Marcus Joseph Ruslander (August 23, 1932 – March 30, 2023), better known as Mark Russell, was an American political satirist and comedian. A sample of his act.

An early blogger, an excellent newspaper and magazine journalist, an open supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2008, professor Jarvis saw that the owners and editors of newspapers were failing to take advantage of the digital revolution of the early 2000s.

Today Jarvis is a testy and relentless critic of the Internet he predicted was coming. In his latest book, the “Web We Weave,” he accuses it “of dividing us, spying on us, making us stupid, and addicting our children.”

But unlike so many in the media, he’s not a pessimist who blames the Internet for its excesses and infamous cultural and political sins. He blames the humans in media and government who have misused it and kept it from reaching its full potential.

As the synopsis of his book on Amazon says:

“The internet did not make us hate; we brought our bias, bigotry, and prejudice with us online. That’s why even well-intentioned regulation will fail to fix hate speech and misinformation and may instead imperil the freedom of speech the internet affords to all.

“Once we understand the internet for what it is—a human network—we can reclaim it from the nerds, pundits, and pols who are in charge now and turn our attention where it belongs: to fostering community, conversation, and creativity online.”

Jarvis remains an optimist about the digital revolution that has been turning so many corners of our world upside down.

He five previous books include, "The Gutenberg Parenthesis," and "Magazine." He cohosts the podcasts "This Week in Google" and "AI Inside" and blogs at Buzzmachine. Jarvis is the Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation Emeritus at CUNY's Newmark School of Journalism.

In his long career as a print journalist, Jarvis was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net.

Here’s his recent bio and picture:

Jeff Jarvis, 2009

I interviewed Jarvis in 2009, when newspapers were well into their death spiral and Jarvis was predicting big changes in the business of writing and delivering the news. Despite the financial plight of print, he was optimistic about the new ways of doing better journalism that he said the digital age would bring.

Q&A

In a previous life Jeff Jarvis was a big-city newspaper editor and TV critic who became the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine.

Today Jarvis is best known as the father of BuzzMachine.com, a smart, Internet-loving blog about the dramatic and often damaging affects the digital revolution and new technologies are having on "the old media."

Jarvis has been brutally critical of the newspaper industry for refusing to embrace and adapt its business and journalism models to the Web until it was too late to avoid the severe financial trouble it’s in today.

He recently wrote a book called "What Would Google Do?" (Collins Business) that explains how the business strategies and worldview Google employed to take over the digital world -- such as openness, collaboration and trusting and relying on its customers -- can benefit other industries and companies.

I talked by phone to Jarvis in April of 2009 from New York City.

Q: What does Google do and what’s so revolutionary about it?

A: The idea behind the book was not so much to write a book about Google as about the changes in our world -- and trying to figure them out by viewing them through the lens of Google’s success. I believe the changes in our world are huge and profound right now and we’re operating under different rules.

We can see that in Google, for example. Google did not grow to be, according to the Times of London, "the fastest growing company in the world" by trying to buy and own and control everything. Instead they created platforms and networks that enabled others to succeed.

Another example of a new rule is that we operated before in a scarcity economy -- where controlling a scarcity was your way to success: I control the press, you don’t. I get to say what goes on it. I get to charge you whatever I want to charge you -- nah, nah, nah, nah.

That’s not Google. Google operates under an abundant economy. They could have had a scarcity with search and charging as much as the market could bear to people who for search for pizza in New York. Instead they charge for performance and they were motivated to put ads everywhere across the Internet. That’s another example of a changed rule, so that indicates changes in the world in the Digital Age after the Industrial Age.

Google also shows the way to having a new relationship with the public, your customers. For one thing, Google trusts us. Google respects us. It thinks we’re smart. Unlike Yahoo -- which tried to catalogue the whole Web, which when you think about it now is pretty funny -- Google said, "No, the people who are using the Web know what’s good and what’s relevant. We’re going to make a system to listen to that and feed it back."

There are other examples too, but I think Google just sees the world differently because it is a different world and it learned how to exploit that.

Q: If there is one thing you could say to try to persuade someone that they need to read your book, what is it?

A: It’s that "My kid has to go to college."

Q: Besides that.

A: We’re going through something much bigger than a financial crisis and something much more fundamental than a recession or a depression. The world is changing in critical ways and you have to start to understand that and change your worldview and act around that. That’s what I try to bring you by understanding Google’s success in this new world.

Q: In a way the world is being turned upside down yet again by Google and that sort of bottoms-up, sharing, cooperative, linked world.

A: Right. Just look at the fact that Google releases betas of all their products. When they do that what they are really saying to the public is this product is unfinished, it’s imperfect, help us finish it." That’s not the way that companies worked -- or could work -- before.

If you spent years tooling your auto factory or hours writing your newspaper story, the myth was that it was perfect -- finished. But in the Internet, and especially in how Google’s used the Internet, releasing betas is a way to actually be humble and, more importantly, to be collaborative.

Q: And to tap the intelligence of the crowd and the whole world rather than just your in-house experts.

A: Right. To respect the intelligence of the crowd and then you want to try to tap it. I think those are both new.

Q: How has your book been received? I noticed that Publishers Weekly reviewed it and said you were kind of "acerbic" and "condescending" and that you had assembled a bunch of "rants." What’s your reaction to that?

A: I’m a blogger.

Q: You can’t help yourself?

A: I’ve got to write in a blogger’s voice. Everyone reacts to it differently, but the book was really written through and with the blog. I’ve been thinking through these ideas over the last two or three years. My readers helped me by arguing with me and correcting me and adding to what I had to say. In one case, the readers even basically wrote a chapter in the book. So it’s very much in a blog voice, and I suppose that might have irritated a couple persons.

Q: Newspapers haven’t taken kindly to your tack about the new media and what’s going to happen to newspapers.

A: Some haven’t, but I think that’s changing, too. Clearly, I respect journalism greatly. I’m teaching it. I did it for my whole career. I’m teaching it now. I believe in the future of journalism. I’m optimistic about the future of journalism. But more and more, I see newspapers trying -- at the very last minute before the gallows -- to throw their Hail Mary passes (sorry for the mixed metaphor there) and trying to save themselves now.

Meanwhile, they’ve squandered the last 20 years since the Web really was invented, 15 years since the release of the commercial browser and craigslist and 10 years since the birth of Google and blogs.

There has been plenty of time for newspapers to reinvent themselves for a world past paper -- and they didn’t. And now at the last minute they are trying to come up with desperation moves like charging for content, or cutting their content off from the world, or trying to get subsidies -- and it’s their fault.

But I believe strongly there will be a market demand for quality journalism and information and the market will find a way to meet that demand -- in some cases with newspapers that have transformed themselves and in some cases with new entities that replace newspapers.

Q: Do you worry about the future of good journalism from local papers and the electronic media? Is it going to disappear? Is it going to reinvent itself?

A: I don’t think it’s going to disappear. It’s going to reinvent itself and I think it can even improve itself and grow and become more targeted and deeper in the community. But it’s going to be very different. I think we bring a lot of assumptions to what journalism is.

Journalism came from newspapers and from full-time journalists. And journalism was stories and journalism came out once a day. There are a lot of inherent assumptions that are hard to get passed.

I realized recently that in my mind’s eye I naively was thinking there was going to be an orderly transition -- it’s like Jan. 20th in Washington, the print president would hand off to the digital president and off we’d go. And that’s not the case.

I realize now that newspapers -- especially newspapers that were monopolies and very powerful and very rich -- were not inclined to disrupt themselves. That’s why they have waited to the last minute for their Hail Mary passes and that’s why many of them are going to die.

Q: Will they be replaced?

A: They are going to be replaced. They’re not going to be replaced by some digital equivalent one-for-one. I think what we are going to have are ecosystems of news in communities. Some of it will come from some new form of a newsroom -- maybe not in a room, but a news organization. Some of it will come from former paid journalists like you who create new businesses. Some from bloggers who make what they do in journalism into a business. Some from public- and foundation-supported journalism at a small level.

What we spend now on investigative journalism is actually very small and it is conceivable to think that it could be supported by a ProPublica or a Huffington Post. I also think we’re going to have to demand more transparency of government data and actions to make it all searchable and linkable. And that becomes part of the ecosystem of journalism, with more eyeballs on what government does.

We’re going to add all this together. It’s an uncertain thing. It hasn’t been done. I run a project at the City University of New York and do business models for news just to try to flesh out these business models and figure out where we go. We have to start experimenting with this.

We have to start failing and learning and improving, but I believe we will come out the other end with a new structure of journalism in local communities.

Q: How do you describe your politics and have they changed or shifted in the last few years to be more friendly toward markets and maybe limited government.

A: Ah. Interesting. On my "About" page on my blog I try to be obnoxiously transparent. I (reveal) more than you’d ever want to know --. But I’m basically a liberal. I was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton.

After she lost, I ended up voting for Barack Obama. But I also started blogging after Sept. 11, because I was at the World Trade Center and that affected my politics, too. I was one of the early -- as were called -- "War Bloggers" and shifted from being an old ‘60s pacifist to a hawk.

The more interesting question you are asking is about the libertarian stripe. When the blogs came along, I asked myself whether they were essentially left or right. If we believe that mass media was essentially "left" -- of the people -- and cable TV and talk radio were both essentially kind of "right," at least as executed by Fox News on TV in terms of being able to rant on topics, what was the Internet?

In the early days of blogs there was a disproportionate number of libertarian bloggers. At first that made sense to me. I thought, "Oh, OK, the Web is about individual liberty, so maybe the Web is libertarian."

In the end I didn’t think that because I think really what the Web does is it enables people to coalesce together no matter what their beliefs and stripes. It cuts across party lines and national boundaries and demographic demarcations and it just enables people to join together. So I don’t think the Web is necessarily libertarian but it I think it teaches us a lot about individual liberty and about the freedom to organize ourselves.

Q: As a libertarian, I like everything you say about where this great restructuring is taking us. As I’ve written down here -- "It’s going to be free and open and transparent and market-driven and it trusts the individual to do the right thing for himself and society." Am I projecting too much?

A: I think that’s all true. But I think that we also have to see after the so-called financial crisis that there is also danger we have to watch out for. I do believe in markets. It actually comes first and foremost when you trust in the taste and intelligence of the people.

If you don’t essentially trust the people, then you don’t believe in democracy or free markets or reform religion or education in journalism, because if the people are all dolts why give them any power or authority?

I learned -- believe it or not, as a TV critic -- an essential faith in the taste and intelligence of the people. So I do believe in generally leaving the markets alone and letting us -- the people -- do what we see best and trust that we are smart as a crowd.

However, witness the banks. Witness the lack of regulation in CBOs (collateralized bond obligations) and such. It did go wacky. I think the answer to that is not more regulation. I think the answer to that, in the Internet view, is more transparency.

We have to have a default of transparency in government and business and journalism that we haven’t had. I’ll have some faith in that and hope that that can fix us. But purely unbridled, unwatched markets -- as we’ve seen lately -- have their flaws.

Q: Also as a libertarian, I know that government always will want to take control of new developments in technology or even prevent the changes they bring. Do you worry about government’s future actions?

A: Yeah -- the same as I guess I’ll worry about anyone in power. That sounds ridiculous; I don’t want to say that, either, because I think that we go overboard on this: Going after Microsoft in its day, going after Google now because they’ve become too big. We love success, we hate success; we love size; we hate size. I think that’s dangerous too.

I do believe in the notion of checks and balances. I don’t think government was doing enough to watch out for us. It certainly could turn around and do too much, but we need checks. The ability of the Internet, though, is to enable us -- the people -- to perform checks. The more that this data is out there, the more we can keep our eyes on it.

Q: It sounds like the structural changes you are describing in the news media is the latest chapter of what Joseph Schumpeter called the "gales of creative destruction of capitalism." It’s cruel but it’s pretty necessary -- and in a relatively free-market economy like ours, it is inevitable -- that change and innovation come along and destroy the old guys and create new winners and losers. Do you see this as a healthy process that we should cheer and embrace or something that is to be feared?

A: Change is inevitable. It is immutable. And the only sane response to it is to seek it out and embrace it and exploit it. That can be painful to those who resist change or who are incapable of changing. But it is inevitable and it is especially inevitable now.

I go back to this notion that it is more than a financial crisis and more fundamental than a recession or a depression. There’s a brilliant economist in London called Umair Haque who calls it right now "a great compression" -- that is to say, perceived value is meeting real value.

I think we are moving from the Industrial Age to what comes next. As we look at newspapers, if newspapers are a canary in the coalmine in this process of change, we see that they refused to change. They tried to protect their past, which is no strategy for the future. And so a lot of them are going to die. We see the same resistance to change in the auto industry and in retail. I think we’ll see the same thing come to advertising and universities and all through society.

I don’t want to belittle the pain that it can cause to people who lose their jobs and don’t have the training to do what’s next. That’s all true, but you can’t really forestall change. My fear in the current bailing out the economy, is that we are bailing out the past rather than the future. We’re bailing out industries that are clearly failing and are bound to fail, when we should be investing instead in innovation, education and infrastructure for the future.

I was talking about this at marketing conference and someone in the audience said what you’re describing is "dialectical materialism" -- and in a sense we are. In a sense we are saying there is an inevitable change. The question is, "Is it just change for change because people messed up and things are changing? Or is it indeed an evolution?"

I think it’s not the evolution that Marx predicted -- It didn’t come from government diktat, it came from technology. I think the Internet and technology are leading us to the next evolutionary phase in the economy and society. I think we have no choice but to run to the change. That’s why I wrote the book in the end, because I think that Google in its DNA understood the world was changing and saw it in new ways to take advantage of that -- and so must we all.

1986

"Columbo" the TV show may have died and gone to syndication heaven, but Columbo, the slightly off-center but lovable homicide detective, is alive and well in the person of Peter Falk.

Falk no longer runs around in a rumpled raincoat constructing cases against rich and powerful murderers. But after just a few minutes in his new office on the Burbank Studios lot, it becomes clear where the deceptively casual Lt. Columbo inherited his endearing eccentricities.

Falk, 57, is surrounded by a gallery of photographs — his two daughters, himself, his hero Ted Williams in full swing -- and half a dozen black-and-white sketches of his own making.

Friendly and shoe-less, he slouches back in his swivel chair, feet on his desk top, flicking his cigarette in the general direction of the stand-up ash tray next to him.

Later, hunched over his desk, he doodles as his gravelly, familiar voice with its East Coast pool-room accent starts, stops and sometimes approaches inaudibility.

He's a regular guy who seems more eager to talk baseball than acting, but is still willing to spin plenty of stories about himself.

He began his adult life as a cook with the U.S. Merchant Marine (the childhood tumor that cost him his right eye didn't stop him from being a good amateur athlete, but it did keep him out of the Marines). He kicked around at several colleges, including Syracuse University, where he picked up a masters in Public Administration.

Before that he attended Manhattan's very liberal New School of Social Research, a fact which helped keep him out of the CIA when he applied for work there in 1953.

His 1946 vacation to Yugoslavia during his college years and his inadvertent membership in what was considered a "pink" Merchant Marine union, he points out with glee, made him such a hopeless CIA candidate that his interviewer laughed him out of the office.

Falk began acting full-time in 1955, after quitting his job as an efficiency expert for the State of Connecticut. In 1956 his off-Broadway work as the bartender in “The Iceman Cometh" brought him some attention and eventually led to steady work as a heavy in TV and films.

By 1961 the son of a department store owner in Ossining, N.Y., had been nominated for two best-supporting Oscars (as a vicious killer in "Murder, Inc." in 1960 and as a Brooklyn hood in "Pocketful of Miracles in 1961). He also had won an Emmy for his portrayal of a truck driver in a TV play called “The Price of Tomatoes."

Since then, his credits have ranged from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963) and the Neil Simon comedies "Murder by Death" (1976) and "The Cheap Detective (1978) to "Husbands" (1970) and “A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), a pair of small-budget but powerful films done with his longtime friend, actor/director John Cassavetes.

In 1972 Falk won a Tony for Simon's "Prisoner of Second Avenue." He hasn't done any TV acting since the immensely popular “Columbo” went off the air in 1977 — after 40 episodes and three more Emmys over five years — but he's been kept busy in movies.

His latest is "Big Trouble," a screwball comedy directed by Cassavetes and co-starring another of Falk's Hollywood cronies, Alan Arkin, with whom he last teamed in 1979 in “The In-Laws."

In "Big Trouble, which opens this month, Falk plays an amiable but quite insane con-man who lures Arkin, an unwitting, hard-working insurance salesman, into a crazy scheme to defraud his own company. It's a typically wacky role for a short and stocky man whose likeable and very human characters always seem to have a great deal of the real Peter Falk shining through.

Q: How's life been treating you since your "Columbo" days? Do you miss being the center of all that attention?

FALK: I'm trying to find some way to say this ... Fame is a terrific thing. It has its advantages. But I don't think most people realize how quick it grows old. What you have to say about fame, if you're talking about its relationship to happiness, is that it's overrated.

You ask what do you miss about Columbo. What you got a kick out of? It's great to be on the cover of Time magazine. But what you get a kick out of was when you looked at the dailies and saw that character do something that tickled you, and you enjoyed it so. The way you played the scene and the whole damn thing worked. What you miss is the frustrations when they didn't work the way you wanted them to, and the delight when they did work. It's great when people ask for your autograph, but it's a poor second to doing something that tickles you.

Q: Did you ever seek fame or dream of being famous?

FALK: I never dreamed of it. Just the opposite. No. I grew up in Ossining, N.Y.. and I put in my time on the street corner. I put in my time in the pool room, and I liked sports. I would have been embarrassed to tell any of my friends that I had any idea of being an actor.

My conception of being an actor was very naive and very romantic. I thought actors were some rare species. I thought they were artists, and I thought artists were Europeans. They came from Europe, 'cause I never saw any where I came from.

When I eventually got up enough courage to become one, I thought that Heaven on Earth was not being the star — that was out of the question. Heaven on Earth was being admitted to the Actors Studio. If I ever got admitted to the Actors Studio, that's the end of the line -- that was …

Q: Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio?

FALK: Yeah. That was in New York City. That was just the place where actors used to go to rehearse among themselves. In those days, that was the big thing. You never got paid for it. Nobody except for a few people. If I had a dream, my dream was that I would be able to make a living on the stage, in New York, as an actor. That I would be a working actor who got paid for acting. And I would have some credibility with other actors. I didn't become one until I was 26 years old. I mean, I didn't announce to myself that I wanted to be an actor.

Q: It's been reported that you started out wanting to be a politician. Was that just because there was nothing else to do?

FALK: No. When I was in school they kept making me president of the class, so I thought, "You'll be a politician.”

Q: Where did you go right? When did you change your plans?

FALK: I think I realized, once I matured, that I wasn't cut out to go out and kiss babies.

Q: You didn't have any burning desire to get elected Governor of New York?

FALK: No. The desire to be a politician left me very quickly.

Q: Are you politically oriented now?

FALK: Yes. I'm interested in politics. We all have to be. But it's unfortunate, the amount of cynicism that's connected to politics. I think it's bad for the country. I think a lot of the cynicism might be justified, but it would be a healthier country, particularly in terms of big offices, if we could be tough on these guys, but on important things. Frequently we get caught up in being tough on them in unimportant ways. It makes it tough for people to go into politics. There's a real danger that good people are staying away. It's just too rough.

I think we oscillate from one extreme to another, so that the feeling that one man, whoever is President, is responsible for all the good, is responsible for all the evil, is very hard for me to believe.

I think the politicians are totally lucky, totally lucky. Something happens that's actually out of their control — oil prices go up and everything is thrown out of whack. Oil prices go down, they get lucky. They make it sound like they did it. I think the country is too complex. These are short term things. In two years, it can go bad again. So I can't get that worked up about those things.

Q: Why did you choose acting?

FALK: There must have been some thing in me that drew me to it, because wherever I was, I'd end up acting. I'd always go in through the back door ... in high school ... and at Syracuse University.

Then when I was in New York at the New School of Social Research, there was a place called the Dramatic Workshop, very well known. It was run by Erwin Piscator, a German Expressionist director who left Germany in the '30s. And I was majoring in whatever the hell I was majoring in -- I don't remember. History?

Whatever it was, I was just stalling you know? But I knew one thing — the less work I could do the better I liked it. And I saw you could get credit for being in a play. The guy said, ‘Oh no, you gotta have these prerequisites, you gotta take fencing or something.’ I said, ‘I don't want to do that — could I read for the play?

So I read for the play and they give me the lead. And this guy offers me a scholarship to go become a drama major. And I remember sitting in Louie's Tavern, laughing my rear off ... this guy is asking me to be an actor. He thinks I'm one of these dopes. He thinks that I don't know this is amateur night here, what we're doing.

You can't make a living as an actor. What am I going to do, starve in a garret in Greenwich Village? Not for me. I was above it all.

Secretly, I was so thrilled. But I was so frightened, so intimidated that I would never admit it. So, I told him no. And that was only out of fear, fear of failure. I really wanted to do it.

I went to a lot of different colleges and I'd always end up doing a play. When I finally got a job where people were paying me — I was going 9 to 5 in Hartford, Conn., as a government efficiency expert — I couldn't even find the office. I was no efficiency expert.

But they had a little theater over there and now I gravitate over there. My life used to begin at night, when I'd go to that little theater and act. So, no matter where I was, l ended up onstage acting.

But I could never confront it, face it and say that that's what I wanted to do. Because I thought to be an actor you had... what did you ask me?

Q: How you ended up being an actor — I think you answered it: You don't know. You just ended up being one.

FALK: Oh, oh, oh. Why I ended up being an actor. Jim Backus said if I wasn't an actor I'd be a box boy in Food Giant.

Q: Food Giant? That must be a New York grocery store?

FALK: Don't they have Food Giants out here?

Q: As an actor, you seem to have gotten pretty good reviews. Have you ever been really blasted by critics?

FALK: I don't remember bad reviews in television, but I got bad reviews in theater and in movies. The first review I ever got on the stage was in 1956 by the leading critic in the country at that time, Walter Kerr, in my first play in New York — the New World Premiere of Molière's "Don Juan." It had never been done before in this country -- and if that production has anything to do with it, it never will be done again.

I opened that show and Walter Kerr opened his review on me — it's burned into my memory: ‘Peter Falk got the evening off to a wonderfully paralyzed start with 10 minutes of totally unaccented exposition.’

