. : Coyne, John R.

26 February 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 17
Program details: Another look at the disruptions on campus, which, apart from the Vietnam War, have most to do, as WFB puts it, with "the demands of black students, or in some cases the demands made in behalf of black students." These involved matters such as separate living quarters, departments of Black Studies, and a voice in faculty hiring and promotion. (JF: "We feel that black students and faculty ... are most capable of determining who could teach from a black perspective"). Mr. Swedan is deliberately unresponsive ("I can only speak for what the white radical students like myself think"); Mr. Coyne, who had recently escaped from the wars at Berkeley and was working on his book The Kumquat Statement (a reply to James Kunen's Strawberry Statement), brings his recent experience to bear in querying Mr. Felder on exactly what he means by "Black Studies."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.142
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6076
item Program Number 143

"Vietnam and the Intellectuals"

Guests: Chomsky, Noam.

3 April 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 18
Program details: A matter-versus-anti-matter meeting between WFB and a man he characterizes as being "listed in anybody's catalogue as among the half-dozen top heroes of the New Left." Mr. Chomsky says nothing to belie his reputation: "I said that there are certain issues-for example-Auschwitz, such that by consenting to discuss them one degrades oneself and to some degree loses one's humanity ... Nevertheless, I can easily imagine circumstances in which I would have been glad to debate Auschwitz-for example, if there were some chance that by debating Auschwitz it might have been possible to eliminate or to at least mitigate the horror that was going on. And, I think, I feel the same way about Vietnam."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.143
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFB8W
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6077
item Program Number 144

"Urban Development and the Race Question"

Guests: Innis, Roy, 1934-

3 April 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 19
Program details: Mr. Innis, a dazzling speaker in the West Indian style, had been urging separate development as the only way to allow the Negro community to shoulder its own burdens. He had recently had an acrimonious exchange with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, who had called this a return to segregation. RI: "My style is, and that of my organization is, that, we feel that our ideology is so sound that we can persuade any brother that it is in his best interest." WFB: "And if you fail to?" RI: "We will try, try again." WFB: "How do you try-forcefully?" RI: "With the most exquisite and persuasive rhetoric." WFB: "Rhetoric. Refine the rhetoric. So that if Roy Wilkins Jr. matriculated at a college like this and said, 'I don't want to join a black student union committed to separatism,' he would not be molested, as far as you're concerned?" RI: "No, not by my troops." WFB: "And are you in control of your troops?" RI: "Oh yes, I have full control of my troops at all times."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.144
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6078
item Program Number 145

"Modernism in the Catholic Church"

Guests: Ward, Maisie, 1889- : Sheed, F. J. (Francis Joseph), 1897-1981.

21 April 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 164 : 20
Program details: A luminous conversation with this magnificent couple, who got their start as public figures at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London. Mrs. Sheed sees the convulsions in the Church today as having less to do with the sort of tension that Browning chronicled ("He said that unbelief shook the believer, and belief shook the unbeliever"); rather, "with a good many [young people] I think it's only that they were frightfully ill instructed. I think nothing could be worse than the religious teaching in most Catholic schools, and when they suddenly find everything thrown open as it is today, they are unduly disturbed. But I have a kind of hope that great good will come of it in the long run." Mr. Sheed: "Well, I don't know what Maisie's view is, but mine is it's one of the most extraordinary paradoxes, that a nun will devote forty years of really dedicated sacrificial life to teaching children nonsense about God."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.145
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6079
item Program Number 146

"The Campus Destroyers"

Guests: Capp, Al, 1909-

21 April 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 1
Program details: Al Capp, a lifelong liberal, had been counter-radicalized by the Sixties and had become a campus speaker the students loved to hate. As he tells it, "Every now and then some student arises, quivering with rage, and says, 'Mr. Capp, you detest us, so why are you speaking here at Chapel Hill?' And I say, 'For three thousand bucks, and I wouldn't spend an hour with a bunch like you for a nickel less.' And you know, they're so relieved." But he is also thoughtful on the question, How is it that a small group can get away with making life miserable for the majority on campus? "This is a very, very sad state of affairs. One could ask the same question of the city of Chicago, a city of millions which permitted Capone and his gang to terrorize that city. One could ask the same of any group of decent, orderly, busy citizens who permit a tiny, active, delinquent minority to make hell out of their lives."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.146
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQT2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6080
item Program Number 147

"The ABM Conflict"

Guests: Gore, Albert, 1907- : Burnham, James, 1905-1987.

28 April 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 2
Program details: Senator Gore was Chairman of the Subcommittee on International Organization and Disarmament and a leading proponent of the proposed treaty to ban anti-ballistic missiles as a defensive measure. Mr. Burnham had been a leading anti-Communist strategist for thirty years. This show explores ABM in particular and nuclear deterrence in general. JB: "It seems to me that the history of relations between nations shows that the road to national suicide is very often laid by over attention to what one thinks the motives and intentions of the enemy are." ... AG: "We need, my friend Mr. Buckley, mankind needs to develop a formula for coexistence. Unless we can find a formula by which nations can live together in peace-" WFB: "Vote for peace." AG: "-then we are going to have nuclear holocaust." WFB: "Let's skip that." AG: "How can we skip it? That's what it's about." WFB: "Well, because it's so obvious ..." JB: "Of course from one point of view it might not be so obvious. We've had nuclear arms for a generation and not had nuclear war."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.147
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6081
item Program Number 148

"Problems of a Chief Executive"

Guests: Price, Raymond K. (Raymond Kissam), 1930- : Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938-

28 April 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 3
Program details: Host and guests often do address the title subject-specifically, the problems of taking over as Chief Executive in a country whole sectors of which are openly mutinous. Along the way, we get a fascinating look at the nuts and bolts of organizing a new Administration-with glances backwards at Mr. Nixon's two predecessors-from the men commonly identified as the liberal and the conservative, respectively, on the President's speech writing team. Especially interesting, in the light of developments in later Administrations, is the discussion of speech writing protocols. WFB: "I notice that there is much less diffidence about acknowledging the fact of it now than there was a few years ago, so that people point to John Jones as the author of that particular speech by the President, whereas these used to be, as you know, highly regarded secrets ... Would you feel free if somebody from the New York Times, say, asked who wrote the speech, or who drafted it, would somebody around say, Oh, Buchanan did?" PJB: "Well, what you would say, candidly, is that Buchanan worked with the President on that issue.... But you take a speech where the President is deeply concerned about it, and where he feels a great deal depends upon it, like the acceptance speech, and the more important he feels it is, the more involved he becomes."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.148
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6082
item Program Number 149

"Cornell and the Conflict of Generations"

Guests: Berns, Walter, 1919- : Van den Haag, Ernest.

19 May 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 78 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 4
Program details: Professor Berns, as WFB introduces him, was "one of several faculty members who quit Cornell in protest against the capitulations of President Perkins to the guerrilla students who took to dictating academic policy a while ago." This passionate exchange begins with the details of current events, but it goes much deeper, to the nature of the university itself. WB: "Various visitors to the Cornell campus ... remarked what was certainly true, that is to say, there was something unique at Cornell, and what that thing was, was the extent to which the administration was actually on the side of the militant students. That is unique.... Mr. van den Haag is right, that the President did manipulate the faculty, he failed to assert any authority ..." WFB: "Why?" WB: "That's an interesting question. Why would a man stand by and see his university destroyed? Of course, he will deny that it's being destroyed. He referred to this fascist-like scene that took place ... as the most constructive event in the history of Cornell.... Academic freedom doesn't mean a doggone thing to him. And he can't recognize it when it's gone."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.149
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6083
item Program Number 150

"The Trouble with Enoch"

Guests: Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998.

19 May 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 5
Program details: "A year or so back," as Mr. Buckley sets the scene, "Enoch Powell was kicked out of the shadow cabinet by Conservative leader Edward Heath, in punishment for a speech in which Mr. Powell advocated an end to colored immigration into England ... It was generally assumed that now, finally, Mr. Powell had gone too far, but on the way to political extinction a funny thing happened, namely, the overwhelming support of the British people and surprising support from the colored minority." In his first of several Firing Line appearances, Mr. Powell takes us across centuries and continents and knocks any facile egalitarianism sharply on the head: "Alone of all countries in the world, until 1962 we had no definition of ourselves ... no definition of a person belonging to the United Kingdom.... There was a definition of a British subject, but that was a person who was a subject of the King or Queen. And so as the British Empire extended, that definition included hundreds of millions of people, wherever the sun had not set on the British Empire. So there literally was no difference in the law of Britain between myself coming back from a day's trip to France, and an Indian from the Northwest Frontier entering Britain by air for the first time."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.150
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6084
item Program Number 151

"ABM"

Guests: Bethe, Hans Albrecht, 1906- : Brennan, Donald G.

2 June 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 6
Program details: A second look at anti-ballistic missiles (taken up a few weeks earlier in Firing Line 147), this time with a more technical edge. Our guests--both experts who can illustrate their points concretely--engage each other on questions such as "how likely is a Soviet first strike, how hard" are our Minuteman missiles' silos, and what is the morality of different counterattack scenarios. DB: "I think I'd like to answer that with a parallel. I think it would be perhaps as difficult as it was for the Japanese to execute a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and catch the battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor. It was very hard for the Japanese to do that, and it would be very hard for the Soviets to execute a nearly completely successful attack on the strategic defensive forces." HB: "I would remind my friend Don Brennan that the Japanese lost the war." ... HB: "I am sure if we sat by our advanced radars, if we saw that a thousand missiles were coming at us, and were coming into the areas of the Minuteman in particular ... we would not wait." DB: "I'd just say I'm mildly surprised that Hans would advocate what we call a launch-on-warning posture, if I understood you right...-my Hudson Institute colleague Herman Kahn has a term ... He used to speak of a thing called a doomsday-in-a-hurry machine."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.151
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6085
item Program Number 152

"Afro-American Studies"

Guests: Lincoln, C. Eric (Charles Eric), 1924-2000. : Brudnoy, David, 1940-

2 June 1969

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 7
Program details: The lively discussion centers on what black studies is or should be: an academic discipline like any other, or a means, as Professor Lincoln put it, "of deterring the sort of black prejudice against blackness" that he himself had grown up with. EL: "I arrived on the campus there and saw a vast sea of people who didn't look like me. They were all white. Every person I saw was white.... This is the kind of experience that you never-" DB: "Yes, I have-when I went to Texas Southern to teach, which is a Negro college.... Suddenly all my students, my chairman, my dean, my president, were Negro.... They're sort of sitting around rapping in Texanese and I don't know what they're saying, and I felt ghastly. I know exactly what you mean." EL: "No. Let me tell you the difference. You were never unaware of the fact that ...all you had to do was walk off the campus ... and you suddenly regained all the power and the prestige and the preference that is yours in this society. I cannot do that in Chicago. I have nowhere to walk-but back into the ghetto."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.152
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6086
item Program Number 153

"The Decline of Christianity"

Guests: Graham, Billy, 1918-

12 June 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 8
Program details: Much of the considerable interest in this show derives from hearing the famous preacher engaging in ordinary conversation. Dr. Graham agrees with his host that the organized churches are in decline, but he insists that in his travels throughout the country he has found "no real revolt against the Person of Christ." BG: "I think the Church is going to undergo restructuring. I suspect that the movement that is under way now is to have small meetings in homes. You know, the early Church, for the first three centuries, met in homes. I suspect the movement is in this direction now. In coming to New York two years ago we found more than a thousand of these groups already meeting. Since then four thousand more groups have emerged."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.153
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFB96
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6087
item Program Number 154

"Labor Unions and American Freedom"

Guests: Carey, James B.

12 June 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 9
Program details: Mr. Carey, as Mr. Buckley tells us, had, with the help of John L. Lewis, launched a counterattack when his union, the United Electrical Union, had been taken over by the Communists. Host and guest sometimes talk past each other, but even so we get a clear idea of what is at issue between Mr. Carey's notion of "an effective union -- a union that represents the views of the people effectively and can deal with management on a basis of equality" and Mr. Buckley's observation that, in the aftermath of the New York City newspaper strike, "the few who survived ... did indeed get their 10, 15, 20, 25 percent raises, but a lot of other people who would otherwise have survived, went from let's say $250 a week to welfare."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.154
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQW4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6088
item Program Number 155

"Violence in America"

Guests: Graham, Hugh Davis. : Gurr, Ted Robert, 1936-

23 June 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 10
Program details: Messrs. Graham and Gurr had both served on the staff of the commission appointed by President Johnson to study violence in America following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Our guests are serious students of their subject and don't use the term "violence" as a devil word (for example, Mr. Gurr cites the vigilante movement on the American frontier as having succeeded in maintaining order in regions where there was no lawfully constituted authority). WFB: "Is it historically nonsensical to say, as for instance Arthur Schlesinger said after the assassination of Mr. Kennedy, that 'We killed Mr. Kennedy, we killed the three most idealistic people in public life during a period of three years, and we have therefore justified the odium of the world'? Or would you simply dismiss that as emotional reaction?" TRG: "I would not be prepared to share Mr. Schlesinger's collective guilt." WFB: "Would you be prepared to disavow it?" HDG: "I would disavow it." TRG: "Personally I'd disavow it." HDG: "I have been told by black militants that I killed Malcolm X."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.155
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6089
item Program Number 156

"The Population Explosion"

Guests: Clark, Colin, 1905- : Sweezy, Alan.

23 June 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 11
Program details: As Mr. Buckley introduces his two guests, "Dr. Sweezy is quite orthodox, i.e., he thinks everything is lost, or just about lost, thanks to the population explosion. Dr. Clark is terribly unorthodox. If anything he seems to be saying we need more people." What follows is a serious, though often heated, discussion of technical and moral questions, ranging from whether we ought to spread industry more evenly around the country to whether it would be permissible to put a sterilizing agent in a city's water supply. WFB: "Let me give you a reductio ad absurdum. One way to affect the population is simply infanticide. Kill the third child or the fourth child, depending on what you economists advise us at any given moment. But we do reject this for moral reasons, do we not?" AS: "Yes." WFB: "There are no functional reasons. It's rather neat, actually, a neat way of handling the problem." AS: "Well, I don't think I'll subscribe to your use of the adjective 'neat,' but I reject it." WFB: "Okay. For moral reasons?" AS: "Yes."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.156
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6090
item Program Number 157

"Marijuana--How Harmful?"

Guests: Baird, Robert. : Smith, David E. (David Elvin), 1939-

7 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 12
Program details: The first of many Firing Line discussions of marijuana and other drugs. The fact that Dr. Smith's practice is among the dropped-out children of the well to do in Haight-Ashbury, whereas Dr. Baird's is among the poor in Harlem, may have something to do with their diametrically opposed viewpoints. DS: "Many people in the suburbs use marijuana, at low dosages, for anxiety relief-much as an individual would come home and have a martini or a beer.... At higher dosages, particularly in group settings, it is used as an intoxicant-in the way you might have five martinis at your country-club cocktail party." ... RB: "No person who is personally well adjusted would want to take marijuana. Why would he want to take it unless he is doing a thoroughly scientific research project?" WFB: "Well, presumably because it yields pleasure." RB: "Well, the pleasure syndrome-if he has to seek that for his own orientation-" WFB: "I didn't say he had to; I said he elects to."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.157
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6091
item Program Number 158

"The Conservative Party and the Future of the GOP"

Guests: Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931-

7 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 13
Program details: "In New York," WFB begins, "there are not two political parties, as in normal states, but four political parties." The Liberal Party is an old-timer; the Conservative Party had been founded less than a decade earlier, by, for the most part, Republicans concerned about that party's drift to the left. It was on the Conservative Party ticket that Mr. Buckley had run, four years earlier, for Mayor of New York. For this show, Firing Line's Producer, Warren Steibel, had invited representatives of the Liberal Party to appear on this show, but they had declined. In their absence, this is a genial discussion between two old comrades in arms, five years after the defeat of Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican presidential nomination, and of Barry Goldwater for the Presidency itself. WFB: "Mr. Mahoney, would you be willing to describe the circumstances that would bring you to endorse Governor Rockefeller for Governor in 1970?" JDM: "I doubt it would take long. I can't conceive of any, at this point." WFB: "Well, suppose he went to Lourdes, or something? ... Are you the forgiving type?" JDM: "We might under those circumstances, but I don't think that he's the supplicant type ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.158
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6092
item Program Number 159

"The Irish Problem"

Guests: Donoghue, Denis. : O'Neill, Terence, 1914-1990

22 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 14
Program details: Firing Line's first look at "the Irish Question"--still very much a question fifty years after the country had been partitioned. WFB begins by saying that Captain O'Neill had resigned "in protest against his own party's failure to back him up with sufficient conviction ... in his determination more or less moderately to provide for the rights of Catholics." Captain O'Neill begins with a partial correction: "I felt that if I were to resign at the time I did that my policies might continue under somebody else, and ... in fact the reform has indeed, though I say it myself, gathered pace since I resigned." A genuine conversation, rich in anecdote, in which our guests-both born and raised in Northern Ireland, the one Protestant, the other Catholic-work to help an American audience understand this tangled situation. DD: "Growing up in Northern Ireland, which I did, the terminology which surrounded me ... in fact was a sectarian and religious terminology. You know, in the sense that I could spot a Protestant at a hundred yards, and, even more radically, he could spot me." WFB: "You being a Catholic?" DD: "I was a Catholic and am ... It was a sectarian division, it was really not a political division. Certainly, it's true I believe even yet in Northern Ireland, that one is not primarily aware of people as being Nationalists and Unionists, in a political context, but rather of their being Catholics or Protestants, in a sectarian context."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.159
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6093
item Program Number 160

"The Decline of Anti-Communism [1969]"

Guests: FitzGibbon, Constantine, 1919-

22 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 15
Program details: "Mr. Constantine FitzGibbon," WFB starts by telling us, "is not by any means primarily an anti-Communist, but he is unflinching on the issue. A few years ago, tired of defending himself against the derogations of the Communist press, he collected his essays and published them under the title, Random Thoughts of a Fascist Hyena." A conversation full of anecdote, starting with a comparison of the protestors of the Sixties with the men of the Thirties (of whom Mr. FitzGibbon was one) who pledged not to fight for King and country; and going on to the West's "difficulty in thinking in triangulating terms, if I may so put it. The Russians never doubted for a moment that they were against both us and the Fascists. We tend to think that our enemy's enemy must be our friend"; with a delicious digression describing a luncheon at which Winston Churchill was given a medal bearing the image of Napoleon: "I couldn't help thinking at that time that if Churchill lived long enough, somebody would give him a large, gold German medal bearing the head of you-know-who on it. Because there wasn't anybody more anathema to Churchill, apart from Hitler, than Napoleon Bonaparte."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.160
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6094
item Program Number 161

"Monarchy and the Modern World"

Guests: Habsburg, Otto, 1912-

23 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 16
Program details: Archduke Otto had a few years earlier renounced his claim to the throne of Austria so as to be permitted to return to his native country, but in Britain Prince Charles had just been invested as Prince of Wales, and in Spain, Prince Juan Carlos had been named successor to Generalissimo Franco. A profound discussion, rich in historical detail, of the survival of monarchy in the modern world, the future of Europe, and what happens to regimes following a national debacle. OvH: "You see, the Weimar Republic died not because it was bad-it had its faults, indisputably-but especially because it was an expression of Germany's defeat in the First World War. Hitler and his people were able to hang onto the Weimar Republic the symbol and the stigma of defeat. It's exactly the same thing we had with the First Republic in Austria.... [It] began in disaster, that is to say, the dissolution of the old Empire. And consequently, there was almost, I would say, a built-in death wish in that regime."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.161
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6095
item Program Number 162

"The UN and World Affairs"

Guests: Caradon, Hugh Foot, Baron, 1907-

23 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 17
Program details: Lord Caradon is a true believer. As conversation this show never clicks, but listening to our guest may help us understand why the UN is as it is. Lord Caradon: "On all the great issues of race, poverty, population- The younger generation, I believe that they are going to save us, and I believe that they will do much better than we've done. But particularly on these questions, it's the division of the world between rich and poor. I believe the young people are right." ... Mr. Buckley: "The notion of you and the Soviet Union sitting around criticizing Rhodesia's imperialism or South Africa's racism, in the light of the long-documented record of barbarity exercised by the Soviet Union, is extremely hard to understand for anybody this side of Talleyrand."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.162
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6096
item Program Number 163

"Is There a Place for the Old Order?"

Guests: Brophy, Brigid, 1929- : Sparrow, John Hanbury Angus, 1906-

24 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 18
Program details: A delicious duel over the place of tradition and civility in the modern world. One sample: JS: "I think there is a presumption in favor of what has been tried and tested by time, and if we stopped every moment of the day to examine critically every statement that was presented to us, or every convention that we were expected to adopt, we'd never get on. I think there is a presumption in favor of what has been used in the past." BB: "But I think that two world wars in this century are a standing presumption against..."JS: "But how can a world war be a presumption? ... I may seem to just object to words, but loose phrases like that are very often the result of loose thought. Of course we all know..." BB: "I'm sorry; I was trying to put the statement in logical form. Let me substitute the word 'constitute' for the word 'is.'"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.163
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6097
item Program Number 164

"American Popularity Abroad"

Guests: Lewis, Anthony, 1927-

24 July 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 19
Program details: A thoughtful though not flashy discussion of how it can be that America is regarded in much of the world as more repressive than the Soviet Union, and what we might do to change this perception. WFB: "It does occur to me that there is something in the American temperament that desires to be rebuffed. That is to say, isn't it true that Americans react so to being disliked that people look out for opportunities to dislike [us]? ... " AL: "I think you put it backwards, actually. We suffer from an excessive desire to be accepted. We're like social climbers, nouveaux riches, who have this terrible fear that people won't like us."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.164
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6098
item Program Number 165

"Post Office Reform"

Guests: Blount, Winton M., 1921-

9 September 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 20
Program details: Mr. Blount, WFB begins, "finds himself in the extraordinary position of seeking to liquidate his empire; for this, one assumes, President Nixon appointed him," since Mr. Blount had proposed to convert the Post Office into a public corporation. A perhaps surprisingly interesting discussion of this problem, which, as we know now, Mr. Blount's efforts were not sufficient to solve. Although some of the specifics he tells us about have been remedied-the Post Office no longer sorts mail with the technology Benjamin Franklin put in place when he was the fourth Postmaster General-Congress still sets the prices and makes the rules. "I note here that in 1789, which was the first year of the operation of the Post Office under the more or less present system, you ran a deficit of $40, thereby, somebody put it, establishing a venerable American tradition."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.165
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6099
item Program Number 166

"Where Should the Nixon Administration Go?"

Guests: Goldwater, Barry M. (Barry Morris), 1909-1998.

9 September 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 4
Program details: Not only did Senator Goldwater take on, in 1964, a race that he was bound to lose not so much against Lyndon Johnson as against the memory of the fallen leader but under Arizona law he had had to resign from the Senate in order to do so. In 1969 he had "triumphantly returned to Washington, escorted," as WFB puts it, "by a Republican President whose election in turn it is quite widely conceded would have been unlikely but for the race of 1964." WFB begins by asking his guest "what did he have in mind when, last spring, he chided dissatisfied American conservatives who were critical of Mr. Nixon." The Senator replies in pure Goldwater mode: "Well, nothing but the same thought that I've always had when I've chided fellow conservatives who are acting as conservatives should. To put it another way, they're speaking their own minds." And we're off on an examination of the Nixon Administration, the Vietnam War, and how one might begin rolling back "35 years of statism."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.166
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6100
item Program Number 167

"Biafra and English Foreign Policy"

Guests: Waugh, Auberon.

22 September 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 79 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 165 : 21
Program details: The Ibos in Biafra (the eastern region of Nigeria) had attempted to secede, the Nigerian government had cracked down with all its force-and the Labour government in Britain was backing the Nigerian government. Mr. Waugh had visited the region as a journalist and come back to write Biafra: Britain's Shame. A rich discussion of the state of Africa, how a country decides when to intervene in others' disputes, and much else. WFB: "Well, is it then your assumption that if the consequences of backing the Nigerian government had been known, neither the Labour government nor a Conservative government would have proceeded to do so?" AW: "Well, I can't honestly believe that they're either so wicked or so stupid as to dissent from that. On the other hand, when was it? About nine months ago, I was going around, because my job takes me among all the politicians in England, and telling them, 'If you go on with this policy, [Colonel] Gowon [Nigeria's dictator] is going to kill half a million people.' And they laughed at me and said, 'Where do you get that figure from?' And of course I had invented it, but it was my assessment of what it would cost. Well, now they know it's cost a million and a half. You know, one does wonder whether in point of fact they care, because politically they've got away with it. It hasn't made a big impact politically, in England."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.167
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6101
item Program Number 168

"Looking Back on de Gaulle"

Guests: Soustelle, Jacques, 1912-

22 September 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 1
Program details: If Charles de Gaulle was a mythic figure, so was his sometime friend and ally: while le grand Charles headed the Free French in exile during World War II, M. Soustelle headed the actual Resistance at home. The two men had broken in 1960 over Algeria: "Should it be a part of France, as President de Gaulle had once believed, or not? When de Gaulle changed his mind and Soustelle didn't, de Gaulle literally sent his former friend into exile. A superb hour with a man who is a genuine scholar as well as a man of action. Whether he is discussing the Constitution of the Fifth Republic or the economy of Algeria, he speaks with the voice of authority. I was one of the few people who met [de Gaulle] during those last few years before 1958, and I saw him more and more bitter, more and more let's say desperate, because he thought that he would never come back. And probably during those years a kind of alchemy took place ... so that he became more self-centered, more egotistical, more authoritarian.... And on certain points, not only did he change his mind or his behavior, but he definitely changed his doctrinal position, his philosophy of power and of politics."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.168
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6102
item Program Number 169

"The Making of the President 1968"

Guests: White, Theodore Harold, 1915-

22 September 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 2
Program details: Whether it is China in the Thirties and Forties or the presidential campaign trail in the Sixties and Seventies, Mr. White brings to the task a superb eye for detail and the ability to discern a coherent pattern. One sample, in response to the question whether he understands himself to be marching away from the dogmatism so generally associated nowadays with American "liberalism": THW: "Let's say that there is about conservatives and about liberals a quality of religion sometimes useful, sometimes offensive.... There are holy truths. The liberal holy truths at the moment are holy truths I share: that we should have peace in Vietnam, that civil rights should be pushed as quickly as possible. Now in the name of those holy truths the witch burners among the liberals will try to bum anybody who doesn't want instant peace in Vietnam, anybody who does not proclaim the cause in Vietnam to have been utterly ignoble."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.169
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6103
item Program Number 170

"The Welfare-Reform Proposal"

Guests: Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.

7 October 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 3
Program details: Mr. Moynihan was the architect of the Nixon Administration's Family Assistance Plan (FAP), the first attempt to rationalize the federal welfare system that had grown up under the War on Poverty. This hour offers a vivid exploration of the whole welfare mess and the plight of the working poor. DPM: "I had just left the Washington Administration of President Johnson, and I remember noticing ... a little announcement in the paper that Head Start-something new, hadn't been heard of-was going to begin this summer in New York, under the poverty program, and that the union scale for Head Start teachers would be $9.75 an hour. And I'm a good trade unionist, and I'm for those teachers, but ... I said, you know, here we are paying nice college girls ... $9.75 an hour to teach the children of men we won't pay $2 an hour. Now what kind of sense exactly is that? ... And of course five years later we find that very little got taught, that there was no change in the outcome."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.170
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6104
item Program Number 171

"Race and Conservatism"

Guests: Moss, John E. (John Emerson), 1913- : Conyers, John, 1929- : Koch, Ed, 1924-

7 October 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 4
Program details: "Some critics of this program, both friendly and unfriendly," WFB begins, "have written in to complain that the host of Firing Line is always asking the questions, so much so that the other side doesn't often get an opportunity to go on the offensive. Accordingly, we have invited three distinguished gentlemen, of indistinguishable liberal reputation, to take the offensive and put their questions on the general theme of race and conservatism." In this first of what would become a more or less semi-annual feature of Firing Line, Rep. Moss starts things off by saying that, "having just been characterized as one having impeccable qualifications for that label, I would like to have a brief definition from you as to what I am, as a liberal." After a few minutes of genial political taxonomy, the moderator, Lawrence Chickering, calls on Rep. Conyers, and we're off and running. LC: "Congressman Conyers, would you like to ask Mr. Buckley some questions?" JC: "Well, I should ask him how I got on this program. I see now that this is a nice, all-white academic surrounding here; you can't even find one black kid to put in the college crew."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.171
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6105
item Program Number 172

"Conservative vs. Progressive Republicanism"

Guests: Javits, Jacob K. (Jacob Koppel), 1904-1986.

24 October 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 5
Program details: "A couple of years ago," WFB recalls, "Vice President Humphrey accosted Senator Javits amiably and remarked, 'If you get any more forward than you are, you'll be head of the Democratic Party.'" Senator Javits fluently defends his breed of Republicans as distinct from liberal Democrats. JJ: "[The Democratic Party] seeks immediately to find a choice in government for any public ill; any, that runs the wide gamut from poverty to the necessity to encourage small business.... I believe that one can be a liberal-and I accept that designation, not because in the Republican Party we use the term particularly; we always use the term progressive,... but I accept it because it defines a way of thinking, an outlook, and I think that outlook, Bill,... is that if the people have to have something done for them, then it's got to be done, and you can't be doctrinaire about the method. I prefer, as a Republican, the private-enterprise method, either as a sole reliance or as a supplement. However, I do not go with the conservatives in refraining from doing it, or rejecting it, because I can't do it through private enterprise."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.172
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6106
item Program Number 173

"Abortion"

Guests: Ayd, Frank J. : Guttmacher, Alan Frank, 1898-

24 October 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 6
Program details: The first Firing Line, though by no means the last, on abortion, which was just becoming a major national topic. There had been agitation for years-strengthened by the thalidomide disaster-for liberalizing abortion laws, and several states had done so. Our two guests present the heart of the opposing positions as clearly as can be. To Dr. Guttmacher, "My own feeling is that the mother-a living human being, who has interaction with other human beings-her rights are so powerfully more predominant than a mass of protoplasm which she carries within her womb that there's no comparison between the two." To Dr. Ayd, "The fact of the matter is from the very moment of conception, where the sperm of the father contributes half of the chromosomes and the ovum of the mother contributes the other half,... you now have a unique individual who has never existed before and will never exist again. And from that moment on, you have a continuum until death occurs, whenever it may occur."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.173
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6107
item Program Number 174

"What Have We Learned from Socialism?"

Guests: Myrdal, Gunnar, 1898-

4 November 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 7
Program details: Gunnar Myrdal, WFB recalls, was "once described in Newsday as the sanctimonious Swede who has been paid well for telling us what's wrong with our country for a generation now." Mr. Myrdal jumps right in: "Well, let me first say after all of this you've heard about me, that's just cheap journalism, you know, which is under my level." In exchanges that frequently draw blood, we get a clear picture of asocialist's--as opposed to a totalitarian's--idea of how central planning should work: "Of course, you know that this country, which is supposed to be a free-enterprise country, you are so full of bureaucratic rules and regulations, it's almost difficult to come and visit you. Of course, we have a much freer life in Sweden.... The main thing about planning is to change the big things. To have the big controls higher up here and the purposes of planning,... then give the greatest opportunity to private enterprise in individual life."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.174
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6108
item Program Number 175

"Salvation, Rock Music, and the New Iconoclasm"

Guests: Courtney, C. C. : Link, Peter.

4 November 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 8
Program details: "Our guests are the authors and stars of Salvation, a rock show advertised and generally thought of," as WFB puts it, "as the successor to Hair." We begin by listening to a few minutes of their work, "at roughly the sound level," according to WFB, "the audience hears it at" in the theater. Mr. Courtney demurs from that description: "The playing of that music at the level at which you hear it in the theater is impossible. Unfortunately, the people at home are sitting there with three-inch speakers on their television sets, due to the desire of the television manufacturers in this country to save as much money as possible to rob you of your needed sound." And so on, through denunciations of hypocrisy regarding sex, the importance of "vibrations" in rock music, and the rest of the kid scene A.D. 1969. Where this show sometimes misses as conversation, it works as illustration.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.175
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6109
item Program Number 176

"The Selling of the President 1968"

Guests: McGinniss, Joe.

10 November 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 9
Program details: Mr. McGinniss, WFB tells us, "dropped his column in June of 1968, intending to do a book on the selling of the President. He asked the Humphrey people if he might tag along, but they said, Hell, no, you can't tag along. The Nixon people were less cautious..." The "selling" in the title refers to the PR tricks used on television: "the image-building, image-changing work," as Mr. McGinniss puts it: "They completely eliminated the Tricky Dick, the loser image, all these bad things that had been hangovers of 1962, and by the time Mr. Nixon went to Miami, I think, it was almost to be coronated, not nominated." One might question, as various reviewers had done, whether Mr. McGinniss had played fair with the Nixon people in presenting his project; but today's discussion proves illuminating on the way we choose our candidates.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.176
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6110
item Program Number 177

"Negotiating for Peace"

Guests: Rostow, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor), 1913- : Moskin, J. Robert.

10 November 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 80 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 10
Program details: "The charge is constantly made," WFB begins-most recently by Norman Cousins in Look magazine-"that the Government of the United States has not pursued opportunities to bring peace in Vietnam through negotiation." Mr. Rostow is willing and more than able to engage the argument that was put forth by Mr. Cousins and is defended here by his editor, Mr. Moskin. ER: "That affair was one of, I don't know, sixty, perhaps seventy-five rabbits that we pursued down every hole. Now, it's unimaginable, I think,... that any American President would miss a bona fide opportunity for peace,...after the experience that President Truman had with Korea, which destroyed his political career ... The temptation, the risk for the future, would be that the President would be tempted to settle for less than true peace ... Now, the episode that was recently written up by Mr. Cousins was one of a great many similar episodes in which a hint would be made to an American official in some remote corner of the world, and we would send officers ... to meet secretly in hotel rooms, and behind potted plants in bazaars, and try to open up a path to negotiation-a path to negotiation which could lead to a peace that was compatible with our treaty commitments. None of them worked."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.177
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6111
item Program Number 178

"Vietnam"

Guests: Cleveland, Harlan.

6 December 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 11
Program details: When Moratorium Day hit the campuses in October 1969, the new president of the University of Hawaii, as WFB relates, "closed down the university at 11:30 and gave a speech recounting, for the first time publicly, his position on Vietnam. We should extricate ourselves, he told his audience, not with deliberate speed but with dedicated dispatch"--which Mr. Cleveland later glosses as "speed that looks as if you mean it." From Mr. Cleveland's point of view, Mr. Nixon's chief problem is "wanting to get as much, squeeze as much out of the negotiation, if there is a negotiation, or out of the mutual de-escalation, if that's the way it works, as he can ... but that's going to be a matter of judgment as you go along, as to how important it is to hang onto that tray in your hand when you're really going to lose the trick anyway." An absorbing discussion, ranging from recent events in Vietnam, back to Korea (WFB: "You don't think we consulted Hammarskjold about it. Can you see MacArthur calling up Hammarskjold and asking for permission for the Inchon landing?"), and forward to the future of Hong Kong.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.178
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6112
item Program Number 179

"Reflections on the Current Scene"

Guests: Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987.

6 December 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 12
Program details: A high-energy conversation ranging from conservatives' views on environmental pollution, to population control in the Philippines, to Middle Americans' embrace of Spiro Agnew, to the Church's understanding that even saints are also sinners. An ominous moment, in the light of developments just a few years away, is Mrs. Luce's working out of her theory of what constitutes greatness in Presidents: "I think there's no evidence whatsoever as of now that President Nixon is or will become a great President. But you know I take a rather simplistic view of what a great man is. I think a great man is always the author of a unique and significant action. So far there is no unique action of which Mr. Nixon is the author."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.179
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U8K
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6113
item Program Number 180

"The Future of the Democratic Party"

Guests: Brown, Edmund G. (Edmund Gerald), 1905-1996.

9 December 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 13
Program details: Mr. Brown, WFB recalls, was dubbed "the giant-killer" when he decisively defeated for the governorship first William Knowland in 1958, then Richard Nixon in 1962; "but then four years later the giant-killer ran into the sheriff of the late, late show, and was himself retired." We begin judiciously enough, with a discussion of the effect the Watts riots and the sit-ins at the University of California had on the 1966 campaign. But then we get to this real eye-opener, on one of Mr. Brown's famous campaign commercials. "I walked in with two little girls and they were obviously six or eight years of age, and I said to them, are you going to vote for me? And they looked at me rather quizzically, and ... as I walked away, I turned around to them and I said, 'Remember, it was an actor that shot Lincoln.' ... Really it was so obviously a facetious remark, and said with a smile, that anyone that had seen the picture would have laughed at it. Before we showed the picture, everybody looked at it, and I thought it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.180
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6114
item Program Number 181

"Why Don't Conservatives Understand?"

Guests: Rapoport, Roger. : Hukari, Harvey H. : Nisker, Wes.

9 December 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 14
Program details: The second installment (see 171) of what will become a regular Firing Line feature: a show where host replaces guests on the firing line. One of the guest-inquisitors in this case is a libertarian conservative; the other two are double-distilled radicals. In reply to Mr. Hukari's question about "how conservatives can escape the vicious stereotype" of being "the son or daughter of a retired Army colonel, combining the unctuousness of Bert Parks with the intellectual depth of Max Rafferty," WFB suggests that "people who are a minority in the intellectual community have got ... to strive harder to insist on the making of proper distinctions." Messrs. Rapoport and Nisker, as young radicals in San Francisco in 1969, don't need to worry about all that. Mr. Rapoport talks about the effort during the last couple of years "to exterminate the Black Panther Party": "I mean,... all of these incidents have happened the same way. The police have surrounded all the headquarters and charged in the same fashion,... and I mean if this started happening to Republican headquarters or Democratic headquarters? I just think-" WFB: "Well, I think any Republican headquarters that has in it Thompson submachine guns and grenades and high-explosive dynamite ought to be charged into, and if in the course of charging in there is resistance and a Republican gets killed, we'll simply have to accept that as one of the costs of doing social business."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.181
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6115
item Program Number 182

"Tariffs"

Guests: Wallich, Henry Christopher, 1914- : Strackbein, O. R. (Oscar Robert), 1900-1993.

18 December 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 15
Program details: Is protectionism the answer to rising unemployment? Our guests strongly disagree, but in the courtliest possible way, in an exceedingly informative discussion of the various types of trade barriers (tariffs, import quotas, internal "turnover taxes" or VATs), how they are applied in different countries, and the effect of different levels of productivity. HW: "The point about wages is this: we pay maybe five times as much per man hour as do the Japanese. We pay two or three times as much as do the Germans, French, Italians. Now, does that ruin us competitively? The answer is we use very little labor per unit of input. And if you restate these wage comparisons, instead of wages paid per hour, in terms of wages paid per unit of output, per slab of steel, or per car, or pair of shoes?" WFB: "Then we do a lot better." ORS: "... Now, Mr. Wallich has just said that there are some industries that are capital intensive, so to speak, where the labor cost is not as high. Well, now, I would like to demolish that theory."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.182
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6116
item Program Number 183

"The Kennedy Years"

Guests: Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006.

18 December 1969

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 16
Program details: Messrs. Buckley and Galbraith had been favorite fencing partners on many platforms, but this was the latter's first appearance on Firing Line, prompted by the publication of Ambassador's Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years. We get the flavor of their style of thrust and parry right from the start (JKG: "Oh, sure, it was a great piece of nonsense, I should- I was greatly tempted to take it out; but once you start improving your record by hindsight-well, you know yourself where it leads, you've done so much of it..." WFB: "Well, I may be guilty of heresies, but I don't remember deserting any of my heresies." JKG: "Oh, yes, yes, Bill-I remember that very good book of yours on The Unmaking of a Mayor, where you deserted your whole conservative doctrine ..."); but there is also serious discussion of the way the State Department bureaucracy works, how a country decides when to intervene abroad, and Mr. Galbraith's exhilarating account of China's border conflict with India that "coincided with the missile crisis in Cuba, and I had this war all to myself for several weeks ... and the effect on a middle-aged intellectual of being able to run a war..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.183
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6117
item Program Number 184

"Agnew and the Media"

Guests: Klein, Herbert G.

6 January 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 17
Program details: Spiro Agnew had, as WFB puts it, "riveted the nation a while ago by charging that those who control the television and news media are a small, endogamous lot who moon their admiration of one another at cocktail parties in New York City and Washington, D.C. It is Mr. Agnew's spectacular charges that Mr. Klein is here to discuss, calmly as ever, because there is nobody in the whole world who is calmer than Mr. Klein." Our guest proceeds to live up to this description, and so there are no fireworks on a topic that had been exploding around the nation. However, he does provide a helpful double perspective, as someone who now represents the Administration but who knows the news media from the inside. HK: "I've heard many of those who reacted hardest say worse things in criticism of the media than Mr. Agnew did. On the other hand, it's like if you go outside of the fraternity and make this type of statement, then it's illegal."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.184
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6118
item Program Number 185

"Dissent and Society"

Guests: Boorstin, Daniel J. (Daniel Joseph), 1914-2004.

6 January 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 18
Program details: Mr. Boorstin, as WFB introduces him, is "superbly documented as a scholar ... but he is also adamant in his denunciation of what one loosely calls the New Left. Indeed one might call him the Spiro Agnew of the Highbrows." What follows is a splendid discussion, rich in detail, of how a community coheres, how America had changed in its perceptions of minorities, and how individuals now feel free "to bollix up the works" in pressing their own demands. One sample from Mr. Boorstin: "I think that if we start with the idea of community then we can easily make a distinction between dissent and disagreement. I define disagreement as the exchange of views over how to obtain the common ends of the community. Dissent I identify ..., through its Latin origin, with a feeling of separateness, the emphasis on that which separates rather than that which unites people. And I think that there has been a tendency to create a cliche, a new cliche in America, which is that it's good for people to feel and emphasize their separateness from all other people; and I think that much of what is glorified under the name of dissent is really the exclamatory expression of the self..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.185
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6119
item Program Number 186

"Skepticism and Disorder"

Guests: Sheen, Fulton J. (Fulton John), 1895-1979.

6 January 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 19
Program details: A superb conversation that ranges from Vietnam and crime in the streets to the beginning of the Cold War and the difficulty many Americans had in believing that the Soviet Union, our recent ally in World War II, wasn't a democracy in the same sense as the United States. One sample: WFB: "Well, but is it always commendable to use restraint, or is restraint sometimes an expression of cowardice or lack of conviction?" FJS: "It can be both.... Take, for example, turning the other cheek. If there are ten men in a line and I preach hate to them and say you must destroy your brother, and one man turns and strikes his neighbor, two strikes three, when will it ever stop? It will stop only at a point where one man turns around and absorbs the evil. In that sense, restraint can absorb evil. From another point of view restraint does not absorb evil; it sometimes may increase it. The crimes certainly on our streets, today, the turn of law by which there is compassion shown more for the mugger than for the mugged, more for the one who does the violence than for the victim-this is a kind of restraint which is not commendable, and which I fear will bring some trouble to our nation."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.186
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6120
item Program Number 187

"The Oppenheimer Case"

Guests: Stern, Philip M.

15 January 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 20
Program details: Mr. Stern believes (a) that J. Robert Oppenheimer got a raw deal, and (b) that our government harmed rather than helped our security by denying itself his services. A rich discussion starting with the security investigations of the early Fifties, but moving back to World War II and the development of the hydrogen bomb, and forward to the "current blacklisting of scientists by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare." Mr. Stern cites the wartime case of Edward Teller, who was almost denied a security clearance because he had relatives in Nazi Germany; Mr. Buckley cites the case of Suez in 1956, where the Soviets found out about the proposed Israeli-French-British invasion through the efforts of one of "these individuals that you simply dismiss as ciphers [but who] are people who change events." PS: "After World War II, when our armies went back in, they tried to find out where the Germans were in their atomic research, and they found that they were two years, at least, behind us, and one scientist tried to find out why. And a cardinal reason was that Germany had done just what we did in the Oppenheimer case ... They had politicalized their science."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.187
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6121
item Program Number 188

"The Mylai Massacre"

Guests: Bennett, John Coleman, 1902- : Frankel, Charles, 1917-

15 January 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 21
Program details: A serious, though sometimes heated, discussion that begins with who bears responsibility for the Mylai massacre (JCB: "Now I do also believe that if you get American troops into a long and indefinite war, going on for years and years in a strange country where they don't understand people, where they can't communicate ... if you search and destroy, and, worst of all, if you are always surrounded by people of whom you can't be sure whether they're your friends or your enemies ... statistically you've got to expect a certain number of people to break loose and do something like this") but goes on to questions such as, Was the attack on Hiroshima launched in cold blood? Where did the word "gook" originate? (CF: "We used it in World War II, against the enemy." WFB: "Did we?" CF: "Well, where I was.... We talked-" WFB: "Surely not you?" CF: "Well, yes, surely me too. If I had said 'Japanese' none of the fellows I was with would know what in the devil I meant") and (from Mr. Frankel) "Aren't both you people sort of forgetting the Hundred Years War?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.188
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6122
item Program Number 189

"Broadcasting and the Public"

Guests: Johnson, Nicholas, 1934-

26 January 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 22
Program details: What business does the FCC have telling broadcasters what to broadcast? Who decides what is in the public interest? At the time of this show, when cable was in its infancy, how did the broadcasting industry differ, from the automobile industry or the cereal industry? Occasional sharp clashes and much good fun. NJ: "In Great Britain there is commercial television service, and there are two channels of BBC. British television has on it the same kind of trash that we do-if anything, they have a wider diversity of trash than we and giv[e] people really a choice of gradations of trashy programs.... But the point is that in addition to that programming, there is also ... a choice, and there is more of a choice every evening on British television than probably on American television in a month." ... WFB: "Well, you see, the paradoxical thing is I really agree with you on practically everything-it pains me to do so-but it seems to me that what you really are is sort of an aristocratic paternalist." NJ: "Gee, that's something I've never thought of myself as ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.189
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6123
item Program Number 190

"Power"

Guests: Berle, Adolf Augustus, 1895-1971.

26 January 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 23
Program details: Mr. Buckley describes his guest as "the last of the great intellectual New Dealers"; his public career had begun at the Paris Peace Conference, and during the New Deal itself he had, among other things, drafted the Securities and Exchange Act. His newest book, Power, was, as WFB puts it, "an attempt to ... decoct from human experience some imperishable laws explaining and indeed governing the uses of power." Serious political theory and lively exchanges-with one of the most telling bits of humor being unintentional, apropos of the Berle Law ("that wherever there is chaos it will always be occupied by power"): WFB: "What about Colombia, for instance?" AB: "It is interesting to note, since ... I crossed the picket line at Columbia myself." WFB: "No, no, I meant the country." Many Firing Line guests speak from earned authority, but here is Mr. Berle explaining his support of Lyndon Johnson's invasion of the Dominican Republic: "It just happens that the Dominican Republic is a republic I know very, very well indeed. I ... drew up the land law for it, in 1924 ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.190
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6124
item Program Number 191

"English and American Audiences"

Guests: Frost, David, 1939 Apr. 7-

11 March 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 81 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 166 : 24
Program details: Mr. Frost, at the age of 28, was one of the best-known figures on both the English and the American airwaves--and presumably also airlines, since he crossed the Atlantic twice a week to maintain his double hegemony. He argues stoutly, and with plausible illustrations, that there really isn't much difference between English and American audiences--despite, as Mr. Buckley puts it,"the expectation that, because of the BBC, there would be in England ... a listening audience that is more sophisticated, more inquisitive, more demanding than the American audience." Not at all, says Mr. Frost. In fact, "I think the picture of there being ... in some curious way ... lower taste or less intelligence in the mass audience in America compared with England is either a ludicrous piece of modesty on the part of Americans or a plot by the East Coast and the West Coast to denigrate the people in the middle of the country." Much about styles of public conversation and interviewing, and a fascinating side-glance at Enoch Powell.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.191
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6125
item Program Number 192

"Public Works"

Guests: Moses, Robert, 1888-1981.

11 March 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 1
Program details: A bracing session with a man who never took "No" for an answer. WFB: "Well, a lot of people are saying about you that ... your impatience with people like John Lindsay is a failure on your part to recognize that historically he is the counterpart of what you were fifty years ago." RM: "No, I don't see anything in that at all. My criticism of John Lindsay is based solely on one thing, that he doesn't get anything done. He just advocates.... Anybody who has any capacity for administration, even on a relatively small scale, like municipal housekeeping, parks, street cleaning, goes along in a car, and he looks at his particular domain, and he passes a place that's dirty, sloppy, obviously isn't well run, and the benches are all torn to pieces, the slats are off, and so forth. He doesn't go into a long disquisition about [Black Panther] trials-" WFB: "Vietnam." RM: "-that kind of thing. He sends for the top man in the borough, and he says, 'The general foreman is out. He lives in the Bronx, send him to Staten Island for the good of the service.' Forty-eight hours, that's all over the place."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.192
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6126
item Program Number 193

"The Idea of The Great Ideas"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

13 March 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 2
Program details: The first Firing Line appearance for Professor Adler, a buoyant thinker and teacher. The "great ideas" get into the discussion, but not separately from the way people are, or should be, introduced to them. Mr. Adler is scathing on the effect our present graduate schools have on undergraduate learning ("the college, instead of being an institution of liberal learning, concerned only to liberate the mind, to discipline it and liberate it,... becomes nothing but a channel, a conduit, into the specializations of the graduate schools." ... "My definition of a good teacher, which I have a hunch you will share, is a person who is himself dedicated to continued general learning.... I know it's kind of trite to say that Socrates was the greatest teacher, but he was. And he was, simply because his teaching was the conduct of an inquiry, in which the students were engaged in the inquiry with him. Now that, it seems to me, is the kind of teaching that should go on in college.") On to Thomas Aquinas, John Dewey, how to help the least able child, and much more.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.193
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFQYM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6127
item Program Number 194

"The New Realism in Movies"

Guests: Bloomfield, George. : Kramer, Larry. : Kastle, Leonard.

13 March 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 3
Program details: Our guests' new films, WFB begins by saying, "have in common a realistic, not to say photographic, attitude towards crime and sex." We begin with a clip from each, with its writer/director setting the scene, and then move on to the discussion. Mr. Kramer has a wonderful story about how he had tried to enlist F. R. Leavis's interest in his version of Women in Love and what the great man did to him; Mr. Kastle tells of the different ways a work in progress looks depending on your perspective: "When I wrote the screenplay in this film there were many scenes that I felt were right. And a lot of it involved nudity. And when I became the director of the film, I had a terrible fight with myself. The writer is always supposed to fight with the director, and I was-I had a constant battle ... And I found that what I was doing was I was taking out things that really happened [in the real-life story on which his film was based] in order to make the movie more truthful....It's a very difficult paradox."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.194
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6128
item Program Number 195

"ROTC"

Guests: Germino, Dante L. : Bierman, Arthur.

2 April 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 4
Program details: In the spring of 1969, WFB begins, "all of a sudden students and faculty discovered that ROTC was somehow intellectually unfashionable. Their discovery had nothing whatever to do with the Vietnam War, you understand, merely a coincidence." It turns out that there are non-Vietnam-related reasons to oppose ROTC-reasons that Mr. Germino is on record as having adduced for a different government program long before we were involved in Vietnam, having to do with "extramural control" and the fact that "the courses are designed for recruitment and training for a single employer"-i.e., they are not academic in the strict sense of the word. Mr. Bierman adds that "I personally have, for example, fought not a very successful battle ... trying to remove credit for physical education at my college, precisely for the reason that you mention, in that I don't think it's an academic subject either." But more important to him is the question "whether one believes that the university should be an agent or an arm of whatever institution pays the bill. Or whether you think that it should in fact try to fight for a certain kind of autonomy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.195
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6129
item Program Number 196

"National Review"

Guests: DuBois, L. Clayton (Larry Clayton) : Leonard, John, 1939- : Cheshire, William.

2 April 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 5
Program details: The third of the occasional programs in which the guests question the host of Firing Line (see 171). The idea this time is to examine current American conservatism by looking at National Review, of which Mr. Buckley is the founder and Editor. We start with the magazine's position on the Nixon Justice Department and individual liberties, the concerns of the young, the use of obscenity-and then the trill: WFB: "I think a conservative is somebody who has a sense of perspective ... I remember a story about Victor Borge. He was 12 years old, and he was a child prodigy, so the Royal Copenhagen Symphony Orchestra put him on to play a Schumann concerto, and .. .towards the end of the first movement, he was doing a trill, and the entire orchestra of 125 people was completely silent, and 3,000 people were completely silent, and all of a sudden he was just carried away by how ludicrous it was to play a trill while everybody was just sort of sitting, so he just went on and on, and they broke out laughing. Now, occasionally, when one finds oneself being very solemn, I think of Victor Borge, and I think it is a part of the conservative view of things to understand, for instance, that this isn't the terminal experience of any human being, we're here at the pleasure of God, and moving, one hopes, into far greener pastures, and that under the circumstances, one must be careful not to become completely obsessed." LCD: "Trill now and then." WFB: "You've got to trill now and then, yeah, that's right; or recognize the trill."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.196
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6130
item Program Number 197

"The Uses of Radicalism"

Guests: Jacobs, Paul, 1918-

10 April 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 6
Program details: Mr. Jacobs is by his own and most other people's reckoning a radical, and part of the purpose of this show is to let him tell us how a radical approaches things, which he does with some panache. "I would distinguish myself from liberals and conservatives somewhat in this fashion: the liberal ... will concede the existence of the problem, and his response to it is to go: Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk ... He says yes, the problem is there and it's pretty terrible, and we probably ought to do something about it ... The conservative ...says, 'What problem? What problem? The only thing that's wrong is that there are people who don't understand the true nature of American society and how great it is and how it's moving on an upward trend all the time.' And so what the radical seeks to do, not always successfully, is to search for the roots of the problem ... it's as if you had a sick patient and the doctors were to say to him, 'Yes, you're sick, I think aspirin will take care of you,' when in fact what's needed is open-heart surgery." And on to the history of race relations in America, and why students in Santa Barbara burned down a bank in protest against their university-supplied housing, and why people like Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. aren't as important as conservatives think they are.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.197
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6131
item Program Number 198

"Order and the Law"

Guests: Garry, Charles.

10 April 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 7
Program details: WFB begins by quoting the celebrated exchange when Bobby Seale had asked his prospective lawyer in the Chicago 8 trial, "Are you as good as Perry Mason?" Mr. Garry had replied, "I'm better. Both of us get our clients off, but Mason's are innocent." On to that trial itself, where some of the defendants' disruptions were in protest at Judge Hoffman's refusal to grant a delay until Mr. Garry had recovered from gall-bladder surgery. CG: "Oh, I think the defendants were exceedingly well behaved." WFB: "Okay. There was one defendant who shouted at Judge Hoffman for having pictures on his wall of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, because he said they were slave owners. Now was that-" CG: "Do you know why he said that?" WB: "Well, just tell me why he said it." CG: "That was Bobby Seale who said that.... Do you know why he said that?" WFB: "Why?" CG: "Because the judge said that he was not a racist himself, and stated his own background ... to satisfy the old doctrine that some of my best friends are Negroes, and Bobby Scale said, How can you say that you're not a racist when in back of you you have all of the racist so-called fathers of our country?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.198
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6132
item Program Number 199

"My Several Lives"

Guests: Conant, James Bryant, 1893-1978.

23 April 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 8
Program details: Mr. Conant was one of the country's leading educational theorists and had been a frequent target of the young Bill Buckley in the Fifties. Now, in the turmoil of the Vietnam era, host and guest are pretty much on the same side of the barricades. JBC: "You know, I feel, if I may say so, a little bit aggrieved at the way Fate has treated me on this question of education beyond the high school. I'm a little like a cavalry officer who got ready to write his memoirs just about the time they mechanized the cavalry." Some time is devoted to the two men's old bone of contention (whether private, and particularly Church-related, schools have a place in American society), but much more is spent on a wonderfully rich exploration of morality and bravery in warfare. JBC: "I said that I didn't see that there was any difference, really, between attacking a person with poison gas, which would attack his lungs and face, perhaps, and ripping him apart with machine guns or fragments of shell.... Once you were in a war, I don't think that you had more or less moral methods of carrying on a war, and this was very true about all of this terrible bombing ... in World War II."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.199
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6133
item Program Number 200

"The New South"

Guests: McKeithen, John J. (John Julian), 1918-

23 April 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 9
Program details: Supreme Court decisions of recent years had led to massive busing-and massive resistance, in terms of "white flight" and refusal to support school bonds. Governor McKeithen, as WFB puts it, "argues ... not the virtues of compulsory segregation, but the necessity of accepting de facto segregation.... [He] persuaded the legislature to pass a law in every way identical to a law passed in New York State in 1969, even, as Governor McKeithen likes to point out, to the point of duplicating a grammatical mistake in that law, in order to dramatize that he doesn't want anything more than what New Yorkers are treating themselves to." Integrationists had impugned Governor McKeithen's motives; on this show he argues, with much supporting detail, "I think it's going to take time. I think eventually, eventually the predominant Negro school, the predominant white school, I think will come to an end in this country. But I don't think we should force children ... into something that their parents won't do themselves."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.200
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6134
item Program Number 201

"Hunger and the Government"

Guests: McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922-

5 May 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 10
Program details: Senator McGovern--who had been a leader in the anti-Johnson, anti-Humphrey forces in 1968, and who had already begun running for the 1972 Democratic nomination--was probably best known for his opposition to the Vietnam War; but his other big issue was, as WFB puts it, "the inadequacy of our war against poverty, more concretely against hunger." This proves to be a fast-moving and informative exchange, beginning with the Soviet Union's routine agricultural disasters and going on to our own "paradox," as Mr. McGovern puts it, which is hunger "at a time when we can produce more than enough to take care of all of our people." Specifics come from both the supply side (as WFB puts it, we "send great gobs of money to rich farmers, like Senator Eastland,... paying them not to grow food") and the demand side (Senator McGovern quotes "studies show[ing] that poor people, dollar for dollar, do a better job of buying what they ought to eat than the rich do").
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.201
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6135
item Program Number 202

"The Southern Strategy"

Guests: Thurmond, Strom, 1902-2003.

5 May 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 82 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 11
Program details: Strom Thurmond had come over from the Democratic Party in time for the 1968 election. He was still, as WFB puts it, "widely acknowledged as among the two or three principal spokesmen for the South. He is also widely applauded and widely reviled for having been a major factor in the victory of Richard Nixon as President," having helped persuade fellow conservative Southerners to vote for Mr. Nixon rather than George Wallace. There is some talk here about that election, but more of this often pungent discussion focuses on the South itself and the way, according to Senator Thurmond, it is misrepresented in the North, with some reminders of how he earned his standing to speak: "I remember when I was governor [in the late Forties], anybody who wanted to vote regardless of color could vote. And we put on campaigns to provide better educational facilities for the black children. And at one point I had to have some white men arrested for lynching a Negro in South Carolina, brought them to trial. I was told it was the first time in the history of the state that had been done. Well, it probably wasn't a pleasant thing, maybe, where a state is predominated by whites, ruled by whites, to do that, but it's the only right thing to do, is to give equal justice to all people."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.202
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6136
item Program Number 203

"The Hess Story"

Guests: Hess, Wolf Rudiger. : Marreco, Anthony.

8 May 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 12
Program details: As WFB sketches the background, "it was 1941; France had been conquered, and Hitler and Stalin had signed their non-aggression pact. Suddenly and secretly, Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess flew to Britain and parachuted down, intending personally to negotiate a peace between England and Germany. For his pains, Hitler sentenced him to death in absentia, Churchill put him in jail, and the Nuremberg court, five years later, sentenced him to life imprisonment." Twenty-four years after that, he remained the only prisoner in Spandau--the next to last having been released in 1966. Today's conversation is halting at times, owing to Wolf Hess's imperfect English, but illuminating on the general question of war crimes, and often moving on the specific case. AM: "I remember your father today as a very straightforward and a very simple man. And I think you'll agree, not a man of tremendous intellect. And I have always believed that it was the planned attack on Russia [by Germany] that completely unbalanced him. And he then searched back in his memory; he quite wrongly thought the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had met skiing ... before the war, was an important figure in England. As you know, dukes aren't, but your father thought he was, and he flew to Scotland in a brave, rash attempt to contact the Duke of Hamilton and negotiate a peace."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.203
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6137
item Program Number 204

"English Youth"

Guests: Roth, Peter M. : Thorpe-Young, Geoffrey A. : Gibson, Christopher. : Riddell, Peter. : Evans, Roger. : Standlen, Nicholas.

8 May 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 13
Program details: The first three young men, top students at one of England's top public schools, evince little interest in the world affairs convulsing campuses around the world; but the three university men raise the energy level with their crackling disagreements about whether there can ever be equality in England without a radical revamping of the school system. NS: "... this is why it is crucial that you should not segregate children in education at an early age, or indeed at any age, because you are thereby saying,... If you pass this exam [at age eleven], you are going to get a good education, and if you fail it, you are going to get a bad one." RE: "... If you happen to be born in a neighborhood comprehensive which is a bad school, you have no opportunity whatsoever under Mr. Standlen's system; under the old English system, if you had that spark of genius in you, you could rise."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.204
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6138
item Program Number 205

"The British Abortion Act--Two Years Later"

Guests: St. John-Stevas, Norman. : Steel, David, Sir, 1938-

9 May 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 14
Program details: Mr. Steel had two years earlier, against an opposition led by Mr. Stevas, guided through the House of Commons the Abortion Reform Act, criticisms of which, Mr. Buckley suggests, are "as relevant in America as in England." The audience may feel a bit left out at the beginning, when Messrs. Stevas and Steel wrangle over who did or didn't draft or redraft the "conscience clause" in that act (which states that doctors and nurses are not obliged to perform abortions), but eventually we get to the point at issue: "The really bad effects of the Abortion Act, you know," says Mr. Stevas, "were that it has made people abortion minded. That's what I object to. I freely can see that there's a case for carrying out an abortion in very difficult circumstances; but now it's the first option that people think of. We have this crazy social policy, in which it's very difficult to get family planning out of the National Health Service, and abortion is made easy. And you get an extraordinary frame of discourse by people who seem to [believe] the worst disaster that could overtake a woman is pregnancy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.205
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6139
item Program Number 206

"The Road Back"

Guests: Braine, John. : Amis, Kingsley.

9 May 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 15
Program details: The road back from socialism, that is. Both guests had been Angry Young Men. "To be an Angry Young Man," WFB explains, "you had to be young, angry about the insufficiency of Western institutions, implacably anti-American, easy-going on the Soviet Union, and talented." Have Messrs. Braine and Amis benefited materially from their apostasy? JB: "I've never had a thing, not even a free ticket to Lord's." The Left, Mr. Braine continues, "never plays fair, and the trouble with the Right is that it does, because we have an entirely different set of values. That's why we're such fools, and that's why the Left is forging ahead of us." ... KA: "Anybody ... might, for arguable reasons, want the American involvement in Southeast Asia to stop, as quickly as possible. That seems to me tenable. I don't agree with it, but it's arguable. But to support the other side, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, to go around crying Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, seems to me reprehensible on a very broad front, morally and intellectually and politically, in the sense that it makes political nonsense."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.206
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6140
item Program Number 207

"Politics and the Media"

Guests: Shakespeare, Frank.

9 June 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 16
Program details: There are few fireworks in this meeting between two old comrades in arms. However, they have a solid and productive discussion about how our information agencies operate, how they might be more effective, and--in the light of 250 State Department officials signing a protest to the Secretary of State over the Cambodian incursion--what are the different obligations of the political appointee and the career Foreign Service Officer. FS: "If a decision was undertaken by the President, which I felt very deeply in my heart and in my mind was wrong for the American people and would wreak lasting damage on the country, I think that I really would have no alternative except to resign and then publicly oppose the decision." For the career Foreign Service Officer, on the other hand, "over the next ten or twenty years there are certain to be a number of policies in any Administration that privately as a citizen he would oppose. He must support those, to the best of his ability, with the same degree of effort and professionalism as he would those he happens to support."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.207
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6141
item Program Number 208

"The Escalation of Student Power"

Guests: Kelman, Steven. : Klein, Alexander, 1918-

9 June 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 17
Program details: To discuss, as WFB puts it, "the causes and directions of student protest," we have a veteran observer and a young man who has had recent experience with the Students for a Democratic Society, "some of whose members, with only a perfunctory trace of sadness, hav[e] advised Mr. Kelman that shortly after the consummation of their revolution, it will prove quite necessary to shoot Mr. Kelman or to hang him." The conversation frequently changes direction, since it is Mr. Klein's thesis that "SDS and National Review and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are all symptoms of a failure to really come to grips with the problems of America," whereas Mr. Kelman concentrates on SDS: "I tried above all to, instead of attributing motives, to analyze why their ideology degenerated in the way it did. Why an organization which started off saying, 'Let the people decide,' and which started off seeking certain things that I would feel are improvements in American society, degenerated into an organization whose model for America would be something like Mao Tse-tung's China."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.208
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6142
item Program Number 209

"The Twilight of the Presidency"

Guests: Reedy, George E., 1917-

1 July 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 18
Program details: A profound discussion of the Presidency, prompted by Mr. Reedy' s own experiences at Lyndon Johnson's right hand, but going back to the founding of our country ("They had no model for government other than that of monarchy.... In those days, while there was a British Parliament, ... the Prime Minister's] primary responsibility was still to the King"). GR: "When I say that [the President] loses contact [with the people], I do not mean that he is cut off from information. No.... In fact, he's smothered in information ... What I mean is that the man is not living in an environment of adversary personal relationships, which is something that is essential for maintaining psychic health.... Most of us go through the day plagued by unreasonable people - by bill collectors - " WFB: "Wives." GR: "by wives, who burst into tears because you've forgotten an anniversary ... by people that are quite likely to punch you in the nose when you step on their toe ... None of these things are pleasant. I don't regard exercise as pleasant, either. But, nevertheless, I think they are essential to an understanding of our fellow human beings, and this a President does not have."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.209
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6143
item Program Number 210

"The Stock Market--Ups and Downs"

Guests: Smith, Adam, 1930- : Levy, Leon, 1929-

1 July 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 19
Program details: Does the stock market go up and down because of real events in the outside world--government actions, the level of inflation, the earning power of particular companies at a particular time--or does it have more to do with the emotional reactions of investors? As of July 1970, the stock market, which had been strong in the early 1960s, had been lagging inflation for more than four years; as we know in hindsight, not until 1981 would the Dow-Jones Industrial Average match the high it had reached in 1965. This show offers a good, solid discussion of an elusive topic. AS: "And no matter what the next thing is that happens in the market-and there will be a next thing-it too is born to die. The day it starts to happen, its days are numbered. You simply don't know how many days there are."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.210
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6144
item Program Number 211

"Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom"

Guests: Burns, James MacGregor.

28 August 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 20
Program details: A rich discussion with a man who is not being ironical in the title of his book (although he admits that there are ironies in it) and who is capable of holding together both the sweep and the details of World War II. In Mr. Burns's view, for example, "the decision, made for military reasons, not to open a second front in Europe in 1942 but rather to wait until 1944 wound up virtually guaranteeing Soviet hegemony over Central Europe, because by the time of Yalta we desperately wanted Soviet assistance in tackling Japan.... Russia had us just the other way around in Asia-that is, we wanted them to create the Second Front... on the mainland in Asia, in order to cut down on our casualties. And what Roosevelt did again, in his typically opportunistic, short-run, realistic way, if you will, is to pay the price [at Yalta] to get Soviet assistance against Japan, after we had failed to come to Russia's assistance in Europe."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.211
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6145
item Program Number 212

"International Trade"

Guests: Stans, Maurice H., 1908-

28 August 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 167 : 21
Program details: As Secretary of Commerce, Mr. Stans was involved, among many other things, with world trade--specifically, at this time, with trying to persuade Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to stop flooding our country with cheap textiles, and trying to persuade Congress not to respond to domestic pressure by raising tariffs and imposing import quotas. The discussion becomes quite technical at times--in terms of balance of payments and what happens to a dollar that a foreigner earns by selling goods here--but host and guest never lose us as they explore the question, as Mr. Buckley phrases it, "Why wouldn't a policy of unilateral free trade [i.e., not imposing tariffs even if others do] ultimately work out economically?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.212
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6146
item Program Number 213

"Marijuana and the Law"

Guests: Kaplan, John, 1929-1989. : Kleindienst, Richard G., 1923-

3 September 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 1
Program details: The second Firing Line discussion of marijuana, this one an often exciting duel between a committed drug warrior and a former public prosecutor who, after working on a panel to recommend new drug legislation in California, reversed his position and came out for legalization of marijuana, on the analogy of repeal of Prohibition. Mr. Buckley starts out by asking whether "... it is possible to discuss marijuana and the law without arriving at any fixed conclusions on how harmful marijuana is." Mr. Kleindienst's first reaction is Yes; but as soon as Mr. Kaplan states that the enormous cost of criminalizing marijuana use could be justified only "if the drug were as bad as some people said it was," it becomes apparent that, in Mr. Kleindienst's words, "You have to talk about the two at the same time,... because if you took my theory that it is dangerous, then it would ... dissipate the validity of his theory."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.213
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6147
item Program Number 214

"How Does It Look for the Dollar?"

Guests: Browne, Harry, 1933- : Janeway, Eliot.

3 September 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 ; 2
Program details: Mr. Browne starts off by explaining that he isn't "advocating devaluation--he is simply looking at the world as it is" and saying that, "as an act of economic desperation," our government will have to "renege on their promise to foreign governments to pay one ounce of gold for every $35 turned in at the Treasury." (The Nixon Administration did so on August 15, 1971.) Mr. Janeway replies engagingly: "Frankly, I find myself a bit off balance being out flanked on the pessimistic side;... they pun on my name all the time and call me Calamity Janeway, and I really regard myself as the last optimist." And we're off on a high-energy discussion of the differences between domestic and international policies, or, as Mr. Janeway puts it, "the hamburger dollar available to us nationals within the sovereignty here [as against] the international dollar."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.214
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFR6E
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6148
item Program Number 215

"The Pueblo Story"

Guests: Bucher, Lloyd M., 1927-

10 September 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 3
Program details: In January of 1968 North Korean boats surrounded the Pueblo, an American intelligence ship sailing in international waters, forced it to come into port in North Korea and imprisoned the crew for 11 months, and let them go only after the Johnson Administration apologized, as WFB puts it, "for doing something the United States Government wasn't guilty of doing." The often moving discussion with this man who had narrowly avoided a court martial for surrendering his ship ranges from the details of the Pueblo's, capture to general questions of intelligence collecting, to, as WFB puts it, "the business that you can only give your name, rank, and serial number" and whether that ought to be changed. LB: "I would hesitate at the present time to discuss actual recommendations ..." WFB: "Why would you be hesitant?" LB: "Because there are several hundred POWs over there in North Vietnam right now who are trying to live up to it, and with a statement that might be made by myself or any other military person, it would be used against those kids, and I wouldn't want to contribute to the problems they've already got."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.215
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6149
item Program Number 216

"The Supreme Court, Rule of Law, and Academic Freedom"

Guests: Fellman, David, 1907- : Pritchett, C. Herman (Charles Herman), 1907- : Kort, Fred.

10 September 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 83 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 4
Program details: Our three guests were all attending the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, whose more traditional members were engaged in fending off a takeover by something called "A Caucus for a New Political Science." As Mr. Pritchett explains, "I think the initial concept of a professional association ... was that this was a place where you came to meet your colleagues, talk about ... our professional interests, our teaching problems, our research problems." But now the association, like the campuses where its members teach, has been politicized, and, as Mr. Fellman (whose campus had been the scene of a fatal bombing at a research laboratory) puts it, "we really haven't gotten accustomed to using the skills necessary to deal with the kind of problems the association now has." An illuminating discussion among men fighting to maintain standards of intellectual discipline against the bomb throwers.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.216
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6150
item Program Number 217

"Why Are They Afraid of Bach?"

Guests: Tureck, Rosalyn.

28 September 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 5
Program details: A lovely show with the keyboard artist who, according to one reviewer, is "to Bach what Marilyn Monroe is to movies." The question before the house is whether young rock fans can be shown that Bach is not dry and academic; Miss Tureck illustrates her points superbly at the keyboard, but, as her engagement with the young panelists demonstrates, she is as much at home with words as with her own craft. Miss Tureck, to panelist Phil Ardery: "I would like to ask you a question, and that is, do you feel when you hear a composer playing his own music, do you feel he's creating it on the spot? Is this the excitement that you feel from him?" PA: "It's what I feel when I go to concerts. I go to a Grateful Dead concert and look at Jerry Garcia improvise on his guitar and listen with my ears to the sounds he gets and it's different every time I hear him ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.217
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6151
item Program Number 218

"The Middle East"

Guests: Eban, Abba Solomon, 1915-2002.

28 September 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 6
Program details: Minutes before the taping began, a messenger arrived to tell Mr. Eban that Gamal Abdel Nasser-Israel's principal tormentor for 14 years-was dead. As Mr. Buckley puts it, "Such is the pace of events in the Middle East that no conversation held about it on Monday appears to be relevant on Tuesday ... On the other hand, the causes of the tension do not change from day to day." The refugee camps are the main focus of discussion with this man who had made an indelible imprint with his internationally televised UN speech on the occasion of the Six-Day War. AE: "We have no guilt ... for that problem; not at all. We have responsibility with the rest of the international community. So, I am responsible in the measure that you are responsible, and we must all do what we can. But guilt, certainly not. Guilt lies with the governments who declared that war" (against Israel, in 1948).
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.218
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6152
item Program Number 219

"Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era"

Guests: Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., 1928-

8 October 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 7
Program details: "Technetronic" being, as WFB explains, "a simple agglutination of 'technological' and 'electronic'." It is Mr. Brzezinski's thesis that the industrial age, "which, itself, produced many strains and tensions, did lead after a time to a number of coherent ideas as to how, more or less, to organize society, how to conduct international politics." But now, as we enter the "technetronic age," the new phenomena-but especially "the impact of modern communications, of modern means of calculations, of modern means of interacting"-have led to the breakdown of "established values, established institutions." And so we're off on a rich and, as it turns out, prophetic discussion of this "messy, congested, chaotic, fragmented, barely structured, partially orderly, partially disorderly" transition.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.219
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6153
item Program Number 220

"Chile and the Future of South America"

Guests: Geyer, Georgie Anne, 1935- : Rodman, Selden, 1909-

8 October 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 8
Program details: Chile, as Mr. Buckley sets the scene, is "in the news as perhaps the first state that will have voted itself into Communism. Mr. Allende is designated as the instrument for the scheduled totalitarianization of the state." Why Chile? Why this country where just six years earlier, as Miss Geyer tells it, "when Frei was elected ... there was a tremendously heady atmosphere ... a spontaneous outpouring of simple joy and relief on the part of the Chilean people that somehow they had voted for a reformist government without a Marxist government"? This proves to be an extremely rich discussion with two close observers of Latin America, explaining such matters as why there has to be, in Miss Geyer's phrase, "a conscious redistribution of wealth": "Largely because of the Spanish characteristics ... You have an economic system that is only an extension of family groups.... There is not much way for the aggressive young man to work in because he can't get credit; the banks are controlled by one family group-the credit goes to the people of that family."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.220
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6154
item Program Number 221

"Africa and Colonialism"

Guests: Huxley, Elspeth Joscelin Grant, 1907-1997.

20 October 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 9
Program details: Mrs. Huxley, who had been raised in Kenya, was highly regarded as an observer of her own country and of Africa generally. This fascinating conversation explores the whole subject of decolonialization, including the limitations of Western democracy in a region accustomed to other methods of decision-making, and the question of how a colonial power should go about letting go. EH: "There does come a point when you've got to choose. Either you say, 'We'll wait for an ideal situation, when more people have had time to graduate from universities and there are more skilled people equipped to takeover the reins of government.' You can do this. Or you can say, 'That is worse...because it involves shooting a lot of people.' Then there is the question of any kind of future based on good will. If you leave in an atmosphere of bloodshed and violence, you can't expect to attain what you hope to be a commonwealth."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.221
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VGGY7M
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6155
item Program Number 222

"Britain's Most Controversial MP"

Guests: Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998.

20 October 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 10
Program details: "Since last appearing on this program," Mr. Buckley begins, "Enoch Powell has made fresh-and very bitter-enemies.... [He] repeated his warnings that England would be overwhelmed by colored immigrants and added the suggestion that subversive forces in England were arguing subtly for an end to the British way of life." And we're off on a glorious ride with Britain's vieillard terrible. WFB: "Why do they say about you that you have become the McCarthyite? ..." EP: "I never understand-" WFB: "Did you think to ask?" EP: "I never understand these American- I didn't ask Anthony Lewis, no; I wouldn't touch him with a barge pole." WFB: "Would you touch the editors of the Guardian, or the Telegraph and the Times, with a barge pole?" EP: "I don't think the Telegraph probably applies this expression to me. The Times, as you probably know, has become our leading Maoist daily. And so you go to the Times in order to find examples of the very things I'm talking about." WFB: "Are you using a metaphor?" EP: "Why no. No, I'm quite serious. Indeed, perhaps-" WFB: "Is one of your fields of expertise the libel law? I hope?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.222
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6156
item Program Number 223

"In Defense of Practical Socialism"

Guests: Crossman, R. H. S. (Richard Howard Stafford), 1907-1974.

21 October 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 11
Program details: A splendid session with the man regarded, as WFB puts it, "as the most reliable exegete of practical socialism, if one will permit the oxymoron." The discussion begins with the Wilson government's failure to reduce, as Mr. Grossman puts it, "the gap between the standard of living of the poor and the not-so-poor," given other problems such as the balance of payments; and goes back and forth between the practical and the theoretical. WFB: "What do you make of the criticism ... that socialism is in a sense an exercise in utopianism, and the balance of payments, mutatis mutandis, is always going to stand in the way of executing socialism. If it isn't that, it's going to be inflation, or it's going to be a lack of-" RC: "Yes. Well, you put it that way; I'll put it another way. I think socialism is the belief in the impossible. But then, you see, every good ideal is a belief in the impossible. Remember when he said, 'Credo quia impossibile'-Tertullian, the Christian, he said, 'I believe because it is impossible.' Now this is something I've always thought was the essential about a radical."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.223
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6157
item Program Number 224

"Three British Journalists Question WFB"

Guests: Palmer, John, 1930- : Steele, Jonathan. : Malcolm, Derrick.

21 October 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 12
Program details: Another of the approximately half-yearly occasions (see Firing Line 171 for background) when the tables are turned and the guests question their host. Our three questioners this time are all associated with the paper that, as WFB puts it, "is called, according as you sympathize with it or not, a great newspaper or a roving assassin at the service of socialists anywhere." Rapiers flash as we go from the prerogatives of the state to the politics of the American establishment to the Vietnam War. WFB: "Now, if you want to move from considerations of politics to considerations of ethics, I'm prepared to do so. But ring a bell and say we're moving from one area to another." JP: 'They have no relationship with each other in your field?" WFB: "Not in the view in which-not when I talk to adults. When I talk to adults and I say to them, 'The state has the right to defend its independence,' I don't expect that they will say, 'Well, does that mean they have the right to eat children?'"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.224
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6158
item Program Number 225

"Desegregation: How Far Should the Government Go?"

Guests: Leonard, Jerris.

30 November 1970

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 13
Program details: In practice, what Mr. Leonard's title means is Assistant Attorney General in charge of desegregating Southern schools-and, as WFB puts it, "in applying himself to a program of rigid integration, he has made many enemies," the more so because this is not what Southern voters expected of the Nixon Administration. The hour at first bogs down a little in hypotheticals, but we then get to a productive discussion of dual school systems versus de facto segregation, of racial balance versus simple desegregation, and of the beginnings of affirmative action. WFB: "Why should you be puzzled by what the Supreme Court would say? Is the Supreme Court that much of an enigma?" JL: "You asked the question. I didn't. I'm not puzzled. I'm sure-" WFB: "Suppose I were President of the United States and I called you and said, 'Mr. Leonard, here we've got a situation in which everybody who is black elected to go to this school, and everybody who is white elected to go to this one, tell me, since you are in charge of these matters, is that legal?' Would you say, 'God knows, Mr. President. It depends on what side of the bed the Supreme Court woke up today'?" JL: "No. I think I would have to say that based on decisions and language that the Court has used in the past, it is likely that the Court would not accept that as being constitutional."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.226
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6160
item Program Number 226

"What Is the Future of Catholic Education?"

Guests: Baker, Kenneth, S. J. : McCormack, Elizabeth J.

30 November 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 14
Program details: While this absorbing discussion keeps opening out into broader issues, the central point is money and control: i.e., how can a school be governed, and what can it teach, and still be eligible for state funds? WFB: "What about the teaching of religion? Do you do that with intent to proselytize?" KB: "Well, I've been a theology teacher for a number of years, and I don't think I've ever taught theology on the basis of proselytizing. Theology is basically, going back to St. Augustine-he called it, 'faith seeking understanding.' ..." EM: "If it's taught as an academic discipline, rather than in a pastoral sense-" WFB: "Would, say, Jonathan Edwards have been qualified to teach in your college?" EM: "I think he would." WFB: "And would Martin Luther? ... Or was he too hortatory?" EM: "I was never in a class of his."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.227
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6161
item Program Number 227

"The Vice President's Speeches"

Guests: Agnew, Spiro T., 1918-1996.

8 December 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 15
Program details: To WFB's opening question--"I should like to begin by asking Mr. Agnew what is his reply to the most frequent criticism leveled against him, namely that he is dividing the country"--Mr. Agnew begins with the fairly obvious but usually unnoticed point that our politics is basically "an adversary system, and there isn't any such thing as a divisive aspect to campaigning over and above the natural divisions that result in a campaign" and then goes on to the more subtle point that when we try to "avoid ... indicating our differences" we wind up not "solv[ing] any problems; people walk away from each other thinking they're in agreement, only to find they're really not." And we're off on the dishonesty of the press, the difficulty with political labels, and the strange new rhetoric of Teddy Kennedy.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.228
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6162
item Program Number 228

"A Dialogue with Young Americans for Freedom"

Guests: Young Americans for Freedom.

8 December 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 16
Program details: "A rather unconventional Firing Line" as WFB introduces it, in which the studio audience from the preceding show--made up heavily though not entirely of members of YAF--is given the floor. Topics range from the radicalism of Triumph (a Catholic magazine run by a sister and brother-in-law of Mr. Buckley's), to Chiang Kai-shek's failure to return triumphantly to Mainland China, to WFB's failure to criticize the Nixon Administration as roundly as he might have criticized a Humphrey Administration for similar actions. WFB: "I once said, if the whole country was engaged in a debate over whether we should demunicipalize the garbage collection, we wouldn't be talking about whether to socialize medicine. By the same token, I suppose, if the whole country were engaged in a debate on how exactly to emulate the Christian way, we wouldn't have to worry about things like world wars."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.229
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6163
item Program Number 229

"Radical Chic"

Guests: Wolfe, Tom.

17 December 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 17
Program details: Tom Wolfe--one of the leading exponents of the New Journalism, wedding novelistic to journalistic skill--was now, with his white suits and his dramatic manner, becoming a prominent public figure. Radical Chic, describing Leonard Bernstein's party for the Black Panthers, had roused the ire of the bien-pensants, led by Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books. Mr. Buckley starts by asking, "Now when you read that passage [of Mr. Epstein's] did you feel guilty about how you handled the situation?" TW: "... He really wanted to establish the fact that somehow I was in league with...I believe he said Spiro Agnew, the Kent State grand jury ... No, somehow I couldn't bring myself to feel very guilty after reading that." And we're off on a joyous whirl through the current scene and the writer's craft.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.230
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707IBG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6164
item Program Number 230

"Vietnamization"

Guests: Pike, Douglas Eugene, 1924- : Salisbury, Harrison Evans, 1908-

17 December 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 18
Program details: The Nixon Administration had announced the policy of Vietnamization"--turning the fighting over to our South Vietnamese allies--but recently, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "we had resumed the bombing, "in retaliation, said Washington, against the shooting down of an American reconnaissance plane; actually, others have said, because the accumulation of men and materiel preparing to move down through the Ho Chi Minh Trail into South Vietnam threatens the entire concept of Vietnamization." Mr. Pike is a leading student of the Vietcong; Mr. Salisbury had notably reported from North Vietnam. They are not always prescient (DP: "To me this is largely academic now because in my opinion it just isn't in the cards for the Communists to win decisively") but are nonetheless deeply informative. HS: "My own feeling has always been that ... regardless of whether we should be there or shouldn't 't be there ... if the time comes when we're going to get out, we have a certain responsibility, perhaps you might say to humanity, to do it in an orderly fashion and to leave behind us the best possible ingredients which could be used in that part of the world towards stability and a better kind of social and political structure."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.231
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6165
item Program Number 231

"The Karl Hess Phenomenon"

Guests: Hess, Karl, 1923-1994.

6 January 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 19
Program details: Mr. Hess, a longtime conservative and Republican, had split with both movements, declaring himself, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "first a libertarian thoroughly out of sympathy with the large role given to government in modern society, and finally an anarchist-the exact meaning of which we shall explore today." Although Messrs. Buckley and Hess had publicly used each other as bad examples, today's conversation is never bad-tempered. KH: "Hermits never socially organized. Ayn Rand never socially organized, perhaps. But anarchists ... left-wing or right-wing anarchists, so far as I know, would all agree that the point is people can socially organize volitionally; they do not need to live under established, institutionalized, self-perpetuating institutions of power." WFB: "Well, the trouble with your explanation of it, as I understand it, is that it sounds-" KH: "Sounds good, doesn't it?" WFB: "Yeah, it sounds very good. The trouble is-" KH: "Now that we've made a decision on that-" WFB: "-it simply doesn't take into account certain rather obtrusive human data."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.232
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6166
item Program Number 232

"Amnesty and Counterrevolution"

Guests: Benenson, Mark. : Cherne, Leo, 1912-

6 January 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 20
Program details: Mr. Benenson's organization assists people who are imprisoned for matters of conscience; Mr. Cherne's assists people who have managed to escape from totalitarian countries. An often profound discussion of how, theoretically and practically, people who seek to help the oppressed go about their work. LC: "Mark, can I ask you this question.... As I gather, you're selecting a kind of symmetrical ... package-Communist, right-wing repression, and neutralist." MB: "Uh-huh." LC: "With the implication that these three forms of society are likely equally to punish dissent, imprison the conscientious objector; and there's nothing in my experience-and this is what startles me-that leads me to an understanding of what basis you can possibly have for what is at best an artificial-" MB: "I'll admit immediately that it's artificial and it's a tremendous oversimplification." LC: "Why? Why do you do it?" MB: "The reason for it is very simple. When we go to a Communist government to get somebody out, we want to be able to tell them that we're working on some Greek cases; when we go to the Greeks, we want to be able to tell them that we're devoting as much attention to the cases of people who are imprisoned in Yugoslavia or Hungary or the Soviet Union."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.233
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6167
item Program Number 233

"Ecology"

Guests: Dubos, Rene J. (Rene Jules), 1901-1982. : Burnham, James, 1905-1987.

7 January 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 21
Program details: An often surprising discussion of trade-offs and freedom, and of the dangers of ideologizing ecology. RD: "As I have thought about environments in this country that have been the most productive with regard to the percentage of distinguished people, of interesting people, that have emerged from them, I have always felt that the best environment that ever existed ... was the small farm, the operating family farm.... one has the wealth of stimuli that comes from an extremely diversified environment." ... JB: "I prefer clean water to polluted water and cleaner air to smog-bound air, but on the other hand, it really always is a question of how clean ... For instance, to get it perfectly clean, that last bit-you can't get it perfectly clean, but to go from 99.2 per cent clean to 99.7 per cent clean, I understand ... costs more than to bring it up to 99.2 per cent. Now is that worth it or not? I don't know."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.234
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6168
item Program Number 234

"Colleges and the Youth Cult"

Guests: Banowsky, William Slater. : Roche, John Pearson, 1923-

7 January 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 22
Program details: Had we come through the worst of the student agitation, or was there, as WFB puts it, "a great Gotterdammerung ahead of us"? Our two guests, at opposite ends of the country, had both been treated to hands-on student violence. Mr. Banowsky had arrived for work one morning to find that "our major academic building was confiscated, and very shrewdly ... chained from the inside. ... You've got to call the police, you see; here are your own black students." Mr. Roche had returned to Brandeis from a stint in the Johnson Administration to be greeted by some "fortunately ... effete arsonists," who didn't succeed in burning down the building where his office was located. A wide-ranging, no-punches-pulled discussion of the current militants, the genuine grievances they were playing on, and the proper model for a college administration.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.235
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6169
item Program Number 235

"Women's Lib"

Guests: Friedan, Betty.

11 January 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 23
Program details: Moments before the taping began, Mrs. Friedan told WFB that she had saved one of his sisters from disciplinary action at Smith College thirty years earlier. Thus handicapped he has trouble gaining momentum against this force of nature, who sweeps through the economics of housekeeping, the liberation of men from the "masculine mystique" of "bear-killing, big-muscle Ernest Hemingway," and the "right of every woman to control her own body." WFB: "No, but the woman's body, as I understand it-at least this has been a point of view that has been accepted by women over the years, at least in many countries-the woman's body, after conception, becomes simply a carrier of something which is entitled to innate consideration." BF: "No, Bill, I can't accept-I mean I don't think that." WFB: "There is a tradition of this." BF: "I can't believe that you even believe it." WFB: "Of course I believe it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.236
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6170
item Program Number 236

"The Crisis of Private Insurance"

Guests: Stone, Clement.

11 January 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 84 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 24
Program details: Insurance companies were becoming more and more reluctant, especially in the inner cities, to write the kind of policies they had traditionally written, against fire, theft, and the like. And yet the public disturbances and general increase in crime made insurance all the more necessary. This show is less rambunctious than some recent ones, but it is a productive exploration of how private enterprise and the state might collaborate without the state's actually taking over the insurance function. CS: "The citizen himself has the obligation to use his ingenuity to protect that typewriter [the hypothetical stolen object Mr. Buckley had introduced into the conversation]; and there are ways in which that typewriter can be protected, whether it's a burglar-alarm system or whether it's some other system. No, it would be wrong for the state or for the nation to take over every man's responsibility."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.237
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6171
item Program Number 237

"The John Birch Society and the American Right"

Guests: Schomp, Gerald. : Koltypin, Peter.

2 March 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 25
Program details: The question before the house is whether the John Birch Society does more harm than good to the anti-Communist cause. Although no consensus is, or could be, reached, Mr. Schomp provides solid analysis, and the fencing match is worth the price of admission. PK: "Dr. Christian Rokovsky ... testified to the same fact: there is a conspiracy-" WFB: "Well, everybody knows there's a conspiracy." PK: "-who is financing and supporting the Communist cause. Now, these facts you cannot get-" WFB: "Let me ask you this: Do you know any American-that I know of; I mean, don't say the guy next door-who does not believe there's a conspiracy?" PK: "Oh yes." WFB: "Who?" PK: "I think there are people who are saying that the Communists are making only-" WFB: "Who? Who? I mean, let's take the most liberal guy we can think of--ohhh, Harold Taylor. Now Harold Taylor would believe there is a conspiracy, in the sense that people actually concert together in order to achieve a common purpose. I don't think Harold Taylor or even, say, Ramsey Clark ... would say it's inconceivable that Soviet money was spent for the election of Allende."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.238
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6172
item Program Number 238

"The Responsibilities of the Scientists"

Guests: Teller, Edward, 1908-2003.

2 March 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 26
Program details: A luminous discussion of the ethics and practicalities of nuclear deterrence with a man who is as much a philosopher as a physicist. ET: "I think that the appropriateness of your response is a moral question, and there are some stable values in morality, and that is why I would object, under all circumstances, to a first strike. I would also say that if we are attacked, I would much rather have a defense, and we can have a defense, but I also think that we must be prepared to retaliate... If it so happens that many millions have to be killed, after many millions of us have died, I would say that the continuation of freedom means to me more than practically any other consideration." ...WFB: "Number one, are you permitted to speak on this subject, and if not, can we infer from your silence that the United States Government has a technological ace up its sleeve?" ET: "Let me start with the second question while I remember it. I am trying to work on that ace ... but I cannot yet tell you whether it will be an ace or a deuce."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.239
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6173
item Program Number 239

"AFTRA: Compulsory Unionism and Civil Liberties"

Guests: Neier, Aryeh, 1937- : Harrington, Michael, 1928-

3 March 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 27
Program details: The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists had informed Mr. Buckley that unless he joined it, he would be prohibited from appearing on television. He had filed suit, inviting the ACLU to join him. This show offers a fine three-cornered conversation among a libertarian-leaning conservative, a liberal who puts civil liberties first, and a socialist who is fully committed to organized labor. AN: "Clearly, Mr. Buckley['s]... point of view would have less access to radio and television if he were limited to an occasional guest appearance and could not have a regular program." MH: "What I'm saying is, I would be delighted to support a law that would provide free television time for William F. Buckley's points of view and all other points of view on a democratic basis. The issue we are facing here is in the area of employment-hiring where workers in an industry have freely decided to follow this policy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.240
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6174
item Program Number 240

"Some Reflections on Television Programming"

Guests: Oliver, Daniel. : Greenfield, Jeff. : Williams, Lynne.

3 March 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 28
Program details: This show--the last Firing Line made for commercial television--is less an interrogation of anybody by anybody than simply a conversation about the medium in general, the differences between commercial and "educational" television, and Firing Line itself. JG: "It's much more exciting to see Lester Maddox walk out of the Dick Cavett Show or-" WFB: "How often can that be arranged?" JG: "Ah! If you invite the right guests.... In other words, if I wanted to book a show in which I know the sparks would fly and if one of the participants was willing, I would definitely have Gore Vidal and Bill Buckley on my television show. I'm not sure that it would contribute to the general knowledge of mankind, but I would guess that the rematch of the great conflict [at the 1968 Democratic Convention] would attract people precisely because it held out the possibility of something-" WFB: "Violence." JG: "Let's say existential."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.241
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6175
item Program Number 0000a

"American Conservatives Confront 1972"

Guests: Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987. : Buckley, James Lane, 1923- : Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931- : Ashbrook, John M. : Friedman, Milton, 1912- : Reagan, Ronald.

5 January 1972

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 2
Program details: This is a transcript of the SECA special taped at KCET in Los Angeles on January 5, 1972, and originally telecast on PBS on January 7, 1972. At head of title: SECA Presents: SECA (Southern Educational Communications Association) special. WFB: "The idea is to take some of the problems that confront American conservatives try to feel out how they will crystallize in the year ahead and how American conservatives will respond to them; and of course the big event this year is the election of the new President. Inevitably Richard Nixon and his policies will occupy much of the discussion ... " NOTE: This is not a Firing Line program. Only the transcript is available.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.275
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6209
item Program Number 0000b

"John Kenneth Galbraith vs. William F. Buckley, Jr.: A Debate"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006.

23 October 1970

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 159 : 3
Program details: National Educational Television's Realities [series]. Broadcast on Monday, November 23, 1970, 9:00-10:00 pm (in New York City on WNET/Channel 13, at 9:00pm. "John Kenneth Galbraith vs. William F. Buckley Jr.: A Debate" features a debate between liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith and conservative theoretician William F. Buckley Jr. on the virtues and faults of the free-enterprise system. The debate ... is on Mr. Galbraith's motion "This House Holds the Market Is a Snare and a Delusion." Members of the Union also join in the debate. NOTE: This is not a Firing Line program. Only the transcript is available.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.225
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6159
item Program Number FLS001, 1645, 1646

"Harvest of Despair"

Guests: Conquest, Robert. : Salisbury, Harrison Evans, 1908- : Hitchens, Christopher.

4 September 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 147 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 1
Program details: In 1932-33, somewhere between 7 and 14 million Ukrainians died in a famine engineered by Josef Stalin. To mark the 50th anniversary, a Canadian film company had produced a documentary, Harvest of Despair. It won prize after prize at international festivals, but not a single American television network had seen fit to broadcast it. And so Firing Line undertook a special, with the first 15 minutes devoted to recapping the historical events, the next 55 minutes to viewing the film, and the final 50 minutes to commenting on it. A harrowing but riveting two hours. Mr. Conquest: "There are famines everywhere. But you look at this as the only famine where you don't see relief workers. No food, soup kitchens, nothing. Even in Ethiopia you see relief work." Mr. Kitchens: "I think that probably by 1933 one still hadn't entered the period of the 20th century when people were more inclined to believe the worst-I mean, would naturally believe that an atrocity was most likely to be true. I have a feeling that it was still relatively innocent." NOTE: Copies of the film "Harvest of Despair" are available from International Historic Films: http://www.ihffilm.com/22377.html
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.947
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6881
item Program Number FLS002

"A Firing Line Special: The Democratic Presidential Candidates"

Guests: Babbitt, Bruce E. : Biden, Joseph R. : Dukakis, Michael S. (Michael Stanley), 1933- : Gephardt, Richard A. (Richard Andrew), 1941- : Gore, Albert, 1948- : Jackson, Jesse, 1941- : Simon, Paul, 1928-2003. : Strauss, Robert S.

1 July 1987

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 100 : 12
Publicity File: Box/Folder 148 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 2
Program details: Broadcast live. Here they all are, the seven candidates for the 1988 Democratic nomination. This two-hour special is not a formal debate; instead, the candidates are asked questions in turn by Messrs. Buckley and Strauss; each had earlier provided a taped biographical segment; and each has a brief closing statement. As samples, three of the candidates' answers to the one question they had been given in advance. As Mr. Buckley states it, "In the Oval Office, there are portraits of five Presidents. Each President on moving in plays a little historical musical chairs, exiling one or two Presidents and repatriating substitutes. President Reagan has hanging the portraits of Jefferson, Lincoln, Taft, Coolidge, and Eisenhower.... Whom will you remove? Whom will you resurrect?" Mr. Jackson would put up Lyndon Baines Johnson: "As long as we have the public-accommodations bill and we have the voting rights act, we will have a Lyndon Baines Johnson." Senator Gore would hang Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and JFK, plus two Tennesseans: Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk (although he calls him James K. Knox). And Senator Simon would "like to see a steelworker from Pennsylvania and a coal miner. I would like to see a farm family there, a working mother..." And we're off and running on this superb capsule view of the Democratic field.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.987
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709FNA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6921
item Program Number FLS101

"A Firing Line Special: The Republican Presidential Candidates"

Guests: Strauss, Robert S. : Bush, George, 1924- : Dole, Robert J., 1923- : Du Pont, Pierre S. [Du Pont, Pete; DuPont, Pete] : Haig, Alexander Meigs, 1924- : Kemp, Jack. : Robertson, Pat.

28 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 148 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 3
Program details: Broadcast live. The first public meeting of all the candidates for the 1988 Republican nomination. As in the meeting of the Democrats four months earlier (FLS002), this show includes taped biographical segments, prepared closing statements, and lots of questions tossed at the candidates by Messrs. Strauss and Buckley, plus a segment of clips from past Firing Line appearances of each of the candidates. Of course, unlike the Democrats, these Republicans have to deal with the fact that they are striving to succeed a President of their own party, and one with whom they have all worked more or less closely. AH: "Well, I admire everything that George just said. But I would also suggest that when one is parceling out loyalty, that to me loyalty has always been having the courage to tell the man you work for what your conscience tells you he must hear, not what you think he wants to hear, and that's been my approach to every President I've served." ... RS: "On that first section, the film you had, I was interested that those candidates of yours, Bill, who were born poor sure stressed how poor they were, but none of your rich ones stressed how rich they were. Now if we Democrats could find a rich candidate we would be bragging about him all over the country." WFB: "May I have a show of hands among the candidates, which of you is wealthier than FDR, Jack Kennedy, or LBJ?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1002
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709N0A
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6936
item Program Number FLS102, 101

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Right Is Better Able to Deal with the Soviets than the Left"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Kemp, Jack. : Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Hart, Gary, 1936- : Schroeder, Pat. : Warnke, Paul C., 1920-2001.

7 September 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 149 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 4
Program details: Broadcast live. A crackling debate with plenty of substance from start to finish. Mr. Buckley leads off for the affirmative by quoting Morton Kondracke to the effect that "Michael Dukakis's 'foreign policy is pure McGovern.' ... If [Jack Kennedy or Harry Truman] were sitting here tonight, there is simply no doubt on which side of the aisle they would stand: either with us, or else they would need to repudiate the whole of their public record." Mr. McGovern leads off for the negative: "Let's look at the record, a seventy-year record.... The Democrats under FDR opened up relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. The Republicans, under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, had no dealings with the Soviet Union. They didn't even recognize its existence. The Democrats under Roosevelt and Truman organized victory over Hitler, including the coalition with the Soviet Union, and I think all here can agree that without the huge Soviet army and the loss of 20 million Russian lives, it is doubtful that the West could have prevailed...." HK: "I must comment about the observation ... that the Democrats added the force of the Soviets to the anti-Hitler alliance. What added the force of the Soviets to the anti-Hitler alliance was Hitler, and the Soviets made the most strenuous efforts to avoid having to join."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1035
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709W0G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6969
item Program Number FLS103, 102

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That George Bush and the Republican Party Are Better Able to Run the Country for the Next Four Years than Michael Dukakis and the Democratic Party"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Bork, Robert H. : Kemp, Jack. : Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. : Hart, Gary, 1936- : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Jackson, Jesse, 1941- : Schroeder, Pat.

5 October 1988

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 149 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 5
Program details: The last Firing Line debate (FLS 102) was on foreign policy, moderator Michael Kinsley reminds us, and this one will concentrate on domestic policy-from poverty to the Equal Rights Amendment, from judicial activism to the creation of jobs, from Social Security to Medicare. One sample: Jesse Jackson: "Since you call upon the Judaeo-Christian tradition, part of its challenge is to do justice and love mercy." Jack Kemp: "Absolutely." JJ: "Why do you oppose ERA for women and even vote against studying pay discrimination against women? Half the nation's poor children live in a house headed by a woman where there is no man...." JK: "What we want is a country in which any man, any woman, of any color, any background, has the opportunity to start a business, get a job, or to get an opportunity to get an education. That's equal opportunity, and I don't think the amendment has anything to do with it." JJ: "Even if a woman became President, it would not disprove the need for every woman to be free of discrimination based on sex." JK: "I couldn't disagree. And I'll tell you what, the first woman President is more likely to be a Republican than in your party, Mr. Jackson."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1041
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6975
item Program Number FLS104

"A Firing Line Special: Sanctions and Apartheid"

Guests: Suzman, Helen. : Durr, Kent. : Merwe, Koos van der. : Dhlomo, Oscar. : Ngcoya, James.

20 April 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 149 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 6
Program details: Broadcast live. The guests on this high-voltage Firing Line Special all oppose sanctions ("We regret," Mr. Buckley notes, "that invitations to prominent advocates of sanctions to appear on this program, including Bishop Tutu and Allan Boesak and Cyril Ramaphosa, were not accepted"). On apartheid, however, they cover the waterfront from Mr. van der Merwe, whose party's principal plank was the maintenance of apartheid, to Mr. Dhlomo, Mr. Ngcoya, and Mrs. Suzman ("perhaps," as Mr. Buckley introduces her, "the most prominent white opponent of apartheid in South African politics, Alan Paton having died"), with, in the middle, Mr. Durr, as a member of the government that was gradually abolishing apartheid. OD: "We even say the destruction of apartheid for us is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. The end is the system that must replace apartheid." HS:"A non-racial democracy." OD: "... Now, if you want that, then of course you are my comrade." KvdM: "I am not your comrade." HS: "I am your comrade." OD: "You don't want that?" KvdM: "I am not a Russian. I don't have comrades. I have friends."HS: "Oh, nonsense." OD: "Well, ...comrade... in my language is friend." KvdM: "There is no word 'comrade' in Zulu, my friend." ... WFB: "What percentage of the South African GNP is black-produced?" HS: "Very little." KD: "Only my friend Koos here makes those divisions. We say there is one economy to which everybody contributes, and everybody's contribution is valuable."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1063
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6997
item Program Number FLS105, 103

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Cold War Is Not Coming to an End"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Gingrich, Newt. : Haig, Alexander Meigs, 1924- : Perle, Richard Norman, 1941- : Solarz, Stephen J. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Hart, Gary, 1936- : Schroeder, Pat.

19 June 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 149 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 6
Program details: Broadcast live. Much had happened behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains: perestroika and glasnost, the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, a loosening of controls in China followed by Tiananmen Square. Does it all add up to an end to the Cold War? Mr. Buckley leads off for the skeptics: "Make no mistake about it: I and my colleagues greatly welcome the extent to which economic reality and spiritual yuppiness and Stinger missiles have put pressure on the Soviet government.... But can we persuade ourselves to believe that if Winston Churchill were here tonight-it was he, you will remember, who declared the Cold War-that he would say that this is, on existing evidence, coming to an end?" Mr. Solarz conies right back: "There may be some who find Mr. Buckley's prognostications of gloom and doom persuasive. But I suspect that there are others-such as Mr. Buckley's political heroes like Margaret Thatcher, who has said that the Cold War is already over, and Ronald Reagan, who was last seen kissing babies in Red Square-who would find them somewhat strange." This sizzling exchange takes us back to the early days of Lenin's rule and forward to the evolving Sino-Soviet rapprochement; we go from perestroika and glasnost to (courtesy of Mr. Perle) the number of SS-20s that have been dismantled under the INF treaty, but which are counterbalanced by new production of the "longer-range and more capable Soviet missile known as the SS-25."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1072
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7006
item Program Number FLS106, 104

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Free-Market Competitiveness Is Best for America"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Kemp, Jack. : Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. : Gingrich, Newt. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Hart, Gary, 1936- : Schroeder, Pat. : Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006.

13 September 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 150 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 7
Program details: Broadcast live. As Mr. Kinsley sets the stage, "At a time when even the Communist world is turning to free markets, I don't think you can expect tonight's negative team to come out for socialism. But you can expect them to give the affirmatives a hard time about whether unfettered free markets are always the best solution in areas like corporate mergers, health care, the environment, and so on." Mr. McGovern duly steps up to the plate: "All of us believe in freedom. All of us believe in competition. No one of us advocated the centralized, state-run systems of the Communist or fascist worlds. So the question is, What is the debate all about? It is about whether there is a proper role for the government in protecting us against the excesses and the weaknesses of a big-business, free-enterprise economy." The argument sometimes bogs down in (often funny) ad hominem remarks, and in Mr. Kemp's tendency to bound along on his standard entrepreneurship speech; but Mrs. Kirkpatrick in particular has the gift of making the proper distinctions: "My question, Pat, is why are you so eager to mix something that doesn't work-that's an admitted evil in itself, like controls and taxes and regulations-with something that works reasonably well, namely a self-regulating market?" PS: "Well, I'm not sure what you mean that I am trying to mix." JJK: "You keep talking about the desirability of a mixed economy as though it were good in itself.... It may be a necessity in itself in our times, I'll buy that, but it isn't a good in itself."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1079
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GU0C
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7013
item Program Number FLS107, 105

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Drugs Should Be Legalized"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Dennis, Richard. : Glasser, Ira. : Sweet, Robert W. : Schroeder, Pat. : Rangel, Charles B. : Gingrich, Newt. : Raab, William von.

26 March 1990

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 150 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 7
Program details: Broadcast live. Another skirmish in the Drug Wars. Mr. Buckley sets the stage: "Our team is not united on all aspects of the resolution, and you should know that it embarrasses us not at all if you single out differences in emphasis. For instance, I believe in capital punishment for anyone who conveys drugs to minors, while Mr. Ira Glasser, a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, doesn't believe in capital punishment for Satan himself..." Mr. Buckley focuses on "$15 billion per year, jail cells for every third college student, a national obsession with a lost cause." Mrs. Schroeder comes out swinging: "I think indeed Bill Buckley has finally hit his midlife crisis.... I suppose I'm looking at this as a parent, but... I think too many people think the trouble with drugs is the crime that comes from that.... The trouble with drugs is also the use of drugs.... To say it's a victimless crime is really incorrect. It tears at the fabric of families, it tears at the whole society's fabric ..." Often heated but illuminating as well, as both sides have come well prepared.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1103
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709Q0M
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7037
item Program Number FLS108, 106

"A Firing Line Special: A United Germany: Anything to Worry About?"

Guests: Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : Walters, Vernon A. : Simon, William E., 1927- : Vinocur, John. : Pfluger, Friedbert.

25 June 1990

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 150 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 8
Program details: Broadcast live. Seven months after The Wall had come down, all Central Europe seemed to be jostling towards freedom, and German reunification was being talked about seriously--not, as Mr. Buckley points out, to the universal joy of Germany's neighbors: "Is there something there [in the German character] that is distinctively susceptible to the demagogy of people like Adolf Hitler, and if that is the case, are sufficient precautions being taken when we talk about German reunification?" He first addresses the man who is "probably better known in America than any German since Hitler, whose demons Mr. Kissinger's parents protested by leaving Germany with their two young sons early in the Thirties." (Actually, Mr. Kissinger points out, it wasn't so much protest as sheer self-preservation.) Is there, WFB asks, "such thing as a German national character, or is that just a recent invention?" Mr. Kissinger replies that "every people is a product of its history, of its culture. ... I think the worry I have about Germany is not Auschwitz, but a certain kind of romantic, short-sighted national policy that brings about what they're seeking to avoid." To Mr. Pfluger, "The nightmare, the Holocaust, is, in my point of view, present in German thinking and in German feeling. We--and also the young generation--we know that we still have a responsibility, not for the past, but [so] that something like that will never happen in the future." And we're off on an extremely rich discussion that goes from Hitler to the Marshall Plan, from the composition of NATO to Gorbachev's growing problems.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1110
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7044
item Program Number FLS109, 107

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Government Is Not the Solution; It Is the Problem"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Armey, Richard K., 1940- : Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. : Heston, Charlton. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Hart, Gary, 1936- : Schroeder, Pat. : Weaver, Dennis.

10 September 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 150 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 8
Program details: Broadcast live. Mr. Buckley frames the question by reminding us that government's derelictions range from the murderous to the risible: "If Hitler hadn't had four hundred divisions, he would have been a routine anti-Semite like Gerald L. K. Smith; as much of a menace as a Ku Klux Klan, which we can cope with without the use of the atom bomb.... Do you know why everyone in New York who can do so communicates via messenger or Federal Express or fax? Because messengers and Federal Express and fax machines are not government enterprises like the Post Office." Mr. Weaver replies: "I think it was James Madison that said, 'If men were angels, no government would be necessary.' And since I fail to see any sets of wings in the audience or on the panelists, I really feel that government in some form is absolutely essential." A high-energy exchange that includes solid nuggets of information: e.g., from Rep. Schroeder: "I looked at what they did in Japan [in social-welfare agencies]... They give money to an agency at the beginning of the year to run the agency. At the end of the year, if there is money left over, then half the money is returned to the treasury, half the money is kept within the agency to pay out incentives, get more efficient equipment, or whatever. So for the first time you have taken government incentives and flipped them, so the incentive is to be efficient, not to be inefficient."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1120
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7054
item Program Number FLS110, 108

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Drug Prohibition Has Failed"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Dennis, Richard. : Glasser, Ira. : Clarke, Kildare. : Rangel, Charles B. : Falwell, Jerry. : Herrington, Lois. : Voth, Harold M.

15 March 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 151 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 9
Program details: As Mr. Kinsley introduces the question, "President Bush doesn't talk much about drugs any more [having made them a year and a half earlier the centerpiece of a prime-time televised speech] and his first drug czar, William Bennett, has wandered off, and so has the attention of most Americans.... But unlike that other war [in the Persian Gulf] the drug war goes on." From Mr. Rangel's perspective, "If I thought for one moment that you [the affirmative side] were sincere about this, I would ask you to take a look at the children that are born addicted to drugs; to talk about those that find themselves in the emergency wards, if you will, Doctor, with the illnesses that are attributed to this." At times the participants are coming from different universes (HV: "Does illness increase or decrease a person's freedom?" IG: "... I don't think a person who is sick is more or less free against the government"), but the various personalities still bring life to this much-discussed topic.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1142
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006GX6AG8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7076
item Program Number FLS111, 109

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Freedom of Thought Is in Danger on American Campuses"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Silber, John, 1926- : Loury, Glenn C. : D'Souza, Dinesh, 1961- : Stimpson, Catharine R., 1936- : Botstein, Leon. : Walters, Ronald W. : Fish, Stanley Eugene.

28 August 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 151 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 9
Program details: A (mostly) new cast of characters for this debate on, essentially, Political Correctness. Mr. Buckley sets the tone: "Ogden Nash once wrote that if the German people had had a more highly developed sense of humor, they'd never have let Hitler pull the wool over their eyes. The first time they saw someone goose-stepping and raising a stiff arm and shouting, 'Heil Hitler,' they'd have keeled over laughing, as most students will do when they think back on some of the affectations of the current age." Lots of fun as the Affirmatives recount ridiculous instances of the PC code and the Negatives recall racial and sexual vulgarisms in times past; but also some solid analysis from an academic perspective: GL: "I'm certainly not one standing here to say, 'I want to be free to make racist remarks in my classes.' What I think is the case, though, is that the cult of sensitivity has evolved in such a way that particular substantive issues of critical importance to be discussed cannot be discussed because particular insular minorities are exercising power, real power, to curtail the discussions that their feelings not be hurt."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1158
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7092
item Program Number FLS112, 110

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That if You Want More Jobs, the Government Should Get Out of the Way"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Armey, Richard K., 1940- : Schlafly, Phyllis. : Stein, Herbert, 1916- : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Eisner, Robert. : Kinsley, Michael E. : Minsky, Hyman P.

26 March 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 151 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 10
Program details: As Mr. Botstein frames the question, "We are in a recession. Some people consider it a contained depression, perhaps the worst economic period since the Great Depression. And we don't really know what to do about it." Mr. Buckley thinks he does: "Bring back full employment by getting government out of the way." After all, "A lot of people say they can't build houses; they can't afford the interest. Why is interest so high? Because of inflation. Who causes inflation? Only the government can cause inflation. The private sector has never discovered how to do it." Mr. McGovern is equally sure that, say, the savings-and-loan crisis "is not the result of too much government intervention ... Rather it is the opposite: the result of too little regulation and monitoring that permitted irresponsible Sand L managers to rob that industry and the American public." Mrs. Schlafly takes up the cudgels against overreaching legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the latest Clean Air Act, and we're off on a vigorous exploration of what government can and can't reasonably do.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1184
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006GX6AN6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7118
item Program Number FLS113, 111

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That U.S. Industry Does Not Need Protection"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Kemp, Jack. : Armey, Richard K., 1940- : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : Gephardt, Richard A. (Richard Andrew), 1941- : Brown, Jerry, 1938- : Thurow, Lester C. : Walters, Ronald W. : Fallows, James M.

3 September 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 151 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 10
Program details: Tonight's debate takes place against the background of a national debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement-=which President Bush was attempting to shepherd through Congress and candidate Clinton was deciding whether to back--and also over our trade relations with Japan, which both Pat Buchanan and one of tonight's debaters, Jerry Brown, had made an issue in the primaries. Mr. Buckley starts out by citing the fabulous amount of merchandise that came into our country last year, and then says, "Was it to crush us or to conquer us or to starve us? Or was it to nourish and enrich our country? It's a sober fact that every single item, however inconsiderable, in all that vast catalogue of commodities that came to our shores came because some citizen desired it, paid for it, and meant to turn it to his comfort or his profit." He then confesses that "that three-sentence description of free trade was done by Winston Churchill in 1908, and not a syllable of it would I for one wish to alter." Mr. Brown turns the tables on the conservative side by making the argument for subsidiarity and states' rights: "What is happening now is a proposal in the GATT treaty and in the Mexican-Canadian-North American treaty to set up tribunals that meet in secret that will be given the right to overrule state laws and congressional enactments."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1197
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCX0TI
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7131
item Program Number FLS114, 112

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Reducing the National Deficit in the Next Four Years Is a Top Priority"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Davidson, James Dale. : Rudman, Warren B. : Crook, Clive. : Thurow, Lester C. : Kuttner, Robert. : Eisner, Robert. : Levy, David A.

8 December 1992

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 8-9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 151 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 11
Program details: Mr. Kinsley begins by recalling that "Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 campaign and his first inaugural address, had spoken of deficits as mortgaging our country's future and our children's future" and had warned of "social, cultural, political, and economic upheaval" if the national debt were not brought under control. "Was Ronald Reagan wrong," asks Mr. Kinsley, "in what he said about the deficit 12 years ago, or was he wrong in what he did about it?" The usual fun and games among the debaters, but also plenty of substance on the history and theory of taxing, spending, and electing. To Mr. Thurow, "This motion is basically about an irrelevancy. There is only one task in the United States. The task is, How do you get America back on the track of raising the standard of living of everybody who is an American?" To Mr. Kuttner, "If that's the case [that 2 1/2 per cent growth is all we can normally expect], how did the OECD countries, during a period of less laissez-faire and more interventionism, how did we all manage 4 per cent growth for the quarter-century after World War II?" CC: "Well, surely the war had something to do with it. I mean, you may not have noticed but there was some reconstruction going on in Europe."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1210
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H19G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7144
item Program Number FLS115, 113

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Women in the Military Should Be Excluded from Combat"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Ripley, John. : Donnelly, Elaine. : Horowitz, David, 1939- : Schroeder, Pat. : Vaught, Wilma. : Wilson, Heather A. : Glasser, Ira.

18 March 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 152 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 12
Program details: The debate over maintaining the ban on women in combat had been sharpened by (a) the increasing recruitment of women for the Armed Forces and (b) the Gulf War, widely seen as showing, as Michael Kinsley puts it, "that high-tech warfare has blurred the distinction between combat and noncombat." This session is given extra authority by the presence of military people, as in this opening exchange: Colonel Ripley: "I would like to define combat as combat veterans see combat. First of all, combat is seen by the great majority so far, those in debates, those who have not experienced it, as a state of being, as essentially an act-a noun, if you will. On the contrary, those of us who have been in combat, particularly sustained combat... see combat as a verb, as something that must be done.... The word itself, to combat, suggests that you must take the fight to the enemy. You must in fact destroy the enemy. That's the whole purpose. You don't neutralize the enemy, you don't persuade the enemy; you kill the enemy." General Vaught: "I don't know how in the world we would exclude women from combat. We haven't been able to heretofore in the history of the world. So the question is not really whether women will be in combat-they have been, they will be. With each year the battlefield becomes more ill-defined, given the ever-changing kind of weapon technology that we have."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1219
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G7088A6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7153
item Program Number FLS116, 114

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That We Need Not Fear the Religious Right"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Robertson, Pat. : Neusner, Jacob, 1932- : Hyde, Henry J. : Glasser, Ira. : West, Cornel. : Lynn, Barry W. : Woods, Harriett.

9 September 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 152 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 13
Program details: A high-voltage debate that goes beyond the narrow question of the "Religious Right" to examine the whole place of religion in American life. We start with Mr. Buckley's relaxed view: "If the Religious Right were to prevail, would their success impede you in your endeavors? Well, if you make your living by making blue movies or producing pornography, you might find life a little harder than it used to be.... Does anybody in this audience fear that SAT scores would diminish if the Religious Right were successful? ... Will anyone here wake up sweating with fear because a rabbi has been asked to recite a prayer at the commencement of your son or daughter?"... HW: "You attended public schools yourself? JN: "Yes. West Hartford, Connecticut." HW: "Good. And did they have prayers in those schools?" JN: "All the time. My sister was the Virgin Mary year after year." PR: "She was Jewish, after all." HW: "... Senator Arlen Specter, when he would not support prayer in school, was talking about his personal discomfort as a young Jewish boy having to sit and listen to prayers and feel isolated-and I'm not just talking about Jews. There are Moslems, there are many other people."... JN: "You want to talk about rather trivial issues, and I am trying to get across a main point, which is that religion is not something that can be private, as Mr. Glasser said. Religion is something that forms your personality and tells you why you're alive. On that basis I favor separation of church and state, but I can't contemplate the separation of religion and politics."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1242
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7176
item Program Number FLS117, 115

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Political Correctness Is a Menace and a Bore"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Glasser, Ira. : Bork, Robert H. : Stimpson, Catharine R., 1936- : Green, Mark J. : Greene, Linda. : Botstein, Leon. : West, Cornel.

3 December 1993

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 102 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 152 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 14
Program details: "Anyone who has followed the political-correctness debate knows," as Michael Kinsley puts it, "that, by reputation at least, we are at the heart of the beast. It was here at the University of Pennsylvania last year that a white freshman was charged with racial harassment for calling a group of black women 'water buffalo.' " It was also here, Mr. Buckley reminds us, that a group of students stole and destroyed copies of a student newspaper that carried an op-ed piece they disagreed with. But these cases make Penn far from atypical in the modern academic world, and Senator Carol Moseley-Braun had recently declared that "a fundamental right is the freedom from insult." Mr. Green starts by welcoming "any debate which forces conservative Republicans to become ACLUers in defense of the First Amendment." Today's debaters are occasionally a bit foggy over hypotheticals, but there are some fine exchanges. Professor Greene: "I think what we need to do is not to focus on calling each other racist or sexist, but instead to try to understand how historical racism has affected our lives and consciousness ..." Judge Bork: "Is it your understanding, Professor Greene, that you are actually defending political correctness with that statement?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1252
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWZ1C
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7186
item Program Number FLS118, 116

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Welfare Has Done More Harm than Good"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Murray, Charles A. : Norton, Eleanor Holmes. : Greenstein, Robert, 1946- : Rangel, Charles B. : Woodson, Robert L. : Bryant, Wayne R. : Piven, Frances Fox.

15 March 1994

Scope and Contents note

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Publicity File: Box/Folder 152 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 15
Program details: President Clinton, Mr. Kinsley reminds us, "campaigned on a vow to 'end welfare as we know it.' " Would he be on the Affirmative side in this debate? Mr. Buckley is quick to make a distinction: "We are gathered, my colleagues and I, to contend that welfare has done more harm than good. This is not to say that welfare has done only harm. A useful distinction here is between welfare, which can be an ongoing lifestyle, and relief, which is on the order of the kind of treatment one receives in an emergency room in a hospital." Ms. Norton comes out swinging: "I ask you, is the abused woman who has finally got the gumption to leave the house of abuse more harmed by welfare than if it were not there? Is the divorced woman in transition whose husband will not give her child support more harmed by welfare than not?" The spirited exchange gives some idea of the gulf between the two sides on this issue. Ms. Piven: "Why do you think a poor woman who is raising children surrenders her respect when she gets some support from the government, but that a much better-off woman, also raising children by herself-but with perhaps assets that she got from a divorce settlement-does not surrender her self-respect...." Mr. Woodson: "The difference is, the poor one has to then turn to taxpayers for support, and that's when you get other people involved in your business.... I think it's wrong to absolve people of personal responsibility. That's the kind of patronizing attitude that you get from people who believe that poor people don't have the ability to make decisions for themselves."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1263
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7197
item Program Number FLS119, 117

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Death Penalty Is a Good Thing"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Koch, Ed, 1924- : Berns, Walter, 1919- : Boleyn, Susan. : Glasser, Ira. : Botstein, Leon. : Bright, Stephen B., 1948- : Stevenson, Bryan.

24 May 1994

Scope and Contents note

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Publicity File: Box/Folder 153 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 16
Program details: Many of the arguments are familiar, if only from past Firing Lines, on this subject-the disproportion between the number of murders and the number of murderers executed; the danger of executing an innocent person. But on tonight's panel we have three people--Ms. Boleyn, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Stevenson--who have faced each other recently in court, and who bring the immediacy of those cases with them. Mr. Stevenson: "You are 11 times more likely to get the death penalty in the state of Georgia if the victim is white than if the victim is black. If the defendant is black and the victim is white, you are 22 times more likely to get the death penalty in Georgia...." Ms. Boleyn: "First of all, as I am sure you know, Mr. Stevenson, we have more white persons incarcerated on Death Row for murders than we do black people." BS: "How does that disprove that race is a factor? The bottom line is that only 27 per cent of the population of Georgia is black; yet 75 per cent of the people that have been executed in that state are African-American." SB: "... The honest answer to your question is that, first of all, as you well know, your statistics are wrong. The Baldus study was found to be nonsense ..." NOTE: The transcript for this episode is currently unavailable.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1276
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GQVU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7210
item Program Number FLS120, 118

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Wall of Separation between Church and State Should Be Lowered"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Graglia, Lino A. : Neuhaus, Richard John. : Paulsen, Michael. : Dershowitz, Alan M. : Lynn, Barry W. : Dorsen, Norman. : Teitel, Ruti G.

8 September 1994

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 153 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 17
Program details: "I permit myself to wonder," Mr. Buckley leads off, "whether ... the day will come when the separationists win their ultimate victory, denying the right to mention the Pearly Gates on a public channel. Perhaps we would be permitted to do so if we referred to them as the 'allegedly' Pearly Gates. You laugh, but you'd have laughed a generation ago if told the Supreme Court would rule that a rabbi pronouncing a general benediction at a graduating ceremony in Rhode Island was judged by the Supreme Court-to be sure, by a vote of 5 to 4-as having violated the First Amendment's guarantee ..." We've been around this track many times before, but the range of reference, from Branch Davidians to Hasidim, is impressive, and the level of showmanship is top-notch-we even get Alan Dershowitz quoting Jesus to explain why prayer should be private.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1283
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCX0HA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7217
item Program Number FLS121, 119

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Women's Movement Has Been Disastrous"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 1941- : Huffington, Arianna Stassinopoulos, 1950- : Alvare, Helen. : Friedan, Betty. : Burstein, Karen S. : Paglia, Camille, 1947- : Kolbert, Kathryn.

7 December 1994

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 153 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 18
Program details: "Anyone who thinks the women's movement" is monolithic should watch this show. Come to think of it, anyone who enjoys good theater should watch this show. Samples: CP: "Essentially feminism remains one of the great progressive reform movements of the last two hundred years. It is analogous to the abolition of slavery, to the abolition of child labor, and so on. Just as Mr. Buckley would not want to abolish Catholicism because of the excesses of certain fanatics, so must we not attribute to feminism the excesses of various neurotics and incompetents." ... BF: "I mean, I am a feminist, but I am not politically correct, and I hate that kind of rigidity. I hate the attempt to make a single doctrine, a single party line, whether it's feminism or anything else." ... HA: "How can a movement that says that some have no right to be born, based on dependency, size, stage of development, disability-and I might remind you some of your sisters say it's okay to have sex-selection abortion-how can such a movement call itself life-affirming?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1296
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GZRU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7230
item Program Number FLS122, 120

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That We're Suing Ourselves to Death"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Huber, Peter W. (Peter William), 1952- : Horowitz, Michael J., 1938- : Weisl, Edwin, Jr. : Dershowitz, Alan M. : Pegalis, Steven E. : Moore, Thomas A. : Gilbert, Pamela.

2 March 1995

Scope and Contents note

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Publicity File: Box/Folder 154 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 191 : 19
Program details: If all this high-priced legal talent couldn't debate, who could? A splendid session on a topic of deep concern. WFB: "In 1989 over 17 million civil suits were filed in American courts; that's one lawsuit for every 10 adults. Less than 50 cents on the liability dollar, by the way, goes to anybody who is injured. But the most significant figure, surely, is this: Since 1960 jury awards have risen in constant dollars over 9,000 per cent." ... AD: "A jury is like democracy. Sometimes it votes for the wrong people. I can't defend an American public that voted for Newt Gingrich, and yet I am stuck with that system." ... TM: "The United States of America brings a lawsuit and nobody raises an eyebrow.... General Motors sues, Ford sues, small businesses sue, and business litigation is certainly growing and growing. It doesn't bother too many people. But Jane Doe wants to bring a lawsuit, and I'll tell you the powerful in the country are worried."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1306
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7240
item Program Number FLS123, 121

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That All Immigration Should Be Drastically Reduced"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Brimelow, Peter, 1947- : Stein, Daniel. : Huffington, Arianna Stassinopoulos, 1950- : Botstein, Leon. : Koch, Ed, 1924- : Sharry, Frank. : Glasser, Ira.