That play was my introduction to method acting. The director was trying to get rid of that artificial presentation of acting where you come out ... Ahh, incidentally, George Segal ended up in that production. I remember his blue pastel knickers and the buckles on his shoes. And I remember my buckles. It was fun.

Q: How did you end up in Hollywood?

While I was still in New York, I did a Hollywood picture, a Twentieth Century-Fox picture with Mai Britt and Stuart Whitman as the stars, but they came to New York because it was about New York gangsters -- "Murder, Inc." (1960).

I had never been to Hollywood before. I rarely got above 14th Street. Off-Broadway was down in the Village, and that's where we lived. I hadn't been in a movie. "Murder, Inc." came to New York and I got the part, and then I got nominated for an Academy Award.

Q: Did that Oscar nomination have a big effect on your career?

FALK: That was the turning point in terms of recognition outside the small group of people in New York City. As a result, Frank Capra cast me in "Pocketful of Miracles" (1961). That was the first picture I ever made out here. Glenn Ford. Bette Davis. That was Ann-Margret's first movie.

Then I got nominated for it. So, I said, ‘Geez, how long has this been going on? All you have to do is get in a picture and you get nominated. There's nothing to this.’

Q: So in your first two movies you were nominated for Oscars?

FALK: And in the same two years I was nominated for an Emmy for “The Price of Tomatoes” on the “Dick Powell Theater."

Q: Do you enjoy being an actor?

FALK: Yes.

Q: Which do you prefer doing ... TV, film or stage?

FALK: Film.

Q: We've heard that when you first moved out here to Hollywood, you thought filming — with all the lights and paraphernalia, etc. — was very artificial?

FALK: Right. But I feel the reverse now. I believe you can be more subtle on film, more real on film. Playing in a big theater, I’m more aware of the artificiality.

Q: Which of your roles are you most proud of?

FALK: I would say "Columbo." I thought I was good in "Under the Influence.” I liked my work in “The In-Laws."

Q: You've done a lot of movie work with your friends Alan Arkin, who was in "The In-Laws," and John Cassavetes, who's directing your new movie, "Big Trouble." Is it more fun shooting movies with your pals?

FALK: Yeah, it's nice working with guys you like, guys you get along with, guys you respect. But that's no guarantee that things won't go bad. But l am comfortable with Alan and I do enjoy him and respect him a lot.

Q: Are there any movie roles you wish you hadn't taken?

FALK: I thought I was lousy in "Luv."

Q: Just looking back on it, or for any particular reason?

FALK: No. I thought it was lousy when I was doing it.

Q: Was it the wrong part?

FALK: Well, a lot of it was probably my fault. Some of it was the script.

Q: Let's talk about "Columbo." What made it such a success, so special? Was it just you, or was it the concept?

FALK: I think it was the character of Columbo, primarily. I don't think you could separate it out — the character, the story, the fact that it was a mystery. But I think the hub of it starts with the character. That's the heart of it, the soul of it.

Q: Newsweek called Columbo a "lovable, low-key guy." Lovable, eccentric — was that what it was?

FALK: Ahhh, well, what was it?

People like somebody they can identify with. A man or person not above them, but among them. Ahhh, so, I think they identified with the common aspects of Columbo. I mean, he's like everybody — he's one of us.

But at the same time, people have always been attracted to heroes — people who are bigger than life, exceptional. In some ways, Columbo was both.

Elaine May said he was an ass-backward Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was smart, but he was an aristocrat. Columbo was just like everyone who walks the streets.

On the other hand, there's something exceptional about his mind. That had something to do with it: his lack of pretension — people like somebody who's not affected, they like somebody who's human.

By human — what do I mean by human? He's got a sense of humor, about himself. He's interested in what human people are interested in -- ‘What did you pay for that pair of shoes?’

His wife is on his mind. Guns make too much noise -- ‘I don't want to go to target practice. There's too much damn noise there.’ It's a human thing. You get a new raincoat in that one episode, it's a human thing to feel uncomfortable in something new. It's stiff.

He nails a guy who's got a lot of dough, is handsome, is on top of the world, because a guy reached too far, greedy — he regrets that. He regrets that the guy had to go that route. It's a human thing.

Also, the clues were good, the murders were clever, and the twists at the end were delicious and unexpected and convincing.

Q: You had good writers?

FALK: We didn't cheat. We didn't make a lot of shows — only six or eight a year.

Q: Where's the raincoat?

FALK: The raincoat's in my house. It was my raincoat. 

Jimmy Stewart

When you look up the word "actor" in the dictionary, Jimmy Stewart's name isn't there. But maybe it should be.

Few actors in history have been so beloved by the movie-going public, or so honored by their peers, as the tall, slightly gawky, drawling country-boy type from Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Stewart, 79, no longer is acting, but his films are enjoying something of a renaissance, thanks to the explosion of the home-video industry. Uncut and uninterrupted by TV commercials, many of the best of his 80-plus movies are being seen for the first time by a whole new audience.

His 1940 Oscar-winning performance in “The Philadelphia Story” is available on tape. So are his Oscar-nominated roles in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “It's a Wonderful Life” and “Anatomy of a Murder,” as well as “Rope,” “Vertigo” and “Rear Window,” three movies he made with Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s.

Although he rose to star status rather quickly, Stewart was never a stage-struck kid. He fooled around with magic and the accordion as a boy, and belonged to the theatrically oriented Triangle Club while at Princeton, but he graduated in 1932 with a B.S. in architecture.

He was headed for a rendezvous with a masters in architecture when a classmate, Joshua Logan, persuaded him to spend that summer with his acting company, the University Players, in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

There, Stewart met his lifelong pal, Henry Fonda, and caught the acting bug that would eventually land him in Holly wood via the stages of Broadway. His first (three-minute) part in New York earned him $45 a week, a decent sum during the depths of the Depression.

In 1935, with his roommate Fonda already signed to a Hollywood studio contract, Stewart left New York City to sign with MGM. Five years and 24 movies later, he was a Hollywood star-making $12,000 a week.

Stewart's Hollywood career was interrupted nine months before Pearl Harbor, when he enlisted as a private in the Army Air Corps. He won his pilot's wings and flew 20 missions over Germany in a B-24 before being given a desk job.

Here’s a Life magazine spread on the homecoming of Col. Stewart, war hero.

By the time he retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1968, he was a brigadier general, the highest military rank ever attained by an entertainer.

After the war, Stewart's roles took on a more masculine bent. He played everything from grisly cowboys and detectives to aviator Charles Lindberg and Harvey's rabbit-hallucinating Elwood P. Dowd, a role he's played on stage, in film and on TV.

One of the first stars to break with the studio system, he was also one of the first actors to elect to work for a percentage of his movies' profits, a decision that proved profitable when he appeared in several box-office hits made by leading directors like Hitchcock.

In all, Stewart was nominated for five best-actor Oscars, winning one. In 1985, he was presented with an honorary Oscar for his more than 50 years of work in Hollywood.

Long active with the Boy Scouts and other community organizations, Stewart's conservative politics are well known. He's a subscriber to William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, but says his politics are rooted in traditional values that come from the influence of his Scottish-Irish father and from his small-town upbringing.

Still quite active today, Stewart hits his Beverly Hills office each morning at eight to work and answer his mail (holding steady at about 200 letters per week), and swims in his pool daily. He takes his dogs on long walks each evening with Gloria, his wife of 37 years and the mother of their twin daughters, Judy and Kelly.

When he's not chasing one of his four grandchildren around the sprawling, landscaped grounds of his Beverly Hills mansion on Roxbury Drive, he's probably traveling somewhere to collect yet another award, like the Medal of Freedom the highest honor possible for a U.S. civilian, that his old buddy President Reagan gave him last year.

Jimmy Stewart

Q: It seems that quite a few of your movies are available on videocassettes these days. What do you think of the home-video revolution?

STEWART: I think it's a good idea, because the quality of videos is so good. They've really taken the time and effort to make the color good — it's like making a new print of the movie. And, of course, you can ask people over to see an old movie, and it doesn't have to be at two in the morning.

Home video is going to be a very important thing in getting more people back to the movies. It's all right, inviting people into your living room. But I think people'll do what they used to do — make an event out of going to the movie theater with family and friends. Movies are going to be around for a long time.

Q: Have you seen many movies lately?

STEWART: Not very many. But I went to one that really brought things back to me. We went with some friends down to the Cinerama Dome (in Hollywood) to see “Out of Africa.” You tend to forget about that great wide screen. “Out of Africa” was ideal for the big screen.

Q: Aren't the “Out of Africas” pretty rare today?

STEWART: I know what you mean. I think there's going to be a big change. The movies are like the Westerns. Westerns have had their ups and downs, too. The violence — people are getting tired of cars going off bridges and crashing into the water. If you've seen four or five of those, you've had enough of them. The sex — God knows, people aren't going to get tired of it, but it can be presented in a way that leaves a little more to the imagination.

Q: The cast of “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) — Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and you — was great. And the movie was so witty and intelligent. Did it have any mass appeal?

STEWART: I think so. Fox said it did very well. That was a very exciting time for me. I had never worked with Katharine Hepburn before. I was lucky to get the part —and I had no idea I was going to get the Academy Award.

As a matter of fact, I was making a picture, and I wasn't going to go to the awards ceremonies, but someone called me on the phone and said you'd better get down to the Ambassador Hotel. I didn't know what the hell was happening.

Q: That was 1940, and you'd just done 24 movies in about five years. Did you have any feeling that you were being overworked?

STEWART: No. That was the ideal way to make movies. I admired the big studio system and the moguls who ran it. This was the ideal way to make movies. . . . Henry Fonda felt the same way. It was the idea of learning your craft while working at it.

You went to work six days a week —lessons, exercises, weightlifting. You took screen tests. You had little parts in big pictures and big parts in little pictures — that's when they were doing B pictures all the time.

It wasn't a question of, "Read this script and see if you like it." It was, "Here's a script and you start next Monday — and you're in the first scene, so be prepared."

Q: You had no choice of roles?

STEWART: Absolutely no choice.

That's the way it was for all the people at MGM. One time I got loaned out to Universal Studios, and the price they paid was that MGM got to use their back lot for four or five days.

They'd send you out on the road for a picture you weren't even in. I remember they said to go up to San Francisco and come out before the movie, tell them who you are and tell them a couple of jokes.

Well, I went to Morey Amsterdam and he gave me three jokes. In those days — and I'd forgotten about it — there were shows at ten in the morning. And at ten the place wasn't packed. It was a bad time for those jokes. Awful. And they didn't seem to get any better, either. I was there for three days.

Q: Was Hollywood in the '30s as crazy and glamorous as they say it was?

STEWART: Whatever glamorous means, I've never known -- but there was glamor. It was established by the studios — they were responsible for the glamor.

And all the wild things that were going on… in MGM's case, it had a public relations outfit that made up half of the wild things. But it was an exciting place. The work was exciting. As I said, you'd work six days a week, and then everybody from all the studios would go to the Trocadero — which is torn down now -- on the Strip.

Everybody'd go for a good time. They'd have different bands, and all the comics got up and tried to outdo each other. I remember one time a lady with a little girl — brown-eyed and wearing bobby sox -- asked if her daughter could sing. They put it up to the audience, and we said OK. She got up and sang for an hour — it was Judy Garland.

Q: Who were your pals in those days?

STEWART: Bob Young, Walter Pidgeon, Spencer Tracy. I was in my first picture with Tracy, and he was wonderful to me. Considerate. A great fellow to learn from.

Q: Of all those women you worked with — Hepburn, Kelly, Dietrich, Lombard, Rogers — do you have a favorite?

A: I really don't have a favorite. In a way, Grace Kelly, but it's very hard.

Q: You've called the Western the true movie form. Why?

STEWART: The Western is the basic movie form because the Western is a visual form, and that's what movies are. John Ford always said -- and he'd say it when we were all talkin' in a scene — "Cut. Everybody's talkin' too much." One time I heard him say, "If you can't tell your story visually on the screen without relying on the spoken word, you're not using the medium properly.”

Q: Yet “The Philadelphia Story” was all dialogue.

STEWART: It was from a play. And if you think back over the years, the number of pictures that have been successfully taken from plays... there are damn few. One of the reasons for this is that on the stage the spoken word is the whole thing. Everything else is background.

In the late '40s, studios would use the Lux Radio Theatre to boost a movie. They sent the script of “Winchester '73” to the Lux people, and they sent it back. They said, "We can't use this script -- nobody says anything. We don't know how to fill in all visuals."

Q: In those days, were you big enough to say, "I want that picture"? And could you get it?

STEWART: I plugged harder for the of role of Charles Lindbergh in “The Spirit of Louis” than I did for any picture. I tried everything. My former agent, Leland Hayward, was producing and Billy Wilder was directing it.

And they said, "You can't play it. You're too old." And I said, "I know I'm old, but you know they have a makeup department. They'll put a blond wig on me. And I'm just as skinny as he was." And they said, "You're too old."

There was a young actor named John Kerr who was around for a while, and they wanted him. But he read the script, and he didn't like Lindbergh for political reasons. That's the way I got the part.

Q: As a pilot, playing Lindbergh must have been a special treat.

STEWART: He was my hero. I worked at my Dad's hardware store when I wasn't in school, and for Lindbergh's flight I made a world out of beaverboard. Over here was the Woolworth Building and over here was the Eiffel Tower, and I made a model of the Spirit of St. Louis and hung it up.

My dad let me keep the lights on, and the Indiana Evening Gazette was across the street, and I'd go over there and find out where Lindbergh was and I'd move the airplane. People kept coming all night.

Q: You had it in the window of the store - which is where you put your Oscar for 20 years, too?

STEWART: He put it there. I didn't.

Q: Are you a product of a small town?

STEWART: I think so. I give the credit to my father, mostly, but my mother too. She was the only one he'd listen to. He had certain values — family, community friendship, church and loyalty — that I got from him.

The idea of community meant so much to him. He sang in the choir of the Presbyterian church and was involved in city council. When he was 40, during World War I — when America first got into it — he just disappeared. He didn't tell my mother, nobody. Three days later be came back an officer. He was in France until the end of the war.

Q: You did basically the same thing, enlisting in World War II, right?

STEWART: Sure. I was in my 30s, and at the studios everyone was saying I was too old, and they could fix it if I was drafted. But my Dad would have come out and shot me.

Q: You've been called a "super patriot." Did you have any problems with your career because you were a political conservative?

STEWART: No. I was raised like that and sort of followed after my father and never gave it a thought. The idea of being anything but a conservative — I never considered it.

Q: You and Henry Fonda were roommates on Broadway and longtime buddies. But politically you were diametrically opposed.

STEWART: Oh, yeah. We would argue our heads off for the first six or eight months we knew each other. But finally we got together — I think we were both drunk — and we said, "Look, we just yell at each other all the time. This is no fun. You shut up about politics and I'll shut up about politics, and we'll never mention it again.”

And we never did. When some thing came up and we were together, we'd just leave the room.

Q: Was there any burning passion or desire to be something else besides acting — weren't you going to be an architect?

A: I wasn't a good student. Here's where my father came in again. He said “be an engineer.” So my freshman year at Princeton I took some engineering courses, but at the end of the year a couple of professors came up and said you'd better get out of this.

I had to go to summer school between my freshman and sophomore years or I'd have been out on my ass. During that summer school someone told me about a mathematics class called 'descriptive geometery,’ which sounds terrible, but it’s not as bad as algebra. I took that during summer school and was able to get into architecture.

Q: Did you enjoy it?

A: Yes, very much. It was a creative type of thing. Joe (Jose) Ferrar was there at the same time I was. Josh Logan, the great director, was in the class ahead of me and he really was responsible for me getting into acting.

I got a scholarship to get my master's degree in architecture and that's what I was going to do. I think all the time my father was letting me get this education he didn't care what kind of education it was. All he wanted to do was have me come back and take his place — in the hardware store. That was it. He never said that, but I always thought it.

I was on my way to commencement up in front of Nassau Hall — and I can remember exactly where it was — and Josh Logan came up to me and said, 'You're coming back to grad school. In the summer we have a place up in Massachusetts called ‘Falmouth’ and we have an outfit called the ‘University Players,' which I'd heard of from three or four other Princeton guys.

And he said, 'Why don't you come up and spend the summer. It's a nice place at the seashore, and I think you'll enjoy it.' And after that summer, I made up my mind to be an actor. If he hadn't asked me to go up there ...

Q: Your famous speech pattern -- your drawl — where did it come from?

STEWART: I swear I don't know. Maybe it came from Indiana, maybe I was born with it.

Q: Did they ever try to get you out of it?

STEWART: No. But I knew about it and got to be very conscious of it. For instance, sometimes I'd do a scene with Hitchcock and he'd look up and say, "Jim" -- he always called me Jim — "this scene is timed."

It was something I had to be able to control. In things like the filibuster in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” you couldn't "hmmm" and "ha." You'd really be in trouble.

Q: What was it like working with Hitchcock? Was there a lot of tension on the set?

STEWART: There have been books written about that and people saying that he was so terrible with women and that there was an evil-type thing — which is absolutely ridiculous.

He kept an excitement on the set. How he did it, I don't know. But nothing seemed to upset him. I remember “Rear Window” at Paramount, when there was just one set.

In one shot he wanted me in focus in the foreground and across the courtyard, too. Now you're dealing with depth of field here, and you have to have more light. So they had all the lights at Paramount on us and even borrowed some from Columbia and MGM.

Finally, just as they told Hitch they had enough lights, the lights tripped the sprinkler for the fire system. It started to rain — and I mean really rain. And he said, "See if you can get someone to turn off the rain, and while you're at it, someone might get me an umbrella"

And he sat under this umbrella until they got the sprinklers turned off. Nothing threw him.

Q: You're so revered now as an actor, but did the critics ever blast you?

STEWART: Oh, sure. I've gotten terrible reviews. You know, you just remember the bad ones. I was in a play at the Shubert Theater in New York, a leading role with a new actress from Austria. The New York Times said: "Jimmy Stewart wanders through the play like a befuddled tourist on the Danube." I've remembered it all my life.

Q: Of all the awards you've won, which is the most treasured?

STEWART: They mean a great deal, and I'm proud of them. I've great respect for the Academy Awards. It's really a pat on the back from your fellow actors. They voted for it.

Q: Is there anything you dreamed of doing but never got the chance to do?

STEWART: No. Gloria and I traveled a lot. We've been to Africa and Brazil... It's been a wonderful life. My family is getting along fine. I have four grandchildren coming tomorrow. This place will be jumping. You think that dog's barking now. 

Meanwhile….

A biopic called ‘Jimmy’ will be released in November in honor of Stewart’s birthday. It stars KJ Apa (“Riverdale”). Here’s the trailer.

One of the many highlights of my long and enjoyable and modestly subversive career as a libertarian newspaperman was to have met and/or interviewed the great economist Thomas Sowell a few times.

Sowell, who will turned 96 on June 30, 2026, was the subject of Jason Riley’s biography Maverick four years ago and featured in this fine video. He was later interviewed by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution about his newest project: a website titled ‘Facts Against Rhetoric,’ a powerful resource dedicated to empirical thinking and intellectual clarity.

I first met Sowell in Los Angeles in 1982 when the free-market economist and conservative social critic came in personally to thank and shake the hand of a black copywriter I worked with at the LA Times. Stan Williford had shocked Sowell by favorably reviewing his book Ethnic America: A History in the liberal LAT.

In the 1990s, after I moved back home to Pittsburgh, I met Sowell again when I worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I ambushed him (see interview below) with a bunch of questions about inner-city public schools and crime at St. Vincent College near Pittsburgh after he gave a talk sponsored by the school's free-market economics department.

I cornered the Hoover Institution senior fellow on his way to the punch bowl and interrogated him so aggressively that he justifiably became a little annoyed. My intentions were honorable.

As a subversive libertarian journalist, I wanted to get Sowell and his ideas in the Post-Gazette’s liberal opinion pages. I did, though the paper’s editor, a liberal Democrat, accused me of asking “tendentious” questions.

Following the ambush interview are transcripts of the two long phone Q&As I did with Sowell in the 2000s for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. I worked as an editor/op-ed columnist at the conservative/libertarian paper, which was heavily subsidized with the pocket change of conservative billionaire Richard Scaife.

A bonus: Sowell’s 1984 interview with Tony Brown, who asks him about his great book, “The Economics and Politics of Race.”

Thomas Sowell tells Pittsburghers how to brake the inner-city slide

The former Marxist-turned-economist minces no words with Bill Steigerwald

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

April 18, 1993

It wasn't much of a post-lecture reception for keynote speaker Thomas Sowell. He never even made it to the punch and cookies.

Thirty minutes after his lecture in St. Vincent College's Kennedy Hall Wednesday night, the Hoover Institution economist/author and columnist was still surrounded by a dozen people near the entrance to the King Ludvig Gallery.

Some who came to hear Sowell knew him as one of the Founding Fathers of the Black Conservatives. Others as the former Marxist intellectual from Harlem who converted to free-market conservatism and was Ronald Reagan's first choice for secretary of Education in 1980.

Most were hip to Sowell's biting attacks on educators, politicians, the media and the welfare state. They didn't need to read his new 400-page assault on the educational establishment, "Inside American Education," which he charges has overtaxed us, betrayed us, lied to us and misused our children for its own bogus social, psychological and pedagogical experiments.

Sowell, 62, used to be despised by traditional black political leaders. Now they ignore his attacks on what he says is their foolish reliance on government programs and their mistaken faith in the efficacy of affirmative action. Of the 500 who came to hear him, fewer than 10 were black. But Sowell is used to being a minority among minorities.

Afterwards, in the King Ludvig Gallery, when it became obvious that Sowell was weakening and his unsatiable interrogators were not, we stepped in and let him have it with a volley of questions.

***

Q: The city of Pittsburgh is now getting inner-city problems, like gangs and drive-by shootings. Is there anything Pittsburgh can do while it still has the chance?

Sowell: Better law enforcement and don't listen to psychologists.

Q: Cops on the street? More patrols?

A: Yeah. We can't accept the idea that there's something inevitable about vast amounts of crime in a ghetto area. I grew up in Harlem, and where I grew up I used to walk the whole length of a block, about 12 blocks long. I didn't weigh 100 pounds soaking wet. And I did that regularly at midnight.

Q: But the culture has changed.

Sowell: That's why I say you need to have more law enforcement and not listen to sociologists and psychologists, because that's part of the changed culture — the notion that there's all kinds of wonderful things you can do to get at the root causes of crime.