6 June 1995

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 154 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 154 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 1
Program details: Mr. Kinsley starts out by drawing attention to the text of the resolution: "Note that word 'all.' This debate is not just about securing America's borders against illegal aliens. It's about cutting the total number of immigrants, both illegal and legal." Mr. Buckley points out the Scylla and Charybdis on immigration: "The great shadow that looms menacingly over one side is rank nativism, to stumble into saying, 'That man who wants to get into the United States is black, brown, or yellow, and we have enough of them' On the other side,... there are the libertarians who say, 'Anybody who wants to do anything should be permitted to do so, and if one of the things people want to do is to come live in the United States, why not?' That is one of the great disabling rhetorical limbs that get in the way of clear thought." Mr. Botstein, rebutting, says, "Today's debate is an experience in deja vu. We've heard the same refrains before: too many bad, different, new immigrants, as opposed to few good, old-style immigrants." But Mr. Brimelow does add something new: the information-publicly available but not widely noticed until he started writing about it-that our current patterns of immigration are not a natural occurrence: they are the result of "the peculiar workings of the 1965 Act. We must never forget that this is a policy, a government policy... There has never been a transformation like this in the history of the world. We're not saying that it won't necessarily work, but we're saying that it's a risk and the American people should be asked whether they want to take that risk. We should have a pause in immigration precisely to allow that great debate to take place."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1320
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GRSC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7254
item Program Number FLS124, 122

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the New Anti-Terror Bill Is Good for Americans"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Toensing, Victoria. : Specter, Arlen. : Emerson, Steven. : Glasser, Ira. : Cole, David, 1958- : Zogby, James J. : Lewis, Anthony, 1927-

10 August 1995

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 102 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 154 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 2
Program details: In June the Senate had passed a sweeping anti-terrorism bill in reaction to the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by disaffected Americans, which had followed by two years the bombing of the World Trade Center by Muslim terrorists. But a similar bill was stalled in the House through the efforts, Mr. Kinsley tells us, "of an unusual coalition of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats ... concerned about the effect on civil liberties and constitutional rights." The bill would, among other things, expand penalties for terrorist crimes, including the death penalty; would create a special court to deport aliens suspected of terrorism; would broaden the permissible use of wiretaps; and would limit appeals of death sentences not just for terrorism but for all crimes. This sizzling debate covers some old territory (like the right to privacy and the right to bear arms) but also some new, like Mr. Zogby's statistics on the number of terrorist crimes committed by non-Arab, non-Muslim groups, such as Puerto Rican activists, anti-Castro Cubans, environmental and animal-rights groups, and Jewish extremists.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1329
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7263
item Program Number FLS125, 123

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Flat Tax Is Better than the Income Tax"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Goodman, John C. : Du Pont, Pierre S. [Du Pont, Pete; DuPont, Pete] : Brown, Jerry, 1938- : Thurow, Lester C. : Kuttner, Robert. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Mann, Steven.

6 June 1995

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 102 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 154 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 3
Program details: Among the many tax-reform proposals floating about, one of the most interesting was the flat tax (which, contrary to the formulation of the above Resolution, is indeed an income tax, as opposed to a consumption tax). The version being propounded by Texas Congressman Dick Armey (and developed with the help of the National Center for Policy Analysis) would exempt from taxation the first $36,000 of annual income (for a couple with two children), and then tax all income over the threshold at 20 per cent. Period. No loopholes, no deductions. Mr. Buckley explains why the plan doesn't violate his criterion of equal treatment under the law: "Equal treatment under the law does not forbid amnesties, forbidding only class distinctions negative in character. It is one thing to say that an American who does not earn a living wage should be spared taxation, another to say that those who earn twice or more than twice a living wage should be penalized progressively." Mr. Thurow comes out swinging for the Negative side: "If you had a flat tax, it wouldn't be simpler [than the 1040 short form] because the problem is not deductions, but calculating your income. You are still going to have to calculate professional income,... you are still going to have to calculate your stock gains and losses. And if you look at deductions, a lot of them simply cannot be eliminated completely. Take the medical deduction. My first wife had a very serious illness and died, and I had a couple years when my medical bills were bigger than my total income. You're going to tell me I can't deduct them? ..." The participants have all come bristling with ammunition, and we swing bracingly from statistics to ethics and justice.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1322
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGP9G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7256
item Program Number FLS126, 124

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Government Has the Right to Regulate the Internet"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Huffington, Arianna Stassinopoulos, 1950- : Cleaver, Cathleen. : Hoffman, Reid. : Glasser, Ira. : Estrich, Susan. : Barlow, John P. (John Perry) : Dyson, Esther, 1951-

23 February 1996

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 102 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 154 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 4
Program details: Congress had just passed the Communications Decency Act, making it a felony to send "indecent" or "patently offensive" material over the Internet if that material might be seen by children. Today's debate addresses not only the usual question of free speech versus overriding public interest, but also the question whether it is physically possible to regulate the Internet. First-time Firing Line debater John Perry Barlow brings a perspective we aren't used to hearing: "I come to you from cyberspace, and that sounds to you like a ridiculous thing to say.... But I am telling you that there is a social space that includes the entire geographical area of the planet Earth and a fairly large and rapidly growing percentage of the earth's population.... Arid those folks are not vulnerable to the excesses of the United States Congress. We are free and sovereign from whatever the United States Congress may wish to impose on the rest of the human race.... You've got people who have never been to this place trying to pass laws which have means of enforcement that they can't use. And this is not the sort of thing that is good for the law."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1348
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709LFM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7282
item Program Number FLS127, 125

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Marketplace Is Not a Social Enemy"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Jasinowski, Jerry J. : Levy, David A. : Hormats, Robert D. : Kuttner, Robert. : Stern, Andrew. : Green, Mark J. : Luttwak, Edward.

29 May 1996

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 155 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 5
Program details: "It is so obvious that the marketplace is not a social enemy that I pause to wonder," Mr. Buckley begins, "whether we are going to hear from these illustrious gentlemen that we should tonight sit here and, after two spirited hours, repeal the law of supply and demand, the law of diminishing returns, the doctrine of comparative advantage. If the marketplace is responsible, as it is, for 114 million Americans working, which is to say approximately 95 per cent of the working population, what system is it proposed that we introduce in its place? The Soviet Union tried to replace the marketplace and produced abject poverty and scarcity in a country the size of our own, with average earnings per person one-sixth of our own." Mr. Kuttner argues for something other than "an absolute, pure market.... We need capitalism, but we need in a good society a reasonable balance between market realms and extra-market realms, if only to help the market do what it does best." In this lively session, our debaters--including several new faces--go through job creation and downsizing, wealthy executives versus just-making-it working couples, the upward mobility of many American workers versus the case of Melinda Bagby, a skilled nurse, Mr. Stern tells us,who has received a total pay raise in the last seven years of 60 cents an hour.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1360
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWZR6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7294
item Program Number FLS128, 126

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Affirmative Action Should Be Terminated"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Graglia, Lino A. : Connerly, Ward, 1939- : Abram, Morris B. : Edley, Christopher F., 1953- : Guinier, Lani. : Botstein, Leon. : Lichtman, Judith L.

23 July 1996

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 102 : 7-8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 155 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 6
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins this often passionate debate by reminding us that "the much reviled California Civil Rights Initiative exactly replicate[s]" the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964-the act about which Senator Hubert Humphrey said on the Senate floor: "If ever this act is used to discriminate against anyone because he is male or white, I will eat the bill page by page." Mr. Edley counters with a wealth of statistics, including those gleaned by "scientifically designed" studies showing "that 30 to 50 per cent of minorities [people of color and women] encounter some form of discrimination" in renting apartments or seeking jobs "when compared with otherwise identical white, male counterparts." Ms. Guinier details police departments' experience in hiring blacks, Puerto Ricans, and, and concludes: "The point is that no single rule predicts success, and no single criterion defines the job. If we understand this, we can learn to use affirmative action as a window, not a wedge." Mr. Connerly asks Mr. Edley, "Professor, how can you reconcile the view that you are opposed to preferences and then file-" CE: "What do you mean by preferences? I don't- I know that all of the Republican talking points that are faxed around say, 'Use the word "preference" as often as possible,' and they say 'Never talk about women, only talk about race.' But I don't really know what you mean by the word 'preferences.' " WC: "Grant me the opportunity of asking the question without the other stuff."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1368
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7302
item Program Number FLS129, 127

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Republican Party Is Better Able to Run the Country for the Next Four Years than the Democratic Party"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Gingrich, Newt. : Hutchison, Kay Bailey, 1943- : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Shrum, Robert. : Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Arthur Meier), 1917-2007. : Andrews, Rob.

19 October 1996

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 102 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 155 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 7
Program details: The motion, Mr. Buckley suggests, should really have been more succinct: "Vote Republican." Why? Because "The Democrats live on illusions fortified by laws. The government will determine-you name it-whom you hire, whom you fire, whom you house, whom you reject, what you bill, what you pay, when you retire, what school your children will go to and what they can't be taught, what you grow and when you grow it, how much of what you earn you get to keep." Senator McGovern counters by taking us through the Republicans' deficit spending. In cross-examination, Speaker Gingrich gives a hilarious account of the House ice bucket; Rep. Andrews talks about "our grandparents and our mothers and fathers and the Medicare issue"; Mr. Kissinger reminds us that Republicans won the Cold War and that there are still dangers in the world. And then there's this exchange: Senator Hutchison: "Do you think President Clinton should seek approval from the United Nations to invade a foreign country, but not the United States Congress?" Mr. Shrum: "Well, of course not. That's a ridiculous question. Of course not. No one here thinks that." KBH: "Well, are you aware that he did that in Haiti? That he went to the United Nations to get permission, but never consulted with the United States Congress? Are you aware that there was mission creep-" RS: "We didn't invade a foreign- As Dr. Kissinger would probably tell you, because he conducted several of them, we weren't invading Haiti." KBH: "We were sending planes in and we hit the ground before there was any kind of agreement. We most certainly did go in." RS: "We were invited in." KBH: "We were propping up-" RS: "We were invited in by the government as part of a peacekeeping mission."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1376
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7310
item Program Number FLS130, 128

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Social Security Should Be Privatized"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Du Pont, Pierre S. [Du Pont, Pete; DuPont, Pete] : Goodman, John C. : Peterson, Peter G. : Aaron, Henry J. : Eisner, Robert. : Kuttner, Robert. : Marmor, Theodore R.

4 December 1996

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 102 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 155 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 8
Program details: Is the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme that can't long survive the retirement of the last baby-boomers, as Messrs. Buckley and Goodman suggest? Or is it, as Mr. Eisner puts it, "the system which has lifted the elderly out of poverty to at least the same extent as people of working age"? If we agree (which even the most optimistic of the participants do) that something will have to be done by about 2029, what should that "something" be? Waiting for the crisis to hit and raising taxes on that generation of workers? Or changing gears right now and following the Chilean example of privatization? Today's debaters sometimes talk past each other-e.g., to Mr. Goodman's complaint that encouraging a larger population, via higher birth rate or more immigration, doesn't solve the problem, Mr. Eisner answers: "The key to the best treatment of the elderly is to have the most prosperous economy." But they also came prepared with facts and figures, which they often impart in an arresting way. Mr. du Pont: "I do know that ... [for] any ten-year period in the history of the United States for the last 120 years, if you had invested your money on the first day of that ten years in the stock market, you would be better off on the last day than you would be under Social Security, and that is true even if you invested your money on the day before the crash of '29."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1383
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GPYS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7317
item Program Number FLS131, 129

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Environmentalists Are Going Too Far, Too Fast"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Craig, Larry E. : Schmalensee, Richard. : Jasinowski, Jerry J. : Linden, Eugene. : Woodwell, G. M. : Pope, Carl. : Brown, Jerry, 1938-

14 March 1997

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 155 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 9
Program details: "If you know anybody," Mr. Buckley begins, "who prefers unclean air or dirty water or barren forest lands, pray keep him away from here and, pray, pray for him. The affirmative side happily concedes the historic advances in environmentalist goals ... But we all recognize that pretty good movements sometimes end up in fanatical hands." Mr. Linden fires back that so far from going too far, environmental protection has encountered serious setbacks ever since the end of the Carter Administration. "The U.S. has had some successes: Delaware Bay has been cleaned up. In World War II, pilots could smell it at 5,000 feet, and it now supports a multi-billion-dollar recreational industry. I guess you could call that a giving rather than a taking." However, "The U.S. is one of 76 countries that have less than 1 per cent of their frontier forests remaining," and the destruction of species "is not just an amenity issue. [Species diversity] is vital for the functioning of ecosystems." And off we go on a fast-paced exchange over how much the incremental improvement in air quality is worth, how much we can do in this country given that pollution and greenhouse gases don't recognize borders, and whether environmentalism has been turned into a religion--with, from Mr. Brown, an argument based actually on religion: "Philosophers, theologians, for millennia have warned against pride, envy, greed, and gluttony.... When there were 250 million people in the world with spears and primitive tools, the impact was minimal. When there are six billion ... with powerful technologies and a philosophy of nonsatiety--never enough--we get the very problem that is the subject of this debate."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1392
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGPE6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7326
item Program Number FLS132, 130

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Government Should Not Discriminate against Private Schools"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Du Pont, Pierre S. [Du Pont, Pete; DuPont, Pete] : Mansour, Jimmy. : Smith, Bob. : Curry, William E. : Glasser, Ira. : Edley, Christopher F., 1953- : Chase, Bob.

9 June 1997

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 156 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 10
Program details: The topic before the house tonight is vouchers. Should parents be able to choose which school their child attends? And if so, should they be assisted with taxpayers' money? A rousing exchange ranging from the bureaucratic inefficiencies of the public schools (WFB: "In Chicago,... 40 per cent of all students attend Catholic schools. How many non-teaching administrative jobs are required to do this? Thirty-six. You would then expect that the public schools would have ... 54. You would be wrong. The public schools in Chicago have 3,300 administrators") to, in Mr. Curry's phrase, the "root causes" of poor schools: "stratification of class and race in this country" ("Show me a school system where all the parents are in the top percentile of income and I'll show you a bunch of kids who, by and large, are on their way to Harvard. Show me a school system whose parents are in the bottom percentile of income, and I'll show you a bunch of kids on their way to jail"). And on through separation of church and state (Mr. Glasser: "Aha! And over 80 per cent of those kids are going to religious schools whose avowed purpose is not to educate those kids, but to propagate their faiths and convert those children"), to whether the private schools are guilty of cream-skimming (Brother Bob: "We've got students that have been expelled from other schools; I've got a student right now with brain damage. I've got students that are ED, LD--we've got everybody, and I'm not sure who else we should be looking for"), to how large a voucher has to be in order to do a poor family any good.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1407
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7341
item Program Number FLS201, 201

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Labor Unions Are Too Powerful"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Williams, Walter E. : Jasinowski, Jerry J. : Green, Max. : Shrum, Robert. : Kuttner, Robert. : Becker, George. : Green, Mark J.

17 July 1997

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 156 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 11
Program details: The captains of the two teams lead off with clear statements of the opposing positions. For Mr. Buckley--who had had a widely publicized run-in with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Firing Line 239)--the fact that John J. Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, had in 1996 imposed a surcharge on members' dues, an extra $35 million to be directed, in his own words, "against Republican incumbents," and got away with it, means that "most union members either (a) don't know their rights [under the Supreme Court decision Beck v. Communication Workers of America] are being ignored or (b) are frightened to assert those rights." For Mr. Shrum, the fact that "since 1973, real income for American workers has been largely stagnant," even as corporate profits rose 15 per cent and "average CEO compensation in major companies soared by over 30 per cent," means that unions' "spending money in the campaign of 1996 [is] one of the most important things the AFL-CIO has done in years. They are fighting back." A rousing battle, with some of the shots coming from unusual angles, like this one from Mr. Williams: "Unions typically refer to the strike as their ultimate weapon. But the strike is not. Their real power is a result of their ability to use government or violence to prevent other workers from competing with union workers for jobs.... If unions could not prevent employers from hiring others in their places, all that a strike would be, would be a mass resignation."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1411
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7345
item Program Number FLS202, 202

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Trade with China Should Not Be Interrupted"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : Lott, Trent, 1941- : Barksdale, Jim. : Bauer, Gary Lee, 1946- : Brown, Jerry, 1938- : Huffington, Arianna Stassinopoulos, 1950- : Hutchinson, Tim.

14 October 1997

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 156 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 12
Program details: The dispute over trade with China, as Mr. Kinsley points out, "has made strange bedfellows, with opinions about what is the best way to effect improvements in China's human-rights behavior breaking down not at all according to party lines-as today's lineup indicates. Mr. Buckley leads off-after citing his own credentials as one who did not toast Chou En-lai in Peking in 1972-by welcom[ing] the evolution of China from the totalitarian state confronted by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1972 to the authoritarian state of today in which the Asian colossus dips its feet in the waters of economic freedom." To Mr. Bauer, "The truth is that tonight's debate is not really about trade, and, in fact, I do not believe ... [it has] that much to do with China. This debate tonight is about America, about who we are, and whether American values can still prevail..." Mr. Kissinger has a lifetime of cards to play: "As someone who spent his childhood in a totalitarian state and left from it as a refugee, I have a deep appreciation of the fundamental importance of American values ... But as somebody who had to conduct the foreign policy of the United States on behalf of two Presidents, I also have an appreciation of what is required to preserve the peace and to bring about the possibilities of progress in other countries". And we're off and running on a high-energy exchange that ranges from Tiananmen Square to China's trade surplus-and that occasionally skirts the borderline of civility, as in Mrs. Huffington's suggestion that Mr. Kissinger is motivated by personal financial interests (HK: "I regret that we have reached this sort of a point. Since you have done a lot of research, it would be easy for you to find out that my position on these issues has been the same before there were any commercial interests in China").
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1421
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWYOA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7355
item Program Number FLS203, 203

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Evolutionists Should Acknowledge Creation"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Johnson, Phillip E., 1940- : Behe, Michael J., 1952- : Berlinski, David, 1942- : Lynn, Barry W. : Scott, Eugenie Carol, 1945- : Ruse, Michael. : Miller, Kenneth R. (Kenneth Raymond), 1948-

4 December 1997

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 156 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 157 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 13
Program details: "I retreat from any formulation of tonight's exchange," Mr. Buckley begins, "that suggests that everyone on the other side should embrace creation. Not everyone on the affirmative side embraces creation. What we contend is that everyone should acknowledge creation as an alternative explanation for cosmic and biological happenings now thought by so many as naturalist in provenance and momentum." Mr. Lynn replies that "none of us on this team have any doubt that we have all been created somehow. Where we disagree with Mr. Buckley and his colleagues is on the relationships between evolution and our current situation." And we're off on a profound debate that ranges from the molecule to the cosmos, with distinctions that may be surprising to the layman (e.g., from Ms. Scott, between evolution and Darwinism: "Darwinism is evolution through natural selection")-and quite a lot of fun along the way: Mr. Berlinski: "The gravamen of your argument is the chordate." Mr. Kinsley: "Are people familiar with chordates?" DB: "Vertebrates. That's us." Ms. Scott: "No, chordates are the group in which vertebrates belong." Mr. Miller: "We're all chordates here, Mike."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1428
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFRUU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7362
item Program Number FLS204

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Black Americans Are Best Served by the Republican Party"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Connerly, Ward, 1939- : Franks, Gary, 1953- : Canady, Charles. : Shrum, Robert. : Ealy, Christopher. : Estrich, Susan. : Scruggs-Leftwich, Yvonne.

23 March 1998

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 157 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 14
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins cautiously: "I engage this subject thus formulated with some reluctance, because it is too easily misunderstood to be saying that political affiliations are the key to progress." However, he and his colleagues will "contend that the Republican Party is better oriented than the Democratic Party to do two things. The first and most important is to stay out of the way of upward-bound black Americans by minimizing the great burdens of regulations and taxation and military service. The second is to pull back from the catastrophic effects of the welfare state." Mr. Shrum takes off the gloves in his opening statement: "So now comes William F. Buckley Jr.-the fierce opponent of Brown v. Board of Education, the writer who penned jeremiads against the 1964 Civil Rights Act-to offer African Americans the tender mercies of the Republican Party. My reaction is, 'Beware of a reactionary bearing such gifts.'" The debaters sometimes talk past each other (CE: "Mr. Franks, are you saying that the War on Poverty was just a big mistake?" GF: "I am saying that the record is pretty clear as far as the separation of the family." CE: "So your position is;-" GF: "Trillions of dollars have been spent. I'm not saying-" CE: "The position of your party-" GF: "Can I answer your question?" CE: "No, I don't want you to filibuster"), but we cover a lot of ground, from law-school admissions in the University of California, to Aid to Families with Dependent Children, to the minimum wage, to Head Start.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1440
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7374
item Program Number FLS205, 205

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the ACLU Is Full of Baloney"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Graglia, Lino A. : Donohue, William A., 1947- : Knight, Robert H., 1951- : Glasser, Ira. : Strossen, Nadine. : Botstein, Leon. : Lynn, Barry W.

4 May 1998

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 157 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 15
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins by citing an article that said, "The ACLU is most generally identified with free speech, religion, and criminal law. That's true. Free speech defined as the right of Deep Throat--and, who knows?, maybe even snuff films--to the airwaves; freedom of religion defined as forbidding the Ten Commandments to be viewed in a courthouse or crosses or menorahs to be exhibited on public property; and criminal law defined as the right of criminals to escape imprisonment because the arresting officer didn't brush his teeth that morning." Ms. Strossen starts out taking the high road: "The ACLU's mission is unique and critically important: to defend all fundamental freedoms for all people in this country. We pursue this broad mission because we have learned through experience that all rights are indivisible, that if the government is ever ceded the power to violate one right of one person or group, then no right is safe for any person or group." And that is why the ACLU takes up some of the cases that Messrs. Buckley and Graglia zestfully cite--in favor of the 14-year-old girl who wished to decorate her school clothes with condom packages, against the Detroit school board's installing metal detectors at the entrances of its weapon-infested schools. And on--often at the shouting level--to AIDS and vouchers and homosexual Boy Scout leaders.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1446
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GVJW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7380
item Program Number FLS301, 301

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the U.S. Senate Should Lift the Cuban Trade Embargo"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Duran, Alfredo. : Jones, Kirby, 1941- : Symington, James W. (James Wadsworth), 1927- : Reich, Otto. : Torricelli, Robert G. : Perez Castellon, Ninoska. : Menendez, Robert.

20 July 1998

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 158 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 16
Program details: There presumably are Americans who want to lift the embargo on Cuba because they like Fidel Castro, but they are not represented in this debate. Instead, all the participants agree that Castro is a tyrant whom the world would be better off without; the point at issue-often heatedly-is (a) whether the embargo has any chance of bringing him down, (b) whether in hurting Castro it is hurting the Cuban people more-and, derivatively, (c) whether it hurts the United States. Mr. Duran: "You keep insisting on the embargo to punish the Castro regime. The embargo is punishing the people of Cuba. ... You are condemning to malnutrition and to sickness a whole generation of Cubans. That is an immoral policy for this country; that is an inhuman policy for this country." ... RT: "I believe that the embargo makes a very important point to the Cuban people of the lack of legitimacy of their government. The United States Government is not just some other enterprise in the world. It carries enormous moral weight."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1458
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7392
item Program Number FLS302, 302

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That It's Time to Abolish the Welfare State"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Goodman, John C. : Du Pont, Pierre S. : Keyes, Alan L. (Alan Lee), 1950- : Galbraith, James K. : Kuttner, Robert. : Tyson, Laura D'Andrea, 1947- : Curry, William E.

3 December 1998

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 158 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 17
Program details: As WFB frames the question in his opening statement, "We tend to date the modern welfare state to 1965, with the Great Society policies of President Lyndon Johnson. In constant dollars we have spent $5 trillion on welfare, yet the percentage of the American people technically below the poverty line is about the same. In identical constant dollars we fought the Second World War at a cost of $3 trillion. The haunting indictment of our experiences with the welfare state is that (a) more human welfare could be achieved without it, and (b) it has, in fact, helped to corrode the great aspirations of our country." Mr. Galbraith, taking up the baton of his father, John Kenneth, responds: "My friend Bill Buckley, who was once a conservative, tonight plays the role of the radical, the abolitionist, the William Lloyd Garrison of the welfare state. What would he abolish? Not poverty, not insecurity, not the fear effacing illness without the means to pay for doctors, not the penury of a penniless old age. No. He would abolish precisely those institutions that protect Americans from those evils ..." A splendid battle over our mixed economy and where it should be heading.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1471
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7405
item Program Number FLS401, 401

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: The Federal Government Should Not Impose a Tax on Electronic Commerce"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Kemp, Jack. : Blackwell, Ken. : Wyden, Ron. : Kuttner, Robert. : Kirk, Ron. : Hitchens, Christopher. : Fox, William.

3 December 1999

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 158 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 192 : 18
Program details: From Michael Kinsley's introduction of the final Firing Line debate: "From the University of Mississippi, welcome to a special Firing Line debate. This one is very special, because it's the last one. Yes, William F. Buckley is hanging up his tongue, or so he claims. Purveyors of false logic need no longer live in terror. Liberals can rest easy again. Dictionaries can rest easy, for that matter. No longer will the cry be heard across the land, "What the heck does 'sesquipedalian' mean?" Our topic tonight ends this series on a nicely forward-looking note. It's about the Internet, specifically, Resolved: the government should not impose a tax on electronic commerce. Alternate title: "A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: The Government Should Not Impose a Tax on Electronic Commerce."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1507
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGPIC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7441
item Program Number S0001, 1

"Dump Nixon?"

Guests: McCloskey, Paul N., 1927- : Lowenstein, Allard K.

26 May 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 85 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 168 : 29
Program details: For this first installment of Firing Line broadcast on public television, we have as our guests two men actively seeking to dump President Nixon. Mr. Lowenstein's organization had voted in favor of impeaching him for high crimes and misdemeanors-no, not Watergate, which was still more than a year away, but rather his conduct of the war in Vietnam. For the same reason, Mr. McCloskey had announced that he would challenge the President for the 1972 Republican nomination. (As it happens, by the time of the New Hampshire primary Mr. Buckley was backing John Ashbrook for the Republican nomination-not because of Vietnam but because of President Nixon's trip to China.) A certain amount of fun and games, but then serious and deeply informed analysis of the Vietnam War itself and the history of American intervention abroad.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.244
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9RS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6178
item Program Number S0002, 2

"Free Medicine"

Guests: Richardson, Elliot L., 1920- : Beer, Richard. : Breckinridge, Madeline. : Polman, Dick.

26 May 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 1
Program details: "It is widely accepted," Mr. Buckley begins, "that the formal opposition to a role for the Federal Government in medicine has pretty well ended-that it is as remote from the public memory as the Tenth Amendment-so that the argument becomes, 'What shall be the Federal Government's role?' " In fact, as Mr. Richardson recounts, the Nixon Administration was pressing for four health-care bills in Congress, at least partly in response to bills proposing something more like the British or Canadian system. WFB: "Inasmuch as you are very anxious to pass your bill, do you feel a certain constraint not to criticize authors of different bills because they might get sore at you?" ER: "... No; we figure-" WFB: "You can't refer to Senator Kennedy's 'damn fool bill' or things like that, can you?" ER: "I wouldn't, of course, use language like that in any case. I am at all times circumspect and tactful." WFB: "Hmm. I see ..." ER: "But I have characterized the bill rather sharply." WFB: "How sharply?" ER: "Well, I pointed out that it would create a monolithic bureaucracy, having the consequence of centralizing total control of the health-care system of the United States in the Federal Government."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.245
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6179
item Program Number S0003, 3

"Separation of Church and State"

Guests: O'Hair, Madalyn Murray. : Blain, Margaret. : Durant, Clark. : Wafer, Ralph.

22 April 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 85 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 2
Program details: Mrs. O'Hair was the country's most conspicuous atheist, not only proselytizing for atheism but also filing suit against anything that smacked of government encouragement of religion. (She had even, as WFB recounts, expressed public displeasure at our astronauts' reading the Bible on their way to and from the Moon.) A spirited duel. WFB: "In the first place it doesn't say that. I hope you can quote accurately the First Amendment...." MMO: "Congress shall make no law in respect to religion." WFB: "That was inaccurate. Can you quote it accurately?" MMO: "I don't care." WFB: "Maybe you'll change your mind if we quote it accurately." MMO: "No, no, no. I'm very pleased that you memorized it for your performance today, knowing that you would ask the question." WFB: "I was taught it in school." MMO: "I don't have to go back and review those things because I know the principle, and if you know the principle, it's not necessary to know the exact words."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.242
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6176
item Program Number S0004, 4

"Strikes in Defiance of the Law"

Guests: Gotbaum, Victor. : Wilson, Malcolm, 1914-

15 June 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 85 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 2
Program details: Mr. Gotbaum had just led a strike that closed bridges into Manhattan, sent raw sewage spilling into local waters, and stopped school lunches from being delivered. The point at issue was the refusal of the Republicans in Albany to sign off on the pension plan agreed to between the City of New York and Mr. Gotbaum's union. Under the circumstances, this show proves to be a surprisingly civil, though sharp, discussion of how far civil disobedience can be taken and what responsibility the government has to the whole body of taxpayers. MW: "I stand foursquare for the proposition that there is no right to strike against the public at any time for any reason ..." WFB: "The proposition on which Coolidge and FDR agreed." VG: "Oh, no. Also Nikita Khrushchev. They don't allow it in the Soviet Union, sir." WFB: "... If I say that Coolidge and Roosevelt believe in two and two equals four, why does it contribute to ... [add] that Khrushchev also believed two and two equals four?" VG: "Because I regard it as an authoritarian principle from where I sit."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.246
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6180
item Program Number S0005, 5

"The Black Caucus"

Guests: Dellums, Ronald V., 1935-

15 June 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 85 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 3
Program details: The Black Caucus in Congress had boycotted President Nixon's 1971 State of the Union address, after a confrontation the year before in which the President had declined to implement the Caucus's list of sixty proposals. Mr. Dellums was not in Congress when the initial list was presented, but he had since become a leading member of the Caucus. Where this show fails as conversation it nonetheless succeeds as an encapsulation of a moment in our political history. RD: "We don't see ourselves as being party loyalists. The problems that confront blacks and browns and reds and yellows and poor people and women and young people in this country go far beyond partisan politics. I don't see myself in the United States Congress as being loyal to the Democratic Party. I'd like to hope that I have enough integrity and enough courage to be loyal to people in this country who desperately need to have their problems solved."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.247
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6181
item Program Number S0006, 6

"The Lawyer's Role"

Guests: Kunstler, William Moses, 1919-

24 June 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 3
Program details: In this sizzling exchange, WFB tries to get his guest to admit that he is advocating illegal activities, and Mr. Kunstler tries to get Mr. Buckley to admit that our activities in Vietnam are at least as illegal. WFB: "Can I proceed on the assumption that you can distinguish between a declaration of war passed by both Houses of Congress pursuant to an attempt to save the world from the Axis powers; to defend the Jewish population of Germany, to the extent that it could be done; to save people from the Axis aggressions against China-can you distinguish between that and somebody burning down a building in protest against social policies that call for building a gymnasium in that university? Is that a distinction?" WK: "You usually don't help me so much. You've given me my answer. Because what you've really said is that under certain circumstances any form of arson, mayhem, bombing is justifiable, and you've given an example of World War II. I'm telling you, there are many people in the United States who believe that it's just as justifiable to try to stop the war in Vietnam as it is to prosecute World War II to stop the Germans from doing the same thing we're doing."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.248
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707SSY
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6182
item Program Number S0007, 7

"War Crimes: Part I"

Guests: Van den Haag, Ernest. : Hersh, Seymour M. : Winston, Mark. : Bruce, Collot. : Winship, Mike.

7 July 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 4
Program details: This high-energy exchange sometimes has everyone talking, or shouting, at once--and the guests in "War Crimes, Part II" (Firing Line 0S9) take serious issue with some of what Mr. Hersh says--but this show does give us a window on the opposing positions on war in general and Vietnam in particular. SH: "The fact is, they're dying. And I can't make up my mind. You know, the more you know about some of these officers and some of the, certainly about the enlisted men, it's really hard to say whether something- You know, Calley was guilty of murder, certainly. But I think the premeditation, perhaps, was in the White House or in the Pentagon. And, you know, I'll leave it there...." EvdH: "You said before that it doesn't make much difference to a man who is killed whether he is killed by accident or by design. You're perfectly right: he's dead in both cases. But the law for the last five thousand years has made a difference whether you kill a man by some accident that you couldn't avoid, whether you kill him by negligence, or whether you kill him by intent."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.252
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6186
item Program Number S0008, 8

"Revenue Sharing"

Guests: Mills, Wilbur D. (Wilbur Daigh), 1909- : Polman, Dick. : Miljavic, Margaret. : Beer, Dick.

7 July 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 85 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 4
Program details: In his 1971 State of the Union message, President Nixon had proposed his revenue-sharing plan--federal grants to the individual states, as opposed to the Federal Government's continuing to run local programs. Rep. Mills had reportedly referred to the plan as "a gratuity in a will signed by a pauper." Mr. Buckley's first question is, "Why is the government a pauper, and ... who pauperized it?" The ensuing discussion, full of detail, ranges from deficit spending to forms of taxation to the congressional committee system. WM: "I feel very strongly that you don't get better government at any level if you split these two responsibilities, because there is this joint responsibility, I think, to raise that which you spend and to spend that which you raise."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.253
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6187
item Program Number S0009, 9

"War Crimes: Part II"

Guests: Bender, John. : Carpenter, Donald. : North, Oliver. : Bruce, Collot. : Winston, Mark. : Winship, Mike.

7 July 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 5
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins by telling us that he had "recently received a letter from three Marine officers stationed at Quantico, Virginia, all Vietnam veterans, all concerned about media coverage of atrocities and war crimes allegedly committed in the Republic of Vietnam." The three officers, our guests on this show, state that they never witnessed or were told at close hand of any such incidents. Their purpose in going public was, as Captain Bender puts it, "primarily ... a concern that the families of our own men-and myself, thinking of the 216 enlisted men that served in my rifle platoon over the nine and a half months that I commanded it, and the 17 officers who were rotated through my company while I was in Vietnam,... I felt personally that I didn't want the families of any of those people to feel that their sons or their husbands were coming home as, quote, 'war criminals.' " A moving account of what the war looked like on the ground--and, yes, Lieutenant North is that Oliver North.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.254
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6188
item Program Number S0010, 10

"Is It Possible to Be a Good Governor? [1971]"

Guests: Reagan, Ronald.

15 July 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 5
Program details: The opening question would have resonance far beyond the California governor's mansion: "What [do you] consider the most clearly impractical demand regularly made by conservative theorists on men of affairs?" RR: "Oh, I think probably instant change.... I think, Bill, the thing that happens is the belief that simply by electing a President or electing a governor, that suddenly all the things that the group that supported that individual wants changed in government will be changed. And it overlooks the fact that... the great bulk of that government is unchanged--meaning the permanent structure, the permanent employees of government ... and they tend to think of an elected official as a temporary aberration, and they're going to go on doing things the way they had always intended to do them ..." Specifics include the welfare system, the withholding of income tax, relations between the states and the Federal Government--and why Ronald Reagan doesn't want to be Vice President.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.255
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6189
item Program Number S0011, 11

"Is St. Augustine Relevant?"

Guests: Sheen, Fulton J. (Fulton John), 1895-1979. : Wirt, Sherwood Eliot. : Niemeyer, Gerhart.

24 June 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 85 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 6
Program details: A luminous show answering the title question with a resounding "Yes." SW: "I think that Augustine is one of the most relevant of the ancients for our day simply because he was probably one of the most honest men of the ancient world. The ... way he describes his inner life in his search for God, to me, is one of the most captivating and revealing sequences in the history of literature." ... GN: "[He] realize[d] that man, ultimately, is not at home-not wholly at home-in any political society. That any political society that we might invent-even the best one-has flaws and falls far short, both of absolute justice and of absolute freedom and goodness." ... WFB: "What is it that made him a saint ... ? I mean, having a fine mind and being a great teacher doesn't make you a saint necessarily, does it?" FJS: "No. As a matter of fact, sometimes a great mind stands in the way. One of the great marvels of Thomas Aquinas is that being so very learned, he was so very saintly. But you ask what is it that makes a saint?" WFB: "Or that made him a saint." FJS: "Made him a saint. It's making Christ lovable. I think that's it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.249
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6183
item Program Number S0012, 12

"Is America a Terrible Letdown?"

Guests: McCarthy, Mary, 1912-

30 June 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 85 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 6
Program details: "I should like to begin," says WFB, "by asking Miss McCarthy wherein America especially let her down." MM: "Oh, I didn't know this was the question we were going to discuss." WFB: "Are you prepared?" MM: "Well, I dislike self-pity. So that I would never speak in terms of 'America let me down.' Let itself down." WFB: "Well, then--let other people down." MM: "Yes, well,... it seems to me that there's been a great change in America, oh, starting sometime after the Second World War. That the quality of people in politics ... deteriorated; that when you see, nowadays, some leftover from, let's say, the Roosevelt Administration, it's, you know, it's like seeing some old cathedral pine standing there... I think that capitalism is the most successful deteriorator of society that's been known yet. I've never been in Russia but I have been in Poland ... and what strikes you about those countries, is, you know, how refreshing they are because they're so backward and reminds me very much ... of my childhood.... I think any logical conservative like you, Mr. Buckley would have to be anti-capitalist. If you're not anti-capitalist, I don't believe you're a conservative."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.251
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6185
item Program Number S0013, 13

"The Problems of a Conservative Legislator"

Guests: Buckley, James Lane, 1923-

15 July 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 7
Program details: The Conservative Party of New York had been founded in 1962, as a counter less to the Liberal Party than to the liberalization of the Republican Party. It was not expected to go far--but in 1970 it sent James Lane Buckley to the United States Senate. Actually, in response to the title question, the Senator says it isn't particularly difficult being a conservative in the Senate: "I think I'm regarded, still, a little bit as a curiosity, but I'm sort of feeling my way around and finding my place--not being put in my place, I might add. And, no, I think I'm just accepted as a member of the team.... The Senate has a very interesting air of total civility, so that, I think, if you aren't more or less apt to be naturally civil, there's something about the atmosphere that causes you to abide by the ground rules." A genial, instructive conversation about the workings of a third party, the demands on a large-state senator, and Mr. Nixon's "full-employment budget."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.256
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707MTE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6190
item Program Number S0014, 14

"What Has Happened to the American Spirit?"

Guests: Dickey, James. : Blain, Margaret. : DuRant, Clark. : Wafer, Ralph.

22 April 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 7
Program details: Mr. Dickey throws the title question back at his host for a definition of the American spirit, and Mr. Buckley replies: "Well, it is easier to say what it isn't... It certainly isn't boredom. It isn't a sense of impotence. It isn't a sense of futility. It isn't a sense of misanthropy. And it isn't a sense of self-hate, either...." JD: "I was in Australia three years ago, and it seemed to me ... Australia is like America was when we had a great feeling of hope and promise and possibility. They still have their frontier down there. I think the thing that's eaten us up in America is excessive introspection and the questioning of every motive so that you can't do the simplest thing without being made aware that there's a certain amount of guilt that attaches to it." He tells about a commencement address he's writing, to be titled "How Can You Possibly?" subtitled "Reflections on Guilt, Joy, and the Quality of Life," "And the opening sentence of the address is, 'How can you possibly stand there eating that ice-cream cone when children are being firebombed in Vietnam?' " WFB: "What is an appropriate response?" JD: "I don't know. I haven't gotten to the second sentence yet." And on through Susan Sontag and Albert Camus and hats made of fox skins and much else.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.243
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6177
item Program Number S0015, 15

"In Defense of Policy"

Guests: Rostow, W. W. (Walt Whitman), 1916-2003.

1 September 1971

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 8
Program details: As WFB relates in his introduction, MIT had decided in 1969 that no one who had defended Lyndon Johnson's policies in Vietnam could continue to claim the privileges of academic freedom there, and so Mr. Rostow had gone off to Texas, where he was working on a book about President Johnson. The conversation begins there (WWR: "I think I can say that my views about Asia, from which derived my views about Vietnam,were formed long before I had the privilege of working with President Johnson"), but ranges across the foreign-policy scene at this critical juncture, just a few months before Nixon's visit to China and the beginning of detente with the Soviet Union, and in the midst, as we would later learn, of the secret talks in Paris to end the Vietnam War."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.259
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6193
item Program Number S0016, 16

"Law and Order in England"

Guests: Rawlinson, Peter.

30 July 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 8
Program details: The American Bar Association had just met in London to discuss the differences between American and English jurisprudence, and that is our starting point with Sir Peter. The conversation turns at times to technical points of judicial behavior and self-policing by British barristers; but there are also fascinating reflections on British history. For example, when Mr. Buckley raises the matter of the turmoil on American campuses, Sir Peter agrees that Britain hasn't seen its like recently--but he adds: "You always remember, though, the great sort of riots in London. They were usually by the apprentices. They were great mobs in the 18th century, and Wellington's hat being knocked off and Lord North's coat jacket cut into bits, and the windows being broken. And that was, after all, not so very long ago.... I don't know. Perhaps in my generation, having been very early confronted with violence in war, one has the greatest contempt for those people who are driven to violence, unless the circumstances are such that they are utterly intolerable."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.258
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6192
item Program Number S0017

"Presidential Hopeful: Fred Harris"

Guests: Harris, Fred R., 1930-

14 September 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 9
Program details: In the run-up to the 1968 election it had been the Republicans' turn to go on the firing line; this time, with an incumbent Republican, it's the Democrats' turn. We have already met George McGovern (Firing Line 201), and now we meet Fred Harris. A sharp duel between a self-described populist who believes, for example, that "the very portions of Lyndon Johnson's program that President Nixon is trying to wind down--like Legal Services--are the parts that have worked best. WFB: And what is the interest that Mr. Nixon has in the maldistribution of power?" FH: "I think he likes it the way it is."WFB: "Why?" FH: "Well, it serves him very well. He's President of the United States, among other things." WFB: "Yeah. But he became that under a Constitution that was put together by, you know, Madison and a lot of other people who didn't have Nixon in mind." FH: "I don't know. Madison might have."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.261
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6195
item Program Number S0018

"The Politics of William Proxmire"

Guests: Proxmire, William.

14 September 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 9
Program details: Yet another Democratic presidential candidate, described by his host as "a maverick liberal with eccentric tastes for economy." Senator Proxmire goes on, in this lively conversation, to demonstrate that his tastes for economy, whether or not one agrees with every particular, are well informed: "Well, I think it's very, very hard to justify-from an economic standpoint, from a military standpoint-building a supersonic B-l whose only unique function, really, would be to gravity-drop a bomb over Russia, when you can retrofit with new engines and a SCAD missile the B-52s, and they'd be far more economically effective, and they could do the job. They could stand off and provide a platform for launching missiles at the Soviet Union much, much cheaper, and do the job." WFB: "I see. So your objection isn't to our capability to get the job done, but to an unnecessary vehicle for getting the job done." WP: "Exactly. You know, I feel very strongly we have to have a strong military force." And on to NASA, Japanese car exports, and President's Nixon's economic plan.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.262
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6196
item Program Number S0019

"Is America Hospitable to the Negro?"

Guests: Jackson, Jesse, 1941- : Hart, Thomas J. : Tracy, Daniel. : Wilson, Brenda.

2 October 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 10
Program details: Jesse Jackson was commonly described as one of the more "moderate" civil-rights leaders--although, as WFB says in his introduction, "moderate" hardly does justice to his "special mixture of evangelism, toughness, eloquence, and bombast." Mr. Jackson-dressed not in jacket and tie but in a boldly patterned T-shirt-proceeds to demonstrate what his host means, with his rapid-fire disquisitions on the civil-rights movement, on the current state of the cities, and much more. One sample: "One cannot see the Public Accommodations Bill-which moves toward some universal respect for one's person in America-apart from the jailings and the bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, and the assassination [of Martin Luther King].... So indeed there is progress, but it is in proportion to the agitation."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.263
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFR7I
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6197
item Program Number S0020

"Pornography, English Style"

Guests: Short, Renee. : Gummer, John Selwyn.

30 July 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 10
Program details: Mr. Buckley sets the stage by telling of "three young men who thought it would be amusing or instructive or profitable, or all three, to put out a magazine designed especially for schoolchildren, edited by schoolchildren, on the subject of sex, etc. A so-called Oz No. 28 resulted in prosecution. Six weeks after the magazine hit the streets, the defendants had been tried, convicted, and jailed, which suits Mr. John Selwyn Gummer just fine." Mrs. Short, while "not pro-pornography, [is] anti-anti-pornography legislation." RS: "I think that one can really leave society to look after this problem reasonably successfully. I think that what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own places is their business...." JSG: "I find it very odd. Mrs. Short's the first one to say you can't leave it to individuals to decide whether to put up ugly buildings or not. They have, evidently, to be stopped from doing that, and they have to be stopped from polluting the environment... But for some reason or other, you find it impossible to say that people shouldn't have advertisements which are generally unacceptable on free sale on public stands." A crackling debate-we sometimes feel as if we were on the floor of the House of Commons, with side-trips to Denmark's porn shops, the American Supreme Court, and Times Square.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.257
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6191
item Program Number S0021

"The Case against Freedom"

Guests: Skinner, B. F. (Burrhus Frederic), 1904-1990. : MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon, 1922- : Hart, Thomas J. : Tracy, Daniel. : Wilson, Brenda.

2 October 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 11
Program details: A serious but never inaccessible exchange between two scientists, with WFB acting as catalyst, on the question: "Does man have free will?" One sample: DM: "I personally wouldn't like to take the optimistic view that anyone who goes in for cruelty as a way of ensuring survival... is bound to-" WFB: "Self-destruct?" DM: "I think it would be nice if that were true, [but] I doubt it." WFB: "When you use the word 'God' you are using a metaphor-or not?" DM: "No, I would take this in the specific Christian religious sense-God as one to be reckoned with." WFB: "Does that make you uncomfortable, Mr. Skinner?" BFS: "No, because when I listen to that sort of thing I'm running a translation inside, of course. I think that the good, personified in a god, does represent those things which we find, to use a technical term, reinforcing. They're the things which induce us to behave in certain ways. And evil? Well, the ordinary Christian picture of hell is a collection of all the aversive stimuli available at the time."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.264
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003O86PFY
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6198
item Program Number S0022

"Marijuana Reconsidered"

Guests: Grinspoon, Lester, 1928- : McKinney, Lawrence.

30 June 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 11
Program details: No fireworks, host and guests being in basic agreement, but a productive discussion of how psychoactive drugs work, and how social pressures work. LG: "It seems clear to me now that marijuana is a harmful drug, in the sense that any psychoactive drug is a harmful drug, but if one puts it-" WFB: "How do you define psychoactive? Is alcohol psychoactive?" LG: "Yes." WFB: "How about cigarettes?" LG: "Yes." WFB: "Okay, is Coca-Cola?" LG: "Oh, Coca-Cola has enough caffeine that it might be considered a psychoactive drug." WFB: "How about lemon squash?" LG: "I don't believe so; but I would have to-" WFB: "Well, then everything is psychoactive-everything good." LG: "Well, no, but lots of things are, more things than most people suspect. But the point is, it's not that I am saying marijuana is a harmless drug, but that in fact its harmfulness ... is far less than the harm which we are imposing on young people through the present approach to its social use." ... LM: "I was really concerned about why some kinds of people really did seem to get dependent on drugs.... And it seemed to me that scapegoating the drug by saying that this marijuana would come into your life and make your son into a hippie was begging the question."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.250
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6184
item Program Number S0023

"The Meaning of the China Vote"

Guests: Bush, George, 1924- : Loh, I-Cheng. : Cooper, Gene. : Jervis, Nancy. : Frank, Christine.

29 October 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 12
Program details: "A few days ago at the United Nations," Mr. Buckley begins, "the General Assembly made a decision which has been widely acknowledged as the most important in its history": to admit Communist China and expel Taiwan. This was, as Mr. Bush tells us, the first time the UN had ever expelled a country-"something that our opponents said wasn't happening,... because they were maintaining that we were talking about restoration of the legal rights" of Peking-and it was seen, as WFB puts it, "as the crystallization within the United Nations of a working anti-American majority." An informative discussion of how Mr. Bush sought to prevent this outcome ("I wish I could say on the air ... a beautiful Texas expression" that General Romulo [Foreign Secretary of the Philippines) had used), and how Mr. Loh's government reconciles its one-China policy with its friends' attempts to have both it and Peking represented in the General Assembly.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.265
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6199
item Program Number S0024

"Why Aren't Good Buildings Being Built?"

Guests: Huxtable, Ada Louise. : Rossant, James S., 1928- : Feingold, Jeff. : Blum, Leslie. : Ferri, Roger.

2 November 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 12
Program details: An absorbing discussion of what makes a building good or bad-which, both guests are adamant in arguing, is different from asking whether it is beautiful or ugly-ranging from Mrs. Huxtable's account of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designing a hospital ("he started this way: when he woke up in the morning and he was lying in bed, he would think, 'I am a patient, and I'm here. I'm flat on my back, and I'm looking at the ceiling, and that is all I can see' ") to Mr. Rossant's explanation of the importance of context ("Much as a theater is the framework of plays, the city is the framework of buildings. We have been conditioned in this country, throughout our history,... to hate cities ... We had escaped the evils of Europe, and the evils of Europe were personified in the cities...." WFB: "But so many of the cities were so beautiful." JR: "Not to the intellectuals and the Founding Fathers of the time").
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.267
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6201
item Program Number S0025

"The Place of the Treaty in International Affairs"

Guests: Kerry, John, 1943-

2 November 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 13
Program details: Five months before this show, WFB had taken as his text, for a commencement address at West Point, Mr. Kerry's sensational testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the barbarism of our activities in Vietnam. Neither host nor guest has changed his views since, but there is light as well as heat generated on Vietnam in particular and morality and foreign policy generally. JK: "I want very much to create a world order in which we can somehow live-" WFB: "Well, do you think Lyndon Johnson doesn't want to?" JK: "No, I don't think he didn't want to. I don't think Richard Nixon doesn't want to, frankly.... I don't subscribe to the theory that so many of my contemporaries do, that he is necessarily an evil man." WFB: "You just say that your moral vision is more acute." JK: "I think he is highly misguided."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.268
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6202
item Program Number S0026

"The News Twisters"

Guests: Efron, Edith, 1922- : Rooney, Andrew A.

1 September 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 13
Program details: Even before Vice President Agnew gave his "nattering nabobs of negativism" speech--blasting the networks for their pervasive bias against, e.g., Republicans, and in favor of, e.g., rioting students-the veteran journalist Edith Efron had begun a clinical study of the 7 PM network news shows. The resulting book had just now been published. Her findings: that the networks are indeed biased in a left-liberal way, and that the network executives know it even though they deny it. How much does it matter? "The situation is enormously dangerous because so long as you have actual bias on the air of a publicly owned medium, which is supposedly regulated by a fairness doctrine, and then huge numbers of citizens are aware of this bias and are intensely angered by it, it is a set-up for an assault on the First Amendment from which we might not recover." Mr. Rooney launches a spirited defense, and we're off to the races.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.260
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6194
item Program Number S0027

"Nixon in the White House: The Frustration of Power"

Guests: Evans, Rowland, 1921- : Novak, Robert D. : Warren, Jeff. : Lewis, Betty. : Brennan, Gerry.

22 November 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 14
Program details: A high-energy conversation that keeps coming back to Nixon but continually reaches out for helpful comparisons--to JFK, LBJ, the Roosevelts, Winston Churchill. One sample, on Nixon's speech on the Cambodian incursion: RDN: "I think he is a man of many heroes, some of them conflicting in nature. I think he wants to be Winston Churchill, at times. I think he wants to be the resolute leader of a nation-confronting great military odds, mobilizing a heterogeneous people into one, to combat the enemy. Unfortunately, or fortunately, those times are not here, and it becomes a little ridiculous when you make a rather small military operation seem like the Normandy invasion." RE: "You read that speech today, out of context, and it really is melodramatic. And you realize, at the same time, that the President was seeing the movie about Patton over and over again, and that this was part of this same-" WFB: "You said 'over and over again.' You used it repeatedly in your book. You don't really mean that, do you?" RDN: "Yes." WFB: "You mean more than twice?" RDN: "Yes." RE: "Oh, five or six times, minimum ... we have documentation on that, Bill, which I can't go into here; but no question about it, he saw the movie many times."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.272
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6206
item Program Number S0028, 28

"The American Conservatives and Mr. Nixon"

Guests: Lukas, J. Anthony, 1933- : Thimmesch, Nick. : McWilliams, Wilson C.

29 October 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 14
Program details: The semi-annual occasion on which the guests question their host. Our guests this time stick to the question posed in the title, which nonetheless gives them free rein to talk about everything from Taiwan's expulsion from the UN, to Mr. Nixon's Supreme Court appointments, to the latest round of GATT, to wage and price controls. JAL: "[President Nixon] is reliably-I think reliably-reported to have used a four-letter word which I presume we can no more use here than the newspapers could use it..." WFB: "... The fact that he should utter an expletive seems to be an odd point to record, since his predecessor couldn't get by a normal sentence without the use of one.... Now, if he had said, 'I'm going to propose a law abolishing the American Bar Association,' then I think I would understand your point better."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.266
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6200
item Program Number S0029

"The Edgar Smith Story: Part I"

Guests: Smith, Edgar, 1934-

6 December 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 15
Program details: And it seemed a story with a happy ending indeed. Edgar Smith had been convicted 14 years earlier of the murder of a 15-year-old girl and sentenced to death; twice he came within hours of being executed but was rescued by resourceful lawyers. He was, WFB tells us, "in the death house longer than anyone in the history of the United States," and during that time he taught himself law and wrote a book, Brief against Death, which convinced many people, including Mr. Buckley and the Washington lawyer Steve Umin, that he was in fact innocent. An hour and a half before this taping, Mr. Smith was discharged from the death house at Trenton, N.J., after pleading guilty to a lesser charge (only because, he claims, of the extraordinary difficulties a new jury trial at this remove of time would pose). He speaks movingly about his time in prison, how he was convicted in the first place, and where he goes from here ("At the present time, I'm trying to believe the fact that I'm not still in the death house. It's very difficult").
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.273
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6207
item Program Number S0030

"The Edgar Smith Story: Part II"

Guests: Smith, Edgar, 1934- : Sullivan, Ronald. : Norman, Geoffrey. : Knight, Hans.

6 December 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 15
Program details: RS: "In court today, the judge asked you, 'Did you kill Victoria Zielinski?' You answered, 'Yes.' And tonight in this studio, you said you had to do what you felt you' had to do to gain your freedom.... Mr. Buckley, why are you so convinced that he is innocent, after what you heard today in court?" WFB: "Well, what I heard today in court was a protracted yawn. The judge simply condensed what I first read in 1961...." RS: "You're convinced that he's innocent?" WFB: "I told you that." RS: "Then he committed perjury today." WFB: "Well, do you want to send him to jail for that?" RS: "No. No, but you see the point I'm trying to make." That point keeps recurring, although there is also illuminating discussion of the way prisons are run, the advisability of having press coverage of trials, and the Anglo-American adversary system of jurisprudence". Footnote: The unhappy second ending to this story occurred in 1976, when Edgar Smith attempted to kill a young woman in California.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.274
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6208
item Program Number S0031

"The Assault on Privacy"

Guests: Miller, Arthur Raphael, 1934-

22 November 1971

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105: 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 16
Program details: We eventually get to the principal subject of Mr. Miller's book, which is that, as WFB summarizes it, "the technology of data collecting is now so advanced ... that we are threatened with the disappearance of the truly private transaction," but we do so by way of a fast-moving exchange on "the right to know, which is, in a sense, the obvious enemy of the right to privacy." How does it all fit in with free speech? How much is mere voyeurism? Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers come into the discussion, as do the New York Times rule, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and lie-detector tests. WFB: "It seems to me that this makes everybody's property everybody else's property, because we are involved in mankind ... Since the ripples from a communication between A and B can very easily affect C, either you do assert the right of A to privacy or you've had it, I think." ARM: "My reaction, which, admittedly, is highly platitudinous, is that there are no absolutes in this business."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.271
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6205
item Program Number S0032

"Who Owns America?"

Guests: Hickel, Walter J., 1919-

16 November 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 16
Program details: A productive discussion of a whole range of environmental issues with a man who, until he went to Washington, D.C., had spent all his adult life in our last frontier, Alaska. WH: "I think that resources have to be wisely used, without abuse.... And so in our country, which is quite a bit different from the standpoint of geological formations and geographical locations, we've seen literally millions upon millions of board feet of timber that are just rotting, for example. We've seen, on the other side, the exploitation of salmon. We've seen exploitation since the turn of the century. So, I say, conservation is really appreciation... You're saying that you think that there's an extreme side on preservation versus exploitation?" WFB: "Yeah." WH: "I think the pendulum had to swing that way. It's a natural thing in things that happen in America."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.269
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6203
item Program Number S0033

"The 18-to-21-Year-Old Vote"

Guests: Martin, Marsha. : Seidman, Larry. : Cortright, S. A. (Steven A.), 1953- : Westbrook, Yvonne. : Morgan, Steve. : Diamond, Larry Jay. : Gerbe, Dave. : Mendel, Meta.

16 November 1971

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 17
Program details: In the course of the anti-Vietnam agitation, the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, had been drafted, sent to the states, and ratified in a matter of weeks. "There is much speculation about all of this," Mr. Buckley begins. "How will they vote? How will they affect national and state elections? Ought they to vote while at college?" Our eight students today are more articulate than many student panelists, and while Vietnam keeps coming up, so do questions of domestic policy and more general questions of political philosophy. Miss Westbrook: "... that, I think, relates back to my first statement, that young people have given up. I think that it has to go further than the vote." WFB: "But how can you give up when you're 18?" YW: "Very easily!" WFB: "You just stopped eating popsicles yesterday." YW: "At 18, you're going to war, and you're killing people, and you're being killed." Miss Mendel: "You probably got popsicles. Not everyone did."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.270
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6204
item Program Number S0034

"Vietnamization"

Guests: Bunker, Ellsworth, 1894-

17 January 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 10
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 17
Program details: "Ambassador Bunker," WFB begins, "is the diplomat who presided over the great metamorphosis we call Vietnamization. There are those who believe that however sensible the concept is, in fact, what it comes down to is that the United States needed to concoct a grand chimera, under the cover of which to pull away from what we used to refer to as our obligations under the SEATO treaty." As a veteran diplomat (starting with his posting to Argentina by President Truman, and continuing under Republican and Democratic Presidents ever since), Mr. Bunker is well able to turn aside a question so smoothly that you hardly realize he has sidestepped; but once he gets into the subject of the training of the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Viet-Nam], and the intransigence of the North Vietnamese and their Soviet and Chinese backers, he is eloquent. "This war was new to the American experience.... Korea wasn't like this; World War II was not like this.... Therefore, we had to learn to fight this war as we went along, in the hard way. It took some time to come to the realization that there wasn't the military war and the other [political and psychological] war. It was all one war. The thing, I think, that brought this home to us, dramatically, was Tet '68, which was a major military defeat for the enemy here, but a major psychological victory for him in the United States."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.276
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6210
item Program Number S0035

"Israel: War or Peace?"

Guests: Peres, Shimon, 1923-

24 January 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 18
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins by asking his guest why his cause, the cause of Israel, "should be championed by the United States." Mr. Peres replies somewhat predictably, but fluently and often movingly--"Israel is obviously a free country, as the United States is itself; and ... there are many similarities in the way the United States was created and Israel was born--the same spirit, the same convictions, the same outlook, and the same desire to do a positive service to other people." When the conversation ranges further afield, he comes up with some unexpected delights: "They say, still, that the constitution of the Fifth Republic is the shortest in the French history. It consists just of two items: Item No. 1: The General is always right; and Item No. 2: In case he is wrong, see Item No. 1."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.279
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6213
item Program Number S0036

"Vietnam: Looking Back"

Guests: Osnos, Peter. : Cloud, Stanley. : McArthur, George.

17 January 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 11
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 18
Program details: Mr. McArthur had been in Vietnam since 1965; Messrs. Osnos and Cloud for about a year. They all agree that despite their own best efforts, people back home have a skewed view of Vietnam and the war. They give vivid accounts of what they found there, starting with Mr. Osnos's surprise when he first arrived ("When you get off the plane, somehow, you expect to have to duck, mortars flying, and it's not like that at all"), and Mr. McArthur's account of how he went about assigning stories: "Everything had a tendency to get covered if you simply left it alone with ten more or less energetic newsmen doing the job. And you wouldn't say, 'Go do me atrocity stories,' or 'Go do me a pacification story' ... Occasionally you'd make some specific assignments, but it wasn't in some limited field or some limited range of what you might call emotional appeal."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.277
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6211
item Program Number S0037

"Inside Israel"

Guests: Rubinstein, Amnon. : Ben-Dor, Leah. : Abbasi, Mahmud, 1935-

24 January 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 86 : 12
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 19
Program details: A no-holds-barred discussion of everything from the petition Mr. Rubinstein had signed urging Prime Minister Meir to modify her position on negotiating with Egypt, to the status of African and Asian Jews in Israel, to the Holocaust, to the U.S. effort in Vietnam. One sample, from Mrs. Ben-Dor: "And I must say I've become more discouraged about the whole situation since I've seen what happened and didn't happen in Biafra [cf. Firing Line #167] and what happened and didn't happen in East Bengal. Here again, in Biafra, people were massacred without anybody interfering, and the Pakistanis were able to massacre people in East Bengal without anybody interfering, and what earthly reason is there to suppose that if we ever allowed anybody to be in a position to massacre us, that anybody would interfere? There are not so many people [in Israel]; it could be over pretty quickly, and everybody would wring their hands."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.278
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6212
item Program Number S0038

"The New Hampshire Primary"

Guests: Ashbrook, John M. : McCloskey, Paul N., 1927-

29 February 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 19
Program details: Reps. Ashbrook and McCloskey were both challenging President Nixon in the primary to be held the following week, the latter because of the Vietnam War, the former because, as WFB puts it, "his support for Richard Nixon in 1968 was based on a number of positions concerning social and international issues which Mr. Nixon no longer holds, but John Ashbrook does." (For the record, Mr. Buckley and his magazine, National Review, were supporting Mr. Ashbrook's effort.) A sparkling exchange, with substance--re Vietnam, and Nixon's just-concluded visit to China, and fiscal responsibility--as well as fun and games. PM: "Well, I don't consider joining the Democratic Party, and I think the significant differences used to be that we were the party of the individual, small business, small farmers..." WFB: " 'We' being Republicans?" PM: "We used to be the party of fiscal responsibility. And I feel more comfortable as a Republican than I do with men like Mayor Daley or John Stennis or Jim Eastland, who..." WFB: "Or John Lindsay?" PM: "Well, I like John Lindsay, but I..." WFB: "We weren't talking about the romantic aspects." PM: "If that's romance, then I'm in trouble."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.282
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6216
item Program Number S0039

"The Meaning of China"

Guests: Terrill, Ross.

29 February 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 87 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 105 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 20
Program details: Mr. Terrill, whose articles--based on first-hand reporting--had had an electrifying effect, comes from the social-democratic side of things, and there are times when this show turns into a matter-versus-anti-matter clash. WFB: "Now, I understand you to ask the questions: Is it really wrong that a central authority should tell this professor what to study, and this guy what books to write? And the very fact that you consider this an open question is remarkable and says a great deal about your appreciation of China, suggesting that we are a way station to Orwell." RT: "Let me tell you why I ask the questions: because I think we don't approach China from a fixed point, as if our world is settled and beyond criticism.... And I want people to think about their own society at the same time as they think about China. In the past, we've looked at China as a kind of exotic area--as if, indeed, it were another planet--without thinking that there were points, problems with points, about our own country as well."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.283
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6217
item Program Number S0040, 43

"Genocide"

Guests: Conquest, Robert.

8 February 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 20
Program details: A rich discussion of genocide and the world's reaction to it, with the world's foremost student of Stalin's reign of terror. To Mr. Buckley, "contemplating the recently discovered genocide in Bangladesh, the eyes and ears of the world are strangely, perversely dull, since no one, that I know of, suspected that the killing was on such a scale." To Mr. Conquest, "I don't think one does know exactly the scale of these things till years later." The operative question, for him, is whether we're attempting to find out what is happening, or whether we judge according to "which side has the best publicity machinery." One sample: WFB: "If I were to arrive at, say, the Daily Telegraph office here with a first-hand account of 100,000 people slaughtered in, say, Brazil, what kind of treatment would my account get in the next morning's papers?" RC: "... The first question is: Who did the killing? . . . Even leaving aside the question of taking ideological stances on the matter, I'd have thought that a million killed in Bengal would be about the same news as, say, a couple of hundred thousand killed in Brazil, which again would be about the same news as four killed in Kent State." WFB: "Or thirteen in Londonderry."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.281
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6215
item Program Number S0041, 44

"The Irish Problem"

Guests: McAliskey, Bernadette Devlin, 1947-

25 March 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 21
Program details: Miss Devlin had earned the reputation of a young firebrand (still only 24, she had already served in Parliament for three years; recently she had physically attacked the Home Secretary on the floor of the House of Commons; visiting New York a year or so earlier, she handed over to the Black Panthers the key to the city that Mayor Lindsay had given her). She demonstrates here that her discontents are not precisely those of most of her Irish Catholic constituents: WFB: "You've had more experience than any country in the history of the world with democratic government, and the fact that you still..." BD:"You'd think by now we'd know it doesn't work." WFB: "...have an imperfect system suggests one of two things: one is that..." BD: "I do suggest one thing: that we scrap the whole system and try another one. This one evidently doesn't work." WFB: "Yeah, that's your suggestion. There are, I suppose, about 50 million people who disagree with you, and unless you want to suspend the democratic process, we are going to have to wait for them..." BD: "We've never had a plebiscite on it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.285
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6219
item Program Number S0042, 46

"Fascism, Past and Present"

Guests: Mosley, Oswald, Sir, 1896-

25 March 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 87 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 21
Program details: A great career in politics had been predicted for Sir Oswald Mosley, until he shocked Britain by founding his fascist party just as Hitler was consolidating power in Germany. This proves to be a surprisingly rich hour, though with a certain surrealism. OM: "I've admitted that the other fascist states--I don't think it would have been so true, if I had won here--did ignore liberty and they did great damage. Mussolini had his Lipari Islands and people interned. They did then, in time of peace, what was done to me... in time of war." ... "Do you really think that flowery speeches like that [Churchill's at Yalta saying that Stalin was "a friend whom we can trust"]... had any effect on a man who had gone the long and dusty road from Siberia to the Kremlin, or that he could be won over by Mr. Churchill drinking his toast? The whole concept was ridiculous, and no wonder clever and able and shrewd American conservatives like Mr. Buckley are alarmed when Mr. Nixon goes to China and has feasts and all the rest of it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.284
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6218
item Program Number S0043, 47

"An English Inquiry into American Conservatism"

Guests: Evans, Roger. : Riddell, Peter. : Middleweek, Helene.

8 February 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 22
Program details: Another installment of the half-yearly feature in which Mr. Buckley changes places with his guests--in this case, three young people who had served as Firing Line panelists many times, starting when they were still at Cambridge. A freewheeling, at times boisterous discussion of everything from the supersonic transport to Vietnam to unemployment--sometimes all in one paragraph. PR: "When you're, for instance, an aerospace worker who's kicked out of a job, who's used to earning $10,000 plus at least..." WFB: "Which is a good argument for escalation in Vietnam..." PR: "No, it's not a good argument for escalation in Vietnam. It's perhaps a good argument for building supersonic jets so that the Rockefellers can fly between Paris and New York all the time." WFB: "Well, that was your decision, not ours...." HM: "And you mentioned Vietnam ..." PR: "The aerospace worker who's out of work--you can't say that he should go along and answer any help-wanted ad to become a cook." WFB: "Oh, but I most emphatically do.... I don't say that there is any obligation in any country to provide the kind of work that people equip themselves for, if the public ceased to demand that kind of specialty..." HM: "Then aren't you cutting off, you know, with your Procrustean stroke?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.280
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6214
item Program Number S0044, 48

"Government Secrecy"

Guests: Anderson, Jack, 1922-

20 April 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 22
Program details: Mr. Anderson, as WFB puts it, "is in the news these days as the principal transmission belt of government secrets to the public." This often-heated clash turns on questions of what secrets the government and public figures should be able to keep secret. JA: "I think that Lyndon Johnson is neither more divinely appointed nor more sublime than I am." WFB: "Well, he was elected President of the United States, which you haven't yet been." JA: "Well, that is correct. But he has also grossly, flagrantly abused the truth. He has misrepresented what happened." WFB: "Of course. I've been saying that for years." JA: "Well, I thought you might agree with me. But what divine right does he have to do this?...Don't I have as much right to dig out those untruths as he has to issue them?" WFB: "You don't have to dig out anything. I haven't needed--" JA: "Of course you do." WFB: "--to filch his files in order to demonstrate the difference between his public rhetoric--" JA: "Somebody had to." WFB: "--and much of his public behavior."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.286
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6220
item Program Number S0045, 49

"The Greek Dilemma"

Guests: Papandreou, Andreas George.

20 April 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 87 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 23
Program details: It was the government of Mr. Papandreou's father, George, that had been ousted by the Colonels in 1967, and Papandreou fils--who had been jailed, released, and expelled from the country--was lobbying the United States Government to apply the considerable leverage that our military bases there gave us to pressure the Colonels into restoring democratic government to Greece. One sample, on the question of how useful Greece would be as an ally. AP: "Hitler had to come down--in fact, delay his whole schedule for attacking the east--in order to confront these literally, practically, unarmed soldiers. It's not very different from Vietnam, by the way. When there is soul in a struggle--" WFB: "Are you suggesting there wouldn't be soul in a struggle against the Soviet Union?" AP: "I am not suggesting that. I think there would be soul in Greece in the struggle against any occupation force, whether it was red, blue, green, or white colors. And this is why we are fighting today against what we consider to be a military occupation of Greece, not an internal dictatorship but a military occupation of Greece by NATO and under the guidance of the Pentagon."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.287
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6221
item Program Number S0046, 50

"Election Reform"

Guests: Finch, Robert H., 1925-

5 May 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 87 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 23
Program details: Campaign reform was in the air. The Democrats had substantially altered their nomination procedures following the battle in 1968, and there were bills proposed in Congress for a mandatory nationwide primary. Mr. Finch explains his opposition cogently and with helpful detail. "The question is," he asks, "who would pay for it?"Also, if there were only one primary on a single date, "it would be impossible to have a development of dialogue on whatever the issues, whatever time frame we go through now, which starts with New Hampshire and ends with California." Mr. Finch has his own proposal, which involves clustering primaries on a few dates, but spreading them out over, say, eight weeks, and letting the state parties continue to write their own rules--e.g., as to winner-take-all or proportional voting.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.289
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6223
item Program Number S0047, 51

"The Implications of the China Trip"

Guests: Walker, Richard Louis, 1922- : Mozingo, David P.

5 May 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 24
Program details: Two months after President Nixon's trip to China (on which Mr. Buckley was one of the accompanying journalists), we have here two old China hands to help us sort it out. We begin with the February 28 Shanghai Communique (which in Mr. Mozingo's view "seeks to get rid of two fallacies...that Taiwan speaks for the government of Mainland China, and second, that the United States, by an overt and forward policy of identification with Taiwan, engages itself in the still existent question of the civil war") and go on to, among other things, the Communique's effect on japan. RLW: "We have, so to speak, cut Japan adrift. Now, Japan is, as Brzezinski describes it, a 'fragile flower.' One of the big questions is the matter of style, the way in which it was done...They thought they had a firm agreement in writing from Secretary of State Rusk that we would not make any dramatic moves in our China policy...without intimate and detailed consultation." The discussion is sometimes a bit technical for a non-China hand, but there are some delicious anecdotes.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.288
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6222
item Program Number S0048, 52

"Alcoholism"

Guests: Sweisgood, Peter. : Hirsh, Joseph.

15 May 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 87 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 24
Program details: The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as Mr. Buckley begins by telling us, "had issued a report the burden of which is that the public attention given to narcotics is all very well and good, but that the principal drug addiction in the United States is alcohol." WFB: "Would [you] consider it unprofessional to raise your hand and say, 'For Heaven's sake, everybody stop drinking'?" JH: "No, I don't think it would be unprofessional of me to say so, but I think it would be unrealistic of me to say so, and I couldn't in good conscience say so." For Father Sweisgood (who had been personally affected by his father's and his own alcoholism, and who says, "If I could drink, I would drink"), "I've stopped looking at the many, many people who can use it well and I'm very concerned about the people who are dying from it.... You've got a much better chance of stopping him [a young man just starting to have a drinking problem] if you tell him the truth in a credible way, either before he crosses the line of loss of control or, once having crossed it, knowing, 'Look, this is a disease. There's something I can do about it before I wind up with this sclerotic liver and a wet brain.'"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.291
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6225
item Program Number S0049, 53

"A Populist Manifesto"

Guests: Greenfield, Jeff. : Newfield, Jack.

15 May 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 87 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 25
Program details: "The candidacy of George McGovern," WFB begins, "is off to a ripping start largely because of the appeal of what they are nowadays calling 'the new populism.' By happy coincidence for [today's guests], they brought out during the same season a book on the new populism called A Populist Manifesto: The Making of a New Majority." And we're off on a rousing battle over taxes and fairness. WFB: "An oil company is you and me and a lawyer to whom we pay $25 and we constitute ourselves an oil company. You are aware that there are thousands?" JG: "They may be you, babes, but they ain't me." WFB: "There are people much poorer than you, my friend, who have gone out and struck oil. H. L. Hunt was one of them. And if there is any?" JG: "You mean J. Paul Getty, don't you?" WFB: "Some people write books and some people..." JG: "Bill, you do mean J. Paul Getty, not H. L. Hunt." WFB: "I mean H. L. Hunt. H. L. Hunt was much poorer than you when he struck oil. I know; my father lent him money." JN: "At what rate?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.290
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6224
item Program Number S0050, 54

"The Arab Side"

Guests: Sharaf, Abd al-Hamid, d. 1980. : Hurewitz, J.C. : Issawi, Charles. : Horelick, Arnold.

1 June 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 88 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 169 : 25
Program details: King Hussein had recently unveiled his plan for a "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which included turning the West Bank--which had been occupied by the Israelis since the 1967 war--into a semi-autonomous state with its capital in Jerusalem ..." The Israelis, obviously, had not been thrilled, but neither had the militant Pan-Arabs. Mr. Sharaf, as befits a diplomat, discusses this and other questions calmly but with some eloquence: "... in the United States, as well as in Europe and in the West generally, there is a basic misconception with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict which stems from some emotional associations--a sense of guilt with regard to what happened to the Jews in the West and a wrong identification of that question with the Israeli question in the Middle East, where the situation is actually reversed. There, Israel has actually occupied territory not belonging to it and has set up the origin of the problem--a state that has been expanding, basically at the expense of the owners of that land, the Palestinian people."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.293
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6227
item Program Number S0051, 55

"Does Subversion Work?"

Guests: Beilenson, Laurence W., 1899- : Barth, Alan.

1 June 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 1
Program details: Laurence Beilenson had just stirred up the dovecotes with a book arguing that the United States should openly support and finance subversive movements within the Communist world. WFB begins by asking whether he is "in favor of doing anything to the Soviet Union in any way different from what the Soviet Union routinely does to us." LB: "No." WFB: "Have you no imagination?" LB: "I should like to be more successful. But the Soviet Union plays in our back yards; I merely propose that we play in theirs." Mr. Barth won't go so far as to characterize this idea as "offensive," but he does believe that "it would present, to be blunt about it, sir, a graver danger of subverting the character of the United States than of subverting the character of the Soviet Union or China, or any other country to which it were directed." And we're off on a heady discussion with historical illustrations stretching back to Hitler, Lenin, and Queen Elizabeth I.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.292
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6226
item Program Number S0052, 56

"Richard Nixon and Young Conservatives"

Guests: Smith, J. Brian. : Harroff, Mark. : Rohrabacher, Dana, 1947- : Hukari, Harvey H.

16 June 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 1
Program details: The McGovern youth were ubiquitous in this election season, but, as WFB points out, "it is obvious that there are other young people around, some of whom are even for Nixon ... It is less obvious that there are still others to the right of Nixon (if that is the word for it), who are a strange, quiet, but fascinating complement to the McGovern people." We have met Mr. Hukari before (Firing Line 181); on that occasion he was the lone right-winger in a sea of left-wing radicals. Mr. Rohrabacher would a decade later become a speechwriter for President Reagan; in 1988 he would win a congressional seat from his native California. The two RNC chaps start out judiciously with polling data on young people; the fun starts when the libertarians jump in: HH: "One notices that the only kind of literature that the campaign committee ... distributes says, 'Re-elect the President'; they never remind you that the President's name is Richard M. Nixon. And there's a very good reason for that: because they've taken a poll that shows more people are in favor of re-electing the President than are in favor of re-electing Richard M. Nixon." WFB: "When you say, 'Long live the Queen,' you don't say, 'Long live Queen Elizabeth.' Isn't that just sort of a way of doing things?" HH: "I don't know. I think there's something more conspiratorial behind it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.294
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6228
item Program Number S0053, 57

"No-Fault Insurance"

Guests: Lewis, Marvin E. : Lansman, Harry A.

16 June 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 88 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 2
Program details: A half-dozen states had adopted "no-fault" insurance laws; other states and the Federal Government were considering doing so. "There are few hotter subjects facing the local legislatures," as WFB puts it, "and for once there isn't a clear-cut liberal-conservative division." Although our two guests are decidedly on opposite sides of the fence, this is less a debate than a thoughtful exploration of the concepts of "specific" and "general" damages, how the different sorts of no-fault laws might work, and whom they benefit and whom they harm. Mr. Lewis, for example, outlines the hypothetical of a woman who suffers a severe sprain of her upper neck and back, but no fracture. It may take her months to be able to pick up her child or do housework without pain, but "under even the Massachusetts bill, what she would receive is $380, which are her bills; but no matter how negligent was the person who injured her, she could not recover those damages for her inconvenience, her pain, her suffering, and her disability."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.295
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6229
item Program Number S0054, 58

"Music and Modernism"

Guests: Valenti, Fernando.

16 June 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 2
Program details: Mr. Valenti, a Yale classmate of Mr. Buckley's, was regarded as one of the premier keyboard artists in the world; he proves to be as delightful verbally as in his chosen medium as he and his host explore the Baroque and its relation to the modern. WFB (after Mr. Valenti has played the gigue from Bach's B-flat Partita): "Wow! Was the hand crossing supposed to be in any sense exhibitionistic, or does the music just make it impossible to accomplish in any other way?" FV: "Well, it's a little bit of both. It certainly is supposed to have a visual impact on the audience, and it's sheer ham.... Some pieces can actually be played, some of the most famous hand-crossing incidents in the Baroque era, without crossing your hands." WFB: "You mean by refingering and so on?" FV: "Yes, you can play your notes and be faithful to the score without this pretzel-shaped operation ... However, it doesn't sound the same, which leads one to believe that... the kinesthetic thrill, the danger of missing the note--which one very, very often does--does something to the performer and does something to the piece.... The reason I know is because we have tried this experiment with some hand-crossing pieces on tape, where you can't actually see the performer ... and you can hear the difference."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.296
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6230
item Program Number S0055, 59

"Three McGovern Delegates"

Guests: Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006. : Galbraith, Peter (Peter W.) : Galbraith, James K.

9 July 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 3
Program details: Here come the Galbraiths, in town for the Democratic National Convention starting the following day. "I regret to report," WFB begins, "that there is no generation gap between father and sons." A wild and woolly hour, with the junior Galbraiths proving frighteningly articulate and sharing their father's style of humor. WFB: "I should like to begin by asking Jamie: If the convention declines to nominate Mr. McGovern and McGovern strikes out on his own, will you also bolt the party?" JG: "I don't think that's a very likely possibility." WFB: "I didn't ask you that." JG: "If the convention were to deny George McGovern the nomination on the basis of the steal of the delegates from California, I would not support the nominee and I would probably work for George McGovern should he choose to run on another ticket. But again, I think that's an entirely hypothetical question." WFB: "I don't mind asking you hypothetical questions." JKG: "You wouldn't want to comment on this larceny, would you, Bill? You're a rather honest man." WFB: "Are you prompting your son?" JKG: "No, I'm just asking you a question." WFB: "Does this happen all the time?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.299
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6233
item Program Number S0056, 60

"Should the SALT Pact Be Approved?"

Guests: Jackson, Henry M. (Henry Martin), 1912-1983. : Church, Frank.

9 July 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 3
Program details: President Nixon had signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty during his controversial trip to Moscow and had now sent it to the Senate for ratification; Senator Jackson, the leading Democratic hawk, strongly opposed the treaty; Senator Church, a leading dove, strongly favored it. The discussion on this show is technical, but host and guests use specifics well to keep the audience in the picture. WFB: "When we use the word 'de-stabilizing,' it seems to me that we fall quite commonly into the error of [forgetting] ... that we do not ourselves plot an offensive war and, under the circumstances, that which de-stabilizes us is of no particular strategic consequences--only that which de-stabilizes them." FC: "Well, that is one of your statements that sounds very profound but which doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense at all..." WFB: "We're not going to attack Moscow, are we?" FC: "...because, look, given the arsenals that had been built up on both sides, given the capacity that each side has to utterly destroy the other, this kind of war between the United States and the Soviet Union is an insanity." ... HJ: "I'm not saying the Soviets are out for a first-strike force, but I have to take a look at what they've got over there. They already have under this agreement, and will have, 1,618 missiles, with a throw weight 4 to 1 over us ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.300
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6234
item Program Number S0057

"Afternoon on the Potomac?"

Guests: Jenkins, Roy, 1920-

3 July 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 4
Program details: Mr. Jenkins--who had just resigned as Deputy Party Leader over the issue of the Common Market, which he supported and Labour Party Leader Harold Wilson opposed--had been in younger days a working journalist and historian; he had just written a book titled Afternoon on the Potomac-- the thesis of which, as he states it here, is that "we've all of us lived through the plenitude of American power, which I think, on the whole--there have been blemishes, certainly--has been rather beneficial for the world for the past generation, and that power is getting rather strained at the present time." An illuminating discussion, primarily of how treaties work, from Bretton Woods to SEATO and NATO. RJ: "We never did march side by side with you in Vietnam."WFB: "In a sense you did." RJ: "What we did was to refrain from criticizing you."WFB: "Yes, but we'll settle for that as a rule."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.298
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6232
item Program Number S0058, 62

"The Pentagon Papers"

Guests: Ellsberg, Daniel.

25 July 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 4
Program details: The term "Pentagon Papers" has entered the language, but we may have forgotten that the papers in question were a study commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara on the background to the United States' involvement in Vietnam. It was Mr. Ellsberg who in 1971 had turned the secret papers over to the Washington Post and the New York Times; the Supreme Court had ruled that the newspapers had the right to publish them, but, as Mr. Buckley phrases it, "that decision ... did not derivatively exonerate those who gave the classified material" to them, and at the time of this show, Mr. Ellsberg was on trial. To Mr. Buckley's first question--whether his guest had immunity for anything he might say in the next hour--Mr. Ellsberg replies: "Well, you haven't come to an expert. I'm a beginner at being a defendant, and all I know is what I've heard in court, really." The discussion begins calmly enough with consideration of the Espionage Act, but once we get to Vietnam, we're off to the races.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.301
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6235
item Program Number S0059, 69

"On the Concorde"

Guests: Benn, Tony, 1925-

3 July 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 5
Program details: Among the biographical data that Mr. Buckley gives in his introduction are the facts that Mr. Benn had briefly been Viscount Stansgate--a title he renounced to avoid being bunged up to the House of Lords, which would have ruined his political career--and that host and guest had first met when the latter was the captain of an Oxford debating team that toured the United States in the late Forties and debated WFB's team at Yale; "I ...note sadly that he did not there upon renounce his socialist faith." (Still in the future: the official shortening of our guest's name to Tony Benn in a populist-tinged pursuit of the prime ministership.) The subject today is the supersonic transport, which Mr. Benn had fostered while Secretary for Technology; the conversation ranges from the Concorde itself, to the American SST that might have been, to China, to moonshots, to whether Edmund Burke was right in his speech to the electors of Bristol.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.297
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6231
item Program Number S0060, 70

"The McGovern Phenomenon"

Guests: Mankiewicz, Frank, 1924-

22 September 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 106 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 5
Program details: It had been Mr. Mankiewicz who, from the hospital in Los Angeles, told the world that Robert Kennedy was dead; it was Mr. Mankiewicz now who was generally credited with getting George McGovern the Democratic nomination. This free-swinging exchange goes from polls to primaries to economics to defense. WFB: "I agree with you, and I think as Mr. McGovern turns away from the surrealism of his position over the last year and a half, he will increase his vote. It's true that there are certain people who are going to be disillusioned with him. The Platonists, who were attracted to him because they thought of him as sort of a convulsive redistributionist, may feel that he is now playing with practical politicians." FM: "We never saw any of those placards- 'Convulsive Redistributionists for McGovern.' We never set up that committee."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.303
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6237
item Program Number S0061, 201

"James R. Hoffa"

Guests: Hoffa, James R. (James Riddle), 1913-

22 September 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 88 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 6
Program details: Jimmy Hoffa had spent seven years in federal prison after having been prosecuted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy for malfeasance in office. Whatever one may think of Mr. Hoffa in general, on this show he is eloquent in his plea for more humane treatment of prisoners. JH: "The criticism I have of the prison system in the United States ... is very simple: that, even though a man is incarcerated and convicted of a crime, you have no right to take away the dignity of a man, nor have you any right to attempt to destroy any initiative that he may have and regulate him as though he were some oddment."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.304
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6238
item Program Number S0062, 202

"The Jewish Vote"

Guests: Wexler, William A. : Glazer, Nathan. : Perlmutter, Nate. : Lebow, Ned. : Manheim, Jarol. : Schneier, Edward.

3 October 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 88 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 6
Program details: American Jews had traditionally voted very heavily Democratic--80 per cent in the 1968 presidential election. This time around the percentage was expected to be much lower, perhaps as low as 50 per cent. Is it purely because of Israel? "No: there are also the quotas being ushered in by affirmative action, and the Cold War apart from Israel; also, as Mr. Perlmutter (who has witnessed the phenomenon close up in his new role at Brandeis) puts it, the very look--yes, the very look-of people who are shouters. The demagoguery that I used to associate with the far Right, the simplistic sloganeering, I'm more apt to recognize today in the extreme reaches of the Left." Host and guests take a vivid side trip to Italy in 1948 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 in exploration of what Jews mean by worrying, re Israel, as Mr. Perlmutter puts it, "whether or not this nation will continue to live."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.305
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6239
item Program Number S0063, 203

"Sex Education"

Guests: Fort, Joel, 1929- : Calderone, Mary Steichen, 1904- : Van den Haag, Ernest.

3 October 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 88 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 7
Program details: Dr. Calderone was widely regarded as the principal pioneer of sex education in the schools, although she insists that her interest is in sex education "for everybody; all of us." The two sides in this debate can agree that, as Professor van den Haag puts it, "even if you present five different value systems and present them, so to speak, neutrally, the major effect on the student would be, 'It doesn't matter,' which is another value system." But as to the place of sex education in the schools, never the twain shall meet. EvdH: "I agree with Dr. Fort that there is a great deal of learning, if not formal education, about sex going on from all kinds of sources. Under the circumstances, why is it necessary also to teach it in schools?" MC: "As a corrective." JF: "Because most of that is not good information." EvdH: "Well, why do you assume that teachers have good information to give?" JF: "I don't assume that either." MC: "I don't assume the parents have good information either."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.306
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001W6R8ZQ
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6240
item Program Number S0064, 204

"Hate America"

Guests: Rader, Dotson. : Beichman, Arnold.

3 October 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 7
Program details: "We are discreetly removed from the madness of yesterday on the campuses," WFB begins, "though an apostolate survives and is perhaps regrouping to strike again. At what? 'At America' is the easiest way to put it." Mr. Rader is emphatically of that disposition; Mr. Beichman emphatically is not. The conversation sometimes spins into outer space but never slows down. AB: " 'All power to the people' is your signature line. What people were you talking about?" DR: "It's basically a populist position." AB: "What people-not the hardhats, obviously. You wouldn't want them to have power." DR: "No, I think the basic thrust of the New Left... We always make a mistake because we assume the New Left is Marxist, which it's not." AB: "Is it Leninist?" DR: "... No, I think in spirit it is basically 18th century. That's how it began-18th-century constitutionalism.... This, coupled with disillusionment with American institutions, coming largely out of the response of those institutions to what were rather good-natured, traditional protests of grievances, the war-" AB: "Wait a minute. 'Good-natured'--you lost me there." DR: "I think they were good-natured."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.307
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00267S566
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6241
item Program Number S0065, 205

"The U.S. Election Viewed from Abroad"

Guests: Fontaine, Andre, 1921- : Aron, Raymond, 1905- : Gordey, Michel.

27 October 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 8
Program details: A week before the Nixon-McGovern election, how do things look from the other side of the Atlantic? Our guests, though disagreeing as to whether they personally hope President Nixon will win, believe that the French people on the whole feel more comfortable with him than with his opponent. A lively discussion, going back to Mr. Nixon's role in the internal-security investigations of the late Forties and early Fifties. RA: "They are used to him and they have the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that he has done better than expected. The journeys to Peking and Moscow were, perhaps, slightly less popular in France than in the United States, but were rather popular." WFB: "Why?" RA: "Oh, for a very simple reason-because we got the impression that the destiny of Europe was decided by Mr. Nixon and Mr. Brezhnev in Moscow, which is perhaps good for peace, but not good for our amour propre."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.308
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6242
item Program Number S0066, 206

"Abortion Laws: Pro and Con"

Guests: Noonan, John Thomas, 1926- : Lucas, Roy.

25 July 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 8
Program details: The most visible abortion battleground was New York State, where the legislature had voted to repeal the extremely permissive law it had passed two years before, and Governor Rockefeller had vetoed the repeal. But the case challenging that veto would probably never make it to the Supreme Court, Mr. Lucas explains, for there were others ahead of it in line; in retrospect, we know that one of those, Roe v. Wade, was decided in January of 1973. This show covers familiar ground, but often from angles that are still fresh thirty years later. RL: "Would you favor legislation requiring a woman to submit to strong medical treatment to stop spontaneous abortion and penalizing her accordingly if she didn't? ..." JTN: "No, I think you're again committing what I would say was a fault in moral reasoning. Because you're bound to avoid doing some injury to a person does not mean that you're bound to do everything possible in the world to help him."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.302
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U8A
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6236
item Program Number S0067, 207

"Harold Macmillan"

Guests: Macmillan, Harold, 1894- : Riddell, Peter. : Middleweek, Helene. : Weil, Stephen.

1 November 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 88 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 9
Program details: A radiant show with the last of the Edwardians; even the left-wing members of the panel are visibly entranced. One sample: In the wake of President Nixon's trip to Moscow, WFB asks his guest about his own abortive trip to Moscow in 1959, for a meeting with Khrushchev that the latter called off because of the U-2 flight. HM: "Well, I think that all our experts here very much overestimated Khrushchev's power. Because Stalin had been a ruthless dictator for twenty years, they assumed that his successor was a successor to a dynasty as strong. But he wasn't for two reasons. First of all, he wasn't as strong as Stalin--hadn't the extraordinary, almost maniac grip that that man had. And secondly, the one thing Russia was never going to have again was the terror. If you're a dictator and you won't have the terror, you are getting very near almost to a free system." And on to civil disobedience among the trade unions, the Special Relationship, and what had changed between 1942, when Churchill said that he had not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, and what Mr. Macmillan calls "the India decision" in 1947.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.311
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6245
item Program Number S0068, 208

"Christianity and Capitalism"

Guests: Soper, Donald, 1903- : Riddell, Peter. : Middleweek, Helene. : Weil, Stephen.

1 November 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 9
Program details: Lord Soper is more than experienced at public controversy; as Mr. Buckley tells us, "He is widely known for his unbroken schedule of appearances at 12:30 sharp every Wednesday at Tower Gate, by the Tower of London. There he speaks and takes questions from hecklers week after week, year after year, decade after decade. Unfortunately," Mr. Buckley continues, he is "a socialist and a pacifist and, unfortunately, he confuses Christian doctrine with these secular heresies." Nonetheless, this proves to be a good-natured exchange, whether on Christian doctrine or on the position of blacks in the American South or on Karl Marx's dialectics or on the Inquisition. DS: "What I would say is this. I would prefer to try to resist Communism, even were we invaded by Communist hordes, by non-violent methods, than to precipitate a war in order to resist that Communist threat. I honestly believe that there is nothing worse than war." WFB: "You believe that there's nothing worse than war." DS: "Nothing worse than war."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.310
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6244
item Program Number S0069, 209

"The Free Market and America"

Guests: Giscard d'Estaing, Valeiry, 1926- : Galbraith, Evan G.

27 October 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 10
Program details: There had recently been a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, at which M. d'Estaing had taken a more conciliatory line vis-à-vis America than his country had followed in the recent past. Today's discussion is often technical, on matters such as excess dollars held by foreign governments, floating versus fixed exchange rates, and Common Market farming policies, but it is good to meet the future President of the republic, in company with the future U.S. Ambassador to France. VGdE: "Flotation is probably a means to be used before an adjustment of parities. If you want to know how the market would judge your own currency, it could be useful to let it float, for instance, several weeks or a few months, but not as an institution."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.309
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6243
item Program Number S0070, 210

"Political Financing"

Guests: Strauss, Robert S.

28 November 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 10
Program details: The election had come and gone, and no one was blaming Mr. Strauss for George McGovern's decisive loss to Richard Nixon. But already the question was, "How would the next presidential campaign be financed? A new law was passed a year ago ...," WFB begins, "but the law is itself the subject of criticism as a bureaucratic nightmare and as a measure of quite dubious constitutionality." A lively discussion of both the theory and the recent history of campaign finance, with Mr. Strauss floating an idea that nearly thirty years later began to find favor with people on both sides of the fence: "One of the great weaknesses we've had, one of the great faults we've had, one of the things that's made people think it's sinister or evil, has been secrecy. And I think bringing it out in the open and opening the doors and windows and letting people see who's giving and to whom they are giving begins to get at the heart of the problem."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.312
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6246
item Program Number S0071, 211

"The Old and the New Foreign Policy"

Guests: Rostow, W. W. (Walt Whitman), 1916-2003. : Rostow, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor), 1913-

28 November 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 11
Program details: A rich hour with these two brothers who are both scholars and men of action. The discussion starts with Vietnam and the alienation of the intellectuals, but roves widely in time and space. EVR: "What's happened, I think, psychologically is that the policies and ideas which dominated the postwar period ... have suddenly lost their power to command." WFB: "Why?" EVR: "... Well, I think men have reached the conclusion that if that policy requires results as terrible as Korea and Vietnam, there must be something wrong with it. There must be an easier way to achieve security." ... EVR: "The line I always took when I did talk about [Vietnam]... was when you use force, you'd better win. ..." WWR: "My own view, from 1961 down to the time I left Washington, was that there's only one military way to shorten the war .. . you had to put forces on the ground across the Ho Chi Minh Trail or into the southern part of North Vietnam ... The President did not accept that position, and I believe for good reasons, ... [but] that led to its being an extremely protracted war.... Pham Van Dong said, 'Americans don't like long, inconclusive wars. This will be a long, inconclusive war, and, therefore, we shall win.' "
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.313
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6247
item Program Number S0072, 212

"Looking Back on the Civil-Rights Laws"

Guests: Carter, Hodding, 1907-1972. : Reed, Clarke. : Adams, John Quincy. : Banks, Taunya Esq. : DeLaughter, Jerry.

12 December 1972

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 11
Program details: These two natives of Greenville, Miss., have wound up on opposite sides of the political fence. Mr. Carter was the leader of the challenger (i.e., anti-Wallace) Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Mr. Reed, one of the first Republican activists in the Deep South, was a conservative leader at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. But today's subject is not partisan politics but rather the civil-rights laws. Would desegregation have come about anyway, owing to as WFB puts it, "a developed conscience," or did it require, in Mr. Carter's phrase, the "extremely heroic effort" of Martin Luther King and others? To Mr. Reed, "I was concerned at the time that the overriding concern of protecting the Constitution and the three-part government transcended the immediate gains of civil rights in the South.... I disagree with Hodding. I think this would have come about, but this saved a great many years. Now whether it saved enough years to tamper with the fabric of constitutional law-that's an open question."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.314
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6248
item Program Number S0073, 213

"The Southern Imagination"

Guests: Welty, Eudora, 1909- : Percy, Walker, 1916- : Weaver, Gordon. : Ward, Jerry. : Hise, Dan.

12 December 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 12
Program details: What made Southern literature distinctive? Is it distinctive still? This show starts a little slowly--Miss Welty in particular is thoughtful rather than quick--but we soon get to the heart of the matter. WP: "I think that for a hundred years Southern literature, before and after the Civil War, was not particularly distinguished. It was ingrown; it was either romantic or it was defensive.... Then along about 1920, I think the cultures began to merge and you had a kind of spark jumping, so that you had people like Faulkner coming on who began to write about their region but in such universal terms, neither romantically nor defensively, that it made itself understood to people from other parts of the country." ... EW: "I was here all that time and I felt the unreality of late-night telephone calls from strangers asking me, 'How can you stay in that place? Why don't you use all of your novelistic powers and so on and write some things against this?' And really, I assumed that my whole life I had been writing about injustice ... I was always against it, but what I was writing about was human beings."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.315
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGKVE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6249
item Program Number S0074, 214

"The Young"

Guests: Burgess, Anthony, 1917- : Tilton, Richard. : Armenakis, Diana. : Bulbulia, Ahmed.

21 December 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 12
Program details: A splendid conversation with the author of A Clockwork Orange, who had just infuriated what Mr. Buckley calls "the militant student community" by publishing an open letter urging them to "think harder and learn who Helen of Troy and Nausicaa were and, for God's sake, stop talking about relevance." One sample from Mr. Burgess: "What have I, a person of a very ancient generation, a person who's already 55, to say to young men and women in their late teens and twenties? I think I have something to say, but this is contested, and not only by the young. It's contested also by people who should know better-the professors, the lecturers who put themselves beside the young deliberately, hoping thereby when the revolution comes, if it does come, that they'll get some sort of special preference, discounting the fact that they'll probably be the first to be put up against the wall and have to face the firing squad."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.316
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001W6R900
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6250
item Program Number S0075, 215

"A Conservative Look at Marijuana"

Guests: Bryant, Thomas E. : Greenway, John.

21 December 1972

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 13
Program details: "Once again," WFB begins, "marijuana is in the news." California voters had just rejected a ballot initiative to ease the marijuana laws; but many organizations had come to favor changes ranging from outright legalization to decriminalization of possession. Are changes in public attitudes prompted by new research? Not really, according to Dr. Bryant: "We have a number of ongoing research projects, trying to get at the physiological, biochemical, psychological changes," but "I'm not sure that there have been any major breakthroughs." Nonetheless, he has come to favor decriminalization. Mr. Greenway, whose specialty is being a curmudgeon, spends several minutes fencing ("I don't care for sincerity, either"), but then settles down to recounting experiences both as a professor and as a member of the Boulder Police Department: "What makes marijuana, to me, particularly dangerous is that it's represented as not being dangerous."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.317
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0026ZQE9S
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6251
item Program Number S0076, 216

"The Catholic Crisis"

Guests: Wills, Garry, 1934- : Marotta, Gary. : Neckelis, Ruth. : Gabel, Jack.

10 January 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 13
Program details: "Mr. Wills was once," as Mr. Buckley puts it, "a political conservative. He is most often referred to nowadays as a radical." He once studied for the priesthood at a Jesuit seminary; his latest book raked his church over the coals. The sharp exchanges here between two old friends and former comrades in arms are clearly illustrative of two different worldviews. GW: "Up until recently ... there were certain ... loyalty tests-if you didn't eat meat on Friday, if you didn't practice birth control... These were the matters of authority; this is what made you a Catholic.... Obviously [the Pope] feels ... that if people can disobey him on [birth control], they are going to say then, 'The Pope doesn't matter' ..." WFB: "No, but only if they defy him explicitly. It's one thing for a bishop to say, 'I will not enjoin on my flock conformity to Humanae vitae'; it's something else for women to use birth-control devices surreptitiously...." GW: "Well, the way that they do defy him explicitly is a very interesting one and very important to the Catholic psychology; that is, the ones who practice birth control now still go to the Sacraments. There could not be in the Catholic mentality a more total denial of the Pope's power to refuse the Sacraments to them."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.318
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6252
item Program Number S0077, 217

"The CIA and Foreign Policy"

Guests: Hunt, E. Howard (Everette Howard), 1918-2007. : Lazo Perez, Mario, 1931-

18 January 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 14
Program details: In the course of the Watergate investigation, Mr. Buckley reminds us, "Mr. Hunt had been outed as a CIA man, indeed as the principal CIA official directly involved in" the Bay of Pigs. Mr. Lazo was not directly involved in that operation, but, as he tells us, "a year after Castro came to power, in January 1960, when the American embassy went down, I became a self-appointed spy for the U.S.... And what I did was to arrange with a friendly European government to send reports once a week to the FBI." ... EHH: "The fiasco of the Bay of Pigs was not a failure of intelligence.... The failure of the Bay of Pigs came about because at a critical time commitments that had been made by high officials of the United States government to the Cubans who were fighting,... those officials backed away from those commitments and, in effect, abandoned the brigade at the beachhead." Discursive at times but fascinating, not least Mr. Lazo's reminiscences of events in Cuba ten and twenty years earlier that are linked to Watergate.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.320
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6254
item Program Number S0078, 218

"The Future of Conservative Values"

Guests: Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.

18 January 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 14
Program details: In his former post Mr. Moynihan had been the architect of the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), discussed on Firing Line 170 and the subject of his latest book, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan. A rich discussion of private charity and government efforts to help the poor, the politics of trust, and much else. One sample: DPM: "This is a book which will, I'm afraid, be reviewed as a book of politics. It's a book about politics. I've had the experience of being in government and out, and trying to make that distinction is not always easy, but it's certainly a distinguishable condition. And this is written as a professor of government about processes of government, processes in which I was involved. So I have to declare my interest in the beginning, but I would hope to be objective about it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.321
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6255
item Program Number S0079, 219

"What Are the Challenges for Conservatives in 1973?"

Guests: Pressman, Gabe. : Reeves, Richard, 1936- : Nichols, Mary Perot.

10 January 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 15
Program details: The semi-annual occasion on which the guests grill their host. As Mr. Buckley frames today's discussion, "A year ago in a television special, a half-dozen American conservatives met to speculate about the future. The re-election of President Nixon, his forthcoming trips to China and Russia were the centers of the conversation.... Inevitably the question of interest not only to American conservatives but to others is: What now?" An often brilliant series of exchanges on everything from whether there are any conservatives of distinction, to whether there was once a reign of terror against liberal journalists, to how one goes about getting marijuana onto one's boat in order to smoke it outside the three-mile limit.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.319
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001WAKUM0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6253
item Program Number S0080, 220

"How Does It Go with the Black Movement?"

Guests: Newton, Huey P. : Sinkin, Lanny. : Holland, Patricia. : Mounce, Gary.

23 January 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 15
Program details: Mr. Newton, WFB reminds us, was "tried and convicted of killing a policeman ... The slogan 'Free Huey Newton' was to the late Sixties what the slogan 'Who promoted Peress?" was to the early Fifties." In due course an appeals court reversed the verdict, and the juries thereafter were hung, so that Mr. Newton eventually was freed. This show has many surprises, starting with the first exchange. WFB: "... imminently he will publish his autobiography, which is called Revolutionary Suicide, a concept I shall now ask Mr. Newton, please, to explain." HN: "I'll explain it, but if I may impose upon you, I have a friend who's almost dying for me to ask this question, if you will. The question is: During the Revolution of 1776, when the United States of America broke away from England, my friend would like to know which side would you have been on during that time?" WFB: "I think probably I would have been on the side of George Washington. I'm not absolutely sure, because it remains to be established historically whether what we sought to prove at that point might not have been proved by more peaceful means. On the whole, I'm against revolutions, though I think, as revolutions go, that was a pretty humane one." HN: "Yes, you're not such a bad guy after all. My friend will be surprised to hear that. I hope he's listening."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.323
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFB9G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6257
item Program Number S0081, 221

"The White House and the Media"

Guests: Whitehead, Clay Thomas. : Mansbach, Richard W. : Baker, Ross K. : Mendelowitz, Allen.

1 February 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 16
Program details: Mr. Whitehead had just given a widely noticed speech in which he had accused television stations of "ideological plugola" and "elitist gossip," and the question before the house is, as Mr. Buckley phrases it, "how does one, in fact, draw up a standard by which to ensure the fairness of individual stations in presenting points of view?" It turns out that there really isn't a standard--not one, at any rate, that Mr. Whitehead or Mr. Buckley can come up with--that doesn't have an element of subjectivity. But along the way we learn a lot about how the FCC actually interprets the Fairness Doctrine, how the new technologies make it easier to infringe on copyrights, and whether reruns are in the public interest. WFB: "Just what does 'elitist gossip' mean?" CTW: "It, in my book, means just what it says. It's the trading of more or less unsubstantiated tales among people who think that they're a little better than other people.... For instance, the network reporter who comes on the air and says, without doing much checking of his own, that, 'It is being said in Washington that,' or 'It is widely believed that.'"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.325
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6259
item Program Number S0082, 222

"Texas Politics"

Guests: Dugger, Ronnie. : Farenthold, Frances. : Milburn, Beryl.

23 January 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 16
Program details: "More attention," WFB begins, "is given to the politics of Texas than to those of practically any other state of the Union. There is, of course, the matter of the hugeness of Texas; but there is also the tradition of Texas-rich, powerful, self-assured, demanding, cocky, impenitent." Mrs. Farenthold is a Democrat who has fought the Democratic establishment on the grounds of its corruption ("We don't have clean-cut bribery any more. It's all with stock manipulation or sale of ranch lands at inflated prices or disposition of oil leases")-although she is evidently shocked when Mr. Buckley asks whether "the Federal Government ought to intervene in Texan affairs in order to set things right." To Mrs. Milburn, the problem is that Texas has "a one-party monopoly and it breeds corruption ... You may change some of the players but the plays remain the same." Mr. Dugger admits that "I would prefer an honest Republican to a dishonest Democrat"-but instantly carries the fight back into the enemy's camp over the way Texas primaries are run. A hard-fought, entertaining hour in this larger-than-life state.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.322
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00267S56G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6256
item Program Number S0083, 223

"The USIA"

Guests: Shakespeare, Frank.

1 February 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 17
Program details: Mr. Shakespeare had just stepped down as USIA Director, having said he would serve only one term, and he had been denounced by the New York Times for "having irritated foreigners [and] demoralized old agency hands... with his stridently propagandist hard-line approach." This rich discussion-which ranges from present-day Bulgaria to early Christianity to Confucianism to Daniel Ellsberg-begins with Mr. Buckley asking Mr. Shakespeare "why he irritated foreigners. What have you got against foreigners?" FS: "... I would say to the extent that we irritated foreigners you'd have to divide the world into groups of people. I think we were an irritant to the Soviet Union, certainly." On to an explanation of how the Voice of America operates, and how to deal with dictatorships: "I think as dictatorships get terribly insecure they frequently try to resolve their internal insecurities by creating, artificially, an external peril. But if you follow that line of thinking too far you'll say, 'Well we should do everything in the world to make that dictatorship secure.' "
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.324
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6258
item Program Number S0084, 224

"The Irish Problem, 1973"

Guests: O'Neill, Terence.

25 February 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 17
Program details: A return visit by Lord O'Neill, whom we last met on Firing Line (159) just after he resigned as PM ("What defeated me was something so typically Irish. That was that in 1966 it happened to be the 50th anniversary of what the British call the Dublin Rebellion and what the Irish call the Rising ... This gave [extreme Protestant Ian] Paisley his platform of protest... and from that moment on, things became very, very difficult"). The discussion ranges back to Cromwell and forward to the likely outcome of the current situation, in which Britain had suspended Stormont (Northern Ireland's parliament) and imposed direct rule from London. There is a fascinating and moving detour on World War II-the part that Northern Ireland played in the Allies' effort, and the difference it might have made had the Irish Republic done the same.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.326
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6260
item Program Number S0085, 225

"The Welfare State"

Guests: Williams, Shirley, 1930-

25 February 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 18
Program details: As Shadow Home Secretary, Mrs. Williams occupies, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "the second most important post in the party. Indeed, she has been spoken about quite even-handedly, not to say resignedly, as not unlikely the first woman prime minister of England." Aha! A spirited give-and-take ranging from nationalized health care to taxation to old-age pensions. WFB: "Your commitment to socialism is a very considerable commitment; so is your commitment to democracy. What I'm asking you is this: As a Christian, if you have to forsake one or the other, which of the two do you forsake?" SW: "What politicians tend to say is, 'I don't answer hypothetical questions.' I will answer it.... Well, I would forsake socialism for democracy ... because-" WFB: "Now, why?" SW: "... What is central to my philosophy, I suppose, is a dispersal, a sharing of power.... I don't want a government which is so powerful, like that of the Soviet Union, that in effect it can order the way in which people live ... So I may want something that you would argue is impossible of achievement, that is to say, the maximum individual liberty but in a situation in which power is distributed as widely as can be." WFB: "I think this is probably fair to say about everybody in this room."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.327
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6261
item Program Number S0086, 226

"Corporal Punishment"

Guests: Kuper, C. C. : Newell, Peter. : Sparks, Kenton. : Hands, Timothy. : O'Dwyer, Victor. : Edwards, Robert.

27 February 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 18
Program details: England virtually alone in the civilized world still maintained the practice of corporal punishment, specifically caning, in its public (i.e., private) schools. On the one hand, critics such as Mr. Newell, himself a "public school old boy," were campaigning to end the practice in England. On the other hand, some Americans, as Mr. Buckley relates, wonder if reinstituting corporal punishment in our country mightn't help solve some of our schools' worst disciplinary problems. Mr. Kuper, who vigorously defends the practice in England but thinks it would be "catastrophic" to export it to the States, is wonderfully old-school. A delicious cultural clash--with the student panelists (all very grown-up sounding, but wearing the Beatle haircuts of the period) speaking not of world events but of what they know first hand.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.328
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6262
item Program Number S0087, 227

"Women's Lib"

Guests: Greer, Germaine, 1939- : Riddell, Peter. : Middleweek, Helene. : Evans, Roger.

27 February 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 27-28
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 19
Program details: A few weeks earlier Mr. Buckley and Miss Greer had taken part in a formal debate at Cambridge on the women's liberation movement. In this rematch, we start out at the level of movement politics ("So I have to do this mental juggling act of reconciling the professional women's association with the radical lesbians ..."), and go from there through the betrayal of the Russian Revolution "when Lenin decided to ridicule Aleksandra Kollontai and to absolutely outlaw the workers' opposition" (WFB: "Now, are we in 1919 in the women's liberation movement?"), to the generation gap created by the mobile nuclear family, to this imperishable exchange: GG: "Well, I mean somebody is exploiting the hell out of sex. I mean, everybody exploits what they have.... I might as well say that if you weren't such a good-looking fellow, you wouldn't be in the position that you're in today. You exploit it too. You may not do it consciously." WFB:"Well, now, wait a minute." GG (to the audience): "Don't you agree that he is a pretty man?" WFB: "Well, I... Let's accept that as a hypothesis." GG: "I think interpersonal subjectivity proves it to be true. Just as this studio is pale blue, you're a pretty man."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.329
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6263
item Program Number S0088, 228

"The Federal Government and Education"

Guests: Weinberger, Caspar W.

30 March 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 19
Program details: Mr. Weinberger had recently been raked by members of Congress for the proposed alterations in his department's budget. He had defended himself ably there; here, in more congenial company, he engages in a deeper discussion of education specifically and government expenditure generally. CW: "It applies to every group that has some stake in the budget or in federal programs.... Usually the litany goes something like this: 'We're doing this program. We've been doing it for many years. We agree with you that economies are necessary ... 'but take it out of defense.' And if you add up all of those reductions from the defense budget, we would be not a second-class power but a fifth-class power."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.330
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6264
item Program Number S0089, 229

"The Equal Rights Amendment"

Guests: Schlafly, Phyllis. : Scott, Ann. : Areen, Judith. : Ryan, Fr. Edmund G. : Eddy, Brenda.

30 March 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 20
Program details: The Equal Rights Amendment was on its way to ratification, when a funny thing happened: one of the states (to be followed by others) that had ratified it rescinded its ratification. The rescission had been mobilized, as WFB puts it, "not by sexist males but by women, many of whom on second blush are discovering in the amendment implications they regard as inimical to the best interests of American women." Like what? Like, replies Mrs. Schlafly, the draft. Wait a minute, says Ms. Scott: "if women are to be citizens and citizens are to be subject to the draft, then women should take the responsibilities as well as the rights of citizenship." Swords flash as we move from the draft to employment opportunities to child support. Whether or not our two guests will ever agree on anything, we do learn where the battle lines are drawn.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.331
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00267S56Q
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6265
item Program Number S0090, 231

"Proposals for Welfare"

Guests: Carter, Jimmy, 1924- : Skinner, Richard. : Young, Margaret. : Stafford, Jeffrey.

23 April 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 20
Program details: This show was the first nationally televised appearance of the future President, and a former associate of Governor Carter's later told Mr. Buckley that it was the first time he had heard the new, less Georgian accent. The Governor, who was the immediate successor to the segregationist Lester Maddox, had struck out on a dramatically new course by saying, in his inaugural address, "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over." Since then he had argued, as WFB puts it, "that Southern governors nowadays face other problems, much the same as those faced by governors of states outside the South." In this encounter, Governor Carter sounds quite conservative in talking about welfare and incentives, and specifically the advantages in having job-training programs and attendant industry dispersed throughout the state so that "instead of moving to Atlanta and living in a 20-story-high apartment complex," poor farmers can commute to a local job that pays a living wage; hence "we haven't had the massive move off the farm areas into the cities that other states have."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.332
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWMRE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6266
item Program Number S0091, 232

"What to Do about the Post Office"

Guests: Hollings, Ernest F., 1922-

23 April 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 89 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 21
Program details: An historical curiosity: this program begins with Mr. Buckley's explaining that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has declined to renew Firing Line's funding, and that therefore, if alternative funding is not found, this will be the last installment. Twelve hundred Firing Lines later ... But back to Senator Hollings, who is scathing on the way the quasi-privatization of the Post Office had been done. The spirited conversation ranges from permitting real competition in postal services, to the effect of poor postal service on the magazine industry, to Senator Hollings's other preoccupation, welfare reform. EFH: "Now here in America, if you try to feed little children like that, there are many in my own crowd who say, 'Oh, no, if you feed them, they'll never work'; whereas one of the great planks of America's national defense, in international relations or foreign policy, is to feed. Get out there. The foreign soul will respond to the hand that feeds it. We want to get there before Communism."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.333
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GPDY
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6267
item Program Number S0092, 236

"The Implications of Watergate"

Guests: Powell, James O. : Murphy, Reg, 1934- : Clark, Robert P.

16 May 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 21
Program details: The semi-annual occasion on which the guests put their host on the firing line-in this case, mostly on the subject of Watergate, which had been simmering since just a few days after the break-in the previous June but had only become the daily staple of our front pages when Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, and five others were put on trial in January. WFB and his guests mostly remand the details of what happened at the Watergate and who ordered it to a time when more evidence is in; instead, the crackling discussion ranges from the possibility of changing the presidential tenure to a single, six-year term, to how Congresses have historically dealt with a President who has been repudiated but is still in office (e.g., Herbert Hoover in 1931), to the continuing war in Vietnam. WFB: "If you live in a society in which lawlessness becomes intellectually fashionable, as it was in this country during the last ten years, you beget, I think, a counter-countercultural lawlessness of which Watergate is an example."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.336
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00267S570
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6270
item Program Number S0093, 237

"Limitations of Presidential Power"

Guests: Humphrey, Hubert H. (Hubert Horatio), 1911-1978.

24 May 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 22
Program details: "There is no one in Washington," Mr. Buckley begins, "with the exception of Richard Nixon, who has had Senator Humphrey's experience within the Executive and the legislature." The Nixon Administration and Congress had been clashing regularly for four years by now--whether over Mr. Nixon's authority to order the Cambodian incursion, or, now, over executive privilege and the growing shadow of Watergate. The Senator is honest enough to admit that the growth of presidential power by no means began with the man who defeated him for the Presidency. Mr. Humphrey starts with FDR and goes on from there, with some of the more flavorous descriptions being of the man he served as Vice President: "Your lapels were never safe with Lyndon Johnson, you know.... Johnson was a total political man. I don't think that Mr. Nixon is at all. Nixon is, in many ways, a loner. That's his style."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.338
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6272
item Program Number S0094, 238

"Meat Prices and Agricultural Policy"

Guests: Butz, Earl L. (Earl Lauer), 1909-

24 May 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 22
Program details: A surprisingly engaging show on what could be a very dry topic. We remember Mr. Butz today, if we remember him at all, mostly for his having been put in Coventry for making a silly joke. In fact, he proves a knowledgeable and lucid guide through the intricacies of farm pricing and foreign trade-e.g., is the sale of wheat to the Russians responsible for higher prices of bread in our supermarkets, or are they a result of other policies, and of general inflation? EB: "... farmers, like TV personalities, are ingenious. They can use their pencil, you know. And I guess what happens is you simply transfer part of your operation to Mrs. Buckley or Mrs. Butz ... or to the nephew or son-in-law, as you say."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.339
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6273
item Program Number S0095, 239

"Conservatives View Watergate"

Guests: Van den Haag, Ernest. : Rusher, William A., 1923-

20 June 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 23
Program details: If Mr. Nixon goes down, how much will the conservative movement be affected? In Mr. Rusher's view, not much: "I don't think that either liberal Republicans or conservative Republicans, as such, have been touched in any important particular by Watergate. It is the group in the White House which is neither liberal nor conservative but administrative, non-political, the Haldeman-Ehrlichman group, that has been totally destroyed by Watergate." To Mr. van den Haag, Nixon "is seen, not necessarily by the conservatives themselves but by the non-conservatives, including those sympathetic to conservatism and those not so sympathetic, as the symbol of how conservative the Republican Party can get and win. No doubt Mr. Goldwater is seen as more conservative, but not as winning." And on to civil disobedience, the ethics of bugging, and whether the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office was really motivated by concern for national security.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.340
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6274
item Program Number S0096, 240

"How Much Protection for the Press?"

Guests: Rembar, Charles. : Williams, C. Dickerman.

20 June 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 37
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 23
Program details: As Mr. Buckley frames the question, "When last heard from, Congress had before it59 separate bills designed to provide 59 varieties of protection for newsmen." These"shield laws" were politically explosive; the Pentagon Papers and the leaks that prompted President Nixon to authorize the Plumbers had been front-page news for much of his Administration. Mr. Rembar takes the view that newsmen should have essentially the same protections as lawyers, doctors, and priests; Mr. Williams has the perspective of having been, once upon a time, an assistant U.S. attorney, and knowing how difficult it is in our legal system to get the information you may need in order to prosecute.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.341
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6275
item Program Number S0097, 241

"Legal Aspects of Abortion"

Guests: Noonan, John Thomas, 1926- : Pilpel, Harriet F.

1 May 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 38
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 24
Program details: Firing Line last took up the subject of abortion in July of 1972 (s0066). Since then, the Supreme Court had dropped its Roe v. Wade bombshell, to the surprise, as WFB points out, of pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike. In this well-argued and often heated discussion, Mrs. Pilpel, who considers Roe a "superb decision," takes seriously that decision's language concerning the different trimesters of pregnancy. Mr. Noonan proves the more prescient in saying, "In fact, throughout the entire nine months, there is [in Roe] no recognition of the baby's interest and life, and we do in fact have, for the first time in our history, for the first time in the history of Anglo-American civilization, abortion on demand as the law of the land."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.335
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6269
item Program Number S0098, 242

"Drugs and Freedom"

Guests: Szasz, Thomas Stephen, 1920- : Simmons, Paul D. : Grayson, Deborah. : Lobenstine, Clark.

16 May 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 39
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 24
Program details: Another round in the drug fight, this time with a man who has made his name arguing that there is no such thing as mental illness. The audience may feel at times that we're behind the looking glass, but the conversation does help us clarify our own thoughts about human motivation. TS: "Drug addiction, Mr. Buckley, is a metaphor.... The phenomenon we are talking about, in my opinion, is best described by the good old English word 'habit.'..." WFB: "Okay. How can we conveniently distinguish between, for instance, my habit, firmly consolidated, of requiring peanut butter for breakfast and somebody else's habit of requiring a heroin shot at breakfast time?" TS: "Why should we?" WFB: "I want you to help me terminologically because I think that unless your prisms are acute enough to distinguish between peanut butter for breakfast and heroin for breakfast, you may very well be being frivolous in a dangerous sense." TS: "... Excuse me, no, there's nothing frivolous about this, Mr. Buckley. The question is ... why you want to make the distinction, because in my view the only reason to make the distinction is to persecute somebody."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.337
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6271
item Program Number S0099, 243

"Is There an Ecological Crisis?"

Guests: Commoner, Barry, 1917- : Resnikoff, Arthur. : Wedemeyer, Susan. : Cormick, Gerald.

1 May 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 107 : 40
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 25
Program details: Mr. Commoner was perhaps the leading scholarly exponent of the view that we needed to change course right now if we weren't to damage our environment irretrievably. He and Mr. Buckley strike sparks off each other in addressing such questions as, how can government best encourage citizens not to pollute? Is government itself encouraging pollution and waste of depletable resources by, e.g., favoring highways over railroads? Do Cadillac buyers not know, or do they not care, that their vehicles use more gasoline than Volkswagens? WFB: "I hope you, if President of the United States, would not appoint as Secretary of Defense somebody who would superordinate the problems of ecology over those of national sovereignty." BC: "Well, that is your hope; mine is the reverse." WFB: "Why would you call him Secretary of Defense? Call him Secretary of Undefense, or Secretary of Surrender." BC: "Why don't we call him Secretary of Survival?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.334
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFR9Q
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6268
item Program Number S0100, 244

"Was It Worth It?"

Guests: Shepard, Alan B. (Alan Bartlett), 1923-1998.

24 July 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 170 : 25
Program details: Admiral Shepard's unequivocal answer to the title question is: Yes, it was worth the effort to send men to the Moon. Does that mean we should go back to the Moon again, or try to go on to Mars? Not yet, he says, given what else we might do with finite resources, and given how much of the data brought back we still have not assimilated. This is not the most exciting show, but Admiral Shepard has thought deeply and speaks engagingly on matters such as what, apart from the human spirit, space exploration is good for. AS: "I think that the recent Skylab mission, which was supposed to be 28 days of blissful experiments and turned out to be 28 days of a cliffhanger, probably demonstrated as graphically as any of us could how well man can function in space--not only the crew but those men on the Earth who are responding to the various emergencies that come up."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.342
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6276
item Program Number S0101, 245

"What Now for the Ghetto?"

Guests: Bradley, Thomas.

24 July 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 1
Program details: Mr. Bradley was the first black mayor of a predominantly white major city; as a young man he had become an L.A. policeman, eventually serving for twenty years, and more recently he had sat on the City Council. This discussion begins, inevitably, with the question of race (WFB: "So you don't think that it would be dismaying, say, to your supporters in Watts if you were to criticize irresponsibility when committed in Watts?" TB: "I didn't say that. It may be dismaying. I'm sure there are going to come moments like that.... But that's the responsibility that you face"), but quickly moves to topics such as education, crime, and the impending traffic crisis if Angelinos can't be persuaded to carpool or ride public transportation.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.343
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GIR2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6277
item Program Number S0102, 246

"World Federalism Today"

Guests: Cousins, Norman.

30 July 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 1
Program details: World federalism, then as now, is a red flag to American conservatives: Abrogate our sovereignty? In favor of whom? Mr. Cousins is the most benign exponent possible, and even his opponents will find his formulations intellectually provocative, e.g., "I had in mind the fact that the world is a geographic unit. The dominant condition of life in that unit is anarchy. Anarchy has never lasted very long in any unit.... The big question is: first, will a responsible world government come into being, one which is a federation where the individual nations maintain their own cultures and institutions, or will it be a monolithic government which will come about by force, or one that could come about by picking up the radioactive pieces... after war?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.344
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6278
item Program Number S0103, 247

"Russian Jewry and American Foreign Policy"

Guests: Simes, Natasha. : Simes, Dimitri K.

30 July 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 2
Program details: The U.S. Congress had overwhelmingly passed the Jackson Amendment, Senator Henry Jackson's effort to prevent the United States from granting the Soviets Most Favored Nation trading status until they stopped blocking the emigration of Jews. The Simeses were among the few who had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union, and they had been living here for nearly a year. Their English is not perfect, but that ceases to matter as they describe life in Stalin's day, compared to the Khrushchev reform period, compared to the current middle-Brezhnev period. DS: "Well, in 1953, you could be an average man. You had nothing against the government. You could enjoy Soviet life and the Soviet regime, and, nevertheless, one day your neighbor in your apartment could decide that he needs your room. He could write a letter to KGB and the next night you could be arrested and your neighbor could get your room. Today ... if you are an average man and don't participate in the opposition against the regime, you will not be arrested, and I think it's a great progress." Alternate title: "Soviet Jewry and American Foreign Policy."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.345
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGKZU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6279
item Program Number S0104, 248

"Questions about America"

Guests: Howard, Anthony. : Heren, Louis. : Wells, Dee.

20 August 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 2
Program details: A delicious exemplar of the semi-annual occasion on which the floor is turned over to, as WFB puts it, "several interrogators who may wish to catalyze my wisdom or tax me with my sins." We begin here with Watergate and go back and forth over the whole relation of government to the people. One sample: LH: "Mr. Buckley, you know,you surprise me because you are espousing sort of 19th-century ideals." DW: "I think he surprises even himself." WFB: "I'm not embarrassed by the 19th century. I think some of the most brilliant political insights were born then, unfortunately buried."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.346
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6280
item Program Number S0105, 249

"Democracy and Political Scandal"

Guests: Foot, Michael, 1913-

22 August 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 3
Program details: In Mr. Foot's previous appearance on Firing Line (075), the themes were economic, and what principally emerged was Mr. Foot's absolute commitment to socialism. Here, discussing comparative British and American scandals (while Watergate was still less than half over, a British sex scandal had been dispatched in weeks), he is less predictable, and all the more interesting. E.g., on why a Watergate-type scandal would have played out very differently in Britain: "Well, I believe that a prime minister who was under the kind of attack that Nixon has been under certainly wouldn't have been able to avoid coming and facing his accusers. He would have had to come there at least every Tuesday and every Thursday whilst the British House of Commons was sitting and, indeed, of course, he would have faced serious risk of a vote of censure."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.348
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6282
item Program Number S0106, 250

"Are Unions the Enemy of the Working Class?"

Guests: Scanlon, Hugh.

22 August 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 3
Program details: The crisis that would the following year lead to the downfall of Edward Heath's Conservative government had arguably been exacerbated by the Industrial Relations Bill, formulated by the Labour government of Harold Wilson but eventually passed under Heath. Mr. Scanlon, a hard-line union man, gives no quarter. HS: "If it were a matter of basic human rights, I would have to agree with you. But I submit to you that the question of the relationships that exist between management and workers is not a question of basic human rights." WFB: "Yes. Well,... Suppose I worked in your union and you called a strike. Would I have the basic human right to defy that strike and proceed to my station at work if I chose to do so?" HS: "I don't think that that is a basic human right." WFB: "Why not?" HS: "Because I believe the principles of democracy are that the minority will obey the will of the majority." WFB: "But suppose that the Parliament, representing the larger majority, says it is one of my human rights. Then am I not right in observing the democratic franchise so formulated?" HS: "You are right in obeying it, but you equally can't deny our right to disobey it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.349
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6283
item Program Number S0107, 251

"Has America Had It?"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

20 August 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 4
Program details: Mr. Muggeridge is disinclined to be apocalyptic about America's future, although he has to concede that the current situation--with Watergate roiling away and the bitterness over Vietnam by no means assuaged--gives America-bashers grounds for Schadenfreude. WFB: "It is widely assumed that there was a terrible collapse of English statecraft before the First World War and before the Second World War. Was there the equivalent gloating in America that you know of?" MM: "I wouldn't have said in America so much, but certainly on the Continent, and in my lifetime I've seen this attitude. When I was young, the Empire was at its maximum strength and I felt this incredible hatred that everybody had for the British. I think the only difference ... is that the British rather liked that-it rather pleased them to be regarded as absolutely unspeakable wherever they went-whereas the Americans have no taste for it."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.347
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSLI
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6281
item Program Number S0108, 252

"The Energy Crisis and Energy Policy"

Guests: Adelman, Morris Albert. : Ritchie, Jock.

13 September 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 4
Program details: Is there or is there not an oil crisis? If King Faisal carries through on his threat to deny us oil (as he would in a few months' time), can we make up the difference from other sources? Mr. Adelman believes we can and argues that the worst thing we could do would be to panic in the face of Faisal's threat. Mr. Ritchie argues that at least at present--"owing partly to economic factors, partly to environmentalist pressure, and partly to a lack of confidence that there will be crude oil to produce"--we are dangerously short on production and refinement facilities. A lucid discussion that helps clarify the issues for the layman--although we may find disquieting the degree to which the experts disagree--on, e.g., the amount of gas or oil or uranium left in the earth: MA: "Jock, I really cannot remain silent. That's a figure that none of my colleagues in the Department of Nuclear Engineering can take seriously and really nobody else should."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.350
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707U1E
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6284
item Program Number S0109, 253

"Amnesty"

Guests: Schwarzschild, Henry. : Chigi, George F. III. : Musil, Robert K. : Goldstein, Arthur.