Well, all the things that are supposed to be the root causes of crime were much worse in the 1940s than they are today. We were poorer. There was more Discrimination. You name it. And there was a lot less crime. So those things are really excuses.

Q: What about young black kids with no fathers in inner cities? Those kinds of conditions ...

Sowell: I don't think one's family situation justifies crime.

Q: Are there any solutions? Any tradeoffs?

Sowell: You can go through a lot of things there. A gang lifestyle becomes possible in a welfare state. Try to become a gang member if you've got to go out there and feed yourself.

Q: What impediments are there to kids in inner cities getting decent jobs?

Sowell: Bad education is one. But it's also true that the chance of anything serious happening to you as a result of following crime is a lot less now than they were then.

There was a time when you committed a serious crime, you were going to get a serious punishment. Now there are all kinds of people out there who come up with all kinds of reasons why you should be rehabilitated, in halfway houses and so on, and it's just a different ballgame. The people who pay the biggest price for this are those who themselves live in the ghettos.

Q: Pittsburgh still has a large middle class inside its city limits. Some of them now hear gunfire every night from drive-by shootings.

Sowell: They're going to move to the suburbs.

Q: Is that inevitable?

Sowell: No. If you're going to have serious law enforcement, you're going to have a serious effect on crime.

Q: Pittsburgh's public schools spend close to $10,000 per student and . . .

Sowell: I don't care how much they spend. Spending that money on the kids has nothing to do with anything. There's no correlation. There are places which spend much less than other places. I'm told New Hampshire is number one in the nation and has one of the lowest per pupil expenditures in the country.

Q: So if we're stuck with bad public schools, and the people who are stuck in bad public schools are primarily poor kids in inner cities . . .

Sowell: Unfortunately, there are bad public schools everywhere.

Q: What's the most important thing a big-city public school system could do to improve education?

Sowell: Eliminate tenure and allow parents to make a choice.

Q: Just within the school system or in and out of the school system?

Sowell: As much as you can get. If you can have it go public and private, fine. But if it's only public, fine. Have the parents make a choice among public schools. Right now they're a captive audience no matter how bad the schools are, they have to go there. And in the low-income areas, that's the dumping ground for teachers who run into problems in middle-class areas.

Q: Do you ever wish you had taken up Mr. Reagan's offer to become Secretary of Education?

Sowell: No. I don't think I could have ever accomplished anything to be worth the aggravation.

Q: Is it possible to do anything to improve education from the top down, or is it a bottom-up process?

Sowell: Oh, there's lots of things and laws and so forth ... But listen, I've talked enough.

2003

Thomas Sowell: An Intellectual Treasure

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Thomas Sowell, one of America's greatest intellectual treasures, is generally referred to as a "black conservative," but he is a revered hero in both libertarian and conservative camps.

A free-market economist, philosopher, social critic, syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Sowell has written more than 25 scholarly, logical, usually provocative and often groundbreaking books on economics, politics, race, immigration, education, culture, the justice system, the U.S. Constitution and Marxism.

Sowell's latest book, "Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One” applies the principles of economics (without the jargon) to such real-world problems as housing, medical care, discrimination and the economic development of nations. I talked to him by telephone on Thursday from San Francisco:

Q: What's the biggest difference between the way a politician thinks and the way an economist thinks?

A: Well, the politician thinks in terms of what would get him elected in the next election. The classic definition, or my favorite definition of economics, is "the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses," which may sound pretty dry. But whether those resources are used efficiently or inefficiently determines whether people are rich, prosperous or poor.

The Soviet Union, for example, had some of the most abundant resources, and quite possibly the most abundant resources of any country in the world. And yet the standard of living in the Soviet Union was not only far below that of the United States, it was lower than that of countries which have virtually no natural resources, such as Japan or Switzerland.

The difference is that what resources the Japanese buy — and they have to buy most of them — they use far more efficiently than the Soviets did.

Q: Who are your favorite economists, or the economists you look up to?

A: Well, of course, Milton Friedman. And the book "Applied Economics" is dedicated to Arthur Smithies, who had this wonderful way of questioning in class, as I say in the subtitle, to get us to "think beyond stage one," because so many policies that sound good, when you only look at the immediate effect, look totally different when you begin to look at the repercussions of those polices.

Rent control is a classic example. When you put in rent control, the tenants have lower rents, the tenants are happy. Fine. In no time, you discover that, 1), nobody is building any more housing, and, 2), the landlords are not maintaining the existing housing as well as they did before, because now there is a housing shortage and they don't have to. And so the housing stock begins to decline, and no comparable amount of new housing is built to replace it. And so now you get a progressively worsening housing shortage.

At some point, the politicians become aware that nobody is building any housing. In some places they say, "All right, we will maintain rent control for low-cost housing, but if you want to build luxury housing, we won't put in rent control." Fine. But resources have been shifted from building ordinary housing to luxury housing.

This has happened in cities across the United States and in countries in Europe and elsewhere. The ultimate consequence is that the people who wanted to produce affordable housing are making it impossible to build affordable housing and shifting resources to building housing that the vast majority of people can't afford at all.

Q: Who are your favorite politicians?

A: Oh, gee. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Q: What's the biggest difference between the way politicians and economists think and act when it comes to health care?

A: The politicians look at it in terms of saying and doing "What will get me elected." What that means is that if you give people the impression that they are getting something either free or at a bargain, they are more likely to vote for you.

Economists, unfortunately, are handicapped because they know there is no such thing as a free lunch. They also know the difference between lowering costs and merely lowering prices. You can lower prices with a law, but that doesn't lower the cost by one penny. It still costs just as much to produce the medicines, educate the doctors and build the hospitals.

So you end up with costs being shuffled around. But they don't go away just because they're shuffled around. The HMOs try to put more of the costs on Medicare and vice versa, so you get this game being played, which doesn't lower anybody's costs.

Q: You say in the book that it's important to have a sense of humor when you're trying to learn about economic policies. What do you mean by that?

A: Well, so many of the policies are so badly mistaken. They not only don't solve the problem, they usually make the problem far worse than to begin with. So you can get quite angry just studying economic policies, even more so than economic theory.

The first thing to remember is that you will have the last word when Election Day comes around, and the time to get angry is in voting booth.

Q: Someone wanted me to ask you if $500 billion budgets matter in the long run?

A: (laughs) There was a time when the entire gross national product of the United States was about $500 billion. It would have mattered a lot then. When the gross national product is in the trillions, it matters less. I'm sure that if I had one-tenth the debts that, say, Donald Trump has, I would be ruined. But that doesn't mean Donald Trump is ruined.

Q: Of all your books, is there any one you'd recommend to someone that would explain who you are?

A: If there is any one book of mine I would most like most people to read, it would be "Basic Economics," because it does just take you from square one right on through everything, from price controls to international trade, stocks and bonds, whatever.

Q: Do you think the level of economic literacy has been going up or down among the general public?

A: I have no idea. I suspect that it is so low it would be hard to measure. In fact, that was the whole reason for my writing these two books — to do what little I can, because there is no great incentive for an economist to write at this level. It certainly won't help his career, but when you're an old man, you can do all kinds of things you couldn't do when you were young.

Q: I would suggest that after working in the media for 30 years, one of your key target audiences would be my fellow journalists.

A: If I were rich, I would send every one of them a copy of "Basic Economics."

2008

Economic Facts and Fallacies

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Economist and syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell says he has lost track of how many books he’s written on economics, history, social policy, ethnicity and the history of ideas.

His latest, “Economic Facts and Fallacies,” adds to his admirable record of using plain language to pass along some of the dismal science’s often ignored, often twisted truths and basic principles to everyday readers.

Professor Sowell, 77, is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. I talked to him by telephone on Thursday:

Q: Do you have any wisdom to share with us about what the politicians should or shouldn’t be doing about our current economic troubles?

A: Well, they’re two fundamentally different questions. The first is, "Is there something that the government could do that might make things better?" The second is, "Is there anything the government is likely to do that will make things better?" The second question is much easier to answer: The answer is “No.”

Q: From what they’ve done so far, are you encouraged or frightened?

A: I think I’m stoically braced for whatever disaster they create.

Q: Are the subprime credit crisis and the stock market’s swoon and the dollar’s drop in value symptoms of a deeper, larger, broader problem?

A: Well, no, they are simply the problems that they are. The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They’ve brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially.

And they’ve brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have.

Q: Why did you write this latest book and who is it written for?

A: It’s written, first of all, for the general public. It’s not written specifically for economists. Most economists know most of these things -- well, they know most of the principles; they don’t know most of the facts.

It’s not meant to be a breakthrough on the frontiers of analytical knowledge. But it is meant to show how so many things that look one way are in fact diametrically the opposite when you take a closer look at them -- and especially if you look at them systematically instead of just in terms of what rhetoric sets off your emotions, which is what seems to be going on in both parties these days.

Q: What’s an example of a fallacy from your book?

A: One is the income gap between rich and poor. It’s maddening to me to keep hearing how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and so on. The fundamental difference is the difference between talking about abstract statistical categories and talking about flesh-and-blood human beings.

Since the book came out, for example, there’s been a study released by the Treasury Department based on income tax returns. There, they are talking about following the same human beings over a span of years, which is wholly different from following income brackets over a span of years, because in all the brackets more than half the people change in the course of a decade. So what happens to a bracket is an abstract question; what happens to the flesh-and-blood human beings is different.

For example, for the flesh-and-blood people who were in the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers in income in 1996, their average increase of income over the next decade was 91 percent -- so they almost doubled their incomes.

Meanwhile, for the people in the top 1 percent -- presumably the rich who are getting richer -- their average income declined 26 percent. That's diametrically the opposite from what we’re hearing from nearly every newspaper and practically every political platform.

But of course it’s also true that if you look at the income tax brackets, the distance of the top bracket from the lowest bracket has increased. One reason is that the very lowest bracket is zero, so it can’t go any lower.

So as you pay people more and more money and as the economy grows and skills become more sophisticated, obviously the ratio from the top and the bottom is going to increase.

Q: Where do these fallacies come from?

A: Oh, God, there are so many of them. As I say in the first chapter of the book, I can only give a sample of the fallacies. What I try to do is show how utterly plausible some of these things sound the first time you hear them, and it’s only when you look just a little bit below the surface that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

For instance, I list several beliefs -- "except for the rich, the incomes of Americans have stagnated;" "the middle class is growing smaller;" "over the years, the poor have been getting poorer;" "corporate executives are overpaid at the expense of stockholders and consumers;" and so on.

I point out that you can find statistics that seem to support every one of those propositions, but you can also find other statistics -- and sometimes the same statistics looked at differently -- which cause the whole argument to collapse like a house of cards.

Q: Is it the politicians who are pushing these fallacies as a way to gain votes? If there weren’t those politicians, would these fallacies disappear?

A: No, because you have ideologues and they create essentially the atmosphere in which the politicians operate. And given the atmosphere, the politicians will seize upon whatever will get them votes at the time. But they don’t create the atmosphere.

Q: Is there a fallacy bouncing around in the presidential races that has caught your eye? On immigration, for instance?

A: There’s no chapter on that in the book. But I think there’s the notion that you can talk about immigrants in the abstract, when in fact there is no such thing as an immigrant in the abstract.

Immigrants from some countries have ten times as high a proportion of their people be college educated as immigrants from other countries. There are immigrants from some countries that have made enormous contributions to the United States, not the least of which were the majority of leading atomic scientists who created the atomic bomb and brought World War II to an end. They were imports, as it were.

But there are other people who are brought in who have brought in diseases which never were known before. They brought in attitudes which were not the attitudes of citizens. In fact, they were the attitudes of people who were hostile.

I’m amazed when they talk about the guest-worker program in Europe. No one even asks, “What has happened with guest-worker programs in Europe?” What has happened is that they’ve brought in people who hate their guts. This is why you have terrorism in London and Madrid and riots in Paris and other French cities by people who have absolutely no desire to assimilate and who in fact hate the very ideas of the country in which they live.

This is not in this book, but it will be in the next edition of “Applied Economics”: There is the second-generation phenomenon. You have people who move in from some poor country -- the Middle East, Mexico, whatever. Those people may be very glad to be in the United States or Britain or wherever they may be. But then they have children. And their children have never seen those other places; they’ve never lived that poorer life. All they know is that the population around them is a hell of a lot more prosperous than they are. And there are all sorts of ideologues and hustlers ready to tell them that it’s society’s fault that they don’t have what other people have. This then gives you the people who hate the country in which they live.

Q: Have your ideas about immigration changed in any way? It seemed to me that 25 years ago you liked immigration and immigrants and you saw the whole process as benefiting the host countries and everyone who arrived.

A: I do think the immigrants I wrote about were a positive influence on the countries to which they moved. But again, the problem is you can’t talk about immigrants in general. They love to say things like, “They thought the Irish and the Jews were unassimilable but look at them now, etc.” Well, the circumstances of the Irish and the Jews were radically different from the circumstances of the people who are coming here from Central America.

First of all, the times were different. First of all, the Irish, the Jews and blacks as well, who were moving out of the South, had leaders and organizations that were doing their damnedest to get them assimilated to the norms and the society to which they were moving. Today, you have just the direct opposite. You not only have groups within in these societies that are trying to keep them unassimilable and full of resentment.

But you also have people from outside the group, including politicians but also ideologues and intellectuals, who say one culture is as good as another and why should we expect them to assimilate to our culture. Well, that’s wonderful. You should try to go to China and live without speaking Chinese.

Q: What fallacy does the most damage to our whole society or economy?

A: I guess the single fallacy from which so many other fallacies derive is what I call in this book “the zero-sum fallacy" -- that is, the idea that what one person gains, someone else loses….

A classic example is rent control. When you put in rent control, the tenants gain in the short run; the landlords lose in the short run; the builders lose in the short run. But of course the builders lose the least, because the same material and skills that are used in building apartment buildings are used in building office buildings and warehouses and all kinds of other structures; they lose very little. But when the supply of housing dries up, then the tenants are really in a bad way. So places that have rent control almost invariably have housing shortages.

I start off in the first chapter, in fact, by quoting some lady who was in Egypt back in the 1960s when they put in rent control. She said people stopped investing in apartment buildings. Huge shortages in rentals and apartments forced many Egyptians to work in horrible conditions, with several families sharing one small apartment. So they really pay the price much more so than the landlords or the builders.

Q: I didn’t think Egypt has rent control problems like New York City.

A: Saigon -- Ho Chi Minh City -- Hanoi. A leader in Vietnam said, “Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi by bombing but we’ve destroyed it with rent control.” The zero-sum fallacy is the biggest in its scope. At Stanford, for example, they’ve issued an order that the professors at the medical school are no longer allowed to accept any kind of gifts from pharmaceutical companies, including the free samples of medicines they give out, which doctors pass along to their patients.

Well, this assumes that if it helps the pharmaceutical company, it helps them at the expense of the patient. It never occurs to them that there wouldn’t be any transaction between the pharmaceutical companies and the patients unless both of them gained something from it.

In my case, I happened to have a medication given to me as a free sample by a doctor -- thank God, not at Stanford -- which has really made my whole life livable. These people pay no price for being wrong -- that’s the problem with third-party decision making. It can be as wrong as two left feet and it costs them nothing.

Q: How does a basic knowledge of economics help someone see through these fallacies?

A: That really is what they would have to read the book to find out. The point is, you can demonstrate time and time again that the things that sound plausible just on the surface -- if you do give them just a little bit of systematic thought -- can suddenly change.

One of the chapters is on male-female economic differences. I must say, when I was doing the research on this I was shocked to discover that there is a very significant income difference between young male doctors and young female doctors.

I forget what the number is, but it’s not 1 or 2 percent. It was only when I dug into it that I discovered that young male doctors worked 500 hours a year more than young female doctors. Well, you know, if you work 500 hours more a year, you'd expect to get paid more!

Q: Is there any rule of thumb people could use to determine if they were being confronted with an economic fallacy?

A: Are you telling me that I should tell people they don’t really need to buy my book? (laughs) ... There are only eight chapters in my book. But after you’ve been through them you’ll be able to derive certain principles which you will suddenly realize apply to all kinds of other things that are not discussed in the book.

There are three questions that I think would destroy the left if people could ask them:

"What are the facts?"

"What are the consequences of what you are going to do?"

And "What is the trade-off?”

People talk as if you can just save the people whose homes are at risk, and that’s it. Well, if that was the case, why not save them? But at what price? We could ratify the Kyoto Treaty, but the question is "At what price and what benefits would there be to offset that price?" That’s the question that the politicians and the ideologues don’t want to ask. They don’t want to compare. They don’t want to weigh one thing against the other.

Timothy Leary Bio (1920-1996)

Leary’s mother was a teacher and his father a dentist. He attended West Point, joined the Army, and earned an undergraduate psychology degree at the University of Alabama while in the service. Next he earned a master’s degree from Washington State University and a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1959, Leary joined the faculty of Harvard University. There, he met professor Richard Alpert and began a series of controlled experiments with psychedelic drugs. Four years later they were fired for using undergraduate students in the tests.

They retired to Millbrook Estate, a 63-room mansion in upstate New York. People like William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg came and went, all united by a desire to experience better living through chemistry.

In 1967, at the height of his cultural dangerousness, Timothy Leary appeared on ‘Firing Line’ with William F. Buckley Jr. In 1970, he escaped from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for possession of two marijuana joints. His bust-out was aided by the Weather Underground and his third wife, Rosemary. He and she roamed from country to country.

In Algeria, the couple stayed with Eldridge Cleaver, who ultimately kidnapped his two fugitive guests after a political disagreement. They escaped from Cleaver’s compound and fled to Switzerland.

In 1973, at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, Leary was arrested by agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Extradited to the United States, he was sent to Folsom prison near Sacramento. He was paroled in 1976.

Leary’s life turned to lecture tours, stand-up comedy, writing books, the Hollywood party scene and exploring cyberspace.

In 1980, as he was preparing to launch what would be a much-ridiculed lecture tour with Watergate villain G. Gordon Liddy, I interviewed Leary on his front lawn in Beverly Hills. This interview has never been published until now.

In January of 1995 the man Richard Nixon called the most dangerous man in America learned of his prostate cancer and celebrated his remaining lifetime on his own web site. He died May 31, 1996 at age 75.

Dr. Tim and Me, 1980

By Bill Steigerwald

I’m one of the funniest, nicest guys who’ve ever been sent down to this planet.

-- Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary sits, guru-like, under a eucalyptus tree on the grass in front of his modest apartment on a quiet corner of Beverly Hills. Wind chimes tinkle. Now and then a Mercedes purrs past or one of Leary’s elderly neighbors walks by. In the distance, an emergency siren cries.

It is 1980. Iran, the hostages and the ayatollahs are in the news. America’s Pied Piper of irresponsible drug use has just turned 60 and has been doing “stand-up philosophy” routines in clubs around the USA. He is still having so much boisterous fun playing with drugs and his young wife that he’d recently been visited in the late night by Beverly Hills police.

As the stay-at-home dad of a six-year-old, Leary spends many afternoons in the street teaching immigrant Iranian kids how to play baseball. Along with my yellow legal tablet of questions and my tape recorder, I arrive with a terrible headache.

Based on his evil media stereotype, his imprisonment on minor marijuana charges, his subsequent prison break and years living on the run in Europe as an international fugitive, I expect to find a cranky, angry old coot filled with hate for America, its culture and all the straight people like me in it.

In fact, I find one of the most memorable – and likable – persons I’ve ever met.

Leary is good natured, charming, full of energy, devoutly optimistic and beaming with stereotype-busting opinions about individual freedom, government, media, evolution, sex, Hollywood, biology, Muslims and a bigger, better future for human beings, his favorite species.

Timothy Leary foresees the future

Q: What kind of people keep in contact with you?

LEARY: I don’t give out my address to people, but you should see my mail. Fifty percent of it is conventional -- serious scientists doing research. The other half is

Jesus and messiahs and UFOs, etc. I’m sure it’s all right, but you can imagine what kind of letters I get.

Q: Do you keep in contact with people from the ‘60s and ‘70s?

LEARY: Everyone keeps in touch. Everybody knows where everyone else is scanning on the radar.

Q: I saw your show at Huntington Beach.

LEARY: What did you think?

Q: I liked it. I liked it. I’m a libertarian politically, so...

LEARY: Me too.

Q: I’m supposed to be critical... (a reddish brown cat comes along)

LEARY: That’s a very old cat, very gentle -- 105 years old. It’s amazing how he always goes to where the real estate paper is.

Q: The story I am going to do is from a Middle American point of view – “Whatever happened to Tim Leary?” What would be your answer to “Whatever happened to Timothy Leary -- that drug guru, drug maniac of the ‘60s”? What have you been doing?

LEARY: I’m doing what I’ve always done -- writing and lecturing and being involved with media. I do four or five TV shows a month, a syndicated radio slot. I’m doing what I always do -- defending the American conservative-libertarian way of life. Encouraging individuality and disrespect for authority and trying to keep the government out of our lives, like every red-white-and-blue American, heh, heh, heh.

Q: The lectures you’ve been doing -- how many?

LEARY: (His phone rings.) I do about 40 a year -- half in colleges.

Q: How are you received -- pretty well?

LEARY: The people who are going to pay $6.50 to come to see me obviously like me. I call it “stand-up philosophy.”

Q: You laced your routine with a lot of drug references. That’s the obvious part of your message, but is it all of it?

LEARY: I’d say 15 percent of it was drugs. I emphasized drugs more than I usually do. I spend much more time on space colonization and genetic research and the breakthroughs in physics. And on new drugs -- the new neurotransmitters that are not street drugs. I try to demystify drugs by saying that the way society adapts to technology is always the same way.

For the first generation it’s taboo and it’s shocking and its mysterious and it’s misused and it’s diabolical. But when it cools down, people learn to use the new technology more precisely and effectively. They try to put drugs into context.

Q: How important are drugs to you in your life? Did the first time you took LSD cause a change in you?

LEARY: I was a hotshot Harvard prof who had devoted my entire professional life to finding new ways of freeing human beings from their locks and inner chains. So when I first stumbled on to LSD, I wasn’t the average backdoor lawyer or politician or business person. It was like a biologist who stumbled on the microscope or an astronomer who suddenly hears about the telescope.

So my reaction was that it was exactly the tool I was looking for all my life to give humanity a way of looooooosening up their thinking and re-imprinting and understanding the brain and moving consciousness outward. That was my profession. I had written classic textbooks and I was a distinguished Harvard professor. I’m a philosopher. I’m philosophizing all the time. I can’t help it. Naturally, drugs being tools to focus your brain, they were my meat and potatoes.