13 September 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 90 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 5
Program details: Although the Vietnam War still dragged on, American troops had come home, and Mr. Schwarzschild was a leader in the effort to close that chapter in our history by granting unconditional amnesty to draft dodgers and deserters. Although the discussion remains civil, host and guest are about as far apart as two people can be, on everything from the constitutionality of the draft, to the applicability of precedents such as President Truman's amnesty for draft resisters in 1947 or the post-Civil War amnesty for Confederate soldiers. HS: "Is it not time for this government and this society, which has now begun to make peace with Hanoi, with Peking, with Moscow, to make peace with the children of our country?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.351
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGL3G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6285
item Program Number S0110, 302

"The Security of Europe"

Guests: Douglas-Home, Alec, Sir*

28 September 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 5
Program details: Sir Alec had been Britain's--the West's, really--point man at the Helsinki Conference (formally, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), and he had spoken strongly on the need for the Soviet Union to offer more than "pious declarations" on behalf of freedom and to take positive steps towards "freedom of movement of people and ideas." However, many observers felt that he had not demanded enough in the way of concrete actions. Was Sir Alec being overly cautious, or was he being realistic? "You've got to be practical here. The Russians just won't take it [the Iron Curtain] down, and, therefore, you have got to find ways and means of contact with Russia which are modest,... but never the less are a plus in terms of international relations and detente." WFB: "Got to vault the wall." ADH: "Well, walls have ends which you can go around.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.352
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6286
item Program Number S0111, 303

"The Nixon Presidency"

Guests: Lubell, Samuel.

28 September 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 6
Program details: Mr. Lubell's latest book had focused on the changes he claims President Nixon had wrought in American life: not through Watergate, but through the way he conducted the 1972 campaign--in WFB's paraphrase, "persuad[ing] the electorate that they should renew his mandate for more powerful government in the name of less powerful government." Our guest quickly turns the tables on his host, saying: "I think we'll get a clearer picture if we just push aside Mr. Nixon and concentrate on yourself, because you are the spokesman for conservatism--" ("A spokesman," WFB corrects), and Mr. Lubell wonders if "there's any basis for conservatism left in the light of [Nixon's] performance." A spirited and serious discussion of the whole question of government intervention versus the activity of the free market.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.353
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGL54
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6287
item Program Number S0112, 305

"The Mechanism of Moral Development"

Guests: Skinner, B. F. (Burrhus Frederic), 1904-1990. : Festinger, Leon, 1919- : Glass, Andrea. : Grill, Harvey. : Clark, Elisabeth.

16 October 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 6
Program details: The first in what WFB describes as "rather spectacular and, I hope, thoughtful series of four exchanges between men distinguished in the social sciences ..." The series lives up to its billing, starting with this session featuring the leader of the behaviorist school of psychology and a leader in cognitive theory. Do people develop the attitudes they do because, as Mr. Skinner puts it, "when we behave in selfish ways, we get slapped down"? Or do you also, in Mr. Festinger's phrase, "start getting the internalization in the sense that the person really likes that, values it, and will go on doing it in the absence of sanctioning supervision"? An extremely rich discussion, full of graspable details ranging from monkeys solving puzzles to the differences and similarities between a child's rattle and Beethoven's Ninth.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.354
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFRBO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6288
item Program Number S0113, 306

"Heredity, IQ, and Social Issues"

Guests: Bever, Thomas G. : Herrnstein, Richard J. : Glass, Andrea. : Grill, Harvey. : Clark, Elisabeth.

16 October 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 7
Program details: The second show in the series on human behavior, this one on the explosive subject of heritability of IQ. "Explosive," because of its implications for social policy. Mr. Herrnstein had stirred up a ruckus with his book IQ in the Meritocracy (though nothing like the ruckus he and Charles Murray would stir up twenty years later with The Bell Curve--see Firing Lines s1029 and s1030), and he and Mr. Bever are old antagonists. But they remain civil enough to give us a clear idea of the points at issue between those who believe there is an element of heritability and those who believe IQ is purely a matter of social conditioning. RH: "It's not unclear at all. When you give a group of children--or adults, for that matter--an IQ test, you get a group of numbers. The numbers don't know where they came from, and these numbers can be subjected to a statistical procedure known as estimative heritability ... The answer comes out that the variation in IQ scores from individual to individual is something between 60 and 90 percent heritable. You don't need a theory of intelligence to say that."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.355
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFRDC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6289
item Program Number S0114, 307

"Can We Have an Independent Prosecutor?"

Guests: Ruckelshaus, William Doyle, 1932-

12 November 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 7
Program details: As Mr. Buckley recounts in his introduction, the Watergate hostilities, which had already been in the headlines for more than a year, had just escalated with the Saturday Night Massacre. Our guest had been fired for refusing to fire Independent Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and he here speaks knowledgeably about the legal and moral ramifications and the probable next steps. WFB: "I should like to begin by asking Mr. Ruckelshaus whether he believes there is any question about Mr. Nixon's right to fire Mr. Cox." WR: "I think there's some question about his right to fire him. There is no question about his power to do so." WFB: "Would you elaborate on the distinction?" WR: "Yes. I think 'right' implies some correctness of action, which I thought was questionable, and that was why I refused to execute the order. I think that acting through a presidential appointee [such as the] attorney general, he would unquestionably ultimately have the power to do so."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.358
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6292
item Program Number S0115, 308

"The Middle East Explosion and American Detente"

Guests: Morgenthau, Hans Joachim, 1904-

12 November 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 8
Program details: One month after the Yom Kippur War had exploded Henry Kissinger's Shuttle Diplomacy, how does the Cold War look? Mr. Morgenthau had been observing the Soviet Union since long before there was a Cold War, and his depth of knowledge is matched by his pungency of expression. HJM: "We have a very unfortunate tendency to go from one extreme to the other. Before 1970 or so, the Russians were the incarnation of evil, not only to be contained but to be rolled back and, if possible, wiped off the face of the earth. Now all of a sudden they have become friends, nice people, and we did exactly the same kind of thing with Stalin. You will remember we called Stalin 'Uncle Joe,' a very nice uncle with lots of blood on his hands ..."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.359
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGL90
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6293
item Program Number S0116, 309

"Limits of Behavioral Control"

Guests: Premack, David. : Azrin, Nathan H., 1930-

18 October 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 8
Program details: Back to our series on human behavior. Mr. Buckley leads off with a quotation from Aldous Huxley, comparing past religious, political, and economic revolutions with "the impending psychological revolution": " 'That will really be a revolution. When it is over the human race will give no further trouble.' " His guests spend the rest of this fascinating hour explaining that even if professional ethics did not forbid this Brave New World kind of thing, human beings aren't so malleable as all that. DP: "It behooves the experimentalist to say: 'You shall not employ me as your technician. Instead we need to know who is man, what is his nature, what are his operating principles, what should his objectives be in the most enlightened way.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.356
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6290
item Program Number S0117, 310

"Psychosurgery and Brain Control"

Guests: Valenstein, Elliot S. : Blumer, Dietrich.

18 October 1973

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 9
Program details: An exhilarating finale to the series on human behavior, this one concentrating on the ethical and scientific limitations on psychiatry and psychology. Drs. Valenstein and Blumer specialize in an area the public finds particularly frightening: surgically killing a portion of the brain that is causing intractable difficulties. EV: "Well, I think there has been a tremendous amount of concern because of the popularization of an idea that these techniques may have much greater application than to a few patients who are at the end of their rope, patients whom all psychiatric treatment, all physical therapies, all drugs have failed." ... WFB: "Suppose Willie Sutton said, 'I just don't want to rob banks. Can you do something to my brain that makes me not want to rob banks?'" DB: "Without making the patient into a vegetable?" WFB: "Yes." DB: "I don't think I could guarantee it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.357
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6291
item Program Number S0118, 311

"Have We Learned Anything from Watergate?"

Guests: Lowenstein, Allard K.

7 December 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 9
Program details: In his third appearance on Firing Line, Mr. Lowenstein is, as always, genial and interesting, but in this case his hatred of Richard Nixon runs so deep that we don't learn a great deal about Watergate (the ADA, under Mr. Lowenstein's direction, had called for Mr. Nixon's impeachment before Watergate, principally on account of the bombing in Laos--see Firing Line s0001). AL: "The rabbis used to tell me you should not engage in Schadenfreude, which is the process of enjoying the suffering of others. I must say that every time I think of the latest involvement of the White House, when I think of--" WFB: "You're tempted." AL: "I'm tempted."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.360
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6294
item Program Number S0119, 312

"The Jesus Movement"

Guests: Martin, Malachi.

7 December 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 10
Program details: A rather rambling and diffuse show. Mr. Martin has the gift of the blarney, but he contradicts himself regularly and has trouble addressing the central question Mr. Buckley raises--concerning the assertion in Mr. Martin's book that, as Mr. Buckley paraphrases it, "the disrepute of Christianity is significantly related to the tendency of diverse cultures and civilizations to take Jesus and adapt him to their own uses and paradigms." One sample from Mr. Martin: "I think we have millions of much better people than ever today and there is born a new thing in the hearts of people. There is, I think, under the pressure of life today and the intercommunication and the action of Jesus, who works with compassion--I do sound like a Bible preacher but really I believe this--there is born a new interest in the self, in what I am."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.361
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707JBA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6295
item Program Number S0120, 314

"The Future of the GOP"

Guests: Richardson, Elliot L., 1920-

20 December 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 10
Program details: The last time the title "The Future of the GOP" was used for a Firing Line show, it was 1967 and the guest was former Vice President Richard M. Nixon. This time around,the guest is the man who resigned from President Nixon's Administration rather than fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (Firing Line s0114). We begin cautiously: WFB: "Are you free to discuss those of Mr. Nixon's characteristics that affect his Administration, either adversely or favorably?" ER: "Yes." WFB: "Beginning with the latter, let's say." ER; "Well, suppose we get a little more specific; we'd find out just how free I was. I think that insofar as I can shed any light on how we've come to where we are and what this may mean for the future, I'd like to try to do that." And so he does, citing, for example, an unrelated case in which the special prosecutor had asked for certain documents. "We had obviously read the documents; they were in our hands. And there was nothing in them that was incriminating, and yet I was instructed by the White House not to make them available to the special prosecutor as well as to stand on executive privilege in the civil action."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.362
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6296
item Program Number S0121, 315

"The Views of a Nixonite"

Guests: Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938-

20 December 1973

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 10
Program details: As WFB recounts it, "A couple of months ago the Ervin Committee investigating Watergate called a witness who, in the course of a few hours, left the senators and their staffs reeling.... The committee has yet to write its report, but it is generally agreed that it will not succeed again in comparing itself and its purposes to the rising sun or the Milky Way. Patrick Buchanan put an end to that." On this show he is a combative and energetic defender of his Chief, occasionally straying away from John Dean, Judge Sirica, and the tapes to talk about, e.g., the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and Harry Truman's drop in popularity during the Korean War. PJB: "In my judgment the President was fully justified if, in fact, it is true that during 1969 and 1970 he secretly bombed the occupied sectors of Cambodia because American troops were on the other side of the frontier. I think he was justified even--which I don't know to be true--if there was a necessary falsification of certain papers at the Pentagon ... in order that Prince Sihanouk could make certain statements with regard to what Americans were doing in Cambodia. To me that would be as justified as the fact that Dwight Eisenhower and others obviously put out lies and false stories about what American troops were going to do prior to Normandy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.363
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6297
item Program Number S0122, 316

"Penal Reform"

Guests: Mitford, Jessica, 1917-

14 January 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 11
Program details: Miss Mitford makes the unassailable point that, to the extent that prisons are intended to rehabilitate their inmates, they are miserable failures, and other means of dealing with criminals should be found. From the perspective of many viewers, however, she muddies her point by her overarching critique of Western institutions of power: "All right, we've got the Rice Krispie man [a hypothetical fraudulent advertiser], who is really a rather minor criminal compared, in my view at least, to the manufacturer of napalm and other genocidal weapons or to the policemen who routinely commit crimes on the beat." Frequent digressions make this show delightful and frustrating by turns.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.364
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6298
item Program Number S0123, 317

"The Revisionist Historians"

Guests: Rusk, Dean, 1909-

23 January 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 11
Program details: "Dean Rusk is, I suppose," Mr. Buckley begins, "by everyone's reckoning the principal historical victim of the Vietnam War"--reviled by the elite press and the revisionist historians and exiled, as his Ivy League friends see it, to the wilds of Georgia. He is, however, unbowed: "Well, legitimate historians are always in the process of revising history, whether it's based upon new archaeological finds or some documents of the 19th century that crop up. But I don't believe that we should roll over and play dead just because someone writes a political tract and calls it history." A rich discussion starting with the beginnings of the Cold War, moving to the early days of the Kennedy Administration--when Cuba and Berlin and, soon, Vietnam were all clamoring for attention--and on to the American campus of today.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.369
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GBM4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6303
item Program Number S0124, 318

"Mr. Buckley Defends His Four Reforms"

Guests: Russin, Joseph. : Coleman, Kate. : Brown, Michael.

14 January 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 12
Program details: The semi-annual occasion on which the tables are turned, and the guests become the interrogators--asked to focus, this time, on Mr. Buckley's new book, Four Reforms (the reforms being in the areas of welfare, taxation, education, and crime). One sample: WFB: "If you deny the philanthropic impulses of the American people, you are being anti-historical." KC: "I'd deny them." WFB: "Well, how do you account for $150 billion [a year in private philanthropy]?" KC: "Tax breaks." WFB: "I don't know where you went to school, but there were only three million people who paid income taxes in the Thirties, and yet practically every private institution, every church, every hospital was built. It was built by Americans. You all of a sudden think that charity was invented by FDR or something?" KC: "No, I just think that during the Thirties their guilt was a little bit larger."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.365
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6299
item Program Number S0125, 319

"Government and Public Confidence"

Guests: Muskie, Edmund S., 1914-

21 January 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 12
Program details: Senator Muskie's Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations had just commissioned the Lou Harris organization to conduct a poll on Americans' knowledge of and confidence in their country's institutions. The results on both counts were, as WFB relates them, pretty depressing. The bulk of the hour is spent--sometimes heatedly--analyzing the poll and debating how close it comes to reality. WFB: "But I am asking about the causes of alienation, and both you and I agree that there is alienation, isn't there?" EM: "Well, it seems to me that since you and I are accepting the poll's measure of whether or not there is alienation, we ought to be interested in how the poll arrived at that conclusion." WFB: "That's a technical question." EM: "That is not technical. It's very substantive." WFB: "The fact of the matter is--" EM: "Independent of this poll I have no personal antennae that tell me--" WFB: "Don't you?""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.366
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6300
item Program Number S0126, 320

"The British Crisis"

Guests: Lejeune, Anthony. : Levin, Bernard.

12 February 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 13
Program details: The "crisis" of the title refers to the Heath Government's confrontation with the coal miners' union, which was demanding a 33 per cent pay increase. Mr. Heath had called an election--an election that he would lose, setting the stage for Margaret Thatcher's ascendancy. This show offers a spirited and wide-ranging discussion, exploring the differences between American and British law on strikes in essential industries, the differences in the two countries' electoral systems, and the causes of inflation. WFB: "[What about] the rather unexpected move of Enoch Powell. How do you interpret his decision not to run again?" (See Firing Line s0127.) BL: "I think Tony ought to speak first on that one because he's an old--" WFB: "Powell watcher?" BL: "...Powellite from top to bottom, and I'm not." AL: "I'm not a Powellite from top to bottom." BL: "From side to side, then." AL: "I'm a Powellite from side to side, yes. Two things only I'd say about it. One, I think that Powell could not have run on a Heath election platform. It would have been totally inconsistent with everything he's said, and since intellectual honesty is his main banner--Bernard may not believe it, but it is his main banner--it would have been quite illogical for him to run on this platform."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.371
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G7085EK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6305
item Program Number S0127, 321

"Enoch Powell and the British Crisis"

Guests: Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998.

13 February 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 13
Program details: Mr. Powell had announced that he would not run for re-election-not because he feared the Conservatives would lose, but because (as Mr. Lejeune suggests above) "the impossibility which I saw in front of myself was that in 1974 I should present myself to the same constituency advocating on most of the important issues the opposite to the policies for which I had invited them to vote four years before." (In the event, Labour's margin of victory was so narrow that a new election was called in October of that year; Mr. Powell run for election from Northern Ireland on the Unionist Party ticket and won.) The conversation focuses specifically on wage and price controls, more generally on inflation and the march of socialism; and on subjects such as these the eccentric Mr. Powell seems not at all eccentric: "The politician should never say that a trend is inevitable. It's his business to see to it that a trend, if he doesn't agree with it, is not inevitable. But I would be prepared to admit that if you wanted to make a case for the inevitability of a trend towards socialism, a very strong point that you could take up would be the fact that a Conservative government which came in in 1970 with a radical market philosophy ... within two years was introducing legislation which not merely re-echoed the legislation of the socialist party but exceeded their delighted dreams."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.373
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6307
item Program Number S0128, 322

"Tax Reform"

Guests: Surrey, Stanley S.

21 January 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 14
Program details: A thoughtful discussion of the federal tax system between two men who have spent much of their professional lives studying it and who are able to explain it to people who have not done so. WFB: "It seems to me plain from your philosophy that you more or less start off on the assumption that what you're dealing with is the government's money, whereas I start off on the assumption that what you're dealing with is the individual's money or the corporation's money. So what you insist on calling tax subsidies, tax expenditures, I would simply view as a form of remission...." SS: "I don't agree ...with the way you characterized my general position ... I would put it this way. We have decided to have an income tax in this country.... The base of the tax, the thing we're going to tax, is an individual's income." WFB: "Yes." SS: "Now, having decided that, then any exclusion from our concept of income becomes a particular preference for that individual as compared with other individuals who are differently treated."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.367
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GX7C
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6301
item Program Number S0129, 323

"Politics and Black Progress"

Guests: Bond, Julian, 1940- : Lewis, John, 1940 Feb. 21-

23 January 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 14
Program details: A detail-filled exploration of changes in voting practices, principally in the two guests' native South, since the passage of the civil-rights acts. JL: "In Dallas County, Alabama, in 1965, for example, only 2.1 per cent of the black people of voting age were registered to vote. Today more than 67 per cent... are registered to vote. They have paved streets, they have a sewer system.... In Greene County, Alabama, in 1965,...less than 300 black people were registered to vote. Today black people control the county. They are working with white people and they're working together. You have a housing authority there. For the first time in the history of that county black people have decent housing." And Mr. Bond tells how he learned something about the tendency among politicians, black or white, to "overpromise": "My notion of the $2 minimum wage, for example, vanished rather quickly when I found myself in the legislature and saw what the temperament of the body was."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.368
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWNG4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6302
item Program Number S0130, 324

"Ulster: 1974"

Guests: Hume, John, 1937-

12 February 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 15
Program details: An unusually lucid discussion of a tangled situation. In reply to Mr. Buckley's question--"Now, if something can last between 1921 and 1968, why can't it last out the balance of the century?"--Mr. Hume gives a masterly account of the threads that came together in the late Sixties to produce the violence that led, in 1972, to Britain's suspending Stormont and assuming direct rule of Northern Ireland. Britain had recently restored a measure of home rule; one of the conditions was that the Catholic minority had to be represented in the executive branch, which was why the Catholic Mr. Hume had been named Minister of Commerce. JH: "Well, the fear is consistently expressed by the Protestant majority in the North, which is a Protestant minority in Ireland, that... by coming into a united country they would be subjected to what they call 'Rome rule.' That fear is consistently expressed. I don't personally believe that if all of the changes they ask for took place tomorrow that would advance their wish for Irish unity one iota."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.370
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6304
item Program Number S0131, 325

"Catholicism and Socialism in Ireland"

Guests: Browne, Noel C.

12 February 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 15
Program details: A crackling exchange between a committed Catholic conservative and a committed socialist who holds the Catholic Church responsible for most of Ireland's ills--ranging from differing rates of infant mortality between rich and poor to the violence of the Provisional IRA. WFB: "If your criticism was intended to be understood as being leveled exclusively at the Irish Catholic Church, how would you explain the following sentence from one of your articles?-- The only possible response by those oppressed by the Church has been and is social revolution, half a bloody century of it, of which the most recent is seen in once-Catholic Cuba.-- How did the Irish Church get into Cuba? ..." NB: "I think you're playing games, if I may say so, Mr. Buckley.... There are many forms of the Catholic Church, and I disagree with the obscurantist Catholic Church. If there is such a thing as a radical Catholic Church or a Catholic Church that accepts the socialist idea, I have no objection to that kind of Catholic Church."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.372
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6306
item Program Number S0132, 329

"The Question of South Africa"

Guests: Vorster, B. J. (Balthazar Johannes), 1915-

13 March 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 108 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 16
Program details: This was the first appearance ever of Mr. Vorster on television, and Mr. Buckley doesn't start him off easy: "I should like to begin by asking the Prime Minister whether, as almost every account of his background in America and elsewhere notes, he was in fact during the war pro-Nazi." JV: "No. I can definitely say that it wasn't a question of being pro-Nazi. I was anti-British...." WFB: "So that in fact to deduce from that that you were pro-Nazi would be as incorrect as to deduce that we were pro-Communist because we were on the side of Stalin." JV: "Quite.... I was pro-Afrikaans." Then onto the present, with the Prime Minister impressively discussing his country's policies on press freedom, comparative standards of living in different parts of Africa, and whether you can have a successful multi-racial society. JV: "I take it what you do mean in fact--maybe you were too polite to say it--is that it is said we are in fact a police state." WFB:"It's certainly said. Certainly, yes." JV: "If that is the case, then it's the only police state that I know of where you must do your level best to keep people out; because as it happens at the moment, we have thousands and thousands of illegal black immigrants in this country and we can't get them out."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.374
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWNS2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6308
item Program Number S0133, 330

"The Question of Rhodesia"

Guests: Smith, Ian Douglas, 1919-

15 March 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 16
Program details: This was only the second appearance of Mr. Smith on television. Mr. Buckley begins by reminding us that "in 1965 Rhodesia had requested independence of Great Britain, and Britain had said no, on the grounds that Mr. Smith's government represented only 5 per cent of the population. Whereupon at 11:15 A.M. on November 11, 1965, the government issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the UDI, the second such declaration by a former colony in Britain's history--the first being our very own, which was signed before the word 'unilateral' was invented." As of this taping, Rhodesia remained a pariah nation, beleaguered by external sanctions and internal terrorism. An informative discussion of the history of colonialism in Africa, the current state of Rhodesia's economy, and the scene in nearby countries such as Mozambique and Zambia. One sample, on the subject of introducing democracy: IS: "The American people basically have always lived under this system. Now, we're dealing with people who say, 'But we don't understand this thing that the white man has brought here. We live under the tribal system. We're quite happy, we're peaceful. Why don't you leave us alone?' What do you say to them? 'You can't be left alone and peaceful. Whether you like it or not, you must come in and play a part with us'? It's not an easy question." Technical note: This program is black and white.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.375
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGLE0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6309
item Program Number S0134, 331

"The Republican Party and Mr. Nixon"

Guests: Bush, George, 1924-

3 May 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 17
Program details: Mr. Bush was developing a reputation as the holder of thankless jobs in the Nixon Administration--first, Ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the vote to eject Taiwan; now Chairman of the RNC during Watergate. His current task was to help as many Republicans as possible get elected to Congress six months thence (though, to be sure, no one was likely to hold him responsible for the eventual failure). It was an ominous sign that Republican candidates had just lost four of five by-elections. WFB: "There has, of course, been a lot of talk about Mr. Nixon as an albatross. Is it your judgment that if Mr. Nixon were to decide tonight that he wanted to become a poet or whatever, and eliminate himself without any sort of residual stigma, under such circumstances as those would you project that the party would have an easier time in November?" GB: "You are not going to like this answer because I know of your intellectual alacrity, but I am not going to get into these hypotheses because this is not going to happen. I know and respect the views of the very distinguished Senator from New York named Buckley ... My view is it is wrong for the President to resign, it is wrong for him to be forced out of office; the system has got to work, the system will work in fairness...." WFB: "You say it's like saying, 'What if the Pope became a Seventh-Day Adventist?'" GB: "Well, something like that. I wish I had thought of that, but, yes, I don't think it's in the makeup of the man."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.376
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWN50
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6310
item Program Number S0135, 332

"The Blackmailing of the President"

Guests: Hunt, E. Howard (Everette Howard), 1918-2007. : Fine, Ralph Adam. : Bernstein, Nina. : Owen, John W.

10 May 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 17
Program details: WFB begins by quoting John Dean's testimony to the Watergate committee: "'I told the President that Hunt wanted $72,000 for living expenses and $50,000 for attorneys' fees, and, if he did not get the money and get it quickly, he would have a lot of seamy things to say about what he had done for John Ehrlichman ...' " In Mr. Hunt's previous Firing Line appearance (s0077) the subject was the CIA and the Bay of Pigs; here he and his host explore the similarities and differences between official acts of clandestine agents and unofficial operations like the Plumbers'. Specifically, Mr. Hunt explains that the financial arrangement he had demanded was simply the clandestine services' traditional way of taking care of the families of captured agents. WFB: "I'm wondering what it is that caused [Nixon and his men] to use that term [blackmail], considering that you were saying this was really a traditional arrangement." EHH: "Well, I certainly understood it traditionally; obviously others did not, who should have."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.378
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6312
item Program Number S0136, 333

"Where Do We Go from Here in the Middle East?"

Guests: Sayegh, Fayez A. (Fayez Abdullah), 1922-1980. : Orbach, William. : Greenberg, Lynn. : Almazani, Salah.

15 May 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 91 : 10
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 18
Program details: Henry Kissinger's Shuttle Diplomacy was back in full swing, with, as WFB puts it, "apparently endless trips to Damascus, to Tel Aviv, to Cairo, to Cyprus." And there was "a vague sensation of movement: the Suez Canal is being reopened, the cease fire on the Egyptian front is months old." However, some observers believe that "nothing will happen until disposition is made of the demands of the Palestinian refugees," and Mr. Sayegh is of that camp. He might not convince any Israelis, but he makes his case in masterly fashion, working from UN Resolution 242, which sought to guarantee Israel's independence, back through the UN action of 1947 in establishing a " 'Jewish state'[which] made provisions for the protection of the Arabs who were to continue to live [there]," further back to the Balfour declaration, which "did not speak of a 'Jewish state'; it spoke of a 'national home,' " and back further still, to the centuries when, "Until Zionism came, it was perfectly normal for Jews and Arabs to live together in our part of the world. So I'm not presenting a vision that is against the nature of things. I am presenting a vision that would be a return to the nature of things once the aberrations of the last few decades are removed from the way."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.382
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707TCY
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6316
item Program Number S0137, 334

"Should the United States Disarm?"

Guests: Aspin, Les.

10 May 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 18
Program details: Rep. Aspin had been, as WFB reminds us, "one of Secretary McNamara's whiz kids in the Pentagon" (he would later himself briefly serve as Secretary of Defense under President Clinton), and he was now one of the Pentagon's sharpest critics. Host and guest agree that, as Rep Aspin puts it, "we should be buying the kind of weapons to counter the Soviet capabilities, not... just go ahead blindly and buy ships." Where the disagreement comes in--with lots of supporting detail on both sides--is over just how you tell what those needed weapons are. WFB: "Theoretically, if there were 200 million Russians and we had 200 million bullets, that would be all we would need if we could aim each bullet at each Russian." In the course of the hour we look at ships and planes and subs and cruise missiles and ICBMs, and Mr. Aspin's assertion, concerning the Soviet army, "Well, that's a very big army, but really half of it ... is on the Chinese border to prevent them waking up one morning and finding that the Chinese have chomped off a bit of territory."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.379
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H1SW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6313
item Program Number S0138, 335

"How Strong Should the Presidency Be?"

Guests: McCarthy, Eugene J., 1916-

10 May 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 19
Program details: "They are all giving thought nowadays," WFB begins, "to how the post-Watergate Presidency should look, how the office might be revised so as to bring it back within republican discipline." A rich discussion of how the Presidency reached its present state--which is, host and guest agree, too strong in some respects and too weak in others--enlivened by the off beat perspective that makes Mr. McCarthy arguably a better poet than he would have been a President: e.g., his proposal that instead of picking the President first and letting him pick his running mate, the "big fights at conventions ought to be over who's going to be the Vice President.... You pick the Vice President and you let him pick the presidential candidate. And you see all the good that would come out of that. You'd be picking a man who would say, 'I have no ambition at this point to be President. I'm going to take the least of all political jobs ... I will demonstrate my humility. And then I will be responsible for the man I pick to be President.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.380
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6314
item Program Number S0139, 336

"Justice and the Fifth Amendment"

Guests: Williams, Edward Bennett.

3 May 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 19
Program details: Political violence had died down with the "Vietnamization" of the war, but ordinary crime had risen, and the courts increasingly seemed unable to cope. "One suggested remedy," as Mr. Buckley frames the question, "is a drastic new look at the Fifth Amendment and its interpretation by the Supreme Court, and here to say, 'Leave it alone,' is Edward Bennett Williams," whose clients had included Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Costello. A brilliant duel that takes the question far beyond the Warren Court--back to the beginnings of Anglo-American jurisprudence, and before that to the medieval Church and to the Talmud. "I think that in a free society it is essentially unfair and essentially unfree to confront one suspected of a crime with conviction if he confesses his guilt, perjury if he denies it, or contempt if he refuses to answer it. It seems to me it is essentially like saying to a small child who is suspected of taking your loose change ... 'If you admit it, you will be thrashed for stealing; if you deny it, you will be thrashed for lying; and if you refuse to answer, you will be punished for disobedience.'"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.377
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6311
item Program Number S0140, 337

"Amnesty"

Guests: Clark, Ramsey, 1927-

3 June 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 20
Program details: Another go at the debate over whether to offer unconditional amnesty to draft dodgers and deserters, last discussed with Henry Schwarzschild (Firing Line s0109). A high-energy exchange between our guest, who feels that this is a decent, important thing for this country so we can get on with living together and solving problems and not unnecessarily creating suffering for ourselves," and our host, who argues that "the majority of Americans would not be united by the granting of amnesty, but would be disunited on the ground that they feel that this was a treacherous act towards those members of American society who followed the law."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.383
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H60K
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6317
item Program Number S0141, 338

"Government and the Arts"

Guests: Berman, Ronald.

3 June 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 20
Program details: How did we get from the point where, as Mr. Berman puts it, "an Elihu Yale could begin a university, a Morgan could begin a Morgan Library, a John Harvard could begin his university," to the point where government subsidies are deemed essential? A genial and illuminating discussion of government funding of the arts and humanities--its justification, its history, and its probable future. RB: "In the 18th century, you had Dr. Johnson suffering, becoming a literary hack; you had Mozart putting up with his very great difficulties. But in the 20th century, in the United States, it is almost unheard of that anyone with the least pretension towards some cultural merit should have his beak unfilled." WFB: "Now, are you saying that with any trepidation? Could it be that fifty years from now you or your children will recognize somebody who was your contemporary who very nearly starved to death? Or do you say this with a very considerable sense of certainty?" RB: "I say it with the normal amount of certainty that any human being has who is probably about to make a mistake."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.384
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G70871G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6318
item Program Number S0142, 339

"The Future of the GOP"

Guests: Ford, Gerald R., 1913- : Kuttner, Robert. : Angle, Martha. : Donatelli, Frank.

28 June 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 21
Program details: The third Firing Line on "The Future of the GOP," the first having been with Richard Nixon in 1967, the second with Elliot Richardson midway through the protracted Watergate agony. On this occasion, Mr. Buckley attempts to engage the Vice President on the question whether President Nixon shouldn't take into account the position of Republican congressmen facing re-election in deciding how to respond if a bill of impeachment should be brought. Unfortunately for the quality of the discussion, Mr. Ford's loyalty, or prudence, prevents him from even considering such a hypothetical involving his Chief. The closest he will come to answering is to say: "I don't think there is sufficient evidence to contend as an impeachable offense that the President was involved in the alleged cover-up, or in the cover-up."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.387
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H3F8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6321
item Program Number S0143, 401

"The Kidnapper, the Victim, the Society"

Guests: Murphy, Reg, 1934-

15 May 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 21
Program details: There had been an upsurge in kidnappings in the United States, some connected with radical political ferment, others apparently connected only with money. The most famous was probably that of Patty Hearst; but Reg Murphy's, as WFB puts it, "gives us the rare opportunity to have the insights of someone who was himself kidnapped who is trained to observe as a journalist observes." A fascinating exploration, starting with the issue of whether acceding to a ransom demand is "anti-social" or "absolutely essential." RM: "The kidnapper operates in an area of paranoia, of extreme tension ... under more tension even than the victim is, because he has to make everything work right, in the first place. In the second place, it's absolutely essential that he be able to communicate in some way with the family ... But he knows that as soon as he does that, he is walking into the police ..."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.381
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6315
item Program Number S0144, 402

"The Limits of Journalistic Investigation"

Guests: Bernstein, Carl, 1944- : Woodward, Bob.

9 July 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 22
Program details: It may come as a shock to be reminded that Watergate dragged on so long that Woodward and Bernstein's book was actually published while Richard Nixon was still President. (In fact, the "smoking gun" tape wasn't released until four weeks after today's discussion.) Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein are candid -- as they were in their book--in admitting that they pressed the ethical limits of journalistic investigation. WFB then raises a question of presidential ethics, in Richard Nixon's having (a) taped his conversations and then (b) not immediately destroyed the tapes once the investigation began: "I think that private conversations are awesomely private and ought to be; besides, unless it's a soliloquy, you're involving somebody else, and to exercise dominion over somebody else's conversation and disclose it I simply find heinous."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.390
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWXW8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6324
item Program Number S0145, 403

"Shockley's Thesis"

Guests: Shockley, William, 1910- : Loesch, Juli. : Atkinson, Paul. : Atkinson, Johnie

10 June 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 22
Program details: Mr. Shockley's current fame, or notoriety, came not in his official field, but rather in a field of more recent interest to him, eugenics. Like, say, Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein, Mr. Shockley was widely reviled for talking about the heritability of certain traits. Unlike them, he was promoting something that, post-Hitler, had become, as WFB puts it, "unspeakable." Mr. Shockley was suggesting a "voluntary sterilization bonus plan": "the amount of the bonus would be dependent on various factors. For example, income-tax payers would be offered no bonus. For all others, regardless of sex, race, or welfare status, ... the bonus would depend upon best scientific estimates - and that's a very important qualifying phrase ... -of any genetically carried disabilities, such as arthritis, hemophilia, Huntington's chorea. And if there is a genetic predisposal to heroin addiction, this should get a big bonus. Then I go on to say, furthermore, add $1,000 for every point you score below 100 on an IQ test." An often heated but illuminating discussion with a man who was seldom allowed to be heard.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.386
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGLZO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6320
item Program Number S0146, 404

"What Do We Want from SALT II?"

Guests: Zumwalt, Elmo R., 1920- : Nitze, Paul H.

22 July 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 23
Program details: President Nixon, as WFB reminds us, had "just returned from Moscow without SALT II in his pocket; that is to say,... a document that carries forward from the agreements of 1972 a plan for the continuing reduction in the strategic arms of the United States and the Soviet Union." Was this because of Watergate, "or because the Russians are Communists, or a combination of the two?" A combination, Mr. Nitze explains ("...one of the things they take into account is what they call the correlation of forces. And I think they do, in looking at the correlation of forces, estimate what the internal political strength of the United States is, and I think it is without doubt that the Watergate affair has weakened the Presidency and therefore has made it more difficult for us to achieve the kind of agreements which we really should have"), and we are launched on a thorough discussion of strategic arms and general military preparedness.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.391
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6325
item Program Number S0147, 405

"Public Medicine?"

Guests: Fine, Max. : Roth, Russell.

10 June 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 23
Program details: Nearly twenty years before Bill and Hillary Clinton entered the fray, there was a major debate over national health insurance. Three proposals were on the table, and "the bones of contention," as WFB phrases it, "seem to be (1) how much, if anything, should be deductible, (2) is there a role for the private insurance companies, and (3) how best to disguise from the people the fact that they are paying the bills." To Mr. Fine, "We need... the principle of health care as a right." To Dr. Roth, "actually more people are receiving more and better medical care in more and better-equipped facilities from more and better-trained physicians than ever before in history, and that really doesn't sound like crisis. The only crisis is in the cost area ..." A sometimes heated, always informative discussion.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.385
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707VL8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6319
item Program Number S0148, 406

"Leadership in America"

Guests: McGinniss, Joe. : Kempton, Murray, 1917-

9 July 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 24
Program details: "The Leadership" in this show's title refers to perceived heroism; "the loss of the American hero" was the subject Mr. McGinniss was currently writing about. Why, e.g.,did Charles Lindbergh keep his hold on the American imagination, whereas Neil Armstrong, as Mr. McGinniss puts it, just five years after he became the first man to walk on the Moon, "has really disappeared back into obscurity and no one has seemingly missed him"? Mr. Kempton, in his dry way, adds perspective to this leisurely and rich conversation: "I don't think, since both Mencken and Ring Lardner flourished in the Twenties, that hero worship was absolutely something that existed then and does not exist now."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.389
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6323
item Program Number S0149, 407

"Looking Back on George Jackson"

Guests: Armstrong, Gregory, 1931- : Harris, Albert. : Kuttner, Robert. : Marks, John. : Stupp, Herbert.

22 July 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 24
Program details: In 1970, a black inmate at Soledad Prison was shot to death while attempting to escape. The next day a white guard was found dead, and George Jackson and two other inmates--who became known as the Soledad Brothers--were indicted for his murder. Angela Davis, a young, black, Communist professor of philosophy at UCLA, became the spearhead of the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. She did not, however, confine her efforts to speechmaking and fundraising: she also bought several guns which were later used by George Jackson's brother, Jonathan, in a hostage-taking attempt at the Marin County Courthouse that left the younger Jackson and three others dead. The following year George Jackson himself--who by that time had been transferred to the maximum-security San Quentin--was killed while attempting a jailbreak. Today's often heated exchange--with a champion of George Jackson (GA: "George ... was a man who had a tremendous ability to care about people. He took upon himself to be, in a sense, the conscience of the black race") and the prosecutor of another of Mr. Jackson's champions--gives us a window on that time when "revolutionary" was a prized designation.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.392
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6326
item Program Number S0150, 408

"The Political Responsibility of Artists"

Guests: Kenner, Hugh. : Kuttner, Robert. : Donatelli, Frank. : Angle, Martha

28 June 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 25
Program details: We begin with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who had just been expelled from the Soviet Union) and Ezra Pound (who two years earlier had been granted, and then denied, the Emerson-Thoreau Award by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), and go on from there in the company of one of America's leading men of letters. One sample: HK: "It seems not to be remembered Paradise Lost was written by a man who might well have been under a death sentence if Andrew Marvell had not intervened and asked him to just be quiet, partly because he was blind. And Paradise Lost is very largely apolitical tract in which Satan coming back to disrupt the harmony of the new creation is marvelously plausible and attractive because he is modeled on Charles II, who had just done the same thing and whose point of entrance to the British psyche was notoriously by way of woman."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.388
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWQH0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6322
item Program Number S0151, 410

"Buckley as UN Delegate"

Guests: Frederick, Pauline. : Scali, John.

4 September 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 25
Program details: The semi-annual occasion on which host becomes interrogatee--this time specifically on his service as "public delegate" to the 28th General Assembly and on the book that came out of it, United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey. The questioners are longtime UN-watchers and, in Mr. Scali's case, a participant since 1973 (and the man who had recommended Mr. Buckley's appointment). This winds up being a spirited three-cornered debate among Ms. Frederick, who believes the UN's "primary purpose ... is to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," Mr. Scali, who believes "that if we had to reinvent the United Nations right now ... we probably couldn't do as good a job as we did in 1945," and Mr. Buckley, who agrees with "the position the American people [according to recent polls] have towards the United Nations... : I think it is worth while and I think it is doing a bad job."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.393
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6327
item Program Number S0152, 411

"The Nixon Experience and American Conservatism"

Guests: Buckley, James Lane, 1923-

4 September 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 26
Program details: Richard Nixon had finally flown off to San Clemente, something that freshman Senator James Buckley had bucked much of conservative and Republican sentiment by urging him to do back in March (JLB: "There were many others who knew exactly what I was trying to say and who agreed with me--unfortunately, more of them privately than publicly"). A substantive and often wryly moving discussion (JLB: "We had a little pool in our office in the mail room as to whether I'd be compared with Judas Iscariot or Benedict Arnold or Brutus most often. And I think Benedict Arnold won") of Watergate details, and of how those fit into broader questions of congressional versus presidential power, of the President's ability to conduct foreign policy, and of our tendency, as WFB puts it, "to associate an idea with a person, and if that person lets [us] down, [to] become disillusioned with the idea."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.394
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G708C6Q
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6328
item Program Number S0153, 412

"The President's Pardon"

Guests: Railsback, Thomas F. : Waldie, Jerome R.

12 September 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 26
Program details: President Ford had acted quickly in issuing a general pardon to his predecessor, and some, like Rep. Waldie, were incensed, believing that "this has obscured ... the extent of his guilt." For Rep. Railsback--who had served with Rep. Waldie on the House Judiciary Committee, which had drawn up the articles of impeachment against Mr. Nixon--"I don't know what good the country derives from some kind of an inquisition of a former President who has been toppled from the highest to the lowest." In the course of this heated discussion, we get Watergate specifics, comparisons to past, unpunished Presidents (not least, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt), questions about the FBI and CIA, and much else.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.396
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6330
item Program Number S0154, 413

"Chile and the CIA"

Guests: Korry, Edward M.

20 September 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 27
Program details: Salvador Allende--who had been democratically elected President of Chile in 1970, but who was a Marxist with ties to Castro's Cuba--had died (very possibly by his own hand) during the coup against his government. Questions had been raised in the American press and in Congress as to whether the CIA had had a hand in "destabilizing" the Allende regime. In the highly charged post-Watergate atmosphere, there was talk of bringing action against various officials, including Ambassador Korry. On this show, Mr. Korry is not at liberty to say everything he knows, but we still get some fascinating stories and serious analysis. WFB: "So therefore you tilted in the direction of helping them [the Allende government]." EK: "I didn't tilt. I walked in to their foreign minister, who described himself in that period as an all-out Maoist--and this was in the period of the Red Guards-- ... and I said, 'You know my view of what I think Dr. Allende and you represent in the way of political forces ... You know that I was opposed to you; but you are now the representative of a sovereign power, and I am a representative of a sovereign power, and we are both mature individuals.'..."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.397
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G7087O8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6331
item Program Number S0155, 414

"England at the Brink"

Guests: Heath, Edward. : Marks, John : Angle, Martha : Donatelli, Frank

10 September 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 27
Program details: Moments before entering the studio, Mr. Heath informed WFB that, as he was in a foreign country, he could make no criticism of any British politician. We'll probably never know whom he didn't want to discuss (Enoch Powell? Harold Wilson? Margaret Thatcher?), but there is plenty else to talk about, especially the Heath government's relations with the unions and whether, as Mr. Buckley quotes an unnamed British politician as charging, "Britain has become a syndicalist despotism." No, says Mr. Heath emphatically, it has not: "We had our position, the trade unions had theirs, the employers had theirs, and we said, 'There have got to be compromises.' We made ours and over a large field the employers and the trade unions made theirs." There's a fascinating discursion on why Conservatives can't attempt to denationalize industry until "a time when a moderate majority in the Labour Party" will agree that if something is denationalized and people invest their savings in it, Labour won't come along next time around and renationalize it.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.395
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6329
item Program Number S0156, 415

"The Economy"

Guests: Rinfret, Pierre.

20 September 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 28
Program details: "It is agreed," Mr. Buckley begins, "that inflation is the acutest problem and that, unlike the other problem that obsessed us for so long, this one cannot be done away with by impeaching it.... There is, of course, vague talk about who is to blame for exactly what. Mr. Pierre Rinfret, an economist, isn't vague about anything." Mr. Rinfret bears out this introduction in a slash-and-burn session that leaves neither politicians nor economists nor businessmen intact. "You didn't mention it... but I worked very extensively for Lyndon Johnson, and he threw me out of the Oval Room in January 1966 with the admonition I was never to come back." WFB: "What had you done to precipitate that?" PR: "Well, I had told him that he was lying to the American people about the war,... and that he was going to devastate the American economy by an increase in federal spending while he tried to run a Great Society, and there just wasn't enough room in the American economy to do both.... Now, you say, Why didn't business see it? Business did, but you've got to remember one thing about American industry. They're not going to stand and fight. They never do and they never will."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.398
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707P8W
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6332
item Program Number S0157, 417

"Recognize Cuba?"

Guests: Mas Canosa, Jorge. : Szulc, Tad.

21 October 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 28
Program details: There was serious talk that Cuba would be swept up in the general good will of detente and the embargo instituted in 1964 by the Organization of American States would be lifted. Mr. Szulc vigorously supports such a move; Mr. Mas vigorously opposes it in any form that it would be likely to take in the current climate ("as it appears now, they go to Cuba on bended knee; I'm just about sure that Castro is going to be the winner in the long run"). This debate sometimes bogs down in accusations (of narrowness; of fellow traveling), but we still learn a lot about the way Cuba fits into the world scene, A.D. 1974.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.399
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6333
item Program Number S0158, 418

"Can You Strike against the State?"

Guests: Wurf, Jerry, 1919-

21 October 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 29
Program details: Mr. Wurf, the leader of the fastest-growing union in the United States, answers the title question with an emphatic "Yes." Mr. Buckley, citing public figures ranging from "Calvin Coolidge to Franklin Roosevelt," answers with an equally emphatic "No." A heated but frequently illuminating debate that keeps returning to a recent strike by some of Baltimore's policemen after the mayor had refused any form of arbitration. JW: "Mr. Buckley, perhaps by your standards we're not conservatives, but public employees are conservative, and they don't want to strike for the privilege of going without wages or walking around the city hall. They strike because there's nothing else available to them in the course of solving their difficulties."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.448
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6382
item Program Number S0159, 419

"Election Rhetoric, 1974"

Guests: Wattenberg, Ben J. : Davis, Lanny J.

8 November 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 171 : 29
Program details: A rich discussion of the implications of the mid-term elections--in which the Democrats picked up 43 seats in the House, 3 seats in the Senate, and 4 governorships--among two liberal Democrats and their conservative Republican host. Mr. Davis maintains that "One of the dangers for the Republican Party is to misjudge the results of the '74 elections as a consequence of Watergate rather than as the natural flow of events that really began some time ago ..." Mr. Buckley suggests--six years before Ronald Reagan's election to the Presidency--that "it is not inconceivable that what we will see in the next few years is an effort by theoretical conservatives to devise a means of building a bridge to blue-collar populists and that that, if it is successful, would constitute a numerical majority in most elections."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.400
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6334
item Program Number S0160, 420

"Russia and the Food Crisis"

Guests: Sosland, Morton I.

8 November 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 10
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 1
Program details: In 1972 the Nixon Administration had made an agreement to sell grain to the Soviet Union that, as WFB puts it, "Mr. Earl Butz, our Secretary of Agriculture, proudly announced [as] the largest grain deal in four thousand years." The immediate result was to help our farmers, our trade balance--and of course the Russians, in that Year of Detente. The result over the next two years had been sharp rises in our own food prices, over and above the general inflation we were suffering. Mr. Sosland is deeply knowledgeable, and the conversation ranges from the peculiar suitability of the Great Plains for growing wheat and corn, to the geopolitical aspects of selling anything into the world market. MIS: "I've kind of had the thesis all along that what the Soviet Union did... is to send out a signal to the rest of the world saying, 'Here is a Communist country that controls its people, is a police state, and we have to buy a billion dollars' worth of grain to keep our people satisfied and happy.' ... I mean, just eight years before, Russia,in a year of short crop, had had bread lines, had had rationing of bread."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.401
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6335
item Program Number S0161, 421

"The Post-Election South"

Guests: Jenrette, John W. : Levitas, Elliott. : Lott, Trent, 1941-

15 November 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 11
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 1
Program details: Another view (Firing Line s0159) of the 1974 elections, this time a discussion with successful practitioners. Their predictions are, well, predictable (TL: "Well, I think it's just a temporary slowdown. I think that we'll continue to have a growth in the Republican Party in the South"; JJ: "If the Republicans feel that this is just a fluke or a happening, they've got another thing coming, because the South I see as being in the forefront of the political situation"). But their analyses of changes in racial attitudes, of reactions to the economic turndown, and much else are well worth listening to.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.402
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6336
item Program Number S0162, 422

"Democratic Culture"

Guests: Fiedler, Leslie A.

15 November 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 2
Program details: A rich discussion with this much-admired and much-criticized American critic. Democracy per se doesn't get into it much, but the American character does, as we go from Mark Twain to soap operas to Gone with the Wind. One sample: WFB: "Well, I can't imagine, say, Mark Twain spending as much time thinking about himself as, say, Faulkner was forced to do given the dominance of the critics, which is a 20th-century phenomenon, isn't it?" LF: "No, not really.... Mark Twain worried a lot about the critics, and he worried a lot about himself, and he worried about who he was in typical American fashion, and he was always assuring people that he was not a funny fellow, and, you know, everybody laughed when he said it. And then he went home and he worried about it."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.403
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GGO2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6337
item Program Number S0163, 423

"Jews and American Politics"

Guests: Isaacs, Stephen D., 1937- : Cuddihy, John Murray.

2 December 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 92 : 12
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 2
Program details: General George Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had set off an avalanche of criticism by referring publicly--in the context of emergency aid to Israel following the Yom Kippur War--to the extraordinary influence of Jews on our foreign policy. He had been quickly defended, not in every particular but on the main point, by the Jewish journalist Stephen Isaacs. This lively discussion, full of detail, ranges from the Holocaust, to voting patterns of Jewish intellectuals, to the emotional effect of the 1967 Mideast War: SI: "Well, the Jew, up until that time, was this impression of a desk-bound, cowering sort of individual, who was led off, unprotesting, to a cattle car to be taken to his death. Well, '67 changed all that. Suddenly the Jew became a very strong person...When I was a kid growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, and I was a 230-pound tackle, the people there who had never met a Jew couldn't believe I was really a Jew...It just didn't fit with the image."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.405
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0026ZQEA2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6339
item Program Number S0164, 424

"The Energy Crisis and the Economy"

Guests: Simon, William E., 1927-

9 December 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 3
Program details: "Soon after the Arab states clapped on their embargo and then boosted the price of oil by 400 per cent," WFB reminds us, President Nixon appointed William E. Simon energy czar, "and the American people were introduced to ... [this] cyclone from Wall Street who bedazzled the Congress, the bureaucracy, and the press, and got us through the winter." But oil was still $10 a barrel, and where do we go from here? The non-expert will have to pay close attention, but the issue of cartels and how to crack them is still very much with us. WFB: "In your conversations, for instance, with these leaders in the Persian Gulf, do you go so far as to say to them, 'Look, insofar as the United States suffers from this huge outlay for imported oil, it necessarily worsens its inflationary situation and it sets up domestic pressures ... to reduce the defense establishment; and to the extent that we proceed to dismantle our defense establishment, we are dismantling precisely the only thing that you can ultimately rely on to keep that oil yours rather than somebody else's'? Now, does their thinking extend that far... ?" WES: "These are extremely intelligent men, all with degrees-- I almost said that they're all American-educated. That doesn't make them extremely intelligent men, but they are experts in their particular fields and you don't have really to draw them pictures about this."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.406
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6340
item Program Number S0165, 425

"The Prospects for Democratic Moderation"

Guests: Udall, Morris K.

12 December 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 3
Program details: Mr. Udall, WFB begins by telling us, "is running for President, and a number of Democrats ... see in him someone who could bridge the gap between, say, the McGovern wing of the party and the Muskie-Humphrey wing." (Historical piquancy: the others whom WFB mentions as serious candidates for 1976 are Henry Jackson, George Wallace, and Lloyd Bentsen.) But the substance of the conversation is on Mr. Udall's principal preoccupations: energy and the environment. Serious discussion ("If you're a businessman and you've got a paper mill, there are two ways you can do it. One is to foul up the Connecticut River. Another way is by increasing your costs 10 per cent and cutting your profit margin maybe by a third [and] and you can leave a clean river") mixed with fun and games: WFB: "But you use these value-loaded words, like 'binge.' Now--" MU: "That's unlike you. I've never read your columns or listened to you where value-oriented words were utilized. So I plead guilty to an aberration." WFB: "Well, no, I use them all the time, but I use them intending an effect." MU: "I do too."WFB: "But I don't mind if people examine the effect I intend." MU: "Indeed."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.409
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6343
item Program Number S0166, 426

"Government by Consensus"

Guests: Rhodes, John J. (John Jay), 1943-

9 December 1974

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 5
Program details: When Gerald Ford was tapped for the Vice Presidency, Rep. Rhodes had become the House Republican leader, which is, says WFB, "a little like being made commander-in-chief of the German army after the Allies had crossed the Rhine." Mr. Rhodes's reaction to the carnage of November 5, which had left him in command of a force of 144, as against the Democrats' 291, had been to propose what WFB describes as "something called a consensus politics, a government by happy coalition of a Republican President and a Democratic Congress." Is this consistent with our two-party system? JJR: "Well, actually, Mr. Buckley, I think it's absolutely necessary ... I don't know any way you can avoid stalemate other than to have some sort of ground rules for working together." A fairly low-key conversation, but with some interesting insights on how the horse-trading gets done in areas where, as WFB puts it, "the end is not necessarily one that is unanimously backed."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.407
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6341
item Program Number S0167, 427

"Food and the Christian Conscience"

Guests: Hesburgh, Theodore Martin, 1917-

12 December 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 5
Program details: "The great World Food Conference in Rome has come and gone," WFB begins,and we had learned that, while we in the West were eating better than ever before, some two million people were expected to starve to death over the next nine months. " An awesome philosophical question arises: whether the juxtaposition of that plenty and that want are spiritually tolerable. An altogether different question arises: whether, given all the good will in the world it would be possible to help the needy by taking from the sated." Father Hesburgh had been prominent among those urging the United States to make a serious commitment to sending food abroad. On this show the duty of the Christian conscience is taken care of in the first couple of paragraphs ("In fact in the very words of judgment that our Lord uses he puts it in terms of feeding and he says 'I was hungry and you gave me to eat...' "); from then on Father Hesburgh sounds like an agricultural economist speaking extremely knowledgeably about where the wheat is why we had been undersupplied the previous year and how quickly wheat would have to be loaded onto boats to do the starving countries any good.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.408
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6342
item Program Number S0168, 428

"The Problem of the PLO"

Guests: Mehdi, Mohammad Taki. : Cowan, Paul. : Lazarre, Jane. : Stupp, Herbert.

8 January 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 6
Program details: We start out with a genial discussion of the meaning and evolution of political freedom (MTM: "In the West, when we have freedom of speech, press, assembly, habeas corpus, trial by jury, et cetera, these are the result of some four, five, six hundred years of evolution and revolution ... Now, in the Arab world, in Asia, in Africa, their modern life begins by the First World War.... And in sixty years the Arabs cannot attain the democratic institutions we have evolved in the West over four or five hundred years"). The gloves come off when we turn to the question whether Yasir Arafat is or is not a terrorist. MTM: "Well, let us give the Palestinians, who are now engaged in this horrible thing of terrorism, let us give them a thousand tanks. Let us give them five hundred Phantom jets." WFB: "Well, you can afford it. Why don't you?" MTM: "Let the U.S. give them." WFB: "Well, why?" MTM: "The United States has been giving these things to Israel, and I'm suggesting if the United States gave a thousand tanks to the Palestinians, five hundred airplanes to the Palestinians, then those Palestinians would never engage in such silly stupid terroristic acts and they will send their Phantom jets to destroy Tel Aviv, and good."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.410
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6344
item Program Number S0169, 429

"Where Do We Go Now for Equality?"

Guests: Jordan, Vernon E. (Vernon Eulion), 1935-

8 January 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 109 : 37
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 6
Program details: The first and second waves of civil-rights activity--from Brown v. Board and Little Rock, through Montgomery and Selma, to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts--had originated in, roughly speaking, the South, and Southerners of all stripes had been complaining that the North didn't practice what it preached. Enter Judge Arthur Garrity,with his angrily protested Boston busing decision. In defending the extension of civil-rights remedies to Northern de-facto segregation, Mr. Jordan speaks, often movingly, of his own upbringing under Jim Crow, and puts the busing question into context: "You know,... busing pursuant to court orders is only about 3 per cent of the kids bused ...[whereas] something like 40 per cent of the kids traditionally have been bused in this country. I mean, busing is as American as apple pie or Yale or Harvard or Howard. And it never became a great issue until such time that somebody who had this kind of skin sat on that bus...." WFB: "Yes. If you took, let's say, a busload of Bostonians and insisted that they be driven 45 miles a day to Groton and back ... they probably wouldn't complain that much."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.411
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6345
item Program Number S0170, 430

"Oil: The Issue of American Intervention"

Guests: Tucker, Robert W.

13 January 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 7
Program details: "Although Mr. Kissinger said it ever so carefully in his famous interview," Mr. Buckley begins, "his words were, 'I am not saying that there's no circumstance where we would not use force, but it is one thing to use it in the case of a dispute over price; it's another where there's some actual strangulation of the industrialized world.' There was an international uproar, as if the Marines had already been dispatched to the Persian Gulf." Mr. Tucker had then published a piece in Commentary exploring how the OPEC cartel had developed, how it might be broken, and how oil affected America's position in the Cold War world. RWT: "You gave a certain degree of urgency and immediacy and clarity to this operation that I didn't quite give in my piece. What I said in the piece was--" WFB: "That tends to happen when I mingle with academic folk." RWT: "Understandably. What I said in the piece was that we should have thought from the very beginning ... that one possible outcome of this crisis ... could very well be a military outcome ... I'm very much against... this conspiracy of silence."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.412
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6346
item Program Number S0171, 431

"How to Speak the Lord's Language"

Guests: Malania, Leo. : Weatherby, Harold L., 1934- : Shattuck, Gardiner. : Lassard, Suzannah. : Morales, Frank.

13 January 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 7
Program details: The Episcopal Church had been controversially working on a major revision of the Book of Common Prayer for a decade. The issue, as Mr. Buckley phrases it, "affects Episcopalians and their fellow travelers theologically, but also the whole English-speaking world culturally," because of the beauty of the Prayer Book's language and its influence on four centuries of English literature. Not surprisingly to anyone who has followed liturgical disputes, today's discussion is matched in heatedness only by shows on the Middle East. HW: "Instead of saying that our Lord was 'conceived by the Holy Ghost,' the new version of the Creed says that he was 'conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit.' There's nothing in the Greek to justify the insertion of the word 'power' so far as I can tell...." LM: "Now, the power of the Holy Spirit... is from the Gospels: 'The power of the Spirit shall overshadow you.' " HW: "Yes, sir, it is, but it's not in the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed." LM: "It is, after all, a translation of that creed, and the 'power of the Holy Spirit' is a translation." HW: "It's an adaptation, sir, not a translation."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.413
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6347
item Program Number S0172, 432

"Legal Rights of Teenagers"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Williams, C. Dickerman.

2 December 1974

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 8
Program details: "One residue of the Sixties was pressure to grant children various rights"-- most controversially on sexual matters (purchasing contraceptives, obtaining an abortion), but also freedom of expression. A spirited discussion, though not one that is likely to change anyone's mind. WFB: "Are you taking the position that, for instance, when the Supreme Court says that the rights of a free press are not confined to people who have reached their majority, does it follow that if the junior-high-school yearbook wanted to print a sex book, let's say, or give a list of the local whorehouses, there would be no authority to prevent that from happening?" HP "Well, I'd have to see the book. In any case, that precise question is pending for a decision before the ... United States Supreme Court now, as you probably know, because a high-school paper, or it may have been a junior-high-school paper, was suppressed and--" WFB: "Whose side are you on there?" HP: "I'm on the side of the kids." WFB : "Well, how do you know that it's to be on the side of the kids to give them the authority to publish material that even majors weren't permitted to publish as recently as ten years ago?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.404
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6338
item Program Number S0173, 433

"Three British MPs against William F. Buckley Jr."

Guests: Kinnock, Neil Gordon, 1942- : Hayman, Helene Middleweek. : Lamont, Norman.

4 February 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 8
Program details: A lively tug-of-war on the comparative virtues of socialism and capitalism with three of the leading younger intellectuals in British political life (Mrs. Hayman having been a Firing Line panelist since her Cambridge days). NK: "You're afraid of being dominated, Mr. Buckley, but what you don't concede is that your philosophy of conservative capitalism contradicts all the tenets of freedom that any libertarian would hold to be self-evident--in that there is a subtle and unlegislated control that every employer can have over his employee, and indeed an even more subtle and even less legislated control that the great corporations exercise even among democratic governments ..." WFB: "In what kind of society does the individual have the maximum mobility? It seems to me, plainly, in a society in which one is able to choose among as many alternatives as possible--therefore in a society in which the private sector dominates: because within the private sector there is a plurality of agencies, and in the public sector there is only one." ... WFB: "Frankly, I find more intellectual freedom in Madrid than I do in Harvard. There is much less conformity in Madrid."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.414
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6348
item Program Number S0174, 434

"The Communist Party and British Policy"

Guests: Reid, Jimmy, 1932-

4 February 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 9
Program details: Mr. Reid (the first Firing Line guest who was an active member of a Communist Party) had been the leader of the "Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' work-in" in defiance of the closing of their shipyard. As with Michael Foot a few years earlier (Firing Line 075), Mr. Reid has a view of capitalism that is nothing short of breathtaking: "I had three sisters who died in infancy. On the death certificates they've no doubt written such things as 'diphtheria,' 'chronic bronchitis.' They should have written 'capitalism.' "... JR: "The naked-claw-and-tooth capitalism exercised in the United States has done a lot of things, for example, the genocidal treatment of the Red Indians; you talk of the kulaks, that's one of the great crimes in the history of humanity. Not so long ago in the Southern states the sport was to hang Negroes from trees ..." WFB: "You're not suggesting this was capitalism hanging the Negroes, are you?" JR: "Indeed.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.415
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6349
item Program Number S0175, 435

"The Intellectual's Responsibilities in an Age of Totalitarian"

Guests: Spender, Stephen, 1909-

5 February 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 9
Program details: Like his friend W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender had spent the Thirties, as WFB puts it, "dancing along the precipice, attempting at once literary integrity and Communist fellow traveling." And like Auden, he recovered from that infatuation with totalitarianism--in Mr. Spender's case, in time to be the first editor of the urbanely anti-Communist Encounter (whose funding by the CIA had later been disclosed). No fireworks on this show, but illuminating discussion of the connections between art and politics. SS: "Henry Moore was a very strong anti-fascist during the Thirties. At the time, he was doing nothing but abstract sculpture, and it worried him quite a lot that he wasn't doing sort of heroic anti-fascist sculpture. But then he decided that this would be completely false to his own sort of vision ... One might, from a left-wing point of view, find it very difficult to see this. However, the totalitarians see it very well, because they discover nothing more dangerous than abstract sculpture."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.416
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GOG2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6350
item Program Number S0176, 436

"William F. Buckley Jr., Malcolm Muggeridge, and the World"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990. : Riddell, Peter. : Hewitt, Patricia. : Galbraith, James.

5 February 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 10
Program details: A return visit by the man who was already known as "Saint Mugg," but whose journey towards holiness has done nothing to curb his tongue. Samples: "You find the Anglican clergy insisting that everything that the New Testament is about can be fulfilled through the Labour Party; that if Jesus was not a paid-up member of the Labour Party it was merely because there was no Labour Party, unfortunately, in Galilee at that time." ... WFB: "Colonel Blimp, then, has really disappeared--" MM: "He's disappeared, except he only lives on in the shafts of wit of the Left. That's his only existence." WFB: "They have to force-feed the Establishment so as to--" MM: "Right. Right. And keep it alive in their little plays and things--" WFB: "So they can look back in anger." MM: "Right. How can they look back in anger if Colonel Blimp isn't there?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.417
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VGGY9K
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6351
item Program Number S0177, 437

"Integrity and Journalism"

Guests: Wicker, Tom. : Safire, William, 1929- : Cook, Blanche. : Cohen, Paul. : Temple, Iris.

10 March 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 10
Program details: This conversation among a card-carrying liberal, a card-carrying conservative, and a Republican moderate winds up centering on the revolt at Attica Prison three years earlier--the subject of Mr. Wicker's book A Time to Die. Serious penology alternates with (pointed) flights of fancy. WS: "What if [Governor Nelson] Rockefeller had gone to Attica? There he is outside the gates. The prisoners say, 'Let's see Rockefeller. We'll talk to him direct.' At that point he can't show that he's a coward; he has to go in and talk to them. And at that point, the possibility of taking him hostage arises. Then what do you do?" WFB: "That presents the opportune time to remold the Republican Party." ... TW: "In the prisons of the State of New York, just a year or so before the Attica revolt, everything was changed over semantically. Guards became 'corrections officers.' Prisons became 'correctional facilities.' Wardens became 'superintendents.' You had to rewrite all those old James Cagney movies. But they didn't change anything else. They just changed the terminology."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.418
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GJRG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6352
item Program Number S0178, 438

"Do We Have Continuing Responsibilities in Indochina?"

Guests: Lewis, Anthony, 1927-

10 March 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 11
Program details: A give-no-quarter battle over the motivations and practicality of our involvement in Indochina. WFB starts right in: "I should like to begin by asking Mr. Lewis whether, as a historical matter, he opposed General Kutuzov's scorched-earth policy after Napoleon marched into Moscow." AL: "A scorched-earth policy may be very admirable. If people decide, say, that they want their country to be Russia and they don't want France to run it, and they decide to fight to the last man, that's like the Alamo, and it arouses one's emotions. But it's very different when the United States decides to fight to the last Cambodian; it's just not our affair." WFB: "But it's not American soldiers who are fighting; it's Cambodians." AL: "Yes. Cambodians. Not Russians. Not North Vietnamese. Cambodians."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.419
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6353
item Program Number S0179, 439

"Feminism"

Guests: Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987.

31 March 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 11
Program details: The peg for this show was the Equal Rights Amendment, at that time stalled in the state legislatures. But the discussion between these two old friends soon deepens in surprising ways. CBL: "Do you think it's possible for a man to be a Christian and not a feminist? ... Jesus Christ was the first feminist.... If you read the Gospels, you'll be astounded at the number of miracles he performs at the request of women.... The whole evidence is that he had some extraordinary mission to women; otherwise you cannot account for their love and loyalty and devotion." ... WFB: "But there's an elision in your argument. You talk about Christ being a feminist, you talk about our tradition leading us in this direction, and all of a sudden this direction turns out to be ERA. And you leave us almost necessarily committed to the proposition that it is the fruit of Christian activity."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.420
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U8K
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6354
item Program Number S0180, 440

"The First Republican Governor of South Carolina in 100 Years"

Guests: Edwards, James B., 1927-

11 April 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 12
Program details: "In November of last year," Mr. Buckley begins, "when the smoke of election day had cleared, a datum emerged of extraordinary historical meaning. A state in the Deep South, South Carolina no less, had elected a Republican governor, for the first time since Reconstruction. All the psephologists and futurists stuck that into their computers, and concluded that if such a thing could happen here, a great deal in America has changed." A lively discussion bouncing back and forth between practical politics and ideological divisions. JBE: "Bill, I think that we've gone through this before. After ... Goldwater's defeat, there were all of these terrible predictions that the Republican Party was through ... And I have a strong feeling that if... we have a candidate who has a track record that proves that he in fact does believe in the great principles ... I think that we'll make the most tremendous comeback that has ever been made ..." WFB: "Well, you've described the ideal candidate." JBE: "Well, I guess I did." WFB: "Yes. Were you describing President Ford?" JBE: "Well-- Bill, you know,... President Ford, I think, is a great fellow, an awfully nice fellow, and he's trying to do what's right and best, but I think he's surrounded himself by people who may not be interested in the same things that Jerry Ford's interested in."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.422
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6356
item Program Number S0181, 441

"Who Killed Bobby Kennedy?"

Guests: Lowenstein, Allard K.

11 April 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 12
Program details: The Warren Commission report was still being hotly debated, and Jesse Jackson had just announced that it was the FBI and the CIA that had killed Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Lowenstein, in his fourth appearance on Firing Line, passes along his wife's worry that instead of being known as "former congressman" he will become known as "current kook," but he has come to believe that Sirhan Sirhan may not have fired the bullet that killed Bobby Kennedy. The problem arises, as Mr. Lowenstein explains, because "the trial... didn't deal with these [ballistics] issues because Sirhan's attorney announced that he had murdered Kennedy and that the issue was his sanity.... So none of this evidence was entered in the trial at all." Why does it matter? As Mr. Buckley works through it, "It strikes me as unlikely, given the fact that everybody agrees, including yourself, that Sirhan Sirhan was trying to kill Kennedy, that merely identifying somebody else who was also trying to kill him is going to excite the sort of inquisitive appetites of our people. But if that other person is himself just the tip of an iceberg ..."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.423
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RVW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6357
item Program Number S0182, 442

"Abortion"

Guests: St. John-Stevas, Norman. : Hentoff, Margot. : O'Rourke, Joseph. : Cook, Blanche. : Cowan, Paul.

31 March 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 13
Program details: WFB essentially acts as moderator on this passionate, provocative show as his guests explore abortion just two years after Roe v. Wade. Mr. Stevas tells of the brutalizing effects of the new abortion law in Britain: "Since it has been legalized, it has become surrounded by rackets, and the only post-operative action that anyone takes is to sell the fetuses to soap factories." Mrs. Hentoff is "a little bit irritated that all those who think of themselves as humanists, as always pro-life, see this killing of fetuses as something that fits in with a liberal, humanist, nonviolent philosophy, when in fact it is killing." Mr. O'Rourke agrees that abortion is killing, but argues that "The real way to stop this brutal business of killing is to out love it, not to outlaw it, because having prohibitory legislation at this point would really reinstitutionalize the killing of mothers."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.421
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6355
item Program Number S0183, 443

"American Prestige in Europe"

Guests: Jay, Peter, 1937- : Levin, Bernard. : Jenkins, Peter, 1934-1992.

28 April 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 13
Program details: In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, what had become of America's prestige? What would become of, as WFB puts it, "the umbrella under the protection of which sovereign European nations have felt free to act wisely or foolishly without, at any rate, risking the conclusive retaliation against foolishness which only super powers are in a position to inflict"? A fascinating discussion that takes as its theme the parallels between the American pullout from Vietnam and the West's ceding Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. One sample: BL: "After all,... the Allied statesmen... knew very well what an abominable fraud the Yalta agreement was. They felt, at the same time, there was nothing they could do about it, so that they might as well make the best deal they could ..." WFB: "Why was there a greater sense of futility when they were triumphant than there was when they were utterly impoverished and shouted back at the Nazi gale with really quite galvanizing effect in 1939?" BL: "Because, I think, in 1939, Britain in general, people and politicians alike, realized rightly that our existence was at stake. Now, at the end of the war, when Europe was being carved up,... the threat was not immediate. Bombs were not falling out of the sky in 1945."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.424
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6358
item Program Number S0184, 444

"The Economic Quandary"

Guests: Knight, Andrew, 1939-

28 April 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 14
Program details: No fireworks, but a solid discussion of inflation, which was rampant in Britain, America, and elsewhere. Messrs. Buckley and Knight examine strictly economic factors but also, and importantly, the political aspect. WFB: "Sometimes you are talking as though people are educable, and sometimes you are talking as though people are invincibly ignorant. Now my notion is that people who are swept away with enthusiasm for socialist generalities tend to be, certainly not uneducated, but most probably invincibly ignorant." ... AK: "The fact is that a politician's got to get in, he's got to win votes, and winning votes is not always consonant with sage economic theory." WFB: "There again it depends on the position. Having said you don't want any absolute pure economic laws, you're now making absolute political laws." AK: "Oh, yes, there is an absolute political law, and that is, 'I want to be re-elected.' "
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.425
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6359
item Program Number S0185, 445

"Was Israel Responsible for Kissinger's Failure?"

Guests: Rabin, Yitzhak, 1922-

9 May 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 14
Program details: The latest effort in the "peace process" had broken down, and Mr. Rabin (who had succeeded Golda Meir just the previous year) was being blamed for intransigence. He is deeply informative about the historical background, and surprisingly candid--though not reckless--about the present and future: WFB: "Well, would you say something that will make the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?" YR: "I doubt it." WFB: "You don't have any little piece of land you're unsentimental about?" (As it happened, Mr. Rabin found that little piece of land, in the Sinai Peninsula, three months later; the "breakthrough" agreement was signed on September 1.)
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.426
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6360
item Program Number S0186, 446

"Hawk and Dove within Israel"

Guests: Rosenfeld, Shalom. : Avineri, Shlomo. : Weisgal, Meyer Wolfe, 1894-

9 May 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 15
Program details: A wide-ranging and deeply engaging discussion of Israel's past and present, how she fits into the Cold War picture, and, especially, her relations with the United States. WFB: "To what do you trace America's commitment to Israeli survival?" SR: "I don't like this phrase 'survival.' It has so many associations since World War II." WFB: "I quoted Henry Kissinger's words exactly." SR: "That's why I don't like it; because the usual phrasing, at least in the past, was 'America's commitment to Israel's security and survival,' which makes a lot of difference. You also made commitments to the survival of the orphans of Vietnam." ... SA: "The major involvements of American foreign policy were not made in terms of American global strategic interests." WFB: "Wilsonian?" SA: "Either Wilsonian, or a feeling by a majority--white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant--that America had to stand by Britain . .. And I think what's happening now is that many Americans, not only Jews, feel that their affinity to Israel is one way of expressing their Americanism, in the same way that WASPs did in 1914 and 1941."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.427
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6361
item Program Number S0187, 447

"Greek Anti-Americanism"

Guests: Vlachos, Helen, 1911- : Lamprias, Takes, 1926- : Mangakis, Giorgios.

10 May 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 15
Program details: Our guests had all been vigorous opponents of the Colonels, who ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974: Mrs. Vlachos and Mr. Lambrias had fled to England, where they were leaders in the resistance movement; Mr. Mangakis was sentenced to 18 years' hard labor for conspiring against the Colonels. In a spirited session they talk mostly about what America might have done differently during those seven years. HV: "After the coup, I advised foreigners not to boycott Greece. And do you know why? Because I had seen a cartoon in The New Yorker of a nice old couple who had gone to a travel bureau and asked, 'How many democracies do you have with a warm climate?' " WFB: "I think that's a very amusing answer, and in a way a wise one."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.428
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6362
item Program Number S0188, 448

"Is Detente Working?"

Guests: Jackson, Henry M. (Henry Martin), 1912-1983.

28 May 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 16
Program details: Few sparks are struck, WFB and his guest--the leading Democratic hawk in the Senate (and the early frontrunner for the Democrats' 1976 presidential nomination)--being in substantial agreement on the dangers of detente. However, the Senator brings specific knowledge of the current state of play: "Well, I've not found any evidence of whatever the [Ford] Administration means by detente involving a two-way operation. Trade is the one that's talked about most. But the Soviets are talking about credit, not ...trade in the traditional sense. They haven't anything to sell us." WFB: "Peace." HJ: "They want us to provide the capital to build their giant energy complex in Asia. The Administration must know this.... I don't understand it, and I don't think the Chinese understand it either, because they've been paying cash on the barrel head. The Chinese come with a checkbook; the Russians come with a chisel."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.429
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6363
item Program Number S0189, 501

"Oil and the Arab Cause"

Guests: Akhdar, Farok.

28 May 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 10
Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 16
Program details: The American-educated Mr. Akhdar was regarded as a principal theorist for the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries, and he proves a formidable apologist for OPEC's cutting production of oil and raising prices--known in our country as the "Arab oil crisis." The discussion is often technical with regard to elasticity of demand and substitutability of other resources, but the exchanges are spirited: WFB "How can you call it oppression? In the first place, Americans discovered the oil. You tax them. It costs you 20 cents to take a barrel of oil out of the ground. You sell it for $1.75. I don't call that exploitation." FA: "That's not true; that's not true. Western intellectuals have this tendency--" WFB: "Don't confuse me with Western intellectuals."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.430
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6364
item Program Number S0190, 502

"The Ozone Controversy"

Guests: McElroy, Michael B. : Scorer, R. S. (Richard Segar), 1919- : Peterson, Russell W. (Russell Wilbur), 1916-

9 July 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 110 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 17
Program details: In 1975 we are just at the beginning of the controversy over (a) whether the ozone layer is in fact being depleted, and if so (b) to what extent man-made chemicals are causing this to happen. Then as now the experts disagree, and the rest of us can only absorb information and hope for a resolution. RSS: "I come from socialist Britain, where I understand it's looked at from this side as though we're trying to control everybody, and I feel very free over there, and I come over here and find [Mr. Peterson] trying to get some buffoons to advise some bureaucrats and perhaps some politicians what they're going to tell everybody to do." WFB: "Well, it's ... the 200th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations, and Adam Smith would have considered it perfectly legitimate to tell people what to do insofar as it was necessary to conserve natural resources ..." RWP: "Adam Smith talked, as you well remember, about the invisible hand ... The one thing that Adam Smith didn't appreciate ... was that there's also an invisible foot, and if you don't pay attention to what you're doing, that foot can come around and kick you."... MBE: "I think the issue here is to try to get the truth and to do so in a way which is responsible, and I think it is not responsible simply to draw a conclusion that because there is some preliminary indication of a problem one should immediately respond by banning all uses of that particular gas."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.431
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6365
item Program Number S0191, 503

"Tom Wolfe and The Painted Word"

Guests: Wolfe, Tom.

9 July 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 411 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 17
Program details: The Painted Word had angered whichever portions of the intelligentsia had not previously been hostile to Mr. Wolfe. As Mr. Buckley points out, "the book mercilessly dissects a social phenomenon, the hold of a few art critics on art, fashion, and the grotesqueries to which a middle class is willing to submit in order to distinguish itself from the philistia whence it came." One sample from Mr. Wolfe: "The game of Jeopardy is played by giving someone the answer to a question and then they have to give you the question. And this is what art became after 1945. The paintings became the answer-it's a puzzle picture-to the question. Start with Abstract Expressionism; Pop Art was the same thing; Minimal Art, Op Art, Conceptual Art, and so on. Now, this is something, despite the demurs of many, many people within the field of art- It's absolutely a new situation. There's never been a situation before in which you have to say, 'Yes, but what's the theory?' when you look at a painting or piece of sculpture."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.432
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GA6G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6366
item Program Number S0192, 504

"The Breach of Faith"

Guests: White, Theodore Harold, 1915-

22 July 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 11
Publicity File: Box/Folder 411 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 18
Program details: An absorbing discussion of Richard Nixon and his predecessors specifically, and politics and morality generally. WFB: "The columnist Garry Wills has written that Mr. White has his own 'enemies list' and that he specifies with whom he will and will not appear to discuss his book. ..." THW: "I do solemnly affirm that I have no enemies list. There are people I dislike and people I disagree with. I have no enemies list. I am not out to get anybody. There is and was a Nixon's enemies list. The most frightening thing--if you asked me what brought about the impeachment of the President--was that cold chill that ran down the spine of the Judiciary Committee on those critical words in the September 15 transcript. Mind you, this is before the election; it's 1972. He's talking to John Dean, Richard Nixon is, and he says he wanted Dean to tell the fellows at CREEP [the Committee to Re-Elect the President] that this is war and to behave themselves like war. And then he says, 'Make a list.' He said, 'We haven't used the power this first four years.' He said, 'We haven't used the Bureau, we haven't used the Department of Justice; but now we're going to use them all.' That's frightening language to come from a President about to win the greatest landslide in American history." (But Henry Kissinger, Firing Line s1202.)
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.433
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6367
item Program Number S0193, 505

"Should the Government Have Secrets?"

Guests: Halperin, Morton H.

22 July 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 411 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 18
Program details: Mr. Halperin was, as WFB put it, best known as "the man who is suing Henry Kissinger," his former boss: Mr. Halperin's phone had been one of a dozen tapped in 1969 in an effort to find out who was leaking information about the secret bombing of Cambodia. A lively show, beginning with the specifics of Mr. Halperin's case and moving to general questions of secrecy, privacy, and national security. WFB: "The Congress of the United States, when it set up the Central Intelligence Agency, proceeded on an assumption that was not then challenged, and has only fairly recently been challenged, which is that you can't have a Central Intelligence Agency that goes on the Today show every morning to announce what it's up to."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.434
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6368
item Program Number S0194, 506

"Did Jack Anderson Con the President?"

Guests: Anderson, Jack, 1922-2005.

6 August 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 411 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 19
Program details: Jack Anderson had, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "persuaded President Ford to sit down for a half hour to discuss, in connection with the forthcoming bicentennial, the strengths of America." President Ford agreed; a pleasant though not earth-shattering conversation ensued; but when Mr. Anderson took his film to first one network and then another, each refused it. Whereupon Mr. Buckley offered Firing Line as a venue for viewing the film and discussing "the implications of [the] experience. The President of the United States talks for one half hour about his feelings about America and his hopes for it, and the poor man can't get on TV. Permit me to express the doubt (a) that it would have happened to President Kennedy, or (b) that President Kennedy would have tolerated its happening to him." (This show's title refers to Press Secretary Ron Nessen's charge that Mr. Anderson had "conned" the President by implying that he had a firm deal with a network, which Mr. Anderson categorically denies. WFB: "So therefore he had no reason to be surprised?" JA: "He couldn't have been surprised.")
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.435
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6369
item Program Number S0195, 507

"The Third Party"

Guests: Rusher, William A., 1923- : Evans, M. Stanton. : Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938-

15 August 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 411 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 19
Program details: Republican voting registration was at an all-time low, and yet 59 per cent of Americans described themselves as favoring conservative policies--whence Mr. Rusher's new book, making the argument for a nationwide third party. WFB: "Your point of view is more that of the mortician here, isn't it, as regards the Republican Party?" WAR: "Well. I don't know. I'm a bereaved member of the party, let's put it that way. There's no doubt that the party is for any practical purposes dead. If we conservatives don't bury the Republican Party, I'm afraid the Republican Party is going to bury us." ... PJB: "It seems to me that Governor Reagan, if he's going to run, has committed himself to the Republican Party--" WAR: "No, he hasn't." PJB: "--that Senator Goldwater and Senator Tower and Senator Brock and Senator Dole and Bill Simon and James Schlesinger and the economic conservatives who are half of this grand coalition are going to be within the Republican Party--" WAR: "Not all of them." PJB: "--in the summer of 1976, and that the only way for the conservative coalition to win in '76 in my judgement is to bring the social conservatives of the Democratic Party within the Republican ranks." A sparkling four-cornered exchange rich in ironies, given the failure of Mr. Rusher's third party in 1976, the success of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and Mr. Buchanan's jumping to a third party in 2000.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.437
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6371
item Program Number S0196, 508

"The Concerns of Young Conservatives"

Guests: Docksai, Ron. : Pearson, Ronald. : Donatelli, Frank. : Moffit, Robert. : Burslem, Jeffrey. : Rohrbach, Eric. : Kane, Jeff. : Buckley, John. : Connally, Michael. : Cannon, Terrell. : Manion, Dan. : Norton, Jerry. : Hechman, Robert.

15 August 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 411 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 20
Program details: Young Americans for Freedom--which had been founded at Mr. Buckley's family home in Sharon, Conn., with its charter document, "The Sharon Statement," written by M. Stanton Evans--was celebrating its 15th anniversary in Chicago this weekend, although, as WFB puts it, about all they had to celebrate was "their own survival and their remarkably good spirits." Certainly there wasn't much to celebrate on the national or international political scene; and while the campuses had calmed down, they were still, as Mr. Docksai reports, "liberal finishing schools." (Not that that's all bad: as Mr. Donatelli reports, "When they wanted the conservative viewpoint, they'd come to me. You know, I'm a 20-year-old kid at the time. And so it makes one, I think, become mature much faster.") This conversation among comrades-in-arms bounces back and forth from the campuses to grown-up politics in a pleasant 15-handed ping-pong match.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.438
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6372
item Program Number S0197, 509

"Where Are We Headed with Disarmament?"

Guests: Ikle, Fred.

6 August 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 411 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 20
Program details: Not the most dramatic of shows, but solidly informative on a variety of disarmament issues, ranging from proliferation to the SALT talks to the danger of some bright reporter uncovering the publicizing our means of monitoring Soviet compliance. One sample: FI: "Potentially, a country of an industrial capability and technological capability such as Japan could probably develop an invulnerable deterrent force. All I meant to say is not that it's not possible but that it's a rather major step requiring major investments over many years." WFB: "But don't you think that modern countries as vulnerable as Japan can reasonably be expected to take major steps to guarantee their own security, given the fragility of American alliances? I'm trying to think of an alliance of ours which I would bet my swimming pool, let alone my son's life. I can't think of one."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.436
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6370
item Program Number S0198, 510

"The Politics of Henry Kissinger"

Guests: Kissinger, Henry, 1923-

10 September 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 21
Program details: This rich hour begins with whether Oswald Spengler indulged in Weltschmerz, and ends with whether Ronald Reagan will still not care what the New York Times thinks of him if he makes it to the White House. In between, reflections, often profound, on the Cold War, the nature of the United States' antagonists, and the conduct of the war in Indochina. WFB: "American[s]... who have traveled to China--people like Ken Galbraith, Scotty Reston, Barbara Tuchman--come back and, sure enough, we hear those old voices from the Thirties, 'The trains are running on time.' Now, how can a free society husband the moral flywheel necessary to distinguish between desirable and undesirable societies in the wake of such relativism as is stimulated by the philosophy of detente?" HK: "First, let me say that if one pushed your argument to a conclusion, one would have to say that the United States must maintain international tensions in order to make sure that its people have the correct perception of the nature of the societies with which they are dealing. It is one of the tasks before us to enable the United States to conduct a vital foreign policy without moral relativism and also without the black-and- white categories with which we tended to sustain ourselves in the past."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.440
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGM30
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6374
item Program Number S0199, 511

"The British Mess, with the First Lady of British Politics"

Guests: Thatcher, Margaret. : Greenfield, Jeff. : Roberts, Sam. : Kramer, Mike.

14 September 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 21
Program details: For most Americans, this show offers a first look at the woman who would do so much to shape the last two decades of the 20th century. At this time, she had been Party Leader for seven months, having defeated former Prime Minister Edward Heath. Today's discussion focuses on domestic issues, particularly the need to generate revenues not through higher tax rates but through economic growth. This, Mrs. Thatcher explains, "is not only a matter of equity: it is also that the privileged few have already been reduced to such a very few by thirty years' punitive taxation that even total confiscation would not yield enough to do much for the poor. MT: We've had a very interesting Royal Commission sitting on the distribution of incomes and wealth, and what they've shown-- contrary to what those who set up the Commission thought it would show--... is that your top 1 per cent have about four times the average income; the top 10 per cent have about twice the average income; down at the bottom, the lowest 10 per cent have about half the average income. Now from half the average to four times the average income is not really a very big variation."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.442
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFREG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6376
item Program Number S0200, 512

"Unemployment, Inflation, and the Economy"

Guests: Heller, Walter W. : Greenfield, Jeff : Reynolds, Alan : Kramer, Mike

9 September 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 12
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 22
Program details: For anyone not fatally allergic to economics, Mr. Heller proves to be a delightful guide, explaining the differences between the early Sixties and the early Seventies not in economist's jargon but in lively English: "I love to talk about my half of the Sixties [1961-1964]. We had 1.2 per cent inflation per year; we have more than that per month these days. Profits doubled in the four years I was Chairman of the Council. And as you quite correctly point out, we had a rather moderate overall expansionary program in the early part of that period. ... Inflation didn't start, really, until Lyndon Johnson failed to finance Vietnam with tax increases." WFB: "Yes." WWH: "What was different is that we had no oil-price explosion; we had no food-price explosion; we had no devaluation; we had no sudden release from economic controls; we had no worldwide commodity boom. All five of those things belabored and beleaguered us and touched off the ferocious inflation of 1973-1974. And in that respect one could say besides good management, we had good luck."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.439
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6373
item Program Number S0201, 513

"How the Vietnam War Was Lost"

Guests: Ky, Nguyen Cao.

14 September 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 22
Program details: The discussion is slow starting, and one may find rather tiresome Marshal Ky's relentlessly blaming the loss of the war on his former colleague Marshal Thieu. But there is solid and at times moving analysis: "I said there was no way to talk or negotiate with the Communists, because with our past experience we know them: if they are in a strong position, they will never accept negotiations; if they are in a weak position, of course they are not honest in accepting negotiations with you. So when they accept negotiations, it means they're going to win. You know, in the mind of European people, when you talk about negotiations, you think of mutual concessions on both sides. But that is not the Communist, and particularly the Asian and North Vietnamese Communist, view of them." Alternate Title: "How We Lost the War in Vietnam"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.441
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGM7G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6375
item Program Number S0202, 514

"The Practical Limits of Liberalism"

Guests: Brown, Jerry, 1938- : Valencia, Manuel. : Keppel, Bruce. : Sparrow, Glen

3 October 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 23
Program details: Jerry Brown was Ronald Reagan's successor as governor; his father, Pat Brown, had been RR's predecessor. Governor Brown the younger would later become known as a flake, "Governor Moonbeam"; in this discussion, primarily of desegregation, he comes across as straightforward and well spoken. JB: "I would leave this [busing] to the sound discretion of the judiciary, and see what happens." WFB: "You wouldn't leave it to the unsound discretion of the judiciary?" JB: "Well, that's a phrase that lawyers use. Whenever the word 'discretion' is used, you usually preface it with the word 'sound'--and maybe that's more a hope than a description."
Availability: On archive.org. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.443
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6377
item Program Number S0203, 515

"Is Our Military Defense Adequate?"

Guests: Schlesinger, James R. : Kuttner, Robert. : Angle, Martha. : Donatelli, Frank.

9 October 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 23
Program details: Mr. Schlesinger had served in a variety of positions in the Nixon Administration, remaining in the last of those after Mr. Nixon succumbed to Watergate. The discussion here begins with South Vietnam, which had just fallen to the Communists, and moves through the Persian Gulf and Soviet power generally, to broader questions such as the difficulties of foreign policy in a democracy. JS: "I believe that if all of us speak out on these issues, the American public will respond, and politicians are quite sensitive to the attitudes of the public." WFB: "Well, I think they'd be awfully sensitive if we lost Israel or something. But are they sensitive in advance of the situation that is militarily intolerable? ..." JS: "No." WFB: "In the Persian Gulf area, do you think that we are as strong as we ought to be?" JS: "I think that we have the capacity to match the Soviet buildup in that area and to balance the power that they introduce into that area ... What I'm concerned about are the trends ..., not the situation at the present time." WFB: "And I guess your point is that however spooky those trends appear to be, we have not reached irreversibility and won't?" JS: "Quite right. And you raised the question about the way democracies perform in this regard. If I recall the remarks of Stanley Baldwin back there in the 1930s, democracies will never face the truth until they are right up against it. It may be too late then."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.445
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6379
item Program Number S0204, 516

"The FCC and Public Policy"

Guests: Wiley, Richard.

9 October 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 13
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 24
Program details: Sharp fire is traded between Mr. Wiley, who was one of the country's most powerful regulators, and Mr. Buckley, who, as chairman of the board of a broadcasting company, was one of his regulatees. RW: "It's a process of evolution, and I think we're making changes as the public interest dictates. And the public interest evolves and changes; it's not a static term." WFB: "There you go with 'the public interest.' You know, what baffles me, as a casual student of the term, is that 'the public interest,' like the word 'democracy,' is used, depending on the intentions of the user, for entirely paradoxical purposes, sometimes in the same paragraph. The public interest all of a sudden becomes that which the majority want; but if that which the majority want is a particular kind of program, then the public interest becomes what the minority want."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.446
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6380
item Program Number S0205, 517

"Running the White House"

Guests: Rumsfeld, Donald, 1932-

9 October 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 24
Program details: Mr. Rumsfeld, stepping into a position that had been renamed to escape the Haldeman taint, was widely regarded as having got the White House back on track. Here he engagingly addresses the question of presidential isolation in the wake of Watergate. WFB: "In England, the Prime Minister is protected against that inclination [to isolate himself] by two things: the institution of the monarchy, and the necessity of appearing two or three times a week in person, to answer questions very directly put to him by the opposition. Would you encourage the President to wander around Congress as frequently as he wanders around the United States, shake the hand of his old colleagues there, answer their questions, and listen to debate?" DR: "He does--in every sense except being physically present in Congress every day.... The breakfasts, or lunches, or dinners, or meetings in the Cabinet Room or in the Oval Office are really very much the kind of thing you are talking about."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.447
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6381
item Program Number S0206, 518

"The Implication of the Manson Phenomenon"

Guests: Bugliosi, Vincent.

3 October 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 14
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111: 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 25
Program details: In a show taped just a few weeks after Squeaky Fromme's attempt on Gerald Ford's life, WFB engages his guest--who had prosecuted Charles Manson and his "family" for the murders of Sharon Tate et al. six years earlier--in an absorbing exploration of the Manson phenomenon: to what extent it grew out of the Sixties culture; whether executing Manson might have put an end to his cult; how Manson resembles and differs from Hitler. VB: "You could look at a photograph of Hitler in high school in a group of fifty people, and right away you'd focus on his eyes. That was not Manson's typical look: he was a visual schizophrenic. He could sit down and talk with you the way I am right now, about football, tennis, anything, and then you might look away from him and then back--and in that momentary interlude, his face would become [transformed] and he'd have that maniacal stare."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.444
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6378
item Program Number S0207, 519

"The Right to Die (or Live)"

Guests: Heifetz, Milton. : Porzio, Ralph. : Grafe, William R.

14 November 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 93 : 15
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 25
Program details: The Karen Anne Quinlan case had been vociferously debated all summer. On April 15, the 21-year-old woman had taken a combination of tranquilizers and alcohol that had left her comatose, with severe brain damage. Her parents, after consulting with their parish priest, had asked the doctor to turn off the respirator; he refused; the parents sued; the judge had just ruled in favor of the doctor. (The following spring the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed that decision. The respirator was turned off; Miss Quinlan lived for another nine years, never regaining consciousness.) Mr. Porzio had defended Miss Quinlan's doctor; Dr. Heifetz had testified for the petitioners. A profound discussion of this agonizing issue, starting off with an earlier case involving a court-ordered blood transfusion for a young Jehovah's Witness. Dr. Heifetz: "The court had a right to say, 'Well, there's an element of doubt in this case. Would she waver? We think maybe she would.' ... What the court did was order the blood, which was correct, but instead of using that as their argument-which would therefore put it into the basis of the right of self-determination-they said there is no constitutional right to die. This is as inane as saying there's no constitutional right to eat apple pie."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.450
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6384
item Program Number S0208, 520

"Crime and Criminals"

Guests: Wilson, James Q. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

14 November 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 26
Program details: In 1974 the crime rate had risen, as Mr. Buckley tells us, "by the largest margin in recorded history: 17 per cent." Our guests--each the author of a recent book on crime and criminals--explore causes and potential methods of deterrence, trenchantly and imaginatively. (Among other things, Mr. van den Haag floats his idea of exiling repeat criminals to a remote town set aside for them, until they have reached an age at which statistics suggest they are not likely to return to crime.) JQW: "There is no clinical evidence I know of that the population of prisons, of criminals generally, is any less rational, or indeed on the average any less intelligent, than the average person. ... They tend to be younger, and have a higher taste for risk than stodgy middle-aged conservative people like ourselves, but they are no different in their ability to calculate the likely consequences of their acts."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.449
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6383
item Program Number S0209, 521

"The Zionist Vote"

Guests: Riebenfeld, Paul. : Lilienthal, Alfred M. : Roberts, Sam. : Kramer, Mike. : Duff, Daniel.

26 November 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 26
Program details: "Unquestionably the single most widely discussed vote ever taken by the General Assembly of the United Nations," Mr. Buckley begins, "was that in which it defined Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination." Most Jewish leaders had "interpreted [this] as a vote encouraging anti-Semitism throughout the world," but not Mr. Lilienthal, who believes that "Zionism in its treatment both of Jews and non-Jews is racist. If you're surprised when I say, 'both of Jews,' it's because ... under the Law of Return it does not consider [Jews] as full citizens in the countries in which they live, but merely as potential citizens." Mr. Riebenfeld takes the bull by the horns--"I'd like to say that it is rather unusual to refer to Dr. Lilienthals ... as a Jewish leader. ... As a matter of fact he prefers not to call himself a Jew but a Judaist"--and we're off and running.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.451
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6385
item Program Number S0210, 522

"What Can the Intellectuals Do for the City?"

Guests: Breslin, Jimmy. : Roberts, Sam. : Kramer, Mike. : Duff, Daniel.

26 November 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 27
Program details: Host and guest don't always connect, but when they do it's a lot of fun. WFB: "Well, you say it's been obvious for a long time, but if so, how come all these bankers bought these bonds, and how come they sold them to all these people? It obviously wasn't obvious to them, right?" JB: "One of the shocks everyone's been getting here is just how dumb bankers can be." WFB: "How about journalists?" JB: "Journalists can be very-- That we know. I think we've assumed that for some time." WFB: "But I mean, there wasn't a front-page story in any journal you or I write for, was there, saying, a year ago, 'Don't buy New York municipal bonds, because they're bum?'" JB: "No." WFB: "Why not? What about our great sources of investigative journalism? Are we brighter than the bankers? As a matter of fact I am, but how about you?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.452
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6386
item Program Number S0211, 523

"The Presidential Assassination"

Guests: Belin, David W.

4 December 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 27
Program details: David Belin had started his work for the Warren Commission believing that President Kennedy's killing was probably the work of a conspiracy. The commission's investigations changed his mind, and he makes his case persuasively--adding, under prodding from WFB, that "I in no way want to say that Castro was involved with the assassination of President Kennedy, but it is curious to me that with all the current furor about possible conspiracies, the most obvious one is cast aside on grounds that Castro was sincere when he said he wasn't involved."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.454
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6388
item Program Number S0212, 524

"Intelligence and Security"

Guests: Pike, Otis.

4 December 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 28
Program details: Mr. Pike was chairman of the House committee investigating the CIA, post Watergate, and there is spirited give and take on questions such as under what circumstances the U.S. might intervene in a foreign country and whether Mr. Pike could, in demanding sensitive documents from the Administration, guarantee that his committee colleagues would not leak them. WFB: "Now isn't it a formalism for you to say that your committee can in fact receive intimate Executive documents and assure that they will not emerge as part of the public record?" OP: "No, I really don't think it is a formalism. You've made your point twice and I've denied it twice." WFB: "No, you've made a theoretical rejection of my point. I'm asking you now for an empirical rejection." OP: "It is not a formalism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.453
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6387
item Program Number S0213, 525

"Is the Stock Market Honest?"

Guests: Ney, Richard. : Welles, Chris.

10 December 1975

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 28
Program details: In the third year of stock-market decline, two radically different critics of the market (Mr. Ney believes that the big players are in a sort of informal conspiracy; Mr. Welles simply believes that, with the growth of large institutional investors, decision-making is concentrated in too few hands) go at it hammer and tongs. RN: "The market is already in chaos." CW: "I thought you said it was controlled...." RN: "It is a chaos caused by them [the specialists], which they are in perfect control of." CW: "Controlled chaos?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.455
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6389
item Program Number S0214, 526

"Should We Choose Our Presidents Differently?"

Guests: Reeves, Richard, 1936-

10 December 1975

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 29
Program details: The author of A Ford, Not a Lincoln is in a state of cheerful despair about the future of democracy in America. A wide-ranging discussion of the way our candidates are chosen nowadays and of the press's failure to hold them accountable. RR: "When I was covering John Lindsay, he had over five hundred people whose single function was to pump out information to make him look good--I mean that was literally the number he had, including the six who sat in the office next to him." WFB: "That couldn't have kept them very busy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.456
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6390
item Program Number S0215, 527

"The Russians"

Guests: Smith, Hedrick. : Kaiser, Robert.

8 January 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 29
Program details: Messrs. Smith and Kaiser, WFB begins, as it were "competed for the best book on Russia, and both of them won." They and their host (who had just returned from his third trip to Russia) range back and forth across this rich tapestry, from the scientist's laboratory to the Kirov Ballet School, from Solzhenitsyn to the Russian Navy, from Czar Nicholas II to Nikita Khrushchev. Mr. Kaiser, re an Intourist guide's resisting Mr. Buckley's wish to visit Nicholas and Alexandra's country palace: "This is part of a gaping inferiority complex felt by the czar's successors, a terrible insecurity about their own legitimacy ... The commissars understood that the czars were members of this great family, were respected and revered in all the courts of Europe, were recognized universally as the legitimate rulers of Russia. And they were the usurpers." ... Mr. Smith on why the Soviets buy Japanese, German, and American technology instead of developing it themselves: HS: "It seems to me that there's more than legitimacy that they're afraid to test.... You're afraid of the dynamism and the spin-off of that dynamism if you let your own inventive and talented people free."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.457
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6391
item Program Number S0216, 528

"Are the Major Parties Stalemated?"

Guests: Connally, John.

8 January 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 30
Program details: Mr. Connally, a Democrat-turned-Republican, was being rumored as a possible presidential candidate for his current party, his former party, or some third party. He and his host examine the public perceptions that had led to the poor Republican performances since World War II at every level except the presidential. JC: "If the Republican Party doesn't soon revitalize itself and rebuild its strength, if it doesn't articulate its aims and hopes and ambitions to the point where it can attract new adherents ... then the Republican Party, at least on the national level, is limited to a contest for the Presidency every four years."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.458
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6392
item Program Number S0217, 529

"The Concorde Conspiracy"

Guests: Hellegers, John F. : Costello, John.

23 January 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 30
Program details: The immediate question was: Would British Airways and Air France be allowed to schedule a few flights of the Concorde each week into Kennedy and Dulles airports? Secretary of Transportation William Coleman would be ruling on this a few days after this taping; in the event, he gave a careful and reasoned ruling in favor of a 16-month experiment, but that would not stop the complaints---from people living near the airports and concerned about noise; from people like Mr. Hellegers, concerned about the effect on the ozone layer ("the whole business about doing anything about the environment is that as soon as you go to one person and say, 'You're creating a problem,' he says, 'Well, look at all these other people. Go and take care of them. Give me liberty and give them death'"); and from U.S. airlines claiming that government subsidies for the Concorde constituted unfair competition (JC: "In America ... the indirect subsidy, particularly in terms of commercial airliners, has come ... via huge defense contracts. And the first subsonic jet airliner, the 707, was funded and the research and the development was done in fact on the back of a jet tanker").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.459
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6393
item Program Number S0218, 530

"What Did the Military Learn from Vietnam?"

Guests: Westmoreland, William C. (William Childs), 1914-2005. : Kuttner, Robert. : Angle, Martha. : Donatelli, Frank.

23 January 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 31
Program details: A moving examination of the Vietnam War from the perspective of the man who commanded our troops there from 1964 to 1968. WFB: "Suppose you had resigned in 1968 and said, 'Get yourself somebody else to run a war--but I'm telling you from my knowledge as a professional that the kind of war, Mr. President, that you're trying to win, you're going to lose, and a lot of people are going to be unnecessarily killed.' Wouldn't you have done more for yourself, for your soul, for your troops, and for the prestige of the United States military?" WW: "I kept, apropos of your question, on my desk a quotation from Napoleon which said in essence that if a field commander has policies imposed upon him which he feels will eventually bring about the defeat of his army, he should resign rather than obey those orders. I was very cognizant of that, but at no time was my army ... in such jeopardy. We never even closely approached the point where we would be defeated." WFB: "But you were defeated." WW: "The United States was defeated, but the military was not defeated. We didn't have any troops on the battlefield at the time of the collapse of the South Vietnamese."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.460
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6394
item Program Number S0219, 531

"The Uses of the United Nations"

Guests: Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.

26 January 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 172 : 31
Program details: Mr. Moynihan had been chosen (by Secretary of State Kissinger) as our UN Ambassador not in spite of his outspokenness but precisely because he did not accept the detente-related dictum, "Do not offend." He had been busily offending all the right people ever since. A high-octane discussion of whether any good can come out of the talk shop on the East River. DPM: "You said in your book--and that was a good book, A Delegate's Odyssey--that debate is what that place can in fact do. What it can't do is legislate; what it can't do is act; it has no such powers, and its pretension to those powers is what gets it in most trouble."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.461
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGMBM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6395
item Program Number S0220, 532

"The Educator's Dilemma"

Guests: Riles, Wilson. : Roberts, Sam. : Kramer, Mike. : Friedman, John.

26 January 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 1
Program details: "A lot of people," Mr. Buckley begins, "are doing a lot of despairing these days about education, and there is a great deal to despair about." Steadily declining test scores, remedial reading being needed at the most selective colleges, disciplinary problems at all levels. Mr. Riles, Mr. Buckley tells us, "in his quiet, non-dogmatic way ... has reassured many people that some sort of progress is being made." This proves to a nicely detailed examination of education issues, ranging from the reliability of test scores, to the question of who should receive higher education, to Nelson Rockefeller's dyslexia. WR: "We've found that older students really stimulate youngsters. I taught first in a one-room school, and I did not have the sophisticated terminology about cross-age tutoring--that's what they call it today. I just had to have the older youngsters help the younger ones, and they responded."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.462
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6396
item Program Number S0221, 533

"The Future of Spain"

Guests: Iribarne, Manuel Fraga. : Mathews, Roger. : Wheeler, John. : Sieve, Harold. : Salas, Juan Tomas de.

23 February 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 1
Program details: Generalissimo Francisco Franco had died in November, having arranged for Juan Carlos to resume the throne from which his grandfather, King Alfonso XIII, had been toppled in 1931. A key member of King Juan Carlos's cabinet was Mr. Fraga, widely acknowledged, Mr. Buckley reminds us, as "the architect of the great transition from the government of General Franco-which was essentially government by one man-to government by a body of men, to an extent as yet undetermined responsible to the Spanish people." A rich discussion that ranges from international terrorism, to the isolating effect of Spain's geography, to the acceptance of Vatican II by the Spanish Church, to the different forms democracy can, and must, take. MFI: "Societies have, well, social realities, and on the other hand they have psychological trends. It shows you that the same system which is convenient, even if you accept the same general principles of law and justice, is not necessarily convenient for America and, say, Congo-Kinshasa. It's not necessarily the same thing, the way democracy is practiced in England or the way it is practiced in Italy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.463
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6397
item Program Number S0222, 534

"Foreign Policy and the Role of Spain"

Guests: Areilza, Jose Maria de.

24 February 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 2
Program details: Even as Spain was regrouping on the domestic front, so she had been working to regain her place in the commonwealth of nations, and Mr. Areilza was the spearhead of that effort. This lively conversation ranges from Spain's renascent domestic politics, to the state of Europe, to the war in Angola and America's role in it. WFB: "So you don't belong to that school of European thought that believes that nuclear weapons ought to be excluded from consideration in the defense of Europe?" JMA: "I think that is part of the great strategic risk the West takes vis-a-vis the tremendous amount of nuclear weapons on the other side, and as long as the SALT negotiations don't settle all that in a definite way-and I don't see that they are settling it yet-the risk is there, and we must commit ourselves honestly."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.464
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6398
item Program Number S0223, 535

"Buckley on an English Firing Line"

Guests: Knight, Andrew, 1939- : Howard, Anthony. : Clements, Richard.

9 March 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 2
Program details: The semi-annual occasion when Mr. Buckley becomes the object of three interrogators whose function it is to explore "his attitudes, assumptions, affectations, and crotchets." This rumbustious hour zings from Chou En-lai to Alexander and Napoleon, from virtue to freedom, from Ronald Reagan's presidential chances to Norman Mailer's New York mayoral campaign. One sample: AK: "Why was it that we didn't recognize that Ho Chi Minh was (a) probably a rather great man; and (b) likely to be an extremely effective Tito-type buffer if only we got in on the right side with him against Russia and China?" WFB: "Well, why didn't we recognize that with Hitler? Hitler made many more people tingle than Ho Chi Minh did, and he would have been an extremely effective buffer between us and the Soviet Union." AK: "No, because- Well, you see, we're talking- WFB: "I think it's very hard to establish that Hitler killed more people per capita ... than Ho Chi Minh did. Ho Chi Minh had the grace to write poetry about it and occasionally weep. But all these tingly people in history like Alexander and Napoleon and Lenin and so on and so forth give me the creeps...." AK: "You mustn't compare Hitler with these people, because we're talking about the battle for the hearts and minds of the Third World, not for the developed democracies."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.465
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6399
item Program Number S0224, 536

"What Is Their CIA Up To?"

Guests: Copeland, Mike. : Walker, Martin.

9 March 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 3
Program details: The CIA had taken a beating at home during the whole Watergate mess, but how was it viewed abroad? For that matter, how was its counterpart, roughly speaking, the KGB? Mr. Walker was known as one of the sharpest critics of the CIA, Mr. Copeland as one of its most able advocates. The conversation starts out genially enough, with Mr. Walker giving a detailed and funny description of a couple of British intelligence operations in Northern Ireland, but the gloves come off when Mr. Copeland brings up Mr. Walker's spending time "with Philip Agee [whose activities were blamed for the deaths of several agents], chasing around identifying CIA agents, as you call them--" MW: "Look. I'm a journalist. I'm a journalist. ... Who are CIA agents in London is a matter of proper concern to me as a reporter. ... It's a matter of proper concern to my readers, particularly when America calls Britain her closest and most natural ally. In fact, you're treating us like a client state. You're treating us like a tributary. You can't have it both ways."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.466
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6400
item Program Number S0225, 537

"The Vision of Solzhenitsyn"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990. : Levin, Bernard. : Charlton, Michael.

10 March 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 3
Program details: In a departure from the usual format, this show begins by re-broadcasting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's first television interview in the West (with the BBC's Michael Charlton), which was, as Mr. Buckley describes it, "a blow at the solar plexus of the kind that first numbs and then revives and then conceivably transfigures." (To quote briefly from Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself, "I am not a critic of the West. I repeat that for nearly all our lives we worshipped the West.... I am not a critic of the West. I am a critic of the weakness of the West. I am a critic of a fact which we can't comprehend: how one can lose one's spiritual strength, one's will power, and, possessing freedom, not to value it, not to be willing to make sacrifices for it.") After the interview, WFB and his guests have a few minutes left to comment. Mr. Muggeridge: "Its impact is due to the fact that it is absolutely true. You see, what Solzhenitsyn has said is at an entirely different level from the comments that go on about our world on television, by politicians. It's in terms of truth. It's in terms of good and evil. It's in terms ultimately of the Christian faith." Mr. Levin: "I would like to say this: that although undoubtedly Solzhenitsyn is a man lit from within by grace, there are others-Sakharov is the obvious example-who are not; who take it simply from what you might call moral pragmatism. As far as I know Sakharov has no religious faith, and yet here is the man who demonstrates, just as Solzhenitsyn, that you cannot-whatever you do and however long you do it-extinguish the spark of freedom in human beings."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.469
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6403
item Program Number S0226, 538

"The Responsibilities of an Ambassador"

Guests: Armstrong, Anne Legendre.

10 March 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 4
Program details: Three years before Mrs. Thatcher became prime minister, Anne Armstrong had had to face raised British eyebrows about the appointment of a woman to the post of ambassador. If this show is any indication, she was able to handle those criticisms as skillfully as she handled the challenge of representing her country in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. AA: "I think the most fortunate thing that happened to me as counselor to two Presidents was that for both of them one of my main jobs was to travel extensively. And my heart would leap in direct relationship as I got farther away from the Potomac, and as I got into the real country. And it's interesting: the Prime Minister [Harold Wilson] told me here the same thing just recently. He said, 'Get out of that hothouse of London. Find out what the real country's like.' "
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.468
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6402
item Program Number S0227, 539

"The Uses of Royalty"

Guests: Hamilton, Willie.

10 March 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 111 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 4
Program details: The feisty and funny Mr. Hamilton was the leading advocate of abolishing the British monarchy, which he describes as an "antiquated, irrelevant institution," a symbol and a cause of Britain's decline. Mr. Buckley takes him up on it, and we're off to the races. WFB: "The fact that fifty million Americans got up at seven in the morning to watch Princess Anne get married suggests a considerable fascination that reasonably translates into commerce." WH: "Oh, yes, you're attracted by it, but you damned well got rid of it, and you show no signs of wanting it back." WFB: "We got rid of yours; we've got a dynasty in Massachusetts."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.467
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6401
item Program Number S0228, 540

"Has Jerry Rubin Grown Up?"

Guests: Rubin, Jerry. : Rader, Dotson.

12 April 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 94 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 5
Program details: Mr. Rubin had just published Growing (Up) at 37, and WFB seeks to explore whether Mr. Rubin has in fact done so, but more generally "whether the disease of the late Sixties [is] something against which most Americans are safely inoculated." In this often uproarious hour, Messrs. Rubin and Rader regret some of the causes they supported then (like the Khmer Rouge) but are unshakably proud that, as Mr. Rubin puts it, "I was part of a generation that risked jail, that risked physical injury ... to oppose a war that was destructive to America." ... WFB: "It does seem to me terribly odd that you should use this forum to say that the Attorney General was wrong to prosecute our guest of honor, Mr. Rubin here, for a crime which he just finished writing a book admitting he committed." DR: "You put your foot in it then, Jerry." Title on transcript: Growing (Up) At 37."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.470
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6404
item Program Number S0229, 541

"The Implications of the Hearst Trial"

Guests: Fort, Joel, 1929- : Dershowitz, Alan M.

12 April 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 5
Program details: Patty Hearst had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army-a radical group led by one Donald Defreeze, an escaped Soledad prisoner, in February of 1974; in September of 1975 she was arrested after taking part in several bank robberies with her captors. During her trial, WFB explains, "the legal community was especially alerted to the historical point that never before ... had a jury been asked to accept brainwashing as a legal defense." The jury didn't buy it, and Miss Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison (the sentence would be commuted by President Carter in 1979). Dr. Fort's "dramatic exchanges with Lee Bailey [the head of the defense team] in the courtroom were," says WFB, "the subject of considerable attention," and his exchanges with Mr. Dershowitz here give us a window on one of the more bizarre incidents in that bizarre period. AD: "That may very well be the central issue pressed on the appeal: whether or not Patricia Hearst was actually tried for what she did on the day of the bank robbery, or whether she was tried for what she became after the bank robbery and indeed perhaps in part as a result of the bank robbery." ... JF: "Well, brainwashing on the model of Chinese thought reform done to American soldiers in Korea 25 years ago has very little relationship to the American youth behavior and to American society in the 1970s."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.471
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6405
item Program Number S0230, 542

"Unemployment"

Guests: Feldstein, Martin.

6 May 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 6
Program details: The persistent high level of unemployment had led Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative Augustus Hawkins to sponsor the Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Bill. Mr. Feldstein concisely explains the difference between his recommendations and their bill: "As far as I can tell, they mean [to achieve] 3 per cent [unemployment] by pushing on demand, cutting taxes, spending more, making money more readily available, and, if that fails, simply hiring people into the public sector; while I had in mind not simply increasing demand but rather changes in the incentives and the structure for labor markets that would cause unemployment to fall without any abnormal increases in demand." Mr. Buckley asks Professor Feldstein to help us out with some definitions (of, e.g., frictional unemployment), opening the way for a rich discussion that includes the effects of welfare and the minimum wage, the situation in England and Sweden, and the effects of increased productivity on quality of life.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.473
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6407
item Program Number S0231, 543

"Is There Any Soviet Justice?"

Guests: Taylor, Telford.

6 May 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 6
Program details: "A couple of years ago," as Mr. Buckley sets the stage, "a small group of American lawyers headed by Telford Taylor hit on the idea of attempting to help 20 imprisoned Russians--18 Jews, 2 gentiles--strictly within the framework of Soviet law." On paper, their chances looked good: after all, "the much-heralded constitution of 1936 probably lists more human rights than any constitution in the world," and the Procurator General of the Soviet Union, Roman Rudenko, had been a colleague of Mr. Taylor's at Nuremberg. Even so, the lawyers' initiative failed, and Mr. Taylor explains why in this serious discussion, rich in detail. TT: "In order to achieve heavier penalties and strike more fear into others who would want to emigrate the law is simply distorted and set aside .... A person who wants to emigrate knows that if he gets in trouble with the law it's all up-conviction is certain; guarantees are going to be set aside. This is very much more of a threat to other [potential emigrants] than the possibility of a fair trial."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.472
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6406
item Program Number S0232, 544

"The New Spiro T. Agnew"

Guests: Agnew, Spiro T., 1918-1996.

14 May 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 7
Program details: Mr. Agnew had been in Coventry for the three years since his resignation and disbarment, following his conviction on charges of tax evasion, but he had just emerged as the author of a suspense novel, The Canfield Decision, in which a Vice President defies his President and comes out for sending intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Israel. STA: "You notice, in this case, the President does not directly order. He can. The sanctions available to him are simply to call the Vice President in and say, 'Look,Mr. Vice President, this is enough of this. I don't want any more.' At that point--" WFB: "Well, what is the sanction then? You can isolate him?" STA: "Isolate him or cut off his budget; send him up to the Senate--" WFB: "Can he cut off his budget?" STA: "Oh, yes." WFB: "What does one do then?" STA: "Well, you have to go up to the Senate and stay there, I suppose." WFB: "God! That's a terrible sanction, isn't it?" STA: "But really the economic sanctions, the aircraft-- Everything the Vice President has is the President's to give or take away, with the exception of his salary, of course; that's prescribed."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.474
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6408
item Program Number S0233, 545

"U.S. Defense and the Political Campaign"

Guests: Zumwalt, Elmo R., 1920-

14 May 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 7
Program details: We eventually get to defense per se--including arms control, the end game in Vietnam, the ABM treaty--but most of the hour is spent on the character of Henry Kissinger. Admiral Zumwalt had told Ronald Reagan--who had used the information in a speech--that Mr. Kissinger had frequently said, as WFB paraphrases it, that "the United States was fated to be the second-ranking power in the world and that it was the responsibility of the Secretary of State to see to it that in our negotiations the U.S. came out as strong as possible under the circumstances." Mr. Kissinger had heatedly denied this; Mr. Buckley wonders whether even if Admiral Zumwalt was quoting accurately it was proper to repeat a private conversation. EZ: "With regard to the scruples, the problem is a tough one... In my view the higher requirement is to get the debate out on the terms we need to debate it on; namely, this tragic view of the future which is leading us on a policy course ... which is very hard to understand in the light of the public explanation of it being given by Kissinger. Rather than to dissemble in the public view as he does, I think it's important to raise openly the question of his tragic view of the future and to have it debated."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.475
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6409
item Program Number S0234, 546

"The Intimate Lyndon Johnson"

Guests: Kearns, Doris.

14 May 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 8
Program details: "Just about everybody knows the story by now," WFB begins: "the pretty little girl, selected as a White House Fellow, goes to the party in the East Room and finds herself dancing with the President of the United States only a few days before her article appears in The New Republic calling for the removal of that President. Thus the meeting between Doris Kearns and Lyndon Johnson" and the beginning of a "long and curious and, by the way, platonic relationship [during which] ... he would talk nonstop about his hopes, dream, fears, and superstitions." One sample from this somewhat surreal but fascinating conversation. WFB: "You had a sense that when he talked to you sometimes those soliloquies were dangerous to interrupt, right?" DK: "Oh yes. I mean, it wasn't that. I mean, if I could recreate his physical presence as it was. He wouldn't be sitting back in a chair like you now, which is not very threatening to me. He would be leaning over, breathing down my neck as he was giving me that soliloquy, which makes you much more terrified to say, 'But sir!' And so you listen and you hope at the end of it you can interrupt or you can give a comment, which you can. And I suspect I was like many others; a captive of that kind of formidable presence."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.476
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6410
item Program Number S0235, 601

"The People's Bicentennial as Spoilsports"

Guests: Rifkin, Jeremy. : Potter, Ned. : Ulanov, Nicholas. : Kaufman, Jonathan.

28 June 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 8
Program details: Mr. Rifkin's organization was pressing for the continuation of the American Revolution via the complete socialization of the United States; as WFB puts it, "Probably the most publicized maneuver of the People's Bicentennial Commission is the offering of huge cash awards--$25,000 is the posted figure--to any wife of a major corporation executive, or any employee, who can produce evidence sufficient to put major corporation executives in jail for violating something or other." This hard-hitting exchange concentrates mostly on the economic side of things. JR: "My reading of history is that in any society, whoever controls the basic wealth, the basic resources of that society, is also going to make the political decisions that affect everyone else's life."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.477
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6411
item Program Number S0236, 602

"Would Anarchy Work?"

Guests: MacBride, Roger. : Potter, Ned. : Ulanov, Nicholas. : Kaufman, Jonathan.

28 June 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 9
Program details: Mr. MacBride is of the thorough going school of libertarianism that would have no laws against anything other than direct violence against another person or his property, of which position he maintains that "We're no more anarchists than Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry, or Tom Paine." He makes his absolutist points in the most reasonable way: "We look forward to a foreign policy of neutrality. We believe in disengagement from the world. We believe in a political neutrality akin to that set forth for this country by Presidents Washington and Jefferson. We look for a sufficient nuclear deterrent to prevent any nation from ever attacking this country; and, combining that with our policy of non-intervention anywhere else in the world, it would seem to be quite unlikely that this country would again be at war."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.478
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6412
item Program Number S0237, 603

"Who's More Electable-Ford or Reagan?"

Guests: Sears, John P.

15 July 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 9
Program details: As the Kansas City convention approached, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were neck and neck; it was the closest nomination contest in many years and the closest a sitting President had come for a hundred years to being unseated by a challenger of his own party. This show was not intended to be purely a pitch for Ronald Reagan: Mr. Ford's campaign, Mr. Buckley tells us, "has had two weeks to designate a representative but has not succeeded in doing so." Mr. Sears, a moderate Republican, would wind up managing Mr. Reagan's next campaign for the Presidency, too, until his spectacular dismissal in the snows of New Hampshire. Here, he does well at focusing on the details: e.g., on how difficult it will be for Gerald Ford, if he wins the nomination, to put together a general election campaign: "Mr. Ford has no personal constituency in the South ... the only way he could have won there would have been if the Democrats had nominated a liberal Democrat who was not from the South. They did not do that ... that forces [Ford] up into the Northeast and Middle West ... And yet the positions he's taken in order to try to fend off Mr. Reagan's candidacy are not ones that he could drop that quickly to go run the other way. So I really don't know what he would do."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.481
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6415
item Program Number S0238, 604

"Looking at the Democratic Convention"

Guests: Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006. : Ulanov, Nicholas. : Kaufman, Jonathan. : Potter, Ned.

15 July 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 10
Program details: The two old friends and adversaries had been doing television commentary on the conventions--or, as WFB puts it, exchanging "disjointed grunts of satisfaction and dissatisfaction on the Today show"--but wanted a chance to talk in greater depth than the eight minutes a day they were allotted. Here they look at Jimmy Carter, the newly nominated Democratic candidate, and at the economy and our tax policies. Mr. Galbraith on liberals' nervousness about Governor Carter: "Well, liberals have their own establishment, which isn't quite as tightly knit and exclusive a circle as those of you who surround Ronald Reagan perhaps, but of the same sort. And Governor Carter was from outside, an unfamiliar figure--not the sort of man of whom my friends could automatically feel that if he were elected, they would be in." ... On the purpose of graduated tax rates: "One of the things that best helps the poor and the deprived to bear life is to hear the occasional screams of the rich."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.482
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6416
item Program Number S0239, 605

"Hentoff, Smith, and Norton vs. William F. Buckley Jr."

Guests: Hentoff, Nat. : Smith, Liz. : Norton, Harold.

8 July 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 10
Program details: Another of the semi-annual occasions on which WFB himself "goes on the firing line"; in this case, three distinguished left-of-center journalists genially but firmly question him on topics such as James Buckley's record as senator (WFB: "... the people who signed the Declaration of Independence would vote almost unanimously for my brother's re-election") and the depth or thinness of Ronald Reagan's thinking (WFB: "Well, it's thin only to the extent that the essential propositions of liberty are thin. I have a low threshold of boredom, and I don't like to hear the Gettysburg Address more often than, say, once a year, but I still think it's a magnificent piece of thought").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.479
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6413
item Program Number S0240, 606

"Free Speech vs. Fairness in Broadcasting"

Guests: Friendly, Fred W.

8 July 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 11
Program details: WFB and his guest, the co-inventor (with Edward R. Murrow) of the television documentary, are both close students of the Fairness Doctrine and its metastasis, from modest beginnings in 1949 to the engine of pervasive regulation it had become. But let Mr. Friendly set the stage: "There's a great contradiction in the whole broadcast system. 'Congress shall make no law,' the First Amendment says. I.e., you shall not license printing presses. And yet when broadcasting came along, it was necessary to license some people. Therefore you were giving a license, and you were saying broadcasters must operate in the public interest, convenience, necessity, and you were saying that they had to let other points of view be seen and heard on the air. I think that's a pretty good idea. I think you are a fiduciary. But I think where you get into trouble is when the government tries to be the super-referee."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.480
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6414
item Program Number S0241, 607

"Church Schools and the First Amendment"

Guests: Pfeffer, Leo. : Lowenstein, Allard K.

2 August 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 11
Program details: The Supreme Court had just ruled that Maryland's law permitting some subsidies to church-related schools was constitutional. WFB engages Mr. Pfeffer, a leading litigator on the separationist side of church-state cases, on the fairness of tax exemptions for religious institutions, and Mr. Lowenstein makes the case in favor of parents' freedom to choose where to school their children. AL: "It's a strange policy doctrine that says it's healthy to have a multiplicity of options for students in college, but that we should enforce conformity at the primary and secondary levels." ... LP: "Any effort on the part of government to interfere with the full freedom of religious institutions in pursuit of their sacred mission would be just as much a violation of the Constitution as any effort of the government to promote, through financial grant, that same mission."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.483
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6417
item Program Number S0242, 608

"Federal Health?"

Guests: Smith, Michael, Jr. : Seidman, Bert.

2 August 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 12
Program details: There was talk everywhere of the need for some form of national health insurance; several Democrats had sponsored bills in Congress and President Ford had agreed in principle, although he was raising fiscal objections. A real discussion never quite develops, though we do get clear statements, from Mr. Seidman of the case in favor, from Dr. Smith the case against. BS: "I would like to have a medical-care system where the doctor can give the patient care on the basis of need, and not on the basis of the patient's financial resources." WFB: "Well, Dr. Smith, do you acknowledge that that is a fair description of the existing situation?" MS: "Not at all, Mr. Buckley. Unfortunately, nowhere does emotion cloud judgment to a greater degree than in the consideration of the mechanics of how health care would be provided."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.484
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6418
item Program Number S0243, 609

"The Economic Planks of Both Parties"

Guests: Rinfret, Pierre.

26 August 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 12
Program details: Mr. Rinfret energetically takes up where he left off on his previous Firing Line appearance (s0156), tracing our economic problems over the last ten years. "We have a very interesting paradox going on right now. It's something nobody wants to talk about. We may not have in this country right now enough capital to put every American to work. I can give you the analogy in a very simple way: ten machines, eleven people looking for work, and only one man can work at one machine at a time. So you can put people to work and the eleventh guy is going to stand there ... We may be in that problem of having underinvested, overconsumed under an ancient antique concept of the 1930s. Consumption is not our problem. And yet every President that comes along,Congress comes along and says, 'Stimulate consumption; we need more consumption.'... So they keep wondering why they're not getting economic growth."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.485
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6419
item Program Number S0244, 610

"Should Books like Little Black Sambo Be on Library Shelves?"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Jordan, June. : Kaufman, Jonathan. : Potter, Ned. : Lipinsky, Lino.

26 August 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 13
Program details: Mrs. Pilpel declares herself as "strongly prejudiced in favor of the First Amendment... not to the exclusion of all others, but ahead of all others, because as long as you have freedom of speech and of the press there is an avenue of protest." Miss Jordan replies, "I'd like to backtrack, if I may, to focus upon your avowed commitment, whole-hearted commitment, somewhat prejudicial commitment to the First Amendment as against other rights.... When we're talking about a free society and we're talking about freedom of expression, we're not talking about freedom of expression that is equally available to all people in this country, as you know. And when we're especially talking about groups such as women in this country and the minority people in this country, we're talking about people who have never had the kind of freedom of expression that has been available to the white male ..." HP: "I am completely in agreement with you that women and minorities--" WFB: "God, the women I know aren't oppressed as regards their freedom of expression."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.486
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707UVE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6420
item Program Number S0245, 611

"Diplomacy for a Crowded World"

Guests: Ball, George W.

9 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 13
Program details: We begin with a little bellicosity (GWB: "The Democratic Party has tended in my judgment to draw much more from an intellectual milieu, and to that extent perhaps it's attracted people who have an interest in foreign affairs." WFB: "But those are the people who usually make the wars, aren't they?" GWB: "Well, that's one of your myths, I know, Mr. Buckley"), but as we roam the Cold War world from Rhodesia to Vietnam to the Soviet Union we get fascinating recollections from someone who has been on the scene since the Nuremberg trials and was now being rumored as possible Secretary of State in a Carter Administration. GWB: "You asked me whether it's ever desirable for the Administration to lie. I can only-- The reason that I hesitated related to a very personal experience." Mr. Ball had been a member of the group within the Kennedy Administration trying to figure out what to do during the Cuban missile crisis, "Well, we had a rational, coherent policy which we did finally evolve and which worked. We couldn't have done it-- I mean we would have been in terrible shape if there had been a premature disclosure. Now ... I found myself in a position where I had to go off and make a speech and I didn't dare cancel..." WFB: "What did you talk about?" GWB: "Well, I talked about economics, but then they got up and asked me about missiles in Cuba. And I gave them as equivocal answers as I could, doing my best to try not to mislead them.... I then went back and spent the entire night as I had been doing every night, in the so-called think tank we had, trying to sort these things out."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.487
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6421
item Program Number S0246, 612

"America in a Hostile World"

Guests: Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1928-

9 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 14
Program details: Another candidate for Secretary of State in a Carter Administration (in the event, he became National Security Advisor and Cyrus Vance became Secretary of State) gives for the third time on Firing Line his pungent, deeply informed view of the world, on subjects this time ranging from the death of Mao Tse-tung to the trade-union movement in the United States, from the relations between the First and Third Worlds to the upward mobility of different ethnic groups in the United States. ZB: "If you go beyond simple events, simple facts, the process of defining what reality is becomes enormously complex. Now, we can state as a proposition, assuming we know the facts, that very recently Mao Tse-tung died. And if we have access to information we can say exactly when he died. That's presumably an uncontestable fact, although even sometimes that can be contested. But beyond that, when you begin to assess what this means for the Chinese regime, what its implications are, even before you move into prescriptions, your assessment of that reality becomes inherently more difficult and invariably more subjective."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.488
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6422
item Program Number S0247, 613

"Subversion and the Law"

Guests: Felt, W. Mark. : Cohn, Roy M.

20 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 14
Program details: "John Ehrlichman," Mr. Buckley begins, "has been convicted for ordering the burglary of the office of the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, and the courts flatly rejected his argument that there was an inherent right vested in the Executive to secure the nation's interest by illegal activities," whereupon, Mr. Buckley continues, Mr. Felt "stepped forward and announced that he had personally ordered two burglaries without court approval and that he would do it again." Both guests immediately challenge the term "burglary": MF: "The dictionary defines a burglary as a break-in with the intent to steal something, and what I authorized were two surreptitious entries to try and get information." (Mr. Felt's break-ins were to offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Weathermen)"And I think by authorizing it I saved a lot of lives.") Mr. Cohn concurs: "Oh, these are not burglaries. The term is just completely misused here. Nothing was stolen; nothing was taken." WFB: "Well, nothing was stolen from Dr. Fielding's office, but that was a burglary, wasn't it?" RC: "No, I don't think that was a burglary. I think the correct term here would probably be surreptitious entry... . And I've been on both sides. I worked with the government, and I practice law and defend people where the FBI is on the other side, so I've seen it from both vantage points." And we're off on a fascinating exploration of this murky subject.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.489
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G707R3U
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6423
item Program Number S0248, 614

"The Claims of Jimmy Carter"

Guests: Shannon, William. : Carter, Hodding, III.

20 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 15
Program details: Jimmy Carter claims, as Mr. Buckley puts it, to "have brought us a series of positions on important issues which speak realistically to the nation's needs. There has been, I think we would all agree, some difficulty in transcribing these positions, which is why we have such expert help here in the studio." They do eventually get to candidate Carter's positions and how they may have changed--on the economy, especially, and abortion--but only after a rich discussion of how his Christianity strikes the opinion-making elite. WS: "We've just had two Presidents back to back, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom in different ways seemed to suffer from a certain megalomania, and it's thought that all we'd need now would be to have a third one who had megalomania touched with religious afflatus, to borrow one of your words...."WFB: "Is it the provenance of the authority that disturbs your set?" WS: "I think so,yes. Not my set. You're as much of this set as I am. You and I happen to be exceptions in that-- You are still a Christian, Bill?" WFB: "Yes." WS: "Yes.... But I think that most people who edit the news on television or radio--" WFB: "Are atheistic Communists?" WS: "No, just mildly bemused agnostics, I would say." ... HC: "I think Jimmy Carter's religion, to a number of the people who live in the set you may travel in, again more than I, is an affront to a number of hard-earned--as they see it--values that they have, their escape from whatever heritages of their own past, religious particularly, and cultural."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.490
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6424
item Program Number S0249, 615

"The Problems of the Panama Canal"

Guests: McGrath, Marcos G. : Cheveille, Richard. : Chapman, Guillermo O.

30 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 15
Program details: The Panamanian government had demanded a thorough revision of the treaty of 1903, which had given the United States dominion in perpetuity over the Canal and the strips of land adjoining it. Secretary of State Kissinger and the Panamanian negotiators had in 1974 reached an agreement in principle, but any actual treaty would require ratification by the Senate, and the proposal had stirred up a hornet's nest back home, becoming a hot issue in the Republican presidential primaries (as it would again in 1980 even though the treaty was eventually ratified in 1978--see Firing Line s0306). Dr. Cheveille and Mr. Chapman point out that the Panamanians' demands did not come out of the blue: Mr. Cheveille reminds us that "The earliest treaty, the 1903 treaty, has been renegotiated several times," and that Lyndon Johnson had agreed in 1964 to something very like the current proposal, but the war in Indochina and the war on America's campuses had put it on hold. Today's discussion ranges from the negotiation of the original treaty, to current issues of U.S. national security, to, with Archbishop McGrath, issues of peace and justice.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.493
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6427
item Program Number S0250, 616

"Panama and the U.S."

Guests: Lakas, Demetrio.

30 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 16
Program details: A second installment on Panama and the Canal, this one with the man whom General Omar Torrijos had appointed as head of state. In terms of intellectual substance, we get the idea right from the outset that we should not expect too much ("I first of all want to thank the American people for being nice and letting me go into their living rooms through this television set"). But it is fun watching WFB try to drag a straight answer out of his guest: WFB: "Well, let me try to put it differently. Archbishop McGrath, your archbishop, wrote an article in which he said that an example of American exploitation of the treaty is that it created military installations for which it paid money at a far lesser rate than, for instance, it pays money to Spain for its installations. So my question is whether you endorse that analysis of Archbishop McGrath's." DL: "Please, he's our spiritual leader, thank the Lord." WFB: "He's not only your spiritual leader." DL: "He's my very good friend." WFB: "He's my friend too, I hope. But he's also somebody who's perfectly prepared to concern himself with secular matters, isn't he?" DL: "There you go getting deep on me again. What's wrong with you?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.494
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6428
item Program Number S0251, 617

"Ten Years of Firing Line: 1966-1976: Part I"

Guests: Crossman, R. H. S. (Richard Howard Stafford), 1907-1974. : Greer, Germaine, 1939- : Macmillan, Harold, 1894- : Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987. : McCarthy, Mary, 1912- : West, Rebecca, Dame, 1892- : Mailer, Norman. : Spender, Stephen, 1909- : Kenner, Hugh. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Udall, Morris K. : Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998. : Smith, Ian Douglas, 1919- : Mosley, Oswald, Sir, 1896- : Welty, Eudora, 1909- : Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990. : Sheen, Fulton J. (Fulton John), 1895-1979. : Valenti, Fernando.

20 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 16
Program details: Ten years is a long time in television, and a tenth anniversary is worthy of a celebration. This show is an anthology of memorable clips-some lasting several minutes, others just a couple of paragraphs-from this first decade's shows. But first, a few words from WFB about Firing Line itself: "Our aim is to get people who have something to say. They can say it on Firing Line without having to jump over roadblocks every few minutes. They can indulge their own styles of thought and speech. They can be frenetic or leisurely. They need only to watch their logic, and be prepared to examine previously unexamined deposits of prejudice, if they are burdened by them. Firing Line is devoted to the proposition that interesting people can be interesting through the course of an entire hour. Failures at this level have been very few. But then, to quote the buoyant observation of Harold Nicolson, 'Ninety-nine people out of a hundred are interesting; and the hundredth is interesting because he is the exception.'"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.491
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GG2O
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6425
item Program Number S0252, 618

"Ten Years of Firing Line: 1966-1976: Part II"

Guests: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918-2008. : Teller, Edward, 1908-2003. : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : Leary, Timothy Francis, 1920- : Cleaver, Eldridge, 1935- : Kunstler, William Moses, 1919- : Thomas, Norman, 1884-1968. : Rusk, Dean, 1909- : Ali, Muhammad, 1942- : Ginsberg, Allen, 1926- : Bond, Julian, 1940- : Lewis, John Llewellyn, 1880-1969. : Jackson, Jesse, 1941- : Dellums, Ronald V., 1935- : Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994. : Humphrey, Hubert H. (Hubert Horatio), 1911-1978. : McCarthy, Eugene J., 1916- : Carter, Jimmy, 1924- : Richardson, Elliot L., 1920- : Hunt, E. Howard (Everette Howard), 1918-2007. : Ford, Gerald R., 1913- : Tureck, Rosalyn.

20 September 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 17
Program details: The anniversary anthology, Part II. WFB: "Firing Line was never conceived as an 'interview.' It was conceived, and indeed the original contract specifically called for an 'exchange of opinion.' The idea was that a conservative position on many matters of public policy tends to be ignored, or trivialized, in a mighty communications industry wired to the pressure points of contemporary and even trendy American liberalism. Accordingly, the producers thought, why not experiment and see if a conservative view of current affairs could survive the battering, week after week, of expert proponents of the Left?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.492
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6426
item Program Number S0253, 619

"The Electoral Verdict"

Guests: Kraft, Joseph. : Reeves, Richard, 1936-

4 November 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 17
Program details: The day before this taping, Jimmy Carter had defeated Gerald Ford for the Presidency; furthermore, in Congress, most of the Democratic freshmen originally elected in the Watergate year of 1974 had been re-elected. These three old pros give us a tour, rich in detail, of the policies and personalities. WFB: "Do the returns ... suggest that the Republican Party carries a stigma which it appears incapable of a cleansing, so that people who want a crack at public life are extremely reluctant to proceed under the sponsorship of the Republican Party? ..." RR: "I think, yes, there is a stigma ... On the other hand,... the election laws are designed to perpetuate the two-party system, so that once you get the Republican nomination you can do anything you want with it--run as an attractive young alternative, or, as Hayakawa did in California, as an attractive old alternative running against the majority party." ... JK: "The first thing I think I'll say is that... it seems to me to be very very much an un-landmark election ... But in answer specifically to your question, it would seem to me that there are several good indices for the Republicans. First of all, they elected some young, fresh faces--Lugar, Wallop, for example. Secondly,... when a state like New Jersey, which I think has unemployment of over 11 per cent, goes Republican, it seems to me that the Democrats ought to be scratching their heads a little bit and worrying a lot."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.498
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6432
item Program Number S0254, 620

"Caracas and U.S. Policy"

Guests: Arria, Diego.

4 October 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 18
Program details: "Providence," WFB begins, "assigned to Venezuela a supply of oil so bountiful as to provide every Venezuelan with a kind of dowry amounting to something on the order of $1,000 per person per year. Moreover, after a shaky start--Venezuela had 155 governments over a period of 125 years--Venezuela has emerged along with Colombia as one of two self-governing republics in South America.... The unspoken sentiment is that Venezuela may soon emerge as the principal spokesman for South America." A good-natured though some what slow-moving hour beginning with Venezuela's new redistributionist policies (WFB: "Why should a country like yours, that is so abundantly endowed by nature, require (a) foreign investments, and (b) higher domestic taxes?" DA: "Well, we have to cope with a problem that has been accumulating for many years, which has been the social underdevelopment of the country ... An increase of tax is not only are venue-producing decision, but is rather also a way of teaching the Venezuelans how to live in a society in which both sides have to cooperate.") and going on to OPEC and whether the grain-producing countries should try to emulate it.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.495
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6429
item Program Number S0255, 621

"What's Going On in China?"

Guests: Chang, Parris. : Zagoria, Donald.

4 November 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 18
Program details: Mao Tse-tung had died in September, and his widow, Chiang Ching, had been denounced as one of the Gang of Four and imprisoned. "As we sit here," WFB begins,"it is not absolutely known even whether the widow of Mao Tse-tung is alive or dead. Every manner of crime is imputed to her, and it is even whispered that she permitted the music of Beethoven into the death chamber of her husband." What will the incoming Carter Administration do about it all? What should it do? A rich discussion with two men who know as much about this closed society as one can know from the outside; we go from the ouster of Teng Hsiao-ping to what should be our policy on selling technology, and especially weapons technology, to Peking. DZ: "Simon Leys ... reports... [that] a young man in a Chinese department store walked up to a man who was obviously a foreigner and tried to offer him some assistance in the English language. And this young man, who subsequently defected to Hong Kong, told Simon Leys that about twenty minutes after that conversation took place he was brought into the public security station and questioned at great length as to why he was in contact with this Western diplomat, how long he had known him, and so on and so forth. And it took him five hours to convince the man that they had had no previous contact."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.497
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6431
item Program Number S0256, 622

"Venezuela and the U.S."

Guests: Mann, Joseph, Jr. : Faud, Kim. : Mayobre, Jose Antonio.

4 October 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 19
Program details: More on Venezuela, with the panelists from the show with Governor Arria returning as guests. A lively discussion of the road to democracy, Latin America's relations with the United States, and experiments by other Latin countries, especially the Friedmanites in Chile. JAM: "Let me ask you a question. Where is the borderline ...between being a demagogue and being a democrat? If there is one, and I think there is one, what we are trying to do here is not simply give a so-called voice to the people. Did they really have a voice in Argentina [under Peron]?" WFB: "Well, they certainly understood themselves as having a voice.... That's why I think that when you talk about strengthening democratic institutions by making the government responsive to the voice of the people you need to make a qualification, don't you?" JAM: "I don't think I said 'responsive to the voice of the people.' I think letting the people express themselves through their institutions--that means congress; that means the executive branch; that means the courts of the judiciary system, even the vote itself." ... KF: "A lot of countries ... do feel it [foreign investment] is imperialism.... They feel that they've really got an anchor around their neck. This anchor may have an ITT label on it, or an Exxon label, or what have you. But they definitely feel that their progress politically shouldn't have a handbrake on it with a 'Made in U.S.A.' mark on it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.496
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6430
item Program Number S0257, 623

"The Problems of Massachusetts"

Guests: Dukakis, Michael S. (Michael Stanley), 1933-

23 November 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 19
Program details: We are not quite two years into Mr. Dukakis's governorship--before the Massachusetts Miracle, also before Willie Horton. A lively exchange on the financial relationships between the Federal Government and the states, on protectionism, on welfare, and more. WFB: "Now I'm not suggesting that Massachusetts should have been punished for voting for George McGovern, but I'm suggesting that there might be some relationship?" MD: "We had lived through four years of Nixon as it was, so it really didn't make an awful lot of difference." WFB: "That's right, but those four years of Nixon's showed your GNP going up rather dramatically, didn't it?" MD: "But it showed our prices going up rather dramatically as well, and our unemployment rate beginning to climb too." WFB: "Well, it's true. It's quite true that the inflation which was the principal patrimony of Lyndon Johnson had to be paid somewhere along the line. However, let's not make this a partisan program." MD: "But Nixon continued the war that caused it in the first place." WFB: "You're talking about Kennedy's war?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.500
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6434
item Program Number S0258, 624

"The Future of Private Colleges"

Guests: Ward, John William. : Conway, Jill Ker.

23 November 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 20
Program details: What is the point of private colleges in the last quarter of the 20th century? As Mr. Buckley states the problem, paraphrasing Professor Jeffrey Hart of Dartmouth, "Once they were enclaves of distinctiveness, with their traditions, their peculiarities ...That is no longer the case. Once they were fortresses of academic excellence. That is no longer the case." Our guests genially but firmly reject the premise; some things have changed, but don't, Mr. Ward admonishes his host, confuse "Columbia University or perhaps your university at Yale, a very large recipient of federal moneys," with the small private colleges..." "See, about the only money that comes into a place like Amherst College would be through the National Science Foundation for research projects." And Mrs. Conway thinks "there is a growing awareness on the part of women students, and men actually, that there is much to be gained from the small-college environment that is currently not so easily available in a large university setting."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.499
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6433
item Program Number S0259, 625

"Deep Throat and the First Amendment"

Guests: Reems, Harry. : Dershowitz, Alan M.

13 December 1976

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 10
Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 20
Program details: Harry Reems, one of the participants in Deep Throat, had been arrested on charges of commerce in obscenity; Mr. Dershowitz, rising to the First Amendment challenge, was leading his defense. (When Firing Line invited Mr. Dershowitz to discuss the case, he insisted on bringing Mr. Reems with him; Mr. Buckley intended to pretend Mr. Reems was not there, though good manners eventually got the better of him.) To Mr. Buckley's questions about the effect of pornography on society (does it foster illegitimacy, rape, abortion?), our guests, the one rather more eloquently than the other, offer a slab of First Amendment absolutism. AD: "I think that there have been major changes in the last ten years, brought about by a complex of factors.... For example, Playboy magazine has probably had more of an influence on the sexual revolution than any hard-core porno films.... You would have to ban Playboy magazine. You would probably have to ban Cosmopolitan magazine ... The point is, if you want to achieve the result, then you have to have much more censorship. If you want to have free speech, then you have to include Deep Throat..." WFB: "I think you are right. You have to sort of revitalize a whole central view of man, which is not easily done by the suppression of anything. But the suppression of certain things is an aspect of one's concern. Just as we suppressed the circulation of racist literature in Germany after the war."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.501
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0026ZQEAC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6435
item Program Number S0260, 626

"The Death Penalty"

Guests: Van den Haag, Ernest. : Shapiro, E. Donald.

13 December 1976

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 112 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 21
Program details: "The Supreme Court," Mr. Buckley begins, "has been playing Hamlet in the matter of capital punishment. At this moment it seems to be saying that capital punishment is permissible but executions are not." Two old antagonists go around one more time, each unable to change the other's mind, but each clearly laying out the arguments for his side. One sample: EvdH: "It is clear that this penalty is the only one that could restrain people who are already in prison for life and attack their prison mates or officers...." DS: "You know, Ernest, I must violently disagree with you ... There are other ways in prison. Solitary confinement is a very effective deterrent to many, many criminals. And I think--" EvdH: "At the present time, Don, the federal prisons contain a man sentenced to life imprisonment who, since he is in prison, has managed to commit three more murders on three separate occasions. Not unless we chain such a man in a way that was done a hundred years ago, and that you would not approve of, nor would I, I do not think that there is... Because you are giving them immunity in effect by saying, 'Nothing further can happen to you except solitary confinement,' which I don't think is that much of a punishment." DS: "Oh, it really is, Ernest, I mean--" EvdH: "I have suffered it for two years. I didn't find it that." DS: "Well, you had your own company, Ernest. I mean, very few people are that fortunate in solitary confinement."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.502
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709QX4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6436
item Program Number S0261, 627

"Freedom under the Bill of Rights"

Guests: Harris, Richard.

3 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 21
Program details: Mr. Harris is rather gloomy about the practice of rights in America. In his book he had examined three cases where protections (of free speech; against unreasonable search and seizure) that supposedly had been won were not granted. In the first and mildest case--which was also the one where there was the least clear and present danger--a schoolteacher who showed up wearing a black armband in mourning for those who had died in the Cambodian incursion was fired. WFB: "In other words, as far as you're concerned, there is no authority over the subject of decorum in a public school." RH: "Right. The courts have said that you can wear your hair any length; you can wear what clothes you want. Now I don't know what you'd do if somebody arrived in public school without any clothes." WFB: "I know what I'd do." RH: "You'd wrap something around them, as we all would."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.503
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6437
item Program Number S0262, 628

"The Moon Movement"

Guests: Salonen, Neil Albert. : Kaufman, Ben.

3 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 22
Program details: Questions had been asked about the Reverend Sun Myung Moon for a while (starting with his sexual practices, and the nature of the charge on which he was arrested in Korea in the Fifties), but it was only recently that his movement hit the front pages. Parents of some of the young people who had joined the Unification Church had made accusations of brainwashing" and had kidnapped their children to bring them back home. Mr. Salonen is a true believer ("I found that [Moon] was not only a man who lived according to his teachings, but by following those teachings I myself experienced a kind of spiritual rebirth which I had only before read about"). Mr. Kaufman maintains that the Unification Church's official writings contain "redundant expressions of anti-Jewish feeling and anti-Christian feeling," and he is appalled by the church's doctrine against separation of church and state: "If the Reverend Mr. Moon and the Unification Church achieve their goal, this separation, possibly Satanic, will end in this country." A lively, though sometimes acrimonious, exchange."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.504
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6438
item Program Number S0263, 629

"The Education of Eldridge Cleaver"

Guests: Cleaver, Eldridge, 1935-

14 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 22
Program details: Mr. Buckley starts by reminding us of the background: "convicted in 1958 of assault with intent to rape and kill, Mr. Cleaver was sentenced to 14 years in jail. Released on parole, he joined the nascent Black Panther Party and became its Minister of Information. He was involved in a gunfight in which one of his brethren was killed and two policemen were wounded; while out on bail, he ran for President on the Peace and Freedom ticket, appeared on Firing Line (124), and fled the country to avoid being returned to jail. In 1975 he returned home. In his previous appearance on Firing Line (of which we see a short clip here) everyone was a pig, a lackey, or an imperialist. A few years in Cuba, Algeria, and North Korea have taught Mr. Cleaver a lot: They [rulers of countries like Algeria] use their foreign policy as a weapon against their own people. They tell the students and the other people who disagree with the Boumedienne government that 'You can't change things now; you can't rock the boat now or it will jeopardize the rights of the Vietnamese people'; because during the time that the war was going on the Vietnamese had one of their major operations in the Western world [there]... And again, they will tell the Algerian people that 'You can't rock the boat or you will jeopardize the rights of the Palestinian people'; and so they had an open-arms policy for revolutionaries ... and dissidents from other countries."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.508
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6442
item Program Number S0264, 630

"Gun Control"

Guests: Kukla, Robert. : Mikva, Abner J.

10 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 23
Program details: Is personal liberty a valid consideration in formulating gun laws? Are different sorts of guns essentially different in their capacity to be misused? Is there a correlation between a state's or locality's gun-control laws and the crime rate in that place? Such questions still vex our country more than twenty years later, but some light is shed on them by WFB and his guests, Mr. Kukla an advocate for legal handguns, Mr. Mikva the author of legislation to curtail them. AJM: "Does [Mr. Kukla] really mean that you should be able to carry a gun down the streets of New York, just in case somebody wants to rip you off?" WFB: "We'll have no reductio ad absurdum on this program."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.505
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6439
item Program Number S0265, 631

"The Latin Liturgy"

Guests: Hitchcock, James. : McManus, Charles J. : Hay, Robert. : McCarthy, Kenneth. : McConnell, John.

10 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 23
Program details: Eight years after the introduction of the new liturgy in the Catholic Church, the argument continued (as it still does, though at a lower level of intensity, more than twenty years later) over whether (a) it was necessary and (b) it was properly implemented. JH:"I like to describe myself as a 'pre-Conciliar liberal,' because I don't think that liturgists before the Second Vatican Council or the fathers of the Second Vatican Council themselves envisioned the virtual elimination of the Latin liturgy." ... CJM: "I think the main problem we have with the liturgy at this particular point in history is [that]... we don't have priests who really know how to use the English yet as a way of welcoming participation--to say, 'The Lord be with you,' and to say it in such a way that it dynamically and spiritually attracts people into responding well, is not an ability that is common among us."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.506
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6440
item Program Number S0266, 632

"Intelligence Operations in the 20th Century"

Guests: FitzGibbon, Constantine, 1919- : Hersh, Seymour M.

14 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 24
Program details: Is there a need for the CIA? Does the CIA fulfill such a need? An absorbing three-way debate among a left-wing journalist who answers "No" to both questions, and two right-wingers who answer "Yes" to the first, "Not entirely" to the second. CF: "I hold very little brief for the activities of the CIA in recent years. . . . But Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's crimes was uncovered and got out of Russia by the CIA. And if the CIA had not had an agent working on this, it would have remained just another dirty little Russian secret in the Kremlin. As it was, it caused--and is still causing--severe trouble to our potential enemies. That is a positive triumph of American intelligence." SH: "Nothing's as clear-cut as all that, because it turns out that we paid an awful lot of money. We were offering money all over, through every agent we had. Admittedly, we had people we could go to. But I think Yankee dollars brought that as much as CIA ingenuity." WFB: "Ingenuity and Yankee dollars go hand in hand."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.507
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6441
item Program Number S0267, 633

"Borges: South America's Titan"

Guests: Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-

1 February 1977

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 95 : 11
Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 24
Program details: A radiant hour with one of the 20th century's finest writers, who tells us, among much else, why he doesn't mind having gone blind ("Of course, when you are blind, time flows in a different way. It flows, let's say, on an easy slope"), and why his second language is his favorite ("Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language, those two registers. For any idea you take, you have two words. Those words do not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say 'regal,' it's not exactly the same thing as saying 'kingly.' Or if I say 'fraternal,' it's not saying the same as 'brotherly.' ... It would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about 'the Holy Spirit' or I wrote 'the Holy Ghost,' since 'ghost' is a fine, dark Saxon word, while 'spirit' is a light Latin word"). Technical note: This program is black and white.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.511
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEION8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6445
item Program Number S0268, 634

"Terror in Latin America"

Guests: Cox, Robert. : de Onis, Juan. : Benham, Joseph.

1 February 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 25
Program details: Argentina was at this time an unstable continent's principal venue for terrorist and counter-terrorist violence. Our guests speak calmly, which makes their tale all the more chilling--from the thousands of people who have "disappeared," to the religious persecution that takes place under President Videla (even though he himself appears to be a committed Christian), to Mr. Cox's account of how a journalist deals with terrorism: "He knows he can't possibly afford to have bodyguards; he can't possibly afford to assume that his life is in danger all the time, so he just assumes his life is not in danger. He takes the ordinary precautions that anybody could do. He looks twice or three times before he goes out in the morning; he does things like that. If you get with journalists ..., they say to you, 'You have to realize before you leave in the morning you might not get home at night.' The funny thing is, having realized that, things are all right. It's when you haven't realized that that people get jumpy and get nervous and get worried." Note: This program is in black and white.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.512
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGMFS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6446
item Program Number S0269, 635

"Argentina after Peron"

Guests: Martinez de Hoz, Jose Alfredo.

31 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 25
Program details: "Juan Domingo Peron," WFB begins, "was exiled from Argentina in 1955 after ten years of disastrous rule, but... as the years went by there was a romanticization of Peron, and you would have thought it was Pericles who had been exiled to Spain." In 1973 he was called back as president; he died the next year and was succeeded by his second wife, Isabel, who ruled for two more disastrous years before she was ousted by the junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla. This second show from Argentina concentrates on the country's other great problem: inflation. Dr. Martinez de Hoz--whose policies so far were working--fills in the background: during the interregnum inflation had mostly been 20 to 30 per cent--in the danger zone, but not hyperinflation. By the time of last year's coup it had reached 800 per cent. "What we did was to tell the workers straightforwardly the following--and this has been one of my policies all the time: tell everybody the truth all the time, and don't hold anything back. So we explained to the workers, 'Look, if things go on like this, we are heading into massive unemployment with the whole production of the country grinding to a standstill. Now if you want to avoid this, you must accept a policy, a wage policy... and if you'll come along with us, and don't cause trouble, I commit myself to avoid massive unemployment'--which is not easy to do, because generally countries come out of high inflation and recession with massive unemployment."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.510
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6444
item Program Number S0270, 636

"Should the U.S. Pressure Argentina?"

Guests: Hill, Robert Charles, 1917-1978. : Roca, Eduardo.

31 January 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 26
Program details: Should the United States, in other words, impose some form of sanctions to persuade Argentina not to ignore human rights in the course of fighting terrorism? To Mr. Hill, "We have grave moral problems in the United States. You know, I'd like to see our people pay attention to making us a better society rather than trying to tell someone else in the Far East, or in Europe, or in the Middle East, or in Africa how to run their affairs." Mr. Roca points out a special difficulty in fighting this kind of terrorist war: "We really make friendship a basic element of our daily life, and these people are using this friendship to introduce into the families of the members of the government- All of the bombs are not put by people disguised as-how do you say mandaderos?" WFB: "Messengers." ER: "Messengers. No, they are disguised as friends of the family, friends of the institution, no? It's difficult to handle all of these questions in the normal manner."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.509
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6443
item Program Number S0271, 637

"Human Rights"

Guests: Lowenstein, Allard K.

9 March 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 26
Program details: "In Geneva every year for about a month," WFB begins, "a body called the Commission on Human Rights meets for the purpose--one would suppose on surveying its record--of reiterating its disapproval of South Africa, Israel, and Chile. To the astonishment of the nations assembled, our representative this year brought up the subject of human rights violated elsewhere, for instance, in the Soviet Union and Uganda. For several tumultuous weeks, the Commission on Human Rights was convulsed ..." But the State Department forgave Allard Lowenstein, who here zestfully recounts his adventures. "I said to Zorin, 'You know, in the Congress of the United States, Ambassador Zorin, we have a saying that we can disagree without being disagreeable,' and his interpreter said, 'I can't translate that into Russian.' I offered to try to say it in French or German. I'm not sure that would have improved things."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.516
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6450
item Program Number S0272, 638

"How Much Liberty?"

Guests: Moss, Robert. : Janitschek, Hans.

8 March 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 27
Program details: Mr. Moss had been warning that, as Mr. Buckley paraphrases him, "There are indications that social democracy [in Great Britain], in its passion for equality is not only engaged in creating relative poverty, but losing significantly its commitment to democratic method." Mr. Janitschek, meanwhile-whose organization's members include Olof Palme of Sweden, Willy Brandt of West Germany, and Bruno Kreisky of Austria-is committed passionately to the cause of socialism, but equally passionately to the cause of democracy. A civil but hard-hitting three-cornered battle. WFB: "Jack Jones,... who is the most prominent labor-union leader, I guess, in Great Britain, finds himself 'at home' in East Germany. Do you know why he finds himself at home there?" HJ: "... Maybe he's got personal friends there. As a democratic socialist I don't think that Jack could possibly wish to live in East Germany under a repressive system."... RM: "I think that we should take people at their word. After all, an obscure agitator in Germany, called Hitler, wrote a silly book called Mein Kampf, which the bourgeoisie shrugged off as a silly book which could never be taken seriously, and he proceeded to carry out coldly most of the things that he put down in writing in that book. I think it's likely to prove the same with our left-wing extremists in Britain today."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.513
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6447
item Program Number S0273, 639

"Is There a Solution for Rhodesia?"

Guests: Amery, Julian, 1919- : Lestor, Joan.

9 March 1977

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 27
Program details: Since Ian Smith's appearance on Firing Line three years earlier (s0133), an attempt had been made by Henry Kissinger to broker an agreement leading to majority (black) rule; Mr. Smith had walked out of the resulting Geneva Conference, saying that the terms had been changed from what he had agreed to. "Meanwhile, terrorism was escalating in Rhodesia, with recent reports of blacks killing nuns," as Mr. Buckley puts it, "in the name of 'Majority rule now.' " Mrs. Lestor comes out swinging ("I'd like to comment on your introduction, which I thought was a very biased introduction"), and the pace never lets up. JL: "I wish we had Mr. Kissinger here now, because it may well be, and my belief is, that one thing may well have been said to Mr. Smith by Mr. Kissinger, which was certainly not agreed by Whitehall ..." JA: "Well, there was a British official with Kissinger all the time." JL: "... The Foreign Office would know full well that the British Parliament and the British Labour Party and the British Labour government would never accept a situation ... where two of the key positions would be left in the hands of the whites in Southern Rhodesia ..." JA: "But my dear Joan, the moment Kissinger had made his speech, the Foreign Office came out, with the full authority of the Foreign Secretary, with a very strong statement fully endorsing what had been-" WFB: "That's exactly what I said." JL: "No, they did not endorse. They did not endorse."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.515
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6449
item Program Number S0274, 640

"Disarmament and Jimmy Carter"

Guests: Chalfont, Arthur Gwynne Jones, Baron, 1919- : Crozier, Brian.

8 March 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 28
Program details: Our two guests approach things from different political angles, but both are serious students of the Soviet Union and of disarmament, and both are informatively apprehensive about America's new President. Mr. Crozier: "I think he may be tempted to follow a path ... of considering the strategic relations between the two superpowers in terms of military hardware and of nuclear technology, and of ignoring the other factors at work, including Soviet subversion ... and the Soviet involvement by proxy, the most striking example of which is undoubtedly the Angola affair, in which some 15,000 or perhaps more Cuban troops were there simply to carry out Soviet foreign policy." ... Lord Chalfont: "I think perhaps the greatest reason for concern was the remark which you quoted,... that he proposed to eliminate nuclear weapons from the earth.... Arms control and disarmament is a highly complex business, highly technical, requiring a great deal of intellectual application, a great deal of experience, and quite frankly, anybody who thinks that he's going to eliminate nuclear weapons from the earth in four years or eight years is, I think, living in some kind of fool's paradise."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.514
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6448
item Program Number S0275, 641

"Divestiture of Oil Companies"

Guests: Hart, Gary, 1936-

28 March 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 28
Program details: How do the oil companies organize their business? What sorts of changes would best serve free-market competition in the abstract, and the actual consumer at the gas pump? Is a solution to the energy crisis to be found in "divestiture" (i.e., ending the practice in which, as Senator Hart puts it, "Whether through the exchange of crude petroleum, whether through joint pipelining arrangements, whether through joint-venturing of refining, whether through a conglomerate of financial arrangements, these firms which control the product from the ground to the gas pump, having these horizontal arrangements among themselves, dominate for all practical purposes anywhere from 75 to 90 per cent of the product at one time or another")? A serious and mostly accessible discussion of these and related questions.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.518
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6452
item Program Number S0276, 642

"The Republicans"

Guests: Dole, Robert J., 1923-

28 March 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 29
Program details: "Senator Robert Dole," Mr. Buckley begins, "but for a few thousand votes cast differently in Ohio and in Hawaii, would now be the Vice President of the United States in a Ford Administration, and Jimmy Carter would be back in Georgia ... We intend to discuss ... why a party that can score almost 50 per cent for a Republican President is reduced nationwide to 12 governorships, 5 state legislatures, 38 and 143 votes, respectively, in the Senate and the House." Those who remember Bob Dole bumbling through the 1996 campaign may be surprised by this lively and productive exchange. One sample: WFB: "Is there a symbolic case to be made for a party that has attempted to assimilate a great scandal and great reverses deciding that the only way it can sort of publicly expiate is by going out of formal existence, even if it reorganizes the same day with the same people under a different banner? ..." RB: "If I had some evidence that by keeping our principles but changing the name we could be a greater force in American politics ... I would accept that. But I look at the South last November, and in my view, voters voted their accent, not their philosophy ... I think this is behind us now."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.517
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6451
item Program Number S0277, 643

"The End of Education?"

Guests: Wagner, Geoffrey Atheling. : Quinn, Edward, 1932- : Rondinone, Peter. : Nelson, Jill. : Lauria, Joseph.

25 April 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 29
Program details: In 1969, the Lindsay administration caved in to protests and disruptions by minority students and accelerated its plans for "open enrollment," under which anyone who graduated from high school in the City was automatically entitled to matriculate at one of the CUNY colleges. The results had been hailed in some quarters, deplored in others; Mr. Wagner's book deploring had been described by Mr. Quinn, his department chairman, as "quite the worst he ever wrote." WFB draws out Mr. Quinn on what could be done to rescue the situation: "Well, suppose they didn't give you the authority to govern educational policy in the high schools. Would you then say, 'Well, I'm sorry I didn't have it; under the circumstances I decline to acquiesce in the policy of open enrollment?' Or would you say, I'll do it anyway'?" EQ: "I'll do it anyway." ... GW: "Actually, I never said that I'm against open admission.... I am against what was called open admission." WFB: "Which was what?" GW: "Which was the result of Pied Pipering vast groups of, as he says, underprepared students at the City's expense, including large numbers of foreign students, into a situation in which somewhat anarchic educational results happen."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.519
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6453
item Program Number S0278, 644

"Looking Back on Allende"

Guests: Ossa, Nena. : Geyer, Georgie Anne, 1935- : Birns, Larry.

25 April 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 30
Program details: Firing Line had looked closely at Chile just after Salvador Allende was elected President (Firing Line 220, in 1970), and just after the coup in which he died (s0154, in 1974). Mr. Birns is convinced that we have since seen, to quote the title of his book, The End of Chilean Democracy; indeed, he maintains that in terms of the brutality and level of repression that now exists in both countries, "I would say that Chile ... is more repressive than Cuba"--prompting Mr. Buckley to catechize Mrs. Ossa on what you can and can't do in Pinochet's Chile. The plus column includes moving freely about the country, leaving the country "with no red tape," criticizing the government, attending church, and "invit[ing] Milton Friedman to go down and lecture and say what he wants to and deplore tyrannical systems ... Can you do that in Cuba? No. Well, how are we doing?" Miss Geyer adds this fascinating bit of background on Salvador Allende, the hero of democracy: "I remember I interviewed [Allende] in '64 .. . And my last question to him was, 'Senator Allende, if you are elected president'--and he wasn't of course, then--but, if you were elected president, how soon would you initiate a one-party state?' And he said, in these exact words, 'Not immediately.' He said, 'That would take a few years.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.520
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6454
item Program Number S0279, 645

"The Impact of the Space Program"

Guests: Mitchell, Edgar D.

18 May 1977

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 30
Program details: A buoyant hour with a man who has spent more hours than practically anyone else viewing his home planet from above. The conversation ranges from the tangible benefits spun off from the space program, to the spirit of adventure, to the theological implications. EM: "It has been my experience that in the European and Asiatic countries the awesomeness of the space program and the closeness that those people feel to us as a result of that effort is significant. ... They feel it was a world program, and they want to identify with that effort." WFB: "You're talking about scientists now, or the public?" EM: "No, I'm talking about the public. And they tend to feel that it has drawn them closer to us in many ways." WFB: "There's a sense of ... a planetary Gemutlichkeit that derives from those spectacular shots of little old earth just suspended there?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.523
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6457
item Program Number S0280, 646

"Nixon Revisited"

Guests: Reeves, Richard, 1936- : Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938- : Kaufman, Jonathan. : Ulanov, Nicholas. : Ciaramella, Donald.

18 May 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 31
Program details: Richard Nixon had just emerged from purdah with a series of interviews with David Frost, prompting this revisiting of 1973-74. The show has an often startling "You are there" quality, especially in Mr. Buchanan's recollection of the discussion of how to handle the smoking-gun tape and Mr. Nixon's resignation: "We argued for a two-step thing.... It was our argument that the tape should be released first, so that Nixon's own people would realize the reason why he was doing what he was doing." WFB: "So they wouldn't think he just quit?" PJB: "They would come to the conclusion, right, that he had to go. They wouldn't say that ... Nixon's people all broke and they caved in under pressure of the House Judiciary Committee." RR: "... How much of that is post facto, though? How much of that discussion revolved around the fact of, 'Let's drop this and see what the impact is. Can we survive this?' " PJB: "No, that was very much in the- We discussed it on the helicopter to Camp David; we discussed it at Camp David. Views shifted. Some argued that Nixon should step up on Monday and say, 'I knew this information ... and I'm going to step down.' And we argued against that. We argued we should drop the tape first and let that hit. And one of the reasons, quite frankly, was there were some in the White House and the President's immediate family who felt it was not fatal. So we said, 'Let's drop the tape first. This will demonstrate- We believe it is fatal, and the country-'" RR: "But you didn't say at that time, 'We believe it is fatal.'" PJB: "Oh, yes we did. We told the President that we thought it was fatal."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.522
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6456
item Program Number S0281, 701

"What's Happening in South Africa?"

Guests: Paton, Alan.

12 May 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 31
Program details: In an absorbing discussion, the man who is arguably the leading white South African critic of apartheid analyzes the current situation in his wonderful but tormented country and looks towards its future: "I have no wish whatever to see the destruction of Afrikanerdom--partly for a selfish reason (it could mean my own destruction as well), and partly because I have an admiration--sometimes reluctant, I might tell you--for the Afrikaner and his achievements, and I don't want to see him destroying himself, which he is in great danger of doing now." ... WFB: "Are you a socialist?" AP: "Well, I'm certainly more inclined towards socialism than towards capitalism. But I must confess that after having lived through the age of Stalin and others, one's enthusiasm for extreme socialism rather abates."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.521
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6455
item Program Number S0282, 702

"The Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Policy"

Guests: Bundy, William P. : Manning, Bayless A.

15 June 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 32
Program details: No fireworks, but an instructive hour on an institution reviled by the far Left as a tool of American economic imperialism, and by the far Right as a tool of international socialism. (Full-disclosure-wise, WFB had been a member of the Council since 1974.) WFB: "Would it be fair to say that one could, with some confidence, make certain inferences about the political prejudices of the majority of the membership? For instance, you don't concentrate on isolationists, do you?" BAM: "I suppose if you put the question sufficiently broadly it is obvious that most people who are in the Council--indeed I suppose one could say all people who are in the Council--are people who have been elected there because in some way or other they have some professional involvement that in some way engages international affairs ... That can go very far afield, as for example an oceanographer might be a member of the Council."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.524
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6458
item Program Number S0283, 703

"Decriminalize Marijuana?"

Guests: Gottfried, Richard N. : Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931-

15 June 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 32
Program details: Eight states at this point had decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, and Mr. Gottfried had been the principal sponsor of a bill to do the same in New York; Mr. Mahoney had spearheaded the successful effort to defeat the bill. Mr. Buckley, who agrees with his friend Mr. Mahoney on most things, takes Mr. Gottfried's side in this thoughtful discussion of the medical and legal issues. WFB: "Since more people die from smoking cigarettes than from taking heroin, why would it not follow from your reasoning that the smoking of cigarettes ought to be proscribed?" JDM: "Well, among other easy distinctions, I think that there's a marked propensity among heroin users to become addicted, to go out and rob--" WFB: "But only because heroin is expensive, which it wouldn't be if it were legal." JDM: "...You might find statistically that more people die from jogging than from taking heroin, but you wouldn't make jogging criminal because of the percentages."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.525
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6459
item Program Number S0284, 704

"What's Up with Eurocommunism?"

Guests: Loebl, Eugen, 1907-

27 June 1977

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 33
Program details: Eugen Loebl had been a committed Communist, and was briefly deputy foreign minister of Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup of 1948. He was soon arrested in a power struggle, and eventually lost his Communist faith and testified in the famous Slansky trial. A rich discussion of the way Communism has played out in Central Europe and the lessons this might hold for the "Eurocommunism" being talked about in France and Italy. EL: "There are two philosophies which could be the basis of the foreign policy. One is a policy of spheres of interest. That is a game the rules of which are far more convenient for a dictatorship. No parliament, no congress, no senate, no press, no Firing Line ... In this respect, America will be always the weaker partner,... will be always on the losing side." ... WFB: "If you want to say, 'Let's play with the notion of Euro communism and let's focus our attentions on Czechoslovakia,' I say I'm all for it. But if you say, 'Let's give them Italy and see what happens,' I think that this is gambling beyond the point that you want to do outside of some chessboard in the Pentagon."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.527
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6461
item Program Number S0285, 705

"Rhodesia Blackout"

Guests: Towsey, Kenneth. : Solarz, Stephen J.

27 June 1977

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 33
Program details: The UN General Assembly, fervently applauded by Rep. Solarz, had just voted to block Rhodesia from maintaining any offices abroad--including the one Mr. Towsey heads. The conversation begins with the Rhodesian specifics, but broadens into a debate on a fundamental question of political philosophy. SS: "It would seem to me that there's a better chance for democratic rule, democratic government in Zimbabwe if they--" WFB: "Do you mean democratic government? Or do you mean freedom?" SS: "I mean a government in which there are free elections--" WFB: "Regular free elections? I mean, Hitler was elected freely." SS: "... But you don't have free elections, in the sense I think we understand it, in Rhodesia right now. Is that an arrangement that you support?" WFB: "No, I don't support it. I simply say that democracy is ultimately uninteresting to me. What's interesting to me is human freedom."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.526
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6460
item Program Number S0286, 706, 706R

"The Foreign-Policy Problems of Great Britain"

Guests: Owen, David, 1938-

25 June 1977, 6 January 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 26-27
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 34
Program details: Much of Dr. Owen's time in Parliament owing to his medical training had been spent on the National Health Service. But upon the death of Anthony Crosland the new Prime Minister James Callaghan had thrust him into his current post the youngest man to hold it since Anthony Eden in 1935. The most obvious foreign-policy problems for Britain at the moment were Rhodesia (how to speed up the handover of political power to the black majority while recognizing as Dr. Owen phrases is "the kith-and-kin argument ... Many white Rhodesians fought in the war on the side of the Allies inside the British forces." WFB: "Including the Prime Minister." DO: "Yes. And these things go deep and understandably") and detente (where President Carter's animadversions on human rights in the Soviet Union had led President Giscard d'Estaing to say that he had "violated the code of conduct of detente"; (Dr. Owen: "I would challenge anyone to write a 'code of conduct' in how you handle human rights") plus a fascinating little discursion on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: "he was a decentralized socialist who didn't believe in statism. He believed in public ownership but he believed in sort of what we would now call local government or freedom of choice.... That's why I'm a Proudhonist."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.529
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6463
item Program Number S0287, 707, 707R

"Human Rights in the USSR"

Guests: Bukovskii, Vladimir Konstantinovich, 1942-

25 July 1977, 30 December 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 28-29
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 34
Program details: Vladimir Bukovsky had first come to Western attention in 1972, when at great personal risk he collected and smuggled to the West documents on Soviet abuse of psychiatric institutions for the torture of dissidents (including himself). He was released and sent into exile in December of 1976. Besides hearing his thoughtful and shrewd analysis on this show, we get to meet a genuine hero of our times. VB: "Well, I remember in the Cold War, I was a member of the Young Pioneer organization, the Communist organization for children, and they forced us to denounce each other for bad behavior, publicly. And it was disgusting. And that was my first, maybe, impulse to reject- I refused to be a member of this organization. It was long ago, really." ... "It's very convenient for them: when they declare somebody as insane, it denigrates not only him personally, but the views he expressed."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.528
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6462
item Program Number S0288, 708, 708R

"What Have We Learned from the Failure of British Socialism?"

Guests: Thatcher, Margaret.

25 July 1977, 23 December 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 30-31
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 35
Program details: In Mrs. Thatcher's second appearance on Firing Line, two years before she would take up the reins of government, the conversation turns to the state of democracy in present-day Britain. We get even more of a feel than in her first appearance (Firing Line s0199) of why she would become so admired, and so reviled: "For years now in British politics you have needed to use the word 'consensus.' ... It's a word you didn't use when I first came into politics. We had convictions, and we tried to persuade people that our convictions were the right ones, and it's no earthly good having convictions unless you have the will to translate those convictions into action. I understand that one time you interviewed Mr. Bukovsky. I was very impressed with one of his speeches. He put it marvelously. Back when he lived in Russia, where they had no freedom at all and one or two like him were determined to fight for it whatever it cost, the view he took was not 'Does my voice count?' The view he took was 'If not me, who? If not now, when?' Now that's the view that I want each democrat--and I use it in the ordinary sense, a believer in democracy--to take in Britain.' "
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.530
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGMVC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6464
item Program Number S0289, 709

"The Soviet Intelligence Apparatus"

Guests: Ulanovskaia, Nadia.

26 July 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 35
Program details: Mrs. Ulanovskaya speaks slowly and with a very heavy accent, but it's worth the effort to hear the story she has to tell--of her husband's connection with Stalin, of her work as a spy in the United States (one of her agents was Whittaker Chambers), of her disenchantment and banishment to Gulag. NU: "When we were in the States [in the Thirties], it was the first time--not that I began to doubt, but that I felt, with some reason, we couldn't do what the capitalists had achieved ... In the States, in spite of that terrible time of the Depression ... to us it didn't look terrible at all." WFB: "You mean by contrast with what you had experienced?" NU: "We saw those jobless people who still ate better. .. . You know, some Communist sympathizers once showed us some slums, but those slums didn't impress me at all." WFB: "Made you feel at home?" NU: "Well, the way we personally lived in Moscow at that time was worse."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.531
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6465
item Program Number S0290, 710

"Young Americans for Freedom"

Guests: Donatelli, Frank. : Buckley, John. : Robinson, Ron. : Heckman, Robert. : Bechtel, Dennis. : Lacy, James. : Easton, Michelle.

29 August 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 36
Program details: YAF had just completed its biennial convention, at which the group--"founded in 1960 and probably," as WFB puts it, "the only political youth organization that survived that mad decade"--had voted to oppose the Panama Canal treaty, call on UN Ambassador Andrew Young to resign, and propose abolishing the minimum wage and most of the regulatory agencies. A lively hour with these spirited young people. One sample, from Frank Donatelli: "[Andrew Young] has been unable in our judgment to make the transition from Baptist Southern minister/civil-rights leader to world diplomat. There are two very separate and distinct roles. It is fine to hail various excesses in the world from a pulpit, but when you have to deal with political leaders from around the world in very touchy situations, a change of rhetoric is necessary. It seems to us that Mr. Young, far from attempting to ameliorate world problems, is himself becoming a problem and an issue ..."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.532
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6466
item Program Number S0291, 711

"The Abuse of Power"

Guests: Newfield, Jack. : Du Brul, Paul. : Starr, Roger.

29 August 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 173 : 36
Program details: Two years earlier New York City had declared bankruptcy (remember the New York Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead"), and WFB and his guests engage in an instructive discussion of who was at fault, when action should have been taken, and why it wasn't. JN: "When this crisis began, I didn't know the difference between a debenture and a debutante-and that was true of a lot of writers covering New York's crisis." ... RS: "The last thing we wanted to be told was that we couldn't spend this money because we didn't have it.... The press of this city were not only blind, but willfully blind."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.533
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6467
item Program Number S0292, 712

"The Race against Jerry Brown"

Guests: Wilson, Pete. : Maddy, Kenneth L.

14 September 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 1
Program details: Governor Brown, who had succeeded Governor Reagan in 1974, would be up for re-election in 1978, and our guests are two of those aiming to unseat him. Both are more or less conservative; each is popular in his region. In the event, it was Evelle J. Younger who got the nod and was decisively defeated; but for now both would-be challengers concentrate on the problems of the state under "Governor Moonbeam." KM: "I think ...you're going to find that Jerry Brown is extremely vulnerable with the public whether it be the issue of the economy and jobs and the direction the state is going to go economically, whether it be the appointments that he makes to boards and commissions and regulatory bodies ... or just the idea that the people are tired of governing by a mystique rather than by an efficient administration." ... WFB: "If Governor Brown were to rejoin a seminary tomorrow, what would history mark as his primary contribution. . . ?" PW: "Bill, you must be reading my mind. As a matter of fact, I have been telling people that really I am moved by a charitable impulse and that is to restore Jerry Brown to that private contemplative life that he so prizes."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.534
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6468
item Program Number S0293, 713

"The Problem of the Illegals"

Guests: Madrid Romandia, Roberto de la. : Kaye, Peter.

14 September 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 1
Program details: "The problem of the illegals," as Governor de la Madrid expounds it, is a problem of insufficient industry in Mexico, insufficient agricultural tools, and too high a birth rate. In a discussion filled with helpful detail, he calls for a comprehensive agreement between Mexico and the United States: "Then we can keep our people in Mexico.... Then the United States can say, 'Fine. If I help you in commerce and in trade, I in turn need energy.' Then we could talk about energy. We could talk about Mexico needing, say,reforms or changes in certain laws like, for instance, Section 602 of your Tax Reform Act of 1976 that limits the amount that can be spent by U.S. persons that go to Mexico on conventions ... I think we should live as neighbors.... And as neighbors do, if you need a cup of salt, go around the back fence and ask for a cup of salt, and in turn maybe next week you get a cup of sugar back."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.535
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWS32
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6469
item Program Number S0294, 714

"Normalization"

Guests: Elegant, Robert S. : Barnett, Doak.

26 September 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 113 : 37
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 2
Program details: A rich three-cornered discussion, ranging widely in time and space. As Mr. Buckley frames the question, "The shibboleth requires that we normalize [relations with the People's Republic of China], and in order to normalize we're supposed to do something abnormal, specifically to rend our diplomatic and military ties with a faithful ally." Mr. Barnett accepts the challenge: "I would say what is abnormal is that for 28 years we have still not fully accepted that the government in Peking is the government of China.... In effect we are compelled by both sides in the ... Chinese civil war, which is not formally ended, to decide which one we regard as the most important." Mr. Elegant poses a ground-clearing question: "I mean, what is the purpose of normalization?" WFB: "Normality." RE: "Normality.... It seems to me that in foreign policy you're looking for a positive result from an action.... It seems to me rather pointless to take an action unless you have some idea as to what consequences are likely to grow from it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.539
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6473
item Program Number S0295, 715

"The New Panama Treaty"

Guests: Schlafly, Phyllis. : Alexander, Shana.

26 September 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 2
Program details: In Mrs. Schlafly's previous appearance on Firing Line the topic (the Equal Rights Amendment) was one on which host and guest were in substantial agreement. Not so here, and the discussion, always lively, occasionally erupts. PS: "Now listen, Bill, you keep setting up a straw man, and misrepresenting what I said. There are lots of wonderful, fine, patriotic bankers all over this country. This involved only ten of the most powerful banks--" WFB: "And they're unpatriotic." PS: "They are the ones who have loaned the money." WFB: "But they're unpatriotic, you say, right?" PS: "I didn't say they were unpatriotic." WFB: "But surely it's unpatriotic to redesign American foreign policy for your personal benefit." PS: "If you want to unload your bad loans onto the American taxpayer--" WFB: "That's unpatriotic, isn't it?" PS: "Well, sure."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.538
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6472
item Program Number S0296, 716

"Federalized Welfare (Debate): Part I"

Guests: Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.

24 September 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 3
Program details: These shows are titled as indicated in Firing Line's records. In fact, this is a formal debate sponsored by Columbia College's Debate Council, on the topic "Resolved: That the Welfare System in the United States Should Be Federalized." Unlike the debates organized by Firing Line itself, starting with the famous Panama Canal debate (s0306), most of the participants this evening are undergraduates, with Messrs. Buckley and Moynihan serving as "guest speakers." DPM: "You had the graciousness, sir,... to announce that we would conduct ourselves by the rules of the House of Commons;... [I] recall that it is the practice of the House to address members by their constituencies rather than by their names ... I would like to introduce you to those designations. The first speaker was the member from Reasonableness. The second speaker was the honorable member from Retrogression. The third speaker with great distinction represents the constituency from Common Sense, and then finally you heard from the honorable member from Inequity. I have not the least doubt that he represents his constituents well, and yet I wonder how often he visits them." ...WFB: "Now [Senator Moynihan] addresses you tonight as though he had not written those words [about the "absurdities" in the welfare system] and speaks again using the old rhetoric about the need of the poor to be maintained, of the thirsty to have drink, of the hungry to be fed, and if I may say so, I would like to take whatever credit is due to Ms. Shahmanesh and Mr. Halpem for avoiding that rhetoric inasmuch as we assumed that there was a general consensus on this floor on the need to look after those who are less fortunate than ourselves."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.536
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6470
item Program Number S0297, 717

"Federalized Welfare (Debate): Part II"

Guests: Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.

24 September 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 3
Program details: These shows are titled as indicated in Firing Line's records. In fact, this is a formal debate sponsored by Columbia College's Debate Council, on the topic "Resolved: That the Welfare System in the United States Should Be Federalized." Unlike the debates organized by Firing Line itself, starting with the famous Panama Canal debate (s0306), most of the participants this evening are undergraduates, with Messrs. Buckley and Moynihan serving as "guest speakers." DPM: "You had the graciousness, sir,... to announce that we would conduct ourselves by the rules of the House of Commons;... [I] recall that it is the practice of the House to address members by their constituencies rather than by their names ... I would like to introduce you to those designations. The first speaker was the member from Reasonableness. The second speaker was the honorable member from Retrogression. The third speaker with great distinction represents the constituency from Common Sense, and then finally you heard from the honorable member from Inequity. I have not the least doubt that he represents his constituents well, and yet I wonder how often he visits them." ...WFB: "Now [Senator Moynihan] addresses you tonight as though he had not written those words [about the "absurdities" in the welfare system] and speaks again using the old rhetoric about the need of the poor to be maintained, of the thirsty to have drink, of the hungry to be fed, and if I may say so, I would like to take whatever credit is due to Ms. Shahmanesh and Mr. Halpem for avoiding that rhetoric inasmuch as we assumed that there was a general consensus on this floor on the need to look after those who are less fortunate than ourselves."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.537
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6471
item Program Number S0298, 718, 718R

"Government by Judiciary"

Guests: Berger, Raoul, 1901-

5 October 1977, 23 June 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 4-5
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 4
Program details: Professor Berger's new book, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, was a bombshell, coming as it did from a lifelong liberal. In today's discussion Professor Berger guides us through the history of judicial usurpation and speaks movingly of his own conflict: "I'm a liberal by the crudest test of all: I'm willing to pay to make things better.... My commitment to the Constitution rises paramount to every other consideration. It's not that I love segregation; in fact one of the very painful things that I have to confront is that I find myself in bed with people I detest. They're going to applaud me; whereas people I respect and esteem are going to criticize me."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.541
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6475
item Program Number S0299, 719, 719R

"Abortion: The Hyde Amendment"

Guests: Hyde, Henry J. : Pilpel, Harriet F.

5 October 1977, 17 February 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 6-7
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 4
Program details: A hotly contested though civil exchange. The starting point is the Hyde Amendment, which sought to ban federal funding of abortion, but the general question can't help being raised. HJH: "George Will … said that if you think people as meat, meat you'll become. And I think human life has become so cheap that human life has become just like animal life--not even as good as animal life, since we have quotas for dolphins, and we don't have quotas for human beings." HP: "I think human life becomes much more cheap when you say to a poor, sick woman, who has even children and can't support them, 'I'm sorry, you'll have to go ahead and have the eighth.'"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.540
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6474
item Program Number S0300, 720

"Is There a Case for Private Property?"

Guests: Hayek, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992. : Roche, George. : Greenfield, Jeff.

7 November 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 5
Program details: A splendid hour, spent more on political philosophy than on technical economics, with the author of The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty. FAH: "Few are ready to recognize that the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction to the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies." ... "It is important not to confuse opposition against [centralized] planning with a dogmatic laissez-faire attitude.... In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing." ... "If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty. And, in turn, liberty of the individual would, of course, make complete foresight impossible. Liberty is essential in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and unpredictable.... Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.544
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006GGHWDU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6478
item Program Number S0301, 721

"Has President Carter Let Blacks Down?"

Guests: Jordan, Vernon E. (Vernon Eulion), 1935-

7 November 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 5
Program details: Mr. Jordan, an old friend of President Carter's, had sharply criticized him for failing to look after the needs of the black community. This discussion begins with specifics like the poverty program, but then moves to the purpose of the civil-rights movement: was it to foster a color-blind society, or a society in which blacks qua blacks would advance? WFB: "Racial discrimination apart, why should there be a black lobby?" VJ: "Apart from discrimination? Discrimination is so much apart of us and of our lives that it cannot be separated so as to make up, Bill, a different aspect of American life. We are so interwoven with our history of neglect and inequity that you cannot separate us out."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.545
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6479
item Program Number S0302, 722, 722R

"Ferdinand Marcos: A Discussion"

Guests: Marcos, Ferdinand E. (Ferdinand Edralin), 1917-1989.

17 November 1977, 23 February 1978

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 2
Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 10-11
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 6
Program details: The Philippines were five years into President Marcos's martial law and looking forward--although with some skepticism--to elections for a new National Assembly within the next year or so. (As it turned out, the elections were held, but in the context of martial law, and Mr. Marcos's party won handily.) Meanwhile, Mr. Marcos tells us, Filipinos were rethinking their place in the world, in the light both of their own history and of recent developments such as the death of Chairman Mao and the Carter Administration's rumblings about our defense commitments. A perhaps surprisingly rich discussion--embattled heads of state are not always very forthcoming--ranging from the need for the Filipino--especially the Filipino who was educated in Western ways--"to retrace his roots, and retracing his roots, of course, he discovered that he was Asian," to the achievement of Mao Tse-tung ("the unification of the Chinese people, a people divided, isolated, degraded, colonized, a people that was marked as a sleeping giant even by Napoleon"), to the reasons democracy has not thriven in the Philippines ("We tried to get used to it and we--my predecessors--somehow convinced you that we were democratic, but we all knew that this was some kind of a mask which we had put over our face. We were trying to ape you and yet we didn't have the basic requirements--education, distribution of wealth, economic equality, equal opportunity, and the most important, believing in it"). Technical Note: The edited broadcast version of this episode is black and white. The unedited raw interview footage is in color.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.548
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEIONI
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6482
item Program Number S0303, 723

"Martial Law in the Philippines"

Guests: Valencia, Fedora. : Lopez, Salvador P.

17 November 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 6
Program details: The conversation sometimes bogs down in apparent language difficulties, but on the whole a helpful counterpoint to President Marcos's exposition. SPL: "I don't agree with that assessment at all of our democracy ... It's not mandatory that we should be judged by American standards. Philippine democracy should be judged according to the condition and the circumstances of our society, not by the demands that we should be like the American society ... The Philippines was one of the only two or three functioning democratic countries in Asia before 1972. We had sixty to seventy years of experience in democracy. All right. There were problems. What country doesn't have problems? ... The job that remained to be done was to correct the evils. You don't cure a patient by killing him, do you?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.549
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6483
item Program Number S0304, 724

"Does the Republican Party Have a Future?"

Guests: Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987.

21 November 1977

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 7
Program details: Mrs. Luce's first appearance on Firing Line (013, in 1966) had been titled "The Future of the Republican Party," and on that occasion, as the Republicans were busily repudiating Barry Goldwater, she had been tough on their stagnation. By 1977-after Vietnam, after Watergate-the Republican Party had less than half as many registered voters as the Democratic Party had and a comparable disparity in elected officials, but Mrs. Luce, although no less scathing about the current scene, draws a distinction that, in retrospect, seems predictive of Ronald Reagan's success: "Each time the Republicans come in simply as critics and tinkerers and repairmen ... they go out a little weaker. Because what is needed is not only carpenters to repair the holes in the Democratic roof. What is needed is a new architect that gives the people a vision of a better future."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.550
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6484
item Program Number S0305, 725

"Asia Policy: A Hawaiian Perspective"

Guests: Vasey, Lloyd R. : Doi, Nelson. : Weyand, Frederick.

21 November 1977

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 7
Program details: "Hawaii is," Mr. Buckley begins, "as the Japanese emphasized at Pearl Harbor, a tiny American salient, thrust two thousand miles into the Pacific Ocean. But it is irrevocably ours, as much so as Kansas or Nebraska. U.S. Asian policy, on the other hand, is made at the other end of the American world, in Washington. What does that shift in perspective do?" Actually, not much, according to our three guests: in a nuclear world proximity matters much less than it did in 1941. But Admiral Vasey is disturbed by the Carter Administration's "isolationist strategy," and General Weyand takes on the question of canceling our treaty with Taiwan: "Now if you're talking about totally withdrawing our commitment [so] that we'll stand by and watch them seize Taiwan by force and thereby deny or abrogate all of the ideals and values that we have about force being used to conquer or dominate or dictate men's way of life--" WFB: "Wait a minute. We consider this an internal affair. We made that plain at Shanghai." FW: "Well, I don't consider it an internal affair." WFB: "Yes, but you're not President." FW: "No. That's true." WFB: "You keep forgetting." FW: "I keep forgetting, unfortunately."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.551
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6485
item Program Number S0306, 726

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Senate Should Ratify the Proposed Panama Canal Treaties"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Burnham, James, 1905-1987. : Will, George F. : Zumwalt, Elmo R., 1920- : Reagan, Ronald. : Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938- : Fontaine, Roger W. : McCain, John S. (John Sidney), 1911-1981. : Bunker, Ellsworth, 1894-

13 January 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 15-16
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 8
Program details: This two-hour debate, the first one done specially for Firing Line, is said to have influenced the subsequent Senate debate on the treaties--and also Mr. Reagan's electability as President two years thence. Each principal was to bring two seconds and a military expert; Mr. Bunker was present to answer any technical questions about the treaties. The result was at once a brilliant duel and a model of civilized discourse on an emotional topic. Two samples: WFB: "Well, let me ask you to give me the answer to a question which you cannot document, but in which I permit you to consult only your insight. Would you guess that the Panamanian people would prefer, or not prefer, to exercise sovereignty over their own territory? Take as long as you want to answer that." RR: "I was just sitting here wishing that I had with me the transcript of the impassioned plea that was made to United States senators at a meeting of the Civil Council a week or so ago in Panama.... The speaker was a black-a Panamanian, not an American. His father, a West Indian, worked on the Canal, in building the Canal. The speaker had worked all his life on the Canal, and his impassioned plea was, even though he was a Panamanian, 'Don't! Don't do this! Don't ratify those treaties!' "... WFB: "Do you mean, Would President Carter, as Commander in Chief-" PJB: "And would the Senate support him?" WFB: "-would he assert American rights in the Panama Canal? In my judgment he would. Yes, sir." PJB: "... With regard to South African and Chilean vessels, or vessels going to and from those two pariah countries?" WFB: "We have a guarantee that antedates this treaty to see to it that nondiscriminatory passage is guaranteed. It's the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty." PJB: "Right, but do you think American Marines would go in to guarantee passage to vessels headed for South Africa?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.554
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFRFA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6488
item Program Number S0307, 727

"G. Gordon Liddy: An Enigma"

Guests: Liddy, G. Gordon.

11 January 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 8
Program details: G. Gordon Liddy had spent 52 months in prison for his role in Watergate, and had applied his tough-minded view of the world to life behind bars. In prison, he tells us, informers are regarded as the lowest of the low. WFB: "If, for instance, you were a member of a terrorist gang, the business of which was, let's say, to kidnap and mutilate systematically, and one day you woke up the beneficiary of a changed view of life, I understand you to be saying that you would not inform on the continuing activities of your former confederates,... and the rape and the murder would continue rather than cause you to act out the role of an informant." GGL: "No. The way you have just stated it would lead someone to believe that... the only alternative to the continued killing and mutilation and so on and so forth would be my turning informer, and that's not so. I could turn and make war upon my former associates by honorably attempting to meet them in battle and kill them."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.552
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GMX2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6486
item Program Number S0308, 728

"William F. Buckley Jr. Faces the Firing Line"

Guests: Geyelin, Philip L. : Yoder, Edwin M. (Edwin Milton), 1934- : Corddry, Charles.

11 January 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 9
Program details: The semi-annual occasion on which the guests become the interrogators, seeking, as WFB puts it, "to extract from me whatever prejudices, superstitions, or sunbursts are curdling, brewing, or germinating here." More genial than some of these sessions, this one ranges from the Middle East to SALT, from the MX missile to import-export controls, from the Humphrey-Hawkins employment bill (Firing Line s0230) to the legalization of heroin for treating intractable pain. EY: "By what particular measure would you apply your instrumental test to foreign policy ... ?" WFB: "I answer that with an ease that you might find both disarming and simplistic. Every day when I wake up I look and see whether the sun has risen on a day in which the Soviet Union is stronger or weaker than us, relatively speaking...." PG: "What are the calipers that you use at sunrise to determine each day whether the Soviet Union is a little bit up or a little bit behind?" WFB: "Well, it usually begins by reading an editorial in the Washington Post. If I find they are in a good mood, then I start counting my silver and worrying."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.553
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6487
item Program Number S0309, 729

"Exclusive Conversation with Chiang Ching-kuo"

Guests: Chiang, Ching-kuo, 1910-1988.

12 November 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 19-20
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 9
Program details: The first of only two Firing Lines (the other being s0940, with a successor of Mr. Chiang's, Hau Pei-tsun) where the guest used an interpreter (the Chinese replies were then edited out, leaving only the interpreter's English). Six years after the Republic of China was expelled from the United Nations, President Chiang (son of Chiang Kai-shek) speaks movingly (though not always presciently) about the future of Taiwan and Mainland China: "Everyone talks about this question as 'the Taiwan question.' As a matter of fact, it is the China question. We are the government of the Republic of China.... After Mao's death, the Chinese Communist regime cannot [gain] firm control in all parts of China. Not Hua Guofeng. Not Deng Xiaoping. ... In the future the Chinese mainland will disintegrate."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.546
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6480
item Program Number S0310, 730

"What Is the Future of Taiwan?"

Guests: Shaw, Shullen. : Moosa, Spencer. : Yinn, Diane.

12 November 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 10
Program details: "Against the background of an almost unparalleled parade," as WFB describes it,"of U.S. Government officials" through Taipei and Peking, it appeared that "the crisis point in U.S.-Taiwan relations" had been reached. But before getting to the crisis per se, Mr. Buckley questions his guests--on how the Republic of China is doing on civil liberties; how the indigenous Taiwanese would react if Mainland forces attacked; and on whether the United Nations should be invited in to conduct a plebiscite--and finds them passionately, indeed ferociously, protective of their adopted country. WFB: "You sound as though you were arguing with me about something." SS: "Yes, sir." WFB: "Whoever said that I believe that you should trust the Chinese Communists on anything? I mean, they don't trust themselves. I'm not sure you should trust the United States, so why should you trust the Chinese Communists?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.547
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6481
item Program Number S0311, 731

"Conscience and the Vietnam War"

Guests: Snepp, Frank.

30 January 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 10
Program details: Mr. Snepp, the CIA's top analyst of North Vietnamese political affairs during the Vietnam War, had been in Saigon right up to the end. The "disdainful title" of his book, as WFB reminds us, refers to "a famous observation by Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, that he hoped the Paris Accords would provide a decent interval of self-determination for South Vietnam before what would surely be the final chapter in their struggle with the Communists." This absorbing discussion ranges from why Mr. Snepp felt free to release CIA secrets ("Perhaps I was wrong and this is an expression of hubris, but I believe that secrets must be maintained by everybody, and not merely by the lower-ranking officials of the State Department and the CIA"), to the terms of the Paris Accords themselves (FS: "Viewed as a whole they were a sellout--of South Vietnam to the North." WFB: "So Thieu was exactly correct to oppose them?" FS: "Oh, I think so").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.556
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6490
item Program Number S0312, 732

"Is Soviet Policy an Extension of Russian Policy?"

Guests: Salisbury, Harrison Evans, 1908-

30 January 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 11
Program details: Mr. Salisbury, the retired chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times, had been a student of Russia all his adult life. In this conversation rich in detail, he sets out his view that "Soviet imperialism is mainly an extension of Russian imperialism all the way back to the Ivans," and only secondarily an expression of ideology: "Lenin himself was really a great improviser, who used a lot of Marxist language to do what he thought he had to do to maintain his power and get his country moving again. [Marxism-Leninism] is a ragbag. I think one of the great delusions of our generation is to assume that there is such a thing as Marxism-Leninism just because they label it that. I just don't think it exists."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.555
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6489
item Program Number S0313, 733

"The Role of Liberals in the Republican Party"

Guests: Mathias, Charles McC. (Charles McCurdy), 1922-

16 March 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 11
Program details: Senator Mathias had led a group of liberal Republicans protesting that some conservatives were encouraging primary challenges against them. The question before the house is: "How sectarian should a political party be?" To what extent does its success depend on refining its ideological differences with the other party, to what extent on broadening its base? In a conversation ranging from Lincoln to Lenin to Goldwater, Senator Mathias makes the case for inclusiveness. CM: "Going back a little beyond Lenin to Lincoln, Lincoln recruited the Republican Party from a very disparate kind of political scene in which you had abolitionists and you had conservatives. You had all sorts of different American groups that he brought together on the concept of freedom...." WFB: "Now, Lincoln may be a bad guy to start out with because Lincoln was so terribly eclectic and at the same time so terribly expediential...." CM: "Lincoln may be a hard man to start with, but in fact he is the man we started with." WFB: "He was the first Republican President, but he didn't found the Republican Party." CM: "No, but he brought it to power. He showed how it could come to power and how it could perform."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.557
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGMZS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6491
item Program Number S0314, 734

"How the U.S. Press Handled Tet"

Guests: Braestrup, Peter.

16 March 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 12
Program details: The Tet Offensive of 1968 was widely described as the turning point of the war: taking the American command by surprise, the Vietcong surrounded the Marine base at Khesanh and actually got as far as the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon. The Allies quickly rallied and drove them back--but not before America had been convinced that we had suffered a serious defeat. Now Peter Braestrup had written a 1,500-page book analyzing the American press's reporting and its effects. An illuminating discussion, from which one sample. Mr. Braestrup: "Adding to the pressures was the terrible fear among the civilians in the White House. You remember that none of these men--including the President--had ever fought in a war on the ground. None of the whiz kids in the Pentagon had ever fought in a war on the ground. They were all defense intellectuals. They saw the big picture, but when the little picture got bloody and smoky, this made them nervous, and it made the President nervous."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.558
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6492
item Program Number S0315, 735

"The Energy Crisis"

Guests: Schlesinger, James R.

21 March 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 12
Program details: "When James Schlesinger was Secretary of Defense," Mr. Buckley begins, "the good news is that there was no war. Now that he is Secretary of Energy, the bad news is that there is no energy, or at least not enough of it, or more exactly a looming world scarcity of it." This is not another discussion of OPEC, but rather one of what we can do given continued OPEC intransigence. Mr. Schlesinger places more reliance on government manipulation, Mr. Buckley more reliance on the free market, in this informative discussion ranging from why there is so much bad blood between coal miners and mine owners, to how Americans can be persuaded of the virtues of nuclear energy (Mr. Schlesinger was once head of the Atomic Energy Commission), to how we can become less profligate in our use of energy: JS: "Prices have always been low in the United States. Energy has been cheap. The American character is expansive. It has not recognized these limits, the question of finiteness. The only experience that America has had with finiteness was the closing of the frontier."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.559
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6493
item Program Number S0316, 736

"The Guilt of Alger Hiss"

Guests: Weinstein, Allen. : Theoharis, Athan G. : Corddry, Charles.

21 March 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 13
Program details: An absorbing exploration of the Hiss-Chambers case with two scholars, one of whom, before he started work on his monumental book, thought that Alger Hiss had been framed and that Whittaker Chambers had perjured himself; the other of whom still believes Hiss innocent. WFB: "I should like to begin by asking Mr. Weinstein is there a survivor who was involved with both Hiss and Chambers who, having remained silent, might now under the prodding of your book speak out with the truth?" AW: "I think there are several who could, Mr. Buckley. I would be very surprised if any did.... Although it should be said that it surprised me when some of the people who spoke to me for the book did. For example, in his own memoir, Witness, Whittaker Chambers calls upon a man he mentions only by the name Paul and ... says he's hoping this man will come defend him... -an old, old, friend. Well, Paul did not at the time. He was a Communist. Paul later broke with the Party and was- I prefer not to mention his name now; he enjoys a certain measure of privacy now. But he confirmed every aspect of Chambers's story insofar as it concerned him."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.560
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U8U
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6494
item Program Number S0317, 737

"[A Firing Line Debate]: Resolved: That the Price of Oil and Natural Gas Should Be Regulated by the Federal Government"

Guests: Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006. : Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008.

30 March 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 13
Program details: This show might be called a mini-debate: it follows the formal procedures-opening statements, cross-examination, rebuttals-but with a single combatant on either side. The two old adversaries go at it, as always, with good-humored ferocity. Mr. Galbraith begins by contending that a free market in oil and gas has not existed for some time: "The market has been extensively superseded by planning, and this planning...has been planning not by the Federal Government, not by other units of government, but essentially by the large and powerful enterprises which bring these products to us." Mr. Buckley counters: "It is of course his thesis, now as always, that the market has been superseded-superseded by natural events rather than by synthetic events. He refers to his kinship with reality and reason by contrast with my own with romance and nostalgia. I do remember nostalgically when an agent of the Federal Government reported in 1885 that under no circumstances would any oil ever be discovered in California."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.561
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RW6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6495
item Program Number S0318, 738

"The Experiences of Sam Ervin"

Guests: Ervin, Sam J. (Sam James), 1896-1985. : Corddry, Charles.

17 April 1978

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 14
Program details: The man who throughout the Watergate hearings, which he chaired, described himself as just an "old country lawyer" has a tendency to go a-speechifying, which frequently draws us away from a discussion of how Watergate-inspired laws have changed our public discourse; still, it's fun to listen to Mr. Ervin's brand of carefully homespun political wisdom. SJE: "Frankly, I think the big trouble in public life is there are too many people in public life with the anatomy of the jellyfish. They haven't got much backbone, and I think they need more backbone in government ..." WFB: "You think they should hang tough?" SJE: "Well, I think they ought to get a backbone some way instead of being so much like jellyfish." WFB: "Like Gordon Liddy?" SJE: "Well, Gordon Liddy has a little too much backbone. I'll have to admit that I have a sort of sneaking admiration for a fellow like Gordon Liddy that does have an excess of backbone. His backbone exceeds his intelligence, really."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.564
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6498
item Program Number S0319, 739

"Algeria Revisited"

Guests: Horne, Alistair.

17 April 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 14
Program details: An illuminating discussion of this turning point in mid-century history. Mr. Horne gives the background going back to 1848, when the Second French Republic--in its infinite wisdom or lack thereof--declared Algeria to be a departement, and "[it] acted like a sort of albatross around the neck of every successive French government." We move on to parallels in Rhodesia today and Indochina yesterday and to a description of the two sides in the civil war itself: "The Algerians among Muslims are very, very fierce people. You ask any German soldier who took part in either the First or Second World War....And on the other hand ... the pieds noirs weren't really French in the way that you and I understand French. They were very meridional, passionate, many of them Spanish, Italian, and were being baked hard by the sun ..."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.562
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6496
item Program Number S0320, 740

"The Neutron Bomb"

Guests: Cohen, S. T. : Scoville, Herbert.

24 April 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 15
Program details: This debate over the moral and strategic implications of the Enhanced Radiation Weapon, as it is formally called, is hampered by the fact that Dr. Cohen is less clear viva voce than in his laboratory or in front of a typewriter. But the discussion sometimes clicks, especially under Mr. Buckley's cross-examination. WFB: "Was it you or one of your colleagues who said that in fact the knowledge of their imminent death might cause [tank personnel] to act as a kamikaze might have?" HS: "That's true.... For example, a tank crew that has been irradiated and knows that it's going to die two weeks later may just decide, The hell with it--I'm going to just shoot the place up.'"... STC: "It is not a blast weapon; it's strictly a weapon to incapacitate tank personnel...." WFB: "Be concrete about it. What does it do?" STC: "It induces severe physiological trauma." WFB: "In three minutes? Five minutes? Ten?" STC: "In less than an hour [they would die]. But the incapacitating effects would occur within several minutes."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.565
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6499
item Program Number S0321, 741

"Cutting Your Taxes"

Guests: Kemp, Jack. : Greenfield, Jeff.

24 April 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 15
Program details: It's hard to remember now that the Kemp-Roth bill pre-dated the Reagan Administration, but so it did. An engaging hour with the young Jack Kemp, who, as WFB puts it in his introduction, had "helped to develop the most welcome political proposal conceivable: eat a greater portion of the cake, so as to increase the size of it." One sample: JK: "If you shrank a year's behavior into one week, and if you taxed Monday's income at 10 per cent, Tuesday's at 20 per cent, Wednesday's at 30 per cent, and so on, then you have to ask the question at what point during the week would leisure become more attractive ... than work? At what point would a tax shelter look far more attractive than an investment in a factory or an entrepreneurial activity?" WFB: "You'd start getting pretty long weekends, wouldn't you?" JK: "You'd get very long weekends."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.566
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6500
item Program Number S0322, 742

"The Holocaust Controversy"

Guests: O'Connor, John J. : Neusner, Jacob, 1932-

12 May 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 16
Program details: A docudrama called "Holocaust" had just aired on NBC to wide acclaim--but not the acclaim of WFB and his guests, who proceed to discuss it with depth and authority. JN: "I think we are dealing with an event that has been exploited so that what happened along time ago--" WFB: "Exploited in what sense? You don't mean commercially exploited, do you? Or do you?" JN: "Well, I think that's not the principal kind of exploitation. There's been a political and an emotional exploitation of tragic events that are rich in human meaning. This is something that some of us have been calling Holocaust Inc., because we are confronted now with the turning of a human tragedy of almost infinite dimensions into a club with which to beat the world." WFB: "Or to beat God." ... JJO: "The defenders of Holocaust keep coming back to the same old theme: it was better to have it on than not have it on. Why? ... For some reason they feel that if you put this on there's going to be a massive change in the thinking of the population."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.567
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6501
item Program Number S0323, 743

"Public Policy and the Economy"

Guests: Simon, William E., 1927- : Shilling, A. Gary.

12 May 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 16
Program details: We were in the midst of the "stagflation" (stagnation combined with inflation) that would two years thence be part of the reason for President Carter's defeat; but at this point our guests are voices crying in the wilderness, "attempting to explain to the American people," as Mr. Simon puts it, "whom I consider, at risk of offending them, economically illiterate," that "economic freedoms and personal and political freedoms are indivisible, that when the government takes over your substance it takes power over your liberty." An electric discussion of, to quote again from Mr. Simon, "the pattern [of] spend and spend, elect and elect, tax, regulate, and dominate our lives and our livelihoods."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.568
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6502
item Program Number S0324, 744

"The Psychological Society"

Guests: Gross, Martin L. (Martin Louis), 1925- : Tamarkin, Norman R.

31 May 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 17
Program details: As the title of Mr. Gross's book suggests, he doesn't think much of modern psychiatry, which in his view is "neglecting the comparatively few people who really need its services, in favor of taking care of the well people on Park Avenue or Miami Beach." Dr. Tamarkin maintains that on the whole the profession is honest about differentiating between clinical conditions and normal grief or anxiety. Mr. Buckley serves as referee. NRT (alleging that Mr. Gross has misquoted certain people in his book): "Dr. Greenson is not aloof, according to him. He talks to his patients regularly--" MG: "Excuse me--" NRT: "--and if you have some strange idea of--" MG: "If Dr. Greenson were to admit this in public he'd be discharged from the American Psychoanalytic--" NRT:"That's--" MG: "--because classical analysis is based on incognito, as you know. Aloofness and--" NRT: "That's hard and extreme [and] rarely practiced, Martin, and he wouldn't be kicked out of the American Psychoanalytic-- That's foolishness you're saying." MG: "No, that's not true. Dr. Greenson has written a text which says specifically, and please read the text again, that psychoanalysis is a cool, detached, objective analysis. It is not normal psychotherapy, which Dr. Freud says was dross, and psychoanalysis was golden." WFB: "Let me try to get concrete."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.569
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6503
item Program Number S0325, 745

"The Crisis of Intelligence"

Guests: Walters, Vernon A. : Meyer, Sylvan

31 May 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 114 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 17
Program details: General Walters had, roughly speaking, been everywhere and seen everything for three decades--confidential translator for Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy; CIA man and ambassador to the United Nations; witness to the Smoking Gun conversation that brought Watergate to a close. On this show--which ranges from Pearl Harbor back to the American Revolution and forward again to Watergate and to a world scene that includes, as General Walters puts it, "42,000 Cubans spread around Africa today"--he proves incisive and impressive: "My own position on assassination is that I am against it for three reasons: (1) It's against the law of God. (2) It's against the law of man. (3) It doesn't work." WFB: "Which shows that God was prudent?" VW: "Very. We know that." Note: Alternate title on transcript is "Secret Diplomacy."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.570
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWR4W
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6504
item Program Number S0326

"Numbering error -- repeat of Firing Line #S298"

Guests:

0000-00-00

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 18
Program details:
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.542
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6476
item Program Number S0327, 801

"[A Firing Line Debate]: Resolved: That We Welcome the Growth of the Public Sector"

Guests: Harrington, Michael, 1928- : Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008.

13 October 1977

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 18
Program details: Like Firing Line s0317, this is a formal debate but with a single combatant on either side. Mr. Harrington contends that "certain hard facts--an aging population; the growth of technology and of pollution-force an increase in the public sector whether anyone likes it or not: Okay. Mr. Buckley and I agree: inexorably, under a Nixon, under a Ford, the government moves in. Why? Why is that historical trend there? Is it there because of a plot? Is it there because Nixon or Ford or whatever conservative gets in sells out? I don't think so. I think there are profound economic, social, technological, and political trends which force conservatives as well as liberals to advocate more government intervention." ... WFB: "Government got into medicine about 12 years ago. What has happened? Do we have more doctors? No. Do we have more nurses? No. What we have is double the cost of a medical bill."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.543
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6477
item Program Number S0328, 802

"The Sinking Dollar"

Guests: Healey, Denis.

26 June 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 19
Program details: A crackling exchange that doesn't have a lot to do with the sinking dollar mentioned in the title (DH: "My dear fellow, I have enough trouble running our own economy not to make judgments about yours") but that ranges over government deficits and North Sea oil, comparative standards of living ("I think that we in Britain have always valued material things less than social stability, comfort, ease, grace. I would say the change in Britain since the war is exactly the opposite one: that having declined relative to other countries for a century,... [since] 1960 I think Britain has given more, not less, attention to material things"), and the relation between taxation and wage increases (with Mr. Healey defending a 98 per cent top tax rate on the grounds that "if you're to get the consent of people with very low living standards not to ... bargain for excessive wages and to settle for moderate increases, then you have to prove to them that other people are subject to similar limitations").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.571
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6505
item Program Number S0329

"Numbering error -- repeat of Firing Line #S318"

Guests:

0000-00-00

Scope and Contents note

Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 19
Program details:
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.563
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6497
item Program Number S0330, 803

"The 1950s Communist Purge"

Guests: Caute, David.

26 June 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 20
Program details: This show offers a clash of world views between WFB and a man whose book had been criticized even by so dedicated an anti-McCarthyite as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., on the grounds that it somehow suggests "that... it was a wicked thing to call a Stalinist a Stalinist or a fellow traveler a fellow traveler." DC: "It all depends on what our premises about a national consensus are. To many people the victory of the Red Army or Mao Tse-tung's Communist regime in China in 1949 was not the collapse of China, nor, to use the phrase you used rather significantly a moment ago, was it a question of 'we,' the United States, 'lost China.'..." WFB: "But you see, Mr. Caute, in America we have a system in which there are branches of government, and it is the explicit constitutional responsibility of the Congress of the United States to monitor the activities of the Executive. Now, one of the activities of the Executive was to engage in a series of maneuvers in the Far East which, assuming a causal relationship of any sort, resulted in the enslavement by the Communists of the Mainland and in a war in Korea in which a great many Americans were killed."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.572
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6506
item Program Number S0331, 804

"The Rhodesian Dilemma"

Guests: Muzorewa, Abel Tendekayi, 1925-

21 July 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 20
Program details: "Bishop Muzorewa," as WFB introduces him, "has been ... the outstanding leader in Rhodesia, demanding political rights for the black majority. He eschewed violence, insisting on other forms of pressure. He pursued Christian principles." But in Western establishment opinion he had fallen from grace by joining (with two other black leaders) in a Provisional Council with Prime Minister Ian Smith, to shepherd Rhodesia through what they hoped would be a peaceful transition. Revolutionaries led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe were waging guerrilla warfare, "with the explicit goal," as WFB puts it, "of frustrating the national plebiscite and creating an all-black Marxist-oriented state." So why aren't Americans rallying behind the moderates? Bishop Muzorewa gives us a richly detailed account of postwar African political history, including the terms on which, say, Tanganyika and Zambia got their independence, and how that affects their attitudes towards present-day Rhodesia: "Your State Department... I believe is acting ... to appease certain powers in Africa ... [who] have one person they have decided should be the king of Zimbabwe and they are trying to be kingmakers themselves. This started with Dr. Kaunda [President of Zambia], who is personally committed to Mr. Nkomo, and he has mobilized every front-line state, so called, to support him."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.578
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9SC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6512
item Program Number S0332, 805

"Muggeridge Revisited"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990. : Knight, Andrew.

27 June 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 21
Program details: The last time Mr. Muggeridge was on Firing Line, Mr. Buckley reminds us, it was to comment on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's first television interview (#S225); a few weeks before today's show was taped, Solzhenitsyn had again made waves, this time with his Harvard commencement address. Solzhenitsyn, with those great burning eyes, speaks like a prophet. Muggeridge, with his twinkling eyes, speaks like a benevolent grandfather-but the two men wind up saying much the same thing, whether speaking of the City of God or the City of Man. MM: Every courageous man in the West who believes in freedom and equality will have a go at them [the South Africans], because that's very easy. But-" WFB: "Or Chile." MM: "Chile, not quite so easily, because there aren't many black people there, and it's not within the orbit much of the West; but South Africa is the absolutely favorite thing. In order not to have to do or say anything about the Gulag, it's perfect.... I've been reading Spengler in these dark days. Do you ever read it?" WFB: "I've managed to avoid it." MM: "You won't avoid it for long.""
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.574
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6508
item Program Number S0333, 806

"Firing Line's British Correspondents"

Guests: Hayman, Helene Middleweek. : Evans, Roger. : Riddell, Peter.

27 June 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 21
Program details: It had been ten years since these three Britons had first appeared on Firing Line--in that case, as panelists when they were all three still at Cambridge. They have jointly and severally appeared many times since as panelists or guest interrogators; it was thought this time to invite them as guests in their own right. They come through splendidly, in a spirited examination of the differences between British and American public-affairs television and political debate (with an account of, among much else, how Enoch Powell had finally broken the barrier of silence against him on British TV), the adversary tradition in debating, and the merits of public speakers from Edmund Burke to Richard Nixon. One sample: WFB: "Are you supposed to memorize your speech [in the House of Commons]?" HMH: "You're supposed to speak impromptu." WFB: "Well, the great orations of Churchill--as a matter of fact, he did memorize them; but a number... For instance, the speeches of Burke were certainly not impromptu, were they?" RE: "He always emptied the House of Commons. He was known as the dinner bell. He was not a successful parliamentary orator. Lord North was the parliamentary genius of his age, which is why he preserved his majority so long in the face of the rebellion in the Americas; and so was Walpole before him. That was a knockabout House of Commons, impromptu style."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.573
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6507
item Program Number S0334, 807

"Cambodia and the Refugee Problem"

Guests: Vin, Im. : Cherne, Leo, 1912-

20 July 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 22
Program details: The holocaust in Cambodia had been going on for three years; somewhere between 15 and 25 per cent of the population had been killed. Mr. Vin had escaped to tell the tale, and although his English is weak, he is a moving witness ("I don't think that what is reported to the world is exaggerated. What is said about the holocaust, the executions, the crimes, starvation, hardship, and sickness, is true, absolutely true"). To the question why are so many people denying the magnitude of the killing, Mr. Cherne points out that some of those who were initially the most skeptical (partly because of "their previous knowledge of the Cambodians as a gentle people; and it seemed inconceivable to them"), once they saw the evidence, "are today the most impressive among those who have assembled the data which make Mr. Vin's story a modest one."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.576
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6510
item Program Number S0335, 808

"What Rights Do Nazis Have?"

Guests: Dershowitz, Alan M. : Neier, Aryeh, 1937- : Van den Haag, Ernest.

20 July 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 22
Program details: The American Nazi Party had sought to march in the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, and finally had been permitted instead to march in a park in Chicago; many people had been surprised--or indeed infuriated--when the ACLU weighed in on behalf of the Nazis. Host and guests, approaching free speech from four quite different directions, shed considerable light on the bases for maintaining free speech and the theories on when it can be justifiably curtailed. One sample: WFB: "Would you defend the right of the American people by constitutional amendment to repeal the Bill of Rights?" AN: "No, because I don't derive my civil-liberties values from the Bill of Rights. I consider it fortunate that the Bill of Rights embodies the civil-liberties values that I hold, but the values come first; the particular instrument come second."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.575
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6509
item Program Number S0336, 809

"Three vs. William F. Buckley Jr."

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Burden, Carter. : Lowenstein, Allard K.

21 July 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 9-10
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 23
Program details: In this installment of the semi-annual turning of the tables, the guests question their host on everything from government spending, to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, to aid to authoritarian regimes. Two samples: HP: "I think what we can agree on in disputes of this kind is that the role of the government, in a culturally diverse, pluralistic society, is to be neutral." WFB: "My God! You want to pass a law [ERA] forbidding me to hire a female nurse for my mother, and you're telling me the law has to be neutral in matters of such gravity as abortion!" ... CB: "But if life is sacred, if that is a basic moral premise, then how can you in any case justify taking life [via the death penalty]?" WFB: "By reading the Bible." CB: "An eye for an eye? You subscribe to that?" WFB: "No, I don't subscribe to that. But there are many instances in the Bible where, given due process, and given the gravity of the crime, the taking of life is authorized."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.577
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52U9O
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6511
item Program Number S0337, 810

"Federal Regulation and the Travel Explosion"

Guests: Kahn, Alfred E. (Alfred Edward)

22 August 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 23
Program details: Mr. Kahn is that rare bird, a regulator who wants his regulatory agency to go out of business (which it eventually did, though not on his watch--Firing Line s0631). He is another breed of rare bird as well: a public servant who speaks plain, and pungent, English. A spirited conversation exploring what is the minimal sort of regulation that is needed in the air lanes, why the government shouldn't be granting monopoly routes, and how competition really can work in the airline industry. HK: "In any case, American Airlines, which was one of the leading objectors to deregulation, has now gone all the way over to the other extreme." WFB: "With cut fares and cut rates." HK: "Oh yes. They just say, 'Get out of our way.' I wish I could say that I had been farsighted enough to have planned it so, but there is a general view now among many airline executives that if the CAB is going to be of so little use to us by way of protecting us, then let's get them out of the way. That is a simply delightful development."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.579
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6513
item Program Number S0338, 811

"Newsmen and the Law"

Guests: Worthington, Peter, 1927- : Rusher, William A., 1923-

22 August 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 24
Program details: Mr. Worthington had been arraigned under the Official Secrets Act--ostensibly because he had published confidential Royal Canadian Mounted Police documents detailing KGB activity; or possibly, WFB posits, because he was such a trenchant critic of the Trudeau government. A bracing discussion of the rights and responsibilities of journalists. WFB: T"he Pentagon Papers case, for instance-where would you have voted on that?" PW: "Oh, but you see, I don't have much use for the Daniel Ellsbergs of this world. It seems to me they're violating the spirit of their oath (if there was an oath). However, as a journalist, if I had the opportunity to receive the papers, I would publish them. Police don't have to admire the informer while using his information."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.580
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6514
item Program Number S0339, 812

"The Mission of the Pope"

Guests: Martin, Malachi.

6 September 1978

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 ; 3
Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 24
Program details: There's a frisson, in retrospect, in learning that the new pope being discussed on this show is not John Paul II but his predecessor, John Paul I, who would die just a month after his election. But for now, Mr. Martin gives us a breathless and detail-filled account of why Pope Paul VI had sought to appease the Communists ("because he was persuaded that he couldn't stop the advent of Communist parties ... [either in Europe or in Latin America] and hence his idea was, 'Let's survive by making friends'"), what the election of Albino Luciani as John Paul I portended, and how the conclave that elected him actually proceeded ("And Wyszynski, this Pole whom the Romans have always referred to contemptuously as 'Our Holy Father of Central Europe,' he sort of steamrolls over everybody. Having dealt with Gomulka and Gierek in the Stalinist period in Poland, he's a strong man. He and Wojtyla of Krakow and a man called Josef Hoffner, a strong arrogant German cardinal--I'm sure his arrogance stems from his desire for the Kingdom of God, but that's his reputation--and Ratzinger and then the four Spanish cardinals ...came in and said, 'No way. We won't accept your candidate or the policy'").
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.581
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H3WG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6515
item Program Number S0340, 813, 813R

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Are in the Interests of U.S. National Security--Part I"

Guests: McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : La Rocque, Gene R. (Gene Robert), 1918- : Russett, Bruce M. : Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Nitze, Paul H. : Bishop, Joseph Warren.

19 September 1978, 5 August 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 25
Program details: Would a new SALT agreement strengthen or weaken the United States? Would failure to reach such an agreement make a nuclear holocaust more or less likely? Two samples from this high-octane debate: PN: "Let me now get to the substantive part. You agree with [chief SALT negotiator] Paul Warnke's statement in which he says that neither the U.S. nor the USSR can attain superiority over the other except by default, and that we will not be guilty of default in this sphere?" GL: "I'd have to answer that I support the statement of Henry Kissinger when he said, 'Nuclear superiority-what in the hell good is it?' "... WFB: "I perceive that there is great confusion, Senator, because you spent the early part of the evening telling us that we had redundant power, and now in the beginning of the second hour you're telling us that the Soviet Union intends to deploy 700 more missiles. Why do they want 700 more missiles when you have just told us how frequently they could kill us with the missiles they have? ..." GM: "Mr. Buckley, what I am saying is that in the absence of an agreement, both sides will continue the pattern they've followed for years-" WFB: "Why? Why?" GM: "-of increasing. Because of the madness that exists-" WFB: "Who's mad? I'm not mad." GM: "I would suggest that if not mad, you're at least lacking in vision and common sense."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.583
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6517
item Program Number S0341, 814

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Are in the Interests of U.S. National Security-Part II"

Guests: McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : La Rocque, Gene R. (Gene Robert), 1918- : Russett, Bruce M. : Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Nitze, Paul H. : Bishop, Joseph Warren.

19 September 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 15-16
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 25
Program details: Would a new SALT agreement strengthen or weaken the United States? Would failure to reach such an agreement make a nuclear holocaust more or less likely? Two samples from this high-octane debate: PN: "Let me now get to the substantive part. You agree with [chief SALT negotiator] Paul Warnke's statement in which he says that neither the U.S. nor the USSR can attain superiority over the other except by default, and that we will not be guilty of default in this sphere?" GL: "I'd have to answer that I support the statement of Henry Kissinger when he said, 'Nuclear superiority-what in the hell good is it?' "... WFB: "I perceive that there is great confusion, Senator, because you spent the early part of the evening telling us that we had redundant power, and now in the beginning of the second hour you're telling us that the Soviet Union intends to deploy 700 more missiles. Why do they want 700 more missiles when you have just told us how frequently they could kill us with the missiles they have? ..." GM: "Mr. Buckley, what I am saying is that in the absence of an agreement, both sides will continue the pattern they've followed for years-" WFB: "Why? Why?" GM: "-of increasing. Because of the madness that exists-" WFB: "Who's mad? I'm not mad." GM: "I would suggest that if not mad, you're at least lacking in vision and common sense."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.584
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6518
item Program Number S0342, 815

"The U.S. Military and the Crisis of Morale"

Guests: Goodpaster, Andrew Jackson, 1915-

6 September 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 26
Program details: In the wake of a cheating scandal that had called West Point's honor system into question, General Goodpaster (who had served in posts ranging from combat duty as a junior officer in World War II to Commander in Chief of U.S. and NATO forces in Europe in the early Seventies) had been recalled from retirement to put the Military Academy back in order. The discussion, slow-moving but productive, ranges from technical aspects of West Point's operations to the general question, Has the West lost its courage? AG: "It developed that West Point was suffering from a very considerable rot. That rot finally came to light, and the facts became known, and a good deal has been done to remedy that. And I think that we--and here I associate myself with the cadets, and with the whole staff and faculty--we're prepared to rest on how well we're doing, not on a prestige that derived from an image that related to a former time."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.582
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6516
item Program Number S0343, 816

"Australia with the Prime Minister"

Guests: Fraser, John Malcom, 1930-

26 October 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 26
Program details: In 1975 the Governor-General of Australia--who, as Mr. Buckley puts it, is "generally expected to do nothing more adventurous than escort visiting presidents and kings to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier"--dismissed the Prime Minister, Mr. Gough Whitlam, and appointed Mr. Fraser. One month later, the voters confirmed Governor Kerr's judgments by giving Mr. Fraser's party a landslide victory. Three years later he was in trouble in the polls, at least partly because, although his government had brought down the inflation it had inherited, it had not brought down unemployment. Today's conversation starts slowly, with Mr. Fraser a little inclined to evasion ("I think it's impertinent for me to make a judgment about the kinds of policies the United States ought to pursue." WFB: "We'd be very grateful, because ours aren't working"), but it improves as we go along, covering matters from economics, to Australia's participation in the World Wars and the Vietnam War, to the proper relations with authoritarian regimes such as Argentina's and Chile's. MF: "We're all affected by the world around us--what the United States can do, the physical power of the United States compared to the Soviet Union. Where does the weight of the hundreds of millions of Chinese fit into that particular equation? And Australia is a nation of 14 million people only, and small nations, I think, have to tread their paths with skill."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.588
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6522
item Program Number S0344, 817

"Labor Down Under"

Guests: Hawke, Robert J. L. (Robert James Lee), 1929- : Lipski, Sam

26 October 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 27
Program details: The future Prime Minister (he would defeat Mr. Fraser in 1983) was at this time not even a member of Parliament, although he was, Mr. Buckley tells us, "frequently designated as the most influential figure in Australian public life." This rousing session on the place of trade unions and the power of the press never slows down. One sample, on whether generous union settlements and rises in the minimum wage hurt the workers at the lowest end of the scale: RH: "No, I don't think it's true in America, and it's certainly not true in this country. It's a nonsense theory as far as Australia is concerned.... Because under the way in which our arbitration system operates, when the trade-union movement goes in and conducts cases to improve wages or working conditions, the results don't flow simply to members of trade unions. They go to all people who are employed ..." WFB: "You have a remarkable facility for simply co-opting all idealistic objectives and saying that they are served by your policies. Now, is this simply a polemical habit, or are you willing to give an objective basis for it? In point of fact, every time in America there has been a raise in the minimum wage there has been a huge increase in black unemployment. Now what's nonsensical about that?" RH: "Well, I wish you'd really listen to what I was saying ..."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.589
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6523
item Program Number S0345, 818

"U.S.-Puerto Rican Relations"

Guests: Romero-Barcelo, Carlos.

25 September 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 27
Program details: Amid demands for independence by bomb-wielding militants, and charges Stateside that Puerto Ricans just wanted to get on the welfare gravy train, public discussion of Puerto Rican statehood had gone into abeyance. It had been revived by Gerald Ford in one of his last statements as President. Governor Romero rebuts the charges and defends statehood on theoretical grounds: WFB: "You don't think it is possible to improvise on the Commonwealth, so as, for instance, to give you a negative veto on federal legislation as it applies to Puerto Rico ... ?" CRB: "Bill, if you don't understand really what it means to be a U.S. citizen ... then you might be happy with that. But once understanding what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, you want to have political participation to the same extent with the same rights and the same privileges and obligations as everyone else. You cannot accept something that is different."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.585
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6519
item Program Number S0346, 819

"Independence for Puerto Rico?"

Guests: Camacho, Luis. : Agrait, Luis E. : Ramos, Oreste.

25 September 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 28
Program details: "Our guests today are representatives," as Mr. Buckley puts it, "of the three positions" on Puerto Rico's future--"nonviolent representatives of the three positions, I might add." Each ably defends his position and informatively discusses matters such as the economy, taxation, and the minimum wage--with Mr. Camacho to add spice: WFB: "If in fact 39 per cent of [Puerto Rico's] per-capita income is being contributed by Stateside taxpayers, how do we transform this into an act of oppression against Puerto Rico?" LC: "Well, even in terms of social dependency, that's an aggression."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.586
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6520
item Program Number S0347, 820

"Three Australian Journalists and William F. Buckley Jr."

Guests: Hewitt, Tim. : MacCallum, Mungo. : Lipski, Sam.

26 October 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 28
Program details: An uninhibited whirl through the effects of modernity on Australia, from uranium mining and the Aborigines to computers and the typing pool. TH: "Now Mungo will go berserk and he'll say, 'No, it's nothing like that, it's nothing as mundane as that.' Of course it's as mundane as that. I do not blame the Aborigine. He sees the chance to make a lot of money [out of the uranium-mining companies], and I believe in making a lot of money. Mungo will now say that I'm a pterodactyl and something frightful has happened. Go ahead." MM: "No, I'll simply say that you are dead set bloody ignorant." TH: "No, I know rather more than you do about most matters." MM: "You probably know a little more about making money than I do." TH: "Libel! Libel!"... SL: "The fact is that most Australians simply don't live anywhere where Aborigines are seen, and this is unlike the situation of the [American] blacks. It may be analogous to the Red Indians, because in most American big cities you don't see Red Indians ... But there is a backlash ... against a certain thrusting down the throats of Australians sitting out there in television land, the kind of notion that they did have some guilt, some sense of overwhelming responsibility to the Aborigines."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.587
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6521
item Program Number S0348, 822

"What Should Our China Policy Be?"

Guests: White, Theodore Harold, 1915-

12 December 1978

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 29
Program details: The winds of change were blowing in China. "Every day," Mr. Buckley begins," a fresh victim of one of Mao's purges is exonerated; tomorrow they may disentomb Mozart at the rate they are going . . ." To help us sort it all out, we have one of the English-speaking world's leading journalists, whose China-watching goes back to the decade he spent in China as a young man just out of Harvard. To take just one sample: THW: "They keep coming back to me, these memories of the Saturday-night dances at Communist headquarters in Yenan.... They would go waltzing around and sashaying, and the commander-in-chief, Chu Teh, would sit there with his wife like a grandmother and grandfather seeing a Jewish wedding, and there would be Yeh Chien-ying, who is now the Defense Minister, and Lin Piao, who has been purged and his throat cut, and P'eng Te-huai, who has been purged and is now being resurrected, I am told... To see these men in that lyrical period when they were the underdogs, when they were fighting the Japanese, when they were behind the Japanese lines and risking their lives everyday--to see their comradeship and their brilliance and their camaraderie was to be carried away by it." WFB: "You sound like John Reed." THW: "But John Reed died too soon to see what happened later, to see Stalin knock off Trotsky, and knock off Bukharin and knock off Zinoviev. I have lived to see these comrades in arms ... poisoned with power,shoot each other down, exile each other. It's a terrible thing. ... I think ours is the only revolution in all history where the revolutionaries did not kill each other off." Alternate title: "What Should Be Our Chinese Policy?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.592
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWSCS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6526
item Program Number S0349, 821

"Singapore with the Prime Minister"

Guests: Lee, Kuan Yew, 1923-

30 October 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 29
Program details: Thirteen years after the city-state of Singapore achieved its independence, it had the second highest standard of living in Asia, after Japan. However, it was not highly regarded in terms of civil liberties and democracy, and Mr. Lee was less often described in the Western press as "prime minister" than as "strongman." A low-key but absorbing hour with this dominant figure. WFB: "Somebody living in your country, judging the situation today over against the situation ten years ago, would he say, 'Prime Minister Lee gives me grounds for believing that human rights are increasing in Singapore'?" LKY: "I would hope that's the answer you'd get from most of the people in Singapore." WFB: "And what would they point to concretely?" LKY: "Well, what is it they are prevented from exercising?" WFB: "Freedom of the press." LKY: "I think human rights in a Third World situation have more important facets than freedom of the press. There's freedom from hunger, from want, from ignorance, from disease, the right to education of the young, the right to a job, the right to a life free from fear."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.590
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6524
item Program Number S0350, 823

"Why Federal Aid to the Humanities?"

Guests: Duffey, Joseph.

12 December 1978

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 30
Program details: Mr. Duffey's appointment had caused some controversy, not least because President Carter had said that he wanted to get rid of "elitist attitudes" in the Endowment. We begin with a discussion of elitism vs. snobbism, and go on to an account, full of detail, of how someone goes about getting a Humanities grant. Mr. Duffey: "The Humanities Endowment has been so confused with the Arts Endowment. ... I remember being asked right after my appointment by one reporter that it was rumored that this Administration wanted to take money away from the Metropolitan Opera and give it for hog calling in the Midwest. I couldn't think of what to respond, so I said, 'Well, hog calling is an art. The study of hog calling and the history of hog calling would be the humanities.'"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.591
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6525
item Program Number S0351, 824

"1979: A Conservative View: Part I"

Guests: Hatch, Orrin, 1934- : Kemp, Jack. : Bell, Jeffrey, 1943- : Buckley, James Lane, 1923- : Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931- : Viguerie, Richard A.

2 January 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 30
Program details: A rich discussion among seven men who are all in one way or another "conservative activists," but who have also contributed to the conservative intellectual movement. The first hour concentrates on matters domestic and electoral, the second on human rights and foreign policy; the talk ranges from how to reform the tax system to how political conservatism has changed since the days of Thomas Dewey and Robert A. Taft, to how difficult it is to float a new idea in the course of a political campaign (JLB: "The best you can do really is to identify yourself with positions that have become sufficiently well understood in the body politic so that they say, 'Yes, I know what you mean'"), to what we can and should do about human rights around the world (JDM: "Certainly we can't dispatch the Marines to every quarter of the globe that doesn't live up to our standards of internal rights...but certainly you can at least--there are thousands of ways to do this--reflect the fact that you disapprove ...").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.593
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6527
item Program Number S0352, 825

"1979: A Conservative View: Part II"

Guests: Hatch, Orrin, 1934- : Kemp, Jack. : Bell, Jeffrey, 1943- : Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931- : Viguerie, Richard A. : Buckley, James Lane, 1923-

2 January 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 30
Program details: A rich discussion among seven men who are all in one way or another "conservative activists," but who have also contributed to the conservative intellectual movement. The first hour concentrates on matters domestic and electoral, the second on human rights and foreign policy; the talk ranges from how to reform the tax system to how political conservatism has changed since the days of Thomas Dewey and Robert A. Taft, to how difficult it is to float a new idea in the course of a political campaign (JLB: "The best you can do really is to identify yourself with positions that have become sufficiently well understood in the body politic so that they say, 'Yes, I know what you mean'"), to what we can and should do about human rights around the world (JDM: "Certainly we can't dispatch the Marines to every quarter of the globe that doesn't live up to our standards of internal rights...but certainly you can at least--there are thousands of ways to do this--reflect the fact that you disapprove ...").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.594
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6528
item Program Number S0353, 826

"The Problem of Illegal Aliens"

Guests: Castillo, Leonel (Leonel J.)

15 January 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 31
Program details: The question of how much immigration we should allow and what criteria should be used for admission was the subject of sporadic debate, but suddenly it had hit the public consciousness that we had some large number of immigrants--3 million? 8 million? 12 million?--who had by-passed the admission process altogether. This proves to be a calm and extremely informative discussion of a topic that often reaches the shouting stage, ranging over the history of our immigration policies (as WFB puts it, "In 1797 the Congress argued that since the United States was already fully populated and mature, we should not allow any more immigrants") and the effects of the 1965 law. WFB: "Well, as a cultural question, would there be an ugly resentment in Mexico of any artifact that might be created along the border that would sound like sort of a reversed Berlin Wall, not to keep Americans in but to keep foreigners out?" LJC: "Well, we just went through that, where after the Department of Justice and OMB and Congress and everybody had approved, without a dissenting voice or vote, the construction of 12 miles of replacement fence and a little bit of new fence at El Paso and San Diego, the Mexican newspapers reacted as if we had declared war on Mexico."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.595
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6529
item Program Number S0354, 827

"The Recognition of China"

Guests: Cline, Ray S. : Cohen, Jerome Alan.

18 January 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 31
Program details: "Not long ago with Theodore White," Mr. Buckley begins, "we touched ... on prospective changes in U.S. China policy. Days later President Carter did it--renounced our treaty with Taiwan, kicked out Taiwan's diplomats, pulled down the U.S. flag from our embassy in Taipei." Was President Carter right? What comes next? The non-China Hand may sometimes be left behind as our guests wrangle, but we get enough details to keep us going. WFB: "Now what happens [given that there is no longer a defense treaty] with the next Democratic President or with Mr. Carter when he's reborn on the subject of China?" JAC: "But look, this was true even under the defense treaty. What was the defense treaty after all? It was a commitment of mush. All it said was the United States would respond according to its constitutional processes in some undefined way if a threat arose to Taiwan's security. According to its constitutional processes--what does that mean?" WFB: "It was a strategic reality and interpreted as such, wasn't it?" RC: "Yes. And it's the same kind of mushy arrangement which we have with the NATO nations, with Korea, with Japan, with the Philippines, with Australia and New Zealand. If they're all mush, then in fact we have no foreign policy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.598
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6532
item Program Number S0355, 828

"Boundaries of the Press"

Guests: Abrams, Floyd. : Rusher, William A., 1923-

15 January 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 32
Program details: Does (or should) the newsman/source relationship have the same legal privileges as the attorney/client or priest/penitent relationship? Mr. Abrams says "yes," and we're off on a high-energy exchange on legal history, theory, and practice. WFB: "That's sort of a revolutionary accretion, and yet, in asserting that point, you tend to do so as an exegete of the Constitution rather than as somebody who wants to amend it." FA: "Well, I do, and for this reason. It seems to me that most of the privileges we have--attorney/client at least, doctor/patient for sure--do not have constitutional roots at all.... I can't go back to the Framers of the Constitution and say--" WFB: "Or rooted in the common law?" FA: "To the common law, certainly not. The common law is almost the antithesis of the First Amendment... The common law, as [Justice Hugo] Black said, is what we had a revolution to get away from. ..." WAR: "Since they [the journalists] do the reporting in this country, I can forgive anybody who thinks that they had had these rights for two hundred years, and that the Supreme Court and other courts fell upon them with berserk fury in the early 1970s and began taking them away."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.596
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6530
item Program Number S0356, 829

"Ecumenism and Schism"

Guests: Vree, Dale. : Morse, Robert S.

18 January 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 32
Program details: In 1977 a group of American Episcopalians, acting in resistance to the ordination of women and to the revision of the Book of Common Prayer (see Firing Line s0171), broke away and formed a new entity, called the Anglican Church in North America. The ACNA soon split, and the following year one of the offshoots, the Anglican Catholic Church, consecrated four bishops, among them Robert Morse. Mr. Vree outlines the reasons for the schism (Sometimes we say to them [conservatives who have remained in the Episcopal Church], 'We go to prepare a place for you.' " Is the break away church a nostalgic splinter group? Not at all, says Bishop Morse: "I would say we are part of an avant-garde movement--I mean, we hope we are in the tradition of the excitement of someone like Pope John Paul II or Solzhenitsyn. There is a great shake out of orthodox Christians taking place, and if you can reach the Episcopalian, who is a very interesting minority in American life, of a certain decision-making class-- . . . if we can excite your Episcopalian with orthodox Christianity, we hope that with this we will begin a renewal of the reunion of Eastern and Western Christendom--Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Anglicans."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.597
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6531
item Program Number S0357, 830

"NATO and European Security"

Guests: Haig, Alexander Meigs, 1924-

12 February 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 33
Program details: General Haig had just announced his resignation as Supreme Allied Commander, and speculation was rife as to the reason. But today's show is not about any political ambitions General Haig might have, but rather about what we can do to enhance our and our allies' security. We start with the fact that the Shah of Iran had just been overthrown--costing us an observation post from which to monitor events in the Soviet Union, and also a stabilizing influence in the Gulf region-and go on through President Carter's decision to put the neutron bomb on hold, to Europe's perceptions of American reliability: "I would start out with the broad observation that the tragic outcome of America's involvement in Southeast Asia left deep scars in the European perception of American reliability.... I think subsequent events-and it would not be difficult to tick them off, ranging from the change of a hundred years' at least crypto-neutrality for Afghanistan; the coup d'etat in Southern Yemen; untended, unchallenged, and illegal Soviet interventionism in Africa ... -all have tended to aggravate the concerns that have been long-standing and which were intensified by the outcome in Vietnam."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.600
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6534
item Program Number S0358, 831

"Reason and Politics"

Guests: Joseph, Keith, Sir, 1918-

12 February 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 33
Program details: Sir Keith had served as Secretary of State for Social Services in the Heath government and had been regarded as a "Tory wet," but since then he had blossomed as a conservative theorist, particularly on social issues. He and his host range over questions of taxation, illegitimacy, class warfare, nationalized health care, and more, at a level of concreteness that always brings us along with them. KJ: "I was in charge of the health service for four years, and I think this is still the best country in the world in which to have a serious accident or a serious illness. If you want to have a serious accident--" WFB: "Schedule it here." KJ: "Schedule it here. But if you want to have a relatively minor one or a long one or a handicap or a disadvantage like arthritis or rheumatism or deafness--not in Britain."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.601
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6535
item Program Number S0359, 832

"The Crisis of British Trade Unions"

Guests: Reid, Jimmy, 1932-

12 February 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 34
Program details: In his previous appearance on Firing Line (s0174), Mr. Reid had stoutly defended his membership in the Communist Party. Two and a half years later he had left the Party, and Mr. Buckley begins by asking "Whether he was moved finally to leave the Communist Party after reflecting on the cogency of the arguments I posed on this program." JR: "No, not quite, not quite.... I think basically what drove me to the conclusion that the Communist Party ... wasn't relevant was this: that the structures of the Communist Parties are based on pre-revolutionary Russian experience." Speaking of Euro communism, he adds: "They can change programmatically all they want, but if they have plans for a democratic socialist society, they will have to become democratic socialist parties. And once they do that, they cease to be Communist Parties." Before we get back to the crisis of British trade unions, we have dealt with Hitler and Frederick the Great, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr., and what Jesus meant when he chased the money changers from the Temple.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.599
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6533
item Program Number S0360, 833

"Three British MPs and William F. Buckley Jr."

Guests: Kinnock, Neil Gordon, 1942- : Pardoe, John. : Boyson, Rhodes.

13 February 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 174 : 34
Program details: As Mr. Buckley sets the stage, "There is clamor for an election, but Mr. James Callaghan, the prime minister, is reluctant to proceed, inasmuch as the polls show him trailing Mrs. Thatcher's Conservative Party by 19 points." The election was duly held in May, with the Conservatives taking 339 seats, Labour 268, and the Liberals 11, but meanwhile our guests have much to say about trade unions, the true meaning of freedom, and one another. RB: "Every time something is put in practice, it doesn't work and then you say, 'That's not it.' At one time you could say socialism would work because it hadn't been tried anywhere. But everywhere it has been tried it has been chaos. And as a suspicious man, it strikes me it might be chaos everywhere when it is tried." ... NK (of Mr. Pardoe): "Let's hope that he makes the choice at some time in the future to comeback to the bosom of socialism." WFB: "You make way for late vocations?" NK: "Oh indeed. There are all kinds of conversions."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.602
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6536
item Program Number S0361, 834

"The Meaning of the Egyptian-Israeli Accord"

Guests: Rabin, Yitzhak, 1922- : Tamir, Shmuel, 1923-1987.

15 March 1979

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 96 : 10
Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 1
Program details: The details had not yet been made public, but President Carter had just flown home after a trip to Cairo and Jerusalem during which he had obtained the signatures of Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat on the follow-up to the Camp David Accords. Although Messrs. Rabin and Tamir are on opposite sides of the political fence, this proves to be a good-tempered discussion of the military situation, the relations among the different Arab states, the Palestinian refugees, and the importance of Anwar al-Sadat. ST: "You have noticed that the last decision made by Egypt was uttered from one mouth without the knowledge of anybody else in Egypt. It was a decision of one man, just as his courageous arrival in Jerusalem was the decision of one man. It was a great step, but of course there is permanent with it apprehension about what happens if he is removed politically or otherwise--as does happen in the Middle East so very often, especially in dictatorial countries, the Arab countries." (For the record, Mr. Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Mr. Rabin in 1995.)
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.604
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6538
item Program Number S0362, 835

"Peace in the Middle East?"

Guests: Avineri, Shlomo. : Katz, Samuel.

16 March 1979

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 1
Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 1
Program details: Against the background of the historic visit of President Sadat to Jerusalem a year and a half earlier, and the treaty just negotiated under the aegis of President Carter, this discussion goes back and forth over the history, the current players, and the likely future. Mr. Katz is a hardliner who had just broken with his old associate (going back to Irgun days) Menachem Begin. Mr. Avineri has hopes for the treaty, partly because of Sadat's formal statement to the Knesset: "'I am here to tell you that for thirty years we have not accepted you ... And here I am to tell you that we are now ready to live in peace with you and to accept you.' " In the course of their often sharp disagreements, Messrs. Katz and Avineri fill out our understanding of this explosive region.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.606
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6540
item Program Number S0363, 836

"Three Foreign Correspondents in the Middle East"

Guests: Bierman, John. : Gross, Richard C. : Bushinsky, Jay.

15 March 1979

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 37
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 2
Program details: These veteran observers (Mr. Bushinsky had been in Israel since 1966; Mr. Bierman was expelled from Iran by the Shah in 1973) take us through the Soviets' involvement in the Middle East and why anyone still trusts them, President Sadat's flair for the dramatic, and how the Carter mission affects Middle Eastern views of the United States. They also shed some fascinating sidelights on, e.g., Middle Eastern corruption. Mr. Bushinsky: "You have kind of a disguised unemployment in a country like Egypt, where many people are kept working and salaried by dint of their presumed jobs, and you as an individual, foreign or domestic, must go through these people--and they are very jealous of their prerogatives; otherwise their jobs might be rendered redundant. You can call that a form of corruption if you will, but... it wasn't necessary to bribe the air-freight personnel to get your shipment out... Maybe there were a few too many rubber stamps along the way, but not corruption on a scale that John had known in Tehran."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.603
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6537
item Program Number S0364, 837

"The Rising Tide of Islam"

Guests: Vatikiotis, P. J. : Warburg, Gabriel. : Ben-Dor, Gabriel.

16 March 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 38
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 2
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins by saying, "The general ignorance in the Western world concerning Islam ... is widely deplored and generally cultivated." This is demonstrated over and over again in this productive discussion, in which our guests-none of them Muslim, all of them deeply knowledgeable about Islam-lead us into this very different worldview. One sample: WFB: "The fundamentalist-" PJV: "Excuse me, I refuse to use the term fundamentalist for Islam. That is a very Christian, canonical, theological proposition. There's no such thing as fundamentalism in Islam. There is orthodox in Islam." WFB: "There is such a thing as a metaphor everywhere." PJV: "All right. Thank you. The problem is that this is the only native idiom they have." WFB: "Cutting off hands is fundamentalist, isn't it?" PJV: "Well, even the cutting off of hands-" GB: "You could call it puritan." PJV: "Puritan, yes." WFB: "Puritanical."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.605
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RWQ
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6539
item Program Number S0365, 838

"The Move for a Constitutional Convention"

Guests: Tribe, Laurence H. : Davidson, James Dale.

11 April 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 39
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 3
Program details: Mr. Davidson's organization was spearheading the effort--which at that time needed to sign on only six more states--to call a convention under the provisions of Article V of the Constitution, for the purpose of considering a balanced-budget amendment. Today's discussion explores in depth the case for such an amendment--as Mr. Davidson puts it, to"rescue congressmen from the prisoner's dilemma" of having the benefits of deficit spending obvious while the costs are hidden--and the cases against (a) the amendment itself (first, according to Professor Tribe, that it is unnecessary: "It's clear that there are political payoffs, and important ones, from contributing to the ideal of fiscal austerity") and (b) the convention method (that it should be used only when "there is a clear showing that representative democracy has broken down").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.607
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6541
item Program Number S0366, 839

"Breaking Up OPEC"

Guests: Adelman, Morris Albert. : Spriggs, Dillard.

11 April 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 40
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 3
Program details: Six years after the Arab oil embargo, OPEC was still calling the shots: it had recently increased the basic price of oil yet again and had announced that individual members could impose surcharges; and the United States was still importing 43 percent of the oil we used. Mr. Buckley begins by reminding Mr. Adelman that back in 1973 he had said--on Firing Line, among other places (s0108)--that we had "nothing to fear from the cartelization of oil by the OPEC powers." Mr. Adelman had come up with an ingenious-sounding plan to entice more oil out of the world market; Mr. Spriggs seriously doubts whether it would work. As we know in retrospect, there was an answer, but it wasn't Mr. Adelman's (see s0377).
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.608
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6542
item Program Number S0367, 840

"The Crisis of Nuclear Energy"

Guests: Cohen, Bernard. : Beyea, Jan.

4 May 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 41
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 4
Program details: In the wake of Three Mile Island, a lively discussion, frightening in its implications: if two bona-fide nuclear physicists disagree so fundamentally, how can the layman come to an informed opinion? Professor Beyea explains "the difference between a technological pessimist and a technological optimist.... When it comes down to it, I run scared about a technological device. I cannot guarantee a technological device until I've tested it many times in full scale. Nuclear power we can never test in full scale, and that disturbs me." As Professor Cohen sees it, "You are ignoring the consequences of not having nuclear power. Every time you don't build a nuclear plant and build a coal plant instead, you are condemning hundreds of people to death." Alternate title: "Understanding Nuclear Energy"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.609
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGN48
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6543
item Program Number S0368, 841

"Watergate: The Innocent and the Guilty"

Guests: Stans, Maurice H., 1908-

4 May 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 42
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 4
Program details: Everyone remembered that Mr. Stans had been indicted for obstruction of justice in connection with Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. Few people remembered that he had been acquitted in court and had been pronounced blameless by the Society of Certified Public Accountants. WFB leads his guest to talk--as he does often movingly and with an amazing lack of bitterness--about his "own efforts to work your way back into the high esteem of the community," about campaign finance in general, and about Watergate in particular. WFB: "The seeds of the hurricane were planted by Nixon." MS: "The seeds of the hurricane go right back to the one incident in the Watergate, a petty burglary, which then was allowed by Nixon and his people to become a cause celebre." WFB: "But it was a justifiable cause celebre, wasn't it?" MS: "Unquestionably, and believe me, I'm not an apologist for Richard Nixon. I don't defend what he did. . . . What I say is that in the search for the guilty there were hundreds of innocent people who were swept into that dragnet and had to prove their innocence, that it was a witch-hunt type of operation that should never again happen in this country."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.610
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6544
item Program Number S0369, 842

"A Merit System for Judges?"

Guests: Berkson, Larry. : Alter, Chester M. : Rush, Fletcher G.

21 May 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 115 : 43
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 5
Program details: At a time when, as WFB puts it, federal courts sometimes appear to be deciding just about everything--"whether you can pray at school, execute criminals, abort a fetus, have a basketball team without women on it," Congress had just authorized a 25 per cent increase in the number of federal judges. How should they be chosen? This productive conversation ranges over the differences between trial judges and appellate judges, the ways judges have been chosen in the past, and efforts being made in some states to improve judges' performance.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.611
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6545
item Program Number S0370, 843

"Modern Attitudes towards Life and Death"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

21 May 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 5
Program details: Mr. Muggeridge presciently predicts, in WFB's paraphrase, that "the same attitude of mind that permits abortion cannot know when to curb its millenarianist passion for the perfect society. What must come, what surely will come ... is euthanasia." The conversation with this favorite Firing Line guest ranges from abortion to St. Augustine's City of God. One sample from Mr. Muggeridge: "The earthly city of St. Augustine is a grubby place, but once you see the City of God, its grubbiness somehow seems much less, much more bearable, because you know that every single thing in it, even the grubbiness, is related to this other City of God."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.612
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6546
item Program Number S0371, 844

"Politics of Intrigue in the Vatican"

Guests: Greeley, Andrew.

8 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 6
Program details: The last time Firing Line had looked at the Papacy (s0339) was during the brief tenure of Pope John Paul I. As today's show was being taped, Pope John Paul II was in the midst of his historic visit to his native Poland. A detail-filled conversation ranging from the election of Karol Wojtyla to, as WFB puts it, "the ritual excommunication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan" by the New York Times (for coming out in favor of aid to private schools), from the tangible effects of prayer on the psyche to the fact that, as Father Greeley puts it, "anti-Catholicism is as American as blueberry pie." Father Greeley on the papal election: "I think the first thing [the cardinals] thought about was a reward to Poland for its strong faith in the face of Communist persecution. The second thing that occurred to them is here was a man who knew how to deal with Communism. He knew how to deal with it intellectually, because he was a philosopher and he understood Marxist philosophy. He sometimes amused himself by arguing with Party members about Marx, whom they hadn't read and he had. But also because he understood it politically."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.613
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6547
item Program Number S0372, 845

"Real Music"

Guests: Tureck, Rosalyn.

8 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 6
Program details: Although Miss Tureck has a wide repertoire, she is best known--as keyboard artist, conductor, and text editor--for her work on Bach; indeed, Mr. Buckley tells us, "Arthur Rubinstein has credited her with the largest single responsibility for the revival of Bach throughout the world." On this radiant show she has with her both a harpsichord and a piano to illustrate her points about how ornamentation was annotated up until the 18th century, how Bach was mistreated in the 19th century, and how different the same piece of music sounds in different tempi. WFB: "Does what you say add up to an excuse not to do the repetitions in the 20th century, which would have fitted the mood of the 18th century?" RT: "Yes, that's an interesting point, because we think of the so-called 'repeats' as repetitions.... A repeat is something quite different from what we think of as repetition. I regard the repeat as a fresh view of the same material."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.614
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEIONS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6548
item Program Number S0373, 846

"Lifting the Trade Ban on Rhodesia"

Guests: Lowenstein, Allard K. : Solarz, Stephen J.