Q: But when you were in the army and before the LSD experiments -- in other words, it didn’t change you, the LSD experiments?

LEARY: Yes. I was always the 24-hour philosopher and I was always an extremely avant-garde -- I was one of the 12 psychologists who in the ‘50s brought about the tremendous revolution that we now call “The Third Force” -- do-it-yourself psychiatry.

I’d say the greatest revolution was one in the 1950s by Benjamin Spock, by Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Eric Fromm. We literally were wrenching the mind away from the psychiatrists and the Pavlovians and giving the mind back to the individual. That was a tremendous revolution.

It leads, of course, to all sorts of silliness and kookiness and sects and gurus, but that’s all right. The kookiest sects today were not as kooky as orthodox psychoanalysis was back then, believe me, heh, heh. I was an avant-garde psychologist, but there wasn’t this social pressure.

Sure there was peer pressure. Some psychiatrists were all trying to put us in jail in the ‘50s for doing group therapy. To psychiatrists in the ‘50s, the idea of a group of neurotics sitting around talking about their problems would be like a bunch of surgery patients performing operations on each other. It didn’t threaten society in general the way drugs did.

Q: What is the best facet of the drug revolution?

LEARY: Encouraging intelligent, disciplined, responsible use of drugs. Of course nobody listened. If I had been more effective ... The CIA had $25 million to support their LSD research, which was the secret, deliberate messing-up of people’s minds. Mine was open and public attempts to free people’s minds. Now if I had $25 million, then, heh, heh, heh, imagine what we would have done, in the way of correct packaging and labeling and cautionary labels, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh.

Q: Are mind-expanding drugs for everyone? Should they be mass produced? Mass marketed, mass advertised?

LEARY: When you talk about brain-activating drugs, you’re talking about a wide range of substances that transport yourself around in your own brain. And that range is as wide as from kiddy cars to rocket engines. The powerful drugs are like rocket engines and both common sense and public law should prevent inexperienced people from jumping into a rocket or jet airplane and taking off from Wilshire Boulevard or landing it in Times Square.

Drugs are very similar, because you have to include liquor. I’m a total libertarian. I think government has no right interfering in the private lives or personal behavior of people as long as they don’t physically hurt anyone else. I don’t think the government can take the place of intelligent parent-child relationships. You can’t have the police bust your kids because of their sexual practices or their drug practices or something you don’t approve of.

Q: Do you think you’ve been treated fairly by the press over the years?

LEARY: I don’t believe in the concept of fairness or justice.

Q: Do you think they’ve exaggerated you or built you into someone you weren’t or anything like that?

LEARY: Yes. That’s the function of the press. You have to personalize -- hello (something happens -- something arrives....)

Q: Can you be taken seriously about anything now, because of your image?

LEARY: Media has been my obsession for the last 20 years. Media is applied intelligence. When I send out a signal -- first of all, you have to be pretty good to get a signal out. You have to be somehow good enough to have the newspaper print it or have the radio station broadcast it.

And one of the laws of communication is that the more intelligent and shockingly precisely futuristic you are, the fewer people are going to get it. If you say exactly what everyone on Main Street wants to hear now, that’s Reagan and Carter, heh, heh. As soon as you start getting more intelligent, more scientific, more futuristic, you’re going to start losing audiences. And you know Einstein was never a best seller, never had a prime-time show.

Q: Do you regret any of the trouble you’ve started?

LEARY: I’m extremely pleased with the amount of trouble I’ve been able to stir up. I’m still controversial after 20 years, see. Eldridge Cleaver isn’t controversial. It’s right on the edge of society’s nerve endings. Of course, society is often most nervous about the next step that’s going to change everything.

Q: What’s the next step. Space migration? Cable TV? What do you hope will happen in the 1980s?

LEARY: Europe is going to become slowly communized. Europeans are making deals behind our backs so fast that NATO’s going to collapse. Only in North America will the freedom impulse not only continue but grow. The place to be in the ‘80s is the U.S., particularly in the Sun Belt.

The West especially is much more advanced that the East -- in terms of everything. In terms of economics, we’re not going to have the kind of depression they’re going to have in the East, because the East is still bogged down in the old techniques of both government and manufacturing and industry. Whereas the Sun Belt has opened up to the new industries, which are electronic, neurological, computers, aerospace, entertainment, media.

Q: Is the any hope for the people in the East?

LEARY: Yeah, migrate, heh, heh, heh, heh. Get out here fast. California is pyramiding. Get out here fast.

Q: I have a terrible time convincing anyone Back East that there are virtues to Los Angeles. They think it’s just weirdoes and earthquakes and murders. The media don’t portray this part of the country as a place to come to.

LEARY: I know. They do that to everything.... but that’s always been true of migration. The Establishment always tries to do that. They used to say that you can’t go across the Atlantic or you’ll fall off the end of the world or the dragons will get you. Or if you want to migrate from Greece to Rome, the Romans are barbarians.

They’ve always warned people ... because the Western frontier has always been wilder, because you get the individualists, you get the risk takers, you get the high-stake visionaries. The people who are on the run. The Western frontier for the last 2,000 or 3,000 years has always been wilder and woollier.

Each wave of the future moves a little farther and farther west. When the first immigrant came over to the United States the Catholic priests deliberately kept their flocks around them in New York and Boston and Philly. They didn’t want them cutting out and getting to California.

I’m amused when I watch the Eastern press. Every time they mention California, they shake their head, heh, heh, heh. But actually the homicide rate is much higher in the East than in L.A., isn’t it?

Q: I don’t know if you can support that. I think L.A. is good town because of the people who are here. They’re the hustlers and the people seeking dreams. People who want to do something more than sit in Pennsylvania or Ohio.

LEARY: They can make fun of California as much as they want. Time magazine, Newsweek magazine and the New York Times, Washington Post, all the syndicates and so forth, they’re all Eastern. The way they treat Western writers …. The whole Western school of writers is entirely different from the East Coast.

The East Coast is either Southern alcoholic or Jewish family or New England WASP -- that’s John Cheever, Episcopalian, adultery and so forth -- it’s a European orientation.

The Eastern literary people have flatly said there are no great American writers, but there is a Californian school of writing that is entirely different and, of course, isn’t even accepted by the East Coast literary Establishment. It’s always been that way. (He speaks in a quiet voice, slow, not crazy or antic or over the top.)

The West Coast writing is much more optimistic. It’s funnier. It’s transcendental. It’s Ken Keasy and it’s Harold Robbins and it’s Henry Miller and it’s Aldous Huxley and it’s science-fiction people and it’s Ambrose Bierce and it’s Chandler.

There’s an enormous body of literature which to me represents the best of the America tradition – nose-thumbing at authority, futuristic, Jack London! Do you know he was writing science-fiction stories 80 years ago? Ironically enough, California writers are much more popular in Europe than they are on the East Coast, except for Henry Miller.

Q: Charles Bukowski?

LEARY: Bukowski’s another.

Q: Who are “the ecological Puritans”?

LEARY: Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader. They represent the absolute worst – they are moralistic, puritanical, virtuous. They are anti-scientific, anti-technological. They’re close-minded. And they’re breeding fear, almost a primitive, barbaric generation of terror. They are the classic -- I’ve got a new column in defense of the big American car. We’re an endangered species, like the low-mileage buffalo, the gas-guzzling whooping crane and the high-octane eagle, heh, heh.

Q: What kind of car do you drive?

LEARY: A Mercedes, heh, heh. I want to get a bumper sticker that says, “Buy American,” but my wife ... heh, heh. (An old-timer passing by on the sidewalk.) Hi. How are you doing? (Leary makes a joke -- something about Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood.)

Q: Does that guy know who you are?

LEARY: No. The paradox is, everyone who knows me, loves me. That’s the paradox. I’m really a wonderful guy. I’m out here. I’m the only father in this neighborhood. There are no fathers for many reasons. There are a lot of Iranians. I’m the one who’s out all the time teaching them baseball. I’m the only father that’s around at all. I’ve got about 20 kids here.

Q: You have a six-year-old kid, right?

LEARY: Yeah. Yeah. So I’m out here all the time. It’s not a heavy, shades-down, shoot-‘em-up drug gallery. I do a lot of my interviews out here. They all love me. To know me is to love me, personally.

Q: That’s the impression I got from watching your stand-up philosophy show. You’re a friendly guy. You’re not a bitter man.

LEARY: I think I’m the happiest man who ever lived.

Q: You still are?

LEARY: Yeah.

Q: The reason I keep grabbing my neck is I’ve got a headache.

LEARY: You need another beer?

Q: No. No.

LEARY: Want an aspirin?

Q: I just grabbed about three of them two hours ago. Um .... The political scene ....

LEARY: (He rolls his eyes). The overwhelming statistic is that 70 percent of Americans are totally turned off by politics.

Q: Why do you think that is?

LEARY: Well, for many reasons. One is that America is ungovernable. It’s simply too big and diverse a country. America’s like the British Commonwealth was 50 years ago. The difference between Maine and Arizona or between Washington and Mississippi is as great as between England and South Africa and India and Canada. I’m very much in favor of regional secession, so that America could become a commonwealth or a confederation. The best run country in the world is Switzerland.

Q: You lived there a while didn’t you?

LEARY: I was in exile there for 18 months. Switzerland is a confederation of independent cantons. It’s great. And they give very few rights to the federal government.

Q: Do you think victimless crime laws will ever be repealed or have their penalties reduced?

LEARY: Victimless crime should be local. If there are some people who live in a neighborhood and they don’t want homosexual teachers and they don’t want liquor and they don’t want cigarettes and they don’t want business and they don’t want marijuana, then let them have local option. So in Camden, New Jersey, they don’t want anything, heh, heh.

On the other hand, maybe Newark wants beer, liquor, marijuana, but doesn’t want gays. All right, there’s got to be local options, because there’s 43 million people smoking marijuana. The only solution is local option, then nobody’s bothering anyone else.

Sex education in schools -- I sympathize with parents who don’t want their children brought up by liberal teachers. If you don’t want your children taught by liberal teachers, then move to a different place.

There’s this illusion of uniformity and we should all be one, we should all agree. You’re going to see more of that in the ‘80s. You’re going to see, paradoxically, what you saw happen in the ‘70s.

Some cities and towns are going to become increasingly liberal, like San Francisco. And they’re already starting “Scopes Trials” and throwing out books in some place in Tennessee. So that’s fine. No big deal. Where you are determines who you are. Geography is the key to the kind of life you lead. People should be encouraged to move so they surround themselves with likeminded people, so they don’t get on each other’s nerves.

Q: Do you think people are more or less free today than they were 100 years ago?

LEARY: Americans?

Q: Yeah.

LEARY: Oh, I think were much freer today because we have many, many more options now. What choices of freedom were there 100 years ago -- liquor? You could run off -- heh, heh, heh -- with a jazz band. There weren’t many options. The increasing boom in technology that is made available to consumers has given us an enormous range of freedoms to be able to come and go as we want. Think of the freedom of literature we have now. Thirty years ago they wouldn’t let Henry Miller’s books be published.

Q: Do you think there are people today still being persecuted for their ideas? Ramsey Clark, I guess, would be an example of someone. He’s getting shit from everybody about the Iranian hostages.

LEARY: I don’t think he’s getting persecuted. He ran out and said he was going to be the quarterback for the anti-Shah team. Well, naturally, you immediately get on your back Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller and Time magazine.

I don’t think he’s getting persecuted. He’s getting exactly what he wanted, and I don’t think he’s worried and I think he’s done us all a great favor. He’s made everyone think, “Does an American citizen have a right to go to Iran and talk to foreigners?”

I’ve never been a great admirer of Clark’s. I personally think the ayatollah is a horrible person and I think Hanoi Jane -- I was very much against the Vietnam war, but I had no illusions about Jane Fonda. I knew the Hanoi government was much worse than the Saigon government. But it wasn’t our business to get in involved in the fight. I never had illusions that I wouldn’t have lasted one day in Hanoi but I could have made a lot of money in Saigon.

Q: How did you live in Algeria then?

LEARY: It wasn’t easy. I’m very familiar with Muslim Puritanism and fanaticism and the idea that it’s all right to kill you if you don’t do what, heh, heh – Arabs are not nice people. Over here, if they’re smart enough to come over here, they’re like the rest of us. But, boy, I would no more go to an Arab country, whew!, because I know from experience.

Q: You said somewhere that “Everything I do is to increase individual freedom, responsibility and choice.” What are greatest impediments to that today in America?

LEARY: Well, old people. I went around to several polling booths to see what was going on. They’re all run by old people -- mainly old women. Naturally, they’ve always been impediments to change. A person who is 70 years old now was born in 1910. Whew! Figure how frightening the future must be to them now.

I’m not complaining about this. These are natural genetic brakes on change that are necessary. Nothing happens until the old guard dies out. It’s going to happen that way in Iran. It’s going to happen that way in China. It’s going to happen that way in Russia. It’s going to happen that way over here.

So the impediments to change are always adulthood. By definition, the word “adult” means one who has stopped changing. So the greatest impediment to change is grownups. (The brown cat comes snooping around again.)

Q: In your lecture you made a lot of references to male-macho, Darwinian stuff. Is this a sudden feminist influence on you? (An elderly woman comes along the sidewalk and says hello. Leary tells her, “Good luck, good luck.”)

LEARY: Feminism to me is aggressive women trying to act like terrible men. My studies -- and from 35 years of being a psychologist, and from all the scientific books I’ve read at every level of science -- have made me feel that women are simply smarter than men.

At the early origins of life, the male was the viral infection that the female allowed to come in and change her DNA because there are all these advantages to the egg to have men running around doing all the errands.

Every intelligent man realizes that women are smarter than men. Who ends up with all the money? Who lives longest? It’s effective biological intelligence. Week after week, month after month, I put out scientifically based and humorously effective propaganda called “the Egg Intelligence and Wisdom.”

I’ve done more of it recently because as I’ve studied Western science and Western philosophy recently, I see that all the mistakes are because it’s a male point of view. Competition between males and fighting and all of that. So obviously, the male macho ... (He stops abruptly, as though he’s run out of thought.)

Darwin struggled and struggled with all-male power. It was all male. He looked for female selectivity. It was a period in England when women couldn’t vote. It was natural that it was all masculine.

Q: Were you a teaching professor at Harvard?

LEARY: No. I’ve never been a teacher. I’m not good at teaching. I’m not good at passing on canned knowledge. I can’t pass on canned knowledge or go to meetings. I break out in a sweat.

Q: You’ve said people are 99 percent genetically programmed and the idea of choice and free will is a lie. Are some people doomed to a life in Peoria?

LEARY: Yeah. There’s no question. I don’t even talk about individuals. I see human beings always as being part of gene pool clouds. As a matter of fact, the most sophisticated scientists today don’t believe an electron is a fast-moving billiard ball.

An electron is a cloud – a cloud of possibilities. You watch birds going south or north and humans are the same way. Yes. I believe there’s a migratory outcast, probably around 7 to 10 percent of any gene pool -- salmon or a flock of gulls.

There have been studies of migratory patterns of animals. Whereas 90 percent of all salmon go back to same spawning pool, 10 percent don’t. It’s that 10 percent that everything depends on if the spawning pool dries up or if it’s taken over by narcotics agents.

DNA never puts all her eggs in one basket. So those who stay in Peoria belong to the 90 percent and God bless them. You need the mass, you need the swarm, you need the collectivity, and they’re playing their role. In their heart, they know they’re right.

Q: Then what is the danger? To let them call all the shots? Or is there a danger?

LEARY: No. Let them call the shots in Peoria, heh, heh. The danger is, don’t go back to Peoria and try to set up a -- you know, I could never be Timothy Leary in Peoria, sitting on my lawn and doing this.

The key to everything -- and this includes galaxies down to electrons and protons -- is to find the right niche that will give you the energy to make the connection and don’t get involved in niches that are not genetically geared to you. And don’t try to change the home ground. You’ll never change it.

Five thousand years from now they’ll come back in spaceships and the ayatollahs will still be fighting the Iraqis. That’s what they love to. They’ll be doing it more sophisticatedly, obviously, but they’ll still be doing it. You never want to change anyone on the spot. The only place real change takes place is on the frontier.

Q: And space is the future? The American future?

LEARY: There is a danger that America will become like the Vikings. The Russians make two visits to space and we haven’t done anything since 1975. I see it as one of my innate functions to be a truth carrier now and then and send out a signal to the 10 percent. I never speak to more than 10 percent -- those who genetically reverberate to my message, which is “move, change.” The trick is to keep moving.

Q: Is it inevitable that the moving is always good?

LEARY: To the individual or the species? The male ejaculates 500 million sperms. Usually no good comes of any of them. Maybe four or five times in your life one of them hits. One little sperm that gets the egg machinery all excited….

Q: What’s the most important message you’re trying to impart?

LEARY: The evolutionary process is intelligent, it is benign and it’s evolving and it’s continuing. The more you understand evolution, the wiser you are, the funnier you are, the happier you are and the more secure you are. All the institutions try to stop evolution.

The Ayatollah’s problem is that he doesn’t want anything to change from what it was 100 years ago. (Another old guy walks by, then Leary’s son Jack comes along.) I wish more Americans would understand me and my philosophy, because they would feel a lot better.

America is the greatest country that ever lived. The young people are the greatest young people to ever hang around. The whole experiment has been a tremendous success -- the whole planet. The more people who understand my philosophy, the happier they’ll be, the nicer, the more friendly, the more hopeful, the more confidence they’ll have, heh, heh, heh. I wish more people understood. That’ll take time.

Q: Do you think they are capable of understanding or just don’t hear it?

LEARY: I give out vibrations of cheerful, reckless, arrogant enthusiasm. That puts 90 percent of the people off, because the whole culture is Judeo-Christian and it is based on the vale of tears and you’re supposed to suffer.

Leary Sees the Future

At a standup philosophy routine in Laguna Beach, the audience is disproportionately composed of yahoos. Males mostly. Leary tells them he loves the beaches of California. He says he has had a terrible time with the press and talks about his run-in with the Beverly Hills police.

Bad PR -- that’s why he ended up in prison, he tells them. Bad PR. Image-damaging AP wire dispatches – “Police arrest Tim Leary, dread king of acid.”

The police said my wife and I were fighting, Leary says. In fact, he says, “My wife and I were in the bedroom. I was taking an incredibly strong aphrodisiac -- not fighting. Suddenly, the Beverly Hills police crash in through front door. I’m somewhere near the star Sirius….”

He tells his audience the ‘70s was “The Me Generation” and the ‘80s will be “The Media Generation.” He tells them in the “ ’60s we took the human body away from the AMA and said, ‘You’re responsible for it – you’re responsible for your own body. You’ve gotta decide that you have to diet it, medicine it, etc.’

The same thing is true for the human brain, he says. “For centuries the brain and human conscious have been the provenance of the ministers and priests and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists. Come on, don’t make me laugh. We wrenched the power and control of the human body and the human brain away from this priesthood of experts with their diplomas and got it back to where it’s got to belong, to individual human beings....”

Leary tells them you have to be responsible and learn from your mistakes. Then he foretells the future.

“Just as we took the body and the brain from the authorities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the ‘80s we’re going to take the media away from ABC/NBC and everyone’s going to get in the media. You can build yourself a satellite dish. It’ll cost you $20,000, but you can bootleg one for $300.

“So break the law. Get yourself a satellite dish so you’ll have 1,000 shows coming in. Get yourself a little transistor. We’ll be building up cable TV and small networks and we’ll wrench power away from the big establishments, just as we did with drugs and with medicines in our body.”

Leary tells his audience that the police are already into media and cinematography. They taped congressmen for the ABSCAM sting and the Beverly Hills cops carried cameras when they raided him at midnight. “The police broke into our building and they had flash bulbs and a video camera. Things went in and out of focus -- we were naked. Oh well, you can’t win them all.”

Leary is good-natured about the raid, even though they videotaped him and his wife naked as they took them to jail. Beverly Hills has “the cutest little jail -- Spanish stucco and tile,” he says. But he says it was “an insult to my pride when they threw me in the drunk pen. I call that police brutality.”

Leary is much, much tougher on Hollywood.

“The Hollywood system is really a company town, where everyone’s afraid. It’s run by crooks. It’s run by people who deliberately make these movies that make you feel bad, that make you feel helpless. They never give you a movie about good-looking men and women getting together, and getting smarter and moving and doing and getting something better. Alcoholic, rum-dum, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, you know, ‘Postman Rings Twice’ repeats and repeats and repeats… It’s a loser industry for losers.”

The man who warns people to never become an adult calls the term “overdose” the sleaziest of adult terms: “Watch out. The ‘overdose’ will get you.” But “overdose” isn’t the problem, he says: “99.99 percent of all people who’ve ever lived on this planet have died of an underdose.”

After telling his audience that “I’m one of the funniest, nicest guys who’ve ever been sent down to this planet,” the most dangerous man in America leaves them with a final bit of advice.

“I wish that you, when your moment of truth comes, can add up your life and come to the conclusion that it’s been one jammed and crammed with excitement and change and growth and hope and positive, high-velocity better fusions and funnier intelligence. Onward and upward, we’ll meet aloft.”

Timothy Leary was great American

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Forum section

June 9, 1996

A great American has died.

But no flags were lowered.

No important politicians delivered instant eulogies.

In fact, many Americans who knew who Timothy Leary was probably cheered secretly to themselves when the 1960s drug guru died on May 31, 1996 of prostate cancer at 75.

Rolling Stone’s old-hippie editors might honor him and put him on a future cover. But men who begin their careers as important clinical psychologists at Harvard and end up as world-famous drug pushers just don’t get elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans.

Great Americans of our day are people like Billy Graham, Colin Powell or Jimmy Carter. Not kooky troublemakers and professional media stuntmen who do whatever it takes — become “stand-up philosophers,” stage vaudevillian debates with G. Gordon Liddy or make a media event of their own slow deaths — to perpetuate their own notoriety.

President Nixon, a Truly Great American who recognized a threat to the nation when he saw one, summed up the conventional, responsible point of view. He once called Leary “the most dangerous man” in the country. Though Leary took it as a compliment; most adults then and now probably would agree with Nixon.

But like it or not, along with his flaws and excesses, Leary — America’s pioneering acid head — was blessed with many of the same character traits and political values that go into the making of most Great Americans.

What’s more, he loved America — in his own way — to the same degree that a flag-waving, law-abiding member of the Rotary Club does.