15 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 7
Program details: In 1966, following Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the United Nations had imposed trade sanctions in an attempt to bring down Ian Smith's all-white government. There had now been elections--of which Mr. Lowenstein had been an observer, and Mr. Solarz had declined to be an observer--in which blacks were allowed full participation (see the Firing Line with Bishop Muzorewa, s0331), but President Carter had announced that the sanctions would continue against the country that its white rulers still called Rhodesia but the black majority called Zimbabwe. Although both guests want, as Mr. Lowenstein puts it, "a democratic government which would not be racist in its composition and which would be achieved with the least bloodshed possible," they disagree, often heatedly, on the best means to that end. (in the event, "Zimbabwe Rhodesia" reverted to transitional British rule at the end of the year and the UN Security Council lifted the sanctions.)
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.615
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E53T2Q
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6549
item Program Number S0374, 901

"Bob Dole: Presidential Hopeful"

Guests: Dole, Robert J., 1923-

15 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 7
Program details: As WFB sets the stage, "Mr. George Gallup has passed along the word that the American public is in a mood to consider alternatives to the present leadership, and seldom in American political history has there been such a stampede of patriots willing to come to the aid of their country." In this first in a series of conversations with potential candidates, Senator Dole is impressive, as he had been in his first Firing Line appearance (s0276)--this time on subjects ranging from Food Stamps to SALT II to inflation. RD: "I must say that we're in a much different position now than we would have been if Ford had been elected, because we probably would have gone ahead with the B-l bomber; we wouldn't have held back on the MX for two and a half years, then suddenly said, 'Well, we think we're going to do it but we don't know about the basing system yet,' so it's still a non-decision as far as Carter's concerned; we wouldn't have had the hanky-panky with the neutron bomb; we wouldn't have let Iran go down the tube ... There's no question about it: President Carter is perceived to be very weak in foreign policy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.616
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6550
item Program Number S0375, 902

"Three Young Republicans and 1980's Election"

Guests: Abell, Richard. : Ward, Lynn. : Barron, David. : Burns, Gene.

23 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 8
Program details: Three newly elected officers of the Young Republican organization explore matters of substance, such as why conservatives' stress on upward mobility should appeal to black and Hispanic voters, and matters of political strategy, such as the unlikelihood that Ted Kennedy would finally challenge President Carter for the Democratic nomination. Examiner Gene Burns: "What Young Republican principle is co-terminous with the desires of blacks and Hispanics? ..." RA: "I think we have to get into the entire taxing structure--" WFB: "I should think upward mobility would be--"? RA: "Yes, upward mobility and the fact that there's an attempt to make a permanent disenfranchised lower class ... We strongly disagree with that. We want the upward mobility, and I feel that the entire welfare system is predicated upon setting up these strata of society that we believe should be broken."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.617
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6551
item Program Number S0376, 903

"Capital Punishment"

Guests: Shevin, Robert. : Simon, Tobias.

23 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 8
Program details: The State of Florida had just executed John Spenkelink, in the first exercise of capital punishment in the United States in two years. An absorbing and frequently heated discussion with the principal legal antagonists in Spenkelink's case. TS: "If Mr. Shevin says it's a deterrent and he wants to execute people ... then I think they should be called upon to prove in a court of law that there is a real deterrent, and that this man's death is necessary in order to save another person's life. Of course they can't do it and they've never done it." WFB: "Well, of course you can't do that under any circumstances." RS: "Except for one fact, Mr. Buckley: that the number of murders in America never rose above 9,000 ... from 1935 to 1965. In '65, when we stopped using the death penalty effectively in this country, until '75 the number of murders rose to 22,500."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.618
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6552
item Program Number S0377, 904

"The Energy Crisis"

Guests: Metzenbaum, Howard.

29 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 9
Program details: Another look (see Firing Line s0366) at the Arab oil crisis, six years old and going strong. Mr. Metzenbaum, a member of the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee, dispenses blame among OPEC, the oil companies, and, especially, the U.S. Department of Energy, but refuses, for all WFB's prodding, to consider President Carter's decontrol measure as a solution. (Note: When decontrol went into effect, the oil crisis quickly dissipated.) HM: "I'm sure you saw the story the other day where Mr. Schlesinger fears to prod the oil firms. Now isn't that unbelievable that the head of the Department of Energy is afraid of the oil companies?" WFB: "No, not at all. The White House is afraid of the New York Times." HM: "What about Bill Buckley. Are they afraid of him, too?" WFB: "No. However, I have certain rights that the government can't take away from me. I have the right to speak my mind, to practice my religion. The oil companies have the right to go out of business or not go out of business. We can't tell the oil companies, can we?, that they have to buy oil at $10 and sell it for $9." HM: "Nobody's asking them to do that." WFB: "Ah, sometimes you sound as though you were."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.619
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6553
item Program Number S0378, 905

"Crisis for the Democrats"

Guests: Wurf, Jerry, 1919-

19 July 1979

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 6
Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 9
Program details: This show is more about policy and less about politics than the title would imply--although the feisty Mr. Wurf's anger at President Carter for his anti-inflation program comes through loud and clear. Solid, substantive discussion of inflation and the size of government. JW: "The President of the United States inaugurates an anti-inflation program. He puts no inhibition on profits, he puts no inhibition on interest, there's no inhibition on anything that makes the rich and wealthy richer and wealthier. And he says, 'You working people will take 7 per cent and no more, otherwise we'll use all of the apparent and unapparent power of this government.' So the president of General Motors comes to Washington and he says the program is excellent, goes back to Detroit, raises the price of automobiles, and nothing happens to him. When our membership here in New York State want to get more than a 7 or 7 1/2 per cent pay increase, the whole federal establishment falls down on their heads."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.622
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6556
item Program Number S0379, 906

"SALT II: What We Stand to Lose"

Guests: Seignious, George.

16 August 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 10
Program details: When President Carter named General Seignious director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Mr. Buckley begins, "the ready inference was that [he] had pulled a fast one, that he had persuaded a hawkish general to take on the job of selling SALT II." Whether it was a fast one or not, General Seignious was indeed selling SALT II, not as an end in itself but as a step along the way: "I would like to see us get into very deep reductions and particularly in warheads, because those are the things that kill people and kill cities and kill cultures and kill our way of life." The discussion is highly technical, but both host and guest give us plenty of detail to bring us along, whether on the different sorts of missiles, on the parallels or lack of them between Hitler at Munich and the current treaty, or on the advantages and disadvantages to an anti-ballistic-missile system.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.623
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6557
item Program Number S0380, 907

"The Television Machine"

Guests: Fuldheim, Dorothy. : Stein, Ben.

29 June 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 10
Program details: Is the most remarkable thing about present-day television, as Mr. Stein maintains in this vivid exchange, its pervasive left-wing, anti-business bias-- ("People watch TV so much that it's like a second life for them, and in this second life conditions are very different from what they are in real life. That is, in real life one occasionally finds a businessman who's not plotting to murder his go-go dancer girlfriend.") Or is it, as Mrs. Fuldheim argues, the fact that through television "the whole standard of knowledge has been raised"? ("I think that television is one of the greatest influences that has ever occurred in civilized society, for it is going to create a homogeneous quality among people. ... And I think that the average person who would not read the National Geographic or the Saturday Review or any of these magazines can see things on television.")
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.620
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GDJK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6554
item Program Number S0381, 908

"The Trouble with Nowadays: A Curmudgeon Strikes Back"

Guests: Amory, Cleveland.

19 July 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 11
Program details: Great fun on how everything has gone to hell in a hand basket. CA: "I don't want to act as if I'm intolerant in any way, because I'm not, but you take women, for instance. Women cannot be curmudgeons.... My aunt once tried to be a curmudgeon and all she succeeded in doing was making my uncle one." ... "Do you know what you had to have in Rome to have a vote? You had to have a hundred thousand asses, that's what you had to have. Asses, that's what it was based on. It was .6 to the dollar today, so you had to be worth $60,000 to vote. And you voted in classes, the ones with the most asses voted, and so forth, down to the bottom. But now you let everybody vote, and what do you get? You get asses for President, that's what you get."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.621
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6555
item Program Number S0382, 909

"Presidential Hopeful: John Anderson"

Guests: Anderson, John Bayard, 1922-

16 August 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 11
Program details: The second in a series of conversations with potential candidates (see the Firing Line show with Bob Dole, s0374). As WFB introduces today's guest, "To the surprise of many Americans, there is a candidate for the Republican nomination for President who is not, so to speak, a Goldwater conservative." Rep. Anderson proceeds to live up to this billing--e.g., on the "segment of the Republican right wing that is so hung up on things like abortion, things like busing, things like the Panama Canal... the so-called 'hot button' issues.... I don't believe, despite their outcry, that they are really large enough to be the swing factor in determining either the nomination or the election. Thereby, of course, hangs the tale. If I'm wrong in that, then I could become one more in a long line of former candidates." And the rest is history.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.624
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6558
item Program Number S0383, 910

"Is SALT II a Disaster?"

Guests: Teller, Edward, 1908-2003.

6 September 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 12
Program details: An illuminating hour with a widely learned guest; the conversation ranges from the dangers of arms-control negotiations to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. WFB: "It's one thing to account for the fears of people who are governed by superstition, because there's very little that can be done about that, but how do you account for the fear of intelligent people in your own profession who feel that one has to turn one's back categorically on nuclear energy?" ET: "There is a very simple answer to that. All of us are governed by superstition. Intelligence is a rare, singular, perhaps pathological phenomenon. Intelligence is an abnormality. Now people can be intelligent in their own narrow field--and you mentioned that. People who really know about nuclear reactors are almost to a man people who have full confidence. We have an association--Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy. We have a big membership. Of course, Linus Pauling does not belong. Linus Pauling is an excellent chemist who knows nothing about nuclear reactors. You don't go to the butcher to buy your bread."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.625
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6559
item Program Number S0384, 911

"Human Rights in Vietnam"

Guests: Baez, Joan. : Sagan, Ginetta.

6 September 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 12
Program details: Miss Baez had just taken out a full-page ad calling on Hanoi to stop its imperialism and its torture of political prisoners; 88 of her old antiwar comrades had co-signed the ad, but another dozen--including Jane Fonda, William Kunstler, and Philip Berrigan--had denounced her. A high point of the show: Mrs. Sagan's account of how, as a young woman in Italy during World War II, she reconciled her pacifism with her desire to take part in the Resistance: "I chose to fight but in a different way than using a gun. ... I chose to join ... a larger group of people who ... smuggle[d] people to Switzerland. If you are caught-- Oh, I did something else. I poured sand in engines, so that when the Gestapo was going to get people, the cars wouldn't run. Or, on trains. Those were very dangerous activities for the person who undertook these endeavors, but it was my life which was at stake, it was not the other person's life."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.626
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGN8O
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6560
item Program Number S0385, 912

"SALT II and the U.S. Senate"

Guests: Hollings, Ernest F., 1922-

20 September 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 13
Program details: Senator Hollings is of the strong-defense wing of the Democratic Party, which sets him at odds with his President--and he's not afraid to say so. Today's conversation ranges from SALT II to the current status of NATO to the buildup of Soviet troops in Cuba and Aden. EFH: "Can we say why those troops are in Cuba, and how they're there and what's going on?" WFB: "I wish you would." EFH: "Well, I know you've got to give Secretary Kissinger credit for this one. During his time in the Administration there were suggestions from the National Security Council that we cut out the intelligence overflights--they were too expensive, all we needed to do was send satellites. Henry Kissinger said no, that would be a wrong signal, absolutely wrong. He said if you stop the overflights they'll start taking advantage. And surely enough, President Carter stopped the overflights and they took it as a wrong signal.... Our friend [CIA Director William] Colby says the three thousand [Soviet troops] would get lost in the traffic in Miami--I mean they're no real threat. I thought that was cute, but it misleads. The fact is, they're there to handle nuclear."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.627
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGNBQ
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6561
item Program Number S0386, 913

"The Crisis in the U.S. Military"

Guests: Westmoreland, William C. (William Childs), 1914-2005.

20 September 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 13
Program details: This conversation with the former commander of our troops in Vietnam touches on that war, and on current matters such as SALT II, but it concentrates on the current ill health of the American military, which General Westmoreland links with the ill health of American democracy: "Now a principle of democracy is that for every right of citizenship there is a duty of citizenship. We inherited this principle from the British, who inherited it, I believe, from Roman law. Now it seems to me that in the last decade we have put inordinate attention on rights of citizenship. Rights, rights, rights. And in the process we have neglected duties of citizenship."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.628
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWPU8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6562
item Program Number S0387, 914

"Thirty Years of Communist Rule"

Guests: Shaplen, Robert.

1 October 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 14
Program details: A few days before this show was taped, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution had been formally deplored in China--although, unlike in Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, the author of those crimes was not denounced with them. Mr. Shaplen had been based in Hong Kong for 17 years, and today's conversation ranges from the wars in Indochina--from the time of our involvement to the present--to how China and Japan are coping with the Soviet Union. RS: "Japanese-Soviet relations today are tense enough--or in a deep enough vacuum, if you want to put it that way--to cause the Japanese considerable worry and to stir their military souls." WFB: "Yes. One can hear the drumbeat now." RS: "One can hear some drumbeats, and of course the Japanese are an emotional people anyway, although a lot of people at first think they're not. But all you have to do is watch one of the right-wing demonstrations in Tokyo--left-wing too, but there are more right-wing--and you see the zest and zeal that comes out of these."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.629
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6563
item Program Number S0388, 915

"Is Socialism Dead?"

Guests: Lekachman, Robert.

1 October 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 14
Program details: "It is, in America, one of the few hopeful signs in an otherwise melancholy world," WFB starts out, "that it isn't all that easy to find the out-and-out socialist, but we have come up today with an outstanding relic of the breed, the distinguished educator Robert Lekachman." The author of Economists at Bay and The Age of Keynes proceeds in the most genial way to demonstrate the truth of that description: "I would concentrate on the acquisition of wealth even more than the taxation of income. And here I would be inclined to pursue a suggestion of my friend Lester Thurow, which is to substitute for the inheritance tax a wealth-acquisition tax, and to impose steeply progressive taxes not one states but on the amount which an individual can inherit in his lifetime."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.630
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6564
item Program Number S0389, 916

"The Impact of the Pope's Visit"

Guests: Steinfels, Peter. : O'Hare, Joseph.

11 October 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 15
Program details: Pope John Paul II, in his tumultuous visit to the United States, had spoken of economic matters in a way that prompts WFB to ask "whether the Pope, as a student, did any work in economics, and if so, who on earth were his teachers?" Mr. Steinfels and Father O'Hare both hold that, as Father O'Hare expresses it, "[The Pope] did not speak primarily as an economic expert. He spoke primarily as a moral teacher,... insisting again and again that we should not lose sight of the primacy of the human person in any social, economic, or political system." But to Mr. Steinfels's assertion that "it is a mistake to separate the human-rights concerns of the Pope from the material or economic rights," because the different sorts of rights are "interlaced," Mr. Buckley maintains that "if you don't have economic freedom you don't have many other freedoms." And we're off on a high-energy discussion of the intersection of political and economics.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.631
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6565
item Program Number S0390, 917

"Crime and Punishment: Gary Gilmore"

Guests: Mailer, Norman.

11 October 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 15
Program details: A low-key and thoughtful appearance by the usually boisterous author of The Executioner's Song. This new novel-on the life and death of Gary Gilmore, the murderer who demanded to be executed by the State of Utah-was widely heralded as a masterpiece, and the writing of it had led Mr. Mailer to contemplate life, death, and literature. "I began to feel that I had to change some of my ideas about what literature should consist of. I've always leaned on the side that literature finally is a guide, that it explains complex matters to us, it gives us a deeper understanding of our existence. And I felt that maybe the time had come, at least for me in my own work, to do a book where I don't explain it to the reader." ... "I wanted the reader to live with this incredible complexity that's involved in not just the process of execution, but with that most mysterious fact that we live and then we die."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.632
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GF6Q
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6566
item Program Number S0391, 918

"Can New York City Govern Itself?"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

30 October 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 16
Program details: Year by year, under Mayors Wagner, Lindsay, and Beame, New York City had been going downhill, landing in 1975 in the ignominy of bankruptcy. As WFB puts it in his introduction: "New York City is both unique--there is only one New York; we could hardly afford more--and representative: representative of the problems of many large American cities. . .. But, even as it surpasses them all in medical research, in opera and ballet, in public libraries and museums, New York City is the largest headache of the mall." Mayor Koch had been in the saddle for almost two years by this point, and "he is controversial--and ubiquitous--and has restored great liveliness to his office." Which liveliness he brings to this show, whether defending the Federal Government's loan guarantees to New York or explaining how he gets to know his people: "I go around the City three days a week. I go on the weekends without reporters, without television cameras, because if you have a reporter or television camera the person you are talking to is no longer a person. He or she is an actor."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.633
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWO3G
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6567
item Program Number S0392, 919

"Is There a Role for the Private College?"

Guests: Giamatti, A. Bartlett.

30 October 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 16
Program details: The discussion focuses more on government funding--and whether an institution that accepts it can remain "private" in any meaningful sense--than on what the distinctive qualities of a private college might be. Not as rich in detail as one would hope from a literary scholar, but still a good exploration of the modern university scene. WFB: "I am asking you to what extent do you feel encumbered at this moment as the result of the government's playing a role which one of your predecessors, Charles Seymour, conceived of as intolerable. Now you say, 'Well, hell, they're paying for medical research and they're helping with student loans, so what?' " ABG: "No, I don't remember saying, 'So what?' " WFB: "Not quite 'So what?'; but it sounded a little bit so-what-ish. Question: Are they nipping at your heels?" ABG: "Constantly. And so are a lot of other people, but that's all right." WFB: "They have greater sanctions, I suppose." ABG: "To the extent that one is properly accountable for the public's money, one therefore has to account for it."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.634
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6568
item Program Number S0393, 920

"Whither Television?"

Guests: Breitenfeld, Frederick, Jr. : Kobin, William. : Pfister, Edward J.

15 November 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 17
Program details: This is one of those twice-a-year occasions on which the guests put their host on the firing line--in this case, mostly on topics suggested by this show's title. Today's guests are better at making statements than at asking questions of their host; still, there is some good discussion of public television--why it should receive public funding, to what extent the material shown should be geared to ratings, and who the real elitists are. Mr. Breitenfeld: I find those who call us elite implying directly that there is somebody out there due to race, heritage, wealth, social standing, education, and intelligence who is unable or unwilling to enjoy what we have to offer. To my thinking the person making the charge, therefore, is a gross elitist."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.635
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6569
item Program Number S0394, 921

"Liberals, Radicals, Conservatives: Who Are They?"

Guests: Podhoretz, Norman. : Solarz, Stephen.

29 November 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 17
Program details: An absorbing hour with a guest who had been a radical well into the Sixties, when, as he tells it, he "faced a choice between loyalty to radicalism and loyalty to intellectual values"--much like his mentors at Partisan Review thirty years earlier, who had "found it increasingly intolerable to be told [by the Communist Party] that they were not permitted, for example, to admire T. S. Eliot, whom all of them considered a great poet, because Eliot was a reactionary in his political views, and also because he was a modernist in his technique, and modernism was regarded as a form of bourgeois degeneracy by the Party. "In Mr. Podhoretz's case, he was first struck by the fact that the "Free Speech" Movement at Berkeley "began shouting down speakers who were in disagreement with its views." He and WFB begin with Lionel Trilling and the Sixties wars at Columbia, and go on to the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the battle against affirmative-action quotas.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.639
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6573
item Program Number S0395, 922

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the United States Should Refuse Recognition to the PLO-Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Solarz, Stephen J. : Weinstein, Allen. : Jackson, Jesse, 1941- : Findley, Paul. : Jabara, Abdeen. : Cooley, John. : Johnson, Thomas. : Kirk, Russell. : Ledeen, Michael.

28 November 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 18
Program details: Light as well as heat on a topic of passionate interest to many Americans. WFB: "U.S. Air Force intelligence, in testimony before Congress, links terrorists from 14 countries with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Representatives of these organizations specialize in achieving their velleities by blowing people up, or kidnapping them, torturing them, shooting them in the knee-that sort of thing.... But what some people call terrorists other people call soldiers or freedom fighters. Isn't that correct? It certainly is, even as it is correct that East Germany calls itself the Democratic Republic of Germany." ... JJ: "The Apostle Paul emerged as a terrorist killing Christians, but God kept a 'let's talk' policy, confronted him on the Damascus Road, and changed his mind, his heart, and his life." ... AJ: "The Palestinians who were displaced and dispossessed in 1948,... Israel was called upon to allow their return to their homes and lands. Have they been allowed to return?" AW: "In a period, sir-" AJ: "Answer the question, yes or no?" AW: "No, you're not a trial lawyer here, sir, you're a debater. I will answer the question in whatever fashion I choose."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.637
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52UA8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6571
item Program Number S0396, 923

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the United States Should Refuse Recognition to the PLO-Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Solarz, Stephen J. : Weinstein, Allen. : Jackson, Jesse, 1941- : Findley, Paul. : Jabara, Abdeen. : Cooley, John. : Johnson, Thomas. : Kirk, Russell. : Ledeen, Michael.

28 November 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 18
Program details: Light as well as heat on a topic of passionate interest to many Americans. WFB: "U.S. Air Force intelligence, in testimony before Congress, links terrorists from 14 countries with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Representatives of these organizations specialize in achieving their velleities by blowing people up, or kidnapping them, torturing them, shooting them in the knee-that sort of thing.... But what some people call terrorists other people call soldiers or freedom fighters. Isn't that correct? It certainly is, even as it is correct that East Germany calls itself the Democratic Republic of Germany." ... JJ: "The Apostle Paul emerged as a terrorist killing Christians, but God kept a 'let's talk' policy, confronted him on the Damascus Road, and changed his mind, his heart, and his life." ... AJ: "The Palestinians who were displaced and dispossessed in 1948,... Israel was called upon to allow their return to their homes and lands. Have they been allowed to return?" AW: "In a period, sir-" AJ: "Answer the question, yes or no?" AW: "No, you're not a trial lawyer here, sir, you're a debater. I will answer the question in whatever fashion I choose."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.638
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52UAS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6572
item Program Number S0397, 924

"Does HEW Want to Control Colleges?"

Guests: Roche, George Charles. : Jacobs, Jo.

28 November 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 18
Program details: A never-the-twain-shall-meet confrontation between an educator who believes that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's enforcement of Title IX of the Higher Education Act of 1972 constitutes a power grab against private colleges, and a government official who sees it as a minor imposition necessary to achieve equity between the sexes. JJ: "I think that what we're talking about is exercising your freedoms in such a way that assures somebody else's freedoms.... And if you're talking about the whole capability of an institution to provide equity, and in this instance sex equity, and... at this point HEW is defining your scholarships as federal money, this is certainly the only way that Congress can influence education." GCR: "But you see, the question here isn't really influencing education in the sense of correcting an inequity. As I say, in four years of constant correspondence and all sorts of litigation there has never been a moment when HEW even alleged that there was an inequity. The issue here, and their insistence, is entirely a matter of control of our campus."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.636
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6570
item Program Number S0398, 925

"The Year That Was"

Guests: Greenfield, Jeff. : Pilpel, Harriet F. : Lowenstein, Allard K.

13 December 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 19
Program details: This discussion with three extremely articulate liberals ranges from the crisis in Iran (it was just a month earlier that radical students had seized our embassy in Teheran, demanding that the United States hand the Shah over to them) to the foreign-policy obtuseness of Ted Kennedy to selective indignation about foreign dictators. JG: "There has been a kind of laziness ... on the part of liberals that what one assails when it comes to human rights is Chile, which certainly deserves it in my judgment, or Paraguay, which deserves it-" WFB: "Don't forget Argentina." JG: "Argentina. Yes, these are wretched governments. But the Soviet Union, with 250-plus million people, is a government that is unbelievable." AL: "Well, what is 'the Left'?" I'm not sure what that means. I think that there's a laziness on the part of some people, left or right, whatever those labels mean, in selective denunciations." JG: "I was coming to that. I find the same laziness in the Reagans and Connallys of this world, that one must endorse the Somozas of this world as a way of preserving American allies."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.640
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E50RXA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6574
item Program Number S0399, 926

"The Changing Media"

Guests: Ferris, Charles D.

13 December 1979

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 19
Program details: "The onslaught of communications technology," WFB begins, "has caught us unprepared. We know now how to give the individual consumer the widest choice of programming; we can reach an individual television set via satellite in Santa Barbara, California, and see what the resident of Atlanta, Georgia, is seeing, assuming that this is something you want to see." Mr. Ferris's dual background makes him well qualified to discuss the legal and social implications of all of this, which he does with verve: "We're making decisions today at the FCC that I think are determining to a great extent the basic infrastructure of the information of the society of the 21st century, and it bothers me that more people are not paying attention to what we are doing.... We are determining to a great extent what it is we are going to carry from the 20th century into the 21st about the Bill of Rights, about the sense of privacy, about what are the things about our society that we really cherish, that could be infringed by the [new cable and satellite] technology unless some thought is given to it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.641
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6575
item Program Number S0400, 927

"Presidential Hopeful: Philip Crane"

Guests: Crane, Philip M., 1930-

3 January 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 20
Program details: Mr. Crane was a popular young congressman of the Goldwater wing of the party, and he had already been running for the Republican presidential nomination for a year and a half. As Mr. Buckley introduces him, "If he achieves the nomination, he will have done so against the heaviest odds since Jimmy Carter won the nomination, and George McGovern. Which is another way of saying that nobody, but nobody, is counted out in these volatile days, including Philip Miller Crane." Rep. Crane is the third Republican hopeful we have met in this election cycle (after Bob Dole and John Anderson), and WFB puts him smartly through his paces on topics ranging from the labor vote at home to the hostage crisis in Iran to the ongoing oil crisis. PC: "There are literally thousands and thousands of capped wells in the United States, and the reason why is because we've told Americans they can only get $5.90 a barrel for their oil when we're saying that if you're an Arab and a member of the oligopoly or if you're Nigerian or Venezuelan, we're willing to pay $26 a barrel or $35 a barrel or $50 a barrel."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.642
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6576
item Program Number S0401, 928, 928R

"Presidential Hopeful: Ronald Reagan"

Guests: Reagan, Ronald. : Plate, Thomas.

14 January 1980, 11 January 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 31-32
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 20
Program details: The wish was father to the thought: instead of asking Mr. Reagan conventionally worded questions about his candidacy, as he had done Messrs. Dole and Anderson and Crane, WFB addressed his guest (without advance warning) as if the inauguration had already taken place: I should like to begin by asking President Reagan: "What would you do if, say, one afternoon you were advised that a race riot had broken out in Detroit?" RR: "Well, I would be inclined to say that that was a problem for the local authorities in Detroit, unless those local authorities were unable to control the situation...." A discussion full of substance-on topics ranging from Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, to the way government bonds should be issued, to the still-ongoing energy crisis, to the still-high unemployment-but also a delicious dress rehearsal: WFB: "Mr. President, the CIA has complained to you that it cannot discharge some of the recent directives that the National Security Council has given it as a result of its having been hamstrung by a number of provisions insisted on by Senator Church three or four years ago. How would you handle that dilemma?" RR: "Why, I'm surprised that they're complaining, because one of the first things I did when I took office was ask Congress to repeal those restrictions that were put on by Senator Church."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.644
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E53T30
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6578
item Program Number S0402, 929

"The United States in the 1980s--Foreign Affairs"

Guests: Teller, Edward, 1908-2003. : Duignan, Peter. : Staar, Richard Felix, 1923-

17 January 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 21
Program details: Today's guests are 3 of the 16 contributors to Hoover's landmark volume The United States in the 1980s, and from their different perspectives they all tell the same tale: despite its material and spiritual poverty, the Soviet Union is scoring success after success in its foreign policy, and is ahead of us in nuclear weaponry, for one simple reason: in Dr. Teller's words, "They have clear-cut goals and they are consistent in pursuing them." Despite the gloominess of the message, this proves to be a lively exchange. PD: ".. . I'm worried about oil. Let 'em have Grenada. You have to have a strategic sense of balance here. The whole of the Caribbean isn't worth much to us. It can be easily neutralized in any time of crisis." RS: "Except that Grenada's 90 miles from Venezuela." PD: "But oil from the Middle East is immediately and crucially important to the whole of Western Europe and Japan." WFB: "Is Mr. Staar's point--and your point too--that if we control the skies over the Caribbean and the water in the Caribbean, whoever has the atolls doesn't matter all that much? ..." PD: "Yes, we need oil; we don't need bananas and coconuts." ET: "We still need the Panama Canal." RS:"We also need the oil in Mexico. We have to think in terms of the future."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.645
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWOE0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6579
item Program Number S0403, 930

"The United States in the 1980s--Domestic Affairs"

Guests: Ricardo-Campbell, Rita. : Anderson, Martin, 1936- : Rabushka, Alvin.

17 January 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 21
Program details: A second show based on the Hoover volume, this one solid and instructive on topics including the three different approaches to welfare, the problems with the Social Security system (MA: "One of the most extraordinary things about the Social Security program is that the people who passed the program and the people who are administering the program have seen fit to exempt themselves from it.... Maybe they know something the rest of us don't"), taxation and Proposition 13, and wage and price controls. All important issues--but, as Mr. Anderson points out, "the most severe problem we face right now is the problems you talked about in the first program--foreign affairs and defense--and unless we solve those we may not have any economic problem to solve."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.646
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCX1MO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6580
item Program Number S0404, 931

"How Active a Supreme Court?"

Guests: Bork, Robert H. : Ennis, Bruce J., Jr.

3 January 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 22
Program details: In the wake of Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong's The Brethren, a clarifying discussion of the Supreme Court, what it should be doing, and what it has been doing. Mr. Ennis takes the activist view; "Mr. Bork holds that this Court and the Warren Court, and indeed prior Courts, have made up the Constitution in large part." ... BE: "The abortion cases are certainly examples of judicial activism. The question is whether it is impermissible judicial activism ... In the abortion cases ... it is harder to see that than in some other area, for two reasons. One reason is that it involves women, who are not a discrete and insular minority totally excluded from the political process... and the other is that the constitutional principle the Supreme Court was relying on ... was the principle of privacy,. . . [which] is not expressly stated in the Constitution ... I happen to agree with those decisions, but I do think they are activist decisions and are more difficult to justify than, for example, Brown v. the Board of Education."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.643
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6577
item Program Number S0405, 932

"America According to Three Top Journalists and William F. Buckley Jr."

Guests: Von Hoffman, Nicholas. : Kraft, Joseph. : Novak, Robert D.

15 February 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 22
Program details: More or less the semi-annual role reversal in which the guests question their host--except that this time, halfway through, they change back to the normal order; and, indeed, all the way along it is more a four-cornered conversation than a Q and A. Topics range from a potential Nuremberg-style trial of the Shah of Iran, to whether it would be a disaster for conservatives if George Bush rather than Ronald Reagan received the GOP nomination, to women and the draft, to Ted Kennedy's challenging President Carter in the primaries. One sample: JK: "If you make a distinction between empirical differences on the one hand and principled differences on the other, isn't it true that the principled differences are far more divisive in the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party?" WFB: "Yes. Yes." NvH: "Right. But not betwixt a Carter and a Kennedy." WFB: "I disagree." RN: "I disagree with that also. Just following up what Joe said, I do believe that Kennedy is very comfortable with the idea of an all-controlling Federal Government... Someone asked him just this week, in a private conversation, how are you, in the Kennedy tradition, calling for sacrifice--asking what you can do for your country--when you're even against registration for the draft? And he said, 'I am for sacrifice. I want the American businessman to sacrifice his profits and to reduce his profits.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.649
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6583
item Program Number S0406, 933

"Government Bailout"

Guests: Lugar, Richard.

14 February 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 37
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 23
Program details: We need, WFB begins, "a philosophy of the role of the government in coming to the aid of divers failing organizations and municipalities ... Why help Lockheed and Chrysler and not Abercrombie and Fitch? Why help New York City and not Indianapolis?" Senator Lugar had initially opposed the New York City bailout and then wound up supporting it; he persuasively tells why, explaining, among other things, that there was no great danger of opening a floodgate: "Finally, no city really has wanted to follow New York .. . simply because the [power of] government literally passes somewhere else.... That's not an appetizing prospect."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.647
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWQSO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6581
item Program Number S0407, 934

"What Is Happening in Ethiopia?"

Guests: Deressa, Dereje.

15 February 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 116 : 38
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 23
Program details: An exile speaks, quietly but eloquently, of his unhappy country, ruled over for six years by what WFB describes as a spectacular sadist, Colonel Mengistu, who set out to make Ethiopia a client state of the Soviet Union." Somalia was torn by war on two fronts and hegemonized by the Soviets, via their Cuban vassals. WFB: "How prominent are the Cubans? Are they behind the scenes or are they highly active and visible in all of the affairs?" DD: "They are highly active and they are visible, quite visible, and some of the atrocities they have committed--they're the kind of thing I don't want to mention on public television. They have violated our traditions, they have violated our homes, and it's the kind of thing that no part of society can accept."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.648
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6582
item Program Number S0408, 935

"A Guide for the 20th-century Pagan"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

15 February 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 24
Program details: A great book man, in his second appearance on Firing Line, talks about what one can say to pagans "without any appeal to faith": that is, he tells them about "the God of the philosophers," who "converges" with but is not identical to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This conversation is sometimes difficult for the non-philosopher, but Mr. Adler has the gift of choosing illustrations to bring us along. MJA: "Kant made a simple mistake.... He said that a hundred dollars in my pocket is not greater than a hundred dollars in my mind. I think that's just nonsense. A hundred dollars in my pocket will do things that a hundred dollars in my mind will not do. I understand the error that he made. Existence is not an ordinary predicate, not an ordinary absolute. It's not like red or green or large or heavy or here or there. And he therefore thought that existence is not a characterizing term. But to say that that which exists in reality does not have more existence and more power than that which exists only in the mind is nonsense."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.650
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6584
item Program Number S0409, 936

"The CIA and the Mission of Intelligence"

Guests: Powers, Thomas M.

26 March 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 24
Program details: The United States had emerged, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "from the hang-it-all-out delirium of the mid Seventies, when it became chic to reveal national secrets and criminal to conceal them," and the CIA was attempting to put itself back together. This rich discussion ranges from the state of British democracy to the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro, from Salvador Allende to Adolf Hitler. Here is Mr. Powers, on Richard Helms's testimony in Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on his appointment as Ambassador to Iran: "Mr. Helms ... was asked if the CIA had been involved in attempting to prevent Salvador Allende from coming to power. He said, 'No.' The answer is 'Yes.' Having said that, you've only just begun to open up the question, really." WFB: ".. . As a matter of fact, I wrote a novel in which I face the same kind of situation in the last chapter, in which my particular guy cops out, so to speak, by simply declining to answer. I assume you'd have preferred if he had done that." TMP: "Well, there were a number of ways that he could have declined to answer or avoided an answer or given not quite such an absolute and clear and wrong answer; and I think he chose not to do any of those things because the net effect... would have let the cat out of the bag, and his whole purpose was not to let the cat out of the bag."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.651
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6585
item Program Number S0410, 937

"What Are We Going to Do about Cuba?"

Guests: Reyes, Manolo. : Jorge, Antonio. : Whelan, James.

26 March 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 26
Program details: At a time when the foreign news was dominated by Afghanistan and Iran and our boycott of the Moscow Olympics, this discussion with two Cuban exiles and an American who is a longtime student of Latin America suggests chillingly that we should be looking rather closer to home. It was Mr. Reyes who had first reported the arrival of a new Soviet brigade in Cuba, which Mr. Buckley and Senator Ernest Hollings discussed on Firing Line a few months before this show (s0385). JW: "If we do not confront the enemy in Guatemala, for example,... if we do not construct the barrier that Solzhenitsyn spoke of recently, if we fail to do that in Guatemala, then the battle will be fought not in Guatemala, but in a matter of time on our own shores. And that does not seem at all improbable or implausible."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.652
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6586
item Program Number S0411, 938

"Approaches to Inflation"

Guests: Roberts, Paul Craig. : Malkiel, Burton.

31 March 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 26
Program details: Mr. Roberts, who as a member of Jack Kemp's staff had played had a large part in drafting the Kemp-Roth bill, and Mr. Malkiel, the author of A Random Walk down Wall Street, discuss what might be done to halt the Carter inflation. Their ideas hold up well in post-Reagan Revolution hindsight. BM: "I think as the recession deepens, which I expect it will, there will then be ample opportunity for tax cuts, which I think will have to be done not in the old way of stimulating consumption, but in a newer way of stimulating research and development, investment, and the things we've been talking about--and that may be the way that we start putting some of these things together and move in the direction of these supply incentives."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.653
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6587
item Program Number S0412, 939

"Should We Be Ruled by Plebiscite?"

Guests: Davidson, James Dale. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

31 March 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 27
Program details: In the wake of California's Proposition 13, mandating a cap on tax rises, the whole idea of referendums had gained a new cachet. Mr. Davidson, whose organization was pressing for a constitutional convention to pass a balanced-budget amendment, engages Messrs. Buckley and van den Haag in a lively discussion of specific initiatives and of the more general question of representative versus plebiscitary democracy. Here is Mr. Davidson's metaphor for why the Federal Government overspends: Assume that everybody in this room, including those in the audience, all shared the same Master Charge card... . And, say, if there were 100 people,... at the end of each billing period we'd all have to pay l/100th of the amount that we ran up on the card. And so we might all say to one another, 'Well, wow, the bill could be fantastic. We might all go bankrupt.'... But the question is, Is it rational for anybody not to spend? And the answer is no, because you get 100 per cent of the benefit that you spend, and you pay 1/100th of the bill that you rack up. So the person who acts responsibly and says, 'No, I won't spend,' is the guy who's going to end up paying for other people's expenditures alone and not get anything himself."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.654
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6588
item Program Number S0413, 940

"Is Big Business Out of Hand?"

Guests: Green, Mark J. : Bleiberg, Robert.

22 April 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 175 : 27
Program details: Ralph Nader, with Mr. Green at his right hand, had launched a drive against, as WFB puts it, "what they designate as the abuses and excesses of big business." Their "Corporate Democracy Act" would regulate the activity of the 800 largest corporations in the country. Mr. Green downplays the left wingishness of the effort ("As for the socialist point, Mr. Buckley, the predicate of every book that I've worked on ... is market economy. It's more competition; it's more small business"); the discussion sometimes reaches the shouting stage as Messrs. Buckley and Bleiberg engage Mr. Green on the subject of regulation of all sorts, from the SEC to the FDA to the EPA.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.655
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6589
item Program Number S0414, 941

"The Fight over Catholic Orthodoxy"

Guests: Davies, Michael. : Champlin, Joseph. : Martin, Malachi.

22 April 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 1
Program details: Although Mr. Buckley's introduction focuses on Pope John Paul's repudiation of the teachings of Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx, the discussion that follows centers not on doctrinal theology but on what the ordinary worshipper encounters at every Mass: the shape of the liturgy. Specifically, on the conflict between traditionalists (like Messrs. Buckley and Davies) who loved the Tridentine Mass, and reformers (like Monsignor Champlin) who support the Novus Ordo mandated by Vatican II. JC: "You liked the old worship because the 'I' was able to pray, and you weren't kind of impinged by the priest or other people? That kind of notion? ..." WFB: "It gave me a sense that the priest was there as a mediator between me and God, whereas it seems to me that the existing approach tends to be sort of crowd-oriented." JC: "I think that's the key thing right there.... Before Vatican II, when I was ordained in '56, the Mass was very much a mystery. I was a priest with my back to the people, in Latin, there was silence in the congregation.... The Council, then, going back to the best traditions of the early Church, said it's both 'I' and 'we' together. It's a vertical worship, yes, but it's also a horizontal worship."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.656
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGNO8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6590
item Program Number S0415, 942

"Allard Lowenstein on Firing Line: A Retrospective"

Guests:

22 April 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 1
Program details: A memorial to, as WFB describes him, "in our time, the original activist," shot dead at age 51 by a former associate. The program--the first such retrospective on Firing Line (others would be done for Clare Boothe Luce, Michael Harrington, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Barry Goldwater)--is composed of excerpts from Mr. Lowenstein's nine Firing Line appearances, framed by the eulogies given at his memorial service by Mr. Buckley and Senator Edward Kennedy. EMK: "He was a person of impassioned political conviction, but personally he loved so many who so often disagreed with his politics. Who but Al Lowenstein could claim among his best friends both Bill Buckley and Robert Kennedy?" WFB: "Of all the partisans I have known, from the furthest steppes of the spectrum, his was the most undistracted concern, not for humanity--though he was conversant with big-think idiom--but for human beings."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.657
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E55X9I
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6591
item Program Number S0416, 943

"The World of Soviet Disinformation"

Guests: de Borchgrave, Arnaud. : Moss, Robert.

9 May 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 2
Program details: The guests are the co-authors of The Spike, an acclaimed novel about Soviet manipulation of Western public opinion (the title refers to the means by which, in pre-computer days, newspaper stories were killed). This riveting discussion focuses on the way the Soviet Bloc conducts disinformation campaigns, with the witting or unwitting assistance of the Western media. Mr. de Borchgrave: "According to what we've heard from defectors--and we've had access to most defectors from the KGB, the GRU (which is Soviet military intelligence), the Cuban DGI, and other Eastern secret services--to a man (because there isn't a woman among them), they all say the same thing: they have successfully over the years anaesthetized Western opinion-makers and Western governments as to their real intentions." Mr. Moss: "The KGB is ... the largest, most ruthless secret service in the world, with over a million employees, and it's bent on our destruction. Yet we can read very little about it, so when we discuss intelligence in our open society, I often have the feeling that we are watching, let us say, a football match in which only one of the teams is showing. The other team has been magically removed from the screen, so we see the remaining team jumping about, striking absurd postures, kicking, pursuing a ball, all inexplicably."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.660
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6594
item Program Number S0417, 944

"Is There a U.S. Transportation Policy?"

Guests: Goldschmidt, Neil.

15 May 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 2
Program details: A surprisingly engaging show on a topic whose interest does not always match its importance. Mr. Goldschmidt gives the impression of seeing transportation steadily and seeing it whole, from private automobiles to airlines to long-distance railways to urban mass transit. Mr. Buckley draws the discussion usefully to questions about the price mechanism and the way oil prices affect our relations with our allies. NG: "But there is a flip side to this ... and that is, we have a responsibility not to surprise our allies. We are asking, for example, from the Japanese a pretty severe price for their partnership with us in terms of the Middle East. Their dependence on oil is much greater than ours. We get half of ours here. They get all of theirs someplace else than at home."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.661
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6595
item Program Number S0418, 945

"The Cabinet: What Are Its Responsibilities?"

Guests: Watson, Jack H., Jr.

15 May 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 3
Program details: Candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976 had praised "Cabinet government." President Carter in 1979 had fired three of his Cabinet officers. This hour offers an often surprising look at how the modern Executive Branch works. WFB: "Now, Roosevelt and Eisenhower used their Cabinets extensively. Kennedy did not; it bored him to tears. Lyndon Johnson hardly knew the names of his Cabinet members.... And historians seem to be saying that the growth of the Executive is such as to incline a President to deal with his associates--with the people who are right around him--rather than with the people who are, however ostentatious their responsibilities, one step removed." ...JHW: "Many years ago ... I read a book by Robert Ardrey called The Territorial Imperative, in which he set out why this instinct for turf was so strong among primates. I can report to you, based on my three and a half years of experience in government, that the instinct for turf... among government bureaucrats is about one hundred times what it is among gorillas."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.662
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6596
item Program Number S0419, 946

"Who Should Reagan Pick for Vice President?"

Guests: Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931- : Weyrich, Paul. : Buchanan, Patrick J. (Patrick Joseph), 1938-

22 May 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 3
Program details: Although these four veteran conservative activists range over the whole political landscape--from the imperative for Reagan to run a national campaign rather than one focused on electoral votes, to the wiliness of Jimmy Carter as a political campaigner--it is particularly illuminating to hear them on the title question. PJB: "I see your argument very clearly. It's an argument that's been made against the Ford idea, which is that it is sort of going back to the past, and Reagan represents a clear break, something new....Whom would you list if you had to list the four or five that Paul mentioned?" WFB:"... It seems to me that Bush is, in virtue of a kind of earned seniority, the obvious candidate, even as Kefauver was the obvious candidate in 1956 to go with Stevenson." PJB: "The Stover of Yale, huh?" WFB: "Well, there is that, yes." PJB: "He has done well, he has a certain claim, and he's got a certain support that Reagan doesn't have."WFB: "That's right.... One of the things that offended people most in San Francisco in 1964 was when Goldwater turned to Bill Miller.... It was felt to be a kind of a defi hurled in the face of everybody else, saying, 'We can do it all by ourselves.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.663
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6597
item Program Number S0420, 1001

"The American Book Awards"

Guests: Chancellor, John.

1 May 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 4
Program details: A departure from Firing Line's usual format, justified by the fact that, as WFB puts it, "it is through books that people tend to promulgate their views." Messrs. Buckley and Chancellor are the co-hosts of the first annual American Book Awards, the successor (not uncontroversially--see the following show, s0421) to the National Book Awards. This show reproduces excerpts from the awards ceremony, with just a short foreword and afterword from Mr. Buckley. One sample, from Theodore White: "I come to present the award for the most unforgiving of all literary arts, the art of autobiography. A young novelist, a young poet, a young raconteur, can hope to do better in his second, third, or fourth time around as he improves his style, but the autobiographer must get it right the first time. He has only one tango with his facts, or she has only one waltz where memory and truth dance to different music. Autobiography permits of no rearranging ... You get it right the first time, or you're a fake forever after."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.658
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6592
item Program Number S0421, 1002

"The Controversy over Book Awards"

Guests: Leonard, John, 1939- : FitzGerald, Frances. : Dystel, Oscar.

22 May 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 4
Program details: A good-natured though adversarial discussion of the awards featured on the previous program: "Were the books chosen intelligently, and by the right people? Where does an avoidance of elitism edge over into commercial exploitation?" FF: "The present system is very likely to bring up only the best-sellers, because that's what people have read. Now the real function, to me, of a literary award--as opposed to something that has to do with the publishing industry--is to discover merit, and to discover merit in books that have not had a commercial success." ... OD: "I think we are trying to compare the TABA awards with the National Book Awards. They are two different events. The National Book Awards is a concept supported by the authors and critics...perfectly valid; I hope it continues in some way. The TABA book awards is a new concept supported by the book community."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.664
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6598
item Program Number S0422, 1003

"The Republican Vice Presidency"

Guests: Vander Jagt, Guy. : Lewis, Drew. : Garment, Leonard.

17 July 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 5
Program details: A spirited and substantive four-cornered conversation that ranges from the prospects of the Reagan-Bush ticket and the question why it wasn't a Reagan-Ford ticket to the problems facing America--stagflation, racial tensions, the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. DL: "Well, first I can say that those that were watching television knew much more than those who were in the meetings [choosing a running-mate]. ... It was rather interesting sitting in Governor Reagan's suite and watching various people on the floor of the convention telling us what was happening." ... LG: "Quite apart from the human tragedy of these lost and stunted lives [in the inner cities] is a very significant social dilemma because the working of the complex American society depends upon harmony among all the parts, and the explosions in Miami and the past explosions in other cities are the worst possible grit in the gears of the American system. So I think that impulse in the Republican Party which is very fresh, very energetic, very confident ... augurs very well certainly for the long-term future and probably very much so in the short term in this next election."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.665
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6599
item Program Number S0423, 1004

"The Republican Platform and the ERA"

Guests: Schlafly, Phyllis. : Heckler, Margaret.

17 July 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 5
Program details: "The most spirited disagreement during the sessions that brought forth the Republican platform in Detroit," Mr. Buckley begins, "had to do with ... women's rights and abortion." The GOP had as recently as the 1976 platform backed the Equal Rights Amendment; this year the platform committee withdrew that plank, over the opposition of Rep. Heckler. This sizzling exchange sometimes reaches the boiling point, but there is also serious discussion of current laws, of working conditions for women, and of the amendment itself. WFB: "I should like to begin by asking Mrs. Heckler whether the statement I have just quoted [from her] doesn't suggest that Mrs. Schlafly, who opposes ERA, also opposes women's rights." MH: "I would have to ask Mrs. Schlafly to speak for herself on the position on women's rights, but I think that those of us who see the amendment as the only vehicle are aware of the fact--as I am, as a member of Congress for 14 years-- that the case-by-case method of dealing with changing the law will simply take another two hundred years...." PS: "I brought along with me a Republican platform that I support and Ronald Reagan supports and which Mrs. Heckler does not support, and I think there's one sentence that... explains the difference between her position and mine. The platform says, 'We support equal rights and equal opportunities for women without taking away traditional rights of women such as exemption from the military draft.' Now I think that one sentence shows who's really for women's rights."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.666
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6600
item Program Number S0424, 1005

"Is Camp David Falling Apart?"

Guests: Perlmutter, Nate. : Fein, Leonard.

21 July 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 6
Program details: The Camp David Accords--negotiated under President Carter's aegis in 1978 and given flesh the following year, again through President Carter's efforts (see Firing Lines s0361 and s0362)--were widely said to be unraveling. This show offers a thoughtful discussion of a highly emotional problem with, as WFB puts it, "two men who are devoted friends of Israel but who can talk about the subject without shouting." The specific point at issue was Menachem Begin's intransigence over West Bank settlements, but, as Mr. Perlmutter points out, Begin's behavior, and indeed the whole Middle Eastern scene, has to be viewed in the world context: "In the last analysis--God forgive me for this--I really think the Jews are irrelevant, I think the Arabs are irrelevant, I think the settlements are irrelevant, I think the homeland is irrelevant.... It's the United States and the Soviet Union, as primitive as a High Noon movie, walking down that street."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.667
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGNRA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6601
item Program Number S0425, 1006

"Marijuana Update: What's New?"

Guests: Novak, William. : Rosenthal, Mitchell.

9 May 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 6
Program details: The two guests' perspectives differ so radically that it is sometimes hard for them to engage each other's arguments--even before WFB adds philosophical libertarianism to the mix ("after all, no one is forcing anyone to take marijuana or forcing anyone to take alcohol or forcing anyone to take heroin"). Dr. Rosenthal: "Studies that Phoenix did in New York were showing that... anywhere from 30 to 70 per cent of high-school students were getting stoned three to five times a week. If that kind of regular drunkenness or regular self-medication goes on, I think that it interferes with the kind of maturing process that needs to go on, and we see many youngsters--by no means all, but we can't argue this issue by looking at best outcomes ... --fall apart and regress toward infantilism." Mr. Novak: "I believe that marijuana, like alcohol, should be legal for adults; I believe it should be illegal for kids. I don't think that will stop the problem. I'm not naive. Kids drink. Kids are going to smoke whether it's legal or illegal....Marijuana [is] a weed. It grows easily and in some parts of the country it grows very successfully. It is said to be the largest cash crop in California."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.659
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6593
item Program Number S0426, 1007

"What Happened at Madison Square Garden?"

Guests: Kramer, Michael. : Kaiser, Robert. : Kondracke, Morton.

15 August 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 7
Program details: This show was taped the day after the Democratic National Convention wound up, and the questions, as Mr. Buckley frames them, are: "Did Walter Mondale overdo it? Is Jimmy Carter far gone in narcissism? Are Democratic delegates suffering from creeping economic illiteracy?" This spirited conversation, which treats of both the substance and the strategy, holds up well in retrospect. Mr. Kondracke: "I think that Carter got himself positioned in the political middle in this convention by being booed over the draft registration, by having Teddy Kennedy force down his throat an economic plank that he didn't agree with, and by having militance on the issue of ERA and abortion force things into the platform that he didn't want. He makes himself seem to be the responsible middle beset by the liberals on the left and the right wing represented by Reagan. So, I think he comes out of this convention in much better shape than he went in." ... Mr. Kaiser: "I think that Reagan has this disarming ability to make people feel that he is a regular guy and a plausible guy, which is going to make it hard for the strategy that Michael well describes to take hold. My sense of it is that the election is going to be won by whichever of these characters succeeds in making the other one the issue, and at the moment I think Reagan's got the advantage. But it's his to lose."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.669
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFB9Q
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6603
item Program Number S0427, 1008

"Defense and the Democrats"

Guests: Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.

15 August 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 7
Program details: A high-energy duel between well-matched antagonists--though ones who agree, probably, on as much as they disagree on. Senator Moynihan had just, at the Democratic Convention, spoken approvingly of President Carter's defense policies--to, as WFB puts it, "my stupefaction and that of others." Today's discussion ranges from the bloodbath in Cambodia at the hands of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, to the Soviets' use of Cuban troops as proxies in Africa, to the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction. DPM: "We thought the Russians would build up to our level [in nuclear weapons] 'parity' and then stop, because we thought they had the same view we had. It turned out they didn't. They have different tastes, they have different history, they have different attitudes."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.670
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9SM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6604
item Program Number S0428, 1009

"Have We Learned Anything about Gun Control?"

Guests: Carter, Harlon B. : Buckley, John J.

21 July 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 8
Program details: The short answer to the title question seems to be: "No." That is, many statistics have been amassed, but our two guests, both serious students of the subject and men who have testified on it in many forums, cannot agree on what the numbers are, let alone what they mean. A ding-dong battle from start to finish: JJB: "In 1977 [Washington, D.C.]put across in the city council the toughest gun-control laws in the country.... The result has been a 26 per cent reduction in homicides by handguns and 22 1/2 per cent in assaults by handguns ... despite the fact that that is just the city, an island surrounded by gun-toting Virginia and Maryland ..." HBC: "... The evaluations of people who in no sense can ever be accused of being friends of ours, the Washington Post and the Washington Star, and another who are friends of ours, the Washington Police Department, do not agree with what Sheriff Buckley just said. They have all said lately that the crime rate has increased and not decreased."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.668
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGNX4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6602
item Program Number S0429, 1010

"How to Unscramble an Egg"

Guests: Joseph, Keith, Sir, 1918-

4 September 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 8
Program details: The "egg" of this show's title is the public sector that the current government inherited from its predecessors, Labour and Conservative alike--for as Mr. Buckley points out, "Socialism did not cease to grow substantially under Mr. Churchill, Mr. Eden, Mr. Macmillan, or Mr. Heath." Mrs. Thatcher intended to break that chain, and part of Sir Keith's mandate was to denationalize as many industries as he could. This fast-moving and detail-filled conversation touches on the difficulties of getting from here to there, on the economics of the Concorde, on the effect of Britain's having craft unions (as opposed, say, to the industry-wide unions of West Germany). One sample: KJ: "Our biggest problems come in the public sector, and there are big problems. You are lucky in America. You don't have-- Would you like to have our nationalized sector? Would you like to copy that? I do recommend you not hasten to nationalize." WFB: "No, somewhere along the line the seductiveness of nationalization passed America by. The last time a significant historical figure called for broad scale nationalization was in 1948, and Henry Wallace got about three million votes." KJ: "Yes." WFB: "We go in for a thing called regulation, and regulation is a way of nationalizing without having to preoccupy yourself with a balance sheet."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.671
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6605
item Program Number S0430, 1011

"The Crisis in Labour"

Guests: Benn, Tony, 1925-

4 September 1980

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 7
Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 9
Program details: Tony Benn, as he was by now known--having dropped syllables from his name along with his inherited title, Viscount Stansgate--had first debated WFB in 1948, and had appeared on Firing Line once before, on the subject of the Concorde (see Firing Line s0059). During the decades since their undergraduate encounter, Mr. Benn has remained as committed to socialism as Mr. Buckley has to a libertarian brand of conservatism. TB: "Why are people poor in the first place? Why do the people who create the wealth end up poor and the people who own the land end up rich? Now that is the basic socialist position...." WFB: "Why, by current standards, were 90 per cent of the American people poor in 1900, whereas only 9 per cent of them are poor today? Because there has been a universal increase [in the] gross national product which has been made possible by the economic exertions of free men--not men dictated to by the government."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.673
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWY7M
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6607
item Program Number S0431, 1012, 1012R

"Inside OPEC"

Guests: Kelly, J. B.

4 September 1980, 4 January 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 24-25
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 9
Program details: An illuminating hour with one of the West's leading experts on the Middle East, beginning with oil and OPEC, but ranging to British colonialism (the pros as much as the cons), to the current situation in South Yemen, and to why we can't take much comfort from the fact that Islam and Marxism are fundamentally incompatible. JBK: "The important thing here is that the emotions, aspirations, that are excited in Muslim breasts, either by the preaching of Islam or by the doctrines of Marxism which are fed to them through different agencies and perhaps in very changed versions--it is not necessary that these two should mix. Both are directed towards the same end: that is, the release from oppression, the enjoyment when you enter in upon your estate. Now who are the oppressors? The oppressors in both cases are deemed to be, whether by Marxists or Muslims, the West."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.672
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6606
item Program Number S0432, 1013, 1013E

"How Does One Find Faith?"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

6 September 1980, 21 December 1980, 23 December 1988, 22 December 1991, 20 December 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 26-31
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 10
Program details: A radiant session with the former left-wing atheist, who became one of the century's leading Christian apologists. Mr. Muggeridge on how he was drawn to faith: "Now why did this longing for faith assail me? Insofar as I can point to anything, it is to do with this profession which both you and I followed of observing what's going on in the world and attempting to report and comment thereon, because that particular occupation gives one a very heightened sense of the sheer fantasy of human affairs--the sheer fantasy of power and of the structures that men construct out of power--and therefore gives one an intense, overwhelming longing to be in contact with reality. And so you look for reality, and you try this and try that, and ultimately you arrive at the conclusion--great oversimplification--that reality is a mystery. The heart of reality is a mystery." WFB: "Even if that were so, why should that mystery lead you to Christian belief?" MM: "Because it leads you to God." NOTE: S0432 is the original 60-minute broadcast. S0432R is the edited 30-minute version, with an added introduction by William F. Buckley, that was rebroadcast annually at Christmas for the rest of the life of Firing Line. The transcript and link that are available for download correspond to the 60-minute version. For the 30-minute version go to http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52UB2/
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.674
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWTVS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6608
item Program Number S0433, 1014, 1014E

"Do We Need Religion or Religious Institutions?"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

6 September 1980, 30 December 1988, 29 December 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 32 -33
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 10
Program details: This show suffers from comparison with the one previous (s0432), but by any other standard it is a wonderful exploration of modern man and his discontents-starting with the fact that Mr. Muggeridge, although a leading Christian apologist, was unchurched. MM: "I've, believe it or not, longed to be a Catholic.... I've longed for it as though it were the most marvelous thing ... The truth is, I think, that I take a very pessimistic view of the Catholic Church, despite the very brilliant Pope you've now got. It seems to me that it's dropping to pieces; and of course it had a severe blow after the Vatican Council. Therefore, I would be joining something of which I was enormously critical, and this isn't really an honorable thing to do." WFB: "That's never bothered you before." MM: "I've never contemplated anything so serious as joining a church. I mean, even if you were to turn to mundane things-joining a club-if you were to join it quite confident that you were going to challenge all its rules and have rows with all its members, it would be rather a foolish step to take...." WFB: "Well, I'm, to put it lightly, stupefied that you would make a decision whether or not to extend your loyalty to an institution based on the behavior of some of its communicants. I can't imagine any time in history when anybody would have become a Catholic if he had been so easily put off." (Malcolm Muggeridge and his wife, Kitty, eventually submitted to Rome, in 1984.)
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.675
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E52UBC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6609
item Program Number S0434, 1015

"Prices and Pricing"

Guests: Kahn, Alfred E. (Alfred Edward)

13 October 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 12
Program details: When Mr. Kahn was first on Firing Line two years earlier (s0337), he was the Chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, with the mandate of abolishing it. He is now in charge of abolishing inflation. It would take several years and a change of Administration for the CAB to go out of business and inflation to come under control, but not through any deficiency in Mr. Kahn's understanding, e.g., of the causes of inflation: "The demands that we place on a society, increasing each year, outrun the productive ability to satisfy those demands, and when society cannot discipline itself to hold the monetary demands--for wage increases that outrun productivity increases; for credit-financed consumer spending, which is a major problem in our society; for government expenditure programs--when society is unable to discipline those monetary demands ...then inflation is the inevitable consequence."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.680
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6614
item Program Number S0435, 1016

"Is This a Time for Action?"

Guests: Simon, William E., 1927-

13 October 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 117 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 12
Program details: On the eve of Ronald Reagan's election, we have here one of his advisors to discuss--as he does with his usual incisiveness--the economic picture, domestic and international, and the way government policies affect it. WES: "Balancing the budget is a buzz word. Everybody wants to balance the budget, and even some politicians would love to balance the budget, but they'd like to balance the budget perhaps at a trillion dollars or two trillion dollars in spending. I don't. I want to see spending limited, and the increase in spending limited to the real growth of the economy." ... "What is the tax burden? The tax burden is the total spending by government, because it's either going to come out as direct taxes on all of us, or it's going to come out through inflation, which is the most insidious tax of all."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.681
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6615
item Program Number S0436, 1017

"The Crisis in American Education: Part I"

Guests: Crosby, Emerald. : Barr, Robert. : Down, A. Graham. : Anrig, Gregory R.

18 September 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 13
Program details: Why are the public schools doing such a poor job? Are the public schools doing a poor job? Four educators with a variety of perspectives--plus their host, who first came to nationwide attention writing on modern college education--go back and forth over these and related questions. Mr. Anrig: "The major push in American education in the post-World War II world seems to me to have been to reach out to hold onto more children, to keep them off the unemployment lines, to keep them off welfare, to keep them off street corners and the drug traffic.... Now in doing that, our performance is not as good as when we didn't deal with these populations.... If you hold onto the youngsters with problems, your scores are going to reflect it." Mr. Crosby: "Every kid that comes out of the Detroit public schools is immunized, because by law we must do that. But there's no law that says he must read." Mr. Down: "Are we really suggesting here that we should have different curriculums for different sorts of people? Everybody needs to know how to read, to write, to think independently, to appraise critically and analytically."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.676
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6610
item Program Number S0437, 1018

"The Crisis in American Education: Part II"

Guests: Crosby, Emerald. : Barr, Robert. : Down, A. Graham. : Anrig, Gregory R.

18 September 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 13
Program details: Why are the public schools doing such a poor job? Are the public schools doing a poor job? Four educators with a variety of perspectives--plus their host, who first came to nationwide attention writing on modern college education--go back and forth over these and related questions. Mr. Anrig: "The major push in American education in the post-World War II world seems to me to have been to reach out to hold onto more children, to keep them off the unemployment lines, to keep them off welfare, to keep them off street corners and the drug traffic.... Now in doing that, our performance is not as good as when we didn't deal with these populations.... If you hold onto the youngsters with problems, your scores are going to reflect it." Mr. Crosby: "Every kid that comes out of the Detroit public schools is immunized, because by law we must do that. But there's no law that says he must read." Mr. Down: "Are we really suggesting here that we should have different curriculums for different sorts of people? Everybody needs to know how to read, to write, to think independently, to appraise critically and analytically."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.677
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6611
item Program Number S0438, 1019

"The Conflict: Christianity vs. Capitalism"

Guests: Arns, Paul Evaristo Cardinal.

5 October 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 14
Program details: A difficult hour with a guest who radiates benevolence but whose mode of expression gives no hint that he is a student of literature and a former professor of patrology and didactics. One sample, on liberation theology: WFB: "Now, a theology of liberation would seek to liberate man from those fetters that are unnecessary to the fulfillment of his dignity and the exercise of his freedom. Is that correct?" PEA: "You see, that's a complicated thing you are saying and we are more simple than this. We see the people suffering in their material necessities and their cultural and their social and also their religious needs, and when they are suffering they must go out of this suffering by their means and also by the aid of the government and help people prepare to help the people, but not against the people. You cannot help them and not also being abstract, but you must go with the people and see what are their strengths."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.678
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6612
item Program Number S0439, 1020

"What's Happening in Brazil?"

Guests: Cardoso, Fernando Henrique. : Gaspari, Elio. : Russell, George.

5 October 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 14
Program details: A lucid and instructive program on a country that had been through a near-Communist takeover, a military coup, growing prosperity, and returning inflation, and was now on the brink of return to full civilian rule. Mr. Russell: "A part of this problem [land reform] is a land-title problem, and from what I understand this is really again quite a Brazilian problem.... The survey system of Brazil is still colonial, and a lot of the problems that look like land reform, in a more metaphysical sense of some enormous overthrow of the system, really have a lot to do with getting out there with a theodolite... and tacking down the land." Mr. Cardoso: "There is no particular reaction against America. Multinationals are German, are Swedish, Japanese, American. If you compare Brazil with other countries, there is no sentiment anti-American--there is sentiment anti-exploitation, anti-inequalities, but not necessarily anti-America."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.679
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6613
item Program Number S0440, 1021

"The New Political Outlook"

Guests: Kramer, Michael. : Kondracke, Morton. : Bartley, Robert.

24 November 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 15
Program details: How did Reagan win? And why were the polls so slow to indicate that he would? A fast-moving four-cornered conversation between two conservatives and two liberals on the substance and strategy of the campaigns. Mr. Kondracke: "Nobody was enthusiastic about anybody...." Mr. Buckley: "I was enthusiastic." MK: "Well, of course you were." WFB: "You can say, 'You were the only enthusiastic person.' " MK: "I wasn't enthusiastic about anybody, and I know very few people who were enthusiastic about anybody. Of course, I tend to know more Democrats than you do." ... Mr. Bartley: "Or to look at it another way,... here was an electorate that was ready to turn Carter out--turn out the incumbent--and he ran against that with the most logical kind of campaign, which is to portray your opponent as a menace to civilization, and made a certain amount of progress with that kind of campaign; but then it came apart at the time of the debates and people went back to what they were going to do anyway."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.682
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6616
item Program Number S0441, 1022

"Harold Macmillan Revisited"

Guests: Macmillan, Harold, 1894-

24 November 1980

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 15
Program details: Mr. Macmillan, appearing for the second time on Firing Line, wears both his learning and his experience lightly, but his sense of authority is still unmistakable. HM: "The great thing is to press on with two things: the creation of wealth in our own Western society...; and the determination that the loss of empire-which Churchill saw coming-must be replaced, as regards Britain, by a united Europe: the realization that although you are very strong in America, we've no right to depend on you. We ought to be helping you as allies. The total population of what's left of Europe-Western Europe-is larger than that of the United States, richer.... We ought not to be hanging onto the tail, we ought to be marching proudly as allies of the United States." ... WFB: "Is it your opinion that the situation is reversible or that the Soviet lead at this point is too extensive to make it possible for us to catch up?" HM: "As a technical proposition, of course, I'm not informed about it, but I've never known any position that is irredeemable."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.683
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6617
item Program Number S0442, 1023

"How Should Ex-Communists Cooperate?"

Guests: Navasky, Victor S.

4 December 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 16
Program details: Is naming one's former associates in a subversive enterprise the least one can do to make reparation? Or is it the sort of thing only a tyrant would ask? Heat, but also light, on the reasons for congressional investigations of Communist activity, and the reasons many non-Communists opposed them. WFB: You can't just say, 'Oops, I'm sorry that I was supporting Stalin during the period that he killed fifteen million people.' ... I want to prove I'm sorry by cooperating with efforts to spread the word, and the most concrete way to do that is to show that you are willing to identify... the other members of the Ku Klux Klan, the other members of the Nazi Bund, the other members of the Communist Party." ... VSN: "To my way of thinking, totalitarian societies are the ones that are supposed to say, 'In order to demonstrate your loyalty to the state, you are required to demonstrate your disloyalty to your friends.' During the Soviet purges, the first two questions they would ask anybody were: 'Who recruited you?' and 'Whom did you recruit?' That's not something we, in a democratic society, are supposed to do."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.684
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9T6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6618
item Program Number S0443, 1024

"Why Is Jazz Neglected?"

Guests: Taylor, Billy. : Wellstood, Dick.

9 December 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 16
Program details: Two leading performers, who are also effective verbal exponents of their art, talk about the origins of jazz, its relations to rock, and the likelihood of finding good audiences in Europe as compared to the United States; but they also turn delightfully to the keyboard from time to time to let their fingers do the talking. BT: "Rock and roll...was a conscious effort by primarily white artists to perform in a way that was black." ...DW: "One difference between jazz and rock is that jazz is not a song-oriented music....Rock is based on songs, and jazz hasn't been, really, for fifty years. There are lots of people who sing, but that's not the same thing. Jazz is an instrumental music. You can't sing an Art Tatum solo and you can't sing a Beethoven symphony."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.685
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9TG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6619
item Program Number S0444, 1025

"Is It Time for Civil Defense?"

Guests: Beilenson, Laurence W., 1899- : Coffin, William Sloane.

9 December 1980

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 17
Program details: Are our leaders, as Mr. Beilenson maintains, profoundly negligent in failing to provide seriously for either civil defense or anti-ballistic-missile defense? Or does such thinking, as Mr. Coffin believes, lead away from disarmament and straight to nuclear destruction? LB: "The best experts say 2 to 6 per cent would die with good civil defense, and that's all. But suppose they're wrong. Let's suppose that civil defense would save only five to ten million people. Aren't they worth saving? What's the duty of a government except to save its citizens?" ... WSC: "The best minds, I think, have said that in a nuclear age everything has changed except our way of thinking.... The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison with the risks in continuing the present arms race." ... WSC: "We have no choice but to trust, and they have no choice but to trust." WFB: "I have a choice. I elect not to trust. Put me down for not trusting." LB: "Me, too." WSC: "I don't trust either of you very far, because you're going to get us into the worst possible jam."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.686
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6620
item Program Number S0445, 1026

"Are Ideology and the CIA Compatible?"

Guests: Meyer, Cord. : Snepp, Frank.

5 January 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 17
Program details: Because of things the participants are not at liberty to say, this show is less easy to follow than some. But there is good discussion, particularly of the recent congressional investigations. Mr. Meyer: "The Church committee investigation did provide an opportunity to educate the American people in a very serious way. This was a chance to lay on the record what the KGB is, what the opposition is up to, what the real world is like out there--and yet so much of the Church committee went forward as if we were living in a perfectly friendly world, with no opposition whatsoever." ... Mr. Snepp: "The agency itself laid the ground for those very destructive investigations. .. --that is to say, [James] Schlesinger's decision in mid 1973 [during his brief tenure as CIA Director] to dig up all the agency's wrongdoings and put them in one particular place. William Colby was assiduous in pursuing these 'crimes,' if you want to call them that, and therefore the docket was there--and the only thing the congressional investigators did was to get hold of it and play it for all it was worth."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.687
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWQ5C
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6621
item Program Number S0446, 1027

"The Abscam Controversy"

Guests: Tigar, Michael.

5 January 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 18
Program details: It was a year earlier, as Mr. Buckley reminds us, that Abscam hit the front pages: "The modus operandi, now widely known, called for an FBI agent, posing as a sheik, or as a sheik's representative, to offer money, typically forty or fifty thousand dollars, to a congressman if he would undertake to sponsor legislation to permit a designated Arab into the country." Half a dozen lawmakers had succumbed and had been convicted, though sometimes of a lesser charge than "accepting a bribe." Mr. Tigar is of course parti pris, but he is persuasive in explicating the distinction between forms of police action that discover already committed crimes (e.g., asking to purchase previously distilled moonshine whiskey during Prohibition) and ones that provoke a crime. MT: "I would have said that the fictitious character of the government's scripting was enough to carry this beyond the outer limits of permissible law-enforcement conduct."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.688
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFBA0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6622
item Program Number S0447, 1028

"Wealth and Poverty"

Guests: Gilder, George. : Lekachman, Robert.

5 January 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 18
Program details: Messrs. Gilder and Lekachman mostly talk past each other (GG: "Avarice is ubiquitous. Capitalism occurs in some places. Avarice does not suffice to stimulate capitalism ... Avarice leads to a search for safety and security and comfort..." RL: "There are people who go to Las Vegas and play blackjack ... there are people who buy stock or, if they are corporate officers, commit their corporations to investments of various kinds, and they're gambling too with calculations of odds"), but WFB steps in with useful clarification, e.g., "If I determine to build a cheaper mousetrap in order to line my pocket, but in the course of creating a cheaper mousetrap I make it possible for you to purchase one, I have committed an objectively altruistic act for selfish motives. Now why do you assume there is an incompatibility between those two concepts?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.689
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6623
item Program Number S0448, 1029

"Are We Menaced by Moral Majority?"

Guests: Falwell, Jerry.

22 January 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 19
Program details: Whether or not one agrees with him on specific moral or theological points, Mr. Falwell ably defends his organization against accusations--by, among others, the ACLU and the President of Yale--that it promotes anti-Semitism and other forms of hate. JF: "Religious tests to prevent one from running for office are not only unconstitutional, they are unthinkable.... In this pluralistic democratic republic, one who would deny a Roman Catholic or a fundamentalist or a Jew or a Mormon the right to hold office--or any other person, black or white--is denying the very precept upon which the nation was established.... I think that we must stand against religious tests, but every citizen has the right to know what his representative believes or doesn't believe."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.690
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GHGO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6624
item Program Number S0449, 1030

"Human Rights and Foreign Policy"

Guests: Derian, Patricia.

22 January 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 19
Program details: The hour drags a bit, as Jimmy Carter's former human-rights chief seems unused to having to defend her positions. But there are some good bits. WFB: "When Khrushchev came to America for the first time, you will remember, Eisenhower did not permit himself to smile in public, which was very difficult for somebody whose smile was as congenital as Jimmy Carter's." ... PD: "I don't think you can find a people anywhere in the world who are perfectly satisfied or even reasonably satisfied to continue to live in conditions as they were fifty years ago.... Those people are going to have a say in their government. They are going to want to have a say and they are going to struggle until they get it. What's going to happen then, if we have been the ones supporting, backing up, helping in every way possible, having warm relations with the dictator who had the foot on the neck? I just don't think it's in our interest."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.691
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6625
item Program Number S0450, 1031

"A Scrutiny of the Reagan Economic Policy"

Guests: Thurow, Lester C. : Davidson, James Dale. : Heilbroner, Robert.

24 February 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 20
Program details: A bracing discussion of the tax plan that President Reagan had just unveiled. RH: "I think that there is a picture in the minds of the Reagan Administration--a picture of the economy as a kind of great coiled spring. It's held down by two weights: one is the weight of government spending and one is the weight of taxation. Take away those weights and the spring will expand, and the forces of growth will unleash themselves. My feeling is that when you take away the weight of government spending, you find that some of the tension goes out of the spring; and when you take away the weight of taxation, you find that the spring doesn't begin to expand to the extent that you thought.".. . LT: "I would be willing, in a world where you essentially shift towards consumption taxes, to bring the capital-gains tax on productive venture capital, plant, and equipment--I would even bring it to zero. On the other hand, I think the tax on non-productive investments--antiques, old silver ... land, gold, second homes--ought to be very high because I think there's a real litmus test as to whether somebody's serious about supply-side economics, and that is, 'Which of the many tax incentives for nonproductive investments would you be willing to get rid of?' If you give me the answer, 'None,' then I say, 'Look, you don't have any real serious interest in supply-side economics.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.692
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6626
item Program Number S0451, 1032

"William F. Buckley Jr. Faces the Firing Line"

Guests: Harrington, Donald. : Davidson, James Dale. : Pilpel, Harriet F.

24 February 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 20
Program details: The semi-annual occasion when, as WFB explains the format, "the tables are turned, and the host of Firing Line becomes the grillee. Three dragons are selected as executioners, and, traditionally, they have done their job with obscene zest, not withstanding diligent efforts, alas unavailing, to bribe them." The topics in this lively and often substantive exchange include abortion, national health insurance, charity (as opposed to welfare), and the reasons why non-Catholic children go to Catholic schools. One sample: HP: "In an interdependent society such as the one in which we live, in which poverty and unemployment is often not the fault of the individual person, is there not a basic principle entitling them to at least a minimum security income without having to beg--which is indecent and inconsistent with the American way, as far as I'm concerned." WFB: "I don't think so. Certainly the Bible does not consider mendicancy humiliating.... I think this: that one should recognize a moral obligation to look after one's fellow man, but for you to recognize that moral obligation on behalf of yourself is different from your coercing a similar moral obligation on the part of somebody else."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.693
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6627
item Program Number S0452, 1033

"A Scrutiny of the Reagan Foreign Policy"

Guests: Bundy, William P. : Smith, Hedrick. : Solarz, Stephen J.

25 February 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 21
Program details: At the dawn of the Reagan Administration, a fast-paced session with three extremely well informed foreign-policy observers and practitioners. WFB: "Since President Reagan virtually began his conduct of foreign affairs by saying that Russian leaders cheat and lie, perhaps we might examine that statement, as history, and as diplomacy. Mr. Bundy, were you offended by the presidential outburst?" WB: "It was pretty outspoken, but there's no question that you can find support in the statements of all the fathers of Communism and of the Soviet structure ... I thought it was a bit on the outright and blunt side for openers." ... HS: "It seems to me that the two men [Reagan and Haig] together see the world a great deal in terms of... the global struggle with the Soviets--and I think that's the reason why they have picked up as the first thread the war in El Salvador. Somehow they feel there is a need very early on to draw the line."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.694
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6628
item Program Number S0453, 1034

"Should Press Rights Be Limited?"

Guests: Rusher, William A., 1923- : Kramer, Michael.

25 March 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 21
Program details: A high-voltage session with three old pros, touching on media bias, the libel laws, and the Supreme Court. MK: "We've sat here over many years talking about the liberal bias of the press. You've written about it [to WFB] and you've written about it [to WAR], and yet we have Ronald Reagan as President. Somehow the liberal press was notable to stop this travesty, so the system is working, it seems to me, and I don't think we need any public or private mechanisms to chain or shackle the press." .. . WAR: "If I might say a word here for the real little guy, Bill, you are not the best example yourself.... When somebody attacks you, as Lord knows they do from time to time, you are not utterly resourceless. The idea of you--" WFB: "No, I'm not saying I am." WAR: "--cowering in a corner if somebody calls you a Nazi?" WFB: "No, no, I wrote a best-selling book about the experience." WAR: "Not only a best-selling book--you have a column in two hundred-plus newspapers; you have a television program. The guy who calls you a Nazi may live to regret having called you a Nazi, but what about the average person--even the average public figure--who doesn't have all those resources?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.696
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6630
item Program Number S0454, 1035

"President Reagan: A Preliminary Evaluation"

Guests: Lewis, Anthony, 1927-

30 March 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 22
Program details: "Anthony Lewis," Mr. Buckley begins, "hasn't had so happy a time of it since Watergate ... Every time Mr. Reagan or one of his principal colleagues takes a position, Mr. Lewis is there to deplore the decadence of the spirit, the decline in public morality, and the disintegration of democracy. President Reagan is fighting a three-front war: against Communist imperialism, against domestic inflation, and against Tony Lewis."(As the participants learned after the taping, this was the very day that he faced yet another antagonist, John Hinckley.) Though host and guest are poles apart, the exchanges--as in previous appearances by Mr. Lewis--are civil and often unpredictable. AL: "We are entitled--indeed, obligated--as the power we are to be concerned about national aggression or aggressive militarism in our hemisphere or elsewhere against our interests. That's one subject. The subject of human rights ... may involve the same countries but it may not. And I think we have to do our best to maintain our moral concern. It's our own soul we're saving. If we as Americans say, 'Well, we don't care about someone being tortured to death because it's being done in a country that's friendly to us,' we are the losers."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.698
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6632
item Program Number S0455, 1036

"How Much Loyalty Is Owed to the Boss?"

Guests: Westin, Alan. : Green, Ronald.

30 March 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 22
Program details: If an employer refuses to correct violations affecting his workers' safety or the public safety, should an employee go public with the information? Should the state protect an employee who does so? Should employers be permitted to fire employees simply because of mediocre performance? Our guests come from opposite sides of the fence but are able to engage each other's arguments, in a way that brings us along even when the discussion turns technical. RG: "What employee being terminated would not first look to some extraneous, occupationally irrelevant cause for the termination? It must have been unfair because, after all, I am its victim ... I think it is counter-productive and dangerous to put employers in the position of accepting mediocrity because the price of enhancing the quality of employees becomes prohibitive." AW: "There are over 3,500 pending anti-reprisal complaints under OSHA ... I think that's a small figure. I think we could have 10,000 meritorious cases because of the fact that there is such a significant lack of safety on the job in some industries ..."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.699
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6633
item Program Number S0456, 1037

"Mortimer Adler and His Great Ideas"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

25 February 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 23
Program details: Mr. Adler's latest book is called Six Great Ideas--the ideas being truth, goodness, beauty, justice, equality, and liberty. One sample from the man whom Mr. Buckley introduces by saying: "He isn't a philosopher only while in his study or at his typewriter. He is as entirely a philosopher as Socrates was." MA: "In our society there are libertarians who think that liberty is the supreme value, and everyone should have as much as possible, without limit. There are egalitarians who [hold] the leveling doctrine of everyone should be equal, without any differences in degree at all.... The only correction of those two errors-the libertarian error and the egalitarian error-is to see that justice is the sovereign idea. You can't have too much justice.... Everyone should have as much freedom or liberty as justice allows, for more than that involves injury to others, and everyone should have as much equality as justice requires."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.695
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6629
item Program Number S0457, 1038

"The Question of Gay Rights"

Guests: Ashworth, Richard. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

25 March 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 23
Program details: Mr. Ashworth had joined the organization of which he is now chairman when he learned that two of his three sons were homosexual; Professor van den Haag has frequently treated homosexuals in his clinical practice. The discussion--often painful, because of Mr. Ashworth's very personal concern with the subject--ranges from the views of homosexuality in different societies throughout history to pertinent laws in the present-day United States. EvdH: "Attitudes towards homosexuality have been more or less tolerant, more or less prohibitive and so on, but I know of no culture where it is regarded as a normal, accepted form of behavior." ... RA: "How can society say to somebody who is homosexual, 'Forget that; forget what you are, and get married and have children'? I think that would be reprehensible." EvdH: "I certainly would agree to that."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.697
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709GNE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6631
item Program Number S0458, 1039

"Television and the Government: Part I"

Guests: Pressler, Larry. : Robertson, Pat. : Shakespeare, Frank. : Rockefeller, Sharon Percy.

27 April 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 24
Program details: In the first hour Mr. Buckley and his guests discuss a range of issues, from the appropriateness of government-subsidized broadcasting, to the role of the Federal Communications Commission, to the likely impact of new developments in technology. In the second hour, they are questioned by a dozen representatives of member stations of the Southern Educational Communications Association. The only member of the group not professionally engaged in television is Senator Pressler, and he is the co-author of the Public Telecommunications Act of 1981. FS: "Is it the proper role for the government... to provide cultural programming to the people on a mandated basis? 'We think you ought to have this sort of program and we will take money from the general tax revenues in order to provide it?' I think that is a fundamental, root question." ... SPR: "I think $100 million does not adequately represent the federal support for this very important educational mission. We have established... federal support for education, for universities, libraries, museums, but the most cost-efficient way to reach people is through radio and television."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.701
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6635
item Program Number S0459, 1040

"Television and the Government: Part II"

Guests: Pressler, Larry. : Robertson, Pat. : Shakespeare, Frank. : Rockefeller, Sharon Percy.

26 April 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 24
Program details: In the first hour Mr. Buckley and his guests discuss a range of issues, from the appropriateness of government-subsidized broadcasting, to the role of the Federal Communications Commission, to the likely impact of new developments in technology. In the second hour, they are questioned by a dozen representatives of member stations of the Southern Educational Communications Association. The only member of the group not professionally engaged in television is Senator Pressler, and he is the co-author of the Public Telecommunications Act of 1981. FS: "Is it the proper role for the government... to provide cultural programming to the people on a mandated basis? 'We think you ought to have this sort of program and we will take money from the general tax revenues in order to provide it?' I think that is a fundamental, root question." ... SPR: "I think $100 million does not adequately represent the federal support for this very important educational mission. We have established... federal support for education, for universities, libraries, museums, but the most cost-efficient way to reach people is through radio and television."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.700
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6634
item Program Number S0460, 1041

"What Can Be Done with the UN?"

Guests: Kirkpatrick, Jeane J.

11 May 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 24
Program details: Mrs. Kirkpatrick's effect would not be felt at the UN until the fall, when the General Assembly would convene, but it was widely anticipated that she would be as forceful as Daniel Patrick Moynihan had been in cutting through the cant. We get a foretaste in this splendid tour of the world, from Chile to Nicaragua, from present-day Israel to Hitler's Germany. JJK on the Carter Administration's human-rights policy: "I suggest that in politics it's terribly important to focus on the consequences of policy for the people who have to live under the policy. If, for example, we look not at the intentions of the Carter Administration in Nicaragua or Iran--where what they intended was democracy and moderation--but at the consequence for the Iranians or the Nicaraguans, which is not moderation and democracy but Khomeini and the Ortega brothers--that is, a worse condition of unfreedom than they had before--then one would think that policy was not a good policy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.702
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6636
item Program Number S0461, 1042

"Can Congress Create People?"

Guests: Galebach, Stephen. : Bork, Robert H.

11 May 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 25
Program details: Mr. Galebach's Human Life Bill written on behalf of Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Henry Hyde attempted to vitiate Roe v. Wade by defining life as beginning at conception thus placing the unborn child under the protection of the 14th Amendment. SG: "With the Human Life Bill we have an exceptional case because the Court declared itself unable to resolve a particular question." WFB: "A factual question." SG: "Yes of when life begins. Now if that factual question is central to the definition of who is a person then a congressional determination would influence the Court." Mr. Bork while no fan of the incumbent Court holds that "If Mr. Galebach is right ... we really have a constitutional revolution on our hands. It means that Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to say what violates the 14th Amendment and the Court ought to defer.... What you are doing or would do--out of very good impulses--is ratify some constitutional damage and make more possible."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.703
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6637
item Program Number S0462, 1043

"Has HEW Hurt the Family?"

Guests: Califano, Joseph A., Jr.

15 May 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 118 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 25
Program details: Actually, by the time of this show, HEW was no more (President Carter had succeeded in his mission of splitting it up into the Departments of Education and of Health and Human Services), but the principle remained the same. Host and guest agree that there are serious problems in America--including severe inflation and second-generation welfare mothers--but how to deal with them? Keep the current, admittedly flawed, system and tinker around the edges? Or change it radically, in the knowledge that many people would be helped but many, at least in the short run, hurt? JAC: :What I focused on most in the welfare problem was ... the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, that piece of welfare most odious to the population at large--3 million mothers and 8 million children. Most of those mothers are either teenagers or 30-to-40-year-old grandmothers, who are basically on the second generation, and what do you do about them? It's easy to say, 'Put people to work,' but putting those people to work is an incredibly difficult problem."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.704
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6638
item Program Number S0463, 1044

"The Press and the Law"

Guests: Friendly, Fred W. : Williams, C. Dickerman.

15 May 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 26
Program details: A sizzling discussion of censorship, prior restraint, libel, and the deliquescence of law under the modem Supreme Court. FF: "How would you have voted on that [the Pentagon Papers] if you had been one of those nine judges?" WFB: "I would have refused to vote on the grounds I can't read fast enough.... It took the New York Times six months to prepare the editorial material. They turned around and they demanded a verdict from the Supreme Court in six or seven days." ... CDW: "Now, it's been a part of the law of libel since earliest times, since Blackstone and the colonial courts, that the state of mind of the defendant is always relevant. For example, punitive damages were allowable if the state of mind of the defendant was one of personal hostility towards the plaintiff or if he knew what he was saying was false."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.705
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6639
item Program Number S0464, 1045

"What to Do about Terrorism"

Guests: Sterling, Claire. : Denton, Jeremiah.

5 June 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 176 : 26
Program details: Senator Denton's subcommittee was investigating the subject of Mrs. Sterling's highly controversial book: international terrorism and the Soviets' role in it. Mrs. Sterling's conclusion: that the Soviet Union is not the mastermind of terrorism ("that's a comic-book concept to think there is a phantom mastermind in a subterranean map room who pushes buttons"), but it is the provider of "the wherewithal for the terrorist groups to become extremely efficient at their craft and therefore to become an effective destabilizing influence in democratic society." A chilling and well-informed discussion that ranges from the camps where the Soviets train Palestinian terrorists to the reasons we lost in Vietnam (JD: "It was ... a distortion of the perspective of our people toward that situation which eventually resulted in its forfeiture").
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.706
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6640
item Program Number S0465, 1046

"John Kenneth Galbraith Looks Back"

Guests: Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006.

5 June 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 1
Program details: These two old friends and antagonists have a go at their central point of disagreement, economics: what leads people to save and to work, how government affects--positively or negatively--the nation's prosperity, what is the morality of progressive taxation. One sample: JKG: "Going back to deficits, how do you respond to an Administration which is committing itself to continuing and increasing deficit financing under conditions of high inflation. Are you in favor of that?" WFB: "I am in favor of a lowered trajectory--" JKG: "I think that's a yes or no question." WFB: "A yes or no question is something that you will get from someone less bright than me."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.707
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWU8U/
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6641
item Program Number S0466, 1101

"The Debate on American Security"

Guests: Barnet, Richard. : Chace, James. : Nitze, Paul H.

12 June 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 1
Program details: Is the best protection in the nuclear age a serious arsenal and the will to regard it seriously? Or is it trust in the Soviet Union? A crackling exchange, with our guests coming from every point on the compass. One sample: PN: "The best way to phrase it, it seems to me, was to look at the question whether it is better to be Red than dead.... I'm inclined to think it is better to be Red than dead, if that is the question, but I think that shouldn't be the question.... What we've tried to do over the entire period from 1946 to the present is to so conduct affairs that that would not be the question...." RB: "I don't think that one can assume that a Russian planner or an American planner is going to look at this military balance in the same way." PN: "I spent five years talking to those fellows and I think I have an impression as to how they look at it, and I don't believe it's inconsistent with what I've said."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.708
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6642
item Program Number S0467, 1102

"El Salvador, Christianity, and Marxism"

Guests: Novak, Michael. : Halbert, John.

12 June 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 2
Program details: Liberation theology, si o no? Father Halbert, who had served for five years as a pastor in El Salvador, interprets Vatican II as "extending God's salvific work" beyond "the limits of the structural church." Messrs. Novak and Buckley draw the line at "Christian Marxism, a juxtaposition," as WFB puts it, "some people have as much difficulty with as, say, Christian Nazism." Along the way, we get a very well informed discussion of the background and current conditions in El Salvador and elsewhere in Latin America.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.709
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6643
item Program Number S0468, 1103

"A Policy for America in Angola and South Africa"

Guests: de Borchgrave, Arnaud. : Solarz, Stephen J.

17 June 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 2
Program details: The winds of change were blowing fiercely, with civil war in Rhodesia (called Zimbabwe by its revolutionaries), Angola, and South West Africa (called Namibia by its revolutionaries). In this installment of Firing Line's coverage of the region (first taken up in 040, with Conor Cruise O'Brien, and visited periodically ever since), the discussion focuses on the question, Should the U.S. actively assist guerrillas, like Jonas Savimbi in Angola, whom we judge to be more democratic and less Soviet-inclined than their opponents? SS: "And when the Angolans come to the conclusion that they want the Cubans withdrawn, I think it's not an untenable assumption that they will go." WFB: "I don't understand your assumption that the Cubans would go or not go depending on what the Angolan people want."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.710
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6644
item Program Number S0469, 1104

"Can America Compete?"

Guests: Peterson, Peter G.

17 June 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 3
Program details: Not only Japan but also West Germany, France, and in some areas even Britain were leaving us in the dust in terms of trade. What had gone wrong? Mr. Peterson goes through a number of areas in which we have shackled ourselves with excessive government intervention. He also gives a vivid description of the differences--familiar to many Americans now, but not in 1981--between Japanese and American management practices: There have been some fascinating studies done on Toyota versus Ford ... For example, in the Toyota plant they have only seven classifications; the Ford plant has over two hundred work classifications." WFB: "Is that an aspect of union jurisdiction?" PGP: "Yes, this is union jurisdiction. Now as a result, the Toyota employee can handle several assignments; he doesn't have a narrow definition of what he can and can't do. As to layers of overhead and so forth, in the Toyota plant there were about five or six, and in the American plant there were nearly a dozen.... There is a much less adversarial, litigious quality to the relationship."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.711
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6645
item Program Number S0470, 1105

"Do We Need a Foreign Policy Doctrine?"

Guests: Ball, George W.

15 July 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 3
Program details: Mr. Ball is a stern critic of the Reagan Administration, which he sees as viewing the Soviet Union as "the Antichrist threatening civilization with its pernicious doctrines." But despite his background as a member of various Democratic Administrations, there is nothing party-line about his views on the Soviet Union, Israel, the draft, Southeast Asia. GWB: "As far as armament is concerned, I support increased defense expenditures ...The problem in the United States as far as defense is concerned is that it isn't engage. The people are not involved. The people will only be involved, in my judgment--" WFB: "With a draft." GWB: "--when you have a draft, and unless you are prepared to address this problem I think you are talking nonsense.... Today we are faced with a struggle, which is basically a struggle around the world--not necessarily just with the Soviet Union, but looking after all kinds of situations around the world. This has to be a common effort of the American people. It can't be confined just to the more unfortunate people from an income point of view."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.715
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFBAA
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6649
item Program Number S0471, 1106

"The Plight of the Democratic Party"

Guests: Cranston, Alan.

13 July 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 4
Program details: With the advent of the 97th Congress, Mr. Cranston became the Senate Minority Whip--the first Democrat to occupy that position since the Eisenhower Administration. He reacts to the Democratic debacle of 1980 by taking the high road, discussing issues seriously (e.g., the inheritance tax and its devastating effect on family-held businesses) and explaining how he is able to find common ground with Democratic colleagues way to his right: "If I can work with Republicans as extreme as Jesse Helms--and I have upon occasion--I can certainly find common ground with everybody on the Democratic side. I look for it; I find it; and we collaborate."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.712
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6646
item Program Number S0472, 1107

"Mr. Begin's Pre-Emptive Strike"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J. : Findley, Paul.

13 July 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 4
Program details: It had been five weeks since Israel carried out its raid on the nuclear weapons factory in Baghdad, swiftly, successfully, and--according to the terms on which its aircraft had been acquired from the United States--illegally. This exchange frequently reaches the shouting stage, with Mr. Solarz maintaining that "Given a choice between popularity and survival, it's understandable that Israel chose the latter," Mr. Findley maintaining that, "Even if one accepts that Israel had at stake its very survival, it committed an act of aggression, an act of war, and because it used United States-supplied equipment, it made us partners in that act," and Mr. Buckley not shouting, but suggesting that "I find it extremely hard to understand the reasoning that says you can only use American airplanes against Iraq after the A bomb has been launched at Tel Aviv rather than the day before." ... PF: "The New Yorker magazine pointed out that violence can never destroy nuclear weapons." WFB: "They just did."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.713
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6647
item Program Number S0473, 1108

"The Question of Namibia"

Guests: Kalangula, Peter T. : Neier, Aryeh, 1937-

17 July 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 5
Program details: Father Kalangula's organization in South West Africa (AKA Namibia) had won an internationally observed democratic election against the Soviet client group, SWAPO (the South West Africa People's Organization) but faced now the opposition of the Soviet-leaning forces in the UN. Father Kalangula makes an impressive and moving case for his side, as in this reply to the examiner, Aryeh Neier: "You said how it would be difficult for political parties to be in prison during the election. I think it is even harder when you have [two] political organizations, one has a military wing and one has not, and when your supporters are being subjected to murders and abductions--that is even worse."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.716
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9TQ
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6650
item Program Number S0474, 1109

"A Traditionalist Concern for Europe"

Guests: Habsburg, Otto, 1912-

17 July 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 5
Program details: Combining depth of learning with breadth of experience, Dr. von Habsburg ranges over European integration, decolonialization in Africa, and the gerontocracy in the Soviet Union. One sample from this illuminating hour: "OvH: I very much believe in the Anglo-Saxon system personally, which means that the constitution has to grow slowly. We have committed in Europe, all too frequently, the error of making an intellectual constitution--" WFB: "Like Rousseau's for Poland." OvH: "Exactly, and the result has been catastrophic, while the constitutions which grow naturally, step by step, are those which are the most successful, and I hope this will be our [Europe's] case, too."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.717
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6651
item Program Number S0475, 1110

"A Strategy for Cuba"

Guests: Navarro, Antonio.

15 July 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 6
Program details: In 1958, Mr. Buckley tells us, "Mr. Navarro was one of a group of well-to-do young Cubans who welcomed Fidel Castro, reacting as they did adversely to the galloping corruption of the regime of Fulgencio Batista, who a decade earlier had himself taken power as a revolutionary reformer." But as the Castro regime evolved towards totalitarianism, Mr. Navarro turned from it and joined the resistance movement, under the code name "Tocayo," eventually taking part in the planning for the Bay of Pigs. This freewheeling conversation frequently turns, informatively, to Cuba's place in current geopolitics, but what's worth the price of admission is Mr. Navarro's own story. WFB: "I should like to begin by asking Mr. Navarro ...: Was Castro a Communist when he entered Havana, or did the United States push him into the enemy camp?" AN: "I do not think Mr. Castro was a Communist when he came to Havana. In fact, I don't think Mr. Castro is a Communist today.... He is a Castroite. I don't think he has the discipline, the spirit of sacrifice, the dedication to be a true Communist."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.714
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9U0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6648
item Program Number S0476, 1111

"Does the Warren Report on the Kennedy Assassination Hold Up?"

Guests: Blakey, G. Robert. : Belin, David W.

10 September 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 6
Program details: Our guests start out wrangling unprofitably over whether Mr. Blakey should have called Mr. Belin to testify before the House Committee on Assassinations; but once we settle down to the substantive matter, the interest level is high indeed. GRB: "Our disagreement with the [Warren] Commission ultimately is based on supplementary evidence ... What they did they did well; it's what they didn't have access to." WFB: "In other words, if you had been running the Warren Commission, you would probably have come to their findings?" GRB: "I probably would have, yes, on the evidence available to them. For example, they did not know about the CIA-Mafia plots ... to kill Castro. That bore on the possibility of a Castro retaliation.... They didn't have access to the great wealth of information that we did about organized crime, principally the conversations of the mob figures themselves discussing John Kennedy, the hate that they had for him and his brother Robert actually discussing their deaths.... While they had the tape of the recording of the police officer [whose microphone was open during the assassination] they did not subject it to the kind of sophisticated acoustical and statistical analysis that we did."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.718
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFBAK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6652
item Program Number S0477, 1112, 1112R

"How to Win Arguments"

Guests: Rusher, William A., 1923- : Miller, Howard.

10 September 1981, 28 February 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 15-16
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 7
Program details: All in the family: WFB invites his colleague Bill Rusher and Mr. Rusher's sometime colleague from their own television show, The Advocates, to help him explore their common trade. Two samples: WAR: "My book [titled How to Win Arguments (More Often than Not)] advises you not to take untenable positions and then risk yourself on television programs." ... HM: "Felix Frankfurter simply reversed himself in an opinion several years after writing the first, and just candidly said in the opinion, 'I've changed my mind, but better that wisdom comes later than never.' " Note: Title on transcript is "How to Win an Argument."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.719
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9UK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6653
item Program Number S0478, 1113

"The Draft and the American Political Posture"

Guests: Lehman, John. : Westmoreland, William C. (William Childs), 1914-2005. : Nunn, Sam.

18 September 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 7
Program details: In the imposing setting of the Senate Caucus Room, a serious discussion with men who have been deeply involved in U.S. military policy. They take up in greater detail the point raised by George Ball a few weeks earlier (Firing Line s0470): that the all-volunteer army may be damaging both to our own morale and to other countries' view of us. SN: "I don't think we're the kind of country that for very long will tolerate a system that is, in effect, economic conscription, and that's what we have now. We are not getting participation in the military, except in the officer corps, of middle- and certainly not upper-income America. If we ever have a war--and God forbid that--we would see very quickly, I think, very severe protests break out because it would be apparent that the son of the banker is not out there fighting and dying, the son of the mill worker is. That's not the kind of country we've been in the past, and I don't think it's the kind of country we can be in the future if we are going to deter war. I believe America's will is being questioned, not just by adversaries, but also by our allies."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.720
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6654
item Program Number S0479, 1114

"What Has Happened to Liberal Republicanism?"

Guests: Mathias, Charles McC. (Charles McCurdy), 1922-

18 September 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 8
Program details: Senator Mathias knows liberal Republicanism from the inside (his ADA rating in 1980 was 72, his AFL-CIO rating 100); he also knows his political theory and history (he gives a delicious version of the story of Edmund Burke and the Sheriffs of Bristol). One sample: WFB: "One of the axioms of democracy is that you will vote for the commonweal, not just what affects your own personal interest." CM: "In theory you have to be informed to know what the commonweal is. You know instinctively what your own interest is."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.721
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6655
item Program Number S0480, 1115

"Where Do We Go on Immigration?"

Guests: Smith, William French, 1917-

1 October 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 8
Program details: The Reagan Administration had just announced an ambitious new program for curbing illegal immigration, and Mr. Smith was point man in this effort. He makes the case calmly and effectively for employer sanctions and explains the difficulties in attempting to produce an uncounterfeitable identity card: (a) such a thing probably can't be made ("We can't even prevent our twenty-dollar bills from being counterfeited"); (b) even if it did, what would it be based on? Birth certificate, Social Security card, Selective Service card-all of which, as Mr. Buckley points out, are readily available on the black market in Mexico City.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.723
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6657
item Program Number S0481, 1116

"Is Modern Architecture Disastrous?"

Guests: Wolfe, Tom.

1 October 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 9
Program details: A rip-roaring attack on the shibboleths of modern architecture-and with a Firing Line rarity, visual aids (illustrations from Mr. Wolfe's book). TW: "The irony of this is all these forms were created for the workers in the ruins and rubble of Germany after the First World War under a Socialist government, and somehow, as if they had bounced off Telstar, landed on Sixth Avenue, Park Avenue-practically any avenue you want to name in any large American city.... Far from housing workers these structures ... are housing the corporate giants of America.... And they are all in worker-housing forms."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.722
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E55X9S
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6656
item Program Number S0482, 1117

"The Myth of American Homogeneity"

Guests: Garreau, Joel.

15 October 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 9
Program details: Mr. Garreau's thesis is that current political and economic issues and changing demographics demand a changed view of regional groupings in North America, cutting across present-day borders. He argues persuasively that Alberta, say, has much more in common with Colorado than with Ottawa, and that Colorado has more in common with eastern British Columbia than it has with Atlanta. Like Mr. Wolfe, above, he has brought a visual aid: a large map of North America divided not into three major countries (plus the Caribbean) but into nine regions, which he calls "nations," such as "the Foundry" (the industrial Northeastern United States), "Ecotopia" (the U.S. Northwest and the Canadian Far West), and "the Islands" (the Caribbean, including part of Florida). What implications does he draw? "I'm not a separatist... I'm a reporter. I'm saying that this is the way things are working now; that this describes the sources of a lot of conflicts that are going through our public affairs."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.724
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6658
item Program Number S0483, 1118

"Is There an Answer to Malthus?"

Guests: Simon, Julian.

15 October 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 10
Program details: Throughout the Seventies, organizations like the Club of Rome and Zero Population Growth had been raising the specter of Malthus: too many people, not enough food, land, or breathable air. And throughout that decade Mr. Simon had been arguing--as he does here, pugnaciously but with a wealth of detail--that the answer to Malthus is the human mind, human resourcefulness. As Mr. Buckley glosses it, "If you don't have copper for telephone lines, but you do have satellites that transmit messages, you're as well off as if you had an infinite supply of copper." JS: "I think that we should confine ourselves to that horizon over which our planning may make some important difference, and I think that thinking of what may happen two or three hundred years from now is far, far beyond that."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.725
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9UU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6659
item Program Number S0484, 1119

"The Economic Lot of Minorities"

Guests: Sowell, Thomas, 1930- : Pilpel, Harriet F.

12 November 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 10
Program details: Mr. Sowell had taken a great deal of flak from the establishment for his dissection of cliches about racial discrimination, but he simply makes his points and defies anyone to misunderstand him: "People often say that I'm denying that there's racism. On the contrary, racism exists everywhere around the world, down through history. That's one of the reasons it's hard to use it as an empirical explanation for anything. In the United States, for example, Puerto Ricans have lower incomes than blacks. I don't know of anyone who believes Puerto Ricans encounter more discrimination than blacks. Obviously there must be something else involved besides discrimination." ...Examiner* Harriet Pilpel: "Are you against labor unions?" Mr. Sowell: "You asked what were some of the factors that stood in the way of black economic progress, and I said that one of them was the labor union. That is a fact, and I'm simply reporting facts, not prejudices."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.726
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9V4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6660
item Program Number S0485, 1120

"William F. Buckley Jr. on the Firing Line"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Green, Mark J. : Sobran, Joseph.

12 November 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 177: 11
Program details: Abortion, supply-side economics, the Moral Majority, and the Equal Rights Amendment all get a look in during this installment of the semi-annual turning of the tables. And this time, our guests sometimes get sufficiently caught up with one another that not all the fire is directed at their host: Mrs. Pilpel: "You're attacking the Constitution... What you're really saying is that the system devised by the Founding Fathers was not a very good one ..." Mr. Sobran: "Let me reinterpret my remarks in my own way. Congress has the obligation to uphold the Constitution too. If the Court acts unconstitutionally, it should take some sort of action."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.727
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9VO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6661
item Program Number S0486, 1121

"How Does It Stand with Busing?"

Guests: Hawley, Willis D. : Sedler, Robert.

20 November 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 11
Program details: A brisk and productive exploration of the theoretical basis and the practical effects of busing for school desegregation. RS: "My submission is that the values embodied in the 14th Amendment--values of racial equality, values of integration--dictate that there should be a constitutional right to attend a racially integrated school to the maximum extent feasible; that the only justification that a school board can advance for not busing for integration ... is that the so-called neighborhood school is administratively convenient to operate; and I would submit that when you weigh administrative convenience against the values embodied in the 14th Amendment, the value choice should be in favor of the duty to integrate." WFB: "... In the first place, I don't really think that any scholar who probed the origins of the 14th Amendment would come to any such bizarre conclusion as your own ... But you seem to be saying that to the extent that you discover that which you find very valuable ... you feel perfectly free to bend the instruments of the law to that purpose...." RS: "I base my argument on historical constitutional values, not on a notion of empirical policy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.728
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6662
item Program Number S0487, 1122

"A View of Washington from the Ohio River Valley"

Guests: Brown, John Y.

20 November 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 12
Program details: Mr. Brown is a Democrat who takes the part of the small-businessman and doesn't like bureaucracies, be they governmental or corporate. So far (he had been elected just two years earlier) his policies had been effective and popular. As he explains it, the reason had less to do with ideology than with being administratively serious: "We've got mostly all businessmen and -women in our administration and that's why we are stimulated. I think when we get through we'll set up a model operation of how government ought to be challenged and how it ought to be cost effective."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.729
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6663
item Program Number S0488, 1123

"What Is There to Learn from the Killing of Dr. Tarnower?"

Guests: Trilling, Diana.

3 December 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 12
Program details: The elegant Mrs. Trilling writing about a murder case? Well, this was a particularly rich murder case in terms of its resonances in our society, and she and Mr. Buckley explore them in absorbing detail. DT: "How did I come to my judgment, my very unfavorable feeling about Dr. Tarnower? It started with something that we're not supposed to say: I didn't like his face." WFB: "His 'slithery face,' your words." DT: "Yes, I said he looked like a reptile ... We all judge by looks all the time, but we're not supposed to say so. It's just one of our minor hypocrisies."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.730
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9VY
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6664
item Program Number S0489, 1124

"Why Are Our Intellectuals So Dumb?"

Guests: Hollander, Paul. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

3 December 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 13
Program details: "The study by Paul Hollander," Mr. Buckley begins, "is terribly overdue. It has been the most conspicuous scandal of two generations that a substantial number of Western intellectuals have been seduced by monstrous social regimes." The "pilgrims" in the title of his book, alas, refers not to people who have made the pilgrimage away from totalitarianism, but simply, as Mr. Hollander's subtitle puts it, to Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978. He passes along the raptures of dozens of these people, ranging from Anna Louise Strong to Staughton Lynd, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag, from Tom Hayden to Harrison Salisbury. WFB: "Is it safe to say that once you've learned political truths you are not again easily deceived?" PH: "No, I'm afraid that's not quite true, because many people who learned something from the case of the Soviet Union fell again on China and on Cuba, and are now falling for Nicaragua right after Cuba; so I think this quest for a good society outside your own is endless."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.731
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9W8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6665
item Program Number S0490, 1125

"The Question of Gold and the Current Economic Impasse"

Guests: Lehrman, Lewis. : Green, Mark J.

10 December 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 13
Program details: Do we need to--and can we--revive the gold standard? Mr. Lehrman's case is not airtight (as the questioning reveals), but it is exuberant. Examiner Mark Green: "Do you trust the Reds more than the Feds?" LL: "That's a rather nice way to put it." WFB: "I'd say it's close." LL: "My belief is we certainly shouldn't trust the Reds and there's no need for us to trust the Feds. I think working people themselves know how to manage their monetary affairs and they don't need seven members of a guardian elite in Washington to tell them how much money they should hold."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.732
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6666
item Program Number S0491, 1126

"Who and What Are the Enemy in Central America?"

Guests: Birns, Laurence. : Singer, Max.

10 December 1981

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 14
Program details: In Mr. Birns's first appearance on Firing Line four years earlier (s0278), he had maintained that Chile was the most totalitarian country in Latin America. He still maintains that in 1981--and adds that "Nicaragua [under the Sandinistas] today probably numbers amongst the 25--probably the 25th, 26th, or 27th most democratic country in the world"--which isn't quite the perspective of his host or his fellow guest. WFB: "Although we live in an age in which Castro was possible, in which Pol Pot was possible, and in which Ho Chi Minh was possible--and in which you admit that you did not anticipate the direction that the Nicaraguan movement would take--nevertheless, here you are saying about El Salvador exactly the same kind of thing that was said in case after case after case, throughout this century, by people who didn't anticipate what was the ideological fervor of people who are determined to eliminate human freedom."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.733
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6667
item Program Number S0492, 1127

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That This House Approves the Economic Initiatives of President Reagan-Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Bleiberg, Robert. : Laffer, Arthur. : Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908- : Lekachman, Robert. : Oakes, John B.

7 January 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 14
Program details: At the end of Ronald Reagan's first year in the White House, an energetic debate before a Harvard audience. Two samples: WFB: "The moral question to one side, [the notion] that by freeing the more wealthy you are damaging, pari passu, the less wealthy is economically illiterate. During President Carter's last year we were running at an inflation rate of 13 per cent and achieving a negative growth rate. Inflation does not, noblesse oblige, decline to afflict poor people." ... JKG: "Let us cease to think of economic policy as a matter of liberalism or conservatism and retreat from hope and fantasy to arithmetic. It's better, let us realize, to pay taxes than to suppress investment with high interest rates. A balanced budget is better than a big deficit that must be financed at high interest rates with further adverse effects on investment."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.734
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6668
item Program Number S0493, 1128

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That This House Approves the Economic Initiatives of President Reagan-Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Bleiberg, Robert. : Laffer, Arthur. : Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908- : Lekachman, Robert. : Oakes, John B.

7 January 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 15
Program details: At the end of Ronald Reagan's first year in the White House, an energetic debate before a Harvard audience. Two samples: WFB: "The moral question to one side, [the notion] that by freeing the more wealthy you are damaging, pari passu, the less wealthy is economically illiterate. During President Carter's last year we were running at an inflation rate of 13 per cent and achieving a negative growth rate. Inflation does not, noblesse oblige, decline to afflict poor people." ... JKG: "Let us cease to think of economic policy as a matter of liberalism or conservatism and retreat from hope and fantasy to arithmetic. It's better, let us realize, to pay taxes than to suppress investment with high interest rates. A balanced budget is better than a big deficit that must be financed at high interest rates with further adverse effects on investment."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.735
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6669
item Program Number S0494, 1129

"The Polish Challenge"

Guests: Lukacs, John.

18 January 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 15
Program details: Professor Lukacs has made a career of being a brilliant contrarian, and whether or not one accepts his conclusions--in this case, that the U.S. and NATO should do nothing about martial law in Poland: it is simply part of the working out of the balance of power in Europe--the intellectual fencing match is exhilarating. WFB: "Why do we simply accept as axiomatic that the Soviet Union would go to war rather than lose Poland? ..." JL: "Well, it would be a dangerous thing to pretend that they won't." WFB: "Well, it would be a very dangerous thing to go to war, too." ... JL: "This entire Cold War grew out of a mutual misunderstanding which has very little to do with Communism; it involved Russia and the United States. The United States, gradually after 1945, seeing the Russians' brutal imposition of regimes in Eastern Europe, believed that this had something to do with Communism. And it had nothing to do with Communism; it had to do with the presence of the Russian army in those countries."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.738
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6672
item Program Number S0495, 1130

"How Should We Deal with Taiwan?"

Guests: Holbrooke, Richard C. : Judd, Walter.

18 January 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 16
Program details: The Reagan Administration had just, after a bitter debate, decided to send Taiwan the F5E fighter, instead of the FX that Taiwan wanted. Many of Taiwan's friends, including Dr. Judd, feared a slippery slope ("the Chinese mainland is reasonably convinced that if the United States continues to retreat, we will downgrade our support of the Republic of China on Taiwan to the point where it has no choice except to give in"). Real politikers like Mr. Holbrooke think even the FX is too much; we should accept the fact that there is one China and its capital is Peking, and "American policy must be dictated by our sense of our own national interest." For Mr. Buckley, the issue is that "You can't be friendly with the Chinese people and with the Chinese government. You can't be friendly to slaves and to slave masters. You've got to choose."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.739
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6673
item Program Number S0496, 1131

"The Issues Involved in Local Control of Reading Matter"

Guests: Gabler, Mel. : Gabler, Norma. : Bonnell, Pamela.

11 January 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 16
Program details: The Gablers are not professional educators; indeed, neither of them went to college. They are self-described "ordinary people" who were shocked one day by their 16-year-old's account of what was in his civics textbook, and wound up launching a campaign to oversee the content of Texas schoolbooks. It's partly, as Mr. Gabler puts it, "a matter of indoctrination. For instance, in the government textbooks you'll over and over have little sentences about the need for government control, government regulation, government power, etc.--never any emphasis on individualism." But it's also, as Mrs. Gabler says, "the lack of teaching the basic skills. That's not what makes the news. The articles that have been written about us are that we've taken books out of the library, taken dictionaries out. And the interesting thing is that we have spent our lives on the lack of the teaching of basic skills." Miss Bonnell, in turn, is shocked at folks like these presuming to criticize the professionals ("We all have the right to bad taste"). A lively, if not always well focused, hour.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.736
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWUHQ
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6670
item Program Number S0497, 1132

"An Energy Policy for the Reagan Administration"

Guests: Pitts, Frank.

11 January 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 17
Program details: OPEC had been less uncooperative lately, but, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "Anything the Saudi Arabians can do to be helpful today, they can do in the other direction tomorrow." A very instructive session with a man who has been involved in the energy industry since the Second World War, who believes passionately that "we in this country should become energy self-sufficient as rapidly as we can," and who offers clear advice on how that goal could be achieved. FP: "We in this country should move in the direction of increasing our oil, our natural gas, and our coal, three large items that [account for] 91 per cent of our total consumption of energy in the United States ... I also believe we should help develop, as much as we can within reason, all types of alternative sources of energy." WFB: "Including nuclear?" FP: "Yes, sir, including nuclear."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.737
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6671
item Program Number S0498, 1133

"Are Reagan's Policies Opposed to the Workingman?"

Guests: Winpisinger, William.

2 March 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 17
Program details: A sometimes heated debate with a dyed-in the-wool union man on unemployment and inflation and the press's treatment of President Carter; but first, deliciously, on Mr. Winpisinger's raising the rents on a union building in Washington, D.C.: WFB: "I was making a reference to the current contention over your insisting on a 15 per cent raise for all people who use your building, which some people have found contradicts the normal rhetoric by which you blame everybody who raises prices." WW: "Not at all. That's exactly the kind of thing that unfamiliarity with facts always breeds. ... We were operating that building at a loss--pure and simply economic loss--and there had not been a rent increase in some seven years ... and so our general secretary/ treasurer ... elected to impose a rent increase that would at least reach the break-even point. Mr. Nader was ... the major tenant in the property ... He resented the magnitude of the increase ..., and we had some words about it, and I finally recommended to Mr. Nader that since he owns a building himself... if the modest rent we were charging was that onerous, he ought to move his whole operation down to his building, where the square footage rent is more than twice as much as we're charging him . . . And his response to that was, 'Well, my goodness, we rent to doctors and lawyers and bankers.'"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.742
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6676
item Program Number S0499, 1134, 1134R

"Is Italy Coming Apart?"

Guests: Gardner, Richard N.

2 March 1982, 13 June 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 119 : 37-38
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 18
Program details: "Scholars and journalists have grown old," Mr. Buckley begins, "trying to figure out exactly how it is that Italy manages. I mean, manages to survive. Inflation 19 percent, unemployment 9 per cent, 730 terrorist attacks last year, 16 governments in 41 years..." Mr. Gardner, who deeply loves the country where he served as his own country's eyes and ears for four years, explains: "The Italians are a fantastically gifted people. They export in a very successful way. We see it around us, whether it's Italian wines, shoes, fashions, apparel, industrial machinery." WFB: "And they have a very industrious black economy." RNG: "They have an economy some estimate as 20 percent to 25 per cent of the gross national product which is not even recorded. This is the classic Italian way of coping. The Italian people, for centuries, have survived by evading government. Many of the unwise regulations which weigh heavily on the big companies are avoided by the small companies, which either are exempt officially or exempt themselves ..." He adds, with reference to the ports Italy provides for the Sixth Fleet,that "The Italians have been an ally second to none and they don't get the recognition."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.743
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6677
item Program Number S0500, 1135

"The Council on Foreign Relations and Its Critics"

Guests: Lord, Winston.

1 March 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 18
Program details: The Council on Foreign Relations--along with the Trilateral Commission, to which Mr. Lord also belongs--comes under vigorous criticism from both the Right and the Left for being too Eastern Establishment, too secretive, too internationalist. Mr. Lord wryly defends his organization ("The Council takes no position as a corporate body. Any group that includes Andy Young, George Will, Arthur Schlesinger, and Norman Podhoretz, for example, can't agree on anything"), and talks about some of the difficulties maneuvering in international waters post Vietnam.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.740
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6674
item Program Number S0501, 1136

"In What Sense Are Human Beings Angelic?"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

1 March 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 19
Program details: With a favorite Firing Line guest, a serious discussion of the nature of angels and what Mr. Adler calls "angelistic fallacies." An angel, he points out, is "a purely spiritual being, a mind without a body"; he quotes Thomas Aquinas's explanation that angels must assume a body to appear on earth--"as you would assume a coat or a mask when you go to a masquerade ball"--"because they must make a sensible appearance to the human beings that they are carrying God's messages to." Angelistic fallacies involve assuming that men are like angels: "Socrates keeps saying that knowledge is virtue. If a man knows what is right he will do what is right. Well, an angel, if he knows what is right, will do what is right, but a man won't."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.741
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6675
item Program Number S0502, 1137

"The Future of Our Relations with Mainland China"

Guests: Fairbank, John King, 1907-

2 April 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 19
Program details: Today's session with one of the Old China Hands criticized by Joe McCarthy sets out as clearly as can be the two sides in the China debate: JKF: "You know, I have to begin by correcting your remarks about me. This is a good Firing Line opportunity. I wasn't a supporter of Chairman Mao; I was a reporter of Chairman Mao, and I still am. They had a revolution in China, and it's the thinking that you represent which is one of our chief problems--not to accept the facts of life." WFB: "Well, you say you were not a supporter of Mao's revolution. I will now quote from you: 'The Maoist revolution is, on the whole, the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many centuries.' " JKF: "Yes. What was the date?" WFB: "'72. Now, have you changed your--" JKF:"Can you say the opposite?" WFB: "What's that?" JKF: "Can you say the opposite?" WFB: "Without any problem at all, in behalf at least of several million Chinese who were killed by Mao Tse-tung, and hundreds of thousands of intellectuals who were imprisoned by him." JKF: "The present view of Mao is very disillusioned, and it comes from the last decade of his reign, when so many people were damaged and China was setback.... The point I'm making is that you've got to begin with history."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.744
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6678
item Program Number S0503, 1138

"The Libertarian Credo"

Guests: Machan, Tibor R. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

2 April 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 20
Program details: According to Mr. Machan, the libertarian credo is actually quite simple to state: "The government's business is to protect the rights of the people of the society from foreign aggression and from criminals. Anything else that needs to be done should be done by the people of the society." A zestful exploration of some of the implications-- from, Can we have a CIA? to Would you let orphans starve? to this exchange, which begins with the examiner*, Ernest van den Haag, saying, "For instance, we prohibit necrophiliac action; in other words, you cannot legally try to go to a cemetery and have intercourse with the dead. We prohibit--" WFB: "Would that be a victimless crime?" EvdH: "According to Mr. Machan it would be. That's my point." TM: "Why didn't you ask me before you said that?" EvdH: "I will ask you in just a moment." TM: "You would have invaded a cemetery, so it would be trespassing, number one, right?" EvdH: "I suppose it is a--" TM: "That's not a victimless crime." EvdH: "No. The dead have no juridical personality, but let that go."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.745
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JMFBAU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6679
item Program Number S0504, 1139

"Alternative Responses to Repression in Poland"

Guests: Rurarz, Zdzislaw.

15 April 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 20
Program details: At the time of his defection, Mr. Buckley recalls, Mr. Rurarz had released a statement saying: "I can no longer represent the present regime, which denies the fundamental rights of the Polish people. There is freedom in the United States, and I will carry on in the struggle against the military regime in Poland." This proves to be an illuminating exploration, starting with our grain exports to Poland, but soon widening to include the Soviet Union's reaction to Solidarity, the disillusion with dogmatic Marxism, and the state of detente. ZR: "I was seeing in Poland all the time the drive for a change... the very fact that more than one million of the Communist Party members in Poland joined the Solidarity movement. I myself was not a member of the Solidarity movement, but I was not hiding my sympathy for Solidarity. When the Solidarity delegation was coming with Lech Walesa to Tokyo, I received them. I made a reception for them. I invited the Japanese, although the [Polish] government was very unhappy about that....I just was believing until the last moment that maybe they will come to reason, that maybe the system will change, but then I lost hope."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.746
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6680
item Program Number S0505, 1140

"Where to Go on Prison Reform"

Guests: Colson, Charles W.

15 April 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 21
Program details: During his time in prison for the part he played in Watergate, Mr. Colson had had a religious conversion and had determined to spend the rest of his life ministering to prisoners, white-collar and violent alike. On this show he movingly describes his own experience of prison and urges an American version of the Thatcher reforms going forward in Britain, in which "non-violent criminals are sentenced not to prison but to community service. Time in prison is interminable. There is no way to describe it....Corporal punishment would, in the eyes of the inmate, be more humane, but the impact on society would be disastrous."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.747
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6681
item Program Number S0506, 1141

"What's Left of the Idea of Federalism?"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

4 May 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 21
Program details: Mr. Buckley reminds us that Mayor Koch was re-elected in 1981 with 75 percent of the vote, running on both his native Democratic ticket and the Republican ticket. He demonstrates here the qualities that make him so popular in the City--he's feisty and funny, he views the rest of the country as duty-bound to support New York, and he has a basic grasp of certain economic realities: "New York is an area that has a lot of very poor people. Now you can say, 'Why don't you tax the hell out of the very rich?' Then the very rich will leave. You have to have reasonable taxation. There was a time when New York City wanted to put a really socko tax on estates, thinking the people who are dead are not going to care. But the people who were living, who worried about that new estate tax, said they were moving out of the City if they imposed it, and started to move--this was under Beame, not under me--and New York City had to rescind that tax."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.750
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6684
item Program Number S0507, 1142

"Looking Back on LBJ"

Guests: Dugger, Ronnie. : Valenti, Jack.

4 May 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 22
Program details: Mr. Valenti loves and admires his former boss. Mr. Dugger loathes him, at least partly on the unusual ground that Johnson was "actuated by pre-nuclear-terror formulations of conceptions like patriotism, honor, courage, and these pre-nuclear-terror formulations, unexamined in a seated President, are dangerous to the human race." Mr. Valenti comes right back: "I recall in two hundred meetings on Vietnam, it was Johnson's inescapable fear of starting World War III... that caused him to do what later critics assaulted him on as a great omission, and that is to go in and win the war. He held back. He fought a limited war ... He never even countenanced the use of any kind of nuclear weapons." Never the twain shall meet--but there is solid information (e.g., on the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic) mixed with the verbal fisticuffs.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.751
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6685
item Program Number S0508, 1143

"The Future of Philanthropy: Part I"

Guests: Hunter, David R. : Marting, Leeda P. : Lyman, Richard W.

29 April 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 22
Program details: The Council on Foundations was meeting in Detroit, bringing together, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "the people who give away two and one half billion dollars per year." The first of these shows is in the normal Firing Line format; in the second show, the floor is opened to questions from a dozen other foundation executives there gathered. The topics of this lively discussion include what sorts of things foundations have funded and should fund, and whether, given their tax status, they are in fact spending their benefactors' money or the taxpayers' money. RWL: "The contributions that foundations make do change over time.... In the 1920s and '30s, for example, foundations were critically important in the development of science in this country and in the world, and played a part they could not possibly play today when science has become so much more expensive ... The contemporary revolution in biology has its roots in developments that were sponsored by foundations, particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, back in the inter-war period." . . . DRH: "Foundations are not open enough to supporting, particularly, people on the Left in critical kinds of activities." WFB: "Isn't that really an abstract position? ... There is a kind of tropism to dissent that causes some people to think it ought to be subsidized, even if it is very stupid." RWL: "In order to get the good dissent, you often have to subsidize some of the stupid dissent, because you can't always tell the two apart in the beginning." NOTE: The transcript for this episode is currently unavailable.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.748
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6682
item Program Number S0509, 1144

"The Future of Philanthropy: Part II"

Guests: Hunter, David R. : Marting, Leeda P. : Lyman, Richard W.

29 April 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 23
Program details: The Council on Foundations was meeting in Detroit, bringing together, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "the people who give away two and one half billion dollars per year." The first of these shows is in the normal Firing Line format; in the second show, the floor is opened to questions from a dozen other foundation executives there gathered. The topics of this lively discussion include what sorts of things foundations have funded and should fund, and whether, given their tax status, they are in fact spending their benefactors' money or the taxpayers' money. RWL: "The contributions that foundations make do change over time.... In the 1920s and '30s, for example, foundations were critically important in the development of science in this country and in the world, and played a part they could not possibly play today when science has become so much more expensive ... The contemporary revolution in biology has its roots in developments that were sponsored by foundations, particularly the Rockefeller Foundation, back in the inter-war period." . . . DRH: "Foundations are not open enough to supporting, particularly, people on the Left in critical kinds of activities." WFB: "Isn't that really an abstract position? ... There is a kind of tropism to dissent that causes some people to think it ought to be subsidized, even if it is very stupid." RWL: "In order to get the good dissent, you often have to subsidize some of the stupid dissent, because you can't always tell the two apart in the beginning."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.749
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6683
item Program Number S0510, 1145

"Shall We Go with a Budget-Balancing Constitutional Amendment?"

Guests: Davidson, James Dale. : Heilbroner, Robert.

15 June 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 23
Program details: Mr. Davidson's organization--as we have heard before on Firing Line (s0365, s0412)--was pressing for a constitutional convention for the purpose of producing a Balanced Budget Amendment; so far it had lined up 31 states, out of the 34 needed. The resistance that would wind up sinking the attempt stemmed in part from opposition to the amendment itself, in part from fears of a runaway convention that might, as WFB quotes one critic, "repeal the Bill of Rights." JDD: "If three-quarters of the states want to repeal the Bill of Rights, we're in a hopeless position vis-a-vis the Bill of Rights anyway." Mr. Heilbroner addresses the substantive matter of the deficit in this good-tempered exchange: "It's very important to have in mind that there are 'good deficits' and 'bad deficits.' And if one could assure ... that the government only borrows to finance capital projects like the Panama Canal or the Manhattan Project or the national road system ..., I can see absolutely no difference between the government borrowing and incurring a deficit for that purpose and a corporation. Furthermore, corporations do not pay back their debts. They roll them over."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.752
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6686
item Program Number S0511, 1146

"How Much Is Secrecy Hurting the U.S.?"

Guests: Teller, Edward, 1908-2003.

15 June 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 24
Program details: An exalting hour with the most humane of warriors, who says, "I have lived through two world wars. I don't want to live through a third one." In response to this show's title question, Dr. Teller contends that "Short-term secrets are both necessary and effective. A secret that is supposed to be kept for more than a year will not be a secret from our opponents, may be a secret from our allies, and will help to confuse the American people.... And since they are the decision-makers in this country, they have a need to know": to know, for example, exactly what might be done with anti-missile technology to really defend the country, as opposed to continuing with "an arms race of more and more of the same."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.753
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6687
item Program Number S0512, 1201

"What Was Special about 1980?"

Guests: White, Theodore Harold, 1915-

23 June 1982

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 9
Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 24
Program details: For twenty years, as Mr. Buckley reminds us, "Mr. White had given us a superb chronicle of American life through the prism of our presidential campaigns, exploring how they exemplify, as he puts it here, our search for equality and ... for opportunity." The thesis he presents in this rich discussion is that, "every generation, America remakes itself," and that the era that began with the GI bill in 1945 came to an end in 1980: "I'm speaking of a particular time in American history when ... we believed that if we could reach the Moon, we could cure cancer, wipe out poverty, stop crime in the streets, and-- the phrase you've heard so often--'If we can reach the Moon, why can't we clean up the air?' " WFB: "Yes, or make Jane Fonda sane." TW: "That I think is beyond the reach of reality or any reach. What you have is, so many good things that we tried to do went too far. They went beyond the limits of the capacity of the nation to do."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.754
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6688
item Program Number S0513, 1202

"The Odyssey of a Southern Liberal"

Guests: Abram, Morris B.

23 June 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 25
Program details: Mr. Abram, whose public career began as a prosecutor at Nuremberg and an administrator of the Marshall Plan, is a life long civil-rights and civil-liberties activist who is not too active to take time to think--for example, about the limits of civil disobedience, about the ideal of academia, about insanity as a criminal defense. MBA: "Martin Luther King, when he practiced civil disobedience, was always willing to go to jail.... He knew that the civilized society, with its constraints of law, protected him and protected his movement, and it was too valuable to be forsaken by him." WFB: "So you distinguish Martin Luther King from William Sloane Coffin and Dr. Spock?" MBA: "Absolutely."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.755
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6689
item Program Number S0514, 1203

"Voting Rights and the Southern Legacy"

Guests: Helms, Jesse.

7 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 25
Program details: Senator Helms was one of only eight senators to protest the new extension of the Voting Rights Act, which put certain states and parts of states that had "historical patterns of discrimination" under special rules. He defends himself more than ably against charges that his motivation for doing so was racism. JH: "It's like Thomas Babington Macaulay said about the House of Commons back in 1852. He said, unfortunately too many members of this body are more interested in the security of their seats than in the security of their country. This was an illustration of it in the United States Senate and it was a sad spectacle."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.756
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6690
item Program Number S0515, 1204

"The Political Future as Viewed by a Young Liberal and a Young Conservative"

Guests: Green, Mark J. : Phillips, Kevin.

7 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 26
Program details: It's amusing, in retrospect, to hear these two best-selling pundits (not joined in this error by their host) explain how badly Ronald Reagan and his team misjudged the basis for his electoral success. Mr. Phillips: "In essence, Ronald Reagan is in some trouble because he represents, partially, a misreading of what the election was about-a confluence in time of a series of what we really have to think of as radicalisms in historical terms-whether it be the New Right, the arch supply-siders, the TV-radio fundamentalists, the one-issue groups. It doesn't knit together in the old conservative sense." ... Mr. Green: "Reagan got so much of what he wanted [from Congress]-it's the Chinese curse, getting what you aspire to-that he has lost what he is so brilliant at, a scapegoat."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.757
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6691
item Program Number S0516, 1205

"Should We Default Poland?"

Guests: Rohatyn, Felix.

21 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 26
Program details: Poland, in which martial law still had not been lifted after seven months, was unable to pay the interest on its foreign debt. But instead of declaring Poland in default, the U.S. Government had lent it the money to make its interest payments. Mr. Buckley asks Mr. Rohatyn--the man who had kept New York City from going into default--to explore the question "why great big grown-up banks lend money to hostile, insolvent governments." The answer is often technical, but host and guest give us enough detail to keep up. FR: "One ought to consider that credits are a strategic material, and ought to be handled on a government-to-government basis, and it ought to be part of our overall set of discussions and negotiations with the Soviet Union."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.762
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6696
item Program Number S0517, 1206

"A Prayer Amendment?"

Guests: Kilpatrick, James Jackson, 1920-

21 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 27
Program details: The Reagan Administration and allies in the Senate were attempting to undo the Supreme Court decision of Engel v. Vitale, which had banned corporate prayer in public schools. Messrs. Buckley and Kilpatrick, usually found on the same side of an argument, disagree on this one, in an exhilarating exchange. JJK: "I keep coming back to minority rights, the rights of the one individual, which you have defended all of your professional life." WFB "I defend the right of the individual against abridgment, but I don't say the way to assert his right is to immobilize the majority."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.763
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6697
item Program Number S0518, 1207

"Is There a Defense beyond the ABM?"

Guests: Graham, Daniel O. : Graham, William R.

26 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 27
Program details: The two Grahams (no relation) unravel for us the complexities of what President Reagan would, the following spring, adopt as his Strategic Defense Initiative (quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by its opponents). Here is Dr. Graham on the making of our first Minuteman system back in the Fifties, in reply to those who say a space-based defense is a chimera: "We didn't know how to make solid propellant rockets of intercontinental size. We didn't know if you could launch these things from holes in the ground, which is a very tough technical problem. In four years we had the force operational."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.764
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6698
item Program Number S0519, 1208

"Looking Back on Senator Joe McCarthy [1982]"

Guests: Reeves, Thomas C., 1936- : Lee, Robert E.

15 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 28
Program details: Joe McCarthy had been the subject of Mr. Buckley's second book, and would be the subject of his forty-fourth book (see Firing Line s1208); Mr. Lee was a friend of McCarthy's; Mr. Reeves had come, through the course of his research, to like McCarthy, though not necessarily to admire him. An often-moving discussion of the man and of the consequences of his actions. Mr. Reeves: "There are two things that I learned ... in my six years of research ... that I was shocked about.... One, I discovered he was a very warm human being with a lot of positive qualities. But secondly, and this was what really stunned me, I discovered that at least by February 1950 McCarthy became a true believer. He is not the wholly cynical, amoral creature who appears in literature. Not at all, and this makes him much more dangerous."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.761
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6695
item Program Number S0520, 1209

"Have We Misread the Fifties?"

Guests: Hart, Jeffrey Peter, 1930- : Leonard, John, 1939-

26 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 28
Program details: The decade that was the background for the previous show becomes the subject of this one. Mr. Hart maintains that the Fifties, so far from being a torpid and conformist time, were full of excitement. (Mr. Buckley, who had founded his magazine smack in the middle of that decade, would scarcely disagree.) JH: "When you have a decade in which the most admired actresses are Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn on the one hand, and Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe on the other, you have a decade of creatively contradictory impulses." JL: "What I like about [Mr. Hart's] book is that it didn't pretend that the Fifties didn't produce the energy that created whatever happened afterward. There's always reciprocal relations between the generations, and this is splendid."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.765
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6699
item Program Number S0521, 1210

"The Economy and the Blacks: Part I"

Guests: Jackson, Jesse, 1941-

13 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 29
Program details: Operation PUSH was holding its annual convention, on the theme "Black America: An Economic Common Market." The idea, as Mr. Buckley explains it, "being to explore means of using black purchasing power to stimulate economic activity and coordination." Reverend Jackson is regarded as less radical than when he first appeared on the public scene--but he still serves it up pretty strong. WFB: "Your figures always astonish me. I've heard you use that figure before about 60 million blacks have been killed as a result of American slaving boats, but only 650,000 blacks were imported in the history of American slavery. So how did you jump from 650,000 to 60 million?" JJ: "It could mean that the rest of them were left at sea or left on shores. You see, I--" WFB: "I don't think you mean that. I don't think you mean that seriously." JJ: "I am as impressed with Lerone Bennett's figures and projections or with Du Bois's figures and projections or George Padmore's figures and projections as you would be with some white historian's analysis. You see? So I have a set of figures and you have a set of figures."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.759
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GJ8K
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6693
item Program Number S0522, 1211

"The Economy and the Blacks: Part II"

Guests: Jackson, Jesse, 1941-

13 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 29
Program details: Operation PUSH was holding its annual convention, on the theme "Black America: An Economic Common Market." The idea, as Mr. Buckley explains it, "being to explore means of using black purchasing power to stimulate economic activity and coordination." Reverend Jackson is regarded as less radical than when he first appeared on the public scene--but he still serves it up pretty strong. WFB: "Your figures always astonish me. I've heard you use that figure before about 60 million blacks have been killed as a result of American slaving boats, but only 650,000 blacks were imported in the history of American slavery. So how did you jump from 650,000 to 60 million?" JJ: "It could mean that the rest of them were left at sea or left on shores. You see, I--" WFB: "I don't think you mean that. I don't think you mean that seriously." JJ: "I am as impressed with Lerone Bennett's figures and projections or with Du Bois's figures and projections or George Padmore's figures and projections as you would be with some white historian's analysis. You see? So I have a set of figures and you have a set of figures."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.758
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GV4C
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6692
item Program Number S0523, 1212

"The Problem: A Statesman Writing History"

Guests: Kissinger, Henry, 1923-

15 July 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 30
Program details: The discussion focuses less on Mr. Kissinger's latest book than on foreign policy past and present. Think what one may about some of Mr. Kissinger's policies, there is no doubt that one is in here the hands of a master. HK: "One of the dilemmas of foreign policy is that when your scope for action is greatest, your knowledge on which to base such action is at a minimum; if you wait until all the facts are in, then the scope for creative action may disappear. When the Germans occupied the Rhineland in 1936, how did we know that they intended an aggression? Since one didn't know, one didn't do anything. By 1940, everybody knew that the Germans intended an aggression, and they paid for that knowledge with 20 million lives."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.760
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6694
item Program Number S0524, 1213

"Is There a New China?"

Guests: Butterfield, Fox.

24 September 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 177 : 30
Program details: Another look at Mao's China (Firing Line s0502, with John King Fairbank), this time with a former student of Professor Fairbank's. Mr. Butterfield's book was regarded as a landmark, and today's discussion, rich in detail, ranges from the price a peasant gets for his grain, to the changes in the contacts Chinese are permitted to have with foreigners, to the steps Deng Xiaoping has taken to avoid a personality cult. FB: "When Deng, in 1978, was fighting for his own political--I won't say survival, but trying to increase his power and--" WFB: "His ascendancy, yes." FB: "His ascendancy--and get rid of a number of people who were still taking the Maoist point of view, Deng allowed the wall posters [on which citizens could criticize the government] to go up. They were largely critical of Mao and of the people who were still siding with Mao, the so-called 'whatever faction'--whatever Chairman Mao said is correct, was correct then, is still correct now. Hua Guofeng was obviously a target. But then when the posters began to go a bit further, when they began to call into question the whole Communist system and when they attacked Deng in particular and said that he too was a despot, then Deng moved to clampdown."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.766
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6700
item Program Number S0525, 1214

"Are the Churches Too Political?"

Guests: Armstrong, James.

24 September 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 1
Program details: Bishop Armstrong, who had prominently opposed, inter alia, U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the execution of Gary Gilmore, maintains that "political activity has not lured the member churches of the National Council away from the historic faith ... in perfect keeping with that which has gone before." One sample: JA: "We have to get into a discussion of who the barbarian is. How can we identify the barbarian?" WFB: "I can do that with lightning speed. It is the Soviet Union which fits every specification of the barbarian invented by the imagination of man."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.767
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6701
item Program Number S0526, 1215

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Feds Should Get Out of Higher Education-Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Van den Haag, Ernest. : Sobran, Joseph. : Brookhiser, Richard. : Giamatti, A. Bartlett. : Botstein, Leon. : Williams, Dennis. : Bernstein, Alison.

5 October 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 1
Program details: All the participants care passionately about education, but even within the respective teams they agree on little else. Mr. van den Haag goes so far as to entertain the heretical view that "a college education is not absolutely essential if you want to become a good citizen and a productive one." (Mr. Botstein counters that "fewer than 20 per cent of high-school graduates learn any geography, fewer than 10 per cent have a foreign language, and fewer than a third do more than geometry"-which would seem to suggest a remedy other than four years of college.) Good moments, but not the liveliest of these debates.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.768
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6702
item Program Number S0527, 1216

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Feds Should Get Out of Higher Education-Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Van den Haag, Ernest. : Sobran, Joseph. : Brookhiser, Richard. : Giamatti, A. Bartlett. : Botstein, Leon. : Williams, Dennis. : Bernstein, Alison.

5 October 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 1
Program details: All the participants care passionately about education, but even within the respective teams they agree on little else. Mr. van den Haag goes so far as to entertain the heretical view that "a college education is not absolutely essential if you want to become a good citizen and a productive one." (Mr. Botstein counters that "fewer than 20 per cent of high-school graduates learn any geography, fewer than 10 per cent have a foreign language, and fewer than a third do more than geometry"-which would seem to suggest a remedy other than four years of college.) Good moments, but not the liveliest of these debates.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.769
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6703
item Program Number S0528, 1217

"Return to Education"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

27 October 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 2
Program details: Americans are spending more time in school than ever before, but with what result? WFB's touchstone illustration: "In 1858, 60 per cent of the American people were literate. In 1960, 85 per cent were literate, and during that period we traveled between the debates of Lincoln-Douglas and Kennedy-Nixon." Mr. Adler's preferred solution: "If I could say this without being heard by anybody I would abolish all schools of education." Meanwhile, he advises, cultivate a proper perspective on academic specialization: "No one can be a specialist any longer in more than one field. I feel just as comfortable being a generalist in the 20th century as Aristotle was in the 4th century B.C. ... When I talk about an educated person, I'm talking about a generally cultivated human being, not a specialist."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.771
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6705
item Program Number S0529, 1218

"The Roosevelt Legacy"

Guests: Prichard, Edward F.

27 October 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 2
Program details: Mr. Prichard was a dazzlingly Bright Young Man when he went to Washington in 1940; he never came to the prominence predicted for him because in 1949 he was convicted of vote fraud for stuffing a ballot box. But he proves a delightful and very acute reminiscer about those heady days beginning when, at age 30, he found himself, as WFB puts it, "in almost daily contact with President Roosevelt." EFP: "The NRA [National Recovery Administration], I think, as one of the [Court] opinions said, was delegation of power run riot. And I think the NRA was largely a failure." WFB: "Mr. Roosevelt called it 'the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by any American President.'" EFP: "Typical puffery.... Presidents can be silly, even the greatest ones."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.770
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWREW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6704
item Program Number S0530, 1219

"Is There a Way Out in the Middle East?"

Guests: Perlmutter, Amos. : Mehdi, Mohammad Taki.

4 November 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 3
Program details: Two months after the massacre of Palestinian civilians in refugee camps in West Beirut, this discussion turns into an intense--indeed, rancorous--argument about how Palestine should be governed. MTM: "To call a theocracy a democracy is a misrepresentation.... Inevitably in history whenever there were Jewish states, Moslem states, Christian states, they have been causes of war. If in Palestine we want peace ...we have to eliminate such social obscenities." AP: "We have to talk about things that are relevant. What is relevant to the conflicts of the Middle East has got nothing to do with religion. It has to do with nationalism. It has to do with national forces."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.772
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6706
item Program Number S0531, 1220

"Looking at the Election"

Guests: Seigenthaler, John. : Alexander, Lamar. : Heard, Alexander.

11 November 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 3
Program details: A zestful examination of the midterm election, with a reminder that in the South, as Governor Alexander puts it, "voting patterns, wildly enough, still go back to the Civil War." A good deal of the hour is spent discussing PACs, which were born of early-Seventies attempts at election reform and which have had the opposite of the intended effect, "atomizing the political climate," as Mr. Heard puts it, and "making] it even more difficult than before for the Congress to act coherently and with what we aspire to, a large view of the general interest." Governor Alexander's solution: "The only law we need [on political contributions] is one which prescribes disclosure of every contribution, and let the people then make a judgment."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.775
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6709
item Program Number S0532, 1221

"Crisis"

Guests: Jordan, Hamilton.

4 November 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 4
Program details: The "crisis" of Mr. Jordan's title was the Iran hostage crisis, around which the last year of Jimmy Carter's Presidency revolved. A brilliant postmortem on the Presidency and the re-election campaign. WFB: "What was the morning-after reaction to the startling choreography at Madison Square Garden when the President sort of reached out for Teddy Kennedy's hand and Kennedy took it as though he were being handed a dead rat?" HJ: "Two dead rats.... The symbol of a unified party after these fights is usually the winner and the loser with up lifted hands. Senator Kennedy that night seemed unable to accommodate President Carter... That became the symbol of a divided party in the fall campaign."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.773
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6707
item Program Number S0533, 1222

"Is the South Changing?"

Guests: Ferris, William. : Cobb, James C. : Millner, Steven.

11 November 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 4
Program details: Is the South changing? Or has it--as Walker Percy had contended on Firing Line ten years earlier--already changed out of all recognition? All three of our guests are professional students of the South; Messrs. Ferris and Cobb are natives, Mr. Millner an immigrant from California. They bring a wealth of detail to bear on the South--and on the America of which it is a part. JCC: "This idea of the South joining the American mainstream--we always considered that this consisted of the South trudging painfully towards the mainstream; we never considered that the mainstream might move towards the South, which I think there is considerable evidence that it has." ... WF: "One of the things, if not the most important thing, that distinguishes it from other parts of the country is this symbiosis of Afro-American and Euro-American cultures.... It goes back to Twain, to Huck and Jim on the raft, and the black and white presence is very deep. Whether the colleges have been integrated or segregated, the closeness of black and white cultures throughout the South has been a very important part of every phase of life, from our literature to our history to our folk lore."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.774
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6708
item Program Number S0534, 1223

"Is Communism Evolving?"

Guests: Pipes, Richard.

9 December 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 5
Program details: A stirring session with a guest who has spent most of his adult life studying the Soviet Union. RP: "... this utterly false alternative, which is presented to us from Moscow and picked up by the West, is that you have a choice of either engaging in the sort of relationship with the Soviet Union where basically you concede what they want or you stand up to them and you are facing a holocaust.... This is entirely a false alternative.... We can be free and we can be at peace, if we arm ourselves ... Western civilization is a very precious thing, and to surrender it in the hope that somehow you'll be able to manage seems to me absurd."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.778
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6712
item Program Number S0535, 1224

"Social Security or Economic Insecurity"

Guests: Peterson, Peter G.

9 December 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 5
Program details: Mr. Peterson was not the first to point out that Social Security as currently structured would not be viable for very much longer, but he is one of the most lucid exponents of the reasons why, and of how the Social Security apparatus fits into the rest of our economy. PP: "I think, at this point, to tell the American people, a whole generation of Americans who were led to believe that indeed money had been set aside and that it would be available, that it is now not available, is to violate a very fundamental principle of a link between a nation and its people."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.779
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6713
item Program Number S0536, 1225

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Women Have It at Least as Good as Men-Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Sobran, Joseph. : Dickey, James. : Fox, Muriel. : Freeman, Erika Padan. : Pilpel, Harriet F.

30 November 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 6
Program details: This debate-which ranges from the Declaration of Independence to the Equal Rights Amendment, from abortion to pay scales-occasionally crosses the line between hard-fought and ferocious, but put on your flak helmet and come along. Mrs. Pilpel, quoting a female Member of Congress: "'It is tragic to have male representatives making decisions about women's minds, women's bodies, women's work, and women's status as citizens.' "... Ms. Freeman: "Many women are only allowed to have their pride through their husband's achievements.... A woman may not be a full person first, a mother second, and a wife third." ... Mr. Sobran: "Isn't it accurate to say that the feminist movement, as we currently know it, is really the Ladies' Auxiliary of Liberalism?" Ms. Fox: "We are not the auxiliary. We are in the forefront of the energy of liberalism in this country today."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.776
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6710
item Program Number S0537, 1226

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Women Have It at Least as Good as Men-Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Dickey, James. : Sobran, Joseph. : Pilpel, Harriet F. : Fox, Muriel. : Freeman, Erika Padan.

30 November 1982

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 120 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 6
Program details: This debate-which ranges from the Declaration of Independence to the Equal Rights Amendment, from abortion to pay scales-occasionally crosses the line between hard-fought and ferocious, but put on your flak helmet and come along. Mrs. Pilpel, quoting a female Member of Congress: "'It is tragic to have male representatives making decisions about women's minds, women's bodies, women's work, and women's status as citizens.' "... Ms. Freeman: "Many women are only allowed to have their pride through their husband's achievements.... A woman may not be a full person first, a mother second, and a wife third." ... Mr. Sobran: "Isn't it accurate to say that the feminist movement, as we currently know it, is really the Ladies' Auxiliary of Liberalism?" Ms. Fox: "We are not the auxiliary. We are in the forefront of the energy of liberalism in this country today."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.777
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6711
item Program Number S0538, 1227

"Nuclear Hysteria?"

Guests: Scheer, Robert. : Kinsley, Michael E.

5 January 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 6
Program details: For so adept an interviewer (it was he who had elicited from Jimmy Carter the news about lust in his heart), Mr. Scheer is a rather overbearing guest. But WFB is able to carve out some space for give-and-take. RS: "We know right now that the command-and-control systems that now exist on either side probably could not last more than 15 or20 minutes in an all-out nuclear war, so really, when you talk about nuclear war, the evidence is pretty clear that you are talking about a situation of extreme chaos, madness--" WFB: "I certainly hope your book is widely circulated in the Soviet Union."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.780
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6714
item Program Number S0539, 1228

"The Humanities and the Federal Government"

Guests: Bennett, William J.

5 January 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 7
Program details: There is no one that conservatives would rather have seen as chairman of this body if it was to exist--and Mr. Bennett, keeping his claims in proportion, engagingly makes the case for its existence as a tax-funded entity. WJB: "Are there things more important than the humanities? Of course there are. But I don't think we decide the budget for an agency of government based on that.... I think it was Macaulay who said it was more important to bake bread than to have pianos.... But that doesn't mean we should all be baking bread and not have any pianos. A modest amount set aside for the humanities to follow the purposes set out in the legislation and to do so in a review system that is fair... seems to me a desirable and defensible function for the government."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.781
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6715
item Program Number S0540, 1229

"Buckley's Turn to Explain Himself"

Guests: Green, Mark J. : Kinsley, Michael E. : Kondracke, Morton.

24 January 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 7
Program details: A bracing installment of the semi-annual show in which host and guests change places, with Mr. Buckley being asked to, as the title has it, explain himself mostly with reference to the policies of the President whose election he had championed. Topics range from defense to inflation, with a heavy concentration on Mr. Reagan's tax policies. Two samples: Mr. Buckley: "People paid more [taxes] in 1981 than they paid under Carter." Mr. Kinsley: "Not the people you are most concerned about, the people in the top brackets." WFB: "What makes you think I'm most concerned about them?" MK: "They are the ones whose rates you wanted to reduce down to 25 per cent." WFB: "It's true that they are the ones who agitate most strongly to avoid tax exposure, but 'they' is 37 million Americans, i.e., the people who pay more than 25 per cent." ... WFB: "Mr. Reagan would unquestionably resist an aggressive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union with a counterattack. I don't think anybody in the world doubts it. I happen to think this is the profoundest protective wall that we have."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.782
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G708158
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6716
item Program Number S0541, 1230

"Do the Banks Know What They're Doing?"

Guests: Davidson, James Dale. : Cline, William.

24 January 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 8
Program details: The short answer to the title question is: "No." WFB gives some of the background of this show: "In the 17 years since this program began, the producer has not had the equivalent difficulty in getting somebody representing ... an institution to visit with us for the purpose of explaining that institution's policies and defending them. We must have issued two dozen invitations, to the people whose names come obviously to mind when one thinks of international banking. They were all tied up. Like their banks. I do not mean to suggest that we settled for second-echelon guests. Merely that an unapologetic defense of banking policies is not likely to be heard." As indeed it was not, nor of the International Monetary Fund or World Bank, which had encouraged the banks in their disastrous lending to Third World and Iron Curtain countries. An informative and rather frightening show.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.783
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6717
item Program Number S0542, 1231

"Ideas and Action"

Guests: Rostow, W. W. (Walt Whitman), 1916-2003.

22 February 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 8
Program details: How does policy get translated into action? How do the different advisors of a decision-maker (say, the President of the United States) maneuver to get their ideas accepted? Mr. Rostow was writing a series of books, each examining a case in point; one of his case studies is the topic of this absorbing hour--President Eisenhower's dramatic "Open Skies" proposal for arms-control verification, launched at the first Geneva summit conference in 1955. WWR: "So at the moment of the summit your duty was not to say, I'm sure Khrushchev will buy this.' All the objective argument was that he would not. But you should make it in total good faith, and I think Eisenhower did make it in good faith.... If you are playing with issues this big, if you could get a breakthrough, it would mean so much to everyone, your own country and to the human race. You don't simply say, 'My analysis of those folks is that they are going to say no.' You keep your powder dry, but you go out and make a fair offer."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.784
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6718
item Program Number S0543, 1232

"Should the U.S. Withdraw from Europe?"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J. : Barnet, Richard.

22 February 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 9
Program details: Messrs. Solarz and Buckley start from the assumption that whatever decisions we take vis-a-vis the Soviet Union--whether in terms of troop strength in Europe or in terms of arms control (currently on the table was President Reagan's Zero Option: that the Soviets dismantle their intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe, in return for our not deploying the Pershing II and cruise missiles)--must be predicated on the need to protect ourselves and our allies. Mr. Barnet starts from the assumption that we are the problem, not the solution. And never the twain shall meet. RB: "I think the Soviet Union has maneuvered itself, largely with the help of this Administration, into a position where they appear to be readier to take the missiles out and to reverse the course and to negotiate than we." WFB: "You must be kidding."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.785
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6719
item Program Number S0544, 1233

"Confidence and Betrayal"

Guests: Cohalan, Florence. : Pilpel, Harriet F. : Tamarkin, Norman R.

22 February 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 9
Program details: A profound discussion among, as WFB puts it, "a very thoughtful lawyer, a very thoughtful doctor, and a very thoughtful priest" on the subject of their obligations when told a secret that has not only past but future implications. Monsignor Cohalan explains that for priests, "The problem is very simple.... Canon law, which would take precedence in a matter concerning the sacraments, says with the utmost possible simplicity and finality that the seal of the confessional is inviolable, period"--even on pain of jail. In both the legal and the psychiatric professions the law and the ethics are less clear. As Mrs. Pilpel points out, "in some states there are no privileges of a certain type.... If a person is called upon to make a disclosure, he cannot effectively plead a doctor-patient privilege in a state, for example, like Texas, where there is no such privilege." For Dr. Tamarkin, "Here's the problem about this whole issue: it's between two goods, in a way. On the one hand you want the patient to be able to see you as in their corner, on their side. On the other hand, you don't want to see somebody going around murdering other people. So you are caught in between two allegiances."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.786
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H5O2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6720
item Program Number S0545, 1234

"The Carter Years: Power and Principle"

Guests: Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., 1928-

31 March 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 10
Program details: Mr. Brzezinski was, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "identified in the public mind as the hawk in Mr. Carter's Administration, the role of dove going to Mr. Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State." And Mr. Brzezinski is, as ever, hawk like in another sense as well, pouncing fiercely upon points of disagreement, in a conversation ranging from the Carter Administration's "normalization" of relations with China, to Ted Kennedy's behavior in 1980, but starting with Mr. Carter's speech about our "inordinate fear of Communism": "Bill, I was consulted and I even contributed, perhaps in a direct way but at least indirectly, to that very phrase, and therefore let me say what that phrase means. It doesn't mean that one should underestimate the threat of Communism, but it means that in the competition between freedom and Communism, we have nothing to fear--that our system is more viable, more creative, more appealing, that Communism is a waning ideology. And I really think that's historically true."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.787
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6721
item Program Number S0546, 1235

"Reagan and the Question of Legal Services"

Guests: Harvey, William F.

31 March 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 10
Program details: This show does not do as much as one might have hoped to clarify the dispute over the Legal Services Corporation, but it does offer some helpful perspective on how we might provide legal services to the poor without creating a lawless posse of lawyers like the LSC. Mr. Buckley points out that "there are more lawyers in Los Angeles than there are in all of Japan," but it is Mr. Harvey--who approves the LSC in principle--who tells of LSC lawyers going into Mexico to recruit immigrants "for the purpose of both employment and the direction of law suits against their prospective employers." This, as Mr. Harvey points out, is illegal, but "most restrictions are not self-enforcing ... and they have not been enforced in the past."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.788
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6722
item Program Number S0547, 1236

"How to Read, How to Figure"

Guests: Saxon, John. : Down, A. Graham.

14 April 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 11
Program details: How can a country spend as much time and money on education as ours does and produce declining literacy and numeracy? Blame partly the theorists, who replaced phonics with the look-say method of teaching reading and who tried, as Mr. Saxon puts it, "to teach a child algebra by teaching him advanced algebraic concepts that had best be reserved for the junior year in college, when he has mastered the fundamentals." Blame also the social engineers, who, as; Mr. Down puts it, have made the schools into "psycho-social devices for solving the problems of our society." A discussion at once gloomy and heartening, with two men who are actively doing something to help--Mr. Saxon, by writing an algebra textbook; Mr. Down, through his own writing and the work of his Council.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.789
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6723
item Program Number S0548, 1237

"How to Speak, How to Listen"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

14 April 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 11
Program details: A visit from Professor Adler is always a treat. On this occasion--sparked by his latest book, How to Speak and How to Listen--he reminds us that real conversation doesn't come naturally. We have to work at speaking clearly and listening attentively just as we have to work at writing clearly and reading attentively. WFB: "What are the responsibilities of the speaker to attract that kind of attention? Should you be able, as a finished listener, to listen to dull people?" MA: "No, any more than you should be able to read well a bad book."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.790
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWYH2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6724
item Program Number S0549, 1238

"The Mess in Central America"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J. : Calero Portocarrero, Adolfo.

3 May 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 12
Program details: Mr. Calero's personal history tells much of the story. Under Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza, Mr. Calero was active in political opposition, and was once jailed for his efforts. He had real hopes for the government of "national reconstruction" that succeeded Somoza, but in January of 1983, when it had become apparent that the Sandinistas had consolidated their hold on that coalition government, he fled the country and joined the armed resistance. While Mr. Solarz speaks happily of the prospects of a "negotiated settlement" in neighboring El Salvador, Mr. Calero says: "The Communists don't share power. That's common knowledge. Any neophyte would know that."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.791
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6725
item Program Number S0550, 1239

"Medical Malpractice"

Guests: Moskowitz, Richard. : Rosenblatt, Stanley. : Mannix, Arthur, Jr.

3 May 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 12
Program details: A lively--though not always good-tempered--discussion of the many issues involved in medical malpractice: "How should doctors be punished when they make a damaging mistake?" Do large malpractice awards punish the culpable doctor or the entire pool of patients whose medical costs will go up? WFB: "It has struck me for years that one very seldom reads about disbarred lawyers, and one very seldom reads about unfrocked doctors, so that to the extent we laymen depend on you all to police yourselves, you don't do a striking job of it. Either that, or most of you are angelic." SR: "Which is hardly the case in either profession ..."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.792
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6726
item Program Number S0551, 1240

"European Unity?"

Guests: Barzini, Luigi.

3 May 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 13
Program details: Mr. Barzini has the depth of a scholar and the facility of a journalist. Agree with him or not that "Europe should have one common foreign policy, one common defense policy, and one financial policy," he is a joy to listen to. LB: "I quote Helmut Schmidt: 'The Americans are what they are, but they are the only Americans we have.' " WFB: "There wasn't quite enough savoir-faire in Europe to prevent two world wars recently."LB: "I say repeatedly that what the Europeans can contribute is the wealth of their past errors, of their stupid wars, of their senseless convulsions and revolutions."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.793
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6727
item Program Number S0552, 1241

"A Traditionalist Looks at Modern Europe"

Guests: Lowenstein, Hubertus zu. : Livingston, Robert.

13 May 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 13
Program details: As a man whose property was seized and who was condemned in absentia by Hitler for his first book, Prince Hubertus has standing to speak of Hitler as an aberration in German history. Still, as WFB reminds him and us, as soon as Germany was united, in 1870, it began starting wars. Prince Hubertus: "I wouldn't be alive today if it hadn't been for the Quaker breakfasts which we received after the First World War. [Then] after the Second World War--" Mr. Livingston: "The present chancellor, Mr. Kohl, will be the last German chancellor who will have a living memory of this.... He remembers and refers often in his speeches to the CARE packages and the Marshall Plan aid that he as a young boy received, but his successor will not have the same memories, and I think this is going to be a significant generational change."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.794
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6728
item Program Number S0553, 1242

"The British Elections"

Guests: Wilson, Harold, Sir, 1916-

13 May 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 14
Program details: On the eve of Margaret Thatcher's re-election, a detail-filled and sometimes quite delicious session with the man who at that point was Britain's longest-serving peacetime prime minister in this century (a distinction he would eventually lose to Mrs. Thatcher), and who had just that morning retired as a member of Parliament. HW: "We are going through an extremely interesting time. I prefer two-party government, and I always thought that if I couldn't win with a working majority, I hoped the other side would be there with a working majority or Britain wouldn't be properly governed. I won four times, and twice only very narrowly." ... WFB: "Did you train Tony Benn with the others?" HW: "Yes, I brought him up. He was a very sensible boy in those days. I think once I used the phrase lightly, right off the cuff--I said, 'He immatures with age.' I think that has continued to be true."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.795
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6729
item Program Number S0554, 1243

"The Afghan Mess"

Guests: Rahim, Abdul. : Assil, Ayyoub.

26 May 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 14
Program details: In the fourth year of the Soviet occupation, there were four million Afghan exiles, and an estimated one million had been killed. "Historians," WFB begins, "will perhaps record that the West rallied to the aid of Afghanistan by depleting our representation at the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980." The two guests speak a slightly unidiomatic English, but they are eloquent in their fervor for their country and their God, and persuasive in their assertion that it would be in other countries' interests to assist them. AA: "The Russians are not coming to Afghanistan as tourists. They are preparing for other countries. They want to reach, as soon as possible, to the Persian Gulf to cut the neck of the oil."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.796
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6730
item Program Number S0555, 1244

"A Fresh Look at Economic Problems"

Guests: Thurow, Lester C.

26 May 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 15
Program details: A bracing session with a man who has his own strong opinions but who is capable of looking even at them with some perspective: "If you recommend policies that are so sensitive that they have to be put in place exactly as you recommend them ... for all practical purposes you are recommending policies that can't work, for the political process is never going to take one idea and put it in place precisely as Art Laffer or Les Thurow thinks it ought to be put in place." And a salutary reminder: "If you take the real-world scientists--geologists, meteorologists, people who study earthquakes--their prediction records and their ability to control is no better than economists'."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.797
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6731
item Program Number S0556, 1245, 1245R

"Is Reaganomics Working?"

Guests: Baldrige, Malcolm.

2 June 1983, 12 August 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 19-20
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 15
Program details: The economy was looking up, but the budget deficit was still sky-high, there was 10 per cent unemployment, and the dollar was overvalued--or was it-- President Reagan's Secretary of Commerce isn't so sure: "There is still enough pressure to keep the dollar as high as it is because it is the safest safe in the world for investments, and it has still comparatively high interest rates; a combination of those two is what keeps the dollar up." And why is the deficit so high? "Nine out of ten congressmen and senators that I talk to are for lower budget deficits. They all say that it is a big problem. But when it comes to specific actions of where to cut, they've all got a different reason not to cut here or cut there, so the job doesn't get done."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.799
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6733
item Program Number S0557, 1301

"Is It True That the Well-Qualified Can Find Jobs?"

Guests: Navin, Hank. : Malarkey, Thomas.

2 June 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 16
Program details: The 10 per cent of Americans who are unemployed are not all at the lower end of the ladder. Messrs. Navin and Malarkey had both been on successful career tracks and have each now been unemployed--and very actively seeking employment--for one year. They discuss, with the pain of personal experience, the difficulty of getting a job if you don't currently have a job, and the fact that, as Mr. Malarkey puts it, "You [an unemployed person] are a social pariah." Mr. Navin: "The job is where we spend most of our waking hours, and it forms the content of our character. It is what it is that we are.... It is how we contribute. When you don't have a job, who are you?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.798
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6732
item Program Number S0558, 1302

"Andrei Sakharov's Complaints against the Freeze Movement"

Guests: Bundy, McGeorge.

20 July 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 16
Program details: Mr. Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, had, from his "internal exile" in Gorki, written a letter to an American scientist prominent in the nuclear-freeze movement in which he said, "The main danger is slipping into an all-out nuclear war. If the probability of such an outcome could be reduced at the cost of another 10 or 15 years of the arms race, then perhaps that price must be paid ..." The reaction in Moscow had been, in Mr. Buckley's description--which Mr. Bundy endorses--"near hysterical." This rich discussion, which moves from the arms race to the current state of NATO to the "exaggeration," as Mr. Bundy has it, in President Reagan's hopes for SDI, starts with the letter itself. MB: "This letter is a perfectly extraordinary example of the imaginative and intellectual force of Sakharov's mind and of his independence. As one man thinking for himself, it's, I think, one of the truly extraordinary documents of the nuclear age,... and I think that really it is just that force, the unconquerable spirit of the man and his independence, that is so deeply offensive to our friends in Moscow."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.805
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6739
item Program Number S0559, 1303

"Where Do the Democrats Go from Here?"

Guests: Greenfield, Jeff. : Green, Mark J. : Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931-

7 July 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 17
Program details: A year and a half before the presidential election, Fritz Mondale and John Glenn and Fritz Hollings and Reubin Askew and Alan Cranston and Gary Hart were shuttling back and forth between New Hampshire and Iowa and Wisconsin. Mr. Greenfield puts matters in perspective: "I think that it was the shift in the American political continuum in ideas that helped elect Ronald Reagan, not actors, not Walter Cronkite's raised eyebrows ... I think what people are beginning to focus on now is, What are the Democrats saying about the nation, the world, and the economy that validates their claim to return to power?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.804
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6738
item Program Number S0560, 1304

"Was Gandhi for Real?"

Guests: Grenier, Richard. : Rudolph, Lloyd Irving.

9 June 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 17
Program details: The movie Gandhi had met with wildly differing reactions--stemming largely from the reactors' views of Gandhi himself. Was he primarily a religious and ethical figure, or was he a political figure in karma yogi's clothing? Mr. Rudolph takes the more positive view of the Mahatma, though Mr. Grenier also acknowledges that "for the Hindus he is a holy man." RG: "The iron law of Satyagraha, which I think we will try to translate as non-violence--civil disobedience--is the following: Its success is strictly proportional to the high moral level of the opponent.... It has to operate in a free society. It had its greatest triumph, far greater than in India, in the United States of America under the leadership of Martin Luther King."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.801
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSM2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6735
item Program Number S0561, 1305

"Is There a New Economics?"

Guests: Reich, Robert.

7 July 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 18
Program details: Mr. Reich is of course on the Democratic side of things (at this time he was coaching at least two of the Democratic presidential candidates in matters economic), but his analysis is far from standard issue: "The choice before us is very stark: that is, either, on the one hand, trying to preserve an old industrial base through tariffs, subsidies, or what have you; or, on the other hand, trying to move the economy forward, acknowledging, number one, that there are enormous social costs and benefits that have to be addressed with regard to a restructuring of that magnitude."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.803
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6737
item Program Number S0562, 1306

"Inside the KGB"

Guests: Barron, John. : De Borchgrave, Arnaud.

9 June 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 18
Program details: We learn a lot about chief opponent, although the conversation doesn't click the way it often does on Firing Line. Guests and host range over the KGB's historical successes and its use, today, of the Cuban DGI as a very useful subsidiary--the more useful, Mr. de Borchgrave suggests, "because people who had trouble idealizing Brezhnev, Chernenko, or Andropov could see Castro as the great liberator of the Third World." Mr. Barron: "It is exceedingly difficult to attract anyone today in any part of the world to the Soviet cause on the basis of ideological appeal. In the Thirties most of the great agents recruited served selflessly out of ideological motivation, out of the belief that they were serving mankind. Most of the cases we know about today involved greed or ego."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.800
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6734
item Program Number S0563, 1307

"Do Civil Rights Equal Affirmative Action?"

Guests: Bunzel, John H., 1924- : Abram, Morris B. : Chavez, Linda.

20 June 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 19
Program details: What these three guests have in common, apart from a lengthy track record of laboring in the civil-rights vineyard--going back in Mr. Bunzel's case to 1946, when he founded the Liberal Union at Princeton--is that (a) they had just been nominated by President Reagan to serve on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and (b) they had been hotly opposed by a variety of social activists--largely, one supposes, because of who nominated them. Although there are no fireworks, guests and host being substantially in agreement as to the unacceptability both of old-fashioned racial discrimination and of modern reverse discrimination, there is plenty to talk about. MBA: "In 1979 President Carter offered me a seat on the Civil Rights Commission. I said that I wanted the President to understand that I differed with his views about preferential treatment by race and quotas. Therefore, three days later I received a phone call saying I would not be appointed, and I thought it was President Carter's perfect right to do that. It is in the Executive Branch." ... LC: "You have a preponderance of blacks and other minorities who continue to earn a great deal less than whites as a group.... And I think that what many minorities are grasping for is a way in which to tie that in some way to race, and to try to seek a solution where, frankly, I don't think it's going to be found."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.802
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6736
item Program Number S0564, 1308

"The Plight of the Democratic Moderates"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

31 August 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 19
Program details: Mayor Koch--whose appeal, according to WFB, is "based on an admixture of personality and chutzpah, as we Catholics refer to it"--is justifiably worried about those of his Democratic brethren who are striving to become President in 1984: "I want to save the Democratic Party from those people who are so foolish as to believe that if they pander to the extremes they will get the designation and then win. They may get the designation, but they won't win." Specific topics on which His Honor says Democrats must get serious include crime, taxes, health care, and constitutional reform.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.806
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6740
item Program Number S0565, 1309

"What Are We Going to Do about the Mess in the Schools?"

Guests: Bennett, William J. : Futrell, Mary.

31 August 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 20
Program details: As WFB frames the question, "There is general agreement only on the proposition that public education is in bad shape. Why this is so, and what should be done about it, is where there is disagreement." To Mrs. Futrell, who by background is a classroom teacher, and whose commitment to the nation's children is clearly genuine, "If we do not have a voice at the Cabinet level speaking for education, then it is not considered to be a priority in this country." To Mr. Bennett, "I am a bureaucrat. I would like to think of myself as a considerate and thoughtful bureaucrat, but the notion that I am somehow more attuned and more in touch with and more sympathetic with the needs of the children of Mississippi than are the parents and the teachers of Mississippi strikes me as ridiculous."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.807
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6741
item Program Number S0566, 1310

"Should We Put the Screws on South Africa?"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J. : Williams, Walter E.

15 September 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 20
Program details: Mr. Solarz had just introduced a bill in Congress to tighten the pressure on South Africa--by, for example, maintaining the ban on selling Krugerrands in the United States and ordering U.S. firms with plants in South Africa to apply there the same employment practices specified in our laws back home--even though the government there was already on the path to what President Botha described as "evolutionary change." Mr. Solarz defends his bill eloquently on moral grounds. His host and his fellow guest point out that it is not moral to urge actions that will have predictably counterproductive results. WEW: "Apartheid is dying of its own weight in South Africa. The gains that ethnic groups make normally come at a time of robust economic activity as opposed to contracted economic activity."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.808
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6742
item Program Number S0567, 1311

"What Is Radio Free Europe Up To?"

Guests: Buckley, James Lane, 1923- : Shakespeare, Frank.

15 September 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 21
Program details: No fireworks, WFB and his guests being long-standing (in JLB's case very long-standing) comrades in arms, but a serious and often moving hour explaining the difference between Voice of America--which, as Mr. Shakespeare describes it, "is the American news and PR service abroad--and the two radios broadcasting specifically to the Iron Curtain countries, acting as surrogate local radio stations ..." WFB: "As though Leningrad had a free radio station?" FS: "Exactly so." Of RFE and RL, Jim Buckley says: "We are operating on the basis that human beings are entitled to the facts. It is up to those individuals how they will react to those facts, and if we start censoring ourselves then we do a disservice to our very mandate. WFB: "Suppose that Walesa was seized and hanged, would you instantly communicate that fact throughout Poland?" JLB:"Of course."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.809
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6743
item Program Number S0568, 1312

"Should We Get On with Capital Punishment?"

Guests: Van den Haag, Ernest. : Conrad, John P.

29 September 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 121 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 21
Program details: Another look at this perennial topic, this one taped in the capital of a state which had accumulated some two hundred prisoners on death row. The guests are old antagonists on this question, who in fact had co-authored The Death Penalty: A Debate. For Mr. van den Haag, "Since I think that murder is an extraordinary crime, worse than any other, discontinuous in a sense with any other, I want for murder to have a unique, a discontinuous penalty." Mr. Conrad cites Immanuel Kant (whom Mr. van den Haag had early in the hour quoted to make a very different point) as having "argued that the state must never use a person as a means to an end. Persons are indeed ends in themselves. If we use even the murderer ... towards the end of the prevention of crime, we are violating a very important principle."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.810
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6744
item Program Number S0569, 1313

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Affirmative Action Goals for Minorities and Women Should Be Abolished-Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Pendleton, Clarence M., Jr. : Reynolds, William Bradford. : Berry, Mary Frances. : Greenberg, Jack. : Lichtman, Judith L.

13 October 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 22
Program details: Plenty of fireworks on this one, not always tempered by a shared assumption of good will. CMP: "The remedy for discrimination is not the practice of more discrimination ... The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not passed so that we could discriminate against whites." ... MFB: "We all know the sad history of slavery, which was the last time blacks had full employment." ... WBR: "It is not only hypocritical, it is sheer nonsense to maintain that we can end discrimination by utilizing the race-conscious tools of the discriminator, using race to get beyond racism." ... JG: "The cancer of racism is the most serious social problem facing America today.... It has placed blacks in a disadvantaged position, with 60 per cent [of the] median income of whites and double the unemployment rate. The only bright spot in the racial picture is affirmative action."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.813
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6747
item Program Number S0570, 1314

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That Affirmative Action Goals for Minorities and Women Should Be Abolished-Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Pendleton, Clarence M., Jr. : Reynolds, William Bradford. : Berry, Mary Frances. : Greenberg, Jack. : Lichtman, Judith L.

13 October 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 22
Program details: Plenty of fireworks on this one, not always tempered by a shared assumption of good will. CMP: "The remedy for discrimination is not the practice of more discrimination ... The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not passed so that we could discriminate against whites." ... MFB: "We all know the sad history of slavery, which was the last time blacks had full employment." ... WBR: "It is not only hypocritical, it is sheer nonsense to maintain that we can end discrimination by utilizing the race-conscious tools of the discriminator, using race to get beyond racism." ... JG: "The cancer of racism is the most serious social problem facing America today.... It has placed blacks in a disadvantaged position, with 60 per cent [of the] median income of whites and double the unemployment rate. The only bright spot in the racial picture is affirmative action."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.812
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6746
item Program Number S0571, 1315

"Was It Censorship in Grenada?"

Guests: Lewis, Anthony, 1927- : Clurman, Richard M.

3 November 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 22
Program details: The invasion of Grenada, or, if you prefer, "the rescue operation in Grenada," as Mr. Buckley sets the stage, "left the country with the one great question during the first day or two, namely: "Should we have done it?" But before we knew it, it appeared that the majority of America's newsmen and intelligentsia were discussing not so much should we have gone in as the near criminality of going in without complete freedom of movement by the press." Although Mr. Lewis had been one of the complainers, he starts out by saying, "I share your implied distaste for the notion that the most important thing in the world is the position of the press in life. I don't think that, and any sort of special pleading and self-pity I don't like." To Mr. Clurman, "As to the motive of the military in not wanting the press, that is both completely understandable and in my view completely intolerable." And we're off on a crackling three-way exchange on whether the press nowadays can be trusted as it could, say, during the Normandy landing, and whether the culture of leaking that began during the Vietnam War had become a permanent fixture. WFB: "Mr. Lewis, if you have a Cabinet meeting, and you decide which way you will tilt as between Pakistan and India, and you read about it in Jack Anderson's column the next day, are you excessively worried about secrecy?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.814
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6748
item Program Number S0572, 1316

"Should America Be Bilingual?"

Guests: Torres, Arnoldo S. : Etzioni, Amitai.

29 September 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 23
Program details: This show starts with the narrow question of how bilingual education is supposed to work and how it in fact works; but it very quickly broadens and deepens into an exploration of what holds the American society together--and whether it deserves to be held together. Mr. Torres: "It's the paranoia that American society suffers from with the tremendous influx of refugees ... who speak a different language and have a different culture and who just may be taking their jobs." Mr. Etzioni: "There are exceptions to be sure, [but] the American society is extremely open and generous ... Just let's talk about the last five years--the Cuban immigration, and a large part of the population of El Salvador has simply moved north, and God knows how many people from Mexico.... by and large, if you talk about American society, I don't think it's fair to call it paranoiac these days."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.811
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6745
item Program Number S0573, 1317

"The Economics and Politics of Race"

Guests: Sowell, Thomas, 1930-

3 November 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 23
Program details: Mr. Sowell had just produced a blockbuster, called The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective. Any author who writes about the topic of group characteristics is taking a tremendous risk, but Mr. Sowell (a) is not averse to risk and (b) had approached his topic empirically rather than polemically, presenting data that show how the peoples of various regions of the world have fared in different areas of endeavor. As we have learned before on Firing Line, he speaks as lucidly and compellingly as he writes: "One of the things I wanted to deal with in this book ... is whether a group is formed by the society around it or whether, in fact, a group has its own pattern which follows it wherever it goes.... I looked at groups in other countries--Germans in Brazil and Australia and Russia, the Chinese in Indonesia and the United States and other countries--to see if they do in fact have their own pattern or are they simply reflecting what happened to them in that particular country, and what I found, by and large, was that they had their own pattern."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.815
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGNZW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6749
item Program Number S0574, 1318

"Are All Young Europeans Suicidal?"

Guests: Stego, Cecilia. : Morrison, Stephen A. S. : Nesse, Knut O. : Kriegisch, Franz F.

3 November 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 24
Program details: The title question refers to the recurrent news stories at the time of young Western Europeans lying by the thousands across railroad tracks to block trains carrying nuclear weapons. The four young people we meet here--all affiliated with the European Democrat Students, all far from suicidal--are fresh and appealing, and have a clear-eyed view of the world that would do credit to their elders. Miss Stego: "The Soviet shave been able to scare everybody to death in Europe." Mr. Buckley: "What happens when you are scared to death? Disarm?" Miss Stego: "Yes. There are some very politically minded groups and leadership within the peace movement, but the lady in the street, the kids, any person in those big marches, are basically afraid. ... That's the main difference between the United States and Europe."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.816
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6750
item Program Number S0575, 1319

"The Eyes of Texas Are Upon Us"

Guests: Mauro, Garry. : Hutchison, Kay Bailey, 1943- : Richards, Ann.

10 November 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 24
Program details: A lively discussion with a future senator (Mrs. Hutchison), a future governor (Mrs. Richards), and the man who manages 22 million acres of Texas land that WFB describes "as oozingly petroliferous." Various economic and political topics are brought up, but the one the discussion keeps coming back to--and the one with the highest emotional temperature--is immigration. These Texans, differing politically, nonetheless agree that immigration is not a local or even a national problem, but an international one. Mrs. Hutchison, for example, proposes that, instead of looking at ways of keeping people out, we look at ways of helping them build up their economies at home so that they can stay there. WFB: "My own experience with bilingualism is that it is an utter and total phony. What you end up doing is having a society in which people speak either English or Spanish and understand a few frijoles words in between."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.817
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6751
item Program Number S0576, 1320

"Poland and Europe, Poland and America"

Guests: Michener, James A.

10 November 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 25
Program details: Mr. Michener is sometimes very prescient, as when, to quote WFB's introduction, "looking for that part of the world which would necessarily emerge as the most volatile, ... he selected Poland two years before Lech Walesa founded Solidarity." At other times he is less so, as when he accepts the view of his Polish acquaintances that "they are under Soviet hegemony and probably will be for the rest of this century." Mr. Michener gives a moving account of the ups and downs this country, in which he finds so much to admire, had experienced in the previous twenty years; e.g., the "Gulag formula" of keeping a population under control: "give people less and less food until they reach the breaking point, then feed them more so they can work, but be sure to diminish the food so they go back to the breaking point."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.818
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6752
item Program Number S0577, 1321

"The Day after The Day After"

Guests: Gold, Victor. : Leonard, John, 1939- : Perle, Richard Norman, 1941-

13 December 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 25
Program details: The Day After was the ABC movie, seen by more than 100 million people, set in Lawrence, Kansas, the day after a fictional nuclear strike. What had been its purpose? VG: "The producers and the director of the show . . . wanted Americans to think that . . .deterrence was a failure . . ." WFB: "How can that which has manifestly succeeded have failed?" VG: "You don't have to debate me on such a thing." WFB: "I know, but I'm asking you how ... to cope with that." VG: "Well, in the scenario . . . they created the failure ... by the fact that the Russians became afraid because we had placed the Pershing missiles." To Mr. Leonard, the fact that the script writer had said he wanted to hinder our deployment of the Pershing missiles means nothing: "Do you know what a writer is like on television?" WFB: "No, I don't." JL: "A writer can say whatever he likes, but what appears on the TV screen is so far from what that writer originally intended because it's been nibbled to death by ducks to make it palatable, ... to make it seem as though you're being provocative, but without ever really offering a significant alternative."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.821
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6755
item Program Number S0578, 1322

"The U.S. and Her Alliances"

Guests: Barnet, Richard. : Perle, Richard Norman, 1941-

13 December 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 26
Program details: Over the concerted opposition of thousands of demonstrators in Western Europe and, on our own shores, the likes of Mr. Barnet (described by his critics as a Communist sympathizer), the deployment of Pershing and Cruise II missiles in Europe was finally going forward -- thanks not least to the efforts of Mr. Perle (described by his critics as a warmonger, the Reagan Administration's Prince of Darkness"). A crackling exchange between these two natural antagonists. RB: "You are not going to persuade the Soviets that they are the evil empire, particularly by aiming more missiles at them." RP: "You can persuade them not to get careless with their own weapons, not to get flamboyant in the use of their conventional weapons."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.822
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6756
item Program Number S0579, 1323

"Is There a Crisis in the Catholic Church?"

Guests: Hesburgh, Theodore Martin, 1917- : Barrett, David.

6 January 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 26
Program details: Although WFB starts by listing several ways in which the Church is said to be in crisis--declining vocations, declining Mass attendance, declining use of sacramental confession--today's discussion winds up concentrating on the American bishops' recent Pastoral Letter on nuclear arms. To Mr. Buckley, "the bishops were here leaving the moral arena that is their proper realm and meddling in prudential" questions outside their competence. To Father Hesburgh, disarmament is precisely a moral question, because "if we don't get this problem solved, all the other problems in a sense become moot... If the nuclear weapon is unleashed, everything else is all over." But Father Hesburgh does not indulge in secular-style fear mongering: "The world got to a point where it was rather fatalistic about whether it will happen or won't happen. There is nothing worse, I think, than a fatalistic world. We need hope to go on living."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.823
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6757
item Program Number S0580, 1324

"Psychiatry and the Law"

Guests: McGinniss, Joe. : Sadoff, Robert. : Halleck, Seymour.

1 December 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 27
Program details: In 1970 the wife and daughters of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald--a Green Beret stationed at Fort Bragg--were killed. The chain of evidence eventually led to MacDonald himself, and despite testimony at the pre-trial hearings by Drs. Sadoff and Halleck to the effect that it was all but inconceivable that he was the murderer, he was tried and convicted. Mr. McGinniss had begun researching his book on the case with the expectation of proving the verdict wrong, only to find additional evidence that it was right. He is rather hard on the psychiatrists; they reply defensively--but also movingly at times. SH: "There are some ethical things that are just excruciating and probably unresolvable. You are often using your empathic skills which were developed originally totally to help people and then turning around and communicating what you have learned as a result of using those skills to an agency which then uses that to harm an individual."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.819
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6753
item Program Number S0581, 1325

"The Rights of Children"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Guggenheim, Martin.

1 December 1983

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 27
Program details: At what point does the state have a right (a duty?) to intervene between child and parents? When parents would deny their child a possibly life-saving operation because of deeply held religious beliefs? When the child has acquired a venereal disease and wants medical treatment without his parents' knowledge? When parents, again through religious conviction, want to remove their children from school at age 14? A painful but informative discussion. Mr. Guggenheim: "There is a sharp difference between allowing a child to be heard--and many times proponents of children's rights either confuse the issue or don't clarify it--and giving the child the dispositive power."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.820
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6754
item Program Number S0582, 1326

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That President Reagan Should be Re-Elected in 1984-Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Will, George F. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Shrum, Robert.

19 January 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 28
Program details: A lively debate before an appreciative audience for such things, the place where WFB first won his spurs, the Yale Political Union. Samples: Mr. Shrum: "All of us agree that Mr. Reagan's re-election is likely to mean more for guns and less for human needs, that it is likely to mean escalation and not negotiation in Central America, that it will probably mean a continuing arms race with the Soviet Union. The difference is that while Mr. Buckley and Mr. Will welcome that result, Senator McGovern and I and most Democrats resist it." ... Mr. Will: "It is a sobering thought that if any of the Democratic candidates now running for President had been President in the fall of 1983, an extraordinary band of cutthroats would now be screwing down the lid of a dictatorship on a now free island [Grenada] in the eastern Caribbean."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.827
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6761
item Program Number S0583, 1327

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That President Reagan Should be Re-Elected in 1984-Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Will, George F. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Shrum, Robert.

19 January 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 28
Program details: A lively debate before an appreciative audience for such things, the place where WFB first won his spurs, the Yale Political Union. Samples: Mr. Shrum: "All of us agree that Mr. Reagan's re-election is likely to mean more for guns and less for human needs, that it is likely to mean escalation and not negotiation in Central America, that it will probably mean a continuing arms race with the Soviet Union. The difference is that while Mr. Buckley and Mr. Will welcome that result, Senator McGovern and I and most Democrats resist it." ... Mr. Will: "It is a sobering thought that if any of the Democratic candidates now running for President had been President in the fall of 1983, an extraordinary band of cutthroats would now be screwing down the lid of a dictatorship on a now free island [Grenada] in the eastern Caribbean."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.828
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6762
item Program Number S0584, 1328

"A Murder Case"

Guests: Aziz, Muhammad [Butler, Norman] : Herendeen, Warren.

18 January 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 28
Program details: "On the evening of February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down in Harlem--not by Ku Klux Klan agents," as WFB reminds us, "but by agents of Elijah Muhammad, the reigning Black Muslim leader." The chief assassin implicated two other men, one of them being Norman Butler, now known as Muhammad Aziz. Although the assassin later admitted that he had lied about the other two, they were not granted a new trial. Mr. Aziz speaks about how his religion has sustained him, and even if Christians, including Mr. Buckley, will have difficulty accepting some of the distinctions he draws, his testimony is moving indeed: "Christianity doesn't lend itself to the black man holding his head up, but Islam does. Islam says you don't have to turn the other cheek if you're attacked.... Islam gives you an operational basis for your everyday life, for your every moment of existence."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.825
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6759
item Program Number S0585, 1329

"The Prison Problem"

Guests: Colson, Charles W. : Coughlin, Thomas.

18 January 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 29
Program details: In his previous appearance on Firing Line Mr. Colson had spoken in large part about his own experience in prison; here he speaks more as a student of the problems with our prisons--principally the inhuman overcrowding and, even so, the staggering cost of building new prison space to keep up with the growing prison population. He has an alternative idea, which he states very effectively. Mr. Coughlin, meanwhile, is willing to stick up for his own institution, the legendary state prison up the river" from New York City: "It's a little-known fact that of the eight thousand people who left this system in 1976, only 12 per cent have returned to prison within a five-year period for a new crime as distinguished from breaking parole on the old crime. Sixty-eight per cent are no problem; you never see them again after they leave."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.826
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6760
item Program Number S0586, 1330

"Is There a Natural Law?"

Guests: McInerny, Ralph. : Solomon, David. : Niemeyer, Gerhart.

6 January 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 178 : 29
Program details: This topic, it is safe to say, has not often been addressed on television talk shows. But guests and host use enough concrete illustrations to give even the non-philosophically minded a very rewarding hour. WFB: "Nuremberg really was an appeal to natural law in a way." GN: "Some say so; I don't. In my mind, Nuremberg was an unreasonable thing, simply for the reason that the Soviets sat among the judges." WFB: "What if they had not?" GN: "Even then I think it would have been very much tainted by the fact that the victors sat over the vanquished." ... RM: "There are certain actions which in and of themselves are wrong--they would thwart the purposes of human nature--such as murder and adultery and lying.... These kinds of actions are excluded. But when you have the inclusions ... the positive natural-law precepts--be brave, be temperate, be just--they don't strike one as constraining prescriptions. They open up all kinds of possibilities of variety and diversity."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.824
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6758
item Program Number S0587, 1331

"What's on Malcolm Muggeridge's Mind?"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

19 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 1
Program details: Another visit with a favorite guest, whose quirky perspective on the world is, as always, provocatively expressed. One sample: "The pacifism in the sense of saying that we will get rid of all our weapons--well, yes, if you are prepared to have no authority in the world, no importance in the world, no influence in the world, to wind up your role as a country, as a people--that is one sort of pacifism, and one that I could bring myself to respect. But the idea that you would give up your nuclear weapons and then whoever...can function in the Kremlin would say, 'Well, it's no use us having nuclear weapons if these people have given them up'--that is pure drivel."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.829
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWSNM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6763
item Program Number S0588, 1332

"How Are the Socialists in England Regrouping?"

Guests: Kinnock, Neil Gordon, 1942-

21 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 1
Program details: In June 1983 the Labour Party had suffered its worst electoral defeat since the end of World War I, and the party leader, the radical socialist Michael Foot, predictably was ousted. So far left had the party gone, however, that it promptly chose another radical Socialist to succeed him. High on Mr. Kinnock's agenda, as we learn in this high-energy exchange, were nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from NATO, and expulsion of U.S. military facilities from Britain. NK: "It might be possible for a large country, with expanses of desert or prairies or water, to be able to accommodate [nuclear attack] without the total annihilation of society ... but it isn't plausible in Europe, where we live cheek by jowl, one with another, and we know that the use of any nuclear weapon would lead to the obliteration of our whole society."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.831
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6765
item Program Number S0589, 1333

"Is Britain a Giant Humbug?"

Guests: Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998.

20 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 2
Program details: In Mr. Powell's fourth Firing Line appearance-his first since he left the Conservative Party and was returned to Parliament from Northern Ireland as a Unionist-the conversation starts with the fuss he had stirred up by criticizing the Queen's Christmas message and moves on from there to the monarch's relation to the government in a constitutional monarchy, the effects of the Falklands War on British-American relations, and Britain's relation to her former colonies. EP:" The English wanted to humbug themselves that the British Empire was not lost and gone. No, no, no, no. It had been transformed into something greater and more wonderful [the Commonwealth], a worldwide association of completely free countries with no subordination one to the other whatsoever; all equal in respect of their external affairs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.830
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6764
item Program Number S0590, 1334

"A French Socialist Speaks Out"

Guests: Rocard, Michel.

23 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 2
Program details: The discussion ranges widely, from the differences between Socialism and (Soviet) Communism to the way the French conducted the war in Indochina. But the main topic is M. Rocard's current portfolio, agriculture, and the way it fits into the global political economy. MR: "You have a very large country with a small density of human beings per hectare. When there is too much space you can always abandon some land and let it go back to desert... We have no flexibility at all... . Such a long occupation of this land that we cannot gain any new land, but we cannot either abandon it." ...WFB: "We conservatives do not want commercial war. We don't want trade wars. We don't want tariffs. Are you as theoretically committed to free trade as American conservatives?" MR: "Any intelligent man is committed to free trade. Even Socialists can be intelligent."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.834
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6768
item Program Number S0591, 1335

"How Is Mrs. Thatcher Doing?"

Guests: Knight, Andrew, 1939- : Riddell, Peter. : Hayman, Helene Middleweek.

21 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 3
Program details: A conversation with three longstanding English friends of Firing Line (all have served many times as guests or panelists, Mr. Riddell and Mrs. Hayman beginning when they were still at Cambridge). The brisk and detail-filled discussion treats of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism, alone and in comparison with Ronald Reagan and Reaganism, on specifics ranging from inflation to defense (conventional versus nuclear) to the welfare state (and the fact that, while many Britons would like lower taxation, few would give up, say, the National Health Service). Mr. Knight: "The difficulty that we are finding with the United States is not that it's taking ... a particularly trenchant tone [in world affairs], it is that it's not us any longer that is taking a trenchant view. This is the aftermath of a declining power."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.832
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6766
item Program Number S0592, 1336

"The World View of Paul Johnson"

Guests: Johnson, Paul, 1928-

22 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 3
Program details: Mr. Johnson's magnum opus had caused a tremendous sensation, and he proves here to deal as compellingly in the spoken as in the written word. Samples: "Of the three great attempts to explain human behavior which have created the modern world, Nietzsche was the one who was proved right [as against Marx and Freud].... He thought that when God died He would leave a huge vacuum in men's minds, and ... that vacuum would be filled by the lust for power,... and I think on the whole that Nietzsche has been vindicated by what has occurred in this terrible century." "I think one of the sources of evil in the modem world is the devaluation of language ... If you can tamper with the language you get at people's psyche; you get inside their minds in a way you cannot do with bayonets."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.833
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6767
item Program Number S0593, 1337

"The Strain in French-American Relations"

Guests: Galbraith, Evan G. : Vinocur, John. : Chevrillon, Olivier.

24 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 4
Program details: The French truck drivers, as Mr. Buckley begins by reminding us, were just ending their week-long blockade of the country's roads--begun in the first place in retaliation for the damage done them by a strike by French customs officials--but today's discussion focuses less on that than on the topic that had been convulsing Western Europe for months: the decision by NATO to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles. Mr. Galbraith: "These weapons prevent the Soviets from their prime weapon these days, which is to try to terrorize Western Europeans into surrender." M. Chevrillon: "[There has been] a huge shift in the French intelligentsia... into some sort of realistic attitude towards the Soviet threat. Those people have understood probably better than their German or English counterparts what Gulag means ... and they are inclined now to accept as a moral value resistance to this kind of totalitarianism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.836
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6770
item Program Number S0594, 1338

"The Conservative Dissent in France"

Guests: Chirac, Jacques, 1932-

23 February 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 4
Program details: M. Chirac had failed in his 1981 challenge to his former ally, then-President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, but, even so, as the wildly popular mayor of Paris and the head of the Gaullist party, he was one of the most prominent figures in French political life. On this show, he apologizes for his imperfect English, but his common sense comes through with Gallic clarity: "We cannot criticize the Americans' economic policies, and also ask them to help us in defense; that is a contradiction." "Our effort is to explain to the French people that the Socialist and Communist system is politically dangerous to freedom and economically failed, and that we do have a liberal system which could improve very much the economic and social situation."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.835
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6769
item Program Number S0595, 1339

"How Does It Look for the Democrats?"

Guests: Zielenziger, Michael. : Yepsen, David. : Herman, Dick.

18 April 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 5
Program details: The Democratic presidential race had pretty much come down to Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Jesse Jackson, and the objective on this show, as WFB puts it, "is to examine this race from other than the usual perch along the Eastern Seaboard." The lively discussion covers the ups and downs of the current race; but it also asks what actually are the differences between the Heartland and the East Coast. Mr. Yepsen: "There are rituals and duties and routines that come from being tillers of the soil.... I'm not saying that it's better or worse, but it certainly makes it different to know in the springtime the issue is rain and getting a crop planted, and that's of concern to a businessman and to the governor at the State Capitol." Mr. Zielenziger: "What is news in Washington often is not news here. So much of Washington news is gossip."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.837
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6771
item Program Number S0596, 1340

"Does Middle America Have an Inferiority Complex?"

Guests: Kerrey, Robert, 1943-

18 April 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 5
Program details: Whether it has a complex or not, Governor Kerrey certainly agrees that Middle America finds it hard to get noticed by the national media. This attractive newcomer to politics (his first race had been the one for governor a year and a half before) speaks movingly about the small family farmer, squeezed as always by fluctuations in the weather and, now, by the huge agri-business conglomerates ("You don't have people in agriculture leaving it, taking a job repairing televisions, then when the economy turns around going back.... Once they're gone, they are likely gone forever"). He is also perceptive about the difficulties in governing: "You cannot run a government like a business. My government is a representative democracy, and my business is a benevolent dictatorship."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.838
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6772
item Program Number S0597, 1341

"The Budget Deficit and the GOP"

Guests: Kassebaum, Nancy Landon.

19 April 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 6
Program details: A spirited conversation with one of the first women elected to the U.S. Senate, a moderate Republican who was a leader in the fight for an across-the-board budget freeze. NLK: "I think most people in this country today worry far more about the increase in interest rates and the effect of that on our economic upturn now than they do anything else. Regarding defense, if we are not strong economically our defense system isn't going to work anyway." WFB: "Well, that's only half true. The Soviet Union is not strong economically and their defense system, unfortunately, works very well." How forward-looking are our legislators? NLK: "We always worry about the future, but it is the immediacy of the moment on which we vote."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.839
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6773
item Program Number S0598, 1342

"Crime and Insanity"

Guests: Menninger, W. Walter. : Modlin, Herbert. : Spring, Raymond L.

19 April 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 6
Program details: Our three guests bring lucidity as well as expertise to a question that has been muddled by generations of editorialists and defense lawyers. RLS: "The insanity defense really grew out of the attempt by judges three hundred years ago and more to try to explain to juries a very simple concept, and that is that all crimes require not only an act but a certain state of mind... One who is so dispossessed of reason that he cannot form that intent obviously cannot be guilty of a crime." ... WWM: "I think it's important to differentiate between explaining why behavior takes place and excusing it.... People tend to take explanations to be equated with excusing, and that's why psychiatry sometimes gets a bad mark."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.840
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6774
item Program Number S0599, 1343

"Should the Democratic Party Move Left?"

Guests: Burns, James MacGregor.

9 May 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 7
Program details: The title question refers to Professor Burns's conviction that the two parties should be more sharply differentiated, with Southern conservatives going Republican and Northeastern liberals going Democratic. An extremely rich hour examining current problems in the light of our constitutional structure. JMB: "I would like for each party to control its own team in the way parliamentary parties do, and then present their two cases--as I think clearly happened in 1980--to the people." WFB: "Although I would like to conclude that there was something in the nature of a conservative revolution in 1980, I don't think it's true. I think people didn't want Carter to be President." JMB: "I think you are doing an injustice to the Republican Party and its conservative principles, as I read that election.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.841
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6775
item Program Number S0600, 1344

"Looking Back on the Election Law"

Guests: McCarthy, Eugene J., 1916- : Etzioni, Amitai.

9 May 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 7
Program details: Mr. Etzioni's latest book, Capital Corruption, was a plea for more stringent revisions of the campaign-finance laws, which had first been passed in 1971 and had been the subject of court cases (including a landmark one brought by then-Senators McCarthy and James Buckley, eventually decided as Buckley v. Valeo), and congressional responses to them. To Mr. Etzioni, sociologist, money is the root of most political evil. To Mr. McCarthy, sometime political practitioner (who to be sure is also a poet and philosopher), "There are other temptations. You see, we're operating as though the greatest temptation was money. We know the classical temptations were of a higher order. There was the temptation of power and, beyond that, of pride."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.842
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6776
item Program Number S0601, 1345

"General Haig Looks Back"

Guests: Haig, Alexander Meigs, 1924-

29 May 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 8
Program details: General Haig had become such a figure of fun--by saying, "I'm in charge here" when President Reagan was shot--that one can forget, until one listens to him, just how deeply experienced he is in public affairs (going back to his service on the staffs of General MacArthur and General Almond in Korea, and including both front-line duty and high-level Pentagon duty in the Vietnam War). His unpacking of the questions that should be asked before "a single drop of American blood is shed" is masterly, as is his explication of how lines of authority should run in an Administration: it doesn't matter who speaks on foreign-policy matters--it is more usually the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor, but in the Kennedy Administration it was the ubiquitous Bobby--but it matters greatly that somebody "is designated by the President, and perceived by his colleagues and peers to be the man designated by the President, to handle and centralize foreign policy.... Either works, where a hybrid or neither is chaos."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.843
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6777
item Program Number S0602, 1346

"The High-Frontier Concept"

Guests: Keyworth, George.

29 May 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 8
Program details: Could the Strategic Defense Initiative really work? Wouldn't it destabilize relations with the Soviet Union? Dr. Keyworth's technical credentials are unassailable, and he proves able to explain difficult concepts so that non-physicists can grasp them: "The Soviets' definition or perception of the word 'deterrent' requires that they maintain a pre-emptive strike, a first-strike capability, whereas for us it is purely the maintenance of a retaliation. If we can reduce those perceptions to a common ground--and I would contend that even a moderately effective ballistic missile defense system does, because it removes any military validity, any validity at all, to a Soviet pre-emptive first strike--if it does that, then we are both left with the threat of retaliation, which is where we started from decades ago, which is far more stable than the situation today."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.844
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6778
item Program Number S0603, 1401

"What's Ahead for the Democrats? Part I"

Guests: Green, Mark J. : Kempton, Murray, 1917- : Brookhiser, Richard.

20 June 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 9
Program details: With the Democratic National Convention still nearly a month away, the primaries had ended with the party firmly in the hands of what WFB calls the "Henry Wallace-George McGovern" wing. Walter Mondale was the presumptive nominee, although neither Gary Hart nor Jesse Jackson had formally conceded. The first of these shows is a Left-Right face-off, with plenty of sparklers; in the second, a half-dozen student panelists put the guests (and their host) through their paces on specific topics ranging from abortion to affirmative action. A sample from Murray Kempton: "One of the things that fascinates me about the Carter people is that they were such Confederates. We all went to Gettysburg one day and they were saying, 'We were here and they were there,' and they're still saying it.... If I were a delegate I would nominate for Vice President a Southern white male,... some tough old cracker who goes around saying, 'Boys, remember Appomattox and what they did to us there. Rally one more time.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.849
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6783
item Program Number S0604, 1402

"What's Ahead for the Democrats? Part II"

Guests: Green, Mark J. : Kempton, Murray, 1917- : Brookhiser, Richard.

20 June 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 9
Program details: With the Democratic National Convention still nearly a month away, the primaries had ended with the party firmly in the hands of what WFB calls the "Henry Wallace-George McGovern" wing. Walter Mondale was the presumptive nominee, although neither Gary Hart nor Jesse Jackson had formally conceded. The first of these shows is a Left-Right face-off, with plenty of sparklers; in the second, a half-dozen student panelists put the guests (and their host) through their paces on specific topics ranging from abortion to affirmative action. A sample from Murray Kempton: "One of the things that fascinates me about the Carter people is that they were such Confederates. We all went to Gettysburg one day and they were saying, 'We were here and they were there,' and they're still saying it.... If I were a delegate I would nominate for Vice President a Southern white male,... some tough old cracker who goes around saying, 'Boys, remember Appomattox and what they did to us there. Rally one more time.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.850
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6784
item Program Number S0605, 1403

"The Olympics"

Guests: Edwards, Harry. : Axthelm, Pete.

12 July 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 10
Program details: On the eve of the Los Angeles Olympics, a discussion of a wide range of sports-related issues that frequently splits into two discussions. For Dr. Edwards--the man who attempted to organize a boycott of the Mexico City Games in 1968 to protest South Africa's inclusion, and who did inspire the two black athletes who gave the Black Power salute when our national anthem was being played--race is the only issue. Mr. Axthelm focuses on the Olympics themselves, and the way their current size and the media attention that attract are effectively an invitation to boycotts and terrorism. Dr. Edwards: "Jackie Robinson accomplished something. He made it possible for more blacks to be more consistently exploited, more consistently and at a greater profit, than ever before in the history of American society." Mr. Axthelm: "The Soviets proved [in 1980] what I have suspected all along: it is possible to run a perfect Olympics so long as there is no individual freedom in the country." NOTE: The transcript lists the title of this episode as: "Looking Again at the Olympics."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.851
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6785
item Program Number S0606, 1404

"The Russians and Reagan"

Guests: Talbott, Strobe. : Kaiser, Robert. : Kondracke, Morton.

6 June 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 10
Program details: As WFB frames the question, "The general understanding is that Soviet-American relations are at an all-time low, which appears to be true, and it is certainly true that this worries some people more than it does others." Mr. Talbott is one of the "some": "I'm certainly worried about what Reagan has done to Soviet-American relations.... A really serious impasse in Soviet-American relations is not a healthy thing." Mr. Kaiser, while not as unworried as his host, refuses "to hold Reagan responsible for everything that's happened." Among other things, he points out, it wasn't Ronald Reagan who invaded Afghanistan. And as examiner Morton Kondracke describes the arms race, "When we build, they build. When we stop building, as we did during detente, they build."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.845
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6779
item Program Number S0607, 1405

"The Real Cuba?-- Part I"

Guests: Almendros, Nestor. : Leal, Orlando Jimenez. : Navarro, Antonio.

13 June 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 36
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 11
Program details: Messrs. Almendros and Jimenez had collaborated on the highly acclaimed documentary Improper Conduct, about present-day Cuba, and particularly the Castro regime's imprisonment and torture of homosexuals. Mr. Navarro--whom we had met three years earlier (Firing Line s0475)--had initially been quite close to Castro but soon realized his mistake. This show starts with a few minutes of footage from Improper Conduct and then moves into an extraordinarily rich discussion of everything from techniques of cinematography to the reasons people join a revolution to the obtuseness of French intellectuals. One sample: WFB: "Why, given the ease with which information travels these days, does it take ten or twelve years to find out what Fidel Castro is like if you are a French intellectual?" NA: "Yes, that's amazing, especially when you think that common people, very ignorant people, know what's happening. For instance, the Haitians that leave poverty and dictatorship in Haiti seem to know very well that the country not to go to is Cuba."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.847
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6781
item Program Number S0608, 1406

"The Real Cuba?-- Part II"

Guests: Reich, Otto. : Luxenburg, Norman. : Aguilar, Luis.

13 June 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 122 : 37
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 11
Program details: The previous show concentrated on Castro's victims; this one concentrates on Castro himself and his regime. Are the guests (and their host) rather one-sidedly anti-Castro? Well, as Mr. Buckley relates: "The producer of Firing Line, Mr. Warren Steibel,... invited six guests known for the enthusiasm they have expressed for the accomplishments of Fidel Castro, but none, mysteriously, was available." A lively hour even so with three deeply knowledgeable guests. Here, for example, is Mr. Luxenburg on the widely held belief that the Castro regime had greatly raised the Cuban literacy rate: "In 1977, in May, a committee of the House of Representatives went to Cuba on a (private) fact-finding mission, and published in their report--and we assume that this information was furnished them by obliging Cuban officials--that prior to Castro there were 187,000 students in Cuba. But there weren't 187,000 students in Cuba before Castro, there were a million. These statistics you can find in any old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.848
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6782
item Program Number S0609, 1407

"U.S. Policy and Human Rights"

Guests: Abrams, Elliott, 1948-

6 June 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 ; 12
Program details: In these balmy pre-Iran/Contra days, Mr. Abrams is able to keep in view the whole range of his portfolio, which he does with great zest, from the comparative human-rights possibilities in, say, Nigeria, a country with "significant democratic institutions built by the British," and Zaire, "which was ruled very poorly by the Belgians, who left no institutions behind"; to the uses of the Helsinki agreement: "I thought the Helsinki treaty would be a travesty ... It has been better than we thought.... What is completely legitimized now is the notion that we can comment on their [the Soviets'] internal political situation, their human-rights situation. You hardly ever hear them any more saying that this is off limits."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.846
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6780
item Program Number S0610, 1408

"Is the Main Threat from the Third World?"

Guests: Lukacs, John. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

12 July 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 12
Program details: Mr. Lukacs is known for taking contrarian positions, and he had recently floated two such, which he explicates and defends on this show: that the United States' fear of the Soviet Union is outdated--what we should be fearing is Third World immigration; and that "the United States is ceasing to be a democracy and becoming a bureaucracy." The conversation (particularly between Mr. Lukacs and fellow contrarian Ernest van den Haag) seldom quite clicks, but there are some good moments: EvdH: "The one thing we know about history is that present trends hardly ever continue." JL: "The American people are very unpredictable, thank God. That bad thing is that so many institutions want to make them predictable."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.852
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6786
item Program Number S0611, 1409

"Is Bipartisanism Dead?"

Guests: Kissinger, Henry, 1923-

31 August 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 13
Program details: Mr. Buckley introduces his old friend as someone who" has always known how to speak with men and women of different views. He has conducted civil conversations with Mao Tse-tung and Congressman Michael Barnes. Is there any sacrifice he is unwilling to make for the national welfare?" This absorbing conversation with the Metternich de nos jours ranges from the Vietnam War to the present-day Philippines to the bipartisan lack of congressional interest in the findings of his bipartisan commission. One sample: "Now Central America has the additional disadvantage that it looks a little bit like Vietnam. It's in the tropics, and it looks like the tropics, and it's a guerrilla war... What people are reluctant to face is that it is very close to our borders."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.853
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6787
item Program Number S0612, 1410

"The Election: A View from New York"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

31 August 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 13
Program details: His Irrepressible Honor is always good value; here he surveys the political scene as the dust settles from the national conventions. On the Democrats: "I wouldn't for a moment say to you that there aren't people in the Democratic Party who take positions that I deplore. I thought... that Jackson and Hart in their foreign policy were quite bad... I am convinced that the positions of Hart and Jackson are not the positions of Fritz Mondale." On the Republicans: "I thought that the battle in Dallas ... was a battle between the far right and the savage right, and I believed that the savage right would ultimately win and they did." On one particular Republican: "I drive people in my own party crazy-angry with me, because I will say I disagree with President Reagan's philosophy; I deplore it; I like him personally. There are some people who cannot distinguish between the political difference and the personal liking."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.854
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GOVM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6788
item Program Number S0613, 1411

"The Republican Party and Moderates"

Guests: Rusher, William A., 1923- : Leach, Jim.

6 September 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 14
Program details: Rep. Leach, a moderate Republican, concurs with some of Mayor Koch's strictures on the Republican Convention, although he expresses them more, well, moderately. Indeed, in his taxonomy "moderate" really does seem to mean moderate, rather than being a cloak for liberalism: "Finally, we hearken much like Bill Rusher does to the Goldwater and Taft traditions of individual rights. What we are concerned about today is a party that has moved beyond Barry Goldwater's individual-rights conservatism... towards ideological purity rather than the themes of America which are very pragmatic." Mr. Rusher, meanwhile, takes a relaxed view of the fireworks at the Dallas convention: "The conservative movement today is a pretty big thing and a pretty various thing.... Most of the differences in the Republican Party for the immediate future are going to be arguments within the conservative community ... That is, in a sense, just the sheer exuberance of growth."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.855
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6789
item Program Number S0614, 1412

"Politics American Style"

Guests: Green, Mark J. : Pilpel, Harriet F. : Mahoney, J. Daniel, 1931-

18 September 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 14
Program details: The semi-annual role reversal in which Mr. Buckley is the interrogatee--a departure from the norm being that the panel is not composed entirely of liberals. The conversation is brisk and entertaining, although there are times when Mr. Green and Mr. Buckley trade volleys of contradictory statistics without any satisfying resolution. Better when the focus is on the moral arena: HP: "... whatever you think about abortion should be your own opinion ..., but the attempt to foist that opinion on the rest of the population would be unfair." WFB: "It's the equivalent of my saying that whatever I believe about civil rights is my business, and if I want to discriminate against people because they are black or because they are Jewish, that's my right. But you say no, it's not your right, because they have rights too.... There is an entire sophisticated culture that says babies have rights too, and they are babies two days before they are born even as they are acknowledgedly babies the day after they are born."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.858
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6792
item Program Number S0615, 1413

"How to Reduce the Deficit"

Guests: Grace, J. Peter.

6 September 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 15
Program details: A lively and at times hilarious look at a grim topic: the way the government wastes taxpayers' money, and the way some citizens take extravagant advantage of that fact. Mr. Grace proves to be a fine raconteur, who takes us with him through his excavations: "When we first went down there, we looked into how much the government owed--about $1.2 trillion. How much is the government owed? That came out to over $800 billion, including what they had guaranteed. It's not that bad. When is this money that is owed to the government due, and when is it going to be paid? We found to our horror that no one had ever aged any of that debt ... Nobody knew when it was due or whether it was overdue." The most comical/infuriating example: 46,000 government employees or former employees, who were receiving a government paycheck or Civil Service retirement--and who collectively owed over $60 million in unpaid student loans.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.856
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6790
item Program Number S0616, 1414

"Church and State"

Guests: Neuhaus, Richard John.

18 September 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 15
Program details: Not the most dramatic show, but genuinely profound on the question of "what happens not only to religious practice but to a nation's culture when the separation of church and state" is taken to mean the separation of religion and society. Pastor Neuhaus: "People forget the fact that the great secularizing forces of our time, the Third Reich in Germany and the Stalinist-Leninist movement in the Soviet Union, are emphatically anti any kind of transcendent reference guiding society. In some senses, they are ... living out the ultimate implications of the naked public square--that the public square has to be filled with sheer, raw power, which claims for itself an absolute or ultimate historical significance."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.857
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6791
item Program Number S0617, 1415

"Mortimer Adler's Great Ideas-Part I"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

11 October 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 16
Program details: One reason Mr. Adler is a perennially favorite guest is his aura of having been formed-unlike, alas, all too many academics--by the great works of Western Civilization that he has studied these many years. Another reason is that he is never more abstract than he needs to be: many of the concepts he discusses are difficult, but whenever possible he brings in graspable details. One sample: "Everyone who's not in an asylum-for his own good or for the public good-a person who's allowed to raise a family, hold a job, move around the streets at will, is a person who has enough intelligence to be a citizen and enough intelligence to be educated ... I think we haven't begun to release the amount of intellectual energy in the minds of the least of us who are not pathologically disabled."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.861
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6795
item Program Number S0618, 1416

"Mortimer Adler's Great Ideas-Part II"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

11 October 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 16
Program details: One reason Mr. Adler is a perennially favorite guest is his aura of having been formed-unlike, alas, all too many academics--by the great works of Western Civilization that he has studied these many years. Another reason is that he is never more abstract than he needs to be: many of the concepts he discusses are difficult, but whenever possible he brings in graspable details. One sample: "Everyone who's not in an asylum-for his own good or for the public good-a person who's allowed to raise a family, hold a job, move around the streets at will, is a person who has enough intelligence to be a citizen and enough intelligence to be educated ... I think we haven't begun to release the amount of intellectual energy in the minds of the least of us who are not pathologically disabled."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.862
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6796
item Program Number S0619, 1417

"The Dalai Lama Looks Back"

Guests: Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, 1935-

27 September 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 16
Program details: The present Dalai Lama assumed full power as the supreme spiritual leader of Tibet in 1950, the same year the Communist Chinese overran his country. He fled in 1959 after, as Mr. Buckley relates, "an uprising against the Chinese Communists which would result, in the ensuing decades, in a holocaust that ranks with Hitler's and Pol Pot's: 1.2 million Tibetans killed... --one-seventh of the population." The Dalai Lama "attempted, in India, to salvage what he could of the religious and historical culture of Tibet." Now, 25 years later, he had been invited to return and was pondering the invitation. He is an arresting world figure; but his ideas come strangely to Western ears: "if there is a clear-cut dialogue between Buddhists and Marxists it may help the Marxists and they may eventually become more human--less rigidity--for the Buddhists have the message of love and compassion ... and the Buddhists may learn some social and economic theory from Marxism. That is my dream."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.859
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VGGYDG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6793
item Program Number S0620, 1418

"Christianity alongside Other Faiths"

Guests: Gilkey, Langdon. : Lopez, Donald, Jr. : Steindl-Rast, David. : Rockefeller, Steven.

27 September 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 17
Program details: This show, like the previous one, grew out of Middlebury College's week-long symposium on the significance of "the Christ and the Bodhisattva--which means in the language of Buddhism a person on the way to Buddhahood--in contemporary life." Do Christianity and Buddhism have anything to say to each other, or are their claims antithetical? An energetic and frequently entertaining discussion, from which, two samples: Brother David: "You seem to think of Truth as many people do primarily in terms of that Truth on which we have a grasp, but that is always a very small part of the Truth. The much greater and more important part of the Truth, in the religious context, is the Truth that has us." Mr. Lopez: "To say that God and Nothingness are the same thing is problematical to me. Because the reality that Christians talk about is mysterious, and the reality that Buddhists talk about is mysterious, does not by any means suggest that they are the same thing."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.860
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6794
item Program Number S0621, 1419

"Examining Poverty in America"

Guests: Harrington, Michael, 1928-

13 November 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 17
Program details: Mr. Harrington, who 18 years earlier had been the very first Firing Line guest, can always be depended upon to give the Socialist Party line--but he does it with such verve and good humor! One sample, from a discussion that ranges from Aid to Families with Dependent Children to the Catholic bishops' pastoral letter on capitalism, to the squeals of French bankers under Mitterrand: WFB: "You've got to increase productivity. But fortunately, under Mr. Reagan, we've been doing that, haven't we?, for the last couple of years." MH: "Oh, I think there is a second act to come, Bill." WFB: "I know, and the trouble with those second acts is that you all look so happy when you predict it, don't you?" MH: "I'm chuckling at the Greek tragedy that's about to unfold."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.864
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6798
item Program Number S0622, 1420

"What Should Reagan's Economic Program Be?"

Guests: Kemp, Jack.

15 November 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 18
Program details: Ronald Reagan had just been triumphantly re-elected--but Jack Kemp's joy is not unconfined: "If the White House drops the ball and they think their mandate is simply to cut spending and not to get the type of economic growth that we need for this country, Kasten and Kemp and Bradley and Gephardt are going to wrest away from the White House the issue of tax reform." Mr. Kemp sometimes sounds a little too gee-whiz to be true--but the intervening years have borne out many of his predictions, even if he and his colleagues did not succeed in enacting the flat tax that was at the center of their program. An invigorating discussion of what in Messrs. Kemp and Buckley's hands is a not at all dismal science.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.865
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6799
item Program Number S0623, 1421

"Bias in the Press"

Guests: Braley, Russ, 1921- : Decter, Midge.

13 November 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 18
Program details: Mr. Braley is a slow and deliberate talker, and so this show lacks the energy of some. But many of the insights are acute. RB: "Watergate was a foreign affair. By that I mean the origins of Watergate and the passion aroused by Watergate was a passion not directed specifically against the instances of Watergate, but against the Administration that continued to pursue the Vietnam War against the advice of the New York Times and its allies." ... MD: "[Establishment journalists assume] that the critics of the press are people who are about to snuff out freedom of the First Amendment. You should hear them, the way they talk about Accuracy in Media, as if the jackboots were coming."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.863
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6797
item Program Number S0624, 1422

"Can Democratic Governments Contend with Communist Governments?"

Guests: Revel, Jean-Francois.

15 November 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 19
Program details: M. Revel answers the title question simply: "No." He points out that "Just after World War I, Central Europe was democratic or becoming democratic. Countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary were more or less in between; Rumania too. Yugoslavia was half democratic. We should have been able confidently to assume that they would be democracies today. But now there is just a very slim slice of Europe--Western Europe--which is democratic." And why? "Because we never learn. We are faithful to an assumed--an alleged--international law whose definition goes back to Yalta or Helsinki, which the Soviets simply do not respect." As predictor, M. Revel was fortunately wrong, at least for the short term. As analyst of what ailed the democratic West--inordinate self-criticism, toleration of tyranny--he was exactly right, and his superbly expressed jeremiad is still valid today.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.866
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6800
item Program Number S0625, 1423

"Religion and Politics"

Guests: O'Connor, John J.

29 November 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 19
Program details: Although over the next 15 years Archbishop O'Connor would become known as a controversialist, we see him here, in his first year in the most prominent Church position in the United States, as threading his way thoughtfully and respectfully through matters on which, ex officio, he must now have an opinion. On points where he is sure, he is not shy about saying so: "The preponderance of teleological evidence [on the unborn child] is that you are talking about human life, ab initio.... We would argue categorically, unconditionally, that the taking of a human life is the taking of a human life, and this is morally wrong." On matters where he is less sure, like the bishops' pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and on the economy, he is diplomatic: "There are a great many of us who do not consider ourselves experts on tactical nuclear weapons ... but most people consider themselves pretty close to the business of taxation, of poverty, of hunger, homelessness ..." A good conversation between two people who care deeply about the role of the Church in modern society.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.867
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6801
item Program Number S0626, 1424

"Book Burning and the Moral Majority"

Guests: Thomas, Cal. : Pilpel, Harriet F.

29 November 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 20
Program details: Contrary to the impression given of his organization by the New York Times and the President of Yale University, Mr. Thomas avers that he wants not to burn books. However, he also wants the New York Times to stop maintaining its more genteel memory hole: "A book by [the Christian evangelist] Dr. Francis Schaeffer... outsold Jane Fonda's Workout Book by two to one, by 300,000 to 150,000, in March of 1982, and yet Miss Fonda's book was number one in the New York Times best-seller list, and Schaeffer's book was relegated to ignominious oblivion ... If you are going to call this thing a best-seller list, then you ought to have best-sellers on it." He and Mrs. Pilpel--although she also wants not to burn books--tend to talk past each other, but there are good moments: WFB: "The Black Plague destroyed a higher percentage of the population of Europe than both world wars, but there we were dealing with a natural menace over which we had no control. But when you get a Hitler, a Stalin, and a Mao Tse-tung, [who] create three societies which between them managed to slaughter people in the tens of millions, you can say that a world that permitted this is a world that's lost its essential sense of gravity."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.868
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6802
item Program Number S0627, 1425

"Where Is the GOP Headed?"

Guests: Gingrich, Newt. : Green, Bill.

6 December 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 20
Program details: Mr. Gingrich was already a leader of the conservative wing of the GOP, and Mr. Green was prominent among the remnant of "Rockefeller Republicans." Ronald Reagan having just become, barring the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, a lame duck, Mr. Buckley asks his guests to focus on "the future of the Republican Party post Reagan." They do so more in terms of programs and philosophy than of personalities, in a crisp exchange. Mr. Green, for example, defends the Federal Government's public-housing program: when it was begun "fully half of the housing in this country either lacked indoor plumbing or was so run down it was a real threat to the life and health of the people... Now, as we've gotten to the point where the housing in this country is much better, a much better case can be made for something like the housing voucher ..." Mr. Gingrich, on the other hand, sees modern liberalism as still "find[ing] it very hard to believe that average people can do anything for themselves, and so they have a tendency to provide more and more professional help, which somehow doesn't help you."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.869
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGO3I
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6803
item Program Number S0628, 1426

"What about Liberation Theology?"

Guests: Rutler, George. : Smith, William B.

6 December 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 21
Program details: Liberation theology--a type of Catholicism with very much a this-worldly, and often an overtly Marxist, perspective--was sweeping through Latin America, and there were rumors that Pope John Paul might ease his earlier condemnation of it. Our two guests explore the doctrinal and pastoral aspects of the question lucidly and engagingly. Father Smith: "Nicaragua is not strong on theologians, but the test case has already been made there and they have failed the test.... the Church there is not for all the poor; it is just for the poor who have a correct ideological understanding of the revolution, and the split comes right into worship. If you are a member of the manager class, or the teaching class, or the bishops, you won't be given communion in certain [of the liberationists'] communities."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.870
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6804
item Program Number S0629, 1427

"Is There a Liberal Crack-Up?"

Guests: Tyrrell, R. Emmett, Jr. : Hitchens, Christopher.

11 December 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 21
Program details: The 1984 election suggested, as WFB puts it, "the collapse of liberalism as we have known it during the past half century," and he asks his two guests, one on the right, the other on the far left, where liberalism is likely to go from here. Messrs. Hitchens and Tyrrell actually talk more about the past than about the future, and it is illuminating (when they don't indulge in billingsgate) to get such different takes on the same set of events. CH: "I believe that the American Left, in starting the civil-rights movement for black Americans, in combating an unjust war in Indochina, and in beginning the emancipation of women ... changed the way everyone thinks and the way everyone lives... the whole world is in debt to the American Left for these three enterprises." RET: "In the Sixties and Seventies the liberals achieved most of the things they set out to achieve, particularly welfare and civil rights, and then were overtaken by a lust for power. They refused to notice that they had indeed achieved these things ..."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.871
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGO6U
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6805
item Program Number S0630, 1428

"The Mysterious William Shakespeare"

Guests: Ogburn, Charlton, 1911- : Charney, Maurice.

11 December 1984

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 22
Program details: It was Mr. Ogburn's book that revived for this generation the theory that William Shakespeare of Stratford was only the front man for the actual author of the greatest body of plays in the English language: the Earl of Oxford. He tells his story engagingly and with much plausible detail; unfortunately for orthodox Stratfordians, Mr. Charney is too indignant to subject some of the less plausible details to a systematic dissection--although he does make the telling point that "Mr. Ogburn [and other Oxfordians]... don't really like the author that they have, and want to replace him with a romantic image of what an author should be."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.872
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6806
item Program Number S0631, 1429

"Deregulation: Good or Bad?"

Guests: Kahn, Alfred E. (Alfred Edward)

7 January 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 22
Program details: Mr. Kahn has shuttled over the years between academia and government, but he has nonetheless retained, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "a preference to speak in plain English." He knows the American economy inside out, and he and his host take us on an exhilarating tour of everything from the Post Office to agriculture to AT&T to the airlines (the Civil Aeronautics Board--which Mr. Kahn had once chaired, with the mandate of abolishing it [see Firing Line s0337]--had just ceased to exist a month earlier). One sample: "There are external benefits, so I find it difficult to argue against the subsidization of provision of mail service to isolated communities. But I think one has to draw that line rather carefully ... I don't think that society owes every community in the country air service."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.873
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6807
item Program Number S0632, 1430

"The Black-Jewish Coalition"

Guests: Berry, Mary Frances. : Brickner, Balfour. : Glazer, Nathan.

7 January 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 23
Program details: WFB begins by positing that "the alliance between American Jews and American blacks is at least fraying, if not actually ruptured." The ensuing conversation is lively, indeed at times obstreperous, but more enlightening than not. MFB: "Blacks didn't start voting Democratic in Roosevelt's first election; they waited to see what was going to happen that was different from what happened with the Republicans. And as old black people tell me in Tennessee, 'What was different 'bout the Roosevelts was: when they had programs, we could be in 'em.' "... NG: "What kind of interest basis is there for the black-Jewish alliance? The old interest basis has disappeared. It's true in the '40s and '50s Jews and blacks were fighting together for anti-discrimination laws--in colleges, in employment, in housing--but Jews don't have to worry much about discrimination now ... It's not a big thing. For blacks, of course, it's a big thing."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.874
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6808
item Program Number S0633, 1431

"Can an American Dominate the UN?"

Guests: Kirkpatrick, Jeane J.

28 January 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 23
Program details: In answer to the title question, Mrs. Kirkpatrick had certainly been doing her best for the past four years. On this show, she gives a pellucid account of the dynamics of that institution (things one hadn't thought of: "Using the veto in the Security Council is a mark of lack of political clout. If you've got political influence then you can persuade more than six nations in the Security Council not to vote for the resolution you're against and you don't need to veto it") and a novel defense of our continued membership ("The reason we should not withdraw from the UN is that our Declaration of Independence requests us to have a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Now there's no doubt that it would be a terrible, terrible affront to the opinions of mankind for the U.S. to withdraw from the UN").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.875
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6809
item Program Number S0634, 1432

"Charles Murray Looks at the Poverty Problem"

Guests: Murray, Charles A.

28 January 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 24
Program details: In the 1960s, the poverty rate was slowly but steadily declining. Then President Johnson declared War on Poverty, and poverty--disappeared? Alas, no; it instead began to increase again. The thesis of Mr. Murray's hotly controversial book was that the program had indeed caused the increase--and for reasons that were entirely understandable: "By 1970, without stretching the rules, without imagining some sort of welfare cheat, you had a situation in which a young woman who had gotten pregnant... could quite reasonably say that her best option was not to marry the man, and to obtain an income which was roughly equal in purchasing power to a minimum-wage job in 1960." WFB: "Some of your critics say it may make sense in the short term for the girl not to marry the boy. However, since this almost inevitably catapults her into a perpetual state of poverty, it's a very poor strategic decision." CM: "We are talking about 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds in many instances ... You can think of it as people making incremental decisions from day to day and suddenly, down the road, they've locked themselves into a situation they had never foreseen.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.876
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6810
item Program Number S0635, 1433

"Women against Pornography"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Dworkin, Andrea.

25 February 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 123 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 24
Program details: Miss Dworkin has looked into the face of pornography and seen "every possible physical abuse and humiliation of women," and she will tolerate no compromise with it--she was the prime mover behind ordinances in Minneapolis and Indianapolis that sought to outlaw it completely. Mrs. Pilpel is clearly no fan of the stuff, but she sees anything that breaches the First Amendment as removing protections from far more than pornographers: "You and the people who agree with you would be among the first people to be suppressed." More heat than light from Miss Dworkin, but it is interesting to see the more multi-dimensional Mrs. Pilpel putting her principles up against her preferences.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.877
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6811
item Program Number S0636, 1434

"What Should We Be Worrying About?"

Guests: Lewis, Anthony, 1927- : Greenfield, Jeff.

25 February 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 25
Program details: What indeed? Mr. Buckley suggests some broad topics (including the deficit and the Strategic Defense Initiative and, less predictably, longevity); he and his guests are off and running, entertainingly and perceptively. JG: "People whose grandfathers and fathers were paid at the level of steelworkers may find that they are [operating] much more in a free-market economy. I have some concern about what happens when that broad middle of the American pyramid begins to experience ... a sense of downward mobility." ... AL: "The degree of agreement here today is rather frightening, but the three of us might agree on the Treasury Department's reform tax legislation, which I expect is a step in your direction." WFB: "A step in the right direction doesn't necessarily ... mean that you are going to correct the problem. If you need two steps to get out of the way of an oncoming train and you take one step, it might be a step in the right direction, but it doesn't help at all."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.878
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6812
item Program Number S0637, 1435

"Are We Coddling the Farmers?"

Guests: Bovard, James. : Mullins, Robert J.

26 February 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 25
Program details: The conversation sometimes fails to click, with Messrs. Bovard and Buckley concentrating on the amount of money that goes to "the farmers" (actually, most of it to the huge agribusiness producers of grain and rice and cotton) and Mr. Mullins arguing that "stability" demands the expenditure. But if we get no meeting of the minds, we do get the two sides' cases clearly presented. JB: "A lot of people put a sentimental value on having people on the farm ... but I think we need to put that in perspective; we need to put a price tag on that. The question is: Are we willing to pay an extra $20 billion a year in order to have an extra 50,000 people living on the farm? ..." RJM: "I am willing to pay a price to maintain stability, not only stability from the farmers' standpoint, but stability from the consumers' standpoint and stability in our industrial production. My friends in the United Auto Workers told me that 85,000 United Auto Workers are out of work today that used to make farm implements that there is no longer a market for. So it's not a nostalgia trip."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.879
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6813
item Program Number S0638, 1436

"The Role of Song at School"

Guests: Melcher, Tom. : Barthold, Steve. : Kliment, Nick. :

26 February 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 26
Program details: A delightfully offbeat show with the current members of Yale's premier singing group. (The gentlemen mentioned by name do the talking on this show; they are joined by their colleagues in a half-dozen of the group's favorite songs.) Topics include the appropriateness of song at an academic institution (conclusion: it's at least as appropriate as sports) and--a perennial sore spot with Mr. Buckley--the pervasiveness of rock. WFB: "How is it that if you walk up and down the halls of an undergraduate dormitory, you hear this terrible music that sells billions of dollars worth per year and yet you, singing pretty conventional-type music, are extraordinarily popular? How come the rock-and-roll culture doesn't sort of drown you out?" NK: "Well, you might find a lot of that kind of music playing in any of our rooms when we're not singing." ... SB: "I think that a lot of the appeal of rock music to our generation is found in the dance."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.880
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6814
item Program Number S0639, 1437

"What Should Congress Do about the Deficit?"

Guests: Pechman, Joseph A. : Walker, Charls E.

1 April 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 26
Program details: It had been remarked that if the Reagan Administration had accomplished nothing else it had made the Democrats conscious of budget deficits. The Republicans now agreed that it was time to address the problem. Our two guests today are old combatants, Mr. Pechman favoring the Treasury Department's plan of, as he puts it, "eliminating preferences and loopholes and unnecessary deductions, and using those to reduce the marginal rates," Mr. Walker favoring a national sales tax. A genial examination of a technical question that has moral overtones. CEW: "I often say that Joe Pechman's difference with me is that he is very much concerned with the tax system and its impact on how income is distributed. Some people would say I am too much concerned with the impact of the tax system on how income is produced."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.881
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6815
item Program Number S0640, 1438

"What Is the Challenge of South Africa?"

Guests: North, James. : Chettle, John.

1 April 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 27
Program details: Mr. North takes an Ecrasez l'infame attitude towards South Africa, to the point of having difficulty being civil to Mr. Chettle, even though the latter also opposes apartheid. One of the most resonant moments of the show, in the light of developments just a few years down the road, is the distinction WFB draws between a totalitarian regime and the South African one: "If I were part of the South African government and I thought you were correct [Mr. North, in saying that there would be increased revolutionary violence], why wouldn't I go in the direction of more repression? Take East Germany. Ninety-eight percent of East Germans get their news from West German television, so they know how the other half lives. But years, decades, and generations go by and nobody expects any improvements in East German liberty, so there are other ways to go than gradualism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.882
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6816
item Program Number S0641, 1439

"Should the Fed Be Tamed?"

Guests: Martin, Preston. : Stein, Herbert, 1916-

11 April 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 27
Program details: Our guests have the weight of authority, though not so great a gift as many of Firing Line's economist guests of bringing a lay audience along with them, as they discuss the different ways of calculating the money supply and the effects that different policies are likely to have. Mr. Stein: "The source of our difficulty, the thing that got us from a 1 1/2 per cent inflation rate in the early 1960s to 14 per cent in 1980, was not the looseness in the system. The source of this difficulty was that we constantly tried to pump the economy to higher and higher levels of output by more and more monetary expansion, and we would not have done that if we had stuck with any kind of monetary rule, whether it was Ml or M2 or M3."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.883
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6817
item Program Number S0642, 1440

"Is There a Conservative Ideology?"

Guests: Minogue, Kenneth R., 1930-

11 April 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 28
Program details: The discussion never quite gets to the title question, except by implication, but no matter: this is civilized conversation at its best, as host and guest range from the definition of ideology to the many forms it takes in the modern world. Mr. Buckley starts out with a formal definition: "a system of political thought that tends to comprehend all important social questions, giving the answers to all important social problems." Mr. Minogue offers a number of applications, e.g., " 'Redemptive doctrines' ... are beliefs that the world we live in is the most cunningly disguised form of oppression and domination ..., that the business of life is to become conscious of it,which [means] adopting whatever ideological theory is to be recommended, and in that way to fight for liberation.... The idea of liberation is almost the opposite of the idea of freedom."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.884
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6818
item Program Number S0643, 1441

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That We Should Go Full Speed on Star Wars--Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Graham, Daniel O. : Keyworth, George. : Fossedal, Gregory. : Shrum, Robert. : Carter, Barry. : Pike, John. : Carnesale, Albert.

25 April 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 28
Program details: This pair of shows doesn't offer the fireworks of some Firing Line debates, but the viewer comes away with a good idea of what the issues are and why this is such an emotional topic. Some samples: Mr. Buckley: "What we have in mind is an act of aggression against the Soviet Union only in the sense that building a roof over our heads is an act of aggression against the rain." Mr. Carter: "This Administration is proceeding at 120 miles an hour on a one-lane road with its lights off at midnight." Mr. Shrum: "This very complex system can never be tested in advance. It has to work perfectly or nearly perfectly in all its components, and it has to work automatically the very first time it's ever used, and it has to do so in a hostile environment and under enemy attack." Mr. Keyworth: "In my opinion, less than one-tenth of one per cent per year of our GNP is a small amount of money to remove us eventually from the scourge of nuclear weapons."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.885
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6819
item Program Number S0644, 1442

"A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That We Should Go Full Speed on Star Wars--Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Graham, Daniel O. : Keyworth, George. : Fossedal, Gregory. : Shrum, Robert. : Carter, Barry. : Pike, John. : Carnesale, Albert.

25 April 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124: 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 28
Program details: This pair of shows doesn't offer the fireworks of some Firing Line debates, but the viewer comes away with a good idea of what the issues are and why this is such an emotional topic. Some samples: Mr. Buckley: "What we have in mind is an act of aggression against the Soviet Union only in the sense that building a roof over our heads is an act of aggression against the rain." Mr. Carter: "This Administration is proceeding at 120 miles an hour on a one-lane road with its lights off at midnight." Mr. Shrum: "This very complex system can never be tested in advance. It has to work perfectly or nearly perfectly in all its components, and it has to work automatically the very first time it's ever used, and it has to do so in a hostile environment and under enemy attack." Mr. Keyworth: "In my opinion, less than one-tenth of one per cent per year of our GNP is a small amount of money to remove us eventually from the scourge of nuclear weapons."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.886
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6820
item Program Number S0645, 1443

"Ten Great Philosophical Mistakes: Part I"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

8 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 29
Program details: This absorbing discussion with a favorite Firing Line guest ranges from how Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes differ from their great predecessors, to whether Socrates was right to drink the hemlock, to what we know that dogs don't know. Some samples: "Unlike the ancients and the medievalists, who always took into account the views of their predecessors so as to sift the wheat from the chaff, each modern philosopher, from the 17th century on to today, wrote philosophy as if he were the first to write it-started from scratch, paid no attention to the tradition of Western thought at all." "Philosophy begins with a kind of common-sense knowledge of the world, goes beyond that to an understanding of what all common-sense persons with common experience know, and then goes beyond understanding to a small measure of wisdom which we are allowed in this life, not very much, but I think the wise person is the person who makes a proper estimation of the order of things in the right proportion to one another."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.887
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6821
item Program Number S0646, 1444

"Ten Great Philosophical Mistakes: Part II"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

8 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 29
Program details: This absorbing discussion with a favorite Firing Line guest ranges from how Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes differ from their great predecessors, to whether Socrates was right to drink the hemlock, to what we know that dogs don't know. Some samples: "Unlike the ancients and the medievalists, who always took into account the views of their predecessors so as to sift the wheat from the chaff, each modern philosopher, from the 17th century on to today, wrote philosophy as if he were the first to write it-started from scratch, paid no attention to the tradition of Western thought at all." "Philosophy begins with a kind of common-sense knowledge of the world, goes beyond that to an understanding of what all common-sense persons with common experience know, and then goes beyond understanding to a small measure of wisdom which we are allowed in this life, not very much, but I think the wise person is the person who makes a proper estimation of the order of things in the right proportion to one another."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.888
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6822
item Program Number S0647, 1445

"Is There a Case for Legalizing Drugs?"

Guests: Nahas, Gabriel G. : Trebach, Arnold S.

22 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 29
Program details: Dr. Nahas believes that marijuana and other illicit drugs can, "even [at] a single exposure," so affect the relevant center of the brain as to "provoke this compulsive type of behavior which is so obvious." Mr. Trebach believes that (a) we can't keep drugs out of the country, and therefore (b) our choice is to legalize or to "go towards a prison society where we can lock up large number of our people, especially our youth." Unfortunately, despite Mr. Buckley's efforts to keep them on track, the two guests spend much of the hour snarling at each other and don't afford the viewer much help in sorting out their contradictory assertions.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.889
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6823
item Program Number S0648, 1446

"Psychiatry: New Explorations"

Guests: Szasz, Thomas Stephen, 1920- : Vatz, Richard. : Weinberg, Lee S.

22 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 30
Program details: Whether one finds this show exhilarating or exasperating is likely to depend on one's view of Dr. Szasz and his principal theory: that there is no such thing as mental illness. WFB: "There are forms of mental disease that end up with violent denouements, right?" TS: "You are entirely right--except they are not mental disease, they are bad behavior." WFB: "Well, the guy who killed Allard Lowenstein confided to friends during the preceding period that Allard Lowenstein was transmitting signals to him through his wisdom teeth. Now what do you call that?" TS: "I call that a very nasty and powerful metaphor to justify his doing something to Allard Lowenstein."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.890
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G7086D0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6824
item Program Number S0649, 1501

"Has New York Let Us Down?"

Guests: Starr, Roger.

29 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 179 : 30
Program details: Mr. Starr takes a bleak view of the condition of his native city and its hopes for recovery from problems caused by a combination of natural economic evolution and perverse political decisions--a view in which Mr. Buckley largely concurs. But the tone is energetic, the problems have resonance with viewers (urban ones, at least) throughout the country, and some of the prescriptions offered (regarding, say, rent decontrol) have since proved out in practice. RS: "I think the war and the rise of totalitarianism across the world scared New Yorkers and scared Americans. It really frightened the whole structure of society. We began to believe that there should be no limits to our liberty and insisted on testing our liberty to its limits. Now whatever you test, Bill, you can't identify its limit until you break it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.891
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6825
item Program Number S0650, 1502

"The Fall of Saigon--and How It Might Have Been"

Guests: Butler, David. : Butterfield, Fox. : Greenway, David.

29 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 1
Program details: A deeply honest exploration of a very painful subject. All three guests have spent time in Vietnam (Mr. Butterfield was there on April 29, 1975, the day Saigon fell); all have studied the political and military history. They and their host all agree that, as Mr. Butterfield phrases it, "We didn't lose the war on the battlefield, we just left." And that, as Mr. Greenway phrases it: "Wouldn't the real moral lesson be: Don't intervene in a situation and take a people under your protection unless you're prepared to stay with them?" Mr. Butler gives a devastatingly simple answer to Mr. Buckley's question why "Vietnamization" didn't hold in the way "Koreanization" held: "There's no Ho Chi Minh Trail in Korea, and it would have been terribly difficult to cut the trail altogether. That's a geographic point."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.892
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6826
item Program Number S0651, 1503

"Yale: The Class of 1950"

Guests: Carver, George. : Galbraith, Evan G. : Massie, Robert K. : Scholes, Robert. : Symington, James W. (James Wadsworth), 1927-

31 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 1
Program details: Mr. Buckley and five of his classmates gather at their 35th reunion for a good-natured and wide-ranging discussion of the current state of the campuses and of the world--of which they have collectively seen a great deal. Mr. Massie: "There is a utopianism about the young.... The natural progression of intelligent men and women is to stand further and further back from utopianism and say increasingly [that] what we've got is worth keeping; let's not throw it away until we've got something better."Mr. Carver: "There is a great tendency to mirror-image yourself and project your own views and ideas on other people ... [to assume that] because Gorbachev has a nice wife who likes Gucci shoes and uses an American Express card there is going to be sweetness and light between us and the Soviet Union. This is not going to happen."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.893
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6827
item Program Number S0652, 1504

"Yale: The Class of 1985"

Guests: Cope, Karin. : Dow, Steven. : Froomkin, Daniel. : Garcia, Gilbert. : Irvin, Morenike.

31 May 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 2
Program details: These five young people--chosen for this show by the Dean's office--are not going to be taken in by their genial host, no sirree. It's touching to watch them bear out Mr. Massie's diagnosis, above; and heartening to see how Mr. Buckley deals with them. One sample: GG: "Mr. Buckley, here at Yale a Chicano-Puerto Rican concentration was developed under American Studies, which I guess in your opinion qualifies as a meaningless concentration.... I think the history of a people in this country and the progress that they've made is very meaningful." WFB: "Well, I think if you study it as history or if you study it as sociology or even if you study it as anthropology it's interesting. What is not interesting is to study it ideologically, and I have a feeling that an awful lot of ideology is creeping into the study of the progress of Chicanos or blacks or women. That is not only, I think, mischievous intellectually, but I think also it tends to crank up an ideological view of the world that gets in the way of clearer vision after you've graduated."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.894
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6828
item Program Number S0653, 1505

"A Look Back at Watergate"

Guests: Kleindienst, Richard G., 1923- : Brookhiser, Richard.

10 July 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 2
Program details: Mr. Kleindienst had succeeded John Mitchell as Attorney General, was asked to resign at the same time that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were dismissed, and had been threatened with a Watergate-related indictment but was exonerated of substantive wrongdoing. Mr. Brookhiser was still an undergraduate at the time of Watergate but was already at that time a keen student of politics. This fine conversation with a man who suffered from his colleagues' transgressions but holds no perceptible grudge ranges from Watergate itself, to the abuses of the press, to the fundamentals of our political system. RK: "What I really tried to do in my book was to write a love letter to our Constitution and to our institutions of freedom. I tried to point out, particularly to young people, that ours is a political society, that politics is a noble pursuit--" WFB: "It's noble and also ignoble." RK: "But it is a noble pursuit; sometimes it's ignobly pursued--that government is a great privilege and also that we have in our Constitution the means by which, if we are vigilant, we can continue to preserve our freedoms."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.895
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6829
item Program Number S0654, 1506

"The Trouble with Lawyers"

Guests: Bork, Robert H. : Pilpel, Harriet F. : Schmidt, Benno, Jr.

10 July 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 3
Program details: We have here three lawyers to discuss, most ably, what is wrong with their profession and what might be done about it. All agree that, as Judge Bork puts it, "This is a litigious society. It's a regulated society. It's going to remain that." How then to unclog our overcrowded courts? Mr. Bork suggests alternative courts, both to "deal with these simple repetitious claims which now flood the main federal courts and keep people waiting for years to get their case heard," and to try "very esoteric matters" currently being handled by "generalist judges." "Who is against specialized courts?" Mr. Buckley asks, and Mr. Schmidt replies: "I am against them. One of the distinctive elements of the American legal tradition is that it has generally entrusted the important decisions to generalist judges." Mrs. Pilpel, meanwhile, points out that the middle class "has a tough time getting into court very often," both for the reasons Judge Bork mentions and because of her fellow lawyers' sky-high fees.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.896
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6830
item Program Number S0655, 1507

"What Are Our Young Novelists Up To?"

Guests: Eberstadt, Fernanda, 1960- : Ellis, Bret Easton.

17 July 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 3
Program details: A rather low-key hour with two best-selling young authors whose fictional characters, as WFB puts it, "share a special kind of aimlessness which is associated only with America, whose affluence can bring on a certain kind of decadence. Supply-side decadence." Miss Eberstadt: "It was only in the '60s that there was a particular break, when people thought it was no longer appropriate to make value judgments--to teach their children to have some kind of fear of God, to obey their parents--and when children were taught that... creative self-expression came before morality." ... Mr. Buckley: "Tell me, why is MTV so mesmerizing?" Mr. Ellis: "I think it is [because] the images are moving so quickly. The images are moving faster than they ever have before in the century in terms of film ... It gets to be like a narcotic.... I think I was influenced as much by movies as I was by books."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.897
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEIOO2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6831
item Program Number S0656, 1508

"A Musical Question: To Perform or Not Perform?"

Guests: Page, Tim. : Chapin, Schuyler. : Tureck, Rosalyn.

17 July 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 4
Program details: To perform or not perform before live audiences, that is. The question was sparked by the career of the crazed genius Glenn Gould, who at age 31 decided to give up live performance, with all its tension and hassles, and instead only produce recordings, where, as WFB paraphrases him, "you can get it: just right." Mr. Page, who edited The Glenn Gould Reader, is inclined to agree with his late friend that recordings are now more important than live concerts; Miss Tureck, performer par excellence, sees the point but adds: "The communication that takes place between certain artists and the audience is something that cannot be measured. I feel that at such moments one reaches the highest level of communication with human beings." A high point of this spirited conversation is Mr. Chapin's account of sidling into a shop (only after he had retired from the Met) in search of a pirated recording of Nilsson and Vickers in Tristan und Isolde, and being greeted by the shop owner, who said, "Mr. Chapin, we've been waiting for you."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.898
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6832
item Program Number S0657, 1509

"Diplomats: Polite or Truthful?"

Guests: Galbraith, Evan G. : Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

31 July 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 4
Program details: Mr. Galbraith, who had just resigned after four years as ambassador, had stirred up a storm a few months earlier when he said Presidents were better served by ambassadors who were not career diplomats. Mr. Eagleburger was one of those who had criticized him, although he himself had earlier lamented "the frequent lack of guts" among Foreign Service Officers. This show is narrower in its range than many, but an interesting exchange on its own terms. EGG: "The host country ... want[s] a man who reflects the views of the President of the United States and not just somebody who comes in, goes through his talking points, and gives a list of those issues given to him by the State Department." LE: "Guts is a quality hard to find in any structured institution."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.899
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6833
item Program Number S0658, 1510

"Three against One"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Green, Mark J. : Kinsley, Michael E.

31 July 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 5
Program details: In this installment of the semi-annual turning of the tables, the lively conversation ranges from Supreme Court activism, to the progressive income tax, to U.S. policy on Nicaragua and South Africa. Samples: WFB: "I believe that all terrorism is wrong,categorically, but I feel much more sympathy for the terrorists who try to help humankind, i.e., who try to shoot tyrants, than I do for people who try to shoot Abraham Lincoln." ... MK: "So ... what it comes down to ... is that you don't care about South Africa because it's not exporting--" WFB: "I care. I care . . . much more than I think you ever did given your record on the subject, but I simply say that the resources of the United States are limited, and Wilsonianism is something that didn't last. ..." HP: "I think what you're saying is that if we had the means,... whenever a Communist dictatorship of any kind came into existence we should stop it." WFB: "It would be a lovely universe if somebody materialized every time you tried to bully him or vice versa. I would love that."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.900
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6834
item Program Number S0659, 1511

"Where Are We Headed in Nicaragua?"

Guests: Alzugaray, Manuel. : Reich, Otto.

3 September 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 5
Program details: The Reagan Administration and Congress had been going back and forth over funding for the Nicaraguan Contras, who were fighting the Marxist Sandinistas (and, as we would learn about a year after this show was taped, some members of the Administration had decided to take matters into their own hands). This often moving show takes us through the background and current situation of Nicaragua and its neighbors--including the fact that, as Dr. Alzugaray relates, elements of the Catholic Church (especially the Mary knoll Order) were actively helping the Sandinistas and other Communists. Mr. Reich: "Americans have this guilt feeling about what we have done in Latin America, and it exonerates, frankly, the Latin Americans themselves from any responsibility ... What happened in Nicaragua was a result of the actions of Nicaraguans. They put Somoza in power, they kept Somoza in power."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.901
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6835
item Program Number S0660, 1512

"Do We Have a Foreign Policy?"

Guests: Ledeen, Michael. : Kinsley, Michael E.

3 September 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 6
Program details: A lively continuation of a discussion begun in the previous two shows--specifically, how do we keep our foreign policy in focus, given the distractions thrown up by the press, Congress, and various unportfolioed do-gooders? ML: "It's not possible for America, whose policy, whether domestic or foreign, is always based on moral principles--and should be, in my opinion--to ignore the moral basis of South African society." WFB: "That would have ruled out, certainly, making Stalin an ally in the last war." ML: "No, it means that long term it is impossible for us ever to have a stable relationship with a dictatorship.... You can have temporary alliances." ... MK: "Irresponsible journalism is exactly what the First Amendment protects." WFB: "Irresponsible journalism is the beneficiary of that which protects responsible journalism, because it's impossible to distinguish between the two."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.902
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6836
item Program Number S0661, 1513

"Capitalism and Apartheid"

Guests: Mandy, S. Nigel. : Solarz, Stephen J. : Neuhaus, Richard John.

26 September 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 124 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 6
Program details: An enlightening hour on a country discussions of which often yield too much heat and not enough light. Mr. Mandy believes--on the basis of evidence, not pious hope--that "apartheid cannot stand up against economic development: Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town--the social adjustments have been made, the economic uplifting is taking place, and the laws are largely not being enforced." ... Pastor Neuhaus reports: "Recently at the South African consulate ... a number of Lutheran bishops, clergy, and so forth were arrested--obligatory arrests, a little two-hour inconvenience--and then one person said afterwards, 'I'm not sure at all it did any good or it's going to help anybody in South Africa, but it made me feel better.' As nice as that person is ... this is just plain dumb, and not only dumb, but potentially cruel in its consequences."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.903
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6837
item Program Number S0662, 1514

"Three Approaches to Terrorists"

Guests: Ackerman, E.C. (Mike) : Jenkins, Brian. : Merari, Ariel.

26 September 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 7
Program details: Three months earlier Shiite terrorists had hijacked a TWA jet and taken it to Beirut, where they held 35 Americans hostage; they eventually executed one of the hostages and released the others only after receiving assurances that Israel would begin releasing detained Shiites. The three experts address this emotional subject with bracing clarity. One sample, from Mr. Jenkins: "Our response to terrorism can't be to match car bomb for car bomb, assassination for assassination, embassy for embassy.... I say that for moral considerations, I say it because of legal considerations, and let me make the argument for practical considerations. That is not the style of warfare where we would have the advantage. Our opponents in that kind of warfare are hard to identify, hard to locate. We have many targets that they can locate. We will have concerns about killing innocent civilian bystanders. They will have no such constraints."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.904
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6838
item Program Number S0663, 1515

"A Reflective Look at Star Wars: Part I"

Guests: Jastrow, Robert. : Worden, Simon Peter. : Kendall, Henry. : Gottfried, Kurt.

3 October 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 7
Program details: Not the formal debate format, but in effect a debate on the merits and possibilities of Star Wars--AKA SDI, AKA High Frontier--against the background of reports from Geneva that Mikhail Gorbachev had proposed a 50 per cent reduction in Soviet weapons in return for the United States' stopping work on a defense system. There are fireworks here--especially between Messrs. Kendall and Jastrow--but also solid information on this complex but crucial topic. HK: "We have no way of building a defense which cannot be punched through by a determined enemy." RJ: "The Soviet Union now has running, full time, four ICBM production lines--the SS-18, -19, -24, and -25. The -24 and -25 are mobile. They cannot be verified. Gorbachev's offer for a 50 per cent reduction for that reason alone is meaningless. We have no ICBM production lines running."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.905
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6839
item Program Number S0664, 1516

"A Reflective Look at Star Wars: Part II"

Guests: Jastrow, Robert. : Worden, Simon Peter. : Kendall, Henry. : Gottfried, Kurt.

3 October 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 7
Program details: Not the formal debate format, but in effect a debate on the merits and possibilities of Star Wars--AKA SDI, AKA High Frontier--against the background of reports from Geneva that Mikhail Gorbachev had proposed a 50 per cent reduction in Soviet weapons in return for the United States' stopping work on a defense system. There are fireworks here--especially between Messrs. Kendall and Jastrow--but also solid information on this complex but crucial topic. HK: "We have no way of building a defense which cannot be punched through by a determined enemy." RJ: "The Soviet Union now has running, full time, four ICBM production lines--the SS-18, -19, -24, and -25. The -24 and -25 are mobile. They cannot be verified. Gorbachev's offer for a 50 per cent reduction for that reason alone is meaningless. We have no ICBM production lines running."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.906
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6840
item Program Number S0665, 1517

"The Problems in the Philippines"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J. : Hyde, Henry J.

28 October 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 8
Program details: Since 1977, when Firing Line had last looked at the Philippines (s0302 and s0303), the new National Assembly had been instituted and, amid charges of fraud, President Marcos's party had won handily, and he has assumed the second position of Premier. Marcos's party had also won the elections of 1984, but he kept putting off a presidential election, even after his principal opponent, Senator Benigno Aquino, was gunned down at Manila airport--on Marcos's instructions, some people alleged. Meanwhile, the Communist insurgency in the countryside was growing stronger. Should we, as Rep. Solarz had urged in Congress, cut off aid to the Philippines unless Marcos implemented serious reforms? What would happen to our military bases there? A serious discussion with two members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who offer parallels ranging from Chiang Kai-shek to the Shah of Iran to election processes in Chicago. One sample: HH: "There are some similarities [between the Philippines and Iran]. There are many more disparities. For example, the role of the church in Iran, the Mullahs, can hardly be equated with the role of the Catholic Church in the Philippines. The reforms that we want Marcos to make are a return, a reversion, to the democracy that for a while flourished in the Philippines, whereas the reforms that were being urged on the Shah went in the other direction. As a matter of fact, the Shah didn't get deposed because he didn't reform quickly enough; he reformed too swiftly and too much."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.907
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6841
item Program Number S0666, 1518

"The Crisis in Congress"

Guests: Dornan, Robert. : Pike, Otis.

28 October 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 8
Program details: Yes, there is a specific crisis, having to do with the deficit, but there is also, as our guests authoritatively explain, a protracted inability of Congress to function as it should. Mr. Pike, who had resigned after nine terms to return to the practice of law, fishing, and boating, puts a lot of the blame on electioneering: "First of all there is a lack of courage in Congress, ... based almost exclusively on this massive need to get re-elected.... It was the alleged reforms of 1975, actually, which required everybody in Congress to cut off all their outside earnings ... In many cases congressmen have to get re-elected to feed their families." Apropos of the deficit, Mr. Dornan points out that President Reagan raised taxes in 1982, "because he made a deal with Congress that for every dollar of revenue raised we would cut three. We haven't cut a plugged nickel."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.908
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6842
item Program Number S0667, 1519

"What about Corporate Profits?"

Guests: Green, Mark J. : Frank, Victor.

12 November 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 9
Program details: Mr. Green's latest book had claimed that the corporate bureaucracy wastes six times as much money each year as the government bureaucracy. Mr. Buckley begins by asking, "Is it [Mr. Green's] opinion that the waste to which he points would be eliminated if the government took over and ran our basic industries?" MG: "No, of course not. The book points out on the first page that the laws of growth, girth, and waste that represent the corporate bureaucracy also apply to the federal bureaucracy. But because so many people have studied the [federal bureaucracy] ... I thought it ... worth while studying whether that same law of inefficiency also afflicts the corporate bureaucracy, and we found out that was so." He sounds entirely reasonable -- but so does Mr. Frank, who roundly contradicts him: "You mention Xerox as an example of one company that controls their legal expenses wisely. I don't know why you don't infer from that that there are very little hidden profits instead of inferring the opposite." We may be left unsure of the answer, but by the end of the hour we know what the question is.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.914
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6848
item Program Number S0668, 1520

"Democratic Politics Texas Style"

Guests: White, Mark, 1940-

1 November 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 9
Program details: This show has two points of special interest, flagged by WFB in his introduction: (1) There were indications of a party realignment in the South. In 1984, Texas Congressman Phil Gramm had moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party and was elected to the Senate. Would others follow? (2) Governor White was being spoken of as presidential material, and this was his first appearance on nationwide television. Governor White's political hopes were not borne out; Southern Republicans' were to some extent (see Firing Line s0730). A genial and informative hour, beginning with the education reforms Governor White was implementing, and going on to federal deficits, redistricting, and the 1988 elections. MW: "You can sit around in a classroom all day and debate the issues of voter turn out, but if it's not a hot contest... You know, there is nothing better than a good hot sheriffs race in east Texas to get people to go vote."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.909
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6843
item Program Number S0669, 1521

"The Hispanic Rumble"

Guests: Callejo, Adelfa. : Bonilla, Ruben. : Rubottom, Richard.