***

Wind chimes tinkled. BMWs purred past. Police and ambulance sirens cried in the distance.

Timothv Leary and I were sitting on the grass in front of his modest rental apartment in Beverly Hills, hiding from the mid-afternoon Southern California sun under the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

It was 1980 and Leary was in his “stand-up philosophy” period. That meant for $6.50 you could see him on stage at an L.A. rock club making fun of Hollywood’s “loser, alcoholic culture” and telling everyone to jump on what he said was going to be the next big mind trip — space travel.

As research for my freelance article, I had gone to one of his shows. The audience was mostly male yahoos, which meant Leary had to ratchet up the drug content of his act to about 20 percent.

It was a slightly ragged but often funny show about his wild past and everyone’s else’s exciting future, but Leary twanged my libertarian heartstrings with a revolutionary call to smash the protected Big Three Network TV Oligopoly.

“In the ‘80s we’re going to take media away from ABC and NBC and everyone’s going to get in the media,” he said with a fair degree of prescience. “You can build yourself a satellite dish. It’ll cost you $20,000, but you can bootleg one for $300.

“So break the law. Get yourself a satellite so you’ll have a 1,000 shows coming in. Get yourself a little transistor, we’ll be building up cable TV and small networks and wrench power away from the big establishments.”

Although I had inhaled a few in my day, I was no devotee of the drug or hippie culture. I have never touched Leary’s sacrament, LSD. I was uncomfortable about interviewing him. Were my counter-culture qualifications in order?

Politically, I was then what I am today — a free-market libertarian with a strong background in Roman Catholicism, conservative Republicanism and Brooks Brothers blazers.

I had no problem with Leary’s drug taking or public drug pushing. I was in favor of getting rid of all victimless crime laws for adults, including drug laws. Personally, however, when it came to hallucinogens, I was (and am) quite content with the current dimensions of my own mini-brain.

But my apprehensions were unfounded. As we sat in the shade, and as he exchanged happy hellos to a passing parade of his elderly neighbors who knew exactly who he was, the ex-most dangerous man in America was as friendly and entertaining as a favorite uncle.

His blue eyes were as bright and clear as his mind, which bounced around from breaking New Age stuff like the Gaia Theory to regional politics, genetic research and space colonization.

His sense of humor was in high gear. His sentences trailed off now and then, but I remember being amazed at what good shape he was in for a high-mileage dude whose brain had been fried and retried a few thousand times.

Leary had just turned 60 — the same age as my Dad. And because Leary was the only father home during the day in his relatively quiet neighborhood, he spent many of his afternoons in the street teaching Iranian kids how to play baseball. It was a nation-scaring thought that would make a perfect opening sentence for the freelance story I was hoping to sell to The New York Times.

***

The interview went well. In fact, of all the famous folks I met and interviewed at length during my 12 years in La La-land — Truly Great Americans like Jimmy Stewart and Tommy Lasorda — it remains the most memorable. It also taught me a valuable lesson about the distortive powers of the mass media. Everything that Leary said smashed the simplistic stereotype I had brought with me.

He was no leftist, no America-hater, no control freak. He had been thrown in prison for possessing two joints of marijuana, yet he sounded more patriotic than John Wayne.

“America is the greatest country that ever lived. The young people are the greatest young people to ever hang around. The whole experiment has been a tremendous success.”

He was not the least bit penitent for his alleged sins against America. “I’m extremely pleased with the amount of trouble I’ve been able to stir up.” He loved being controversial. He was doing his life’s work — making the authorities nervous, stirring up trouble.

“I’m doing what I always do — defending the American conservative-libertarian way of life: Encouraging individuality and disrespect for authority and trying to keep the government out of our lives, like every red-white-and-blue American, heh, heh, heh.”

Leary, who employed that diabolical, teen-age laugh often, admitted he was no adult. It was a deliberate choice. When you become an adult, he said, you stop changing. You die.

In fact, when I asked him to name the greatest single threat to more individual freedom in America he didn’t say Commies or Republicans or the FBI. He said “old people.”

But he wasn’t complaining. It’s part of evolution. Old people run everything, he said, and they’ve always been impediments to change.

Leary was upbeat, optimistic, future-looking and philosophically consistent: He wanted everyone to be smarter, better and happier. He wanted individuals to be as free as possible in body and mind.

Nothing he said offended me.

He knew he gave out “vibrations of cheerful, reckless, arrogant enthusiasm” that “put off 90 percent of people, because the whole culture is Judeo-Christian and is based on the Vale of tears” — the idea that you’re supposed to suffer.”

Your most important message to the 10 percent who pick up your signal, Doctor?

“That the evolutionary process is intelligent. It is benign and it’s evolving and it’s continuing. The more you understand evolution, the wiser you are, the funnier you are, the happier you are and the more secure you are.”

The more people who understood this, he said, “the happier they’ll be, the nicer, the more friendly, the more hopeful, the more confidence they’ll have, heh, heh, heh. I wish more people understood … but that’ll take time.”

***

Everyone knows Timothy Leary had his flaws and excesses. He had a wicked irresponsible streak. His hedonistic drug mantra — “Turn on, tune in, drop out” — created unknown casualties among America’s impressionable youth.

But he used no guns, employed no trickery and engaged in no fraud. His most powerful weapon was his unshackled and zany mind, boosted by his savvy showmanship and the mass media, whose generous promotional help made him a regular — if threatening — character in the American sitcom of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Yet as I found out to my great surprise when I interviewed him, the real Leary and the media Leary were not the same people.

The real Leary was much more than a merry drug huckster. He was as anti-authoritarian as Tom Paine. As freedom-loving as Thomas Jefferson. As iconoclastic as Mark Twain. As adventurous as Amelia Earhart. As suspicious of religion as H.L. Mencken. As futuristic as Buckminster Fuller. As good-neighborly as Mister Rogers. As interested in people improving themselves as Dale Carnegie. And as enthusiastic about life and its possibilities as Teddy Roosevelt.

I know Richard Nixon wouldn’t buy it, but to me that adds up to a Truly Great American.

***

In November of 1980, Leary was fired from his job as a morning radio host at a rock station in conservative Orange County. I wrote a piece about the sacking of Uncle Tim for L.A. Weekly and was paid $20.

***

This is the first paragraph of his Wikipedia citation:

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs.^[2] Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from “bold oracle” to “publicity hound”. According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was “a hero of American consciousness”, while writer Tom Robbins called him a “brave neuronaut“.^[3] President Richard Nixon disagreed, calling Leary “the most dangerous man in America”.^[4] During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the counterculture movement, Leary was arrested 36 times.^[5]

I’m one of the funniest, nicest guys who’s ever been sent down to this planet.

-- Timothy Leary, 1980

Timothy Leary sits, guru-like, under a eucalyptus tree on the grass in front of his modest apartment on a quiet corner of Beverly Hills. Wind chimes tinkle. Now and then a Mercedes purrs past or one of Leary’s elderly neighbors walks by. In the distance, an emergency siren wails.

It is 1980. California is still a paradise over-populated by young, ambitious and happy migrants from Back East and America’s Pied Piper of irresponsible drug use has just turned 60.

He’s been doing “stand-up philosophy” routines in clubs and is still having so much boisterous fun with psychedelic drugs and his young wife that he’d been visited recently in the early morning by Beverly Hills police.

As the stay-at-home dad of a six-year-old, he spends many afternoons in the street teaching immigrant Iranian kids how to play baseball. Along with my yellow legal tablet of questions and my tape recorder, I arrive with a terrible headache.

Based on his evil media stereotype, his imprisonment on minor marijuana charges, his subsequent prison break and years living on the run in Europe as an international fugitive, I expect to find a cranky, angry old coot filled with hate for America, its culture and all the straight people like me in it.

In fact, I find one of the most memorable – and likable – persons I’ve ever met. Leary is good-natured, charming, full of energy, devoutly optimistic and beaming with stereotype-busting opinions about individual freedom, government, media, evolution, sex, Hollywood, biology, Muslims and a bigger, better future for human beings, his favorite species.

Q&A

Q: What kind of people keep in contact with you?

LEARY: I don’t give out my address to people, but you should see my mail. Fifty percent of it is conventional — serious scientists doing research. The other half is Jesus and messiahs and UFOs, etc. I’m sure it’s all right, but you can imagine what kind of letters I get.

Q: Do you keep in contact with people from the ‘60s and ‘70s?

LEARY: Everyone keeps in touch. Everybody knows where everyone else is scanning on the radar.

Q: I saw your show at Huntington Beach.

LEARY: What did you think?

Q: I liked it. I liked it. I’m a libertarian politically, so...

LEARY: Me too.

Q: I’m supposed to be critical... (a reddish brown cat comes along) …

LEARY: That’s a very old cat, very gentle -- 105 years old. It’s amazing how he always goes to where the real estate paper is.

Q: The story I am going to do is from a Middle-American point of view – “Whatever happened to Tim Leary?” What would be your answer to “Whatever happened to Timothy Leary -- that drug guru, that drug maniac of the ‘60s”? What have you been doing?

LEARY: I’m doing what I’ve always done -- writing and lecturing and being involved with media. I do four or five TV shows a month, a syndicated radio slot. I’m doing what I always do -- defending the American conservative-libertarian way of life. Encouraging individuality and disrespect for authority and trying to keep the government out of our lives, like every red-white-and-blue American, heh, heh, heh.

Q: The lectures you’ve been doing -- how many?

LEARY: (His phone rings.) I do about 40 a year -- half in colleges.

Q: How are you received -- pretty well?

LEARY: The people who are going to pay $6.50 to come to see me obviously like me. I call it “stand-up philosophy.”

Q: You laced your routine with a lot of drug references. That’s the obvious part of your message, but is it all of it?

LEARY: I’d say 15 percent of it was drugs. I emphasized drugs more than I usually do. I spend much more time on space colonization and genetic research and the breakthroughs in physics. And on new drugs -- the new neurotransmitters that are not street drugs.

I try to demystify drugs by saying that the way society adapts to technology is always the same way. For the first generation it’s taboo and it’s shocking and its mysterious and it’s misused and it’s diabolical. But when it cools down, people learn to use the new technology more precisely and effectively. They try to put drugs into context.

Q: How important are drugs to you in your life? Did the first time you took LSD cause a change in you?

LEARY: I was a hotshot Harvard prof who had devoted my entire professional life to finding new ways of freeing human beings from their locks and inner chains. So when I first stumbled on to LSD, I wasn’t the average backdoor lawyer or politician or business person. It was like a biologist who stumbled on the microscope or an astronomer who suddenly hears about the telescope.

So my reaction was that it was exactly the tool I was looking for all my life to give humanity a way of looooooosening up their thinking and re-imprinting and understanding the brain and moving consciousness outward. That was my profession.

I had written classic textbooks and I was a distinguished Harvard professor. I’m a philosopher. I’m philosophizing all the time. I can’t help it. Naturally, drugs being tools to focus your brain, they were my meat and potatoes.

Q: But when you were in the army and before the LSD experiments -- in other words, it didn’t change you, the LSD experiments?

LEARY: Yes. I was always the 24-hour philosopher and I was always an extremely avant-garde psychologist. I was one of the 12 psychologists who in the ‘50s brought about the tremendous revolution that we now call “The Third Force” -- do-it-yourself psychiatry.

I’d say the greatest revolution was one in the 1950s by Benjamin Spock, by Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Eric Fromm. We literally were wrenching the mind away from the psychiatrists and the Pavlovians and giving the mind back to the individual. That was a tremendous revolution. It leads, of course, to all sorts of silliness and kookiness and sects and gurus, but that’s all right.

The kookiest sects today were not as kooky as orthodox psychoanalysis was back then, believe me, heh, heh. I was an avant-garde psychologist, but there wasn’t this social pressure. Sure there was peer pressure.

Some psychiatrists were all trying to put us in jail in the ‘50s for doing group therapy. To psychiatrists in the ‘50s, the idea of a group of neurotics sitting around talking about their problems would be like a bunch of surgery patients performing operations on each other. It didn’t threaten society in general the way drugs did.

Q: What is the best facet of the drug revolution?

LEARY: Encouraging intelligent, disciplined, responsible use of drugs. Of course nobody listened. If I had been more effective ... The CIA had $25 million to support their LSD research, which was the secret, deliberate messing-up of people’s minds. Mine was open and public attempts to free people’s minds.

Now if I had $25 million, then, heh, heh, heh, imagine what we would have done, in the way of correct packaging and labeling and cautionary labels, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh.

Q: Are mind-expanding drugs for everyone? Should they be mass produced? Mass marketed, mass advertised?

LEARY: When you talk about brain-activating drugs, you’re talking about a wide range of substances that transport yourself around in your own brain. And that range is as wide as from kiddy cars to rocket engines.

The powerful drugs are like rocket engines and both common sense and public law should prevent inexperienced people from jumping into a rocket or jet airplane and taking off from Wilshire Boulevard or landing it in Times Square.

Drugs are very similar, because you have to include liquor. I’m a total libertarian. I think government has no right interfering in the private lives or personal behavior of people as long as they don’t physically hurt anyone else.

I don’t think the government can take the place of intelligent parent-child relationships. You can’t have the police bust your kids because of their sexual practices or their drug practices or something you don’t approve of.

Q: Do you think you’ve been treated fairly by the press over the years?

LEARY: I don’t believe in the concept of fairness or justice.

Q: Do you think they’ve exaggerated you or built you into someone you weren’t or anything like that?

LEARY: Yes. That’s the function of the press….

Q: Can you be taken seriously about anything now, because of your image?

LEARY: Media has been my obsession for the last 20 years. Media is applied intelligence. When I send out a signal -- first of all, you have to be pretty good to get a signal out. You have to be somehow good enough to have the newspaper print it or have the radio station broadcast it.

And one of the laws of communication is that the more intelligent and shockingly precisely futuristic you are, the fewer people are going to get it. If you say exactly what everyone on Main Street wants to hear now, that’s Reagan and Carter, heh, heh.

As soon as you start getting more intelligent, more scientific, more futuristic, you’re going to start losing audiences. And you know Einstein was never a best seller, never had a prime-time show.

Q: Do you regret any of the trouble you’ve started?

LEARY: I’m extremely pleased with the amount of trouble I’ve been able to stir up. I’m still controversial after 20 years, see. Eldridge Cleaver isn’t controversial. I’m right on the edge of society’s nerve endings. Of course, society is often most nervous about the next step that’s going to change everything.

Q: What’s the next step. Space migration? Cable TV? What do you hope will happen in the 1980s?

LEARY: Europe is going to become slowly communized. Europeans are making deals behind our backs so fast that NATO’s going to collapse. Only in North America will the freedom impulse not only continue but grow.

The place to be in the ‘80s is the U.S., particularly in the Sun Belt. The West especially is much more advanced that the East -- in terms of everything. In terms of economics, we’re not going to have the kind of depression they’re going to have in the East, because the East is still bogged down in the old techniques of both government and manufacturing and industry. Whereas the Sun Belt has opened up to the new industries, which are electronic, neurological, computers, aerospace, entertainment, media.

Q: Is the any hope for the people in the East?

LEARY: Yeah, migrate, heh, heh, heh, heh. Get out here fast. California is pyramiding. Get out here fast.

Q: I have a terrible time convincing anyone Back East that there are virtues to Los Angeles. They think it’s just weirdos and earthquakes and serial murders. The media don’t portray this part of the country as a place to come to.

LEARY: I know. They do that to everything.... but that’s always been true of migration. The Establishment always tries to do that. They used to say that you can’t go across the Atlantic or you’ll fall off the end of the world or the dragons will get you. Or if you want to migrate from Greece to Rome, the Romans are barbarians.

They’ve always warned people ... because the Western frontier has always been wilder, because you get the individualists, you get the risk takers, you get the high-stake visionaries. The people who are on the run. The Western frontier for the last 2,000 or 3,000 years has always been wilder and woollier. Each wave of the future moves a little farther and farther west.

When the first immigrants came over to the United States the Catholic priests deliberately kept their flocks around them in New York and Boston and Philly. They didn’t want them cutting out and getting to California.

I’m amused when I watch the Eastern press. Every time they mention California, they shake their head, heh, heh, heh. But actually the homicide rate is much higher in the East than in L.A., isn’t it?

Q: I don’t know if that is true. I think L.A. is a good town because of the people who are here. They’re the hustlers and the people seeking dreams. People who want to do something more than sit in Pennsylvania or Ohio.

LEARY: They can make fun of California as much as they want. Time magazine, Newsweek magazine and the New York Times, Washington Post, all the syndicates and so forth, they’re all Eastern.

The way they treat Western writers …. The whole Western school of writers is entirely different from the East Coast. The East Coast is either Southern alcoholic or Jewish family or New England WASP -- that’s John Cheever, Episcopalian, adultery and so forth -- it’s a European orientation.

The Eastern literary people have flatly said there are no great American writers, but there is a California school of writing that is entirely different and, of course, isn’t even accepted by the East Coast literary Establishment. It’s always been that way. (He speaks in a quiet voice, slow, not crazy or antic.)

The West Coast writing is much more optimistic. It’s funnier. It’s transcendental. It’s Ken Keasy and it’s Harold Robbins and it’s Henry Miller and it’s Aldous Huxley and it’s science-fiction people and it’s Ambrose Bierce and it’s Chandler.

There’s an enormous body of literature, which to me represents the best of the America tradition – nose-thumbing at authority, futuristic, Jack London! Do you know he was writing science-fiction stories 80 years ago? Ironically enough, California writers are much more popular in Europe than they are on the East Coast, except for Henry Miller.

Q: Charles Bukowski?

LEARY: Bukowski’s another.

Q: Who are “the ecological Puritans”?

LEARY: Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader. They represent the absolute worst – they are moralistic, puritanical, virtuous. They are anti-scientific, anti-technological. They’re close-minded. And they’re breeding fear, almost a primitive, barbaric generation of terror. They are the classic -- I’ve got a new column in defense of the big American car. We’re an endangered species, like the low-mileage buffalo, the gas-guzzling whooping crane and the high-octane eagle, heh, heh.

Q: What kind of car do you drive?

LEARY: A Mercedes, heh, heh. I want to get a bumper sticker that says, “Buy American,” but my wife ... heh, heh. (An old-timer is passing by on the sidewalk.) Hi. How are you doing? (Leary makes a joke -- something about Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood.)

Q: Does that guy know who you are?

LEARY: No. The paradox is, everyone who knows me, loves me. That’s the paradox. I’m really a wonderful guy. I’m out here. I’m the only father in this neighborhood. There are no fathers for many reasons. There are a lot of Iranians. I’m the one who’s out all the time teaching them baseball. I’m the only father that’s around at all. I’ve got about 20 kids here.

Q: You have a six-year-old kid, right?

LEARY: Yeah. Yeah. So I’m out here all the time. It’s not a heavy, shades-down, shoot-‘em-up drug gallery. I do a lot of my interviews out here. They all love me. To know me is to love me, personally.

Q: That’s the impression I got from watching your stand-up philosophy show. You’re a friendly guy. You’re not a bitter man.

LEARY: I think I’m the happiest man who ever lived.

Q: You still are?

LEARY: Yeah.

Q: The reason I keep grabbing my neck is I’ve got a headache.

LEARY: You need another beer?

Q: No. No.

LEARY: Want an aspirin?

Q: I just grabbed about three of them two hours ago. Um .... The political scene ....

LEARY: (He rolls his eyes). The overwhelming statistic is that 70 percent of Americans are totally turned off by politics.

Q: Why do you think that is?

LEARY: Well, for many reasons. One is that America is ungovernable. It’s simply too big and diverse a country. America’s like the British Commonwealth was 50 years ago.

The difference between Maine and Arizona or between Washington and Mississippi is as great as between England and South Africa and India and Canada. I’m very much in favor of regional secession, so that America could become a commonwealth or a confederation. The best run country in the world is Switzerland.

Q: You lived there a while didn’t you?

LEARY: I was in exile there for 18 months. Switzerland is a confederation of independent cantons. It’s great. And they give very few rights to the federal government.

Q: Do you think victimless crime laws will ever be repealed or have their penalties reduced?

LEARY: Victimless crime should be local. If there are some people who live in a neighborhood and they don’t want homosexual teachers and they don’t want liquor and they don’t want cigarettes and they don’t want business and they don’t want marijuana, then let them have local option.

So in Camden, New Jersey, they don’t want anything, heh, heh. On the other hand, maybe Newark wants beer, liquor, marijuana, but doesn’t want gays. All right, there’s got to be local options, because there’s 43 million people smoking marijuana.

The only solution is local option, then nobody’s bothering anyone else. Sex education in schools -- I sympathize with parents who don’t want their children brought up by liberal teachers. If you don’t want your children taught by liberal teachers, then move to a different place.

There’s this illusion of uniformity and we should all be one, we should all agree. You’re going to see more of that in the ‘80s. You’re going to see, paradoxically, what you saw happen in the ‘70s.

Some cities and towns are going to become increasingly liberal, like San Francisco. And they’re already starting “Scopes Trials” and throwing out books in some place in Tennessee. So that’s fine. No big deal. Where you are determines who you are.

Geography is the key to the kind of life you lead. People should be encouraged to move so they surround themselves with like-minded people, so they don’t get on each other’s nerves.

Q: Do you think people are more or less free today than they were 100 years ago?

LEARY: Americans?

Q: Yeah.

LEARY: Oh, I think were much freer today because we have many, many more options now. What choices of freedom were there 100 years ago -- liquor? You could run off -- heh, heh, heh -- with a jazz band. There weren’t many options.

The increasing boom in technology that is made available to consumers has given us an enormous range of freedoms to be able to come and go as we want. Think of the freedom of literature we have now. Thirty years ago they wouldn’t let Henry Miller’s books be published.

Q: Do you think there are people today still being persecuted for their ideas? (former U.S. Attorney General) Ramsey Clark, I guess, would be an example of someone. He’s getting shit from everybody about the Iranian hostages.

LEARY: I don’t think he’s getting persecuted. He ran out and said he was going to be the quarterback for the anti-Shah team. Well, naturally, you immediately get on your back Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller and Time magazine.

I don’t think he’s getting persecuted. He’s getting exactly what he wanted, and I don’t think he’s worried and I think he’s done us all a great favor. He’s made everyone think, “Does an American citizen have a right to go to Iran and talk to foreigners?”

I’ve never been a great admirer of Clark’s. I personally think the ayatollah is a horrible person and I think Hanoi Jane -- I was very much against the Vietnam war, but I had no illusions about Jane Fonda. I knew the Hanoi government was much worse than the Saigon government.