1 November 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 10
Program details: As a new immigration bill was being debated in Congress, we have here a somewhat exasperating hour with two activists who want the United States to do something to help Mexico, and an experienced diplomat who brings benevolence but not many practical suggestions. AC: "What is this country doing about resolving this problem [Mexican unemployment]? They are our neighbors to the south. And I don't see this country doing anything about that." WFB: "We've lent them $83 million in the last 11 years." AC: "That's a loan.... We do more for other countries than for our neighbors to the south." WFB: "You're surely not suggesting that America take over political and economic arrangements in Mexico so as to create a climate that's hospitable to investment and savings and anti-inflationary policies. Mexico is a sovereign country." AC: "I am suggesting that if we are interested in curbing the flow of illegal immigrants to this country, we need to be doing something."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.910
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6844
item Program Number S0670, 1522

"Cry, the Beloved Country"

Guests: Lelyveld, Joseph. : Hutchinson, John.

7 November 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 10
Program details: The subject is another country with intractable problems, but this show has a concreteness that brings the difficulties into focus. Mr. Lelyveld, who had done two tours of duty in South Africa, in 1965 and in 1980, and who had just published Move Your Shadow: South Africa Black and White, believes the "conflict is bound to end in cataclysm: I think there is the tragic possibility ... that the more brutal people will come to the fore on both sides and you'll be left no ideologies, really, but power." Mr. Hutchinson sees the possibility of a peaceful transition, as "the African National Congress is being brought, if only by the business community, into the discussion.... Buthelezi and the Zulus, the largest single group, are being totally ignored by the press in the United States, even though they represent the strongest current force for gradual constitutional change.... You will find liberal leaders here describing [Buthelezi] as a traitor, because he is a reasonable man."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.911
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6845
item Program Number S0671, 1523

"A Look at the Hillside Stranglers"

Guests: O'Brien, Darcy. : Watkins, John G. (John Goodrich), 1913-

12 November 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 11
Program details: An absorbing show but painful, both because of the grisly subject matter (the 1977 rape-murders of ten young women in Southern California) and because of the controversial role played by Dr. Watkins in the investigation and trial, and the merciless interrogation of him here by Mr. O'Brien on the question whether one of the Stranglers had a multiple personality. Mr. O'Brien: "Later on, [Kenneth] Bianchi was able to confess in great detail, which could be corroborated by outside evidence, to all the murders in his personality as Ken without ever bringing in this 'Steve' business. Nor had 'Steve' ever been seen before you [Dr. Watkins] talked to him, nor has he ever come out afterwards."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.913
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6847
item Program Number S0672, 1524

"The Right to Die"

Guests: Mehling, Alice V. : Barry, Robert.

7 November 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 11
Program details: Miss Mehling's organization was pressing for the widespread adoption of Living Wills, whereby a person can, while compos, direct his family and his doctors to withhold certain forms of treatment (including nutrition and water) if he should become comatose and be deemed unlikely to recover. Father Barry sees this as "the first step towards euthanasia, active euthanasia by omission." This is an emotional issue on both sides, and one made both more urgent and more frightening by the tasks medical science has taken on in recent years. Miss Mehling: "Twenty-five years ago, when people were dying at home, you would never have thought about the need to try to shove food down their throats ... It was accepted that people did die."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.912
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6846
item Program Number S0673, 1525

"What Does PEN Have to Offer?"

Guests: Mailer, Norman. : Vonnegut, Kurt.

2 December 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 12
Program details: Messrs. Mailer and Vonnegut were actively involved in raising funds for the forthcoming New York conference of PEN--the international society of poets, essayists, editors, and novelists--and they spend here a surprisingly (given past antagonisms) good-natured hour discussing writers, oppressive societies, and the world at large. NM: "...writers of one country and writers of another country tend to have more natural communion than governments because we grow up and read foreign writers. If we have an affection for Russia it's because we read Russian novelists of the 19th century." ... KV: "[I want to] destroy the will of the United States Army to fight, and I would certainly like to do that with every army." WFB: "Oh, it's antecedent to your wanting to emasculate our army that you would have previously succeeded in emasculating other people's armies, is that the idea?" KV: "Sure, anybody's army that I can put out of business." WFB: "That sounds better." NM: "Mr. Vonnegut is famous for his sense of hyperbole."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.915
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEIOOC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6849
item Program Number S0674, 1526

"AIDS: The Rights of the Patient, the Rights of the Public"

Guests: Dershowitz, Alan M.

2 December 1985

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 12
Program details: A serious discussion of a serious problem, and one where physicians and legislators--not to mention lawyers and commentators--were hampered by lack of knowledge as to the communicability of the disease. One sees the full-blown civil-libertarian at work in Mr. Dershowitz's wrestling with the question of what happens at the local public school if a child is diagnosed with AIDS (Mr. Dershowitz winds up saying that parents of other children could be allowed to keep them out of school to avoid danger of infection, but that the parents of the infected child could not be forced to keep him at home). Is it relevant to ask how a particular AIDS victim acquired the disease? What should be done with someone who knowingly communicated the disease to another? Much to think about here--and although some knowledge has been gained, the problem has scarcely gone away in the intervening years.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.916
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6850
item Program Number S0675, 1527

"Whom Should We Back in Angola?"

Guests: De Borchgrave, Arnaud. : Lewis, Anthony, 1927-

13 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 13
Program details: "The question is," as Mr. Buckley phrases it at the beginning of this rich and absorbing hour: "Should the United States, or should it not, assist Jonas Savimbi in his struggle to unseat the government of the MPLA, which survives because of military aid from the Soviet Union, and because of 30,000 to 45,000 Cuban troops?" Mr. Lewis says no--mainly because South Africa is backing Savimbi, and we would undermine our credibility with black South Africans if we did so too. Mr. de Borchgrave points out that Savimbi's UNITA is part of "this incredible new phenomenon called anti-Communist national liberation fronts," and Mr. Buckley amplifies this point: "Savimbi is engaged in Angola in exactly the same thing as the Contras are engaged in in Nicaragua. They're trying to decontaminate a revolution failed. They [the Contras] fought very hard to oust Somoza and bring some measure of liberty and democracy and justice. The whole movement was aborted by, in effect, a Marxist coup"--in Nicaragua by the Ortegas' Sandinistas, in Angola by Agostinho Neto's MPLA.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.919
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6853
item Program Number S0676, 1528

"Firing Line 1966-1986: World Leaders"

Guests: Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994. : Reagan, Ronald. : Thatcher, Margaret. : Marcos, Ferdinand E. (Ferdinand Edralin), 1917-1989. : Macmillan, Harold, 1894- : Ford, Gerald R., 1913- : McCarthy, Eugene J., 1916- : Humphrey, Hubert H. (Hubert Horatio), 1911-1978. : Hawke, Robert J. L. (Robert James Lee), 1929-

14 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 13
Program details: Firing Line is 20 years old, and this is the first of three celebratory anthologies of clips from past shows--and what a celebration it is! Harold Macmillan alone would be worth the price of admission: "I've always thought that the peoples of the old Europe, having twice in my lifetime destroyed themselves by a kind of internecine war, like the Greeks did in the Peloponnesian War, must now get together." And then there's Eugene McCarthy, bringing a poet's eye and an offbeat sensibility: "The only thing [Nixon] did [on going into Cambodia] that sort of saved it was to call it an 'incursion.' We'd never had an incursion in the history of the country. It was our first incursion." But Mr. Nixon gives as good as he gets: "We have to recognize that politics is a great drama. And I will give credit to our Democratic friends. Generally speaking, the Democratic politicians, the so-called liberal politicians, have been more exciting and more interesting. Now part of the reason for that is that they can be less responsible." And so on, delightfully.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.921
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9WS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6855
item Program Number S0677, 1529, 1529R

"Firing Line 1966-1986: Personalities"

Guests: Thomas, Norman, 1884-1968. : Leary, Timothy Francis, 1920- : Cleaver, Eldridge, 1935- : Ali, Muhammad, 1942- : Ginsberg, Allen, 1926- : Mailer, Norman. : Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987. : Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918-2008. : Sheen, Fulton J. (Fulton John), 1895-1979. : Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001. : Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006. : Crossman, R. H. S. (Richard Howard Stafford), 1907-1974. : Greer, Germaine, 1939- : West, Rebecca, Dame, 1892- : Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998. : Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

14 January 1986, 19 September 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 14
Program details: While Firing Line has had its share of world leaders (featured in the first installment of this celebration, above), "personalities" have been so thick on the ground that Mr. Buckley and his producer, Warren Steibel, decided to limit this anthology to people who had appeared in the show's first five years. Some of the "Did-people-really-do-those-things-in-the-Sixties?" vignettes defy simple quotation: Timothy Leary in his flower-child outfit; Allen Ginsberg playing his harmonium and chanting "Ommm." Then there's the young Muhammad Ali: "I'm thinking ahead of myself. You see, you're a wise man, and you make a man think." WFB: "Did that ever happen in the ring?" MA: "No, boxers don't think as fast as you. They're slow." Or the youngish Norman Mailer: "You know, for years I've felt that the greatest trouble with this country is that it's insane.... One of the tiny things I felt it was certainly insane about was me."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.924
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9X2
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6858
item Program Number S0678, 1530, 1530R

"Firing Line 1966-1986: A Potpourri of Persuaders"

Guests: Shrum, Robert. : Prichard, Edward F. : Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. : Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1928- : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Heckler, Margaret. : Schlafly, Phyllis. : Lowenstein, Allard K. : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : Wolfe, Tom. : Greenfield, Jeff. : Solarz, Stephen J. : Green, Mark J. : Hayman, Helene Middleweek. : Riddell, Peter. : Evans, Roger. : Evans, June. : Tureck, Rosalyn.

14 January 1986, 10 April 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 14
Program details: The main principle of selection for this third anniversary anthology seems to be favorite passages that somehow didn't make it into one of the first two. So we have Margaret Heckler arguing with Phyllis Schlafly: MH: "In Alabama, if [a man kills his wife] in the act of adultery, he would then be indicted for the crime of manslaughter; but she, in the opposite situation, would be indicted for the crime of murder. It's a double standard." PS: "And for this we should make our young women subject to the draft?" Or Tom Wolfe: "If you ever have a preposterous statement to make, and I offer this as a suggestion to anyone who has something they know to be preposterous they have to get off, say it in five words or less, because we're always used to five-word sentences as being the gospel truth." The final "persuader" in this hour uses a different medium: Rosalyn Tureck, the piano (with the assistance of Johann Sebastian Bach).
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.922
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H0N8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6856
item Program Number S0679, 1531

"Bill Buckley and Firing Line Get Roasted"

Guests: Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006. : Pilpel, Harriet F. : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- : McCarthy, Eugene J., 1916- : Wolfe, Tom.

14 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 15
Program details: A complete change of pace for this last segment of the anniversary celebration. The zingers come too fast to count, but here is the beginning of Jeff Greenfield's introduction: "Hello, and welcome to a special edition of Firing Line. My name is Jeff Greenfield, and, no, there has not been a bloodless coup. William F. Buckley is alive, well, present, and, God knows, soon to be heard from. I have temporarily fled the sleazy commercialism of ABC News for the purism of non-commercial, taxpayer-supported television to act as your host or guide or ringmaster ... Most television shows don't last a single season on the air. Five years is an extraordinary achievement; a decade is often cause for national celebration. So part of our purpose tonight is to try to figure out the incredible longevity of a show that disdains every convention of the medium of television.... For instance, television is said to be a visual medium. The only element of visual interest on Firing Line I have ever been able to detect is whether Mr. Buckley would someday part his hair with his tongue."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.923
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8H6LE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6857
item Program Number S0680, 1532

"What's Wrong with the Political Parties?"

Guests: Peters, Charles. : Kinsley, Michael E.

13 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 15
Program details: The main thing wrong with the parties -- according to Mr. Peters, the coiner of the term "neo-liberal" -- is that they're, well, partisan: that they put their gain as a group ahead of an honest look at the issues. And the "reforms" of the Seventies have only made things worse. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Peters's own reforms, he does change the terms of the debate: "Practical reforms are also idealistic reforms.... If you ask people to give up public benefits that they did not need, like Social Security for the rich, again you would save billions and billions of dollars. So there are realistic, practical means of meeting the deficit that ask people to be their best selves rather than to be selfish. And I think people are tired of being selfish." ... Mr. Kinsley: "The ironic effect of the contribution ceiling in the post-Watergate reform laws is to eliminate all disinterested large sums of money.... you lose the potential for the occasional rich people who gave money in the old days. In part they were serving their class interests, in part they were one go trips, in part idealistic. Whereas with PAC people there is absolutely no hope."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.920
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6854
item Program Number S0681, 1533

"Is Canada's Mulroney a Disappointment?"

Guests: Coxe, Donald. : Walker, Michael.

9 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 16
Program details: Our guests today answer the title question with a "Yes" in italic capitals. The Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney, running for Prime Minister after 16 years of Liberal rule--most of it under the flamboyantly Mao-and-Castro-loving Pierre Trudeau -- had, as Mr. Coxe explains, "achieved something that had never been done before: he won in every single province. Therefore we had, for the first time, a government ... that could speak for the whole nation rather than playing off sections of the nation against each other." And yet he had muffed the chance to pursue a free-trade agreement with the United States, had refused to back his own Finance Minister's brilliant plan for getting entitlements under control, and had increased rather than decreased the Ottawa bureaucracy. A serious exploration of a country that Americans take much too much for granted.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.917
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6851
item Program Number S0682, 1534

"Monetary Reform"

Guests: Martin, Preston. : Lehrman, Lewis.

9 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 16
Program details: In attempting to make monetary policy apprehensible to "homo politicus"-- to explain, among other things, how it affects the pressing problems of high interest rate sand high inflation -- WFB begins by asking his guests to take us through the history of monetary policy, which they do, starting with the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, working back to the run-up to World War I, and then moving forward through President Nixon's closing of the gold window. Does it matter how the world manages its currencies? According to Mr. Lehrman, "the 'elegant float' ... has the consequences of producing embargoes, autarky, tariffs, bilateral trading agreements. It causes nations to begin to go to war through economic means ... and thus lead[s] on to war." A stirring debate, whether or not one comes to believe that a true gold standard can be restored.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.918
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6852
item Program Number S0683, 1535

"Continuing to Learn"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001. : Botstein, Leon.

27 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 125 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 17
Program details: The central thesis of Mr. Adler's latest book, A Guidebook to Learning: For the Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom, is that our serious learning begins only when we finish our formal schooling. In fact, Mr. Adler stuns the examiner, Leon Botstein, by saying, "To say 'a wise young person' is equivalent to saying 'a round square.' Wise and young will never go together." (WFB: "Was Robert Hutchins mature when at the age of 27 he was made dean of the Yale Law School?" MA: "No. Nor was he mature when he became president of the University of Chicago at age 30. His immaturity and mine-both immature-caused much of the trouble at the University of Chicago.") This-dare one say wise?-hour includes this diagnosis of our current intellectual woes, unlikely, alas, to become inapplicable as the 20th century gives way to the 21st: "In all preceding centuries-the ancient world, the medieval world, and the modern world up to almost the end of the 19th century-men did not hesitate to arrange knowledge in either an ascending or descending order, some kind of hierarchical [order], so you ... understood the relationship of various parts of life. But in the 20th century that violates neutrality, that violates our detachment. We mustn't evaluate things in any particular way."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.925
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6859
item Program Number S0684, 1536

"A Preliminary Talk about 1988"

Guests: Rusher, William A., 1923- : Davidson, James Dale. : White, F. Clifton.

24 March 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 17
Program details: This "preliminary talk" centers--as befits the curricula vitae of our guests--on the potential Republican candidates. The participants would not win all their bets, but they, and we, have a lot of fun along the way. JDD: "The difficulty that Bush faces is that [qua Vice President] he is an attendant lord, fit to swell a scene or two, but he is not going to be the Prince of Denmark." ... WAR: "The problem with Dole as a presidential candidate is ... that he is a very smart man and a very clever one and witty." WFB: "And amusing." WAR: "Those are dangerous capabilities in a President or a presidential candidate." WFB: "Dangerous to what?" WAR: "Dangerous to the public confidence in him." WFB: "It did Adlai Stevenson in." ... FCW: "One factor you have to remember ... is that Ronald Reagan ran for President for twenty years. The Republican Party is a growing party because of Ronald Reagan."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.927
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6861
item Program Number S0685, 1537

"Let's Legalize Those Drugs"

Guests: Glasser, Ira. : Rangel, Charles B.

24 March 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 18
Program details: The title of this show can be assented to by Mr. Glasser--"because The criminal sanction does do something: it creates and maintains the criminal structure"--and by Mr. Buckley--because "We are not winning the war against drugs and, under the circumstances, we should examine alternative possibilities"--but emphatically not by Mr. Rangel, who has "often wondered, if we were taking a look at the tobacco situation de novo, whether or not we would be as liberal today knowing the danger of tobacco abuses." Strongly put cases here; not much meeting of minds between men who would both become favorite Firing Line debaters: CR: "If you want to talk about Valium, that's a classic example of how you find a drug that's being abused by doctors, by patients, and we should have stronger deterrents than--" IG: "Criminal ones?" CR: "You bet your life, criminal ones."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.928
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6862
item Program Number S0686, 1538

"Medical Care: The Challenges"

Guests: Califano, Joseph A., Jr. : Pifer, Alan.

2 April 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 18
Program details: "We propose to talk today," WFB begins, "about the gloomiest subject in the world this side of nuclear devastation. It is of course the cost of medical care and the aged." (One of the guests, Mr. Califano, was present at the creation: he did, as WFB puts it, "as much as anyone alive to give us Medicare and Medicaid.") And yet the tone of the show is not gloomy at all, partly because of Mr. Pifer's inherent cheerfulness, even when talking about "the year 2050, with ... 36 per cent of the population past the age of 65 and a median age of 53," and partly because of advances that have been made. JAC: "We've had a tremendous decline in this country in deaths from heart attacks, 25 per cent in 15 years." WFB: "Traceable to what?" JAC: "Thirty-three and a third per cent is traceable to change in diet, lowering cholesterol, one-quarter of the people quitting smoking. Only a tiny percentage is traceable to heart surgery, coronary by-pass."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.929
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6863
item Program Number S0687, 1539

"How Does It Go with Revising Our Teaching?"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

27 January 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 19
Program details: Some years earlier Mr. Adler had taken time out from whichever book he was writing to focus on modern American education. The resulting Paideia Proposals were received enthusiastically by serious people, but with justified skepticism about their making it through the education bureaucracy. In brief, the proposals assert that teaching is "a cooperative art"; thus seminars should be an integral tool from kindergarten on. Mr. Buckley quotes the commonest criticism-"that we do not have a teaching class equipped to administer [this] program"-and we're off and running: "In every case where there is some degree of the Paideia Proposals being put into practice,... once that happens, that one thing [the introduction of seminars], it changes the character of the school, changes the character of teachers ... their own minds become refreshed.... In one of the worst black ghettos in Chicago, they've introduced seminars.... The children were so excited by the fact they were reading books and discussing them, they brought their parents to school and it changed the character of that community."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.926
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6860
item Program Number S0688, 1540

"[A Firing Line Debate]: Resolved: That We Should Move towards Privatization, Including the Schools-Part I"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Friedman, Milton, 1912- : Sowell, Thomas, 1930- : Shanker, Albert. : Starr, Paul, 1949- : Honig, Bill.

2 May 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 19
Program details: One of the best Firing Line debates. These are well-matched teams, which given the strength of WFB's team is saying a lot about Messrs. Shanker, Starr, and Honig. WFB opens the proceedings by talking about President Reagan's privatization efforts in general, but the debaters quickly home in on the schools: "What effect would vouchers have on public schools?" Would private schools be made to keep troublesome students? Could private schools, if they accepted voucher students, have any religious content? Two samples: Mr. Sowell: "As long as public schools are a monopoly, they will act as all monopolies act towards customers-with contempt." ... Mr. Starr: "I appreciate the subtle message of Mr. Buckley in staging this debate at a public institution which he, or at least Mr. Friedman, might wish to privatize, and which, if it were private, would have set a tuition high enough so that many of you here today could not have afforded to attend."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.933
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWVRK
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6867
item Program Number S0689, 1541

"[A Firing Line Debate]: Resolved: That We Should Move towards Privatization, Including the Schools-Part II"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925-2008. : Friedman, Milton, 1912- : Sowell, Thomas, 1930- : Shanker, Albert. : Starr, Paul, 1949- : Honig, Bill.

2 May 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 19
Program details: One of the best Firing Line debates. These are well-matched teams, which given the strength of WFB's team is saying a lot about Messrs. Shanker, Starr, and Honig. WFB opens the proceedings by talking about President Reagan's privatization efforts in general, but the debaters quickly home in on the schools: "What effect would vouchers have on public schools?" Would private schools be made to keep troublesome students? Could private schools, if they accepted voucher students, have any religious content? Two samples: Mr. Sowell: "As long as public schools are a monopoly, they will act as all monopolies act towards customers-with contempt." ... Mr. Starr: "I appreciate the subtle message of Mr. Buckley in staging this debate at a public institution which he, or at least Mr. Friedman, might wish to privatize, and which, if it were private, would have set a tuition high enough so that many of you here today could not have afforded to attend."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.934
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWRR4
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6868
item Program Number S0690, 1542

"What's on Yehudi Menuhin's Mind?"

Guests: Menuhin, Yehudi.

2 April 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 20
Program details: Mr. Menuhin, as anyone who has heard him play should have guessed, is not merely a brilliant technician but also a wise and lovely man. Samples: "I think we have had too much thinking along simplistic lines about either/or. Either we are idealistic like Wilson or we are clever like the politician must be to protect the interests of the country. Unless there is in the idealist some practical wisdom and unless there is in the politician some distant ideal, his world will shrink to the immediate survival, which is too narrow an ambition." "I often thank Destiny and thank my wife and thank everything that's been given me for allowing me to spend part of the day with thoughts that are not concerned with immediate survival, with a great mind like Haydn or Beethoven or Bartok--to be able to cleanse, as it were, to have all of me belonging to the thought. That allows me then to return to the preoccupations of the day without being dominated by them."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.930
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6864
item Program Number S0691, 1543

"David Stockman Regrets"

Guests: Stockman, David A.

25 April 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 20
Program details: Mr. Stockman had been anathematized as a traitor by many conservatives, and Mr. Buckley doesn't start him off easy: "The purpose of the book, one gathers, is in part expiation: so that we can all know what a fool he was, while celebrating the survival of his intelligence and his decision to go public with the news of the fools he left behind him to run the White House and Congress." But Mr. Stockman didn't get where he was by being a shrinking violet, and he defends himself ably. WFB: "How is it that this impression is abroad that you have repudiated supply-side economics when in fact the only tax, as I understand it, you say right now that you would endorse would be a consumption tax?" DS: "Because the media is glib and superficial. If you take this whole book, it's four hundred pages, there's a lot of complicated history in there. There is a demonstration that the choices we face in running this country aren't easy. You can boil it all down in one slogan: Stockman repudiates supply-side. That's not true at all."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.932
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6866
item Program Number S0692, 1544

"What Was Accomplished in Tokyo?"

Guests: Baker, James A., III.

2 June 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 21
Program details: Tokyo had been the site of the Group of Seven economic summit, and the focus of discussion--at the summit and on this show--was, as Mr. Buckley phrases it, "the apparent failure of the float to regulate the value of foreign currency over against the dollar." Mr. Baker maintains that it hasn't failed, exactly, although "it's clear that there is too much volatility ... We're really on an information standard, if you will. If I should say something about the value of the dollar on this program, it would have an effect, and that's why I won't say anything about the value of the dollar on this program. It would have an effect on the foreign-exchange markets. We have got to find a way to relate more to the underlying fundamentals." An illuminating discussion touching on the Japanese economy, the dangers of protectionism, Latin American debt, and the workings of the Marshall Plan.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.938
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6872
item Program Number S0693, 1545

"Are We Overdoing Defense?"

Guests: Weinberger, Caspar W.

2 June 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 21
Program details: "The call by the Administration for a 12 per cent increase in Pentagon funds," Mr. Buckley begins, "has met with a cold shoulder in Congress. And the reason for this, it is generally accepted, it that the public perception is that the Pentagon is already quite stuffed." Mr. Weinberger defends defense, cogently and engagingly, on many grounds: that a nuclear deterrent is much less expensive to maintain than a purely convention alone; that if defense expenditures were cut, that would have knock-on effects throughout the economy; but, bottom line, that "we preserve the peace now by being strong enough to persuade any possible enemy that an attack on us would be far too costly for them to make because of our retaliatory capability." Next step: replacing what Mr. Weinberger quotes President Reagan as calling the "mutual suicide pact" form of deterrence with a real defense: the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.937
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6871
item Program Number S0694, 1546

"Terrorism: Viewed from Abroad"

Guests: Netanyahu, Benjamin (Netanyahu, Binyamin). : Kemoularia, Claude de.

30 May 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 22
Program details: Mr. Netanyahu's brother, Jonathan, had been killed in the Entebbe raid to rescue hostages held by Idi Amin. M. Kemoularia's government service goes back to a stint as Interior Minister immediately after the Liberation; as UN Ambassador he had recently joined the British Ambassador in vetoing a censure motion against the United States for our raid on Libya, which some people called a terrorist act. What is terrorism? Can we accept Mr. Netanyahu's definition--"the systematic and deliberate attack, the murdering, maiming, and menacing of innocents, civilians, for political goals"--which has the effect of exonerating the people who fought for Israeli independence of terrorism, since their targets were British military and administrators? A fascinating look at a crucial problem, even if the participants are by no means disinterested.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.936
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GNDG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6870
item Program Number S0695, 1601

"Politics and Word-Play"

Guests: Rotunda, Ronald. : Schorr, Daniel, 1916-

25 April 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 22
Program details: The conversation begins with the word "liberal" but branches out in all sorts of interesting ways. WFB: "What is it about the word 'liberal' that diminished it in stature, among young people especially?" DS: "... Partly the success of liberal programs and partly the failure of liberal programs.... In having helped to solve or at least alleviate some of our problems, they have not found solutions for some of the newer problems ...and have been declared bankrupt." ... RR: "We find, starting with Roosevelt's second election, much more class-based politics; that is, Roosevelt got progressively a higher percentage of the vote in each lower economic class ... [Now] there are some hints ...that politics is moving away from a class base ... This may just be a phenomenon that begins and ends with President Reagan's two terms in office, but it may be broader than that."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.931
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6865
item Program Number S0696, 1602

"Debtors and Creditors"

Guests: Wriston, Walter B.

30 May 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 23
Program details: The title of this show refers to, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "how we are expected to get our money back from all those nice, deserving countries to which Mr. Wriston lent it," but the discussion that ensues ranges over the history of banking in the 20th century, from the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (Mr. Wriston would have voted for it, "on the grounds that the small saver, which it was designed to protect, needed the reassurance after the bank holiday to get the economy moving again") to present-day transactions with South Africa. WBW: "There's a finite amount of capital and unlimited numbers of places to put it.... It goes where it's wanted and stays where it's well treated."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.935
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6869
item Program Number S0697, 1603

"Gary McGivern, Governor Cuomo, and the Politics of Crime"

Guests: Tigar, Michael. : Kavanaugh, Michael.

25 June 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 23
Program details: In 1968 three prisoners were being transported in the back seat of a police car. An attempt was made to overpower the policemen in the front seat; when it was all over, one of the policemen and one of the prisoners was dead. The other two prisoners, Gary McGivem and Charles Culhane, were eventually convicted of felony murder. A few months before this show, Governor Cuomo had recommended clemency for McGivern, setting off a firestorm (George Bush, speaking to the New York Conservative Party dinner, said that "one difference between Mario Cuomo and Ronald Reagan is that the latter did not recommend clemency for cop-killers"). Our guests on this absorbing show are well acquainted with the case: Mr. Kavanaugh was the prosecutor; Mr. Tigar handled McGivern and Culhane's appeal. MK: "When I look at this case as a professional prosecutor, the first thing I'm looking for ... is why would Joe Singer be lying? To believe [the defendants], Singer would have to be lying." WFB: "... Why would Singer lie, then?" MT: "Because his role in this episode ... was one of total incompetence. This is an inadequately trained, marginally intelligent officer with very little experience who, according to evidence, has reacted in a situation that left his partner dead." WFB: "He panicked?" MT: "He panicked."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.939
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6873
item Program Number S0698, 1604

"Clemency, Parole, Sentencing: The Mess"

Guests: Tigar, Michael. : Frankel, Marvin E.

25 June 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 24
Program details: Springboarding off the previous show, this one examines more general questions relating to sentencing, clemency, and parole. Mr. Frankel was largely responsible for the 1984 regularization of New York State sentencing practices, but he and Mr. Tigar are agreed, in this deep and often passionate discussion, that those reforms did not go nearly far enough. MF: "Our sentencing practices ... have given unbridled power to judges to fix a sentence substantially without rules." ... MT: "Whenever you have great public decisions that affect vital human concerns being made in a corner, and in a fairly dark one at that, you ... open the way to all manner of finagling and corruption."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.940
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6874
item Program Number S0699, 1605

"Pornography and the State"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Sears, Alan.

9 July 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 24
Program details: Mr. Sears had been appointed by Attorney General Ed Meese to head a commission to investigate "the nature, extent, and impact on society of pornography in the United States." Mr. Sears's is clearly no fundamentalist crusade: what he is going after is material that incites to violence and material that affects children. To WFB's question, "Isn't it preposterous to say that Playboy has never been obscene? ... Nothing would offend them more than to prove that," Mr. Sears stoutly maintains that within the definition of the law, no, Playboy is not obscene. With so un-heavy-handed an opponent, Mrs. Pilpel is more the stock civil-libertarian than she was against Andrea Dworkin a year earlier (Firing Line s0635): "I am very much concerned about other things in this society which the commission was not concerned with; for example, shouldn't we be just as excited over homelessness, over poverty?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.941
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6875
item Program Number S0700, 1606

"Are We Putting away Enough Murderers?"

Guests: Dershowitz, Alan M.

9 July 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 25
Program details: The crackling discussion goes back and forth between the particular (Was Claus von Bulow innocent?) and the general (the exclusionary rule, the death penalty, the whole adversary system of justice). Mr. Dershowitz, always good value, is at times breathtakingly candid: "If you start out with the assumption in criminal cases that the vast majority of people charged with crime are guilty, and I certainly start out with that assumption ... and then you follow that with the assumption that the job of the criminal defense lawyer is to do his or her best to present the case for the accused defendant, then, obviously, the criminal defense lawyer's job is not to help bring out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; it is by all lawful, proper, and ethical means to limit the truth from coming out, because the truth will sink his client."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.942
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6876
item Program Number S0701, 1607

"What's Wrong with America's Military?"

Guests: Hadley, Arthur T. : Lind, William.

23 July 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 25
Program details: Between the Reagan Administration's push for a defense buildup and Congress's (and especially Rep. Les Aspin's) push for restructuring, the problems with the military were much in the news. The civilian viewer may find this hour exasperating, in that we come away without The Answer (WFB: "Is it your judgment that the level of competence and intelligence in the volunteer army is insufficient to the achievement of what it is that we need?" WL: "No." AH: "Yes."), but we do get a good idea of which questions to ask. WL: "If you're a young officer who, say, wants to stay as a company commander ..., wants to stay as a fighter pilot, you can't do that. You have to metamorphose yourself into a bureaucrat... The kind of young officer you most want to keep is the kind who gets out in disgust and frustration at that point. And the kind who stays, too often ... is the sort of person who's comfortable playing the courtier games ...who's comfortable as a military yuppie, if you will."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.943
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6877
item Program Number S0702, 1608

"Brzezinski on U.S. Strategy"

Guests: Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1928-

23 July 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 26
Program details: Mr. Brzezinski's latest book was Game Plan: How to Conduct the U.S.-Soviet Contest, and the conversation--gloomy in theme though never in temper--revolves around that topic, starting with the continuity of Moscow's foreign policy from Russian Empire to Soviet Union, and going on to the present state of the arms race. Mr. Brzezinski: "The problem with population-wide defense is ... what have you accomplished? You have accomplished defense against one way of dying ... from nuclear missiles delivered by ICBMs. But why, in real warfare, should your opponent limit himself to killing you just that way, when he can kill you by bombs, by cruise missiles, by chemical warfare, by bacteriological warfare?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.944
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6878
item Program Number S0703, 1609

"Mr. Buckley on the Firing Line"

Guests: Kramer, Michael. : Kondracke, Morton. : Hentoff, Nat.

30 July 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 26
Program details: A fresh cast of grillers tries its hand, with results entertaining and sometimes profound. Topics range from sex, to SDI, to foreign policy. Two samples: WFB: "I think it's difficult to say we're heading towards a new Victorianism unless you suggest that any retreat from excessive libertinage is to head in the direction of Victorianism." ... "Some people laughed it off as a metaphysical romp when ten years ago I said we ought to make Israel our 51st state. Well, it was in part that, but it was in part really an attempt to suggest a transcendent relationship. If we guarantee the security of Israel to the point where people really believe it, then almost in the nature of things aggressions against Israel become unthinkable, any more than they would be against Hawaii."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.945
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6879
item Program Number S0704, 1610

"The Crotchets of a Veteran Journalist"

Guests: Schorr, Daniel, 1916-

30 July 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 27
Program details: Mr. Buckley reveals that on Mr. Schorr's previous visit to Firing Line, as a fellow guest with the author of a book on language and politics (Firing Line s0695), he had asked if he might return solo sometime to talk about his fifty years in journalism. The hour is less volatile than one might expect given his career (reprimanded by CBS for saying it had fudged its post-resignation treatment of Richard Nixon; fired by CBS for leaking a congressional report to The Village Voice; fired by CNN for reasons not entirely clear). In fact, conservatives are in danger of finding themselves liking their old nemesis, who gives here a pretty convincing explanation of the story he did for CBS in 1964 about Barry Goldwater's reception by Bavarian right-wingers. The conversation ranges from Goldwater and Spiro Agnew to prior restraint and CIA secrets ("with an account of Bill Colby coming to the press at one point and saying, 'If you go with the story now it will do immense damage.' Well, CBS and the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and apparently everybody except Jack Anderson sat on that story. We are Americans").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.946
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6880
item Program Number S0705, 1611

"The Prospect of Death"

Guests: Muggeridge, Malcolm, 1903-1990.

14 September 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 180 : 27
Program details: The topic of this program was set, according to WFB, "at our guest's suggestion-and his suggestions are my commands." At age 83, Mr. Muggeridge found the subject much on his mind-not in a gloomy way, but from the Christian perspective that he had finally embraced (he and his wife, Kitty, had joined the Catholic Church in 1984). Indeed, the talk during this radiant hour is less of death than of life: "People are inclined more than ever today to speak of the quality of life. They want to improve the quality of life, and they've gone to very great lengths sometimes to do it. But they've nearly totally overlooked what is true necessity, and that's the sanctity of life." ... "Ultimately, we belong to a proposition of love, and that proposition of love will inevitably work if you surrender to it. And this is what life's about."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.948
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6882
item Program Number S0706, 1612

"An English Dispute over the South African Mess"

Guests: Huddleston, Trevor. : Johnson, Paul, 1928-

15 September 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 1
Program details: The movement to impose sanctions on South Africa was in high gear. One of its leaders was Archbishop Huddleston; one of its most fervent opponents was Mr. Johnson. Put on your flak helmet and come along. PJ: "If you're going to wreck the economy, if you're going to stop investment, then of course those Africans and their families will starve." TH: "It's very touching of you to think so much about these Africans when you know perfectly well that the average wage of the whites in South Africa is seven or eight times that of every African and continues to be so." PJ: "What difference does that make if African black miners are getting three times in real terms what they were ten year sago? Isn't that progress? Isn't that a good thing? Don't you want them and their families to be happy?" TH: "You know very well that I do, and I know them and their families a great deal better than you do."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.949
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6883
item Program Number S0707, 1613

"For Central America: A Radical Prescription"

Guests: Ayau, Manuel F.

2 October 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 1
Program details: Mr. Ayau's university had been a tremendous success. Imagine: a genuine university, teaching everything from literature to engineering to biology, but teaching also the ideas of a free society--and all this in a country that has known very little of such a society. Mr. Ayau's "radical perspective" involves offering these ideas to his countrymen and their neighbors. Not the fastest-moving show, but a helpful look at a region that North Americans tend to regard as the home of bananas, revolution, and corruption. MA: "The State Department's intro mission throughout Latin America has been very harmful. They really don't like capitalism. They blame Latin America's backwardness on capitalism and we haven't really tried it."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.954
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GHTQ
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6888
item Program Number S0708, 1614

"Southern Republican Statesmen Look Around"

Guests: Baker, Howard. : Alexander, Lamar.

10 October 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 2
Program details: Mr. Baker--the first Republican Senate Majority Leader since the Eisenhower Administration--had retired from the Senate the year before and was testing the waters for a presidential campaign. Mr. Alexander, who had gone to Washington as Mr. Baker's chief assistant twenty years earlier, was just ending a second highly successful term as his home state's governor. There are no fireworks on this show, but some pleasant conversation on topics of general interest--mainly, as WFB phrases it, "Why is the South still preponderantly Democratic, notwithstanding its inclination to Republican Presidents?" HB: "I think that Republicans are thought of as grand strategic thinkers and Democrats are thought of as concerned and compassionate. Both those things are overstatements and gross simplifications, but it is true." LA: "You don't get elected mayor of Tupelo worrying about the gold standard."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.955
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6889
item Program Number S0709, 1615

"The Textbook Controversy in Tennessee"

Guests: Farris, Michael P. : Dyk, Timothy B. : Frost, Vicki. : Taylor, Faye P.

10 October 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 2
Program details: The case being referred to as Scopes II had been set in motion three years earlier, when Vicki Frost protested against some of the textbooks being used in her daughter's school. The controversy attracted national constituencies on both sides: Mr. Farris was backed by the Concerned Women for America, an anti-secularist lobby, and Mr. Dyk was backed by Norman Lear's People for the American Way. To the plaintiffs, the "open ended" questions used in the so-called "character education curriculum" are perniciously relativistic; to the defense, as Mr. Dyk puts it, "I think the beliefs are sincere, but I also think they're very, very broad beliefs and they're fundamentally inconsistent not only with the values of public education but with the skills that public education is trying to teach." An illuminating look at a deep division within our society.
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.956
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GLNI
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6890
item Program Number S0710, 1616

"What Happened in the Philippines and Where Is Cory Going?"

Guests: Pelaez, Manuel.

2 October 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 3
Program details: When President Marcos declared martial law in 1972, one of his most vigorous opponents was the rising young politician Benigno Aquino (see Firing Lines s0302, s0303, and s0665). Aquino was promptly jailed on charges of murder and subversion, and his sole link with the outside world became his wife, Corazon (Cory), who up till then had played a very private role. In 1980 Aquino was permitted to go to the United States for heart surgery, taking his family with him. In 1983 he returned to resume his political career, and was gunned down at the airport. (On Marcos's orders? Mr. Pelaez: "Well, let's say that he created the environment which led some people to believe that they were doing him a service by eliminating Mr. Aquino.") In an election held in February of 1986 Mrs. Aquino defeated President Marcos; when he attempted to overturn her victory, a military rebellion backed by massive street demonstrations forced him to flee. At the time of this show, Mrs. Aquino had just paid her first state visit to the United States, to wild acclaim. Mr. Pelaez, whom she had called out of retirement to be her ambassador, here recounts his country's recent history--often very movingly--and offers his own thoughts, less on "where is Cory going" than on what the U.S. should do.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.953
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6887
item Program Number S0711, 1617

"The Mayor of New York on the Drug Problem"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

16 October 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 3
Program details: WFB was by this time coming to the position that the war on drugs was doing more harm than good. Mayor Koch had come to the position that we had not yet begun to fight, and he had offered, in the New York Times, his own battle plan, which included full-scale military interdiction. A serious (but far from low-key) discussion of a serious problem. EK: "We can't wait! The numbers that are now using drugs are growing every day. The federal figure is that 5,000 people who never used cocaine before will use it today, and 5,000 new ones to be added will use it tomorrow and every single day. Can we permit that to go on?" "I'm a supporter of the military, I believe the Soviet Union's a threat to the free world, I don't want us ever to be second best. Nevertheless,... the Russians are not coming at the moment; I hope they never come; we have to be prepared in the event they were to come. But we know the drug pushers have come, are coming, and will continue to come, and that this society is being destroyed."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.958
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6892
item Program Number S0712, 1618

"What's Wrong with the United States?"

Guests: Worsthorne, Peregrine. : Knight, Andrew, 1939- : Riddell, Peter.

15 September 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 ; 4
Program details: When the Thatcher government--alone among European governments--supported President Reagan's raid on Libya and indeed permitted U.S. bombers to take off from British soil there was a firestorm in British public opinion. "Obviously" as Mr. Buckley puts it "there was more in the background" to cause this eruption and our guests all superbly well spoken and well informed explore that background here. Mr. Knight: "It is ironical the way the roles have reversed. In the 19th century ... it was the Americans who were constantly belaboring the imperial powers.... Now the boot is on the other foot because we have lost power we're a rather ineffectual country ... The United States in a way is assuming our mantle and we are now the ones who use vitriol because the United States has the power and is having to take the responsibility." Mr. Worsthorne: "I think we are superficially anti-American and not basically anti-American."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.950
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6884
item Program Number S0713, 1619

"A British Socialist Speaks Up"

Guests: Livingstone, Ken, 1945-

16 September 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 4
Program details: In taxonomizing the left wing of the Labour Party, one starts with party leader Neil Kinnock (see Firing Line s0588) and keeps going leftward till one reaches the Trotskyist Militant Tendency. Somewhere between those two is Mr. Livingstone. His soft-spokenness only adds to the shock value of some of his assertions; that, plus the fact that he is not some fringe figure: a 1982 BBC poll, as Mr. Buckley relates in his introduction, "found him to be the second most admired man in Great Britain, coming in just after the Pope." Mr. Livingstone: "I think most probably Nicaragua's a more democratic society than the United States of America at this point in time." "I have not the slightest doubt that if you had some sort of an attempted left-wing coup in Britain, America would just step in immediately and slaughter us all."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.951
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6885
item Program Number S0714, 1620

"Human Rights, Foreign Policy, and Ronald Reagan"

Guests: Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Arthur Meier), 1917-2007. : Kinsley, Michael E.

16 October 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 5
Program details: An amazingly good-tempered show given that there was a time when Mr. Buckley and his guest, the widely acknowledged dean of American liberalism, were not on speaking terms. Two samples: AS: "There ... is a faction in this Administration which regards an arms-control agreement as contrary to the interests of the United States. They believe an unlimited arms race is to our interest because either the Russians will try to keep up, which they think will wreck their economy, or they'll fail to keep up, which will leave us with a decided military advantage.... You can't deny that there is that faction." WFB: "Not only do I not deny it, I most fervently associate myself with it." ... AS, replying to examiner Michael Kinsley: "Well, obviously I reject the notion of any determinism of cycles. Alternations in mood create opportunities for individuals.... If you and I in our time and Bill in his time weren't out there actively proposing things, thinking about things, organizing, writing--then the opportunity created by the cyclical change would not be fulfilled."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.957
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GFNO
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6891
item Program Number S0715, 1621

"A British Conservative Speaks Up"

Guests: Tebbit, Norman.

16 September 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 33
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 5
Program details: Since the Conservatives' landslide victory of 1983 the story had been mixed indeed: inflation had come down to 3 per cent (from a high of 22 per cent), and Britain had the highest GNP growth in Europe; however, unemployment was still at 13 per cent, and the nuclear-freeze movement (inherently anti-Reagan and anti-Thatcher) was very strong. Mr. Tebbit's delivery is restrained, but he is extremely knowledgeable and at the heart of current British politics. Samples: "We have decisively changed people's thinking over some of these old shibboleths of 19th-century socialism; the Labour Party ought to be grateful to us for helping to bring them into the early 20th century." "I must say the class structure in Britain has never worried me unduly, coming from my background [straight from high school into journalism, thence to the RAF and a stint as a civilian pilot] to being Chairman of the Conservative Party.... I think we're a very much less class-ridden society than France, for example--very much easier to move through the classes in Britain."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.952
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6886
item Program Number S0716, 1622

"The Catholic Controversy"

Guests: Curran, Charles E. : Clark, Eugene V.

20 November 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 34
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 6
Program details: "Our two guests truly embody the Catholic controversy." Monsignor Clark is a traditionalist who says, "Our opinions don't matter; we're pursuing the truth here of what the Church teaches in its formal tradition as Christ's teaching." Father Curran is the professor who had been told by the Vatican that he could no longer teach theology at a pontifical university because of the heterodoxy of his views; he says: "The Church will never change and it will never make the word and work of Jesus meaningful and appropriate in the contemporary scene unless theologians are able to raise these questions [e.g., concerning birth control]." Despite the high stakes, the tone is extraordinarily genial, and the discussion highly accessible to the layman, Catholic or not.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.959
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6893
item Program Number S0717, 1623

"How Badly Has the President Been Hurt?"

Guests: Lewis, Anthony, 1927- : De Borchgrave, Arnaud. : Clurman, Richard M.

11 December 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 126 : 35
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 6
Program details: On November 3, a pro-Syrian Beirut magazine had broken the story that members of the Reagan Administration had been engaging in secret talks with Iran, in what we would come to know as "Iran-Contra." In the U.S. elections on November 4, the Republicans lost control of the Senate, which they had held for the first six years of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. By December 11, John Poindexter and Oliver North were household words, and critics were asking of the President, What did he know and when did he know it? A crackling discussion among four experienced observers, each with his own perspective--for example, Mr. Clurman dissecting the title question: "One, if it turns out he knew about the Contra operation ..., then he's lied about it;... secondly, if it turns out he just didn't know about it at all, then he's wounded because he's not in charge of his government... ; thirdly, if he was inattentive, then, forgive me, he sounds dumb;... or, fourth, if he was told and he forgot about it, that's rather alarming.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.964
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6898
item Program Number S0718, 1624

"The Rise of the Conservative Establishment"

Guests: Blumenthal, Sidney, 1948-

20 November 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 7
Program details: Sidney Blumenthal's book had been hailed by liberals and leftists, and regarded as a hatchet job by many conservatives. In person Mr. Blumenthal seems nervous and tentative, and this show never really comes alive. SB: "I think often the anti-Communism of the conservative is offered as an emblem of positive belief from which not only flows rejection of Communism but a number of other items that suggest a coherent program and a complete philosophy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.960
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6894
item Program Number S0719, 1625

"What Should Conservatives Look for in President Reagan's State of the Union Address?"

Guests: Davidson, James Dale. : Weyrich, Paul. : White, F. Clifton.

13 January 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 7
Program details: The State of the Union address was just two weeks away, and, as WFB puts it, "there is ghoulish speculation about what he will say," given the Iran-Contra imbroglio and the attendant debacle in the senatorial elections. Our guests, old pros all, advise the President firmly to take a hard line, and Mr. Davidson advises him to take a really hard line ("I would say that instead of concerning himself solely with what is good in terms of his political perspective, I would say let's talk about the true state of the Union. And in doing that, one of the texts that I would advise him to look to is Jonathan Edwards's sermon about the sinners in the hands of an angry God, where he points out that sometimes you can sin a long time and not be brought to justice for it, but eventually it catches up with you. And I think we are in that position in terms of the federal deficit"). A lively four-handed conversation that goes back and forth between political tactics and policy substance.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.965
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6899
item Program Number S0720, 1626

"Has America Lost Its Industrial Know-How?"

Guests: Halberstam, David.

1 December 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 8
Program details: The rise of Japan in international trade, and the concomitant slip of the United States, had led to much Angst about America's ability to compete and many calls for renewed tariffs. Mr. Halberstam's book approaches the story by offering parallel portraits, of the Nissan and Ford automobile companies. This hour offers no fireworks, but solid exposition and penetrating insights. Mr. Halberstam: "The Japanese worker of today is really rather more like our grandparents or the great-grandparents of people in Detroit. He's someone who takes that job--and he's an immigrant, really: not someone from a foreign country, but from a very primitive peasant life--and he can compare his life as a Nissan worker with the almost feudal condition of his parents on a primitive farm: how poor they were, how little dignity they had, how much illness there was, how little food, how vulnerable they were to forces outside their control."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.961
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6895
item Program Number S0721, 1627

"How Do We Stand on Disarmament?"

Guests: Rowny, Edward.

1 December 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 8
Program details: At the Reykjavik "preparatory summit" in October, President Reagan had stunned many of his allies, at home and abroad, with his proposed "zero option": we and the Soviets would, within ten years, eliminate all our ballistic missiles. The summit broke down only when Secretary Gorbachev said, "Oh, by the way, and you'll stop this Star Wars business." General Rowny has been dealing with apocalyptic matters most of his adult life, but it seems to have dampened his spirits not at all, and he takes us genially through the ins and outs of arms control. ER: "The Soviets say that they don't want a nuclear war because a nuclear war could never be won ... Yet they continue to pile up large numbers of nuclear weapons, and how do you account for this anomaly? They must feel that there's some psychological value ... Now if we could reduce the number of weapons so that neither side had a first-strike capability--we don't have one today, the Soviets do--then we have begun to reduce the risk of nuclear war."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.962
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6896
item Program Number S0722, 1628

"Does Sex Education Work?"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

11 December 1986

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 9
Program details: As WFB puts it in his introduction, "The New York public schools ... have been distributing to children material which a generation ago was available only from dirty old men in Paris bookstores." Over to our guests, old antagonists, spirited as always. Mrs. Pilpel: "Parents ... know that a dangerous situation exists where there's ignorance ...they do not feel adequate in explaining things to their own children, and they are delighted at the prospect that decent information... will be given in an academic atmosphere, where the children learn about other things." Mr. van den Haag: "Parents are very willing, it seems to me, to abdicate their authority when they are told there are specialists who know how to do these things. Forgive me, there is nothing that these sex-education specialists teach the children that an ordinary, commonsensical person couldn't teach them.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.963
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6897
item Program Number S0723, 1629

"Afterthoughts on Reykjavik"

Guests: Kissinger, Henry, 1923-

13 January 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 9
Program details: "When in doubt, consult no less than Talleyrand himself," as WFB puts it; and so, to explicate Reykjavik and the European reaction to it, we're off on a bracing hour with the man who, agree with him or not, has seen more and done more in international affairs than anyone else now living. One sample from Mr. Kissinger: "Gromyko was rather rigid and morbidly suspicious. Gromyko was like an African rhino who charged in a straight line, always quite predictably. Now they've got Dobryn in there, who was ambassador in Washington and who must have taught them that what you see is what you get, and you can afford to accept American proposals because they indeed may not be in the American interest. They may result from a bureaucratic compromise."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.966
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6900
item Program Number S0724, 1630

"Why I Should Be President"

Guests: Du Pont, Pierre S. [Du Pont, Pete; DuPont, Pete]

23 January 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 10
Program details: Mr. du Pont was the first hopeful to declare himself officially a candidate for the 1988 Republican nomination, and his record as governor certainly makes a good case for why he should be President. As WFB puts it, "He was handed a state close to bankruptcy and eight years later, following policies which we will examine during this hour, left a state regenerated." Unfortunately, as the nation would learn over the next two years, Mr. du Pont's charisma level does not match his intelligence or his good nature. PdP: "Gary Hart ran for President for a year and a half, and Walter Mondale turned to him one day and said, 'Where's the beef?' Pete du Pont's campaigning started by putting the beef on the table the first day: ending farm subsidies, tying drivers' licenses to drug tests, researching and deploying the Strategic Defense Initiative, and so forth."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.967
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6901
item Program Number S0725, 1631, 1631R

"Anglican Priestpersons"

Guests: Spong, John Shelby. : Wantland, William C. : Oddie, William.

23 January 1987, 5 June 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 10
Program details: Three members of the Anglican Communion--two American, one English--discuss with their Roman Catholic host a matter that had already been roiling the waters for more than a decade: "If the Episcopal Church ordains a woman, does that make her a priest?" If not, why not? The two traditionalist Anglicans hold (a) that there is no warrant in Scripture for women priests, and (b) that for Anglicans to go further down this road would block any possible reunion with Rome or Constantinople. (Father Oddie: "A great Episcopal bishop once said,... 'It may well be that it is the historic vocation of the Episcopal Church ... to show the rest of the Catholic Church that [the ordination of women] does not work.' ") Bishop Spong holds that the Bible is not much of a guide, because "the place of women in the Biblical tradition is a very ... sexist, oppressive position ... that reflects the period." A crackling debate on a topic with implications for all the Eucharistic churches.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.968
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6902
item Program Number S0726, 1632

"Arms Control: The Cutting Edge of the Argument"

Guests: Courter, Jim. : Green, Mark J.

23 February 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 11
Program details: Rep. Courter, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, had been pressing for termination of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic-Missile) treaty, and he makes his case dashingly here. JC: "Let's say it's 1997, and you're President of the United States, and there's a confirmed launching of a sea-launched ballistic missile--one--aimed at the United States. What would you do if you won this debate today and we didn't have any type of defensive capability?" Examiner Mark Green: "I would say, 'That congressman, he made it more likely the Soviets would launch a first strike because of his insane technology called SDI' " JC: "I asked a legitimate question. What would you do?" MG: "And I answered it. It's more likely that we would have a war because of your system." JC: "The question is: What would you do? The answer is: You couldn't do anything. You'd watch it come."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.969
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6903
item Program Number S0727, 1633

"Pull Out of NATO?"

Guests: Krauss, Melvin. : Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

23 February 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 11
Program details: As Mr. Krauss's second affiliation suggests, there is nothing anti-European or pro-Soviet in his assertion that we ought indeed to pull out of NATO: he believes that by supplying so much of the West's defense, "We have made our allies into weak allies, and now to preserve allied unity we have to adjust our policies to our weak allies." Mr. Eagleburger denies that our allies are unreliable: "In my experience ... and particularly when dealing with Europe, when an American went behind closed doors and said, 'We have had enough, and we're not asking now, we're telling you, this has got to stop, 'ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that in fact happened." And we're off for a bracing look at our principal alliance system."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.970
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEIOOM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6904
item Program Number S0728, 1634

"Should We Ship Ex-Nazis Back to the Soviet Union?"

Guests: Ryan, Allan. : Zumbakis, S. Paul.

24 February 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 12
Program details: "As we meet here," Mr. Buckley begins, "in Israel a man is being tried for war crimes; his name: Demjanjuk. It is alleged he was known as 'Ivan the Terrible' during the terrible days of Treblinka, the most consummate killing factory in the history of the world." John Demjanjuk had been an American citizen for forty years, but had been tracked down by the Office of Special Investigations, established in 1979 to hunt for Nazi war criminals. In this chilling debate on a gruesome subject, Mr. Ryan asks, "Does it shock one's conscience that Karl Linnas, who has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in American courts to be a mass murderer, might now face a death sentence [in the Soviet Union]?" Mr. Zumbakis replies that it does shock the conscience "to take an alleged war criminal and send him to certified war criminals for trial.... I think Americans first of all should be tried here and punished here ... If we're dumping people that we don't want to punish ourselves, we're avoiding a moral obligation."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.971
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6905
item Program Number S0729, 1635

"Grilling the Host of Firing Line"

Guests: Greenfield, Jeff. : Pilpel, Harriet F. : Green, Mark J.

24 February 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 12
Program details: Never a dull moment with these three favorite Firing Line grillers back at the old stand. Specifics range from abortion to taxes to human rights in China to the "shopworn" topic WFB would have preferred to "just agree not to mention," Iran-Contra. One sample: MG: "You're a tough critic of government. Awkwardly, a close friend, a man you respect, is the head of government. Aren't you going to be relieved, as a journalist, when your friend leaves Washington, so you won't feel inhibited by friendship to defend what's indefensible?" WFB: "You as a lawyer know what it's like to defend the indefensible, I suppose. But I ask myself: What would be the alternative? If Pericles were waiting to take office I would then say, 'Well, Mr. Reagan, let's go back to the farm.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.972
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6906
item Program Number S0730, 1636

"Can We Republicanize the South?"

Guests: Campbell, Carroll. : Hunt, Guy. : Martin, James.

25 March 1987

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 11
Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 13
Program details: Sometimes this hour slips into self-congratulation--but perhaps that should be allowed in men who are the first Republican governors in their respective states since the 1870s. And when they buckle down to analysis, they are acute if not scintillating. CC: "What we were able to do was to differentiate what the intervention of government might be. [Southerners] don't want the Federal Government intervening. They do want an activist state and local government dealing with problems." ... JM: "I got maybe 15 percent of the black vote [in 1984]. But particularly it was stronger in those are as where those blacks who are in business live." ... WFB: "Purely at an objective--if you like, Machiavellian--level, would it help Republicans for Jesse Jackson to simply run away with the Democratic vote?" GH: "In looking over the main front runners on the Democrat side, we'd be very happy to have any of those opposing us in 1988."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.973
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6907
item Program Number S0731, 1637

"The Role of South Korea"

Guests: Walker, Richard Louis, 1922- : Holbrooke, Richard C.

25 March 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 13
Program details: We went to war for South Korea, and yet, as WFB puts it, Korea more or less refuses to engage the attention of the American people. This has got to change, for ... a very big event is scheduled in Korea next spring: the beginning of democracy." Mr. Walker is known as a conservative, Mr. Holbrooke as a liberal, but their perceptions of Korea are as one. What this hour lacks in fireworks it more than makes up in vivid description and analysis. Mr. Walker: "The Korean political style is to go right up negotiating ... to the very precipice, and then back off and come down with a practical, pragmatic solution. What worries me is, sometimes we in the United States . . . don't understand some of the dynamics of what's occurring in that society." Mr. Holbrooke: "North Korea is the closest thing on earth today to George Orwell's 1984. It is a true, crazy nightmare of terror and totalitarianism. [South] Korea is a place where income is rising, people have a growing freedom to move around, and things are moving forward."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.974
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6908
item Program Number S0732, 1638

"Mortimer Adler on the Constitution: Part I"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

6 April 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 14
Program details: Mr. Adler's latest book is We Hold These Truths, an examination of the American Constitution, understood as comprising the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution itself, and - the Gettysburg Address. The discussion, as always with this favorite Firing Line guest, is rich but never abstract; and if Mr. Buckley and many of his fans will disagree with Mr. Adler at times - well, even Homer nods. MA: "In every other constitutional system I know ... there's a separation between the head of state and the chief of government - which we don't have. We combine head of state and chief of government in the same man and therefore give, symbolically, much more gravity to the Presidency than it should have.... I've often said that we ought to have a front-parlor President who speaks very well, the way Reagan does, and a back-parlor President who thinks better than Reagan does."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.975
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6909
item Program Number S0733, 1639

"Mortimer Adler on the Constitution: Part II"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

6 April 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 14
Program details: Mr. Adler's latest book is We Hold These Truths, an examination of the American Constitution, understood as comprising the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution itself, and - the Gettysburg Address. The discussion, as always with this favorite Firing Line guest, is rich but never abstract; and if Mr. Buckley and many of his fans will disagree with Mr. Adler at times - well, even Homer nods. MA: "In every other constitutional system I know ... there's a separation between the head of state and the chief of government - which we don't have. We combine head of state and chief of government in the same man and therefore give, symbolically, much more gravity to the Presidency than it should have.... I've often said that we ought to have a front-parlor President who speaks very well, the way Reagan does, and a back-parlor President who thinks better than Reagan does."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.976
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6910
item Program Number S0734, 1640

"What to Think about the Moscow Talks"

Guests: Hyland, William. : Weiss, Seymour.

4 May 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 14
Program details: Secretary of State George Shultz had just returned from Moscow with a highly controversial agreement to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces (our Pershing and cruise missiles, the Soviets' SS-20s) from Europe. This hour is sometimes uncomfortably technical for the non-specialist, but if we can keep up we learn a great deal. WH: "We have to recognize that the Soviets have done something here that is unusual. They've agreed to dismantle a major part of their forces -- the SS-20 -- which proves the case, I think, that the Pershings and the cruise missiles that we were putting in... matter to them. They're prepared to pay a price." ... SW: "It's been Soviet policy to sow seeds of dissension within the alliance and particularly between the United State sand Western Europe from the inception of NATO. This is just made to order to do that."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.980
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6914
item Program Number S0735, 1641

"Higher Education Has Failed Democracy"

Guests: Bloom, Allan.

15 April 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 15
Program details: Mr. Bloom's surprise best seller was gathering kudos and brickbats around the country; the only disappointment here is that he proves to be not always as focused viva voce as he is on the page. Still, an interesting and often moving look at the sad state of the American academy. AB: "Since I was in a university, since I began in 1946, the universities were instruments of egalitarianism. It was there that the civil-rights movement was generated. Everybody I know affirmed those American principles and worked for them. And then suddenly, when the movement came to its head, it said that the universities were corrupt instruments of the old accommodation. So the very source, the place where the principles were held, and knowingly held in a scholarly way, where people could affirm them not only with their passion but with their reason, was discredited."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.977
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GXE9XC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6911
item Program Number S0736, 1642

"Where Is the Feminist Movement Going?"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Schlafly, Phyllis.

15 April 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 15
Program details: The last time Harriet Pilpel discussed feminist issues on this program, it was opposite Andrea Dworkin (Firing Line s0635), by comparison with whom Mrs. Pilpel sounded like a male chauvinist. She is more comfortably positioned opposite the formidable Mrs. Schlafly. Both guests agree that, despite the demise of the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist movement has changed the face of America--but they sharply disagree as to whether that is for good or ill. HP: "I would think it would be generally conceded that through the efforts of organizations like Planned Parenthood we have done a great deal to decrease the kind of terrible poverty, desperation, and illegal abortions which characterize the Third World." PS: "Well, that's one point of view, I think you could make quite an argument that because of the Planned Parenthood ideology--the promotion of promiscuity with contraceptives--we have all the problems of babies born out of wedlock today. Once you increase the level of people who are engaging in promiscuity, you're going to have more babies and you're going to have more poverty."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.978
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6912
item Program Number S0737, 1643

"Uses of the Past"

Guests: Hart, Jeffrey Peter, 1930- : Spengemann, William. : Russell, Francis.

4 May 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 16
Program details: The sparkling conversation ranges back and forth over striking moments in the past (chiefly the American and European past) and how one chooses to write about them; and over the current desire in the academy not to use the past, but rather to discard it. JH: "Europe, in effect, came to an end in 1940." ... FR: "I remember August 1914, and yet I remember it slightly differently with every decade, as things come on. It isn't the same 1914 for me in 1987 as it was in '67." ... WS: "Jeff talks about 1940 as a watershed year, a year that separates the past from the present absolutely in some way. Nostalgic historians are apt to locate that turning point wherever they want." WFB: "Wherever it's convenient." WS: "Well, it isn't just a matter of convenience, it's something the historian feels very deeply--that everything before that point is different from everything after it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.979
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6913
item Program Number S0738, 1644

"Are We Getting Anywhere in the UN?"

Guests: Walters, Vernon A.

27 May 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 16
Program details: A brilliant discussion of the United Nations? Well, yes. General Walters is the latest in a line of splendid American representatives to that body. As WFB relates in his introduction, General Walters has been on the spot for four decades-from attending the meeting between President Truman and General MacArthur on Guam, to arranging for the meetings of Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in Paris. One sample from General Walters: "The first thing you have to remember about the UN is that of 159 members, there are about 45 democracies. So you've got to understand that the language spoken there is not the language of democracy. It's the language of the one-person state or the one-party state."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.981
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6915
item Program Number S0739, 1701

"The Crisis in the Catholic Church"

Guests: Novak, Michael. : Weigel, George.

27 May 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 17
Program details: The crisis in question is not the one of dwindling vocations and lay questioning of Church teaching; but one high up in the hierarchy, with the bishops' recent pastoral letters on war and on the political economy. What ensues is a correspondingly high-level discussion, with a great deal worth thinking about. Two samples: GW: "Catholics have something that the evangelicals, I think are beginning to understand that they need, and that is a way to talk about moral norms in a pluralistic society. We call it natural-law theory; they call it general revelation." ... MN: "The bishop on Long Island said that he had a disagreement in conscience with Bill Casey. As I read the text, it wasn't a difference in conscience at all, it was a difference in political judgment about what's going on. Now to make that a matter of conscience, I think, is a bit of theological imperialism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.982
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6916
item Program Number S0740, 1702

"Two Dissenters"

Guests: Lekachman, Robert. : Reich, Robert.

1 June 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 18
Program details: Dissenters from capitalism, that is. Although our guests don't agree with each other on all their prescriptions, they are both sufficiently opposed to their host that the two sides' positions are brought out in sharp relief. RR: Protectionism is not the way to go because protectionism ends up blaming them for a problem that is fundamentally our problem. Americans are living high on the hog, and unless we become more productive we are simply going to slip into deeper and deeper debt to the rest of the world." WFB: "Well, now, I would maintain, which both of you would disavow, that the principal delirium under which we operate that makes this possible is the myth that any dollar that's appropriated in Washington is self-generating."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.983
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6917
item Program Number S0741, 1703

"Sidney Hook Evaluates Liberalism"

Guests: Hook, Sidney, 1902-1989.

1 June 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 18
Program details: "This side of the Soviet-Nazi pact," says Mr. Buckley in his introduction, "nothing has cost the Communist movement in the world more than the defection of Sidney Hook." A glorious hour with a man who, at age 85, had spent much of the century in the ideological trenches. SH: "We know there is no transference of training from one field to another. Picasso was a great painter, but his views on politics were absurd. Ezra Pound was a great poet, but he was a rabid anti-Semite who should have been hanged." ... "Most people confuse the term relative with relational. See, truth is relational, not relative. I'm always suspicious of someone who tells me truth is relative, even when it's Pascal."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.984
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6918
item Program Number S0742, 1704

"Buckley Quizzed by the Dissatisfied Right"

Guests: Lofton, John. : Phillips, Howard, 1941- : Rusher, William A., 1923-

24 June 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 19
Program details: Normally when Mr. Buckley becomes the one being questioned, his examiners are political liberals. This time he finds himself facing a trio to his right. A delicious hour, with some surprises. WFB: "I tend to be nervously impatient ... and that nervous impatience, for instance, in the American Revolution would probably have had me on the side of Sam Adams rather than John. And in Israel I probably would have joined the Irgun rather than its more sedentary alternative. And in South Africa I would have said: 'To hell with these people, I'm not going to live another day as a slave. I'm going to start shooting people.' I'm not saying this is wise or prudent, I'm saying this is the way I would behave, probably." WAR: "Bill, every once in a while, whether he knows it or not, gets his kicks out of taking the slightly angular position just to watch the ball bounce that way. He doesn't, I think, regard it as that. He'll have an elaborate, almost theological justification for what he's done. But in point of fact there's a little gamin back in there that's having fun with the whole situation."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.985
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6919
item Program Number S0743, 1705

"Sovietology"

Guests: Hyland, William. : Pipes, Richard.

8 July 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 19
Program details: What do Sovietologists know that the rest of us don't know? Our two guests are at the top of their field, and they take us informatively and clearly through the technical aspects of their epistemology. But they speak also of its limits (Mr. Hyland: "When the issue is joined at the policy level, the Sovietologist then really doesn't count for very much, because other interests come into it"), and, under WFB's questioning, they move away from how they know to what they (think they) know. Mr. Pipes: "I think [Gorbachev] is genuine in his desire for reforms; I think he is running into tremendous difficulty because of resistance and the complexity of the problem; and I give him less than an even chance of success."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.988
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6922
item Program Number S0744, 1706

"What's with Solidarity?"

Guests: Mroczyk, Peter.

8 July 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 20
Program details: A splendid hour with a man who was at the heart of the Polish resistance in 1980-81 and who knows how to tell the story--both of what went on then and of what was still, though on a much smaller scale, going on six years later. PM: "The first reactions of the West [to Solidarity] were extremely cautious, and I felt that the West went left, right, and center assuring everybody who wanted to hear or who didn't want to hear that they had nothing to do with Solidarity." WFB: "Did you want to hear that?" PM: "I think, quite frankly, at that time, yes. It was a good thing for the West to say. We were trying, we had to prove to the Polish government... that we were a genuine indigenous movement."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.989
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6923
item Program Number S0745, 1707

"The Controversy over Bork"

Guests: Cutler, Lloyd N. : Taylor, William. : Taggart, John Y.

27 July 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 21
Program details: Judge Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court had already, two months before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings would begin, led to a pitched battle in the press,continued on this show. A sizzling exchange on matters ranging from how judges decide (or should decide) cases to whether there are any permissible "litmus tests" for judges. Two samples: LNC: "Judge Bork['s]... mind, in my own view, is quite open on whether he would overrule Roe v. Wade if he had the opportunity. But if he were to say in the hearing, 'The first chance I get I will overrule Roe v. Wade,-- I think a motion to disqualify him in that case, when it comes up, would lie properly." ... WT: "I mean, it's not that he thinks that Supreme Court decisions in the past have been merely wrong ... He thinks that they're matters, in some areas, of judicial usurpation."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.990
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6924
item Program Number S0746, 1708

"At Stake in Nicaragua"

Guests: Abrams, Elliott, 1948-

19 August 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 127 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 22
Program details: Four years after the Contras had begun fighting in earnest against their former allies, the Sandinistas appeared ready to sue for peace. Mr. Abrams is low-key but persuasive and, as the Administration's point man in this region, extremely well informed. Two samples: "Democracy, that's the goal of the policy. We hope that democracy can be obtained through a negotiating track.... If it cannot, our view is you need to continue aid to the resistance as the only other method short of U.S. use of force to obtain that goal." "I think it's fair to say that the largest group of ex-anything among the Contras is ex-Sandinistas, who have left in disgust and are now fighting for freedom in Nicaragua."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.993
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6927
item Program Number S0747, 1709

"What Makes Al Haig Run?"

Guests: Haig, Alexander Meigs, 1924-

24 June 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 22
Program details: From time to time General Haig gets bogged down in details, but mostly this is an interesting show in its own right, and an impressive performance by a man we are vetting as presidential material. AH: "... That's the role of deterrence. And therefore [a nuclear force] should be analyzed from the political-psychological point of view as the first step, and the war-fighting point of view only as a secondary step--as important as that war-fighting point of view is." "I think it's rather ludicrous that Americans constantly turn to men who have had nothing but legislative experience to take on a job which is, after all, the chief executive office of this land."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.986
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6920
item Program Number S0748, 1710

"What Did the ABM Treaty Promise in Respect of Testing?"

Guests: Sofaer, Abraham.

27 July 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 23
Program details: The Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972 had become the touchstone of those who opposed President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI's supporters maintained that, by the terms of the treaty itself, we were entirely within our rights to go ahead with SDI. Mr. Sofaer, as carefully questioned by Mr. Buckley, proves an admirable guide through the thickets of "restrictive" versus "broad" interpretations and "conventional" versus "exotic" systems. WFB: "What is it that animates so many people--the editors of the New York Times are an illustrious example--to seek a disadvantageous interpretation of a treaty when the alternative is so clearly adducible? ..." AS: "I really am not a psychologist. I can tell you that some people are against SDI and that probably motivates some of this.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.991
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6925
item Program Number S0749, 1711

"Is South Africa Meeting the Test?"

Guests: Keyes, Alan L. (Alan Lee), 1950- : Bloomstein, Charles.

19 August 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 23
Program details: The Reagan Administration maintained that South Africa was changing, and that the wrong kind of pressure could do more harm than good. Many in Congress, the press, and the United Nations were for full-scale sanctions at any cost. Today's show offers a civil but passionate discussion. CB: "The real problem in the United States is we think we can change South Africa... South Africa has to change itself." ALK: "Politics boils down to some understanding of what it takes to empower those who do not have power in such a way as to assure their full participation without destroying the society of which they are a part. I think it's fairly hard to dispute that that has to be the goal, and if you look at sanctions, they don't serve that goal."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.992
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6926
item Program Number S0750, 1712

"The Implications of MacDonald v. McGinniss"

Guests: McGinniss, Joe. : Abrams, Floyd.

18 September 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 ; 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 24
Program details: Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald was the Green Beret convicted of murdering his own wife and daughters (see Firing Line s0580). He had now sued Joe McGinniss, the author of a book on the case, not for libel (where the First Amendment protections would have been clear) but for fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, breach of contract, breach of the covenant of "good faith and fair dealing," on the grounds that Mr. McGinniss had seemed sympathetic but had wound up concluding that MacDonald was guilty. This hour offers a fascinating tour through the implications of the First Amendment and the workings of our civil court system. JM: "One of the jurors said ... something ... which I found rather chilling, if interesting, and that was, 'We felt there must have been something wrong here or else the judge would not have permitted it to get this far.' "
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.994
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6928
item Program Number S0751, 1713

"Why Are Our High Schools Screwing Up?"

Guests: Cheney, Lynne V. : Ravitch, Diane.

18 September 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 24
Program details: As horror stories go, this one is pretty rich. As WFB paraphrases from Mrs. Ravitch's book, "Two out of three [high-school seniors] don't know within 50 years when the Civil War took place. That would mean that one-third of our high-school seniors think it happened after 1910 and one-third before 1810." How did this happen? WFB: "Who is the educational establishment?" LC: "Well it's all of us, I suppose. We are all the enemy in the sense that, I think, as a nation we haven't valued history and literature as much as we should." ... DR: "The issue is not, Are we doing better or worse? That would be like saying: Well, let's not worry about poverty, because there was worse poverty 50 years ago ... Anyone who says that it's good enough to only educate half of our children--not in the classics, but in the most basic knowledge needed by all American citizens--is, I think, taking a rather elitist point of view."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.995
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6929
item Program Number S0752, 1714

"Capitalism Viewed Historically"

Guests: Berger, Peter L.

1 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 25
Program details: Mr. Berger is a former socialist who has been viewing the world empirically for several decades and has concluded that "If you want to intelligently bet on an economic system today which creates wealth, which leaves people a high degree of freedom, which can [support] human rights, which can be combined with democracy, it is the safer bet to bet on capitalism. Socialism in any of its forms is, it seems to me, a very poor bet." A rigorous look at a fundamental question. PLB: "When ordinary people are given a choice, they almost always opt for capitalism.... It's the intellectuals who are typically those who do not like capitalism and adhere to various socialist ideologies."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.996
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6930
item Program Number S0753, 1715

"The Secretary of Defense Look at Current Crises"

Guests: Weinberger, Caspar W.

14 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 181 : 25
Program details: Mr. Buckley invites his guest to start by looking at the War Powers Act of 1973 and the current American presence in the Persian Gulf, and to go on from there. Impressive and articulate, Mr. Weinberger has no trouble keeping track of both forest and trees. WFB: "I can understand people who get annoyed when ... the Spanish tell us that they're not going to really let us use their air base--the primary purpose of which is to defend Spain, not Wichita." CWW: "Well, it's to defend NATO. Another purpose that is very close to the primary purpose is to defend the United States. We aren't in NATO and we aren't in Japan for altruistic reasons only. We're there because forward defense is the very best kind of defense. I would much rather defend California in New Guinea or South Korea than I would in Oregon."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.999
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6933
item Program Number S0754, 1716

"The Day after the Big Republican Debate"

Guests: Tarrance, Lance : Barrett, Laurence. : Leubsdorf, Carl. : Hines, Cragg.

29 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 3-4
Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 1
Program details: Three veteran newspapermen and a pollster join WFB for a review of the Republican candidates' performance. But they quickly move from a technical discussion of the candidates to the substance of what was discussed. WFB: "Well, take ... farms. Kemp reacted with horror at the thought effacing Iowa with a platform of badmouthing farm subsidies. Reagan was there a year ago and said, 'I want to remind you all that under my Administration you've been paid four times as much as by any previous Administration.' This, from a party that seeks to shrink federal subsidies and to balance the budget, is intellectually unnerving, isn't it?" CH: "But politically very honest." WFB: "Politically very what?" CH: "Honest." WFB: "Well, I don't really think that's correct." CH: "Or realistic...." CL: "You know, Reagan was also talking about phasing out price supports over a period of time, but the difference of course is that he's not running for anything any more." LB: "Reagan is also making a point that that would be the goal if our trading partners cut down or cut out their support of their agricultural industries in their several countries." WFB: "That's like saying, 'I won't murder anybody as long as I can see that nobody else is murdering somebody.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1003
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6937
item Program Number S0755, 1717

"A New Republican Looks at Her Party"

Guests: Kirkpatrick, Jeane J.

14 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 2
Program details: Actually, the new Republican looks at the world in relation to her party--from the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty to Nicaragua to the Great Society to NATO. Low-key but never shallow. JK: I'm ready to settle for almost any ... political system that a people decides on for themselves, that isn't imposed from outside--by the Soviet Union in the case of Afghanistan, by Vietnam in the case of Cambodia. Now, in Nicaragua, I would be willing to settle for a government that the Nicaraguans were willing to settle for, providing the Nicaraguans were willing to choose that government through some sort of free and self-determining processes. But they have a government that's been imposed by force, that governs by force, which force is provided by a remote foreign power."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.998
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6932
item Program Number S0756, 1718

"Debates and Politics"

Guests: Weyrich, Paul. : Burnette, Kevin. : Brookhiser, Richard.

29 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 2
Program details: In this hour we look at the meeting of the Republican candidates through a conservative prism. As WFB poses the question, "What were [the candidates] saying to American conservatives on the issues? ... Indeed, what is it that conservatives most wish to hear these days?" Occasionally rambling but often insightful. RB: "If the person who wins the Republican nomination has any political intelligence at all, which may eliminate George Bush, they have to take into account the force and the effect that Robertson has had." ... WFB: "The thing [Haig] said that struck me with greatest force is: Look we ought to be awfully happy that we're not living in a nuclear-free world. Fifty million people were killed the last time we had a nuclear-free war.... Now I think that's a very important point to make at a moment when the President of the United States, who is our leader, has taken, in effect, a position that thinks in terms of international denuclearization."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1004
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6938
item Program Number S0757, 1719

"Better a Shield than a Sword"

Guests: Teller, Edward, 1908-2003.

19 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 3
Program details: A radiant hour with a man who has spent half a century at the highest levels of nuclear physics and has never checked his conscience at the laboratory door. The discussion begins with the Space Shield--SDI--but Mr. Buckley is soon leading his guest into reminiscences. Dr. Teller: "We now know that the dropping of the bomb did not change a single vote in the Japanese war cabinet: three of them were for unconditional surrender before Hiroshima, and three for fighting on for better terms, and not a single vote was changed, except that the Emperor violated the constitution and appealed to the people.... Had we demonstrated, had we dropped an atomic bomb at 30,000 feet over Tokyo Bay that would have lit up the evening sky, that would have been seen and heard by 10 million Japanese--heard like thunder--not a single person would have been killed. I think the Emperor would have acted."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1001
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6935
item Program Number S0758, 1720

"Three Young Latin Americans Wish to Be Heard"

Guests: Arguello, Juan Ramirez. : Rivera, Antonio. : Brito, J. T. Gonzales. : Hitchens, Christopher.

1 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 3
Program details: Our three guests are engaging but, unfortunately, not completely fluent in English. The result is some good moments mixed in with a good deal of floundering. Examiner Christopher Hitchens: "Was I wrong in getting the idea that nothing will satisfy you but the removal of the FSLN--Sandinista--government from power in Managua?" Mr. Ramirez: "No. Only a true democratic system will satisfy us. They can remain with their party if they want. That's not a problem.... So what we want is for them to dismantle the totalitarian system they have been trying to implement... Dismantle the ration cards which they use to control the population; dismantle the security system they have--we call it CDS, the committee of defense in the slums--that they use to repress the people; that they separate the state from the party, the army from the party."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.997
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GR9Q
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6931
item Program Number S0759, 1721

"Soviet Words and Deeds: Afghanistan"

Guests: Cherne, Leo, 1912- : Birch, John.

3 December 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 4
Program details: The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan during the Carter Administration; eight years later they were still there, still maintaining that they did not invade, they only, as Mr. Buckley phrases it, "answer[ed] fraternally the call of a friendly government for help against reactionary fascist forces." But there were signs that they might be thinking of pulling out, and the UN General Assembly--in a move led by, among others, Mr. Birch--had voted to condemn the occupation. About one-third of this show is devoted to viewing a British documentary on the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Birch gives historical perspective ("I think that the Russians have come to realize after all these years and the bravery of the Afghan resistance--they have learnt a lesson that we in fact learnt in the last century, which is that you can't have a military victory in Afghanistan"); Mr. Cherne: "I think the Soviet Union knows that it has lost this war. You know that I'm not given to optimism. I wish I were. I would be very depressed if I thought we would be sitting here a year from now facing this situation." (In the event, while the Soviets started pulling out the following summer, George Bush had been inaugurated before they finished--and at that the story wasn't over; see Firing Line s0831.)
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1005
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6939
item Program Number S0760, 1722

"The Drive for Disarmament"

Guests: La Rocque, Gene R. (Gene Robert), 1918- : Courter, Jim.

19 October 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 ; 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 4
Program details: Admiral LaRocque--whose active service goes back to Pearl Harbor and who retired as a Rear Admiral in 1972--is an ardent advocate of disarmament. Mr. Courter is an ardent advocate of the Space Shield. At times their ardency bursts into shrillness, but mostly this is an exciting and instructive hour. JC: "We and the Soviet Union do not mirror-image each other.... The Soviets will use [on-site] inspection for the gathering of intelligence. We'll use inspection for the purpose of corroborating their compliance with arms-control agreements." GL: "Arms control as we've known it... has been singularly unsuccessful.... They meet over there in Geneva, and they come out...[and] say: We have agreed that we will build no more square weapons, no more round weapons, and no more triangular weapons. That's seen as a challenge, then, to the engineers and the scientists and the militarists to build tetrahedrons."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1000
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6934
item Program Number S0761, 1723

"Where Are We on the War Powers Act?"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J. : Roth, Toby.

3 December 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 5
Program details: The War Powers Act had been brought to the fore again by events in the Persian Gulf: not what we now think of as the Persian Gulf War, but the latter days of the Iran-Iraq war, which had led to attacks on shipping in the Gulf. This had led in turn to a beefing up of the American naval presence there, and some of our ships had been fired on. So: "Should President Reagan go to Congress for permission to continue?" A brisk and informative discussion. SS: "If there's any one lesson we should have learned from the war in Vietnam, it's that in order to sustain a military presence abroad, we need the support of the Congress and the American people at home." WFB: "Which we didn't have." SS: "Which we didn't have then, and which I think the President does have now, but it's important to send that signal to our friends and foes in the region."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1006
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6940
item Program Number S0762, 1724

"Morality and Disarmament"

Guests: Pipes, Richard. : Coffin, William Sloane.

10 December 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 5
Program details: A hard-fought but never bad-tempered debate between a veteran Cold Warrior and a veteran pacifist. Mr. Coffin: "I would use moral leverage to insist that it's a great mistake to fight evil as if it were something totally outside of yourself. I think self-righteousness is the most immoral position nations can take." Mr. Pipes: "Why are you insisting on blurring the moral differences between systems, between ways of life, between ideologies? There surely are profound differences. It doesn't mean that one is all good and the other's all evil, but on balance there are enormous differences and I don't see why one has to blur these differences to be moral."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1007
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6941
item Program Number S0763, 1725

"The Problems of the Catholic Church"

Guests: Neuhaus, Richard John.

10 December 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 6
Program details: Actually, this exhilarating hour is more about the potential of the Catholic Church, it being Pastor Neuhaus's contention that a religious revival is on the way and the Catholic Church will lead it. This broad and deep discussion includes the right relation of religion and politics, the nature of worship, and the meaning of true ecumenism. RJN: "What we're moving to is a genuine pluralism, which is not the pluralism of pretending that our differences make no difference.... That's shallow, superficial, and it's finally dehumanizing ... I mean, you can dress it up in all kinds of humane, liberal, caring, compassionate language, but what it's really saying is that I don't take you seriously, and I don't take seriously most particularly what you think is the most important thing in your life: namely, your relationship with God, the meaning of your existence, and your eternal destiny."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1008
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6942
item Program Number S0764, 1726

"Max Lerner's America"

Guests: Lerner, Max, 1902-

30 December 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 6
Program details: This show meanders at times, but it's worth staying with it for the distillation we get of Max Lerner's six decades on the public scene. ML: "I think [the Republicans'] problem is that they are so wedded to the traditional ethos and traditional value system that there is a kind of stasis that sets in with them.... In the case of the Democrats I think that their problem is that they have not really confronted the entire question, and they make a cult of change without asking: In what direction? At what pace? For whom? For what purposes?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1009
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6943
item Program Number S0765, 1727

"How Do Conservatives View 1988?"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Green, Mark J. : Kinsley, Michael E.

30 December 1987

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 7
Program details: A fast-paced installment of the semi-annual turnabout, with three Firing Line regulars grilling their host. Topics range from economics to AIDS to arms control, and more. One sample: WFB: "How, in fact, do you move against a GNP that gives 23.7 per cent of its income to federal spending unless you can do something about entitlements, over which Reagan has no control whatsoever?" MK: "Well, he's been President of the United States for eight years. If Ronald Reagan wasn't going to take on entitlements, who ever will?" WFB: "Well, he can have a coup d'etat, and do away with the House of Representatives, and do something about entitlements."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1010
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6944
item Program Number S0766, 1728

"Coming Up: The INF Hearings"

Guests: Perle, Richard Norman, 1941- : Hyland, William.

7 January 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 7
Program details: It was Mr. Perle who had originated the "zero option" idea (see Firing Line s0721), and Mr. Hyland is not impressed ("To break up the American-German alliance for an agreement with Gorbachev strikes me as almost total madness"). A fine discussion of INF (intermediate-range nuclear forces) and related matters, generating both heat and light. Mr. Perle: "One reason why I hope there will be a serious ratification debate is that we have not taken arms control very seriously for a long time. People stand up and cheer any treaty, the concept of a treaty, agreement for agreement's sake--and that, I think, is very damaging. It leads to sloppy negotiating. It encourages concessions, including unwarranted concessions. I think real scrutiny would be a good thing. I think the Administration should be put through the wringer on this."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1011
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6945
item Program Number S0767, 1729

"Do Capitalists Go Too Far?"

Guests: Forbes, Malcolm S.

7 January 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 8
Program details: One of the world's most exuberant capitalists attacks the question with verve. One sample: WFB: "I think it's true that, in democracies in particular, people tend to want to punish a system because there are conspicuous people within it who, in their judgment, abuse that system. Now, would you concede that we have very conspicuous abusers of capitalism right now?" MSF: "Oh, no question. I don't know that they're worse now than they ever were, they're just on a larger take basis, they're dealing with larger sums--Mr. Boesky and Company. I really think that in this country we take the functioning of capitalism for granted, but we're not happy about those many who fall through the net. We're not happy with the unsolved problems. And it's not just villainy, there are shortcomings in capitalism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1012
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6946
item Program Number S0768, 1730

"Impasse in Israel"

Guests: Zogby, James J. : Zion, Sidney.

19 January 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 8
Program details: Not a pleasant program to watch--as the animosity between the guests mirrors all too clearly that in the Middle East--but an instructive one. Two samples: SZ: "If it's true that the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) is representative of the Palestinian people, they are then represented by a group that... each year passes again its charter that says: We will destroy the state of Israel. Clear cut. No doubt about it." JZ: "But Israel is involved daily in the destruction of the Palestinian national identity, occupation of Palestinian land, the deportation and expulsion of Palestinian leaders." ... WFB: "If France was prepared to receive the president of West Germany four or five years after the second of those terrible conquests, and if we could receive the people who actually bombed Pearl Harbor, it seems to me that one could hope historically that there might be some means by which the essential requirement of both peoples could be met."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1013
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6947
item Program Number S0769, 1731

"The Libertarian Candidate"

Guests: Paul, Ron, 1935-

19 January 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 9
Program details: Dr. Paul, a former Republican, is the Libertarian Party's candidate for President, and he proves, in this energetic exchange, to be a well-spoken exponent of the libertarian creed. WFB: "As somebody who occasionally calls himself a libertarian, I regret the extent to which the libertarian position is discredited by a kind of reductionism that is simply incompatible with social life. You want to destroy the FBI, for instance. Why?" RP: "Well, we could point out, first, that the first 125 years of this country existed without an FBI. That came about, I believe, during the First World War. The CIA is a really recent phenomenon, 1947." WFB: "Well, we existed 125 years without an airplane, too."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1014
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWV20
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6948
item Program Number S0770, 1732

"A Tribute to Clare Boothe Luce"

Guests:

19 January 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 9
Program details: This is only the second time that Firing Line has paused to mark the passing of a favorite guest (the first being the tribute to Allard Lowenstein, s0415). This show includes delicious excerpts from Mrs. Luce's four Firing Line appearances, and concludes with Mr. Buckley's eulogy at her memorial Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan: "Clare Luce, now at Mepkin finally, is no longer disturbed. It is only we who are disturbed, Hank Luce above all, and her friends; sad, so sad without her, yet happy for her, embarked finally, after stooping so many times to pick up so many splinters, on her way to the Cross."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1015
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6949
item Program Number S0771, 12

"The Pope's New Encyclical"

Guests: McBrien, Richard P. : Novak, Michael.

29 February 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 10
Program details: These guests, a leading Catholic liberal and a leading Catholic conservative, had been signed up before the announcement of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, an encyclical which had been criticized by, among others, Messrs. Buckley and Novak for being, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "susceptible to the argument of moral equivalence; namely, that there are not important moral differences between the two contending blocs pursuing a cold war." Here they have as a foil Father McBrien, who does not by any means agree with his Pope on everything but does agree with him on this question. WFB: "[The Pope] said it is insufferable that people should be suffering from a lack of food anywhere in the world, while in the Midwest they are destroying food. Now I think it is insufferable morally, but I know of no way to avoid that problem. I really don't." RM: "You know what you've done, though? As a theologian I recognize what you've done, and I think it's absolutely legitimate. You've just made a distinction between a moral principle and its application."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1016
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6950
item Program Number S0772, 1734

"Should We Legalize Drugs?"

Guests: Glasser, Ira. : Stutman, Robert.

29 February 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 10
Program details: Changing hearts and minds on this particular issue is one of the hardest tasks in the public arena, but our guests and their host have another go at it. Each has excellent arguments, vividly presented. Do we make laws for everyone with the 12-year-old in mind? Does the War on Drugs turn people into criminals, or were a majority of users of illegal drugs criminals first? Has the War on Drugs actually--and contrary to what is often asserted--reduced the number of addicts in the United States? You pays your money and you takes your choice, but these three lay out the choices for us.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1017
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6951
item Program Number S0773, 1735

"Will Doctors Have to Go Out of Business?"

Guests: Fischer, Lee A. : Montgomery, Robert M., Jr. : Musgrove, Martha

15 April 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 11
Program details: A highly combative exchange among a doctor, a lawyer, and a journalist on the state of medical malpractice. As Mr. Buckley gives the background: "In Dade County, Florida, in 1987, the average malpractice insurance premium for doctors was $165,000 per year. That was up, in four years, from $30,000. In Palm Beach County ... malpractice insurance for obstetricians ... added $700 to the delivery cost for a baby. Enough, finally, was enough." Doctors walked off the job, until the legislature passed a bill altering the malpractice law. Mr. Montgomery tends to see doctors in these cases as entirely in the wrong; Dr. Fischer returns the compliment concerning lawyers. Still--thanks largely to Mrs. Musgrove--we do get an idea of the points at issue.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1019
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6953
item Program Number S0774, 1736

"Scare Tactics and AIDS"

Guests: Fumento, Michael Aaron. : Tamarkin, Norman R.

31 March 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 11
Program details: As Dr. Tamarkin puts it, "This whole issue of AIDS is so sensitive politically ... it's a lightning rod for a lot of strong opinions because it has to do with seeking pleasure, with sex, with drugs, with a contagious illness for which there is no cure." Mr. Fumento is a serious student of the spread of the disease, and while his findings are far from uncontroversial (he was working on a book to be called The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS), he has the facts and figures in hand for this perhaps surprisingly low-key discussion of a highly emotional topic.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1018
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6952
item Program Number S0775, 1737

"The Problems of Mayor Koch, Democrat"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

28 April 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 12
Program details: WFB leads off: "Mayor Koch, one charge that you leveled against Jesse Jackson was that he was untruthful. Haven't you invited the same charge to be made against yourself? Because before the New York primary you said that under President Jesse Jackson the country would be broke in three weeks and defenseless in six. A few days later, you said that if it came to that alternative, you would vote for candidate Jackson against candidate Bush on the grounds that a President Jackson would do 'less damage' to the country than a President Bush. Were you suggesting that under President Bush the United States would be broke in less than three weeks?" And we're set for the usual delicious mix of substance and chutzpah. EK: "... regrettably, what I did was to use words that were too sharp. Jesse Jackson is more than a candidate, he is an emotional symbol to large numbers of our population, and they did not want to hear my commentary, or did not want to hear the sharp rhetoric."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1020
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6954
item Program Number S0776, 1738

"Chile and a Novel Approach to Social Security"

Guests: Pinera, Jose.

28 April 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 12
Program details: Soon after Mr. Pinera became Chile's Minister of Labor in 1978, he proposed a startling new idea: privatize Social Security. Perhaps even more startling, the Pinochet regime agreed, and the system has been a fabulous success. Mr. Pinera explains why, lucidly and engagingly, also explains why it would be a good idea here, and talks about the prospect of re-establishing democracy in his country. One sample, which takes on a haunting resonance in the light of the campaign launched against Augusto Pinochet eight years after he stepped down as president (see Firing Line s01190): "Basically, what the military has said is: Look, in 1973 there was this Marxist government; they were violating the constitution, it was like a tiger going around creating problems. People asked us to mount the tiger. We have mounted the tiger. We have dominated the tiger. Now we ride to decide how to dismount the tiger without being eaten."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1021
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6955
item Program Number S0777, 1739

"Mortimer Adler on The Closing of the American Mind"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

6 May 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 128 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 13
Program details: Mr. Adler had dissented from Allan Bloom's runaway best seller (discussed on Firing Line s0735), and Mr. Buckley here invites him to explain why. As the hour plays out, Mr. Adler spends more time-as engagingly and cogently as always-on education in general and some of his own concerns in particular, though when he turns to his fellow philosopher he is illuminating: The two great political philosophers that Bloom admires most are Plato and Rousseau, and neither is a democrat in my sense of the term. Neither would take Mill's view that democracy is the ideal form of government with a long future and almost no past."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1022
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6956
item Program Number S0778, 1801

"Dirty Rock Lyrics"

Guests: Gore, Tipper. : Simmons, Doug. :

8 June 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 13
Program details: This is the first Firing Line in a new format: it runs half an hour instead of an hour, and, instead of an examiner called in somewhere past the midpoint of the show, there is a moderator, as in the Firing Line debates, who starts things off. As it happens, each of these guests is something of a Johnny One-Note (Mrs. Gore: "We have to show that we respect the First Amendment and artists' rights ... but at the same time be sensitive to young children." Mr. Simmons: "The record industry ... would love to get rid of [heavy metal].... Why worry about it?"), but Mr. Buckley is on top form: "To whip up community sentiment, whether it's against acid rain or against child abuse, is a legitimate function of social invigoration, and to suggest that because you might stumble into something that was intended to be artistic is to ask for a kind of protection that you can't legitimately hope for.""
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1024
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GE30
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6958
item Program Number S0779, 1802

"Who Should Be Vice President and Why?"

Guests: Maslin, Paul. : Green, Mark J.

6 July 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 14
Program details: This vigorous discussion is about evenly divided between what sort of person a Vice President should be and--since our guests are both liberal Democrats--whom Michael Dukakis should pick as his running mate. (Most of the running-mate discussion is on the plausibility of Jesse Jackson, though Mr. Maslin does mention Lloyd Bentsen as a strong contender.) MG: "One point I would like to make, if I could, that we are leaving out of this equation: ... Democrats are frustrated because they have been out of the White House 16 of 20 years, and are extremely united behind Dukakis because they don't want a Reagan successor. Therefore, there will be very little moaning if Dukakis picks someone that's not ideal, unlike the Republicans, who are already complaining that Governor Tom Kean is the keynoter [at the convention], and you have Republicans like Howard Phillips and Richard Viguerie bitterly attacking Reagan and Bush. I don't think you will see that phenomenon in the Democratic Party this year."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1031
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6965
item Program Number S0780, 1803

"The Central American Mess"

Guests: Van den Haag, Ernest. : Farer, Tom J.

8 June 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 14
Program details: Messrs. van den Haag and Farer are the co-authors of U.S. Ends and Means in Central America: A Debate and they know their stuff--although, as their book title suggests, they disagree on what those ends and means should be. Mr. Farer takes a laid-back, laissez-faire view of the Soviets' potential installation of missiles in Latin America ("We have the means to act directly and immediately to deal with it, which ... makes it very unlikely that it would be attempted"), Mr. van den Haag takes a more pre-emptive view ("It may not be a reasonable thing for the Soviet Union to place nuclear arms in Cuba, but they did it. And I see no reason to believe they may not act equally irrationally in some Central American republic.... We should be ready"), and Mr. Buckley keeps them on track ("One can't reasonably assume that the Soviet Union is going to invest a billion dollars a year in Nicaragua, which I am told has been done for the last four years, unless they intend to do something other than to Bolshevize the bananas").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1023
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6957
item Program Number S0781, 1804

"Update on Drug Legalization"

Guests: Grinspoon, Lester, 1928- : Szasz, Thomas Stephen, 1920-

29 June 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 15
Program details: Guests and host all agree that drugs should be legalized, but at that point Dr. Szasz takes leave of the others (and, some would say, of his senses). Dr. Grinspoon would legalize drugs but tax them heavily, to pay for the social costs of drug use; Mr. Buckley was developing his "federal drugstore" idea, to provide drugs cheaply enough to get organized crime out of the business, but in a regulated fashion; and Dr. Szasz calls any sanctions "scapegoating." One sample: TS: "Let's take some heroin addict who, at age 25, ODs. Look at the amount of money he has saved society by not being on welfare for the next 60 years, and not being in jail and not mugging people." WFB: "But suppose he wasn't going to be on welfare. Suppose he was going to be Thomas Edison." TS: "That's unlikely that he would be so undisciplined then." WFB: "I don't think it's unlikely at all... Unfortunately there's no correspondence between genius and the capacity to self-destruct."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1028
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6962
item Program Number S0782, 1805

"A Bishop Rethinks Sexuality"

Guests: Neuhaus, Richard John. : Spong, John Shelby.

8 June 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 15
Program details: Put on your flak helmets for this one: Bishop Spong, in calm, reasonable tones, argues for, oh, nothing more than a complete remaking of Christian sexual morality ("The issue is that we live in the 20th century.... What we have done in our society is to separate puberty from marriage by ten to fifteen years with no corresponding ethic to tell young people how to deal with sexual energy ... Do you think they're going to refrain from sexual activity? I think they're not, and therefore I suggest that we find a way to enter into that world and provide a relationship that can be a committed relationship and have an aspect of holiness about it"). Pastor Neuhaus does not pretend to take a detached view ("Why do you want to take a Christian position when the argument of your book is that there is nothing normative about the Christian Scriptures or the Christian tradition?"). A high-voltage exchange, generating light as well as much heat.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1025
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6959
item Program Number S0783, 1806

"Shaking Up the Republican Party"

Guests: Kean, Thomas H. : Dowd, William.

6 July 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 16
Program details: Mr. Kean--who would be the keynote speaker at the Republican convention the following month--had indeed shaken up his party with his landslide re-election three years earlier, in which he had won 60 per cent of the black vote and two-thirds of the union vote. Was the secret of his success a "laudable politics of inclusion"? Or was it--as some Republicans protesting his choice as keynote speaker argued--that he was a Democrat in Republican's clothing? Or was it simply his personal attractiveness, which comes through clearly on this show? A low-key but interesting discussion of a moderate's views: "I found a simple fact, and that is that crime is much greater in the black community than anywhere else in the state, so if you stress law and order, blacks are just as concerned about that if not more concerned than anybody else."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1029
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6963
item Program Number S0784, 1807

"The Right to Make Fun of Public Figures"

Guests: Falwell, Jerry. : Pilpel, Harriet F.

6 July 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 16
Program details: Hustler had published a satire which included Jerry Falwell having sexual relations with his own mother, and Mr. Falwell had sued. Some had expected the Rehnquist Court to take the opportunity to modify the "New York Times rule" on libel suits involving public figures, but instead of softening the rule it held that obvious satire does not constitute "reckless disregard for the truth." This show offers a crackling debate on the whole subject of civil liberties versus individuals' rights. JF: "Had the ad been of Harriet and her mother or father, I rather think she might be sitting where I'm sitting today rather than there defending the issue." WFB: "No, actually she wouldn't, because Harriet is a very principled woman, and she would, I think incorrectly, feel that this was a sacrifice necessary to sustain the vitality of the First Amendment."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1030
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6964
item Program Number S0785, 1808

"How Does It Go with Deregulation of the Airlines?"

Guests: Borman, Frank. : Kahn, Alfred E. (Alfred Edward)

29 June 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 17
Program details: Mr. Kahn had been the principal force behind airline deregulation in the 1970s (see Firing Line s0337); Mr. Borman had been one of its chief opponents. Mr. Borman now says: "I think the experiment's worked extremely well.... I read somewhere that in 1977 only 25 percent of Americans had flown. This year, 75 per cent have flown. So we really have made available a wonderful facility to people who in any other country in the world can't enjoy it." A good-tempered discussion of how free-market theory actually plays out in people's lives.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1026
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6960
item Program Number S0786, 1809

"When Should We Step Aside and Let Death Take Over?"

Guests: Callahan, Daniel. : Etzioni, Amitai.

29 June 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 17
Program details: An absorbing and intensely disturbing discussion of medical ethics and the aged. Mr. Callahan starts from the fact that a tremendous amount of money is spent on medical procedures in what proves to be the last year of a patient's life. He also points out that, "by constantly trying to extend lives and find more and more ways to apply the technology to the elderly ... we're not getting a happier group of elderly, we're getting an elderly more fearful of growing old and more fearful of death." He finds the expenditures essentially unfair to the young and would "set limits"--apparently an arbitrary age--after which certain procedures could not be done. Mr. Etzioni fairly sputters with indignation but makes some good points about allocation of resources. We may not wind up completely agreeing with either, but we will be left with a great deal to think about."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1027
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6961
item Program Number S0787, 1810

"The French-American Connection: Accord or Discord?"

Guests: Francois-Poncet, Jean. : Wahl, Nicholas.

24 August 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 18
Program details: French-American relations had come a long way since the days when de Gaulle was referring to "les deux hegemonies," but there were now two unsettling factors on the horizon: U.S.-Soviet implementation of the INF treaty, to remove intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe, and the unification of Europe, scheduled for 1992. Our extremely knowledgeable guests are worried but non-apocalyptic. JFP: "There was a time when there was a certain opening of France towards the Soviet Union. This has changed. There is a lot of reluctance, a lot of caution in assessing the Gorbachev experiment. Our feeling is that a close coupling with the United States is necessary for our defense, although we have a deterrent, want to keep it, and want to modernize it."NW: "I think that the French have become the most anti-Soviet people in Europe."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1032
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6966
item Program Number S0788, 1811

"Contra Aid"

Guests: Purcell, Susan Kaufman. : Roett, Riordan.

24 August 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 19
Program details: A ceasefire had been in effect in Nicaragua since April, but talks had broken down. What should the United States be doing? According to Mr. Roett, "The Nicaraguan situation needs to be looked at in the context of 1988-1989, not in the context of President Reagan's inauguration, when he himself took on the Contras as a very personal cause. He is finished; they, too, will soon be finished." To Mrs. Purcell, "When you set up a negotiating process between one side that is heavily armed by the Soviets and the other side that really doesn't even have food and boots, it is a very unequal negotiation." Mr. Buckley, taking issue with Mr. Roett, asserts that "There is no such thing as a nice clinically, hygienically, hermetically sealed Soviet satellite in Central America." Heat but also light on this subject of protracted American consideration.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1033
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6967
item Program Number S0789, 1812

"Media Bias"

Guests: Rusher, William A., 1923- : Clurman, Richard M.

24 August 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 20
Program details: A fast-paced but never superficial look at the media by three elder statesmen who have spent most of their adult lives in the media. RMC: "Everybody knows, it's no secret, they [journalists] mostly vote Democratic.... The biographical argument has nothing to do with what comes out of the media. This week we have Quayle under glass, but on the other hand we had fried Geraldine Ferraro much worse when she ran for Vice President." ... WAR: "What I am also concerned about is that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, that we have found ourselves in a situation in which the media ... far from being Greek-chorus commentators on the situation, are partisan participants in every situation, with opinions on every major issue, and pushing those opinions by a selective process in their news reportage."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1034
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6968
item Program Number S0790, 1813

"Southern Strategy: The Bush Agenda"

Guests: Campbell, Carroll.

8 September 1988

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 12
Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 20
Program details: A pleasant session with one of the new breed of Southern Republicans. Governor Campbell doesn't give away any state secrets about the Bush strategy, but he and Mr. Buckley look informatively at the Democratic Convention (CC: "When ... the dust settled, and people were able to go back and look at Mike Dukakis, not against Jesse Jackson but... really against the whole of America, they realized that they had a [candidate] on the Left ... and once they began to discern that, I think that the efforts of the Democratic Convention began to unravel") and the black vote in the South (CC: "For too many years the black population of the South has been assumed by the Democratic Party.... The Republican Party made a great mistake in that we said: 'Okay, they've got it, we don't need to try.' Well, we're not saying that any more.... We don't need to alter what we stand for, we need to sell what we stand for").
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1036
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6970
item Program Number S0791, 1814

"Battle for the South: Election '88"

Guests: Courson, John. : Fowler, Don.

8 September 1988

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 5
Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 21
Program details: A relaxed discussion centering on how different the South still is, or isn't, from the rest of the country, and why blacks vote as they do, and how representative government differs from plebiscitary government. One sample: MK: "Mr. Buckley ... were you saying, and I hope you were, that the Republicans ought to try to get black votes by telling black voters, 'Listen to Charles Murray; we want to cut off all your social welfare, and it'll really be good for you'? You recommend that as a political strategy?" WFB: "Well, it's obviously useless as a political strategy, because it would be no more useful than if I were to tell you to start going to church every Sunday. You would deeply resent it, even though it would do you a lot of good. But I do think that slowly there's got to be a penetration."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1037
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6971
item Program Number S0792, 1815

"Broken Alliance: Blacks and Jews"

Guests: Kaufman, Jonathan. : Williams, Juan.

27 September 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 21
Program details: A discussion that is painful at times but deeply honest and perceptive, and of great interest even to non-combatants such as white Gentiles. One sample: JK: "To be fair, I think Jews, like most whites, still underestimate what it's like to be black in this country. I mean, I've been in a number of forums with Jews talking to blacks and it is striking to me still the kind of patronizing tone that Jews bring to those dialogues very often. There's a sense in which Jews feel that they understand blacks better than blacks understand blacks." JW: "And that's grating to blacks, let me just tell you."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1038
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6972
item Program Number S0793, 1816

"What Constitutes a Dirty Campaign?"

Guests: Shrum, Robert. : Irvine, Reed.

27 September 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 22
Program details: Not the most tightly focused debate, but guests and host score off each other with such gusto that we can just sit back and enjoy the ride. RS: "I don't think this Pledge of Allegiance issue [Governor Dukakis had vetoed a bill punishing schoolteachers who failed to lead their charges in the Pledge] has much to do with liberal or conservative." WFB: "It's part of a syndrome.... [Dukakis] is so clearly on the side of that part of the Court... which seeks to attenuate the responsibility for inculcating civic--and it used to be also religious--values, that I can't think of anything more important for people to focus on, as distinguished from what the minimum wage should be, $5.45 or $6.45." RS: "It's probably not important to you what the minimum wage is, but it is important to lots of other people." WFB: "No, because in the long run you're going to get conclusions about the minimum wage based on more fundamental characteristics."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1039
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6973
item Program Number S0794, 1817

"The Post Office Mess"

Guests: Miller, James, III. : Biller, Moe.

27 September 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 22
Program details: Who would have thought a discussion of the Postal Service could be so much fun? Mr. Biller is a force of nature, light years away from the usual TV talking head; quotations offer only a pale image: MB: "You know what I resent? Mr. Miller speaks of the Congress of the United States as if it doesn't represent the people. The people elect the Congress of the United States just as they do a President...." JM: "May I ask one question? How much money has your political-action committee spread around on Capitol Hill on this issue [privatization of the Post Office]?" MB: "That doesn't mean you're buying votes! Your party doesn't get political contributions? Political contributions are not being made to Mr. Bush?" Mr. Miller does get the unexpected pleasure of being able to say to, of all people, Mr. Buckley, "To ask that question is to fail to appreciate the importance of competition."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1040
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6974
item Program Number S0795, 1818

"Stopping START"

Guests: Kissinger, Henry, 1923-

11 October 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 23
Program details: Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had just visited with Secretary of State George Shultz to discuss the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) negotiations in Geneva. Messrs. Buckley and Kissinger begin there and take us on a brilliantly lucid tour of the current state of arms control and much else. HK: "Arms control, which started about 25 years ago under totally different circumstances, has become an esoteric numbers game which is almost its own purpose and whose contribution to stability and security is growing more and more elusive." ... HK: "If we have seen how Gorbachev has treated his own colleagues on the Politburo--every one of whom that voted him into office has since been purged--it would be rather reckless for us to stake everything on one man." WFB: "Recent polls ... have shown that the majority of Europeans believe that Reagan is a greater threat to the peace than Gorbachev. Now you can dismiss this as an eccentricity or ... some sort of schoolboy iconoclasm, but there are, I think, deeper implications that Gorbachev's road show carries with it a terrible and conceivably even fatal psychological potential."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1042
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6976
item Program Number S0796, 1819

"The Long Not-So-Hot Campaign"

Guests: Kinsley, Michael E.

11 October 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 23
Program details: Firing Line here takes advantage of having been, a year earlier, the first venue for each party's candidates to meet in a nationally televised forum. In this session, we see three segments each from George Bush's and Michael Dukakis's performances, with Messrs. Buckley and Kinsley commenting after each pair. MK: "My main reaction to both [of the autobiographical segments], especially the Bush one, is: I remember seeing them at the time and thinking: 'This is so excruciatingly contrived and phony I can't stand it.' But my standards have really plummeted about artifice in politics since then." WFB: "You now think it's sublime?" MK: "Well, I wouldn't go sublime, but it seems tolerable, which it didn't at the time. I think my standards have sunk quite a bit because of the way this campaign has gone."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1043
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6977
item Program Number S0797, 1820

"Japanese Takeover: Good or Bad?"

Guests: Powell, Jim. : Bryant, John.

11 October 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 24
Program details: The amount of money that foreigners had invested in the United States had recently exceeded, for the first time, the amount of money that Americans had invested abroad. Rep. Bryant was the author of a bill requiring all foreign holdings in the U.S. to be registered. Was this the first step towards protectionism? A fast-paced and engrossing show on a topic that many of us might expect to find overly technical. WFB: "I'm trying to get a philosophical fix here before we go into the economics of it. Is it your blanket position that any foreigner doing any kind of business in America ought to have exactly the same license as an American?" JP: "Yes. I think you judge the moral caliber of a civilization by how well it treats strangers."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1044
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6978
item Program Number S0798, 1821

"The Philippine Dilemma under Aquino"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J.

7 November 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 24
Program details: It had been nearly three years since Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had fled the Philippines and Corazon Aquino had taken over as president (see Firing Line s0710). The Communist insurgents were still active, and Mrs. Aquino's vice president had recently urged her to step down and call new elections. In this spirited debate, Mr. Solarz argues strongly that "Mrs. Aquino has not only succeeded in establishing democracy and reviving the economy, but in winning the confidence of the Filipino people." SS: "What you have in the Philippine press is the background music of democracy. As someone who edits the National Review magazine, you should be entirely comfortable with that proposition." WFB: "Not if it's atonal. Background music has got to be harmonious for democracy to work."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1045
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6979
item Program Number S0799, 1822

"What's So Bad about Being Poor?"

Guests: Murray, Charles A.

7 November 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 25
Program details: The phrase "thinking outside the box" might have been coined for Mr. Murray. It has been his specialty--and has more than once made him the subject of searing controversy--not to be satisfied with the conventional wisdom, and today's conversation is a mind-opener. CM: "We have tended to [say]... we don't know how people enjoy themselves, we don't know how they get self-esteem, but let's take care of the money and then let people take care of the rest of their lives as they see fit. I think that's only true for a very small segment of the population.... For a great many people, the way they go about providing for their material resources is intimately bound up with their self-esteem, bound up with the way they enjoy themselves, bound up with the way they form their communities, and it has been fundamentally unhelpful to say that we can tie off this one area of life and deal with it independently."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1046
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6980
item Program Number S0800, 1823

"Loyalty and Betrayal in Politics"

Guests: Shays, Christopher.

28 November 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 25
Program details: "The theme of this show is less loyalty and betrayal" than, as Mr. Kinsley puts it in his introduction, "the role of 'voting against' in a democracy." WFB had just spearheaded Buck PAC, a political-action committee to defeat Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, the self-described "turd in the punchbowl of American politics" (and incidentally to replace him with Joseph Lieberman). To Mr. Shays (who happens to be Mr. Buckley's own congressman), "The narrower the view that it includes, the smaller that party becomes. What you left me with, as a Republican ..., is a state now represented by two very liberal senators. I served [in the state government] with Joe Lieberman. I happen to like him a lot, but he is a very liberal senator."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1048
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6982
item Program Number S0801, 1824

"A Democrat Critiques the Reagan Years"

Guests: Carter, Hodding, III.

28 November 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 26
Program details: This show is often entertaining, though weakened by the fact that Mr. Carter, who served his presidential namesake as State Department spokesman, tends to repeat, without evidence, all the cliches about President Carter's successor. HC: "... you have for the first time created a thought in this society that we may be permanently divided by class, that it may be okay, acceptable, inevitable that we're going to leave behind 20 per cent of our folks ... that the idea that anybody was going to have a chance to reach up and grab and go forward has been to a large degree minimized." WFB: "... If there were going to be a stratification of America into a class system, then you would say: Well, exactly the same people who constituted the 10 per cent richest eight years ago constitute the 10 per cent now. Statistics show--and on this a tremendous amount of work has been done by Thomas Sowell--that the descent from there and the ascent to there has been as dynamic as at any time in American history."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1049
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6983
item Program Number S0802, 1825

"National Review's Predictions for 1989"

Guests: Allison, Wick. : O'Sullivan, John. : Rusher, William A., 1923-

5 January 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 26
Program details: At the end of the Reagan Administration, two generations of National Review honchos (including our host, the Editor-in-Chief) stick their necks out about the future, giving us some good fun but also food for thought. WA: "The oldest baby-boomer is now 42 years old.... The bulk of the population are settling in to establishment of their families, to the purchase of homes ... One might be fairly liberal in one's attitude, or tolerant of other people's weirdnesses, but you get less so when it's the protection of your family and neighborhood." ... JO: "I think conservatives are going to talk a lot about the idea of empowerment, a word that's sometimes been used by people like Jesse Jackson on the Left, but which has much more meaning, I think, when conservatives use it." ... WAR "The Soviet Union, I am absolutely convinced, is going through a period of recognition at long last, forced on it--there's nothing voluntary about it--forced on it by facts, that it simply isn't making it as a 20th-century, let alone a 21st-century society, and that it is going to have to change radically. That's fine with me and I encourage them, and I'm sure it's fine with Reagan and he's encouraging them."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1051
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6985
item Program Number S0803, 1826

"What about the New French Abortion Pill?"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : O'Sullivan, John. : Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008.

28 November 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 27
Program details: Ru-486 had been developed in France, and the question was, should it be licensed for use in the United States? This sometimes painful and often profound discussion revolves around what Ru-486 actually is (an abortifacient or a contraceptive?) and how, therefore, it fits into the abortion argument. HP: "If [a woman] took the pill she would not know whether she had been pregnant or not; therefore, if she had any doubt as to whether she wanted to have an abortion, she would not have to confront that issue...." WFB: "I don't really see how morally you evade the responsibility by cultivating ignorance. If you lean out of your apartment building with a .22 rifle and shoot into a crowd without any idea as to whether you hit anybody, I don't think you're entitled to feel better." ... WFB: "You'd like to make it [abortion] illegal ... but in a society in which it's not illegal, is there a presumption that because it's distasteful you want it to be difficult to consummate?" JO: "I don't want it to be dangerous, if that's the drift of your question. I don't want to punish people who have abortions by making it more likely that they will perish or suffer some dangerous illness."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1050
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6984
item Program Number S0804, 1827

"The Real Justice Holmes"

Guests: Lerner, Max, 1902- : Berns, Walter, 1919-

7 November 1988

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 27
Program details: A rich discussion of an historical topic with strong current implications. WB: "I don't deny that he [Justice Holmes] was a very powerful figure in the field of the common law, and his fame is deserved there, but the Constitution of the United States is not a common-law document... He gave rise to a school of thought that effectively undermines the Constitution." ... WFB: "It' s also Oliver Wendell Holmes who says: 'If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them; it's my job.' Do you consider it his job as a Supreme Court Justice to help the American people go to hell?" ... ML: "I go along with the fact that there are natural rights, but who decides what they are? The Warren Court liberals, Justice Brennan now, Justice Thurgood Marshall, Justice Harry Blackmun have a very different notion of natural rights--don't they, Walter?--from your notion of natural rights?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1047
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6981
item Program Number S0805, 1828

"Day of Reckoning: The Reagan Legacy"

Guests: Friedman, Benjamin.

5 January 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 28
Program details: Whether or not one signs on to Mr. Friedman's thesis--that the federal deficit is a disastrous legacy of the Reagan Administration--this is a lucid and engaging discussion of a constellation of important questions. BF: "If this [the 1986 revision of the tax code] was the big reconsideration of our tax system for fifty years, which is what it was billed as being, we should have used that opportunity to get away from an income tax towards a consumption tax." ... WFB: "It seems to me that if the government goes to you and asks you for $100 from your savings, and then ten years later gives you $110, but [it] can only buy you what $45 used to buy you, somebody has swindled somebody without having to answer to the SEC ..." BF: "I see it not as a matter of a swindle, but a risk."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1052
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6986
item Program Number S0806, 1829

"Vice Presidency: Nothing or Everything"

Guests: Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Arthur Meier), 1917-2007.

5 January 1989

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 97 : 13
Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 182 : 28
Program details: A surprising conversation about the Vice Presidency, which Mr. Schlesinger proposes to abolish. WFB: "The reason I don't dwell on Quayle is that the gravamen of your case doesn't rest on his shoulders." AS: "It's pre-Quayle." WFB: "...But you'd like to adduce Quayle to fortify your argument, wouldn't you?" AS: "Why not? ... The selection of Quayle brought as much dismay to the Republicans as it brought glee to the Democrats." ... AS: "Originally the Constitution only provided that the Vice President, in case of the death, removal, resignation of the President, should inherit the power and duties of the office, but not the office itself. John Tyler staged a constitutional coup in 1841 when he seized the office. John Quincy Adams wrote at that time, 'Contrary to the views of the Constitution, we now have as President of the United States a man who was never intended for that office.' "... AS: "What do you think Dr. Freud would have made of the fact that recently George Bush has been in Texas shooting quail?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1053
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6987
item Program Number S0807, 1830

"Health Risks in a Nuclear Environment"

Guests: Bailie, Tom. : Steele, Karen Dorn. : Fox, Michael F.

10 January 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 1
Program details: Mr. Bailie had charged that emissions from the Hanford Nuclear Facility had been causing health problems in the region for forty years; Mr. Fox says, "The Hanford operation is one of the safest operations in the state"; Ms. Steele's research leads her to concur with Mr. Bailie, although she points out that "The U.S. Department of Energy has never done a baseline study--who was here, where they went, and how they were affected." The show suffers from Mr. Fox's tentativeness as a debater, but we still learn a lot. In Mr. Buckley's summation: "Let's by all means say to the government: Find out what's going on. And say to the scholars: Find out what did go on, and attempt to distinguish between the two. Meanwhile, don't let perestroika, as Mr. Shrum suggests, give us a false sense of complacency."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1054
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6988
item Program Number S0808, 1831

"An Insider Look from a Nuclear Community"

Guests: Connor, Tim. : Steele, Karen Dorn. : Burnham, John B.

10 January 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 1
Program details: This time (as opposed to the previous show) the nuclear forces score a clear victory, thanks to Mr. Burnham's knowledge and persuasiveness. JBB: "... Chernobyl was a Russian experiment in which they purposely bypassed three safety systems in order to run the experiment. In the second place, Chernobyl is a reactor that's totally unlike any reactor we have in the United States.... Chernobyl is a terrible example. Three Mile Island is a good example." WFB: "On Three Mile Island you would make the point that after all there wasn't a meltdown, and therefore, what?" JBB: "It was an economic disaster, but it was a technical wonder. Everything went wrong. Everybody pulled the wrong levers. And no one was hurt. That's sensational."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1055
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6989
item Program Number S0809, 1832

"Saint or Sinner: Junipero Serra"

Guests: Maholy, Noel. : Castillo, Edward.

10 January 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 129 : 32
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 2
Program details: Junipero Serra, the Franciscan founder of the string of missions along the California coast, had been beatified by Pope John Paul II, raising protests from those, like Mr. Castillo, who believe that the system that he established here was "not of benefit to the Indians." Today's conversation doesn't always connect, but there are interesting bits along the way. Father Maholy: "If at any time I became convinced that Father Junipero Serra was not a saint in his own day and in his death, I would have asked to be relieved of the job, because there are too many valuable things to be done and important things to be done." Mr. Buckley finds it, well, outrageous that an "Ad Hoc Serra Outrage Committee"-- according to a newspaper headline, of "Indian and leftist and atheist groups"--was presuming to tell the Church who was and wasn't a saint.
Availability: On archive.org. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1056
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6990
item Program Number S0810, 1833

"The Great Harold Macmillan"

Guests: Horne, Alistair.

20 March 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 2
Program details: A wonderful conversation about a man who was himself a favorite Firing Line guest. Mr. Horne had been named his official biographer--but with the stipulation that his book not appear until after Macmillan had died, which he had done, at the age of 92, in late 1986. One sample from Mr. Home: Macmillan felt passionately about the Falklands and said he wished he were still there in power. He wrote to Mrs. Thatcher and said: "Can I be of any help, just give you support in the country? Though the country was not divided as it was over Suez. To his amazement she called him in, and he was there for two hours. She actually asked him how to run a war and, in fact, took all his recommendations. He was then 88.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1057
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6991
item Program Number S0811, 1834

"The Vietnam Tragedy"

Guests: Sheehan, Neil. : Clurman, Richard M.

20 March 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 3
Program details: Mr. Sheehan's new book was a topic of heated controversy; he describes his experiences ably and often movingly here, in this discussion with two journalists of a pre-Vietnam generation. NS: "In World War II, if... George Patton gave you a briefing on what was going on in the Battle of Normandy, it bore a pretty good relationship to what was happening. Suddenly, in Vietnam, you were in a situation where ... you were seeing one thing when you went out in the field, and the command [in Saigon] was telling you another--and you were trying to reflect the truth.... We thought as reporters our duty was to report the truth about this war so that the President would change policy and win the war." ... RC: "You've had the experience and I've had the experience ... of hearing people blame the press for losing the war in Vietnam. It's an argument that I totally reject...." WFB: "I think that the press became anti-Vietnam partisans, and to suggest that the press didn't influence domestic attitudes is to undermine the power and the prestige of the press. You wouldn't want to do that, would you?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1058
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6992
item Program Number S0812, 1835

"Sex in Schools"

Guests: Prather, Hilma Skonberg. : Brock, John.

20 March 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 4
Program details: Kentucky had the nation's highest birth rate among white teenagers, leading the legislature to pass a law requiring sex education with an emphasis on abstinence throughout primary and secondary school. Mrs. Prather and Mr. Brock engage in an energetic debate on a subject of interest far beyond Kentucky's borders. HSP: "As educators we don't just list positive things. We need to give students both sides of the picture, not just the methods that we prefer ... Abortion is here. They have to be taught to deal with it...." JB: "I'm saying that if we list [abortion] as an alternative to an unwanted pregnancy, that, to some youngsters, would send a confused signal: that if it is an alternative, and if our teachers are telling us it's an alternative, then it's something we can consider doing."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1059
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6993
item Program Number S0813, 1836

"The Democratic Party: A New Political Force in South Africa"

Guests: Worrall, Denis. : Beer, Zac de.

21 April 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 4
Program details: A splendid counterpoint to the Firing Line Special on South Africa (Firing Line FLS104). Since the guests on this show are considerably closer to one another politically, we don't get the fireworks that the Special offered, but we do get a solid grounding for the American audience. Mr. Welsh's opening question sets the tone: "Now, Mr. Buckley, I'd like to ask you whether, in general, the American public knows that there is quite a live, vital, liberal opposition to apartheid in South Africa by whites." Mr. de Beer: "I submit to you that what unites black people in South Africa today is the common experience of oppression, and the day they cease to be oppressed, they will be at least as fragmented among themselves as the white people are now." ... Mr. Worrall: "Democracy is a very delicate plant. We know this. I mean, South America, much of Asia-democracy hasn't grown easily. We're fortunate in South Africa in this respect, that we have certain advantages. We have a parliamentary tradition which is very well established. We have a very well developed legal system, a proud legal system, an excellent judiciary with independent judges. And we have a reasonably highly developed economy by African standards. So those are all factors that work in favor of democracy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1064
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6998
item Program Number S0814, 1837

"A Controversial Prime Minister Speaks Out"

Guests: Hawke, Robert J. L. (Robert James Lee), 1929-

12 April 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 5
Program details: The second appearance on Firing Line of this feisty, often outrageous (his own word) political leader, covering economics, foreign relations, labor relations, and much more. One sample: WFB:" Are there Australians about whom we should worry who feel that the United States is in any sense acting imperiously in its relations with Australia on the matter of mutual defense?" BH: "William, I think people like you tend to be professional worriers ... but I don't think there's anything for you to be worried about. The fact that you have some people who make stupid noises and have positions which are based on prejudices rather than any intellectual position-well, we've got our share of them, but I don't worry about them and I don't think you should either."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1060
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6994
item Program Number S0815, 1838

"What Is the South African Left Up To?"

Guests: Alexander, Neville.

21 April 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 5
Program details: The third in the South African series (see Firing Line FLS104 and s0813): a somber but absorbing session with a black activist opposed to continued white rule in South Africa. NA: "I think I must stress, as somebody who operates in a legal framework in South Africa, that I'm not advocating violence. I'm simply saying that one needs to understand why it is that organizations which in all other respects are democratic, are committed to a democratic ethos-that organizations like those have found themselves in a position where they had to take up arms. The Afrikaners did that here in South Africa, incidentally, and they look back with pride on their record of resistance to British imperialism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1065
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6999
item Program Number S0816, 1839

"A Comparison View of Sex, Booze, Politics: Australia vs. America"

Guests: Adams, Phillip. : Veliz, Claudio.

12 April 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 6
Program details: A freewheeling look at popular behavior in two New World countries. PA: "We have things on television, on national television, that you would only see on cable. We have frontal nudity, you can say all sorts of naughty words without too much problem..." CV: "I think that what is missing here-it's not that I'm crying for it to be there-is the puritanical component. There were no puritans as a group established early in Australia to help to shape Australian society." ... CV: "I was just wondering whether... the United States and Australia are as different as all that. I think they are different, but they're more like each other than like any of their neighbors. The similarities of countries inhabited by people who use the English language and who have originated from England is remarkable." ... PA: "I don't recognize the country that Claudio is describing. I've never lived there."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1061
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6995
item Program Number S0817, 1840

"Racism and Immigration: An Australian Dilemma"

Guests: Blainey, Geoffrey. : MacPhee, Ian.

12 April 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 6
Program details: A calmer discussion than one might have expected, given the strong differences between the two guests, but solidly informative on a topic that has increasingly come to the fore in our own country. As Mr. Olle frames the question: "Australia is one of the world's misfits. Physically, of course, we're part of Southeast Asia, but psychologically, emotionally, ever since whites' settlement some two hundred years ago, the bonds that bind have tied us to ... the Motherland, Great Britain. And ... we tended to contrive an immigration policy aimed at preserving a white Australia, a fact that conveniently ignores forty thousand years of pre-occupation by Aboriginal Australians." ... GB: "I think that a country which sees itself as the defender of the free world but can't control its own borders is not necessarily a country sufficiently in charge of its own destiny to give assurance to its allies." ... IM: "We are a compassionate society, and amongst other things we recognize an obligation to the refugees of the world, so we bring in those refugees whom we think we can settle."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1062
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/6996
item Program Number S0818, 1901

"Mother Teresa Talks with William F. Buckley Jr."

Guests: Teresa, Mother, 1910-

2 June 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 7
Program details: Mr. Buckley begins by explaining that "This program is designed as a forum for the exchange of opinions. I would like to think that I would suppress any opinions of my own that differ from Mother Teresa's and I propose, therefore, to be inordinately, gratefully quiet as we listen to her." Some of what we duly hear is what we might expect from this holy woman ("We deal with the lepers, we deal with the dying, we deal with AIDS.... It is an opportunity for the people to share in the joy of loving"), but there are also surprises: "Once I met a lady who was in terrible pain of cancer, and I told her, 'This is but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.' And the lady, though she was in such great pain, she joined her hands together and said, 'Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.' "
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1066
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEIOOW
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7000
item Program Number S0819, 1902

"Should We Trust the Soviets?"

Guests: Weinberger, Caspar W.

2 June 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 8
Program details: The NATO summit at the end of May, approached apprehensively, had proved a smashing success for President Bush. Mr. Buckley invites his deeply knowledgeable guest to help him explore the issues and the background. CWW: "If you only went on what was politically realistic, the Falklands would belong to Argentina and probably NATO would be confined to somewhere west of France ... You can't just look at things that seem to be politically impossible or military impossible and then shrug your shoulders and give them up." ... "We can dismantle and the Soviets can apparently dismantle. They can take these 500,000 troops out and they can turn them into farmers and say, 'You go work in the wheat fields.' But in 24 to 48 hours they can have them back in uniform armed and trained again, and we can't do that. We would debate such a change for ten or eleven years."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1067
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7001
item Program Number S0820, 1903

"The Government Maze"

Guests: Kemp, Jack.

2 June 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 8
Program details: Even when he is talking about the most dismal topics--poverty, homelessness, despair--Mr. Kemp can't help being exuberant: "I'm saying with all my heart that I don't think we ought to leave fighting poverty to the Left. We know what cures poverty: jobs and education and housing and opportunities." WFB: "The Left don't know how to cure poverty-- Charles Murray proved that definitively." JK: "They know how to redistribute bread. We've got to show people how to create bakeries." ... JK: "The foreign minister of Vietnam the other day ... said that rent controls have done to Hanoi what American bombs could not do: 'It destroyed our housing stock. We were stupid'-- quote, unquote--'and we must change.' Now goodness gracious, if Communists can change ... maybe some of the cities of the United States can reconsider the type of policies that diminish the stock of housing and affordable housing for the poor."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1068
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7002
item Program Number S0821, 1904

"Brzezinski and the Cold War"

Guests: Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1928-

7 June 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 9
Program details: This discussion of turmoil in the Communist world was taped three days after the massacre in Tiananmen Square and five months before the Berlin Wall came down. A hopeful but never facile look at the opportunities and dangers ahead. ZB: "Communism in Eastern Europe is doomed because it never had any genuine social roots. Unlike China unlike the Soviet Union where whether one liked it or not... the Communist revolutions were still indigenous in Eastern Europe they were quite literally foreign imports imposed by Soviet bayonets. And now with the Soviet Union in turmoil the East European societies ... are throwing off this artificial graft ... But implementing democracy is going to be very difficult... We ought to try to help them but many people in the Communist countries now have a simplistic notion of free enterprise."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1069
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7003
item Program Number S0822, 1905

"The Fight for Bach"

Guests: Tureck, Rosalyn.

7 June 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 9
Program details: On a previous appearance on Firing Line, Mr. Buckley recalls, "Miss Tureck had insisted that young people were discovering Bach. I don't think she was wrong about Bach, but I am very much afraid that she overestimated the musical curiosity of our youth, since, as I look out of my window, I don't see students in Tiananmen Square clamoring for more Bach." The conversation this time ranges delightfully from--once again--affinities between rock and Bach to the differences between performing earlier centuries' music on contemporary instruments and performing it on modern instruments: "There's a certain exoticism in seeing and hearing, say, an early-18th-century instrument ..., and although it's tremendously important for musicians to know them ... we are negating our 20th century altogether and erasing our present selves."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1070
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFRH8
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7004
item Program Number S0823, 1906

"Mortimer Adler and Education"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

7 June 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 10
Program details: The conversation goes over ground covered before-why Professor Adler's Chicago colleague Allan Bloom has hold of the wrong teaching method; why Aristotle is the greatest philosopher--but there are always new insights from this remarkable philosopher: "I would say to you, there's one and only one self-evident proposition in the whole field of moral thought, and that is: 'We ought to seek everything that's really good for us and nothing else.' Now, play that on your piano as follows. We'll test it as a proposition. Think the opposite: 'We ought not to seek what is really good for us; we ought to seek what is really bad for us.' Both of these are unthinkable. If the opposite of a proposition is unthinkable, then you have a self-evident truth."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1071
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7005
item Program Number S0824, 1907

"Was the Supreme Court Wrong about Flag Burning?"

Guests: Glasser, Ira.

23 August 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 10
Program details: A hard-hitting but good-natured discussion of this, well, combustible topic. IG: "Whether or not you feel allegiance to the flag as a piece of cloth that symbolizes something or whether you feel allegiance to the principles that the flag represents, the paradox is that one of [those] principles ... is freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to say, 'Bleep your flag, to hell with your country, I don't like it.' And that's what the First Amendment is about." ... WFB: "May I make a confession? I frankly don't much worry about the flag issue, but here's what I worry about tremendously: that is our disposition to say, 'If the Supreme Court says it's so, it's so.' I wrote a book about 17 years ago in which I said, 'Before I die, I want to see a constitutional amendment that simply says no to the Supreme Court, and I don't much care which one.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1073
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7007
item Program Number S0825, 1908

"The Legal Future of Abortion"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Wattleton, Faye. : McFadden, J. P.

23 August 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 11
Program details: Earlier in the summer, the Supreme Court, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, had modified the effective carte blanche for abortion given in Roe v. Wade. Would it go further yet in its next term, in which it had agreed to hear three more abortion cases? This is an exciting though not always coherent show, as the combatants occasionally all talk at once, but light as well as heat is generated. MK: "Are you really prepared for the full legal implications of the position that all fetuses, even two-minute-old fetuses, have every human right that you and I have?" ... WFB: "We're entitled, are we not, to say there has been a certain evolution in moral thought during the past two hundred years? The Declaration of Independence is a morally historic document, and so is the Emancipation Proclamation. And it seems to me that in the past 75 years there was a feeling that not only did the mother have rights, but so did the unborn child."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1074
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7008
item Program Number S0826, 1909

"The Political Aspects of Abortion"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Wattleton, Faye. : McFadden, J. P.

23 August 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 12
Program details: Round Two of this debate, again focusing more on the central issues-the rights of a woman versus the rights of her unborn child-than on the specific aspects mentioned in this show's title. FW: "Mr. Buckley, you have raised the specter of slavery repeatedly... and I think that there is a very important distinction between living people-human beings-and fetuses, and to equate fetuses with living blacks who were in bondage and enslaved against their will is not quite fair to this argument." WFB: "I'm not equating them; I'm saying there are things in common, namely an evolutionized moral attitude towards that institution." FW: "There was no woman that was being forced to carry a slave against her will...." JPM: "We are speaking about a class of people who were not considered persons under the law or the Constitution, just as people like me believe that the fetus is a person but is not given constitutional rights." FW: "It's a little hard to see my ancestors the same as fetuses, and I reject the argument and the analogy."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1075
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7009
item Program Number S0827, 1910

"Michael Harrington Remembered"

Guests:

7 September 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 12
Program details: Socialist and poverty-warrior Michael Harrington, who had been the very first Firing Line guest back in 1966, had died, of cancer, at the age of only 61. In this tribute to an old friend and adversary--the third such tribute on Firing Line, the others being to Allard Lowenstein and Clare Boothe Luce (Firing Line s0415 and s0770)--Messrs. Buckley and Kinsley reminisce and comment on clips from Mr. Harrington's Firing Line appearances. From WFB's summation: "Michael Harrington is a marvelous example ... of the extent to which the rhetoric of social gentility tends to help the left-winger. He reaches to Adam Smith for a quote that says, in effect, even the father of modern conservatism can care for people. Conservatives have never, I think said that people should not care for other people, with the possible exception of Ayn Rand, with her war on altruism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1076
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7010
item Program Number S0828, 1911

"Is the War on Drugs Lost and Over?"

Guests: Raab, William von.

7 September 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 13
Program details: Mr. von Raab had just been fired by Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady for saying publicly that the Bush Administration was not serious in its war on drugs. He proves to be a most articulate and engaging guest, on a topic one might have thought had already been talked out. WFB: "Let me ask you why so bright a guy as Bill Bennett, whom you admire and whom I admire, why is he underwriting a scenario that is as synthetic as you insist this one is?" WvR: "No, I didn't say it was synthetic. I think the scenario is good. I don't think it will be carried out. I don't think the money is sufficient, and I don't think the bureaucracy will support it.... The State Department... has too many balls in the air, and they don't want to have their debt negotiations with Mexico skewered because of a wrangle over the drug traffic."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1077
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7011
item Program Number S0829, 1912

"How to Make Public Schools Less Mediocre"

Guests: Lieberman, Myron. : Flanigan, Peter M.

7 September 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 13
Program details: Mr. Lieberman favors radical school choice. Mr. Flanigan's organization puts together poor students and sponsors who not only pay for them to go to private (mostly parochial) schools but also serve as mentors. Guests and host are agreed that the public schools are a mess; the question, in this provocative discussion, is the best and most politically feasible way to fix them. ML: "There is a movement now in this country for public-school choice [choice of schools, but limited to public schools]. I regard this as a big banana peel. Some conservatives favor it because they think it has some resemblance to the free-enterprise system, but the notion that you're going to get the benefits of free enterprise from choices offered by a public monopoly, I think, is ludicrous on the face of it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1078
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7012
item Program Number S0830, 1913

"What's Up to Date in Missouri on Abortion?"

Guests: Lee, Samuel H. : Carlson, Karen. : Susman, Frank, 1941-

10 October 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 14
Program details: Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (see Firing Line s0825) was a case originating in Missouri, where our guests have been longtime combatants. Although the topic is hot, the discussion here is civil and insightful. SHL: "Over and over you see the majority of people ... particularly if you're focusing on Missourians-believe abortion is wrong.... When it comes down to specific restrictions they may be in favor of abortion for rape or incest or the hard cases, but when it comes down basically to abortion as a backup for birth control, the majority of people are opposed." ... FS: "Before Webster you had the pro-choice forces who enjoyed the status quo and were clearly the 'ins.'...It's easier to mobilize and energize those who are on the 'outs,' ... and that was the 'antis.' This is the very first time in 16 years ... that both sides have fielded teams. It remains to be seen who will win the game, but it's the first time there have been two teams on the field."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1082
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7016
item Program Number S0831, 1914

"Update on the Afghan Resistance"

Guests: Tomsen, Peter. : Karzai, Hamid.

10 October 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 14
Program details: A low-key show, but very informative, on the current state of play in Afghanistan. The Soviets had made a big show, back in February, of withdrawing their troops (see Firing Line s0759)--but since then, as Mr. Tomsen tells us, "they have been massively supplying their puppet government in Kabul--It's the biggest Soviet airlift since World War II." ... HK: "We have a country that's divided into so many ethnic groups and so many tribes and so many political parties--there are eight political parties in the coalition government in Peshawar--there are bound to be differences. And they're all armed. But it does not have any bearing at all on the performance against [the puppet government]."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1080
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7014
item Program Number S0832

"Re-Evaluating a Famous Liberal: Robert Maynard Hutchins"

Guests: Ashmore, Harry S.

10 October 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 15
Program details: Robert Maynard Hutchins had never appeared on Firing Line, but a favorite Firing Line guest, Mortimer Adler, had been a sidekick of his (see Firing Line s0683); indeed, Mr. Hutchins was the editor-in-chief of the Great Books series. On this show we look at American education through the prism of Mr. Hutchins's ideas about it. HAS: "Hutchins took the position that the distinction of American education that set it apart from that of the older universities on the continent was that we had no ruling class here, and the problem was to educate every citizen to perform effectively in a democratic society.... It was an article of his faith that any child above the level of moron could be educated. And he felt that the burden of educating children who came from diverse backgrounds, particularly those who came from inferior backgrounds, rested upon the educator."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1081
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7015
item Program Number S0833, 1916

"William F. Buckley Jr. Looks Back with Barry Goldwater on Politics, Etc."

Guests: Goldwater, Barry M. (Barry Morris), 1909-1998.

16 October 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 15
Program details: At age 80, and two years retired, Senator Goldwater hasn't lost his savor. In this splendid session, his old friend asks him to "take a fix on issues that concerned conservatives in 1964, to ask how they look to us now, 25 years later." The first of these issues is civil rights: "You voted with 21 other senators against the civil-rights bill. Do you have reasons to regret that vote?" BG: "I still agree with my vote, that you have the right to rent your house to whoever you damn please-black, white, green, or purple." They go on from there to immigration and the effects of different ethnic groups ("Well, having said what I've said on this, I'm not worried"), to the Supreme Court, to the Soviet Union ("I do think, as old as I am, I'm going to live to see the day when there's a freer economic system in the Soviet Union than they have today.").
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1083
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709SDC
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7017
item Program Number S0834, 1917

"William F. Buckley Jr. Looks Forward with Barry Goldwater on Politics, Etc."

Guests: Goldwater, Barry M. (Barry Morris), 1909-1998.

16 October 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 16
Program details: Different topics, same vision, clear as the desert air. BG: "I voted against federal aid to education, and I argued strongly against it, because I don't believe that some jackass sitting in Washington can tell my teachers in Arizona how to teach our children. I want to leave that up to the parent-teacher associations, if we still have them, leave it up to the families." ... "There is a very determined, strong effort going on in this country to take away the prerogatives and the strength of the President and confer them onto the legislative branch. I don't believe in that.... You'd be amazed sitting in that body if you listen to the amendments that are being offered that just mean: Move a little more power, move a little more power."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1084
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709I2S
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7018
item Program Number S0835, 1918

"William F. Buckley Jr. and the Phoenix Symphony"

Guests: Chapin, Schuyler. : Sedares, James.

16 October 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 16
Program details: This show that includes part of the rehearsal of a harpsichord concerto Mr. Buckley would play with the Phoenix Symphony the following night. But first, a lively discussion of the music world, here and there, past and present. SC: "Beginning at the beginning, how did we get into what you have called 'this mess'?" WFB: "It began with a letter sent by the manager of this orchestra--some people suspect he was drunk when he sent it--but in any event, he asked me if at any time in 1989 or 1990 I would consent to play a harpsichord concerto by Bach with this symphony orchestra. I read it a dozen times wondering whether he were serious, and ... well, you get sort of a Walter Mitty rush, and here I am." ... SC: "If you name the three oldest continuing orchestras in the world, two of them are American. This always startles people, but it happens to be true. I'm not now talking about orchestras in Europe like the Gewandhaus or the Leipzig or whatever that have come and gone and come and gone. But in the sense of continuous performance the [two] oldest in the world are the Vienna Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic--in 1842 both were started--and the third is the St. Louis Orchestra."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1085
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7019
item Program Number S0836, 1919

"President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan: Part I"

Guests: Horne, Alistair. : Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Arthur Meier), 1917-2007. : Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006.

17 November 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 17
Program details: The Berlin Wall had just come down, and this rich discussion with three men who were behind the scenes in Washington and London starts with the erection of the Wall in 1961. (Macmillan served as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, stepping down just a month before Kennedy was killed.) One sample: AH: "From Kennedy's point of view, Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of Florida, was absolutely overriding, and it swept off his vision any threat to Berlin. Macmillan, three thousand miles away but much closer to Europe, saw Berlin as the possible danger, and he saw that what Khrushchev may have been playing, as he often did in his rather crazy, adventurous policies, was a maximum and a minimum. The maximum was achieved if Kennedy lost his nerve and he could get Cuba, and then he could roll up Berlin. But the minimum might have been to have taken Berlin as a pawn and exchange a pawn ... over Cuba.".
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1090
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGOB0
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7024
item Program Number S0837, 1920

"President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan: Part II"

Guests: Horne, Alistair. : Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Arthur Meier), 1917-2007. : Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006.

17 November 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 17
Program details: The Berlin Wall had just come down, and this rich discussion with three men who were behind the scenes in Washington and London starts with the erection of the Wall in 1961. (Macmillan served as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, stepping down just a month before Kennedy was killed.) One sample: AH: "From Kennedy's point of view, Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of Florida, was absolutely overriding, and it swept off his vision any threat to Berlin. Macmillan, three thousand miles away but much closer to Europe, saw Berlin as the possible danger, and he saw that what Khrushchev may have been playing, as he often did in his rather crazy, adventurous policies, was a maximum and a minimum. The maximum was achieved if Kennedy lost his nerve and he could get Cuba, and then he could roll up Berlin. But the minimum might have been to have taken Berlin as a pawn and exchange a pawn ... over Cuba.".
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1091
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGODS
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7025
item Program Number S0838, 1921

"What's Wrong with America?"

Guests: Silber, John, 1926-

17 November 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 18
Program details: Mr. Silber was a legend in his own time, both for his accomplishments and for his personality (as Mr. Kinsley puts it in his introduction, "No one that I'm aware of has compared [Harvard President] Derek Bok to Socrates and Churchill or to Hitler and Stalin. John Silber has elicited all of these flattering comparisons"). Here, he is consistently interesting on the modern American academy. Two samples: "There is no way to make ideas safe for students. You have to make students safe for any and all ideas." ... WFB: "Would you consider it reason for disqualification if somebody were in fact a Marxist--i.e., would you not hire a Marxist?" JS: "No, I have knowingly hired Marxists, but I think it is very important to see the kind of work they're doing and the way in which they operate with regard to evidence ... [in] pursuit of truth."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1092
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7026
item Program Number S0839, 1922

"Awaiting Execution?"

Guests: Tigar, Michael.

1 November 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 18
Program details: If 75 per cent of the American people believe, as WFB puts it, "that cold-blooded murder ought to be punished by execution," and if "we have a republic that writes its own laws," then why are so few murderers executed? Is it because of "the cool resources of very bright people" determined "to render the law nugatory"? In this return visit by one of those very bright people, we get an illuminating discussion of crime and capital punishment. MT: "For every Ted Bundy you point out, where the process took so long, we find that there are three or four people who are in the seventh or eighth or ninth year, and all of a sudden a competent principal lawyer gets a hold of the case and finds that there's some reason there that this penalty ought never to have been given." ... WFB: "The lawyers have [made it]... an almost impossible epistemological question to establish basic guilt or innocence ... This makes a travesty of the law and a travesty of the democratic process."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1086
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7020
item Program Number S0840, 1923

"Animal Rights?"

Guests: Nuland, Sherwin B.

1 November 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 19
Program details: Animal-rights fanatics had escalated their attacks on research facilities to the point where, as Dr. Nuland tells us, "Scotland Yard has recently called the Animal Liberation Front, after the IRA, the most dangerous terrorist organization in the United Kingdom." In this fascinating session, Dr. Nuland informs us of the centrality of animal research to virtually "all research as we have known it in biomedicine in the 20th century"--from vaccination to heart surgery--and he and Mr. Buckley discuss the moral context. SN: "There's a difference between ... animal welfare and ... animal rights. The difference, of course, being: Do animals have rights in the true theological, moral, philosophical, sociological sense as human beings do, or do they not?" WFB: "I would say animals have no rights, but we have an obligation not to amuse ourselves by treating any animal sadistically or wantonly."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1087
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7021
item Program Number S0841, 1924

"The Romanticizing of War"

Guests: Fussell, Paul.

1 November 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 130 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 19
Program details: Mr. Fussell--a decorated combat veteran and highly regarded literary critic--had been accused of pacifism and lack of patriotism because of his books on the nature of warfare. This rich discussion disposes of the simplisms and places war in its full context. PF: "I really wrote the book for younger people. I wasn't aware ... that I would get so much flak from people my age, because I thought it was fairly obvious that I thought the [Second World] War was a war in a good cause and a necessary cause. Obviously the Nazis and the German armed forces had to be destroyed. No question about it." "I was trying to make it impossible for people to talk again about body counts,... as if the people being killed were not human beings with, forgive the expression, souls, no matter how loathsome or offensive. I killed a great many Germans, and I doubt if I killed a single Nazi, actually.... Even in a good war you have to do terrible things." "I don't really object to war, in a sense. I object to not understanding war."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1088
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7022
item Program Number S0842, 1925

"Student Concerns and Fears"

Guests: McManus, Joseph. : Van Meter, Margi. : Virendra, Sunaina.

17 November 1989

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 20
Program details: Older viewers, listening to these bright young officials of the American Association of University Students, are likely to sigh--whether in relief or disappointment--and say, "How things have changed!" MK: "When I was in college, which was the Sixties and Seventies, students were in a perpetual rage about almost everything. They don't seem to be in a rage today, but what are the issues that really can get kids in college excited, overwrought, mad today?" MVM: "Tuition increase." SV: "Tuition increase."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1089
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7023
item Program Number S0843, 1926

"The Link between Attitude and Healing"

Guests: Cousins, Norman.

22 January 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 20
Program details: Mr. Cousins had written, 14 years earlier, an article about his own experience as a patient that led to his being made an adjunct professor of medicine, specializing in "psychoneuroimmunology." Mr. Cousins is careful here not to overstate his case ("It would be a mistake to encourage people to believe they can ha-ha their way out of any serious illness"), but he maintains--genially, and from the perspective of the informed layman--that how doctors treat their patients in the human sense can be nearly as important as how they treat them medically. NC: "The question is not whether we should tell [the patient] the truth, but how do we tell the truth? This is where the doctor's art comes into play. You can tell the truth in a way that will devastate a person and actually impair the environment of effective treatment, or you can tell the truth in a way that challenges."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1097
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7031
item Program Number S0844, 1927

"What's Up with Capitalism?"

Guests: Forbes, Malcom S.

17 January 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 21
Program details: Another visit with the world's most exuberant capitalist, on topics ranging from the bad press the Robber Barons have got to the future of Eastern Europe. Two samples from Mr. Forbes: "Somehow it has a better aura if you put all your money into a J-boat and defend the America's Cup in the middle of the Depression at very high cost than if you build a palace or light 100,000 candles." "They're going to be surprised, most of the people [in Eastern Europe] that think ... all they need to do is vote and then they have an economy. It's going to be disappointing. But I think the West is going to be surprised by the degree to which, when people are freed--and most of those people have had an education; they're not coming from centuries of blackness and darkness and chaos. These were countries that had economies before ... I think we're going to be surprised by the relative rapidity with which the creeping capitalism begins to trot."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1093
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7027
item Program Number S0845, 1928

"Ed Koch, Veteran Politico, Speaks Out"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

17 January 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 21
Program details: As WFB puts it in his introduction, "Our guest today is for the first time in memory a private citizen," having been defeated by David Dinkins in a four-way Democratic primary. Defeat doesn't seem to have dampened his spirits, on anything from the ACLU ("I liked them when they supported the rights of other people to advocate whatever they wanted to ... But [then] they became ... advocates of the bizarre ideas") to the difference between ethnic pride and racism. WFB: "Bloc voting is in part the kind of ethnocentrism which doesn't offend us ... But ethnocentrism which is really a reflection of hostility to the other race is something more ... Now what kind of ethnocentrism was it that brought Mr. Dinkins in? Both kinds?" EK: "Well, I would say 'both kinds' is fair. But there's no question that if you get 97 per cent of the black vote there is an element other than racial pride. No other group has ever voted that way."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1094
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7028
item Program Number S0846, 1929

"What's Up with Evangelical Christianity?"

Guests: Sproul, R. C. (Robert Charles), 1939-

22 January 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 22
Program details: Dr. Sproul had founded his Ligonier Ministries to fill the gap in Christian education between, as Mr. Kinsley summarizes, "Sunday Schools on the one hand and graduate seminaries on the other." He proves here to be a likable apologist from the Evangelical point of view, dealing with-even if not managing to solve in half an hour-questions such as the problem of pain and the sense in which the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible are true. "We can only embrace by faith what we understand at least in part by the mind. This is when Augustine says that rationality is a necessary precondition for authentic faith. A faith without rationality he defined as credulity, and I agree with him. That's where superstition comes into religion, and there's a great deal of that."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1098
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7032
item Program Number S0847, 1930

"The Art of Negotiating"

Guests: Burt, Richard.

21 February 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 22
Program details: More than a year after our last look at the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) negotiations (see Firing Line s0795, with Henry Kissinger), and even as the East-West dynamic was being radically recast by events in Germany, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, Mr. Burt gives us a sobering but illuminating insider's view of everything from nuclear proliferation in the Third World, to the stabilizing effect of redundant weapons. RB: "There is, in fact, a kind of second Russian Revolution under way. Remember, at the beginning of the first French Revolution no one would have predicted that 13 years later Napoleon's army would have been marching around Europe."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1099
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7033
item Program Number S0848, 1931

"A Princely Look at Russia and Eastern Europe"

Guests: Romanov, Nicholas.

22 February 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 23
Program details: Even before the Gorbachev regime had disintegrated, there was talk of restoring the Russian monarchy, and Prince Nicholas's was one of the names often mentioned. Here he speaks movingly and informatively of the country he regards "as his homeland, although his parents had fled before he was born. If you could just install a czar or a king in Moscow it would not solve problems.... What has to be recreated is something that has been partially lost... It's a national feeling, a feeling of pride, historical pride, national pride ... Then even a Romanov fits in the picture, because it's part of the past and can smoothly bring over the past and tie it up with the present. We need that. We, as exiles, also need to recognize present Russian history as part of our history."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1101
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7035
item Program Number S0849, 1932

"Is There a Theme to The Bonfire of the Vanities?"

Guests: Wolfe, Tom.

17 January 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 24
Program details: Is Mr. Wolfe simply an (unusually brilliant) observer? Or does he have a reform agenda, a la Dickens and Zola? A quicksilver conversation about the social scene, the art of the novel, and more. TW: "New York and many large cities in this country today are like resort communities in that the wealth, the prestige, celebrity, high life, luxury belong to one set of people. Political power belongs to the natives. And the advantages of the swell life are yours only so long as there is no conflict... with the native political structure." ... TW: "I never like to think of Bonfire in terms of a thesis because ... that sets boundaries. If it's only this, then it can't be that." WFB: "Yes, I understand that, but at the same time I simply decline to think of you as entirely passive... I believe that you do get indignant. I believe that there are things you genuinely don't like even though you try to treat them with a certain dispassion that makes them literature."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1095
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7029
item Program Number S0850, 1933

"Why Do Things Work in Switzerland and Not in the U.S.A.?"

Guests: Galbraith, Evan G. : Freymond, Jacques.

22 February 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 24
Program details: "We're in Switzerland," Mr. Buckley begins, "unquestionably the smallest nation to exercise such influence ... since the heyday of Portugal and Athens." The mystery is how the country not only survives but prospers when "it seems to violate all the rules": it has four official languages, its cantons make their own laws, and "it is the most militarized country in the West in terms of per-capita obligations, and hasn't fought a war since the days of Napoleon." It's easier to ask than to answer; M. Freymond is doubtless right in saying, "You have to explain that through the history. Switzerland is the oldest system of collective security in the world--seven hundred years. And it has worked." Mr. Galbraith adds the banker's perspective: Switzerland has "a long tradition against protectionism," "a bank secrecy ... which is enforced by criminal laws," and a combination of "hard work and capital." All in all, a pleasant tour of this lovely country.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1100
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7034
item Program Number S0851, 1934

"Should We Legitimize the Current Practice of Living Together?"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Van den Haag, Ernest.

22 January 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 25
Program details: "San Francisco had passed a domestic partnership" law, giving some of the legal benefits of marriage to unmarried couples, whether gay or straight. An article in Mr. Kinsley's magazine had said this was the wrong direction: the answer was to permit "gay marriage." After a lively discussion of the new modalities, Mr. Buckley speaks on behalf of old-fashioned common sense: "Permit me to be square enough to say that one of the problems we face today ... is the problem of the broken family, and the problem of the broken family has to do with a feeling of only tangential loyalty when people live together. Eighty-three per cent of the people who were born in the Bronx the year before last were born to single-parent households. Now it may not significantly change that situation to restore the old orthodoxy, but I should think it would move in that direction."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1096
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7030
item Program Number S0852, 1935

"What Do They Do about Drugs in England and Amsterdam?"

Guests: Gazzaniga, Michael S.

22 May 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 25
Program details: Another go at the drug question--this time by looking, with a close student of the matter, at what has actually resulted in places that have, in different ways, liberalized their drugs laws. The city of Amsterdam, as Mr. Kinsley reminds us, had decriminalized possession of marijuana; Britain had a policy (partly abandoned) of giving maintenance doses of heroin to registered addicts. Mr. Gazzaniga has the facts at his finger tips and gives us a detail-filled counterpoint to the recent Firing Line debate on drugs (See Firing Line FLS107): "You have to remember the magnitude of the problem was slight [in Britain] compared to the United States. In 1968 there were only 2,000 [heroin] addicts in all of the UK, while probably in New York at that time there were 150,000. So right away when you go to use these cross-cultural comparisons, you have to be very careful."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1104
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7038
item Program Number S0853, 1936

"Is England Still Influencing America?"

Guests: Hitchens, Christopher. : O'Sullivan, John.

22 May 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 26
Program details: Not as many fireworks as one might have expected from these two friendly antagonists--both guests being Britons who have spent much of their working lives in the United States--but an amusing look at the present state of the "special relationship." CH: "Why can't I go into a supermarket without seeing a picture of Princess Diana, whom I left England to get away from? ... If I go back to England, what do I get? McDonald's hamburgers and American nuclear bases." ... JO: "The reason why the Americans always wanted the British in the European Community was because they would represent [the Americans'] thought, the ideas of free trade and free markets, which would mean that the Community would never be closed to American goods and American capital."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1105
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCX048
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7039
item Program Number S0854, 1937

"A King Speaks Out"

Guests: Constantine II, Former King of the Hellenes, 1940-

22 May 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 26
Program details: King Constantine was deposed by the Colonels in 1967 and had stepped foot in his country only once since, for his mother's funeral. But he had spent the intervening years thinking deeply about the role of monarchy in the late 20th century, and this show proves as instructive as it is moving. MK: "Mr. Buckley,... a lot of people may be thinking you're verging on conscious self-parody here. Are you actually a monarchist? ..." WFB: "In respect of America I'm a republican with a capital R and a small r. I don't, however, feel that it's ever correct to assume that the cultural institutions that are natural for a particular country are natural elsewhere." ... King Constantine: "The tremendous success of the king and his two prime ministers ... in restoring democracy in Spain is a wonderful example of what can be achieved in countries like mine."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1106
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7040
item Program Number S0855, 1938

"What Is Intellect?"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

6 June 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 27
Program details: The title question does not address interesting but superficial topics like IQ versus other measures of intelligence. It goes right down into questions of materiality versus immateriality, body and soul. MA: "We cannot think without our brains, but we don't think with them.... The brain is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of intellectual activity." ... "There is no theology in the argument at all. As you say, there are consequences. If the immateriality of the intellect is denied, it raises a very serious question about the immortality of the soul. If the immateriality of the intellect is affirmed, there's some reason for supposing that an immortal soul is possible."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1108
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7042
item Program Number S0856, 1939

"Who Belongs in the Loony Bin?"

Guests: Millett, Kate. : Farber, Seth.

6 June 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 28
Program details: Ms. Millett was one of the founding mothers of modern American feminism, the author of Sexual Politics. In 1973 her family had her committed to a mental institution as a manic-depressive, and her story since, recounted in her new book, was one of doubting her own sanity and finally examining the nature of sanity in general. A disturbing and fascinating show. SF: "What I think Kate documents so powerfully is how once a label is put upon her and once the people around her start accepting the psychiatric version of reality as the absolute truth, then any statement she makes, any action she makes, can be interpreted as a sign that she's crazy."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1107
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7041
item Program Number S0857, 2001

"Does a Politician Have to Be a Good Actor?"

Guests: Moore, Roger.

22 February 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 28
Program details: In the age of television, would aspiring politicians be well advised to take a screen test? This relaxed conversation between two old friends may not tell us much we couldn't have guessed, but they say it so well. RM: "There are a number of tricks you learn in acting. You should look people in the eye. Your eyes should never waver, because the minute you look away, even if you look away to think, you've broken attention--attention and tension -- You have to look straight in the eye, and at the same time the wavering of the eye can appear to be a lie." WFB: "It usually is, I suppose, with a politician, isn't it?" ... WFB: "What about Reagan?" RM: "The Great Communicator." WFB: "Why?" RM: "His ability in closeup. He came, maybe, with a natural ability ... but I think those years of experience of talking to cameras paid off. There is an honesty and a sincerity, and an ability not to do things that nerves otherwise might do."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1102
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7036
item Program Number S0858, 2002

"The Legal Implications of Abortion"

Guests: Tribe, Laurence H.

6 June 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 29
Program details: Mr. Kinsley begins: "The talk-show host Larry King says that when the subject is abortion, the host never learns anything new. One goal of today's program is to prove him wrong." Whether that goal was achieved is debatable, but it certainly is unusual to hear someone who says, as Mr. Tribe does, "I think it's awfully hard to deny that forcing a woman to remain pregnant against her will, to make a use of her body that she has come to find profoundly offensive,... is a deep assault on her freedom and, indeed, on her equality," also say, "The fetus surely is alive. There's no doubt that it's a member of the human species. Its very helplessness cries out for protection." An unusually thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion of a topic that often incites to a trading of slogans.
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1109
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7043
item Program Number S0859, 2003

"The Battle over Freedom of Expression"

Guests: Mathews, Tom. : Chapin, Schuyler.

10 July 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 29
Program details: "After months of heated public debate over the National Endowment for the Arts' funding of obscene material, four artists"--including Karen Finley, the woman who covered herself with chocolate--had been denied renewals of their grants. This program offers a genial and instructive conversation about the whole question of support for the arts. Two samples: WFB: "When you consider that the record of the public critics is so dismal--I mean, Van Gogh couldn't sell a single canvas; ninety obituaries were written about Bach, only two of which mentioned that he also composed music--what makes us feel that the NEA is spurring on the kind of critical judgment that makes us satisfied that the money is being well spent?" SC: "Part of the answer is simple: You never know. But because you do not know, I do not think it is plausible to withdraw patronage, which in one way or another has been key to the creation of art." .. . TM: "Patronage has always come with strings.... It's unreasonable for an artist today to think that funds that come from the Federal Government won't have some strings attached."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1111
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7045
item Program Number S0860, 2004

"The Opposition to Cuomo"

Guests: Rinfret, Pierre. : London, Herbert.

10 July 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 30
Program details: Mr. Rinfret had notoriously been chosen by a group of Republican pols going through one of their number's Rolodex. Mr. London, who passionately wanted the GOP nomination, does not hide his bitterness. The result is sometimes unpleasant, but good theater. PR: "You're really out to destroy the Republican Party." HL: "That is certainly not the case." PR: "That's what you told me." HL: "I said I'm out to destroy any party that continues to increase taxes without any regard at all for the working-class population in this state." WFB: "That would or would not include the Republican Party?" HL: "That would certainly include the Republican Party." WFB: "Therefore you are out to destroy the Republican Party."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1112
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7046
item Program Number S0861, 2005

"Should Lawyers Work for Nothing?"

Guests: Pilpel, Harriet F. : Abrams, Floyd.

10 July 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 30
Program details: New York State was desperately short on public defenders for the poor, and so the state's chief judge had proposed requiring lawyers to spend 20 hours a year on pro bono work. Many lawyers had responded that this was a violation of the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments. Our guests here are two lawyers who believe that, as Mr. Abrams puts it, "I don't think it is unjust or unconstitutional for the state to make a claim on you ... to devote some minimum amount of service for what is viewed as the public good." A productive discussion of the title question and related matters, including the unlikelihood of an unrepresented tenant's winning in housing court, and the fact that lawyers are so widely hated.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1113
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7047
item Program Number S0862, 2006

"The Cambodian Dilemma"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J.

1 August 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 31
Program details: In one of the stranger enemy-of-my-enemy situations, the United States, not only under President Carter but also under Presidents Reagan and Bush, had supported the infamous Khmer Rouge against Cambodia's Vietnamese invaders. Secretary of State James Baker had just withdrawn that support, and Mr. Solarz had persuaded congressional Democrats to go along. This show offers a serious discussion of a tangled moral and geopolitical problem. WFB: "We tend to ... [be] so contented by the general evidence that the Communist enterprise is self-discrediting that we assume that... it is everywhere discredited. Unhappily that is a false and optimistic epistemology." ... SS: "We have to recognize that this is a situation in which our influence is at best highly limited. China and Vietnam will have far more to say about the future of Cambodia than we will."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1118
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7052
item Program Number S0863, 2007

"Economics Is Not a Dismal Science"

Guests: Buchholz, Todd. : Passell, Peter.

24 July 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 31
Program details: The assertion in the title is borne out by this entertaining and substantive look at various "defunct economists," to borrow Keynes's phrase (quoted by Mr. Kinsley), and their modern followers. PP: "There's economic theology from the Right, which these days is more dramatic than economic theology from the Left. There's no Left left, let's face it. There's a rabble of ideas ... from the Left, and there's quite an organized and interesting set of ideas from the Right. And I'm not from the Right." ... TB: "It's much easier to be Richard Gephardt and travel the country condemning the practice of foreign countries and claiming that the only way we're going to preserve American industry and American jobs is if we erect trade barriers. That's just a lot more stirring ... than if you agree with the 98 per cent of economists who believe he's wrong."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1114
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7048
item Program Number S0864, 2008

"Spies: Heroes or Thugs?"

Guests: Raviv, Dan, 1954- : Melman, Yossi.

24 July 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 32
Program details: Our guests are the co-authors of Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel's Intelligence Community, and under Mr. Buckley's questioning they tell us things we would never even have thought to ask. YM: "Friendly nations do spy against each other. They share information, they collaborate, yet at the same time they spy against each other." WFB: "Well, (a) I know this, and (b) I approve of it. That is to say, however intimate Israeli-American relations become, it seems to me only prudent that to the extent that we can get information about Israel that Israel hasn't given us, we proceed to listen for it, and vice versa." . . . DR: "When it comes to operational capabilities, simply getting a job done, I've heard it repeatedly from CIA veterans: 'Nobody does it like the Israelis.' ... But we still look at the strategy behind it and find that often it is flawed. The politicians are listening to their intelligence agencies, and we think that it's about time for better control."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1115
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7049
item Program Number S0865, 2009

"An Extraordinary Supreme Court Decision"

Guests: Neuhaus, Richard John. : Fried, Charles.

24 July 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 24
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 32
Program details: Justice Scalia had stunned many conservatives with his opinion in Employment Division v. Smith, ruling that a state's drug laws did not have to make an exception for Indians' ceremonial use of peyote. Not all conservatives, though, which lays the groundwork for today's profound discussion. RJN: "In one of the most callous statements ... in the recent history of Court language, he [Scalia] says we will recognize that this will create a certain disability for minorities in our society, namely those that aren't able to muster a majority in the legislature." ... CF: "A lot of countries ... proclaimed freedom of religion--for instance, Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union--and what they meant... was: you're free to be religious so long as you are intensely private about it.... If I thought Scalia's decision were taking us to a kind of French Revolutionary notion I would be as horrified as you are, but I don't see it that way."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1116
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7050
item Program Number S0866, 2010

"Why All the Fuss over Brennan's Successor?"

Guests: Kilpatrick, James Jackson, 1920-

1 August 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 25
Transcript: Box/Folder 183 : 33
Program details: Justice William Brennan had just retired after 34 years as the brains of the liberal-activist wing of the Supreme Court, and Judge David Souter had been nominated to replace him. This high-spirited, deeply informative discussion ranges from the specific to the general and back again. (WFB and Kilpo aren't even afraid to say that Brown v. Board was wrongly argued.) WFB: "It seems to me Mr. Souter would be entitled to say, 'Well, I'm against abortion, but whatever I'm against has nothing to do with how I will reason constitutionally.' "... JJK: "I don't know, speaking as a conservative, exactly what I would want a conservative Justice to do. What activism would I ask of him? I'm not sure. . . . Take a look at the Miranda rule and stop it a little bit. Stop the excesses of the exclusionary rule. That's about all you can ask of a conservative on the Court."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1117
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7051
item Program Number S0867, 2011

"William F. Buckley Jr. on the Firing Line"

Guests: Kinsley, Michael E. : Kramer, Michael. : Pakenham, Michael.

1 August 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 1
Program details: The semi-annual frolic in which the guests question their host, except that our guests this time seem less interested in tripping up Mr. Buckley than in finding out just what these puzzling conservatives do believe. Mr. Kinsley: "Suppose that Bush got Souter into a room before he picked him and said to him, 'Now just whisper into my ear. Would you or would you not overturn Roe v. Wade? ...' Which answer do you think Bush wanted?" WFB: "I don't know, and I'll tell you why I don't know. Because a lot of people who are against abortion are afraid of overturning Roe v. Wade?... They feel it would create, at least for a while, close to a civil-war atmosphere in a lot of states, places like Missouri and Louisiana." ... Mr. Pakenham: "It seems to me that the position you've taken on the decriminalization of narcotics has got to be either true loony libertarianism, which I find hard to scan but am delighted to hear you defend, or it's a very neat way--as is being increasingly perceived by minority leaders--of keeping a troublesome underclass comatose."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1119
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7053
item Program Number S0868, 2012

"Oil Gouging and Japanese Skulduggery"

Guests: Pickens, T. Boone.

20 September 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 1
Program details: Not the most intellectually satisfying of Firing Lines, but Mr. Pickens's righteous indignation with the Japanese makes for good theater. TBP: "I have been given an opportunity to see some part of corporate Japan on the inside, and I want to see more of it. I want to become a member of the board of directors, I want to participate in the management of the company.... I want to be given a chance. In America you get a chance. And I don't understand why in Japan you don't get a chance."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1121
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7055
item Program Number S0869, 2013

"Crime and Punishment"

Guests: Tigar, Michael. : Schwarzschild, Henry.

20 September 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 2
Program details: Host and guests find some fresh angles in this stimulating return to an old question. WFB: "As long as you are against capital punishment under any circumstances you are willing to use the law in any way that you possibly can to manipulate the jury to agree with you, de facto." MT: "I hope I misunderstand what you said, but if that is a statement that I would manipulate the law in a way contrary to the law, then that's not true." ... HS: "... the heart of our disagreement with you: namely, ... whether it isn't much more importantly true that a society that uses homicide as an instrument of social policy, when it's called the death penalty, is to that extent regressive and barbarous ..." WFB: "[That position was not accepted by] that barbarian Immanuel Kant or that barbarian Hegel, who said that precisely it is an affirmation of someone's humanity and rationality to hold him responsible for his actions."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1122
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGOGU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7056
item Program Number S0870, 2014

"Are Vouchers and/or Choice the Way to Go in School?"

Guests: O'Beirne, Kate Walsh. : Fliegel, Sy.

1 October 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 2
Program details: A rich discussion of an emotion-laden topic. Mrs. O'Beirne: "Among more affluent families, they choose schools all the time? What's revolutionary and, I guess, threatening now to the education establishment is that many of us are arguing that low-income families should have the same choices that other Americans have always had." ... Mr. Fliegel (who was formerly a superintendent in the New York City public-school system): "You can't allow the bureaucracy to become an excuse for not doing anything.... Too many schools say: I can't do it; the bureaucracy won't let me do it; the unions won't let me do it. Then what are you doing here?"
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1124
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7058
item Program Number S0871, 2015

"A Family Quarrel in the Conservative Party"

Guests: Sobran, Joseph. : Lambertson, Giles.

1 October 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 30
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 3
Program details: President Bush's Desert Shield had indeed provoked a fierce family quarrel, with charges like "Interventionist!" and "Isolationist!" being hurled across the dinner table. There is more heat than light in this half-hour, but the central points do get raised. WFB: "Something should have been done about Hitler earlier than it was. Fifty-five million people were killed in World War II. We should have prevented it, right? Now if Hussein is allowed to develop a nuclear arsenal, it seems to me that he is of a temperament that simply casts aside normal humane considerations, as he did in Iran ..." GL: "If we manage to get him out of Kuwait and get him home again and nothing else, he'll consolidate his power and do it again. I think he is a threat." JS: "... this guy, in an eight-year war, could only take a 50-mile strip of Iran ... He just doesn't seem to me to be anything like a Hitler, much less a threat to us."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1125
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7059
item Program Number S0872, 2016

"Are Presidential Campaigns Mostly Theater?"

Guests: Simon, Roger. : Kinsley, Michael E.

20 September 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 31
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 3
Program details: A sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying look at how Presidents are made (sausage, anyone?). Mr. Kinsley (who introduces the show and then takes his place as a guest) points out that our current primary system, now widely thought to need serious reform, was itself a reform of the smoke-filled-room system. RS: "It has been suggested, I think with some accuracy, that the Republicans select stronger, more disciplined candidates because their process is slightly less democratic. They don't allow as many small, factional groups to control primaries." . . . "We watch [debates] as we watch the Indy 500, to see who crashes and burns." . .. MK: "Would that we could get back to what was considered outrageous manipulation and anti-democratic practices in 1968."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1123
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7057
item Program Number S0873, 2017, 2017R

"Two Friends Talk: Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr.: Part I"

Guests: Reagan, Ronald.

11 October 1990, 1 September 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 4
Program details: There are no fireworks at this meeting of two old friends, but there is broad and deep discussion of the world and how Mr. Reagan may have changed it. WFB: "Conceivably, might there be USSR-American cooperation in developing SDI?" RR: "Well... I have told [Gorbachev] that I would advocate making that information open to the world ... in return for all of us destroying our nuclear weapons. But I said the reason for having it is- I used the example of World War I. I said all the nations of World War I met and outlawed poison gas, but we all kept our gas masks. I said, Who can say that down the way somewhere there won't be another Hitler, there won't be another madman that could use the knowledge of how to make weapons and blackmail the earth?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1130
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGOU6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7064
item Program Number S0874, 2018, 2018R

"Two Friends Talk: Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr.: Part II"

Guests: Reagan, Ronald.

11 October 1990, 8 September 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 131 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 4
Program details: There are no fireworks at this meeting of two old friends, but there is broad and deep discussion of the world and how Mr. Reagan may have changed it. WFB: "Conceivably, might there be USSR-American cooperation in developing SDI?" RR: "Well... I have told [Gorbachev] that I would advocate making that information open to the world ... in return for all of us destroying our nuclear weapons. But I said the reason for having it is- I used the example of World War I. I said all the nations of World War I met and outlawed poison gas, but we all kept our gas masks. I said, Who can say that down the way somewhere there won't be another Hitler, there won't be another madman that could use the knowledge of how to make weapons and blackmail the earth?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1131
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064EGOZG
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7065
item Program Number S0875, 2019

"Educational Practices Gone Wrong"

Guests: Cheney, Lynne V.

2 October 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 4
Program details: Mrs. Cheney had just issued a report on the American educational establishment called Tyrannical Machines, and under Mr. Buckley's questioning she outlines lucidly and engagingly what she would do to change that establishment. WFB: "I heard somebody say that Aristotle, if he were to rematerialize, would not qualify to teach philosophy in a public school in New York City. That's not an exaggeration, right?" LC: "No, it's true. He wouldn't have been properly certified. He wouldn't have taken the right number and kinds of courses in education." . . . LC: "It doesn't work just to put your head down and keep ramming against the SAT or the way we train teachers or the way we select textbooks. You just waste your energy doing that. The way we should approach these ... is to set alternatives into place. Then you set competition going and then you give people motivation to improve."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1126
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7060
item Program Number S0876, 2020

"The Pros and Cons of Coal"

Guests: Quenon, Robert. : Pope, Carl.

9 October 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 5
Program details: This meeting of an environmentalist and a coal man is surprisingly uncontentious--but very informative, as each finds ways of making the subject vivid to the layman. Mr. Quenon: "Many of the things that we know today we know as a result of the advances of science--how many parts per million there are in this piece of atmosphere and that piece of water.... I defy you to travel anywhere except a remote Pacific island to find an atmosphere that's as clean as ours is." ... Mr. Pope: "If I had a business behind your house, and as part of this business I made big barrels of sulphuric acid, you might benefit from my business; I might be producing electricity and you might be burning my electricity. I don't think you'd find it acceptable for me to go and dump my barrels of sulphuric acid in your back yard, although this might be the low-cost solution."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1127
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7061
item Program Number S0877, 2021

"Does Appalachia Deserve Our Tax Money?"

Guests: Wise, Robert E., Jr. : Weidenbaum, Murray.

9 October 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 5
Program details: As Mr. Kinsley points out, the War on Poverty was prompted not by the inner cities but by Appalachia. In the 35 years since, conditions there have improved greatly but far from completely. This sometimes heated discussion explores the history and the current state of play. REW: "Even though the Reagan Administration sought to eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission several times, four times on an overwhelming bipartisan vote it was approved. Those were a lot of representatives not from Appalachia, but they recognized the importance of this program and they also recognized how little it cost in terms of what it brought back." MW: "There's an old principle they understand. It's called back scratching. You scratch my back ... I'll scratch your back .. ." RW: "It's also called federalism--recognizing the needs of each region of our country."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1128
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7062
item Program Number S0878, 2022

"The Illusion and Reality of China"

Guests: Mosher, Steven W.

9 October 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 6
Program details: Sixteen months after Tiananmen Square, what's going on in China? Our guest is, as Mr. Kinsley puts it, "a notorious figure in ... American relations with China." As a Stanford graduate student in the 1970s, Mr. Mosher was allowed to visit a small Chinese village. The reports he brought back--of forced abortion and infanticide--infuriated the Chinese officials and led Stanford to expel him. He here fills us in on the often grim but fascinating story of what has happened since. WFB: "I don't think it necessarily follows that people who are sadists,... even genocidists, can't be charming, do you? I experienced Chou En-lai very briefly, but I did find him absolutely charming.... This didn't mean that I was going to go back home and write that he was other than what I knew him to be." . . . SM: "I don't believe that the [Communist] ideology has a great hold in China today. ... On the other hand, the institutional apparatus of Communism, the oppressive secret police, the use of the army to inhibit and, indeed, if necessary, actually kill people to force them into the political line, that's still very much in place."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1129
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7063
item Program Number S0879, 2023

"What Do We Owe Our Country?"

Guests: Friedman, Milton, 1912-

13 December 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 6
Program details: "Mr. Buckley," as Mr. Kinsley puts it, "will be required to defend himself from charges of apostasy by a conservative even better credentialed than himself." WFB's book Gratitude had proposed a year's national service between high school and college. Fasten your seatbelt and watch these two old comrades-in-arms have at it. MF: "You, of all people ... somebody who's spent his life trying to fight the overgrown government, who's spent his life defending the virtues of individual freedom, of the free market, and here you come up with a program that's the opposite of everything you've stood for all your life." ... WFB: "We live in a society in which young people and older people don't give any evidence of gratitude for what it is that we inherit, and I'm looking for the redevelopment of an ethos that causes people to show that they are willing to reciprocate." MF: "The question is, why is it that we have had so much of a reduction in the sense of gratitude? In my opinion it's primarily because we've been doing so much through government ... and as a result we have destroyed a sense of individual responsibility and responsibility to one another."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1134
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWWGU
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7068
item Program Number S0880, 2024

"How Does International Law Affect Foreign Policy?"

Guests: Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927-2003.

13 December 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 7
Program details: Senator Moynihan proves an excellent guide through these thickets, in a discussion prompted by President Bush's having invoked international law as the basis for our countering of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. WFB: "We either know or we don't know that international law has been broken--people disagree about that. Sometimes six lawyers say yes and six lawyers say no...." DPM: "They do that before the Supreme Court five days a week when it's in session, and no one ever doubts that there's a federal legal system.... That law is there, it's in writing, rarely is it truly ambiguous."... WFB: "Can [Bush] say to Congress: I don't need you any more, because the United Nations Charter's the supreme law by which I'm governed in this matter?" DPM: "And under Article 25 a nation must abide by a ruling of the Security Council. I think he could say that. I hope he doesn't."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1132
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7066
item Program Number S0881, 2025

"New Insights on the Russian Revolution"

Guests: Pipes, Richard.

13 December 1990

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 7
Program details: A gripping look at the Soviet Union, with a man who has spent all his adult life studying it. RP: "Intellectuals [in Russia], as in many other parts of the world, had a very ambivalent attitude towards the Bolshevik experiment. They didn't approve of it, and yet they felt that the cause which Bolshevism represented was in some way progressive, whereas the cause of capitalism was regressive.... So, for example, during the critical civil war, the socialist intelligentsia sided with the Bolsheviks and not with the Whites." ... "There are signs that the right-wing groups [i.e., the hard-liners] are becoming very impatient with all of this [perestroika and glasnost], and it's entirely possible that they will, in the next few months, strike, and by means of a Putsch impose a right-wing dictatorship, with or without Gorbachev" (as in fact they did attempt, eight months after this conversation).
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1133
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GB74
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7067
item Program Number S0882, 2026

"Does Oil Dominate World Policy?"

Guests: Yergin, Daniel.

8 January 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 8
Program details: Opponents of our intervention in the Persian Gulf were shouting, "We won't die for oil!" How important is oil? "Our whole society is really shaped by oil," Mr. Yergin explains. "It determines where we live, how we live, how we commute, how we travel, how we conduct our courtships." WFB: "Oughtn't we to say to Saudi Arabia: We've been in there and we've helped you during these very, very tough days. Now please sign a 50-year accord to sell oil at a price that makes it impossible to revive OPEC. Would that be sound statesmanship in your lights?" DY: "Well, it's certainly a very intriguing idea if you can get it to work in this era of nation-states. Where it maybe really happens is not in a de jure but a de facto fashion ... But the one problem you always come down to is, What is the just price? ... It all depends on whether you're a buyer or a seller."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1136
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7070
item Program Number S0883, 2027

"Are Blacks and Hispanics the New Majority? What Does This Portend?"

Guests: Brookhiser, Richard. : Chavez, Linda.

8 January 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 8
Program details: A civil and productive conversation on the hot topic of ethnicity in the United States. WFB: "Ms. Chavez, in your judgment does the vision--or, if you prefer, the fantasy--of the WASP still affect ethnic thought in America in the sense of its being an archetype?" LC: "What troubles me ... is that somehow we seem to be talking about bloodlines here. ... In fact, in the United States what is most remarkable is that these ethnic divisions disappear over time, and it is now more common for Eastern and Southern Europeans to marry outside of their group ... And I think that is increasingly becoming true of Hispanics, and we even see some increase in intermarriage rates between blacks and whites." ... KB: "[WASPs], because they happened to get here first, put a character type in place, and then what happens after that is assimilation ... A lot of the ... problems we have come from an abandonment of these WASP principles of living, and the main villains in that were WASPs themselves."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1137
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7071
item Program Number S0884, 2028

"Are All Religions Equal?"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

8 January 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 9
Program details: When in doubt about the nature of truth and the way philosophical truth applies to religion, call in our time's philosopher par excellence. MA: "There's no Chinese physics; there is no Japanese physics or Hindu physics or mathematics or technology ... In some sense the whole world has been Westernized by technology, has it not? ..." WFB: "And do you predict-" MA: "That in due course people will be aware of the fact that acting and living and using the truths of these transcultural elements in their culture requires them to face up to the inconsistency between what is asserted logically in technology and physics and mathematics, and what they hold in their religions." ... WFB: "If you can foretell the collapse of the non-rational aspects of the religions you cite ... then why can you not forecast a recognition of the truths of religion within our own culture?" MA: "Because our own culture ... is dominated by a philosophy that's made a mockery of truth: positivism. It asserts that the only truths we have are the truths of science."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1135
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7069
item Program Number S0885, 2029

"Momentous Changes in Eastern Europe"

Guests: Kirkpatrick, Jeane J.

15 January 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 9
Program details: A rich discussion of Eastern Europe and, especially, the Soviet Union, a year after the Berlin Wall came down and just as Gorbachev had shaken his Western supporters by the crackdown in Lithuania. JJK: "I believe that a totalitarian state almost by definition requires an ideological core, because how else are they going to control culture as well as society?" ... "I think [Gorbachev] probably is [still a closet Communist]. I've talked to a number of Soviet reformed Communists and reformed socialists and dissident democrats, some of whom have known Gorbachev quite well and who believe that he has always been a Communist, in fact, on the model of Dubcek. He was seeking Communism with a human face, believed it was possible--his fundamental delusion. But Communism with a human face involved a lot of diminishing of the role of brute force in that government."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1138
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7072
item Program Number S0886, 2030

"Failure of Morality in Foreign Policy"

Guests: Martin, David, 1914- : Sanders, Sol.

15 January 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 10
Program details: This show is a bit slow moving, but gripping even so in the stories both guests have to tell. We start off with the subject of Mr. Martin's book: Churchill's dropping of Draza Mihailovic in favor of Josip Broz Tito as our ally in Yugoslavia in World War II. It is Mr. Martin's thesis, backed up by newly declassified British files, that Churchill was deliberately misled by a Communist sympathizer in British intelligence, who convinced him that Mihailovic was a fascist. SS: "Traditionalist conservative figures in nationalist movements are not those with which Americans can immediately commune.... It has always been easier for us to deal with Communists, who were internationalists, who could talk to us in slogans that we would understand."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1139
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7073
item Program Number S0887, 2031

"Politics and Corruption in Higher Education"

Guests: Sykes, Charles J., 1954- : Spengemann, William.

15 January 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 10
Program details: Mr. Sykes here continues the free-swinging attack on the modern university that he began in The Hollow Men and earlier books. He takes as a locus classicus of academic corruption Dartmouth College; the only weakness in this show is that Mr. Spengemann, who defends his institution, doesn't speak up more. When he does, the sparks fly. WS: "I don't understand, Charles. On the one hand you say that students ... are told that nothing is more right than anything else, and then in the next breath you tell us that they're being told continually what's right and what's wrong?." CS: "You have hit on one of the paradoxes, which is that the politically correct approach to these issues begins with the idea of deconstruction--the idea that if we can't undermine the state structures we'll undermine the structures of language. We'll tell you that all beliefs are equal.... But the idea is not to leave a blank slate. It is to clear the field for the imposition of often very, very draconian ideological perspectives."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1140
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7074
item Program Number S0888, 2032

"Remembering Malcolm Muggeridge"

Guests:

15 January 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 11
Program details: It's not as if Firing Line viewers were being deprived of their Muggeridge fix by his death (in November 1990, at the age of 87). Two of the shows featuring him, "How Does One Find Faith?" and "Do We Need Religion or Religious Institutions?" (Firing Line s0432 and s0433), had been rebroadcast every year at Christmastime, a tradition that would continue throughout Firing Line's own life. But this masterly redaction brings in Mr. Muggeridge's comments--which are often, as WFB points out in the newly taped introduction, "mischievous"--on much outside the scope of those two session. One sample: "I regard liberalism as the great disease of our society, and when I said that people like Mrs. Roosevelt, admirable though they were in their intention, would be seen to have done more damage than people like Hitler and Stalin, I meant precisely that."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1141
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709KJE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7075
item Program Number S0889, 2033

"Desert Storm and the Plight of the Democrats"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J.

9 April 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 12
Program details: In the aftermath of Desert Storm, President Bush, as Mr. Kinsley points out, "had the highest poll ratings since poll ratings began," and Democrats, especially those who had "left hostages to fortune in the form of quotations warning about huge American casualties," were hurting. Mr. Solarz was one of a comparatively few congressional Democrats who had voted in favor of going to war, and he uses his position of strength to launch a superb defense of his wounded brethren: "I think it's entirely legitimate to question the judgment of those who opposed the resolution authorizing the use of force in the Gulf. But I think it is ludicrous for some Republicans ... to accuse those Democrats... of representing the party of appeasement."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1143
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7077
item Program Number S0890, 2034

"Are Our Presidents Lacking in Greatness?"

Guests: Shogan, Robert.

9 April 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 12
Program details: This show offers much more than a rate-the-Presidents parlor game (although that's fun too). As Mr. Shogan explains, "What I tried to do ... what I think would be valuable is, since the Presidency affects all our lives greatly, to understand what are the factors that allow Presidents to succeed in certain situations and what inhibits success." Two specifics: Reagan's success with the economy stemmed from the interaction of "his ideology, the feeling that freedom is the greatest good and government is its enemy; his values, his respect for the American past; and his kind of personality, which took so much of the sting out of his rhetoric." LBJ was "a consensual President"--meaning that "He pretended that there was just a common agreement on nearly everything. ... He did that because he didn't want to have to explain himself."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1144
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7078
item Program Number S0891, 2035

"Blacks and the Failure of the War on Poverty"

Guests: Lemann, Nicholas.

9 April 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 13
Program details: Mr. Lemann's controversial book looks at the subject of black poverty from an arresting angle: by considering the movement of blacks from the rural South to the urban North in the mid 20th century to be every bit as much a mass immigration as the 19th-century movement of rural Italians or Irish to those same Northern cities. If we accept his construct, it has major implications for where poor blacks might be on the assimilation curve. NL: "There's a whole theory that I just disagree with, which is: the key to individual economic success is empowerment in American society.... I don't accept the paradigm: Grandpa came to Ellis Island and he became empowered as a hod carrier, and then Dad became empowered as an IBM junior executive. It sounds like a wacky concept to me, and the real question is: Do people get the skills they need and the motivation to get a job and join the mainstream of American society?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1145
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7079
item Program Number S0892, 2036

"The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus"

Guests: D'Souza, Dinesh, 1961-

21 May 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 13
Program details: The discussion, like Mr. D'Souza's book, is about all aspects of racial and sexual politics on campus, from admissions policies to speech codes to curriculum. DD: "When universities practice preferential admissions, and when students ... are outmatched by their peers, there's a great temptation to believe that the reason I am experiencing some difficulty in reading Hamlet by Monday is not because I am not well enough prepared, but is because Shakespeare is a white male." ... DD: "The argument is not that Bach wrote bad music, but that Bach wrote white music, and that in a curriculum that is open to all groups there should be ... representation for other forms of music .. ." WFB: "Yes, but of course that gets into the way of the principal operative axiom of the melting-pot society, which is that people of your ethnic background, and of mine, and of Michael's, and of everybody's in this room, can adapt to a culture and exploit its special resources."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1146
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7080
item Program Number S0893, 2037

"Is Political Funding Ruining Colleges?"

Guests: Roche, George Charles.

21 May 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 14
Program details: Mr. Roche's impressive performance here reminds one why conservatives were so dismayed by his downfall eight years later. The "political funding" of the title refers to the way government funding is used as a wedge to impose affirmative action on private colleges. That is why Mr. Roche famously established Hillsdale's policy of refusing any government funding. GR: "We had matriculated blacks and women on the Hillsdale campus for over one hundred years before the government took any interest in the question one way or another." WFB: "Back when it was passing the Fugitive Slave Laws." GR: "That's right. In fact, for equal treatment irrespective of race or sex, Hillsdale was the first institution in the United States to formally write that into its charter."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1147
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7081
item Program Number S0894, 2038

"Do the Tests Show Our Students Third Rate or Worse?"

Guests: Cheney, Lynne V.

21 May 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 14
Program details: President Bush had just proposed a national achievement test for high-school students and had run into criticism both from the Left, anxious to protect the under performing teachers unions, and from the Right, uneasy with the specter of national control of local schools. Mrs. Cheney is the perfect guide to this debate, outlining what other countries do and explaining the difference between aptitude tests, which attempt to test what the student is capable of, and achievement tests, which find out what the student has actually learned. LC: "Any time you have a high-stakes exam, teachers will teach to it and students will study for it. The point is to get an exam in place that is worth teaching to, that is worthy studying for." ... "When you try to explain to a Frenchman or a Japanese or a German that we test for this thing called aptitude, they're very puzzled that we even think you can test for it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1148
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7082
item Program Number S0895, 2101, 2101R

"Is There a Problem of Nuclear Waste Disposal?"

Guests: Hollister, C. D. : Makhijani, Arjun.

4 June 1991, 27 October 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 22-23
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 15
Program details: Apart from actual meltdown, the biggest worry about nuclear power plants has to do with radioactive waste: how can you dispose of it without risking its radiation getting into the water supply, or being loosed by an earthquake? Mr. Hollister thinks he has the answer: sea mud. His verve in describing his idea (actually, an idea worked out in a 15-year study by scientists from 8 countries) is matched only by his lucidity in explaining it. CH: "To me the key is predictability. As you correctly point out, the key is going to a place where nothing has happened for the past 60 or 70 million years; therefore the next half-million years looks like a pretty safe bet, because the world is a probabilistic world."... AM: "The Department of Energy has been singularly unsuccessful politically and scientifically in managing nuclear waste. In 1970 they said: We will have a repository in 10 years. In 1982 they said: We will have a repository in 16 years. In 1990 they said: We will have a repository in 20 years."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1151
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7085
item Program Number S0896, 2102, 2102R

"Firing Line: Twenty-Five Years and Still Going Strong"

Guests: Thomas, Norman, 1884-1968. : Leary, Timothy Francis, 1920- : Ali, Muhammad, 1942- : Luce, Clare Boothe, 1903-1987. : Thatcher, Margaret. : Reagan, Ronald. : Bush, George, 1924- : Du Pont, Pierre S. [Du Pont, Pete; DuPont, Pete]

26 June 1991, 24 November 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 24-25
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 15
Program details: Firing Line had celebrated its 20th anniversary with three hour-long anthologies. For the 25th, the excerpts are triple-distilled into one glorious half-hour, framed by brief comments by Messrs. Buckley and Kinsley. Two of the excerpts remind us that not only does Firing Line comment on events, occasionally it shapes them: the Panama Canal debate may have been a factor in Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980; and it was on the Republican candidates' debate in 1988 that George Bush referred to Pete du Pont as "Pierre." One sample from the new material: WFB: "Norman Thomas ... I really didn't like him.... I think I didn't like him because he always understood himself to occupy the entire spiritual stage. Anybody who was on the other side wasn't simply wrong, he was evil."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1152
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANCWW6U
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7086
item Program Number S0897, 2103

"Is Peace Possible in the Mideast?"

Guests: Pipes, Daniel. : Hauser, Rita E.

26 June 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 26
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 16
Program details: In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Secretary of State James Baker had decided to bring peace to the Middle East. Somehow, though, the Israelis and Arabs didn't have his Nobel Prize at the top of their agenda. In an amazingly civil discussion of this always highly charged topic, Mrs. Hauser and Mr. Pipes both explain and illustrate why it is so difficult. WFB: "Mightn't we ... say that there are two irreducible minimums here: number one, Israeli security, and number two, a homeland for the Palestinians? And then say: Okay, you-all discuss the details. We'll act as a broker but this is--without calling it a plan--this is indispensable to whatever plan you work out. Is that fair?" DP: "I would not go that far." RH: "If we don't go that far and even farther we will be in procedural discussions from now until the next decade."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1153
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7087
item Program Number S0898, 2104

"Are We Unfair to the Israelis?"

Guests: Zion, Sidney. : Zogby, James J.

26 June 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 27
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 16
Program details: Back to shouting on the Middle East, in a show that offers a microcosm of the conflict there. SZ: "To say that Jordan is not Palestine is just a historical lie ... It was Palestine until 1946 ... That should be a starting point for Palestinian nationalism. In 1947 they rejected that state. In 1967 they used that territory that they said they'd be satisfied with to launch a war. And then they said that the PLO is their sole and exclusive representative, and the PLO is dedicated to the destruction of Israel--and they say so." JZ: "That's not true." SZ: "From that territory, from that land that they were never satisfied with, you want to set up another state. It would be quite suicidal for us to do that. No other country would be asked to do that." JZ: "It would be suicidal for Israel to maintain an occupation over a million and a half people who, in fact, resist that occupation."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1154
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7088
item Program Number S0899, 2105

"Can We Rely on Soviet Peace Initiatives?"

Guests: Beichman, Arnold.

4 June 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 28
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 17
Program details: The U.S. and USSR had just concluded the CFE agreement (Conventional Forces in Europe), clearing the way for a summit meeting the following year. Mr. Beichman, a veteran student of the Soviet Union, is unimpressed: "We have to keep negotiating. This is what I call treadmill diplomacy. We have to go on, knowing full well that the agreements will be violated ... We have to do so simply because of those weapons." ... WFB: "Don't you see signs there of a genuine total skepticism about Communism itself?" AB: "It's been there for a long time among the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but not in the leadership ranks. If they gave up Marxism-Leninism, what do they have to justify their monopoly rule?"--just the question, it turned out, that the hard-liners in the Kremlin were asking themselves as they prepared their Putsch against Secretary Gorbachev, attempted two months after this show was taped.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1149
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7083
item Program Number S0900, 2106

"Is Darwin Obsolete?"

Guests: Johnson, Phillip E., 1940-

4 June 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 132 : 29
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 17
Program details: Mr. Johnson was one of the first to argue against Darwinism not from the point of view of Biblical literalism, but from evidence about the complexity of organisms and variability within species. A fascinating discussion of a theoretical subject that our guest is able to make concrete. PJ: "When you look at the evidence of life, just the single cell--you don't even have to get up to human beings and complex creatures or flowers or anything beautiful, but just bacterial cells--when you look at that evidence without prejudice, for what it is, and what you see is something that is packed with information, with a complicated program of instructions. That is the kind of thing that as far as we can tell always comes from intelligence."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1150
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7084
item Program Number S0901, 2107

"Do We Need a Space Station?"

Guests: Kerwin, Joseph. : Green, Bill.

15 July 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 18
Program details: A civil but spirited argument between a space-station enthusiast and a skeptical member of the House Appropriations Committee. WFB: "Dr. Kerwin, do you foresee economic benefits from the space lab that will equal the cost of launching it?" JK: "At least, and I say that from the experience of the Apollo program, which led to a 20-year period of time of American leadership in space, and therefore in aerospace-related products, including computers, including aircraft, including medical equipment. We have been living on that Apollo legacy." ... BG: "At the present time, what's happened? One, the astronomers and astrophysicists have no use for the station; the National Academy of Sciences just came out with their wish list for astronomy for the next decade and there's not a thing that goes on the station... The station's useless for Mission to Planet Earth."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1155
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7089
item Program Number S0902, 2108

"Confirm Clarence Thomas?"

Guests: Norton, Eleanor Holmes.

15 July 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 18
Program details: It would be another three months before Anita Hill burst onto the nation's front pages, but Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court was already highly controversial. In this session we learn how a black conservative looks to one black liberal: "We shall see what Clarence Thomas's qualifications are. But where a nominee has set his face against all that black Americans have struggled for for 100 years, he cannot expect them to embrace him. He may go to the Court, but if so, he should go without our imprimatur." ... WFB: "You seem to be saying that the Supreme Court ought to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of America, but it seems to me that in an ideal Platonic sense that ought to be absolutely irrelevant." EHN: "Verboten, indeed. ... What kind of silly-looking court would it be that touched base with the great diversity of our population?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1156
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7090
item Program Number S0903, 2109

"How Much Fact Checking Should Publishers Do?"

Guests: Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. : Theodoracopulos, Taki, 1937-

15 July 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 18
Program details: Kitty Kelley's scabrous biography of Nancy Reagan had sparked debates about just what the responsibility of a book publisher is, or should be, and this is one of the more delightful ones. Host and guests trade stories about libels here and in Britain, and argue about the two countries' vastly different laws. Mr. Lehmann-Haupt is serenely confident of the lightness of New York Times v. Sullivan; Mr. Buckley, who has both sued and been sued for libel, asks, "Why, if you're elected as a congressman, ought somebody be free to call you an adulterer or a thief?"; and the raffish Taki (who had written a book about his imprisonment for cocaine possession) finds himself on unaccustomed middle ground: "There must be balance. I think that in America the fact that you're a public person and anyone can write anything about you is just as unfair as in England, where you can't write anything about a public person."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1157
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7091
item Program Number S0904, 2110

"Is the Democratic Party Falling Apart in the South?"

Guests: Riley, Joseph P., Jr. : Fowler, Donald L.

29 August 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 19
Program details: A year before the presidential election, Mr. Kinsley is saying, "The failed coup in the Soviet Union ... allowed President Bush to revel once more in the role of world leader... If a Democrat is ever to be elected President again, the party will have to figure out a way to appeal to the South." The two Southern pols who are our guests aren't conceding anything. WFB: "If you have to point to a single problem it's illegitimacy, risen by a factor of 280 per cent in the last 15 years.... Now, licentiousness and permissiveness is associated with the Democratic Party." DLF: "Well, I guess we Democrats do get criticized for being overly concerned with sex, and you Republicans are overly concerned with money--and I don't know who gets the better side of that...." JPR: "You use the term 'domestic agenda,' and that's too political sounding. I'd say the American agenda, when a President walks in ... and talks about illegitimacy in a leadership way. When has President Bush tried to articulate that problem?"
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1159
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SQFRJQ
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7093
item Program Number S0905, 2111

"An Expert View on Russia"

Guests: Pipes, Richard.

17 September 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 19
Program details: The Soviet Union had held on longer than its Eastern European satellites, but on August 19 the hard-liners forced the issue with their coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The resistance was led by Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic, and on August 22 the coup collapsed. Mr. Buckley starts off, "We all burst out with spontaneous joy on the 22nd of August: We had won.... Now, between the time of Hiroshima and the time that we won, I went from being a minor to being a senior citizen, and it seems to me that those years in between, relatively painless for me and for you, were climactically painful for millions of people. So we are entitled to ask: . . . From what we now know, how might we have accelerated the demise of this great totalitarian monster?" Mr. Pipes answers straightforwardly: "I don't think we could have done much about that. It had to collapse essentially of its internal crisis. And I think, if anything, we accelerated it by the policies adopted by President Reagan. I would not give him credit for the collapse, but I think he contributed to it by his psychological willingness to stand up to Communism." And we're off on a splendid discussion ranging from the history of Communism around the world to the likely "balkanization" of the Soviet empire.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1164
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7098
item Program Number S0906, 2112

"The Need for Education Reform"

Guests: Pursell, Carl. : Donley, Edward.

29 August 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 20
Program details: George Bush, the "Education President," had proposed a major experiment in the nation's school system--and had asked corporations to fund it. To Mr. Donley, that's just fine: "It's a small percentage of the amount of money that the business community spends in retraining people to make up for the deficiencies of the public education.... We're going to have a massive number of experimental efforts attempting to determine in a practical, daily, working world of education whether there are ways to do it better. That appeals to the business community." (Indeed, his Pennsylvania 2000 is part of this effort.) Rep. Pursell doesn't have a great deal to say, but Mr. Donley is quite capable of carrying the ball.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1161
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7095
item Program Number S0907, 2113

"How Far Can Political Ads Go?"

Guests: Bozell, L. Brent, III. : Kinsley, Michael E.

17 September 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 20
Program details: Clarence Thomas? In the run-up to Mr. Thomas's confirmation hearings, Mr. Bozell's organization had provoked a firestorm by producing an ad that asked just that question. Today's discussion, often heated, starts with that ad and explores the history and ethics of what we now call negative campaigning. LBB: "This man [Ted Kennedy] undertook the most scurrilous character assassination campaign against Judge Robert Bork ... These same people ... said: We're going to 'Bork' Thomas. And our point was, 'If you're going to try to do it again, if you're going to put values and integrity on the line, we're going to talk about yours.' Did it work? ... I submit that there hasn't been the level of intensity against Thomas that there could have been."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1162
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7096
item Program Number S0908, 2114

"How to Run a College"

Guests: Botstein, Leon. : Palms, John. : Silber, John, 1926-

29 August 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 21
Program details: We learn more about the difficulties of running a college than about how it should be done in this engaging session that begins with Mr. Kinsley saying, "Mr. Buckley, you've persecuted any number of college presidents in your day . . ." WFB: "They are my favorite pincushions." ... JS: "I think the college president has about as much authority as he has the capacity to assert and sustain ... I think most college presidents assiduously avoid any intellectual argument with their faculty because I don't believe they can sustain that encounter." ... JP: "Unfortunately, we don't complete the education that we're supposed to complete in high schools, so many colleges are in the process of completing that." ... LB: "Beware of the world which is littered with so-called highly tested underachievers."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1160
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7094
item Program Number S0909, 2115

"The Right to Death"

Guests: Humphry, Derek.

17 September 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 21
Program details: Mr. Humphry's how-to book on committing suicide had shot to number one on the New York Times best-seller list, to a mixture of adulation and accusation. On this absorbing show, Mr. Buckley does not argue with his guest but rather draws him along, teasing out his arguments and leaving the viewer with a great deal to think about. DH: "The Hippocratic oath is the nonsense of the medical world, devised two and a half thousand years ago by a group of Greeks.... In this age it has no application." ... "I broke the law on two occasions: when I helped my wife to die; when I helped my father-in-law to die. I regretted doing that very much, the actual breaking of the law. I was glad to help them. I thought it was the decent and honorable and loving thing to do." ... "I don't want to encourage [assisted suicide]. I want to legitimize it.... This sort of thing is a very serious matter and it's wrong for it to be done covertly."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1163
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7097
item Program Number S0910, 2116

"The Split in the Black Community"

Guests: Carter, Stephen L.

28 October 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 22
Program details: Mr. Kinsley launches the discussion with the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; after some wrangling over how good or bad Judge Thomas's testimony was, we settle down into a productive examination of affirmative action and the taboos surrounding it. SLC: "The President, of course, said that race played no role in the selection process, that Clarence Thomas was the single most qualified individual. I don't think many people took that claim seriously. I think the President probably could have done a lot of work toward binding up some of the racial wounds in America had he said what was probably true: 'There were many outstanding candidates, people I thought would have done a good job, and I used race as one means of sorting among them.'... You know, the President does have a bit of a problem there since he was engaging in exactly what he opposes--" WFB: "That's right." SLC: "--but that's not a knock on Clarence Thomas.... The President seemed to be under the impression that unless he could make a case that race played no role in the selection, there was something wrong with the selection process."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1165
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7099
item Program Number S0911, 2117

"Are Our Visions of Liberty Secure?"

Guests: Glasser, Ira.

28 October 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 22
Program details: It had been 200 years since the Bill of Rights was ratified, and the Supreme Court had agreed to hear a case involving an invocation by a rabbi at a high-school graduation. Messrs. Buckley and Glasser--longtime friendly antagonists--argue civilly but seriously, focusing principally on the First Amendment and religion. WFB: "The fanatical interpretation of the ACLU ... is that it is your holy responsibility to protect any human being from the normal pressures that he ought to identify with being a minority. I'm a Catholic; I'm a minority; but it doesn't bother me at all that a Protestant version of the Bible might be used by somebody who says a blessing at an event." IG: "Well, the fact that it doesn't bother you doesn't mean that makes it okay. The issue really is who else it bothers and what ought the proper role of government to be."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1166
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7100
item Program Number S0912, 2118

"How Are Our Libel Laws Doing?"

Guests: Lewis, Anthony, 1927-

4 November 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 23
Program details: Messrs. Buckley and Lewis surprise each other by the extent of their agreement-- which only adds to the pleasure of this profound exploration of the First Amendment's protection of public speech. AL: "The real essence of the First Amendment... is the right to disagree with the government.... And I'm confident that conservatives and liberals alike would think that was an essence of democracy." ... WFB: "Hugo Black thought there ought to be no libel law at all. If the Founding Fathers said, 'There shall be no law... abridging the freedom of speech,' then there should be no law.... Why should this right transcend other rights?" AL: "You want me to defend the proposition that it should. But I'm not an absolutist on the First Amendment. I didn't agree with Justice Black, and moreover he didn't agree with himself.... When it came to kinds of speech that he didn't like ... he found ways to get around his own absolutism."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1168
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7102
item Program Number S0913, 2119

"Are there Taboos in Publishing?"

Guests: Van den Haag, Ernest. : Osnos, Peter.

4 November 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 23
Program details: Mr. van den Haag had prompted this discussion by a letter to Mr. Buckley in which he alleged, as he puts it here, "that major publishers ... all seem, without conspiring, to have exactly the same opinion: Let's not publish anything on black-white intelligence differences; let's not publish anything that feminists may take offense at; let's not publish anything that homosexuals would take offense at." Mr. Osnos stoutly disagrees, and we're off and running. PO: "I can tell you, sitting here as a representative of a major publisher, that it is incredibly hard to get your books, even your best books sometimes, reviewed. . . . The New York Times is inundated with books. There are roughly 45,000 trade books published in the United States each year, and about 5,000 of them can actually get reviewed one way or another in the New York Times. That means that 40,000 books don't."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1169
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7103
item Program Number S0914, 2120

"Is Communism Really Over?"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

4 November 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 24
Program details: Today's show is quite different from most of Mr. Adler's Firing Line appearances, which bring basic philosophical concepts to bear on everyday life. Here the philosophy is political philosophy, and the bracing discussion centers more on Marx than on Aristotle, and on how the Soviet Union got to be the way it is and what we can hope for in the future. MA: "A capitalist economy, free-enterprise economy, with pluralistic agencies of enterprise, with workers and owners being in the same class for the most part, would achieve a socialist democracy." WFB: "I regret very much the use of the word socialist, because it invokes its own history, and its own history is one of a dogmatic, anti-capitalist position... Moreover, distributive justice has never been understood to be equal." MA: "Not equal now. Remember, the point is: All haves, but some have more, some less. Never egalitarian; that's wrong."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1170
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7104
item Program Number S0915, 2121

"The New Europe and the Uses of Monarchy"

Guests: Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik von.

28 October 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 24
Program details: Another look (see the visits with Prince Nicholas Romanov, Firing Line s0848, and King Constantine, s0854) at the possibility of restoring monarchy in the countries emerging from behind the Iron Curtain. Whether you find Mr. Leddihn enthralling or infuriating, where else can you hear from someone who has first-hand memories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? WFB: "There's no presumption, is there, that the first-born male is going to have these particular qualities? Is it simply your notion that to vest certain powers in him rather than in the population at large is a safer historical bet?" EKL: "I can give you here a saying: 'A monarch can be a Nero or a Marcus Aurelius, and the people collectively can be a Nero, but never ever a Marcus Aurelius.'"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1167
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7101
item Program Number S0916, 2122

"How Much Is Hydropower Worth?"

Guests: Come, Matthew Coon. : Cote, Marcel.

1 December 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 17-18
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 25
Program details: In this first of five shows from what someone has called "our troubled neighbor to the north," the discussion begins with the plans of Hydro-Quebec to flood a large part of northern Quebec in order to produce cheap, clean electric power. But it quickly moves into larger issues, because (a) this was taking place on the eve of Quebec's secession referendum, and (b) the Crees and Inuits who live on that land were raising constitutional objections to Hydro-Quebec's plans. This show starts slowly--at least for American viewers, who are unfamiliar with the issues--but quickly picks up steam. Mr. Coon Come: "If Quebec were to achieve its sovereignty, then it must recognize other peoples' sovereignty. If they have that claim, why should there be a double standard?"... Mr. Cote: "The Crees, and in fact all the aboriginals in Canada, are under the protection of the Queen...and I don't think that the Crees will allow themselves to be transferred from one country to another without saying a word."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1171
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7105
item Program Number S0917, 2123

"Do Women Have It Better in Canada?"

Guests: Hosek, Chaviva. : DesLauriers, Marguerite.

1 December 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 18, 134 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 25
Program details: As Mr. Coxe frames the question, "Canada's crisis is not just Quebec versus Anglo Canada; in addition, various groups of Canadians who transcend provincial boundaries are ... saying they want to be a part of reshaping Canada now that almost everything is up for discussion." One such group is feminists, well represented in this fast-moving exchange. CH: "One of the differences between Canada and the United States is that there is ... a general social agreement that sharing some of the risks of life in a communal way, through the state, makes sense. That's the reason that we have the kind of Medicare that we have in this country and you don't have it. That's one of the reasons we have maternity insurance and maternity benefits and various other programs. It's a different culture." ... WFB: "Isn't the discovery of any right also the discovery of somebody else's duty? If you're going to get paid when you have a child, somebody in this room's going to have to put up the money ..." MD: "I want to quarrel with the language of 'discovering rights' as though they're sort of brute facts. Rights are conferred in a social context and used in a social context."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1172
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7106
item Program Number S0918, 2124

"Bob Rae, Socialist, versus Wm. F. Buckley Jr., Conservative"

Guests: Rae, Bob.

3 December 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 18, 134 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 25
Program details: As Mr. Coxe puts it, "Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, market-oriented political parties have been very successful everywhere from Sweden to Russia. But... in Canada the great political success story... has been the New Democratic Party, the only party in Canada which is avowedly socialist"--although not in the sense we may think, Mr. Rae is at pains to explain. This highly informative show is not the debate suggested by the title; rather, Mr. Buckley and his guest continue the previous show's exploration of the differences between Canada and the United States. WFB: "Could you tell us the extent to which the socialism that you represent is an evolutionized form of socialism, over against the orthodox socialism that we grew up with?" BR: "The word [socialism] connotes many different things ... and the fact that it's been used by Stalinists ... has meant that in North American terms it's not always the most popular word to use. But the evolution that's taken place ... has been a stronger commitment to markets and a commitment as well to social institutions which promote solidarity."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1173
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7107
item Program Number S0919, 2125

"Is the United States Buying Up Canada?"

Guests: Hurtig, Mel.

3 December 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 18, 134 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 25
Program details: This one is a debate and deliciously so, hard-driving but never bad-tempered. MH: "The United States would never tolerate the degree of foreign ownership that exists in Canada.... Today, in 1991, there's not one single industry in the United States that's majority foreign-owned and controlled by any non-residents ...; whereas in Canada the automobile industry, electrical-apparatus industry, transportation industry, rubber industry, tobacco industry--I could go on...." WFB: "Money is fungible. Whether a Dutchman owns it or an American owns it is entirely immaterial as far as I'm concerned. All I want is prosperity." MH: "No, you're totally wrong. So much depends on where the profits end up."... MH: "We love Americans in many ways, we admire you, we are fortunate to live next door to you ... but we don't want to be Americans...." WFB: "In the first place I didn't invite you to become an American. However, I married a Canadian and after 41 years she became an American, so we'll give you time to think about it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1174
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7108
item Program Number S0920, 2126

"Is Canada a Better Place to Live than the U.S.?"

Guests: Kenney-Wallace, Geraldine. : Blackstone, Simon. : Bretzler, Eric. : Durrant, Audrey. : Gloin, Kevin. : Jones, Dylan. : Pinho, Armanda.

3 December 1991

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 133 : 18, 134 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 25
Program details: Professor Kenney-Wallace mostly turns her students loose on their host, with satisfying results, both intellectually and theatrically. AD: "Since the history of your country mandates that there should be the freedom to bear arms ... shouldn't there be an equal priority for the freedom to health care?" WFB: "No. "Why should there be? If it mandates your right to free speech does that mean it mandates your right to free abortions? They're unrelated." . . . EB: "Why can't you use compromise? Why do you have to use force?" WFB: "Because we want to look after you.... Who's going to say to North Korea day after tomorrow, 'You can't have a nuclear weapon.' Canada?" . . . KG: "Would it not be more advantageous to follow the lead of Canadians and be a little more socially responsible in your economic policy?" WFB: "Well, I think in certain respects that's absolutely true. For instance, in Canada there is no ban against using public money in schools or universities that are church-related. I think that's highly civilized."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1175
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7109
item Program Number S0921, 2127

"President Bush and the Conservatives"

Guests: Sununu, John.

8 January 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 25
Program details: George Bush had never been the conservatives' beau ideal, but plenty of conservatives supported him in 1988 and found much to applaud in his Administration. Breaking the No New Taxes pledge, however, and signing what conservatives called the "quota bill"--the Civil Rights Act of 1991, making it easier to sue for job discrimination--had soured them, and National Review had just printed an editorial welcoming a challenge to President Bush in the primaries. On this show Mr. Sununu does not give an inch in defending his boss. WFB (on the Civil Rights Act): "He vetoes and vetoes and vetoes, and then he yields. Now, he may yield because of what the French call force majeure." JS: "No. He yielded because he won.... The President vetoed a piece of legislation that was quota producing.... When he gets legislation that meets his criteria, he accepts it.... It is a good, non-quota bill." ... JS: "When you take a good, hard look at what George Bush has done in detail, conservatives will begin to understand that this is probably the most conservative President of the 20th century."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1176
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7110
item Program Number S0922, 2128

"Will Germany Be a Problem?"

Guests: Walters, Vernon A.

8 January 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 26
Program details: A rich discussion, broad and deep, with the man who was our ambassador to West Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. VW: "One of the things that governs in Germany ... is the measure of guilt felt towards different countries. The greatest measure of guilt is felt, I think, towards Poland--justifiably. The second greatest measure of guilt is France--unjustifiably. The French were treated better than almost anybody else who was occupied by the Germans...." WFB: "What about Russia?" VW: "That's where you'd expect the largest one to be, and there's some, but it's a recent phenomenon. . . . When the Soviet Union was threatening and still blockading Berlin and keeping the Wall up they didn't feel any guilt." . . . VW: "Every time somebody in Europe would say to me: 'Why don't you put your financial house in order?' I would say: 'How do you think it got out of order? It got out of order defending you! ... And you Europeans--just remember that we are the only country in history that ever financed its competitors into competition with us.' I know, I was in the Marshall Plan administration and I saw it happen." WFB: "And no regrets?" VW: "I think not, overall. We've won the long war. Freedom has won the long war."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1177
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7111
item Program Number S0923, 2129

"The Role of Television in Politics"

Guests: Minow, Newton.

8 January 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 26
Program details: Mr. Minow has never been allowed to forget that he is the man who proclaimed television "a vast wasteland"--but he believes in its potential. A thoughtful discussion on the way our political campaigns are run. WFB: "Do you have any philosophical or political reservations about the coincidence between forensic virtuosity and civic wisdom? Can't you envision a situation where A is clearly a better man than B, but just doesn't quite make it on television? ..." NM: "Well, many people say, Could Abraham Lincoln--he was not telegenic, he was not a good-looking man, they say he spoke kind of slowly--could Abraham Lincoln have been elected in a television age? My sense is that if a candidate is on long enough--let's say if there were three or four debates--the American people are wise enough to size him up. If it's 30 seconds--no. But I think if there's enough of a time period and a chance to see, I think the American people can judge that."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1178
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7112
item Program Number S0924, 2130

"What to Do about the Problem of Refugees"

Guests: Kurzban, Ira. : Stein, Daniel.

16 January 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 27
Program details: As Mr. Reeder frames the question: "Several weeks ago 38 Cubans landed in Miami in a stolen helicopter and said they had come to America because economic conditions in Cuba had become intolerable. On the tape we just saw, we heard a Haitian man give much the same reason for coming to this country. The Cubans were heralded as defectors, the Haitians were intercepted and taken to Guantanamo. Do conservatives think this policy is moral?" A serious discussion, but one that cannot solve the dilemma that Mr. Buckley describes: "People who make heroic efforts to gain freedom--the boat people in Vietnam come especially to mind--show the intensity with which freedom is something people want, and they ought to be applauded and encouraged. But it's also true that you run into situations ... in which the nature of the existing organism is threatened by an unregulated inflow.... So the question is, How do you decide?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1181
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7115
item Program Number S0925, 2131

"Is There a Way Out for the Cities?"

Guests: Koch, Ed, 1924-

8 January 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 27
Program details: Mr. Koch doesn't have to think twice about his answer: "The deaths of the American cities have been predicted for hundreds of years--ever since they were formed.. . . They will not die. The city will not die because it provides something special for us." He and his host discuss the grim topic of potential civicides--welfare demands, labor-management disputes, high taxation--vigorously and entertainingly. EK: "... a table in the New York Times ... showed what the costs were amongst the 50 states for mental health per capita. My recollection is that New York was spending $140 per capita for mental health, and New Jersey, right across the river, was spending $50. I would say to people: Are we three times crazier than New Jersey?" WFB: "Or do we make people crazy after they come here?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1179
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7113
item Program Number S0926, 2132

"The Protocols of Alleging Rape"

Guests: Coombs, Mary Irene. : Joseph, Paul.

16 January 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 28
Program details: The rape trial of William Kennedy Smith the previous fall had kept the nation's cartoonists in clover--and its feminists, who tend to be Kennedy-lovers, in a state of trauma--for two months. In contrast, this is a civil and productive discussion of why--feminism apart--rape is such a difficult crime to prosecute justly. PJ: "I have heard proposals that we lower the burden of proof in rape cases to something like a preponderance of the evidence, and it horrifies me. It makes me wonder what other crimes and what other classes of people we are going to rule out of the presumption of innocence. .. ." MIC: "Rape in some ways is a different crime ... For one thing there's essentially no other crime where the consent of the victim is a crucial element of the crime.... To say: 'I thought he wanted me to take his money, he was inviting it,' is simply not relevant in robbery cases."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1180
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7114
item Program Number S0927, 2133

"A Report Card for Schools"

Guests: Castor, Betty. : Resnick, Lauren.

16 January 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 29
Program details: Ms. Castor was responsible for implementing Florida's new law on educational accountability. Ms. Resnick served on the National Council of Education Standards and Testing and was a co-founder of the New Standards Project, which was working with 17 states, including Florida, to develop appropriate standardized tests. Both guests clearly know their stuff; unfortunately, neither, despite Mr. Buckley's questioning, rises sufficiently above generalities to teach us much we didn't know. LR: "We have, in fact, a double standard. We don't say we do, we don't mean to, but we have it de facto. We have a hidden tracking system that begins in kindergarten or first grade that's very difficult to break and that allows certain children to slide through with low expectations for them."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1182
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7116
item Program Number S0928, 2134

"What's Wrong with the Economy?"

Guests: Levy, David A. : Reynolds, Alan.

26 March 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 184 : 29
Program details: Mr. Botstein sets the stage: "Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has the United States public and all its politicians and its commentators been so concerned about the state of our economy." Like Mr. Botstein (cf. #FLS112, above), Mr. Levy believes we're in a "contained depression"; Mr. Reynolds believes a few changes in the law would work wonders. Both guests give us plenty of specifics to hold onto as we follow them through their arguments. DL: "We try cutting deficits, we try increasing spending, we raise taxes, we cut taxes. One important reason why we keep incurring these huge deficits is ... because the private investment engine is temporarily stalling." ... AR: "Who are we losing jobs to? The unemployment rate is 9.4 in Britain, it's 9 something in France, it's 10 1/2 in Canada. The whole world economy has been going through a disinflationary monetary crunch."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1183
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7117
item Program Number S0929, 2135

"A Mini-Debate: Should Blacks Vote Democratic?"

Guests: McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Clyburn, James. : Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Williams, Armstrong.

6 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 1
Program details: This show -- the first in an election-year series -- is accurately described as a mini-debate: there are no big opening or closing statements, but instead of the informal give-and-take of a regular Firing Line, the participants take turns cross-examining each other, as in the middle portion of a formal debate. Good fun even if there aren't many surprises. WFB: "I would like to ask Mr. Clyburn . . . whether it has ever occurred to him . . . that to the extent that you have this unanimity which you have had in the recent past in black reliance on the Democratic Party, which is the statist party, that there might be some overhang there of a plantation mentality. . . ." JC: "I find it very hard to figure out how you will apply an individual remedy to a harm that was heaped upon a group. Now if the group was the recipient of the harm, then it seems to me that it's the group that needs to find the remedy, and the remedy must apply to the group. . . ." AW: "As an African-American, I think that anybody can see that the welfare system that the New Deal put in place -- even the President at the time said, 'I pray to God that it doesn't become an opium to the society' -- I think it's a tragedy that the welfare system has been put in place to the extent that it still exists. Because I'll tell you, it is the worst form of slavery. What you do is you enslave people's minds."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1187
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7121
item Program Number S0930, 2136

"How Vulnerable Is George Bush?"

Guests: McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Campbell, Carroll.

6 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 1
Program details: In this second installment of the election-year series, the panelists go at each other over the question posed by Judge Sanders: "Will the economy and joblessness defeat Mr. George Bush?" GM: "Number one, we've got a 7.3 per cent unemployment rate. That makes any incumbent President vulnerable, particularly when you have one who is widely perceived as being vitally interested in foreign affairs and being bored about the domestic problems of the American people." . . . CC: "It would be difficult if the economy went down for any President to do well in the fall, including George Bush. However, I think we need to recognize that the Congress of the United States, particularly the House of Representatives, has been controlled by one party since the early 1950s. And that one party has been a party to the development of all of the programs and the debt of this country because the spending and the taxing start in the House of Representatives."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1188
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7122
item Program Number S0931, 2137

"A Mini-Debate: The Politics of Abortion"

Guests: Buckley, William F. (William Frank), Jr., 1925-2008. : Tucci, Keith. : McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Kissling, Frances, 1943-

5 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 15
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 2
Program details: As many times as this subject has been discussed, the participants in this mini-debate-the third installment of this election-year series-find some new angles on it. WFB: "All of these complicated considerations, don't they all apply to old people? I know an old person who can't recognize his own children-very poor family, great hardship keeping that guy alive. He gets no pleasure out of life. He just lies there in bed and stares. Shouldn't we just kill him?" ... FK: "What we have in America on this subject are two overlapping majorities. You've got a majority of Americans who believe that the government should not interfere in the decision of a woman to have an abortion, and that same majority of Americans also is disturbed by the number of abortions ... by the reasons they think women are having abortions, and therefore they do support regulation and restriction of abortion."
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1186
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7120
item Program Number S0932, 2138

"Are CEOs' Salaries Out of This World?"

Guests: McGovern, George S. (George Stanley), 1922- : Clurman, Richard M.

5 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 16
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 2
Program details: The Time-Warner merger had rocked both the financial and the publishing worlds and ended, as WFB puts it, "the special place that Time magazine and its sister publications had in American culture." One point at issue: the incredible "executive compensation" (salaries plus bonuses and perks) being paid; Steve Ross, Mr. McGovern tells us, had received a reported $79 million in one year, whereas Henry Luce, the founder of Time-Life Inc., used to receive, according to Mr. Buckley, about $350,000 a year. RMC: "In addition to disclosure, it would make a big difference if the directors were really independent--if they didn't sit on each other's boards, if they didn't, indeed, sit on each other's compensation committees, because they all have a stake in raising the level of what each of them gets paid."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1185
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7119
item Program Number S0933, 2201

"Democracy Asian Style"

Guests: Han, Sung-ju. [Han, Sung-Joo]

26 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 17
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 3
Program details: The first in a series of extraordinarily rich shows on the future of Korea. (One plus: all the Korean guests were at least partly American-educated and speak excellent English.) Mr. Han, discussing past attempts to institute democracy in Asia: "Generally the presidential system has been more difficult to maintain. Either the president becomes dictatorial, as it happened in the Philippines, as it happened in this country, or the president becomes very weak and subject to takeover by the military or other factions. Now we've experienced both of these situations, and I think because we have had these immunizations we have a fairly firm ground for democratic development in the future." ... WFB: "There's no point in democracy if you're going to have Peron and Hitler elected all the time." HSJ: "We can't refrain from democracy for fear of choosing the wrong man."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1189
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7123
item Program Number S0934, 2202

"Reunification in Korea: Is It Possible? Is It Probable?"

Guests: Kim, Kyung-Won.

27 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 3
Program details: A moving account of the differences between the two halves of this divided country. Mr. Kim: "We are, for good or bad,... an exceptionally homogeneous nation... We became a united single state in the 7th century and remained one until we became divided in 1945. So the longing for unification was so much more intense, the anguish of having to live under conditions of division was so much deeper. When we saw the Berlin Wall come down and the Germans become reunited ... we were euphoric. We said, 'Oh, if this could happen to the Germans we should be able to expect it for ourselves.'"... "Pyongyang city is their showcase... It's a totally artificial thing, it's no living organism ... But when you move out of Pyongyang and go into villages and towns where foreigners are not normally allowed to go, then you begin to see what life conditions are like. And there it's not progress, it's deterioration."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1192
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7126
item Program Number S0935, 2203

"What Kind of Ally Is Korea?"

Guests: Hyun, Hong-Choo. : Gregg, Donald.

26 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 3
Program details: A very good ally, Messrs. Hyun and Gregg agree, in a detail-filled conversation that goes on to examine the current texture of that alliance. Mr. Gregg: "The Koreans have had a magnificent economic success by a formula which is quite interesting, which is strong governmental control from the top, and free enterprise working very vigorously from the bottom.... People like Paul Volcker ... think it is now time for Korea to really free the market,... but like a parent trying to teach a child to ride a two-wheel bicycle, the government is a little reluctant to let go of the back of the seat." ... Mr. Hyun had been in Los Angeles just after the Rodney King riots, in which Korean storekeepers were hit especially hard. WFB: "When you spoke to Korean victims of that lunacy that lasted three days, did they feel that America has betrayed them?" HCH: "Actually there are three kinds of conflicting emotions now prevailing . . . Some of them would like to come back to Korea, the American dream soured; some of them would like to move to a safer place to do business, the suburban areas. But the majority of the people there would like to stay there and to rebuild.""
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1190
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7124
item Program Number S0936, 2204

"Do We Need a U.S. Military Presence in Korea?"

Guests: RisCassi, Robert.

26 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 3
Program details: In case anyone had thought North Korea had given up attempts at sabotage, ten days earlier a small detachment of North Korean soldiers had been caught making their way through the demilitarized zone. Mr. Buckley recounts the reaction from Pyongyang: "'The South Korean puppet government has committed a grave provocation, seriously getting on our nerves by fabricating a false report after creating an incident.' It is," comments WFB, "like a time warp with just a little echo chamber in Castro's Cuba." General RisCassi is no polemicist, but he has a quiet authority that gives weight to his assertions. WFB: "Are you free to tell us to what extent our technology permits us to establish whether North Korea is actively engaged in the development of a nuclear weapon?" RR: "I can tell you from all the means that are available to me that we are convinced that they have constructed a facility that will allow them to fabricate a nuclear system within two to three years."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1191
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7125
item Program Number S0937, 2205

"How Should the Civilized World Deal with Peking?"

Guests: Hu, Jason Chih-chiang. : Du Pont, Pierre S. [Du Ponte, Pete; DuPont, Pete] : Rusher, William A., 1923-

29 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 4
Program details: How, if you're the United States, do you deal with a country that sells modern missile technology to rogue states in the Middle East, and which three years earlier massacred hundreds of its own people who were demonstrating for freedom? How, if you're the Republic of China, do you deal with that same country, which wants to place you under its totalitarian regime? A rich discussion of the changes that have--and the changes that haven't--taken place in the People's Republic, and of the best way of nudging Peking in the right direction. JCH: "... at least they probably are no longer proud of themselves being called Communist. In fact many of their economic policies are turning more or less market-oriented. But politically they still maintain a very tight control. I often describe the situation in Mainland China as someone who is driving a car giving you a left-turn signal but actually has turned right."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1196
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7130
item Program Number S0938, 2206

"The Dark Days of Taiwan"

Guests: Chien, Frederick F.

28 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 4
Program details: By 1965, as Mr. Rusher recounts in his introduction, "the Republic of China had found its place in the sun: 16 years after Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were driven off the Mainland by Mao Tse-tung's Communists, the ROC had prospered to the point where it was removed from the list of developing nations. Then the clouds rolled in: in 1971 Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations in favor of Peking; in 1978 the Carter Administration withdrew diplomatic recognition. But instead of collapsing, Taiwan, as Mr. Buckley puts it, became stronger and stronger, more and more powerful, more and more attractive." This show is an often moving account of how Taiwan reached the point where, as Mr. Chien puts it, "No longer are we talking about mutual defense treaties; no longer are we talking about political alliances; we are talking about trade, investment, environmental protection, technological transfers. In all these fields the Republic of China is a country to be reckoned with."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1193
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7127
item Program Number S0939, 2207

"One China or Two Chinas?"

Guests: Ma, Ying-jeou.

28 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 23
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 4
Program details: It can be hard for Westerners to grasp the official ROC position on "the China question," but Mr. Ma explains it compellingly: "There is only one China, but China has been divided into two areas, the Taiwan area and the Mainland area, and there are two political entities controlling respectively the two areas." Sometimes there are language difficulties and Mr. Ma doesn't quite seem to grasp the question he was asked, but mostly this is a fine exploration of the political and economic possibilities ahead, looking towards the time when, as Mr. Rusher phrases it, "Deng Xiaoping is dead, the other older leaders of the Long March are dead, and a new generation has come in, much softer...and serious change is under way there...." MY: "Well, first of all we don't think it's very likely that the Chinese Mainland will deteriorate the way the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe did."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1194
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7128
item Program Number S0940, 2208

"The Premier of the Republic of China Speaks Out"

Guests: Hau, Pei-tsun. : Hu, Jason Chih-chiang.

28 May 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 4
Program details: After forty years of rule by Mainland-born members of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, Taiwan was evolving towards a true constitutional democracy. Other parties had been allowed to contest the 1990 election, and the Mainland-born Mr. Hau was Premier to the ROC's first Taiwan-born President, Lee Teng-hui. This is only the second Firing Line in which the guest has used an interpreter (the first having also been from Taiwan, #S309 with then-Premier Chiang Ching-kuo). The result is a slower pace than often, but it's well worth it for the view from this unique vantage point. HP: "Sudden overnight change such as has taken place in the Soviet Union could not happen in Mainland China ... because 80 per cent of the population of Mainland China are farmers. For the past ten years Deng Xiaoping's so-called agricultural village reform guaranteeing income to each household has been quite successful. It has allowed ... a great improvement compared to the days of Cultural Revolution and the People's Commune. But because they are quite cut off from news of the outside world, basically 80 per cent of the population ... are in a stable situation.... This is a basic difference between the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and of Gorbachev."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1195
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7129
item Program Number S0941, 2209

"How Vulnerable Are Incumbents?"

Guests: Solarz, Stephen J.

16 September 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 5
Program details: The day before this show, Mr. Solarz, who was completing his 8th term as Representative of New York's 13th district, located in Brooklyn, had learned that he would not be going back to Congress in January. Under reapportionment, his district had been redrawn with the aim of electing a Hispanic; in the event, he found himself running against five Hispanics. This half-hour starts with the question of whether only a Hispanic can represent Hispanics, only a Jew Jews, and so on, but deepens into a general discussion of the theory of representative government and the way the Executive and Legislative Branches are supposed to play off each other. WFB: "The late Professor Willmoore Kendall... in a famous essay called 'The Two Majorities,' remarks that the role of a Chief Executive is to appeal to certain Utopian instincts or appetites among people, and the role of Congress is to apply mechanical brakes." ... SS: "While I disagree with many of his policies, there is no question that Ronald Reagan was able to effectively push his program through the Congress. I think part of the problem we've had in the last four years is that President Bush simply has not been actively or effectively engaged in the effort to push his domestic program through the Congress."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1198
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7132
item Program Number S0942, 2210

"An Insider's Look at the Coming Election"

Guests: Shrum, Robert.

16 September 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 5
Program details: A splendid conversation between two old pros, starting with WFB's question, "What is it about Bill Clinton that makes him a moderate?" and going on to school choice, taxation, welfare, and much else. One sample from Mr. Shrum: "If we were going to be dispassionate I would tell you that what this election reminds me of is the 1980 election. We have a President who has severe economic problems; who appeared to have a big success in the Middle East, which is now a very modified success at best....And the Republican tack here is to assault the character of the Democratic nominee-very similar, I think, to what was going on with Reagan in 1980 when we were being told that he had an unnatural affinity for pushing the button and starting a nuclear war."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1199
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7133
item Program Number S0943, 2211

"Are Liberal Vulnerabilities Now Apparent?"

Guests: Limbaugh, Rush H.

16 September 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 4
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 5
Program details: Mr. Limbaugh's career was skyrocketing; the radio show had led to the launching of a television show, and his latest book was a runaway best seller. This show affords a fascinating look at two utterly different personalities that have placed themselves in service to, mostly, the same goals. One sample: WFB: "Style means a lot to me. I'm waiting for the day when people would be laughed out of the campus who use the word 'freshperson.' It's an idiotic attempt at hermaphroditic excess." RL: "It is, but if you oppose it, you're the one laughed at." WFB: "You oppose it." RL: "Oh, I do. But I'm brave, I'm courageous."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1200
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MBTSMM
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7134
item Program Number S0944, 2212

"What Truly Separates the Major Parties?"

Guests: Leo, John. : Gigot, Paul.

6 October 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 5
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 6
Program details: The parties' national conventions had both been highly charged, and Mr. Buckley raises the question of what lies beneath the rhetoric. JL: "I would say that family values is part of the social issue, and it is an issue that is not gaining any salience in this campaign, I think because of the excesses of the Republican convention. Chattering about witchcraft and demonizing homosexuals is not the way to present this issue, but--" WFB: "It's a good start, isn't it?" JL: "No, I don't think so. No, I think to have Newt Gingrich jumping up and down about Woody Allen is not the way to open up the family issue." Mr. Gigot concurs: "It began to be perceived ... by a lot of people as, 'Anyone who is a homosexual, for example, is not welcome in our party,' rather than making it an issue that, say, 'Should you subsidize through the tax code somehow, or through affirmative-action programs, the homosexual lifestyle?'" A good-natured and productive conversation that moves from family values to the abortion debate to the way Democratic convention delegates were chosen.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1201
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7135
item Program Number S0945, 2213

"Why Are We in a Recession?"

Guests: Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1908-2006.

6 October 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 6
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 6
Program details: Mr. Buckley and his old friend and adversary occasionally have such a good time slanging each other that they have to remind themselves to get back to the recession, but the audience wins either way. One sample: WFB: "We went longer than at any time in postwar history without a recession. Now, was this simply the magical accomplishment of Ronald Reagan, or is your profession learning something about governing business cycles that we didn't know ten years ago?" JKG: "That is an important question and I'm not going to attribute further blame to Ronald Reagan, much as I enjoy doing it. We have entered into something that is new, dangerously new, and that is a high-unemployment/low-performance equilibrium. We had that in the 1930s. This is much less serious than it was then, but the notion that there is an automatic recovery process is something that we must now question."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1202
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TZ8GYOE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7136
item Program Number S0946, 2214

"The Lawyer Problem"

Guests: Starr, Kenneth. : Glasser, Ira. : Taggart, John Y.

6 October 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 7
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 6
Program details: A year earlier Vice President Quayle had publicly complained about the litigiousness of American society, and Mr. Starr--whose name six years later would, for better or for worse, become a household word--had undertaken to draw up a program of reforms. He skillfully makes the case for his proposals, Mr. Glasser equally skillfully makes the case against, and Messrs. Buckley and Taggart keep the discussion on course. KS: "The loser should make the winner whole.... It's a system that is used in all countries except this one. It was once our system. We strayed away from it in an effort, among other things, to encourage litigation ..." IG: "If I'm driving a Ford Pinto and somebody hits me from behind and, because there's a defect, the car blows up and kills my kid, who's sitting in the back seat, I want to sue the Ford Motor Company for tort.. .. If I have to contemplate not only the cost of hiring somebody but, as an ordinary citizen working with a salary, who's not very well endowed, I have to worry that if I should lose the suit I have to reimburse them for all their fancy lawyers, it seems to me that it's a good bet that will discourage litigation and discourage fairness."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1203
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7137
item Program Number S0947, 2215

"Conservatives Look at the Election"

Guests: O'Sullivan, John. : Brookhiser, Richard.

4 November 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 8
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 7
Program details: Bill Clinton had just defeated George Bush for the Presidency of the United States, and, as WFB puts it, "I want to consult with my colleagues about what happened and what is its meaning, and to speculate whether America is doomed to hellfire for life everlasting." A collegial and informative conversation, starting with the tax issue. Messrs. Brookhiser and O'Sullivan both date the unraveling of the Bush Administration to the 1990 budget deal--partly because, as Mr. Brookhiser puts it, "the tax policies that they decided on were bad and contributed to lengthening the recession"; partly because, as Mr. O'Sullivan puts it, "you couldn't trust Bush--not for any discreditable reason of personal character, but because [of] the tax issue ... 'Read my lips. No new taxes,' as a lot of people have pointed out, is saying, 'Look, this isn't just another politician's promise. I really mean it.' So when you break that pledge and when you then in addition go on to say, 'Read my lips'--in other words, 'I'm treating your astonishment, shock, and disappointment with contempt'--I think at that point he lost his grip on the character and trust question. He never regained it."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1204
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7138
item Program Number S0948, 2216

"In Search of Anti-Semitism"

Guests: Podhoretz, Norman.

4 November 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 9
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 7
Program details: Mr. Buckley had just published a book called In Search of Anti-Semitism, prompted by several incidents, including a scurrilous essay in The Nation by Gore Vidal--of which Mr. Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, were the primary victims--and certain remarks by Pat Buchanan on the Israel lobby in the United States. Messrs. Buckley and Podhoretz had been debating publicly and privately the issue of at what point statements (e.g., Mr. Buchanan's) go over a line beyond which you can't, as Mr. Podhoretz phrases it, reasonably say, "It doesn't matter that much. It's not--as compared with other things--that serious." In today's discussion these two old friends offer a detail-filled exploration of the line between "iconoclasm" and hurtful prejudice, although the conversation bogs down occasionally in "you'll remember I wrote to you" recollections.
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1205
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7139
item Program Number S0949, 2217

"Reviving the American Dream"

Guests: Rivlin, Alice M.

4 November 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 10
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 7
Program details: Mrs. Rivlin's book had startled the public-policy community by recommending that the Federal Government withdraw from education, housing, highways, and several other areas; however, it also proposed having the Feds take over all health-care funding. This vigorous discussion helps us focus on just what we mean by "federalism" at the end of the 20th century. WFB: "As an economist, are you worried about the increasing size of the wedge ... which is the difference between what it costs me to hire you and what you get? ... It costs an employer 35 per cent more than its employees get because of Social Security, medical insurance, sick leave, etc.--and that, of course, decreases our competitive mobility." AR: "I think one of the real competitive problems is the high cost of health care in the United States." WFB: "Sure. GM pays more for health care than for steel." AR: "That's one of the reasons why I think we have to face up to this health-cost problem and get it down. It's not just that people are hurting, it's that our economy is hurting."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1206
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7140
item Program Number S0950, 2218

"Was Bush Reagan's Successor?"

Guests: Noonan, Peggy, 1950-

30 November 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 11
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 8
Program details: To rephrase the title question, "Did George Bush deliberately distance himself from Ronald Reagan, and, if so, is that what cost him the 1992 election?" Miss Noonan had written celebrated speeches for both men, including the line "Read my lips"--brilliantly effective at the time, devastating in retrospect after President Bush broke his no-new-taxes pledge. This half-hour offers a stimulating conversation on the modes and substance of presidential public appearances. PN: "I sometimes thought that [Mr. Bush] might have been somewhat traumatized ... He saw in the Reagan White House a great deal of attention being paid by Mike Deaver and Jim Baker to--almost the aesthetics of an event: to the balloons falling; to the Dover Cliffs; to where the President will stand. I think Reagan could look at all that stuff and think: 'Well, here we are communicating, and this is how you do it in a sophisticated world.' George Bush would look and think: 'This isn't genuine, it isn't real, I don't like it, and I'm recoiling from it.' "
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1207
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7141
item Program Number S0951, 2219

"A Conservative Quarrel"

Guests: Eastland, Terry. : Lind, Michael.

30 November 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 12
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 8
Program details: As WFB recounts, "conservatives' esteem for the different branches of government has gone up and down over the decades; at present, none of the three looked especially appealing. Mr. Eastland's book, subtitled The Case for the Strong Presidency, is the springboard for a discussion which, although polite in tone, goes in substance beyond the level of quarrel" to total war. ML: "I find it rather disturbing that in recent decades conservatives, because they happen to control one branch of government, the Executive Branch, started recycling ... the anti-legislative arguments which the authoritarians in the Weimar Republic, for example, rehearsed. Their argument was: The Reichstag is nothing but a collection of special interests, it's completely corrupt, whereas the President, Hindenburg, or the Chancellor somehow stands above parties ..."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1208
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7142
item Program Number S0952, 2220

"What's Wrong with the Deficit? Part I"

Guests: Crook, Clive. : Davidson, James Dale. : Eisner, Robert. : Kuttner, Robert. : Levy, David A.

8 December 1992

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 9
Program details: A new departure for Firing Line: after the formal debate, an informal free-for-all. Although there are times when everyone is talking at once, connoisseurs of public speech will enjoy seeing the different formats back to back with (mostly) the same participants. And there proves to be plenty more to say--e.g., Mr. Eisner's lucid explanation of a most illucid subject, the federal deficit: "The federal deficit--and by the way, it is not a 'national' deficit; it's a deficit of the Federal Government--is of course the difference between its spending and what it takes in in taxes--what it takes in in revenues, I should say, which is taxes. The problem is that the Federal Government keeps its accounts in away which resembles that of no private business, state or local government, or foreign government. It does not separate out capital expenditures from current expenditures.... It's as if a person said, 'I'm going into terrible deficit because I am buying a house.' "
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1211
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709ES6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7145
item Program Number S0953, 2221

"What's Wrong with the Deficit? Part II"

Guests: Crook, Clive. : Davidson, James Dale. : Eisner, Robert. : Kuttner, Robert. : Levy, David A.

8 December 1992

Scope and Contents note

Background File: Box/Folder 101 : 8
Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 13
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 9
Program details: A new departure for Firing Line: after the formal debate, an informal free-for-all. Although there are times when everyone is talking at once, connoisseurs of public speech will enjoy seeing the different formats back to back with (mostly) the same participants. And there proves to be plenty more to say--e.g., Mr. Eisner's lucid explanation of a most illucid subject, the federal deficit: "The federal deficit--and by the way, it is not a 'national' deficit; it's a deficit of the Federal Government--is of course the difference between its spending and what it takes in in taxes--what it takes in in revenues, I should say, which is taxes. The problem is that the Federal Government keeps its accounts in away which resembles that of no private business, state or local government, or foreign government. It does not separate out capital expenditures from current expenditures.... It's as if a person said, 'I'm going into terrible deficit because I am buying a house.' "
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1212
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G709UYE
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7146
item Program Number S0954, 2222

"Mortimer Adler Sums Up"

Guests: Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001.

30 November 1992

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 134 : 14
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 9
Program details: Some familiar topics are covered in this rich conversation with a favorite Firing Line guest-on the importance of philosophy to the ordinary person; on teaching as "a cooperative art"-but also something quite new: MA: "When one prays to God one believes in God as one does not believe if one affirms God's existence as a philosopher. So one has gone beyond philosophy. The leap of faith is not from less sure grounds for the affirmation of God's existence to more sure grounds, but it's from the affirmation of God's existence to belief in God as benevolent, caring, just, and merciful." WFB: "Your discovery of God was in the nature of an epiphany rather than in the nature of philosophical deduction." MA: "Absolutely." WFB: "But having had that epiphany you then proceeded-I know from a knowledge of your books-to make certain deductions which in your judgment directed thought about God in a fruitful channel, but not necessarily led to His discovery." MA: "No. The leap of faith involves going beyond argument to what cannot be proved, and the sign that one has made that leap is asking God for help." (Note: Mr. Adler would become a Catholic in 1999, at the age of 96.)
Availability: Special order, please contact the Archives. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1209
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7143
item Program Number S0955, 2223

"The Two Futures of the World"

Guests: Walters, Vernon A.

12 January 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 15
Program details: This often grim discussion of post-Soviet Russia--where a sharply deteriorating economy had led the Congress of People's Deputies to order President Yeltsin to dismiss Prime Minister Gaidar--is enlivened by both men's gift for the vivid illustration. VW: "Let me just tell you an unpleasant joke that is circulating in Moscow. A man gets up in the morning, flips on the light, and the light comes on. He says, 'Gee, the light's back.' He goes into the kitchen, turns on the water, and there's water. He says, "The water's back on.' Then he says, 'I bet the gas is working.' He turns on the gas and the gas is working. He says to his wife, 'To the barricades! The Communists are back!"... WFB: "I hate to use the word 'conservatives' in this context, but--" VW: "I refuse to use it in this context. I refuse to call Boris Yeltsin's opponents conservatives. They are extreme, leftist, Stalinist Communists."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1213
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7147
item Program Number S0956, 2224

"President Clinton's Religious Left"

Guests: O'Sullivan, John. : Sobran, Joseph.

26 January 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 16
Program details: Mr. Buckley starts out by unpacking the title of this show: "In the New York Times appearing a day before the inaugural of Mr. Clinton and under the by-line of two liberals, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, we read, 'It's more demanding than special interests. It's more pious than political correctness. It's more evangelical than any rainbow coalition. The painfully sincere tone and rigidly mandated diversity of this week's inaugural events constitute a frightening new movement in American politics; the Religious Left.' " Mr. O'Sullivan explains this development by reference to an argument by Tom Bethell that "when people stopped believing in God or they lost an old-fashioned secular faith like patriotism or nationalism, there was a vacuum, and people can't stand that kind of philosophical vacuum." Is it, asks Mr. Buckley, " 'Do your own thing,' or is it 'Be your potty little self? Because after all, those come from two distinctly different patrons--Woodstock and Chesterton." Mr. Sobran: "No, this is much more 'Do your own thing.' But the thing you do must be in some kind of conformity with the things that other like-minded people are doing too."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1217
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7151
item Program Number S0957, 2225

"In What Direction Should Clinton Move?"

Guests: Green, Mark J.

26 January 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 17
Program details: Mr. Green's book, according to his host, devotes a chapter of modest size to every problem in America with the possible exception of "original sin." Mr. Buckley elects to start with voter registration, and the conversation quickly deepens into an exploration--marked by some breath-taking differences of perspective--of the very nature of democracy. WFB: "Now, in our century we have seen the vote given to women. Good. We have seen the vote given to blacks. Good. We have seen votes given to illiterates. Bad...." MG: "Why in the world shouldn't illiterates vote? Just because they're not literate or intelligent by your standard? They have interests that are as important to them as yours are to you...." WFB: "I put it once this way ... It was established ... that 20 per cent of the American people had never heard of the United Nations. Now, it seems to me, if we could actually locate these 20 per cent of the people, we ought to say to them: Would you mind not voting until you hear about the United Nations, because it's really quite an important factor in your knowledge?"
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1218
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7152
item Program Number S0958, 2226

"Do We Need a Federal Community Property Act?"

Guests: Wenig, Mary Moers. : White, Shelby.

12 January 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 18
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 10
Program details: Even though two-thirds of all recent first marriages, according to Ms. White, will end in divorce, and 80 per cent of married women will eventually be widowed, most women do not know the law regarding their and their husband's money. This proves to be a lucid and instructive discussion of an underexplored problem. MMW: "Do you read Ann Landers? Ann Landers provides wonderful insight into American culture, and Ann Landers now and again will print a letter which shows that many wives believe that they live in a state of community property--that is, they do believe that everything that's acquired in the course of the marriage really does belong to the two of them. And in fact, they're wrong, unless they're part of the quarter of the country that lives in the 10 community-property jurisdictions."
Availability: On amazon.com. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1214
DVD Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OEIOP6
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7148
item Program Number S0959, 2227

"Under Clinton: A Hotter War on Drugs?"

Guests: Morgan, John P.

12 January 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 19
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 10
Program details: President-elect Clinton had promised to renew and indeed step up the War on Drugs, and Dr. Morgan is not impressed: "I think the drug war worked in this fashion: by practically destroying a generation of young black men we may have frightened a few white middle-class youths away from using drugs." He is deeply informative on matters such as the way addiction works, the historical relationship between drug laws and actual drug use, and the relationship between marijuana and other drugs. "If I believed that tomorrow legalization would ensue and the amount of drug use would quadruple, sextuple, I would say no, we can't risk that. But I see no evidence that will occur."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1215
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7149
item Program Number S0960, 2228

"Will It Be Economic War with Japan?"

Guests: Recchia, Richard.

26 January 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 20
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 11
Program details: The Clinton Administration had declared war on Japanese minivans, proposing to increase tariffs on them tenfold. Mr. Recchia--a Detroiter whose experience in the auto industry includes stints with Chrysler, Fiat, and Ferrari--takes us on a brisk tour of the worldwide economic scene from the automaker's perspective. WFB: "Why doesn't the market provide cheaper new cars? ..." RR: "In order for you to provide a low-priced car, it really has to have tremendous volume and worldwide appeal. As long as you restrict the number of cars that are imported into the United States, none of the worldwide producers like Toyota are going to spend billions of dollars to produce a low-priced car... So Toyota and all the other Japanese companies moved the type of products that they import into the United States to the higher-priced models. That took the pressure off the domestic industry to answer with a lower-priced car."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1216
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7150
item Program Number S0961, 2229

"Should Women Be in Combat?"

Guests: Donnelly, Elaine. : Horowitz, David, 1939- : O'Beirne, Kate Walsh. : Ripley, John. : Vaught, Wilma. : Glasser, Ira. : Wilson, Heather A.

18 March 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 21
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 11
Program details: The second installment of a new Firing Line format: after the formal debate, an informal free-for-all. There's plenty more to say, and some different matchups bring out different points. WV: "Where there's a problem with respect to sexual issues, there's usually a lack of leadership." ED: "So you're saying that leadership is the answer to the relationships that men and women have? You're going to repeal the laws of nature with leadership?" ... WFB: "I'm trying to resist the notion that we should restructure an entire tradition any time it's possible to find an exceptional case ... You can find a 15-year-old who knows more about civic history than a lot of people who vote, and I'm sure you can find one woman, two women, a hundred women who are classier fliers than the average fighter pilot. But this doesn't, in my judgment, suggest that either the Constitution should be changed, or the service regulations, in order to expedite that exception."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1220
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7154
item Program Number S0962, 2230

"Women's Right to Fight?"

Guests: Donnelly, Elaine. : Horowitz, David, 1939- : O'Beirne, Kate Walsh. : Ripley, John. : Vaught, Wilma. : Glasser, Ira. : Wilson, Heather A.

18 March 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 135 : 22
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 11
Program details: The second installment of a new Firing Line format: after the formal debate, an informal free-for-all. There's plenty more to say, and some different matchups bring out different points. WV: "Where there's a problem with respect to sexual issues, there's usually a lack of leadership." ED: "So you're saying that leadership is the answer to the relationships that men and women have? You're going to repeal the laws of nature with leadership?" ... WFB: "I'm trying to resist the notion that we should restructure an entire tradition any time it's possible to find an exceptional case ... You can find a 15-year-old who knows more about civic history than a lot of people who vote, and I'm sure you can find one woman, two women, a hundred women who are classier fliers than the average fighter pilot. But this doesn't, in my judgment, suggest that either the Constitution should be changed, or the service regulations, in order to expedite that exception."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1221
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7155
item Program Number S0963, 2231

"Are We Demobilizing Too Fast?"

Guests: O'Keefe, Sean.

30 March 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 136 : 1
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 12
Program details: A year earlier, Les Aspin, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had attacked the Bush Administration for proposing an across-the-board reduction of the military, rather than a thorough post-Cold War rethinking. A few weeks before this show, Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, had ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to come up with $10 billion in cuts within one week. SO: "In many ways in [Secretary Aspin's] own terms it is a tread-water budget and program that has no fundamental difference in strategy, no different focus than what he inherited, but at the same time he intends to spend less on it. And every time we've done that, historically, we've lived to regret that."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1222
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7156
item Program Number S0964, 2232

"Are We Overmedicating?"

Guests: Wennberg, John E.

30 March 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 136 : 2
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 12
Program details: A fascinating discussion that addresses its audience both as potential patients and as citizens at the beginning of the Clintons' push for a nationalized health-care system. What Dr. Wennberg studies is not so much "overmedication" as the appropriateness of one treatment as against another, and the extrinsic factors in prescription: "The chances of having bypass surgery if you live in New Haven are about twice that if you live in Boston, whereas about 75 per cent more people with arthritis of the hip end up with surgery if they live in Boston than if they live in New Haven"--just because of the biases of the respective teaching hospitals. JEW: "Do you prefer the risks and benefits associated, say, with surgery compared to the risks and benefits associated with drugs? They're very different, and the differences are subjective, and it requires the involvement, the engagement of the patient in the decision process--which essentially flips Western medicine upside down in terms of the traditional roles between the doctor and the patient."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1223
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7157
item Program Number S0965, 2233

"One Woman's View of the GOP"

Guests: Richardson, Heather

30 March 1993

Scope and Contents note

Publicity File: Box/Folder 136 : 3
Transcript: Box/Folder 185 : 12
Program details: A bracing session with a rising star of the conservative movement. WFB: "It fascinated me that you should say that the dirty little secret of American politics is that the Democrat would beat the Republican in a local election two out of three times." HR: "In any open seat. That's my understanding of how the numbers run." WFB: "I wonder why that should be so." HR: "I think primarily it's because Republicans are busy out earning money and pursuing private-sector careers, whereas the Democrats view government as a legitimate end in and of itself, so they make careers of politics." "I spent some time living in public housing and a lot of time going around to inner-city public schools. Most of the lower-income blacks that I met and talked with agree wholeheartedly with Republican principles, but they've rarely met a Republican who bothered to come and talk to them or demonstrate any kind of an interest."
Availability: Not available. Hoover Identifier number: 80040.1224
Digital Collections Link: http://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/7158
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