But it wasn’t our business to get in involved in the fight. I never had illusions that I wouldn’t have lasted one day in Hanoi but I could have made a lot of money in Saigon.

Q: How did you live in Algeria then?

LEARY: It wasn’t easy. I’m very familiar with Muslim Puritanism and fanaticism and the idea that it’s all right to kill you if you don’t do what they say, heh, heh – Arabs are not nice people. Over here, if they’re smart enough to come over here, they’re like the rest of us. But, boy, I would no more go to live in an Arab country —whew! — because I know from experience.

Q: You said somewhere that “Everything I do is to increase individual freedom, responsibility and choice.” What are greatest impediments to that today in America?

LEARY: Well, old people. I went around to several polling booths to see what was going on. They’re all run by old people -- mainly old women. Naturally, they’ve always been impediments to change.

A person who is 70 years old now was born in 1910. Whew! Figure how frightening the future must be to them now. I’m not complaining about this. These are natural genetic brakes on change that are necessary. Nothing happens until the old guard dies out.

It’s going to happen that way in Iran. It’s going to happen that way in China. It’s going to happen that way in Russia. It’s going to happen that way over here. So the impediments to change are always adulthood. By definition, the word “adult” means one who has stopped changing. So the greatest impediment to change is grownups. (The brown cat comes snooping around again.)

Q: In your stand-up ‘lecture’ you made a lot of references to male-macho, Darwinian stuff. Is this a sudden feminist influence on you? (An elderly woman comes along the sidewalk and says hello. Leary tells her, “Good luck, good luck.”)

LEARY: Feminism to me is aggressive women trying to act like terrible men. My studies -- and from 35 years of being a psychologist, and from all the scientific books I’ve read at every level of science -- have made me feel that women are simply smarter than men.

At the early origins of life, the male was the viral infection that the female allowed to come in and change her DNA because there are all these advantages to the egg to have men running around doing all the errands.

Every intelligent man realizes that women are smarter than men. Who ends up with all the money? Who lives longest? It’s effective biological intelligence. Week after week, month after month, I put out scientifically based and humorously effective propaganda called “the Egg Intelligence and Wisdom.”

I’ve done more of it recently because as I’ve studied Western science and Western philosophy recently, I see that all the mistakes are because it’s a male point of view. Competition between males and fighting and all of that.

So, obviously, the male macho ... (He stops abruptly, as though he’s run out of thought.) Darwin struggled and struggled with all-male power. It was all male. He looked for female selectivity. It was a period in England when women couldn’t vote. It was natural that it was all masculine.

Q: Were you a teaching professor at Harvard?

LEARY: No. I’ve never been a teacher. I’m not good at teaching. I’m not good at passing on canned knowledge. I can’t pass on canned knowledge or go to meetings. I break out in a sweat.

Q: You’ve said people are 99 percent genetically programmed and the idea of choice and free will is a lie. Are some people doomed to a life in Peoria?

LEARY: Yeah. There’s no question. I don’t even talk about individuals. I see human beings always as being part of gene pool clouds. As a matter of fact, the most sophisticated businesses today don’t believe an electron is a fast-moving billiard ball. An electron is a cloud – a cloud of possibilities.

You watch birds going south or north and humans are the same way. Yes. I believe there’s a migratory outcast, probably around 7 to 10 percent of any gene pool -- salmon or a flock of gulls.

There have been studies of migratory patterns of animals. Whereas 90 percent of all salmon go back to same spawning pool, 10 percent don’t. It’s that 10 percent that everything depends on if the spawning pool dries up or if it’s taken over by narcotics agents.

DNA never puts all her eggs in one basket. So those who stay in Peoria belong to the 90 percent and God bless them. You need the mass, you need the swarm, you need the collectivity, and they’re playing their role. In their heart, they know they’re right.

Q: Then what is the danger? To let them call all the shots? Or is there a danger?

LEARY: No. Let them call the shots in Peoria, heh, heh. The danger is, don’t go back to Peoria and try to set up a --you know, I could never be Timothy Leary in Peoria, sitting on my lawn and doing this.

The key to everything -- and this includes galaxies down to electrons and protons -- is to find the right niche that will give you the energy to make the connection and don’t get involved in niches that are not genetically geared to you. And don’t try to change the home ground. You’ll never change it.

Five thousand years from now they’ll come back in spaceships and the ayatollahs will still be fighting the Iraqis. That’s what they love to. They’ll be doing it more sophisticatedly, obviously, but they’ll still be doing it. You never want to change anyone on the spot. The only place real change takes place is on the frontier.

Q: And space is the future? The American future?

LEARY: There is a danger that America will become like the Vikings. The Russians make two visits to space and we haven’t done anything since 1975. I see it as one of my innate functions to be a truth carrier now and then and send out a signal to the 10 percent. I never speak to more than 10 percent -- those who genetically reverberate to my message, which is “move, change.” The trick is to keep moving.

Q: Is it inevitable that the moving is always good?

LEARY: To the individual or the species? The male ejaculates 500 million sperms. Usually no good comes of any of them. Maybe four or five times in your life one of them hits. One little sperm that gets the egg machinery all excited….

Q: What’s the most important message you’re trying to impart?

LEARY: The evolutionary process is intelligent, it is benign and it’s evolving and it’s continuing. The more you understand evolution, the wiser you are, the funnier you are, the happier you are and the more secure you are.

All the institutions try to stop evolution. The Ayatollah’s problem is that he doesn’t want anything to change from what it was 100 years ago. (Another old guy walks by, then Leary’s son Jack comes along.) I wish more Americans would understand me and my philosophy, because they would feel a lot better.

America is the greatest country that ever lived. The young people are the greatest young people to ever hang around. The whole experiment has been a tremendous success -- the whole planet. The more people who understand my philosophy, the happier they’ll be, the nicer, the more friendly, the more hopeful, the more confidence they’ll have, heh, heh, heh. I wish more people understood. That’ll take time.

Q: Do you think they are capable of understanding or just don’t hear it?

LEARY: I give out vibrations of cheerful, reckless, arrogant enthusiasm. That puts 90 percent of the people off, because the whole culture is Judeo-Christian and it is based on the vale of tears and you’re supposed to suffer.

Professor Leary sees the future

At a standup philosophy routine in Laguna Beach, the audience is disproportionately composed of yahoos. Males mostly.

Leary tells them he loves the beaches of California. He says he has had a terrible time with the press and talks about his recent run-in with the Beverly Hills police.

Bad PR -- that’s why he ended up in prison, he tells the yahoos. Bad PR. Image-damaging AP wire dispatches – “Police arrest Tim Leary, dread king of acid.”

The police said my wife and I were fighting, Leary says. In fact, he says, “My wife and I were in the bedroom. I was taking an incredibly strong aphrodisiac -- not fighting. Suddenly, the Beverly Hills police crash in through the front door. I’m somewhere near the star Sirius….”

He tells his youthful audience the ‘70s was “ ‘The Me Generation” and the ‘80s will be ‘The Media Generation.’ ” He tells them in the ‘60s we took the human body away from the American Medical Association and said ‘You’re responsible for it – you’re responsible for your own body. You’ve gotta decide you have to diet it, medicine it, etc.’

“The same thing is true for the human brain,” he says. “For centuries the brain and human conscious has been the provenance of the ministers and priests and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists.

“Come on, don’t make me laugh. We wrenched the power and control of the human body and the human brain away from this priesthood of experts with their diplomas and got it back to where it’s got to belong, to individual human beings....”

Leary tells the crowd you have to be responsible and learn from your mistakes. Then he tells them about the future.

“Just as we took the body and the brain from the authorities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the ‘80s we’re going to take the media away from ABC/NBC and everyone’s going to get in the media.

“You can build yourself a satellite dish. It’ll cost you $20,000, but you can bootleg one for $300. So break the law. Get yourself a satellite dish so you’ll have 1,000 shows coming in.

“Get yourself a little transistor. We’ll be building up cable TV and small networks and we’ll wrench power away from the big establishments, just as we did with drugs and with medicines in our body.”

Leary tells his audience that the police are already into media and cinematography. They taped congressmen for the ABSCAM sting and the Beverly Hills cops carried cameras when they raided him at midnight.

“The police broke into our building and they had flash bulbs and a video camera. Things went in and out of focus -- we were naked. Oh well, you can’t win them all.”

Leary is good-natured about the raid, even though they videotaped him and his wife naked as they took them to jail. Beverly Hills has “the cutest little jail -- Spanish stucco and tile,” he says. But he says it was “an insult to my pride when they threw me in the drunk pen. I call that police brutality.”

Leary is much, much tougher on Hollywood.

“The Hollywood system is really a company town, where everyone’s afraid. It’s run by crooks. It’s run by people who deliberately make these movies that make you feel bad, that make you feel helpless. They never give you a movie about good-looking men and women getting together, and getting smarter and moving and doing and getting something better. Alcoholic, rum-dum, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, you know, ‘Postman Rings Twice’ repeats and repeats and repeats… It’s a loser industry for losers.”

The man who warns people to never become an adult calls the term “overdose” the sleaziest of adult terms: “Watch out. The ‘overdose’ will get you.” But “overdose” isn’t the problem, he says: “99.99 percent of all people who’ve ever lived on this planet have died of an under-dose.”

After telling his audience that “I’m one of the funniest, nicest guys who’ve ever been sent down to this planet,” the most dangerous man in America leaves them with a final bit of advice.

“I wish that you, when your moment of truth comes, can add up your life and come to the conclusion that it’s been one jammed and crammed with excitement and change and growth and hope and positive, high-velocity better fusions and funnier intelligence. Onward and upward, we’ll meet aloft.”

A link to a look at Leary’s standup routine, circa 1984.

His visit with William F. Buckley Jr. on ‘Firing Line’ in 1967, when Leary was at the height of notoriety.

Timothy Leary Bio:

His mother was a teacher and his father a dentist. He attended West Point, joined the Army, and earned an undergraduate psychology degree at the University of Alabama while in the service. Next he earned a master’s degree from Washington State University and a doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1959, Leary joined the faculty of Harvard University. There, he met professor Richard Alpert and began a series of controlled experiments with psychedelic drugs. Four years later they were fired for using undergraduate students in the tests.

They retired to Millbrook Estate, a 63-room mansion in upstate New York. People like William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg came and went, all united by a desire to experience better living through chemistry.

In 1970 he escaped from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for possession of two marijuana joints. His bust-out was aided by the Weather Underground and his third wife, Rosemary. He and she roamed from country to country.

In Algeria, they took stayed with Eldridge Cleaver, who ultimately kidnapped his guest couple after a political disagreement. The Learys escaped and fled to Switzerland.

In 1973, at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, Timothy Leary was arrested by agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Extradited to the United States, he was sent to Folsom prison near Sacramento.

After he was paroled in 1976 Leary’s life turned to lecture tours, stand-up comedy, writing books, cyberspace and the Hollywood party scene. He launched a much-ridiculed lecture tour in 1982 with Watergate villain G. Gordon Liddy. He learned of his prostate cancer in January 1995 and celebrated his remaining lifetime through his own web site. He died at age 75 in Beverly Hills on May 31, 1996.

This part of a 1983 documentary shows how Leary looked when I met him.

From History.com:

At 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, become the first explorers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which at 29,035 feet above sea level is the highest point on earth.

Lofty Ideals

Edmund Hillary, the world's most famous New Zealander, doesn't have his own Web site yet. But he does have his own entry in the encyclopedias.

That's the kind of permanent record of your life you get when you're considered one of the greatest explorers of the century.

Anyone over 40 knows that back in 1953, long before Gore-Tex and other high-tech bad-weather garb and climbing gear made mountaineering a sport for the masses, Hillary and his Sherpa companion Tenzing Norgay were the first two humans to conquer all 29,028 feet of Mount Everest.

Though seven expeditions before them had failed, they reached the top of the world at 11:30 on the morning of May 29, 1953. They planted some flags, snapped some photos and immediately started worrying about getting down safely so they could live to tell everybody about it.

Hillary, an Auckland beekeeper before becoming world famous, went on many other exciting adventures, including leading the first mechanized motorcade to the South Pole in 1958.

He also has explored unmapped regions of Nepal, set up hygienic water systems in remote villages and built schools, hospitals and bridges throughout Nepal and the Himalayas. In 1974 the Canadian Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation was established to help fund a variety of international aid projects that " he remains active with today.

Tomorrow night at 6:30, as part of his humanitarian efforts in Nepal, Hillary, now 79, will put on a lecture/slide show at the Byham Theater. Call the Carnegie Science Center at 412-237-3400 for information on tickets, which range from $25 to $100 and can only be bought in advance.

Sir Edmund Hillary

Q: Are you happy with your entry in the encyclopedia?

A: I've looked at the odd encyclopedia and I've read the odd entry. And none of them are necessarily what I would regard as completely summing up what I am. But most of them are fairly close. I'm not really very concerned as to how I'm presented in an encyclopedia.

Q: You have been called the last of the great 20th-century explorers. Do you think that's a lot of hype or is it accurate?

A: Oh, I think it's a lot of hype. There are lots of good explorers, certainly before me and after me. I think that Tenzing and I managed to climb Everest for the first time and we got a lot of publicity as a consequence.

Q: I know your famous answer when you were asked why you climbed Everest was "Because it was there" ....

A: That really wasn't me that said that, of course. That was said by very much a predecessor of mine, George Leigh-Mallory. He pioneered the approach to the mountain in 1923. He died on the mountain in 1924.

Q: Oh, OK. So why did you climb it?

A: What I generally say is that it's the sense of challenge, the attempt to stretch yourself to the utmost and overcome considerable difficulties. If you can do that, you get a great sense of satisfaction.

Q: I have another quote from you. Let's see if you said this: "It is not the mountains we conquer but ourselves." Did you say that?

A: I think I did say that over the years, and I believe it, too.

Q: You had a lot of competition in those days. How did you get to the top first?

A: It was a combination of factors, really. I was certainly very fit. But we had a very excellent team. Our team had a very strong team spirit. The team in general was very hopeful that we might be successful in getting someone to the summit.

And because Tenzing and I were probably the fittest couple at the time, we were the ones who were given the final job, and we were able to complete it. And on the last day, we had a little bit of luck that you always need, in that the weather was pretty reasonable.

Q: Did you have oxygen?

A: Yeah, we used oxygen on the mountain. In those days we didn't know whether it was humanly possible to reach the summit without using oxygen. Frankly, we didn't know if it was possible to reach the summit even using oxygen. So we had that sort of psychological barrier to overcome, which is something, of course, no other expedition has had to worry about.

Q: When you were at the very top, what were you thinking when you stood there?

A: I didn't have a feeling of this sort of tremendous excitement within me. I was still very much aware of the fact that we have to get safely down the mountain again. I did have a feeling of very considerable satisfaction. So many expeditions had tried the mountain, and they were pretty good expeditions, too. But finally Tenzing and I had got to the summit.

Q: You are in the encyclopedias because of your climb on Mount Everest, but you also drove across Antarctica for the first time. Which of those two or any other adventure you've gone on was the hardest?

A: Well, the one, of course, that got the greatest publicity was the climb of Mount Everest. But I have been involved in other expeditions — driving to the South Pole and driving jet boats up the Ganges River in the Himalayas and things of that nature — that to me have been just as challenging as the climb of Everest.

I tend to take every adventure as it comes. They all have their problems and they all have their periods of danger, and so on, but this is all part of the challenge. I really don't decide that this one particular expedition was any better than any other.

Q: If you were a young man now, what adventure would there be out there that you would be after? Some people say all the great adventures are all gone.

A: I guess in a way, many of the great adventures, the massive ones, have gone. The mountains have been climbed. The poles have been reached. People have gone to the bottom of the ocean and all the rest. But there are still very large numbers of very demanding things still to be done.

The modern adventurer, say a mountaineer, he can choose to try and climb a mountain by a very difficult route that may have not been done before. By so doing, because of his greater skill and greater technical equipment, he is able to do the same sort of thing we did 45 years ago. The challenge remains just the same because he has greater skill but he's doing harder things.

Q: Are you happy with the popularization of mountain climbing?

A: I think mountaineering is a great sport as long as it's handled sensibly. However, I'm not an enthusiast for the commercial side of trying to climb Mount Everest, having someone conduct you to the summit if you pay $65,000. But if someone is skilled and experienced and wants to put a little expedition together and go to the top, I wish them the best of luck.

Q: What do you do for excitement now?

A: Well, now that I'm much older, of course, I get more of my excitement out of working on projects with the people of the Himalayas. We have established lots of schools for them and hospitals and medical clinics. I find this in many ways just as satisfying as a big physical challenge.

Q: Your appearance in Pittsburgh is part of your fund-raising efforts around the world?

A: Yes, it is. I travel around the world a good deal each year, doing talks and raising funds for the projects in the Himalayas. I have a great affection for these people, particularly the Sherpa people, so I feel almost a sense of duty to carry on and do these things.

Q: What are you most proud of?

A: Unquestionably, it's not really the great adventures. But more the fact that as a result of our efforts many children in the Himalayas have been able to go to school and get an education and many young people have been able to get medical treatment. I think these are the things that are really most important.

The New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist was born in 1919 and died in 2008.

Tucker Carlson is always in the news.

This time it’s because he trashed Donald Trump over his foolish attack on Iran and because the New York Times went all the way to Maine to interview him about it.

Over the years, Carlson’s views have been famously hard to keep track of, constantly changing and tough to pin down. His latest criticism of Trump’s warmaking is just the latest example.

The vintage Q&As

In the mid-2000s, long before he became the King of Cable on Fox, and even longer before he was fired and became his own internet network, I interviewed him four times when he was co-host of CNN's "Crossfire."

Carlson, who called himself a neocon in those early days, is now one of the strongest critics of America’s serial interventionism in the Middle East and our government’s current unconditional financial and military support of Ukraine.

Since 2005 his political positions, while still conservative, have shifted around quite a bit, which he freely admits.

Here he is talking to Reason magazine about libertarianism and his fondness for Ron Paul when Paul was running for president in 2007-2008.

In this interview from October of 2022 with Fox’s Will Cain, Carlson explains how ashamed he is now that he was so wrong about supporting the war in Iraq and how much he dislikes the incompetent people who are in charge of our country. Iraq, he says, was the beginning of his break from the “conventional” Neocon/Republican viewpoint.

Here’s an interview from March 2023 with one of his former colleagues at FOX who asks him about journalism, the covid vax and his airing of footage of the ‘insurrection’/riot of Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol that Democrats had kept under lock.

Here’s where Carlson lives. Here he is at age 12 — or so he appears — on C-SPAN in 1995, when he still wore his trademark bow tie.

As he told the Atlantic in December 2019, “There’s no topic on which my views haven’t changed, because the country has changed so much. And what I have learned is that a lot of the things I believed were totally wrong, a lot of the information that I was basing my opinions on was wrong, or dishonest, false, even fraudulent in some cases. A lot of the things conservatives were saying at one time have been completely disproven.”

When I talked to him on the phone nearly 20 years ago he was the Carlson we know today — always upbeat, well informed, friendly, funny and happy to give me 15 minutes of his time no matter where he was.

The following interviews appear as they did in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, where every Saturday for about eight years I talked to smart, newsworthy and important Americans like Milton Friedman, George McGovern, Jane Jacobs, Molly Ivins, David McCullough, Ron Paul — and Tucker Carlson.

2003

Tucker Carlson finds his niche

Everyone else who appears as a guest or a host in the MSNBC/ CNN/CNBC/FOX News talk-and-shout sector has written a book, so why not Tucker Carlson?

As a real writer, as an actual trained journalist who’s written for places like The New York Times, Forbes and New York magazine, he’s actually qualified. Carlson’s “Politicians, Partisans and Parasites,” while alliteratively titled, is not much of a test of his reportorial skills.

It weighs in at only 192 pages and it is basically a humorous quicky-memoir of how a young conservative staffer from The Weekly Standard with a two-pack-of-Camels-a-day habit became a TV talking pundit and co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” I talked to Carlson last week via telephone:

Q: Shouldn’t you be working for Fox TV by now?

A: Nooo! What? Fox is dying for more conservatives on their air? I don’t think so! You’d definitely have the “coals to Newcastle” problem there.

Q: Give us a 60-second sound bite about your book.

A: Mostly it’s a book about the experience of working in cable news, which is not a unique environment, but a pretty different one. It’s ad hoc. It’s a “45-seconds-to-airtime,-good-luck,-buddy” kind of thing.

There’s a lot of ad-libbing, and it’s risky in the sense that there’s no five-second delay. You screw up, and people see it. It’s an exciting and interesting environment filled with smart and, in some cases, deeply eccentric people — and nobody ever writes about what it’s like, so I figured I would.

Q: Speaking of “deeply eccentric,” tell us a little about James Carville. You’ve seen him in action on and off TV.

A: I think he’s a riot. I don’t hold him responsible for a lot of the things he says. I’m not even sure he’s aware he’s saying them a lot of the time. I admire James because he is one of the few people on television who will actually say what he thinks.

However outlandish or demented it might be, he’ll say it. I like that very much. He has the courage of his convictions, even if they’re horribly wrong, which they are.

Q: You’ve got some heavyweight blurbers on the back of your book — P.J. O’Rourke, Christopher Hitchens, (presidential candidate) Al Sharpton and William Kristol. Who did you have to pay the most?

A: (Laughs) Well, with Sharpton it was a pretty clear quid pro quo — my support for his blurb. You’ll also notice that he’s going to be rewarding me with the chairmanship of Amtrak if he wins. He cracks me up. I don’t think he’s in danger of becoming president.

I went to Africa last month with Sharpton and (Harvard prof) Cornell West and a bunch of guys from the Nation of Islam. I had a marvelous time, but one thing I learned is that Sharpton doesn’t hate white people. He just hates white liberals.

Q: Really?

A: Oh, he hates them. He hates them so much that he’s planning on giving a prime-time speech at the Democratic convention in Boston next summer, thereby humiliating his party. That’s how much he hates them. So, we’ve got a lot in common.

Q: What about William Kristol. You worked for him for six years. What are your politics, and how do they differ from someone like Kristol?

A: They’re pretty closer to Kristol. I think of myself as an Episcopalian neo-con. I’m supportive of a vigorous foreign policy. I like Israel. And I’m conservative. I’m more socially conservative than I am economically conservative. I’m more upset about abortion than taxes.

It’s hard for me to believe that children who are viable are aborted in this country. You’d think people would be chaining themselves to buildings and lying down in the streets. You’d think the mall would be filled with protestors, and it’s not. I don’t really know why.

Q: At one point Robert Novak and other fellow conservatives deemed you too liberal to be on “Crossfire.” Did you prove that to be wrong?

A: I guess I’m liberal to the extent that I like Israel and I don’t hate people, by and large. I’m actually quite conservative. I’m just not that interested in the Republican Party. The fortunes of the party and my interests just don’t intersect that much.

I’m not a partisan. On a lot of issues I care about, the Republican Party consistently sells out. I don’t care one bit for the Republican Party. I vote for it most of the time. I’m an ideologue, not a partisan.

Q: “Crossfire” was always ripped by newspaper and magazine critics for all the yelling and shouting. But Michael Kinsley once said that “Crossfire” was the only place on TV where the guests were really grilled and not let off the hook.

A: See, I think the world has changed. Now there are a number of forums on TV that ask difficult questions. I don’t think we have a monopoly on that. The monopoly I think we have now is in literal balance. There is no single megalomaniacal host of “Crossfire” telling you the way the world is who goes unchallenged. There’s not a single phrase you utter on that show that isn’t challenged by a smart person trying to make you look stupid.

So that environment causes you to really think through everything you’re going to say. If I had my own show, it seems to me, you run the risk of indulging your own hobbyhorse theories about the world, and essentially there’s no one there to call “bull****” on you.

Q: You become Bill O’Reilly.

A: That’s kind of what I was trying to say without saying it. That’s exactly right. You become kind of a humorless solipsist. … On our show, one side may inherit a weaker position than the other on some nights. But always there are two sides evenly matched. I think out of that tension between the two sides, viewers get a better sense of what the debate is.

Q: What’s the worst part of being on a highly partisan debate show?

A: The worst part is when we don’t argue, but instead name-call. That’s not fun. It’s not good to watch. It’s very tiresome. It’s embarrassing. And I hate it when we do that.

Q: Do you miss writing as a full-time job.

A: Yeah, a lot. No, that’s not true. I don’t miss writing. Writing is torture, obviously. But I do miss being on the road. I miss going places and seeing people and hearing things I had never heard and meeting some people I didn’t know. I miss getting on airplanes and going to weird countries and seeing stuff.

Q: How long do you see yourself doing “Crossfire” or that kind of show.

A: I have no idea. I’ll probably wind up juggling in a street fair in Ottawa or something. I literally have no idea where I’m going to end up. I’ll do it till I get fired or I get bored, whatever comes first.

2004

The Iowa Caucuses

The Iowa caucuses are hard upon us.

So who better to call for the latest inside-the-porkway poop on which Democrat is going to win than Tucker Carlson, the co-host of CNN's "Crossfire"?

Carlson, a fine writer and straight-talker whose book "Politicians, Partisans and Parasites" recounts his crazy career in cable news, was in Los Angeles yesterday for a little R&R when he answered the Trib's desperate call for professional analysis.

But he'll be back in Iowa for Monday night's too-close-to-call primary, where Howard Dean, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, John Edwards, Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich are still fighting it out before heading to frozen New Hampshire.

Q: Where did John Kerry's lead come from all of the sudden? Has his wife Theresa been throwing her money around?

A: No, I don’t think that’s it at all. He’s been dormant this whole time, waiting for what has happened, which is the Dean Meltdown.

Q: So you call it the “Dean Meltdown”?

A: No question.

Q: How does it manifest itself?

A: A Dean Meltdown is the point at which adult Democratic voters finally realize this man cannot be elected president.

Q: And all those pork farmers and meat-packers in Iowa have figured that out all of the sudden?

A: I think they have. People were excited by Dean, but all of the sudden they have caught hold of themselves and realized this is an incredibly irresponsible choice.

Q: Do these tracking polls, which now show Kerry has a slight lead, have any reliability at all?

A: No, they don’t. They’re not specifically predictive. One poll or a series of polls is not going to tell you who is going to win. However, taken together, they show a trend pretty clearly – and the trend is the collapse of the Dean campaign.

Q: Is it more Dean’s personality or the issues?

A: I think it’s both. Dean was a guilty pleasure for a lot of angry Democrats. His positions on foreign policy, his inability to leave a thought unexpressed, added up to the perception that this guy could just never be Commander in Chief.

Q: Now are we seeing the rise of Kerry or is he a blip?

A: I honestly don’t know. I bet on Kerry early. I put money on Kerry. I know Kerry. I thought he’s by far the most plausible opponent for a bunch of different reasons.

I mean, look: If the center of the Democratic critique of Bush’s foreign policy is that he has alienated the rest of the world, it kind of implies that you’re going to have to nominate someone else who can, like, I don’t know, make up with France. Right?

When you look at Howard Dean, is he really the guy who’s going to bring the French back? I don’t think so.

It’s going to be an election run on pretty serious issues, as far as I’m concerned. This election is going to turn on the question, “What is America’s place in the world?” It’s not going to be an election on prescription drugs or the silly transient issues that no one is going to remember a decade from now. It’s a big election, and Dean is an angry little man.

Q: Can you explain in English what a caucus is for those of us back here who don’t ever want to take part in one?

A: Despite having attended a number of them, I’m not sure I can get all the details right. But essentially it’s a bunch of Iowa voters gathering in, say, the basement of a school, and arguing – publicly -- about who ought to be the nominee. Ultimately, I believe that each caucus place has to come some consensus.

Q: There are 1,900 of them.

A: Exactly. Each one has to pick somebody. The key difference between a primary and a caucus is that you can change your vote once you get there. You can come to a caucus site committed to, say, Kucinich, and leave having supported Dean.

Q: Was Dean right when he said that these caucuses were basically for political insiders and controlled by special interests, or was Time’s Joel Stein right when he said it was a boring “dorkfest” for people who get their kicks by doing jury duty?

A: It’s both. Because Stein’s right, Dean is also right. In other words, because it’s such a difficult, cumbersome process, the activists control it, because they are the only ones motivated to go. It’s so difficult, you have to have a very high level of intensity to participate. And the higher the level of your intensity, the crazier you’re likely to be.

Q: If Dean loses, will that mean the end of him?

A: Yes.

Q: If you had to bet on a winner now for the entire nomination, who would it be?

A: Kerry.

Q: Really?

A: Yeah.

Q: Kerry’s obviously going to do better in Iowa, but does that give him legs for New Hampshire?

A: I think it does. On paper, Wes Clark is the best-situated to win the nomination, simply because Iowa and New Hampshire represent the nation a lot less than South Carolina does, and Wes Clark is a much more natural South Carolina candidate than John Kerry is.

However, there’s something really wrong with Wes Clark and anyone who’s spent, say, 20 minutes talking to him perceives that. I don’t think that’s percolated down to ordinary newspaper readers yet, but it will.

Q: And what is that “something wrong”?

A: I’m not sure. I flew across the country last night with a close friend of mine who is a big-time Democrat. We talked about it between Miami and L.A. the whole time almost: “What is it?”

I’m not sure we were able to put a finger on it, exactly, but there’s something missing. He’s too purely driven by ambition. He is ambition in search of an idea, really. He’s very smart. I’m sure he has a higher IQ than anybody else running. And he certainly has a more impressive resume in some ways. Have you talked to him?

Q: No.

A: I really recommend it. It’s absolutely worth going to one of his events. There’s something absolutely wrong with him. He does not hear questions. He will not deviate from what he’s trying to say. It’s bizarre. He’s a pod person! I can’t explain it.

I like almost everyone who’s running for president. I know them all. Most of them are likable persons. They’re career politicians. They didn’t get there by being unlikable, right?

Carol Mosley Braun – delightful. Whatever else she is, and she’s a lot of other things, she’s totally charming. Most of them are that way. Dick Gephardt is a pretty nice guy. John Kerry -- good guy. There’s something wrong with Wes Clark.

Q: That’s scary.

A: It is. I’m not kidding! The hair on my arms stands up every time I deal with him. He was at CNN, so I’ve dealt with him a lot. It’s very strange. That’s not decisive. A lot of weird people have been elected president through the years. But he’s too weird.

2005

Tucker Carlson talks

Tucker Carlson’s new 9 p.m. MSNBC talk show, “The Situation with Tucker Carlson,” is only a month old, but it already has been trashed by The New York Times.

The Times’ TV critic, who obviously didn’t appreciate “The Situation’s” fast-and-furious pace or the illiberal politics of its libertarian-leaning conservative host, called for the show to be canceled after two weeks.

More objective viewers, however, would give Carlson credit for developing a smart, politically balanced and often funny hour of civilized TV debate and commentary on the big news and issues of the day.

I talked to the affable former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” by telephone on Wednesday from his MSNBC offices in Secaucus, N.J.:

Q: Why should we watch your new show as opposed to the other cable news/talk/shout shows?

A: It’s more interesting, funnier and probably more informative.

Q: Is it too good-natured?

A: Is it too good-natured? Is it not nasty enough? (laughs) It’s just not nasty enough? It’s just not unpleasant enough? Yeah. It’s one of our major problems.

Q: How do you define your politics?

A: I would say probably closer to Pat Buchanan than anyone else. I would say I am a traditional conservative. I am completely opposed to the war in Iraq.

Q: You were for the war until you went to Iraq. Then you came back enraged.

A: I was enraged because it sort of brought me back to first principles — my own. And it reminded me that the only good reason to go to war is in self-defense — or to protect the physical integrity of your country. Look, I have grave concerns about government’s ability to do things well. I don’t trust the post office to deliver the mail and all of a sudden you get conservatives trusting government to create a brand new society in a place that has remained unchanged for thousands of years.

Q: Talk about social engineering. I thought conservatives were supposed to be against that stuff.

A: Exactly right! The idea that I get called “liberal.” I can’t think of a subject on which I’m liberal. … I’m much more libertarian on drugs than maybe some conservatives. I’m not for the death penalty. It makes me uncomfortable to give the government authority to kill people, except in self-defense, because I think that power has been misused. I’m adamantly against abortion. I don’t see why people say I’m liberal or a moderate. I don’t feel that way at all. People assume that President Bush speaks for all conservatives. That’s absurd.

Q: Who would you like to see be nominated to fill the Supreme Court vacancy?

A: (Antonin) Scalia, by far, is my favorite justice — so someone like Scalia. The president said that the nominee’s opinion on Roe v. Wade will have no bearing or won’t be the deciding factor. I don’t know why not. It’s wrong. It’s outdated. It’s undemocratic to have the Supreme Court decide for every state what their abortion policies ought to be. I’d like to see a genuine conservative get the job. The president is under all this pressure from the right to appoint someone other than (Attorney General) Al Gonzales and I’m glad.

Q: Tuesday night on your show you sided with Moammar Gadhafi on Africa’s permanent poverty problem.

A: Yeah. I did side with Gadhafi on Africa. Africa has been hurt rather than helped by handouts from the West. You lose your dignity when you live on charity. Objectively, Africa is, by almost every measure, worse off now than it was in 1960.

So how has independence helped ordinary Africans? It hasn’t. I think it’s basically a welfare continent with some exceptions — Nigeria, South Africa, maybe Botswana. Most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are very poor and heavily dependent on Western aid, and that’s bad.

One of Gadhafi’s points was “Stop begging handouts from the West,” and I think he’s absolutely right. And his other point — that aid is bad because it comes coupled with requirements that you liberalize your government — I disagree with. The problem with Africa is bad leadership, obviously. It’s not the West. It’s not white people. It’s African leaders — and they’re terrible.

Q: Now, the Valerie Plame CIA case. Judith Miller of The New York Times went to jail to protect her source. But Matt Cooper of Time is going to testify before the grand jury, and Time turned over his notes in the first place. Is this a dangerous capitulation by journalism?

A: I think it’s scary. Apparently, Matt Cooper was released by his source to name him to the grand jury. That’s fair. But I think the whole thing is insane. This is an example of why an independent counsel is a scary thing. … I think the whole thing is scary and overblown. If I were Judith Miller, I would have split for Paraguay. I wouldn’t hang around and go to jail. I don’t think you have a reason to abide by unjust laws.

Q: How did the liberals at PBS treat you during the year you had the “Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered” show?

A: They were really nice to me. They were always really nice to me. Nobody ever told me what to say or what to think. They were appalled by my opinions sometimes, but they didn’t say much.

Q: How do you gauge the conservative-liberal balance or imbalance at PBS?

A: Well, it’s overwhelmingly liberal, obviously. The measure that matters to me is, “Do they let me say what I want to say?” And they did.

Q: What’s it going to take, ratings-wise, for MSNBC to keep you around?

A: I have no idea. I haven’t felt any ratings pressure at all. I think they understand the show has rolled out at the beginning of the summer. They’ve had all sorts of different kinds of programming in that 9 o’clock spot for a long time. They understand that it’s going to take time for people to find the show, and they seem patient enough to wait for that. And I’m grateful.

2008

Democrats have no excuses

September 13, 2008

Tucker Carlson hasn’t been as easy to find on cable TV since MSNBC axed his show “Tucker” in March.

But the former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” and trouble-causing conservative political commentator still works as a senior campaign correspondent for NBC’s liberal-tilted cable channel.

Carlson, an excellent writer and reporter whose stories have appeared in Esquire, The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, has during his career managed to tick off everyone from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to the Republican Party.

Known for his non-partisanship, he told the Trib in 2005 that his politics “were probably closer to Pat Buchanan than anyone else.” Though he has strong libertarian leanings and became a strong opponent of the war in Iraq, he calls himself a “traditional conservative.” To find out what he’s been doing and get his take on the McCain-Obama race, I telephoned Carlson Thursday at his office in Washington:

Q: We’ve heard that you’ve professed your love for Sarah Palin but has she saved the Republicans from certain defeat in November?

A: No. But she appears at this point to have made possible a victory. Put it this way: It would be shocking if any Republican won this year but she clearly has helped.

Q: Do you know anything about her or her politics that everyone else in North America hasn’t heard already at least 10 times?

A: One of the reasons I love her is I know so little about her.

Q: Do you plan on going to Alaska to check out her background or go through her garbage or whatever?

A: I’m trying to figure out how to bring my fly rod and get up there, yeah. It’s salmon season. You know what I’d like to do? I’d love to do a piece where I follow her footsteps in fishing — where I fish in every spot she’s fished in.

Q: Last December you wrote a nice on-the-road piece on Ron Paul for The New Republic. Do you think you’ll have a chance to do anything like that on Sarah Palin?

A: I probably couldn’t get within three counties of Sarah Palin now. It’s funny. Two weeks ago you could have gone out to dinner at Sarah Palin’s house. But now I think I’d probably be tasered if I got within 100 yards of her.

Q: Palin seems to have really — what’s the cliche? — “resonated” with Western Pennsylvanians, who are socially conservative Reagan Democrats who are mainly white. People are really connecting with her and vice versa. She’s like someone from around here in some ways.

A: In a lot of ways. She’s pro-life, pro-gun, pro-union. It’s an unusual combination, and I can see why she fits in perfectly there.

Q: You’re not a partisan Republican?

A: No.

Q: If you were, what would you be most worried about Palin. Obviously questions about her experience are out there.

A: If the press is really going after you. If you’ve got 3,000 people, each hoping to make a career based on tripping you up, you’re going to be tripped. If you’re talking in public a lot, and people are gunning for you, it’s inevitable that you’ll make some grave error.

Q: Do you have any sense that the Obama juggernaut, if in fact there was one, is starting to lose its wheels?

A: Definitely, they were caught off guard (by the Palin choice). They’re still running against Hillary Clinton. I’m not attacking them. I understand why. But they were taken completely off guard by this. They don’t know how to respond. This was news to the press because obviously most reporters in Washington are for Barack Obama, I would say. There are probably only three who aren’t.

But it turns out not everybody in the country is an Obama fanatic, and yet a lot of Republicans didn’t like McCain. Palin made it possible for Republicans to like McCain again. So all of a sudden you see this surge in support for the McCain ticket because of Palin and the Obama people just didn’t know how to respond to it.

Q: You were an emcee at the Ron Paul rally in Minneapolis. Does this mean your libertarian streak is getting deeper or wider?

A: No. It’s remained constant lo these many years. Organized groups of libertarians — it’s such a big tent that it tends to allow some unfortunate fringe elements in.

Q: The 9/11 truth squads?

A: The “truthers,” yeah. I was repelled by them so I left midway through. I think Ron Paul is a completely sincere, interesting, thoughtful, decent guy. And I like him. I don’t agree with everything, but I agree with a lot of it and I think he’s a genuine guy.

But Jesse Ventura got up and started ranting about the United States government and how it’s likely responsible for 9/11 and it was an inside job, and I thought, “That’s disgusting.” I don’t want to be around that, so I left.

Q: Do you think Ron Paul’s campaign will have any effect at all on Republicans in the medium or long run in terms of economic policy or limited-government kind of thinking?

A: You’d hope so. You’d hope that someone would call Republicans back to their roots and remind them that it was once a party based on individual liberty and small government.

Q: Do you dare to predict how this Obama-McCain race will end?

A: Well, I’ll say this: If Democrats lose, they just need to think of a more profitable profession to get into. There’s no excuse for Democrats losing this election. None.

Q: Yet they seem to be doing their best.

A: They’re trying hard. If he had picked Hillary Clinton, this would not be a race.

And years later, after I drove 11,276 miles around the USA in the fall of 2012 for my book Dogging Steinbeck, I reviewed Fallows’ book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America for Reason magazine. His account of flying around the USA was not a good book, travel or otherwise, and I wrote so.

In fact I called it a plane wreck.

Q&A with P.J. O’Rourke

Adam Smith for Dummies

Pittsburgh Trib, 2007

On the Wealth of Nations by P.J. O’Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Adam Smith’s seminal 1776 masterpiece explaining the magical workings of free markets is riddled with economic and social truths that still hold up today.

But trying to read “The Wealth of Nations’ “ 900 dense pages is an endurance test for even the most serious modern reader – or prison lifer, for that matter.

Atlantic Monthly Press has solved that problem by hiring satirist P.J. O’Rourke to dig into Smith’s opus and tell the rest of us what it’s about.

O’Rourke’s wit, journalism skills and economics acumen make him a good choice for Atlantic’s new series of “Books That Changed the World,” which kicks off Jan. 10 with the publication of his lively exegesis “On The Wealth of Nations.”

I recently talked to O’Rourke by phone from Washington, D.C.

Q: What’s the sound-bite synopsis of Adam Smith’s epic?

A: Well, that it’s really about freedom and morality and not actually about economics is really the one sentence summary. So when one is sent to read it as an economics thing, it’s like, “Dude, this is like 200-and-some years old. What did he know? He didn’t have an iPod….” But his book is really about why we put up with a free market.

Q: You actually read “The Wealth of Nations” and its predecessor, “A Theory of Moral Sentiments.” But let’s stick to “Wealth of Nations.” Does it hold up?

A: No let’s go back one book, because “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” being somewhat more abstract, holds up brilliantly. I mean, there’s not a word wrong with that thing today.

You can read that today with the same number of “ah-ha” moments, because it’s about the fundamentals of human nature. It’s a brilliant work of ethics and psychology and philosophy, but not the kind of philosophy you have to use numbers to understand.

It’s a damn good book. It’s a sort of self-help book, too. Clean up the language – you could hit the best-seller list with this one. I probably wrote about the wrong book.

The “Wealth of Nations,” of course, is fighting some battles like the intellectual battle about whether gold and silver have intrinsic value, as opposed to notional value, that are long-gone stuff. So there are sections of “Wealth of Nations” that are moot – though it’s not that they don’t hold up.

Q: Is there any single most enduring truth from “The Wealth of Nations”?

A: Oh, totally. When Smith starts out right at the beginning about how you have to allow for the human desire for self-betterment or self-interest. And how you have to have freedom of exchange between people.

That is so fundamental, not only to making an economy work right, but just to any decent democracy or society. Yeah, it blows you away how clearly he puts this.

Q: I’ve tried to read “The Wealth of Nations.”

A: It’s a slog, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t really recommend it.

Q: But you can find chunks of it and quotes from it referred to by other famous people. It’s like, “Who needs Hayek? Adam Smith said everything back in 1776, just in different words.” It seems like everyone has stolen from Smith – who apparently stole from others before him too, right?

A: Oh, definitely. He owes a huge debt and he makes no claim for tremendous originality. Friedrich Hayek would be the first to tell you that. If Hayek were around, and you said that to Hayek, he would agree completely. As would Milton Friedman.

Not about certain academic work that Friedman did -- and ditto for Hayek. These guys did all sorts of stuff we don’t understand – about price curves, Phillips Curves, Phillips screw drivers and heavens knows what.

But as far their stuff that any of us understand – “The Road to Serfdom” or “The Free to Be You and Me” or whatever, they would be the first to say, “Yes, we see so far. But we’re not even midgets standing on somebody’s shoulders. We’re head lice looking out from Adam Smith’s wig.”

Q: Who should be forced to read the original today – which politicians or East Coast editorial boards?

A: All of them. All of them. Right, left and middle of the road. It’d be easy for me to pick on the leftists, particularly about protectionism. But any understanding of the fundamental philosophical and moral and ethical groundwork beneath free markets seems to be just absent.

The world these days has a Clintonian view. It’s not that they disagree with market freedoms, but they regard it as teleological – as a means to an end. “Why do we want free markets? Because they make ordinary people more prosperous.” That isn’t the point. The point is, either we are free and equal or we are not.

Q: Is there anything Smith wrote that you think he would be ashamed of today?

A: Well, not ashamed of, but there is stuff he is wrong about. Especially when he gets into specific policy recommendations. Essentially the whole last book of “The Wealth of Nations” is nuts-and-bolts policy recommendations. He is self-contradictory in there. He is often wrong.

It shows the problem that no matter how good your ethical and moral foundations may be, when it comes to making those recommendations on the sewer board about whether or not to build a new aeration plant, they are viciously tricky.

No amount of brilliance as an economist, a philosopher, a moralist, an ethicist or prose stylist necessarily grants you the right view. At the moment that he wrote this book, you could have taken him to task for some of his stuff and he probably would have agreed.

Q: Is there anything Smith wrote about that you completely disagree with?

A: Well, as I say, there are specific policy recommendations about taxation and education. He’s very confusing about state support in terms of religion. But it would be tactical disagreements rather than strategic – it’d be detail stuff. But no, there is no whole side of his thinking that gives one pause.

It’s not like Hume. Hume is this incredibly admirable and sensible man, but he insists that he is an atheist. Smith doubted him a bit on this – they were great friends. But Hume maintained that he was an atheist and so you go, “No. I just can’t agree with that.” But there’s nothing like that in Smith, who is, incidentally, very coy about his religious ideas.

Q: Is there anything funny in “The Wealth of Nations”?

A: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Smith has a kind of dry, slightly academic sense of humor. But there is this wonderful passage about refuting the idea that we should always try to get more gold and silver and always try to export consumable properties so as to increase our hoard of gold and silver, which is our real measure of wealth.

He said, you know, you could say the same thing about pots and pans. They are real durable too. So why don’t we manufacture and keep more pots and pans? Yeah, he can be quite funny and quite cutting.

A pull quote from O’Rourke’s book:

O’ROURKE ON SMITH

“Unfortunately, Adam Smith didn’t have graphs. Hundreds of pages of The Wealth of Nations that readers skim might have been condensed into several pages that readers skip entirely. Another thing Smith didn’t have, besides graphs, was jargon. Economics was too new to have developed its thieves’ cant. When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible he didn’t have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence. He had to go on talking through his hat until the subject was (and the reader would be) exhausted.”

The synopsis of ‘On the Wealth of Nations’ at Amazon was no doubt written by O’Rourke:

In ‘On the Wealth of Nations,’ America’s most provocative satirist, P. J. O’Rourke, reads Adam Smith’s revolutionary ‘The Wealth of Nations’ so you don’t have to.

Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, ‘The Wealth of Nations’ was also recognized as really long: the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes—including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page “digression concerning the variations in the value of silver during the course of the last four centuries,” which, “to those uninterested in the historiography of currency supply, is like reading Modern Maturity in Urdu.”

Although daunting, Smith’s tome is still essential to understanding such current hot-topics as outsourcing, trade imbalances, and Angelina Jolie. In this hilarious, approachable, and insightful examination of Smith and his groundbreaking work, P. J. puts his trademark wit to good use, and shows us why Smith is still relevant, why what seems obvious now was once revolutionary, and why the pursuit of self-interest is so important.

April 7, 1997

In June 1998, U.S. News’ owners sacked Fallows — who wrote a 19-page letter to his staff….

April 28, 2007

Bob Chitester, the public TV producer famous for bringing his friend Milton Friedman’s pro-capitalist series “Free to Choose” to PBS in 1980, is living proof that you don’t have to be liberal or based on a seacoast to produce quality programs for PBS.

Here’s the Q&A I did with Milton Friedman. Plus a clip from Uncle Miltie.

As president and founder of Free to Choose Media (www.freetochoosemedia.org), a nonprofit foundation in Erie, Pa., Chitester runs a multimedia production house that creates documentaries, classroom material featuring ABC’s John Stossel and, lately, Internet content that all carry an openly pro-market, libertarian bent.

“The Ultimate Resource,” currently running intermittently on the high-definition channel HDNet, is a one-hour documentary that lives up to the foundation’s mission statement to explore “the concepts of freedom and wealth creation through expert storytelling and high-quality presentation.”

Filmed in such exotic locales as Ghana, Peru and Estonia, it shows how the world’s 4 billion poor can lift themselves out of poverty if they are given access to free markets, strong property rights protections and the rule of law.

Soon to appear on PBS stations, “The Ultimate Resource” features such inventive thinkers as micro-financier Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. I talked to Chitester by telephone on Wednesday:

Q: “The Ultimate Resource” has a pretty obvious theme or message. What is it and who was it aimed at?

A: Obviously, the target for the program is the world. We began the project with the stated objective that we want to create a program that would speak to every human being on the face of the Earth.

Our goal was to reinforce what most individuals believe and feel, which is that they have the capability to achieve some great things -- to achieve a life that is positive and good for them. I think most people in the world feel they can make tomorrow better than today for themselves.

What we were trying to do was emphasize and focus on that, and to also point out some of the things that would stand in the way of an individual achieving that outcome.

Q: And what stands in the way?

A: Well, barriers to trade. If there are barriers to trade, people can’t maximize their output. If people have a skill, a skill that is only useful to or of interest to a limited percentage of people in any specific population, then clearly the larger population they can reach, the more likely they are to get the maximum return from their skill. You can only do that, therefore, through free trade.

Obviously, globalization is a very positive thing because it expands markets for human endeavors that appeal to only small numbers of people. It is really minorities -- in terms of their skill sets and what they are interested in doing -- who are the greatest beneficiary of globalization in terms of giving them more opportunity.

Q: What makes Free to Choose Media a unique production company?

A: We are unique in that our mission is to advance the ideas of a classical liberal society -- a society based on private property, voluntary association and free markets.

We believe that the evidence of the past century or two clearly indicates that those societies that are built on those principles end up being the societies in which the average citizen has a better quality of life, a more fulfilling life, than any other society we’ve yet been able to figure out.

Q: Are you trying to teach, persuade, proselytize?

A: We are trying to open people’s eyes to ideas that they’ve not been exposed to and to do so in a way that is consistent with their own commonsense assessment of how the world works and their personal experiences, so that they are exposed to these ideas and they then say, “You know, I hadn’t thought about that before. That seems to make a lot of sense.”

And they then are open to continue to investigate these ideas as they go forward and hopefully, in doing so, the ideas will begin to have an influence on how they behave as members of the political constituency of whatever nation they are in.

Q: Why did you start Free to Choose Media?

A: It isn’t so much that I started a production house as that I had the good fortune of meeting Milton Friedman and persuading him to undertake, with me, the creation of what became “Free to Choose,” the PBS series that went on the air in 1980.

Many people think that the TV series was based on the book; that was not the case. The book would not have existed had we not created the television series.

Literally from that point on I have been engaged in any and every activity that I was capable of conceiving of and finding the resources for to advance the ideas that Milton presented in that TV series and book.

Q: In a nutshell, what are your personal politics?

A: In a nutshell, they are very similar to Milton Friedman’s. In an answer to that question he said, “Well, I’m a Republican capital “R” but a libertarian small “l.” I don’t absolutely consistently vote Republican but I would tend to do that. I am fundamentally, though, a libertarian.

Q: Back in 1980 did it take a miracle for a guy from Erie, Pa., to get an openly pro-capitalist series like “Free to Choose” on PBS?

A: No, it didn’t take a miracle. What it took was John Kenneth Galbraith having done a series called “Age of Uncertainty.” In doing that series, he thereby created an environment in which it was just politically not possible for PBS to turn down a series on the other side. There was so much made of the Galbraith series.

It did not hurt our situation that the gentleman who introduced me to Milton Friedman, Allen Wallis, chancellor of the University of Rochester, was at the very same time chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He shared my view that the Galbraith series demanded a response. As it turned out, there was enough clamor in the nation that PBS do something that they went along.

Now they did not give it as favorable a placement as they did Galbraith. Galbraith went into what they then were calling their core schedule, whereas Friedman was put on the air Friday evenings following the “Rukeyser Report” because in PBS’ eyes “Free to Choose” was finance or something like that.

Q: Is PBS more or less hospitable to your politically incorrect ideas about capitalism today than it was in 1980?

A: I would say there is no change. The culture at PBS is still decidedly not interested in the ideas we are trying to put forward. But you have to be a very astute and careful listener or viewer to understand what I mean by that.

Bill Moyers may be the exception because to a certain degree he has been certainly fairly direct about his own views. But most of the programming on PBS, like “Frontline,” like “Nova,” etc., will tell you they are neutral and that they are offering all sides.

The bottom line is you have to do a really careful analysis to see how in word choice, how in the characterization of stories, etc., that there is a left-of-center orientation. It’s not blatant.

I think that is one of the mistakes, by the way, of those who share my view that federal funding of PBS ought to come to a screeching halt. They try to make the case that there is this outrageous, blatant liberal advocacy on PBS.

There is none of that. It is much more subtle. I have a real concern over what they do but it is not the same kind of blatant advocacy that some people claim.

Q: You have a two-hour project in the works on Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto. What’s so great about him?

A: Well, Hernando De Soto has spent the last probably 20 years running around the world saying that one of the key factors standing in the way of people advancing themselves is the lack of officially recognized property rights.

As he said in his first book, “The Other Path,” which was written as a counter to Peru’s Shining Path (communist guerrilla movement), in Peru you have in effect crony capitalism, mercantilism, where most of the people of Peru are just pushed away. They are kept out of the economy.

The way they are kept out is that they have no official standing in the society; they have no property rights acknowledged by the government. But he said if you were to go in the barrios or out in the countryside, the dogs knew where the boundaries were.

When you walked from one person’s plot to the another, a different dog would come up to you. But if that individual tried to sell that property, he couldn’t because he had no title to it.

All their neighbors knew it was their property. All their neighbors knew that for three generations that family had had it. But they had no official credentials that would allow them to in any way benefit from it.

That’s basically what DeSoto’s work has been. He’s been expanding on it and refining it -- and we’re going to document it and share it with the world.

Here’s the interview I did with DeSoto.

Saturday, Nov. 8, 2003

Does the USA Patriot Act -- which gives government law enforcement and intelligence agencies sweeping new powers to defend America from foreign and domestic terrorists -- trade away civil liberties for more security? Or is it just what we needed to prevent the next Sept. 11?

Paul Rosenzweig, a Heritage Foundation legal fellow, and Vic Walczak, chief legal counsel for the Pittsburgh chapter of the ACLU, will debate the pros and cons of the Patriot Act at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Room 204 of Duquesne University’s School of Law.

This week I asked each of them the exact same questions:

Q: Let’s say I met you at an airport bar and asked you whether I should be thankful or frightened about this thing called the Patriot Act? What do you say?

Vic Walczak: It’s a mixed bag. There are some good and necessary changes in the law. But on balance, the threats to freedom and civil liberties outweigh the benefits.

Paul Rosenzweig: By and large you should be thankful. Let’s remember that the greatest single victory so far has been that there hasn’t been another attack. It can’t all be laid at the doorstep of the Patriot Act, of course. The efforts to disrupt terrorism overseas have been substantial, and they have probably a far more significant effect.

But the one thing everyone should realize is that the one thing that every review of pre-Sept. 11 that we’ve done said is that we have had insufficient coordination between our intelligence branches and our law enforcement branches. The one great success of the Patriot Act is that it increased that coordination.

Q: What is the worst thing you can say about the Act?

Walczak: There are two major dangers posed by the Patriot Act. The first is that it reduces meaningful court oversight for law enforcement agents’ invasion of people’s privacy rights, such as telephone and computer communications, health and medical records, student records, business and financial transactions, etc.

Second, it shrouds much of the government’s law enforcement activities in secrecy. So that if and when abuses occur, they are difficult or impossible to detect.

Rosenzweig: The worst thing I can say about the act is, to a large degree, it is wildly misunderstood. It has become a symbol for a lot of other things that people are concerned about. They’re concerned about enemy combatants, concerned about immigration, concerned about the terrorism information awareness system — none of those things are in the Patriot Act itself.

The worst thing about the Patriot Act is that the administration has let it become a caricature for everybody’s fears.

Q: Is there any example of something the act does that either steps on or threatens to step on our civil liberties?

Walczak : Lots. I’m trying to pick one.... Normally, before government agents can invade people’s privacy in their homes, in their communications, in their various records, they need to demonstrate to a judge that there is probable cause that the targeted person is involved in some sort of criminal wrongdoing or has evidence of a crime.

The Patriot Act wipes out, for a whole category of investigations, the probable cause requirement and the meaningful judicial oversight.

For instance, the government could come in and search your home and download your computer information and get information from the library about what you’ve been reading and get your medical records - even if they cannot show that you are a criminal suspect - and they wouldn’t have to tell you they had done all of that.

Rosenzweig: Actually in the Patriot Act itself? The one I would pick is the potential misuse in its definition of what constitutes a domestic terrorist threat. It defines domestic terrorism, and it defines it in a way that is intended to capture Timothy McVeigh -- using violence to terrorize people. But it defines it in a way that if misused, is potentially applicable to Operation Rescue or Greenpeace, who sometimes do much-less violence but things that are violent - blocking abortion clinics or boarding ships.

Q: What is most absurd attack on the act that you’ve heard?

Walczak : Absurd defense? (Laughs.) That “It promotes civil liberties.” Isn’t that what the Heritage Foundation is saying? That’s absurd. It may promote security, but it doesn’t promote civil liberties. Another is, “Even though we are getting lots of power, just trust us not to abuse it.”

Rosenzweig: It’s a toss-up between the angry librarians and the so-called sneak-and-peek, so I’ll take sneak-and-peek, just for fun. Sneak-and-peek is really known as “delayed notification.” It allows the government to enter your house, but not tell you that they’ve been there immediately -- of course, only with the permission of a judge.

It has a lot of good uses. That’s how we put a bug in John Gotti’s eating club in Brooklyn.... We’ve been using this for over 30 years to fight Mafia dons and drug lords and things like that. It’s absurd to say that we shouldn’t use it to fight terrorists.

Q: Are the opponents of the act, and the backers of the act, both overstating their cases -- in other words, there’s a lot stuff that will happen in theory, but has anything actually really happened in the real world?

Walczak : It’s difficult to know what the government is doing under the act, because there is so much secrecy built in to prevent people from finding out when and how they are using these provisions.

Rosenzweig: That is a good question. I think to a larger degree, there is a lot more heat than light here. There have been two or three reported instances in which the Patriot Act has expressly been invoked for capturing terrorists we might not have captured before, but not many more than that.

Q: Why should people who believe in limited government, and fear the power of government, trust that this massive, sweeping set of laws will not diminish our freedoms in the long run?

Walczak: They should not. ... The primary danger from the Patriot Act is that it weakens the ability of the courts to monitor what the executive branch is doing - the executive branch is law enforcement. With that reduced oversight, you dramatically expand the chances for abusive and unconstitutional behavior by government officials.

Rosenzweig : They shouldn’t trust. They should do what President Reagan said: “Trust but verify.” The absolute bedrock for any enhanced power is oversight. But we also should recognize that this situation is different. That where we would be careful about giving government powers to fight common law crimes — drugs, murders, rapes, robberies, whatever -- here the consequences of failure are potentially much more catastrophic. So we need to grant the powers because we need to avoid the next horrific attack. But trust only with verification.

For more than 50 years, Alexander Haig -- first as a military leader and then as friend and/or close adviser to seven U.S. presidents -- has been one of the country’s most important and powerful figures.

Haig served on Gen. MacArthur’s staff in Korea and was a brigade and battalion commander in Vietnam, where he received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism.

He was military adviser to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Then, in 1972 as a full general, Haig helped Nixon negotiate the Vietnam cease-fire and arrange the president’s historic trip to Communist China.

In 1974, President Ford named him supreme allied commander in Europe and in 1981 he was sworn in as President Reagan’s secretary of state.

Today the 1947 West Point grad owns his own advisory firm, Worldwide Associates Inc., which gives strategic advice to corporations on global, political, economic, commercial and security matters, and is host of the weekly television program, “World Business Review.”

I talked to Haig on Thursday by phone from his office in Washington.

Q: Was the war in Iraq prosecuted to your total satisfaction?

A: Well, of course it’s not over yet. The fighting phase is over, largely. There will be a terrorist phase, but the most important phase will be the rebuilding of Iraq. Until that is done in a satisfactory way, we can’t conclude the case by a long shot.

Q: Are you optimistic about the ability to transplant democracy to Iraq?

A: Now that’s not a process that happens overnight. And when we Americans are foolish enough to believe we can do that, more often than not we are disappointed. We saw that in Haiti and in a number of places.

You know, the best way to spread democracy is by example -- not by bayonets or pressures or blackmail or economic embargoes, but by example. And that’s how we Americans are going to be successful.

Now in the case of Iraq, they have a history which is acquainted with democratic procedures and representative-type government, although it was a monarchy before it was a so-called republic.

Q: So we’re not trying to build it from scratch.

A: No. They have had a very highly educated population that’s been the cultural center of the Middle East and the historic center of the world. Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. This is a country where I think there would be considerable hope for representative government and due process, and that means respect for the rule of law.

So I think we have reason to be optimistic if we can get a balance between the various ethnic and religious sectors, such as the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Kurds, the other religious minorities and other nationalistic interests.

Q: Are you comfortable with the Bush administration’s “active” — I put quotes around “active” because I think it’s almost a euphemism -- foreign policy in the Middle East?

A: I’m not only comfortable with it, I would suggest that it’s 30 years overdue. Both parties, Republican and Democrat, have mishandled Middle East polices for at least 30 years and I’ve been involved with the area in most of those 30 years:

Starting out with our willingness to let the British withdraw from the region in the early ‘70s, for the want of a little money. Then the overthrow of the shah of Iran. Followed by the hostage crisis of 18 months’ duration, in which we did nothing but bluster and fume, and in the process continued to lose credibility.

In the Reagan years, the Lebanon blow-up was very badly handled in my view, and it resulted in the murder of 260-some Marines. And then the demolition of our embassy annex with the loss of another 60 State Department personnel. And we did nothing but put our tails between our legs and run home.

Q: So we should have been more -- I’ll use the word “aggressive” -- but more ...

A: Principled about preserving our interests. I don’t have to tell you what happened in the (first) Gulf War. We had the conflict won. We were the ones who wrote the resolution, so the claim that we were confined by it is sort of foolish.

Q: The resolution what -- not to finish the job on Saddam?

A: To just free Kuwait. Of course, the facts of the matter were that that was a major strategic error and it lost us credibility throughout the region and made Saddam Hussein the hero in the Middle East.

That was followed, I don’t have to tell you, by one terrorist act after another, each one becoming more and more violent. It was true especially during the Clinton years, when we had eight years of bluster and fume, and demolition of our embassies in Africa and the attempted murder of former President Bush in Kuwait City.

So all of these things left a residue of zero American credibility and, in fact, contempt for America. That led to the kind of violence -- the suicide bombings that we see not only in Israel — and finally 9/11.

We, of course, had a similar terrorist effort against the World Trade Center made early in the Clinton administration and had that bomb been put in a better position in the trade center, we would have lost tens of thousands of people, because there would have been no warning.

We knew who did it. The evidence was pretty clear. Now, all these terrorist groups are linked. We uncovered the big training camp in northern Iraq where al-Qaida and these terrorists from different groups come in and train, get equipped and go back to do their mischief. So what we’ve got is one of the key players in global terrorism -- Saddam Hussein.

Q: So you have any unsolicited advice for President Bush about what to do or not to do next?

A: That depends on the situation. We are at war. The United States is not now out of war. We are still at a state of war with global terrorism that was declared as a result of 9/11.

I think the president did the right thing by declaring war. This is the first and very important step in the battle against global terrorism, because the outcome of what’s happened in Iraq is going to cast a shadow over every one of these terrorist movements.

In that area -- and people overlook it -- the president has done extremely well. We have been wrapping up al-Qaida cells and related terrorist activity at an unprecedented rate abroad and at home.

Q: Of all of your many important jobs, which was the most rewarding, most satisfying, the most fun — however you would want to characterize it?

A: The most satisfying, and also the most traumatic, is commanding young men in battle, where you have a very important responsibility for their life and their welfare. There’s nothing that compares with it, from Watergate to Timbuktu.

That is the most moving experience a human can have, to see the bravery and courage of our young people. And they deserve the absolute best in political leadership, and they haven’t got it in recent years in America.

We now have a young president who has thus far shown he has what has been lacking in most of them -- and that’s an unusual degree of character. You can buy brains, you can buy good looks, you can buy television personality. But character is what makes the difference between a good president and a so-so president -- or worse.

Q: If I said to you, “General MacArthur,” what would be your one-sentence response about him?

A: Superb. I knew him personally. I worked right in his office at the outbreak of the Korean War. I landed at Inchon, which was his conception, and was carried out despite the vehement opposition of President Truman and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the exception of the Navy.

Q: How about Henry Kissinger?

A: Kissinger’s a brilliant scholar with great historic depth, and without historic knowledge I would say most people don’t even know how to even start with foreign policy. That’s the first premise of foreign policy -- knowing history.

Q: Mr. Nixon.

A: Mr. Nixon was a badly maligned victim of Vietnam and his own lifetime effort of anti-communism. He was among the best presidents I’ve served in foreign policy.

Q: Ronald Reagan.

A: I obviously have great affection for Ronald Reagan. I think he accomplished a great deal through what I referred to earlier -- a high level of character. A visceral intuition.

Q: I know you’ve been asked this a thousand times, but if you aren’t “Deep Throat,” who do you think is?

A: (Laughs) You know I’m not “Deep Throat” because Woodward and Bernstein have both denied it vigorously. Finally. It took them 20 years or more to do it, but they did it. (laughs). And anybody who had known history knew I wasn’t even in the White House when “Deep Throat” was at work. (laughs). I was a vice chief of the Army.

— Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Oct. 6, 2007

Troubles in the Americas

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes and edits The Wall Street Journal’s “Americas” column each Monday, which means she has to keep a sharp eye on the politics, economics and business of Latin America and Canada.

At the invitation of St. Vincent College’s Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government, she’ll visit Pittsburgh Friday, Oct. 12, to deliver a luncheon lecture at the Duquesne Club.

O’Grady, who’s also a member of The Journal’s editorial board, will talk about “Threats to Liberty in the Western Hemisphere and How to Confront Them” (Call 724-537-4597 for tickets). I talked to her Wednesday by telephone from her office in New York City:

Q: First off, tell us some good news about the Americas.

A: Well, the region is really bifurcating and some countries are going hard to the left and other countries are really struggling hard to reform.

In fact, the 2008 Doing Business Report from the World Bank shows Colombia as one of the top 10 reforming countries in regulation in the world this year. It’s done many, many regulatory reforms to try to ease the burden of government on entrepreneurs.

Colombia is one example -- with a very brave president and ally of the United States -- that is really trying to restructure the economy and make the country modern and integrated into the modern global economy.

It’s really hard. These are all democracies, and so they have the same public choice problems that we have in this country -- the most powerful interests are the ones who don’t want anything to change. So it takes a really strong leader.

Mexico also did a lot of reforming. It still has monopoly problems and a lack of competition but it has reformed a lot in terms of regulation and trade openness, which are really important to innovation and growth.

Chile was a great reformer in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It really hasn’t done much reforming in at least 20 years, but at least it hasn’t lost too much ground. It has been able to defend the free-market reforms that were done during the dictatorship.

El Salvador has been a good reformer. It has a big crime problem. The judiciary and law enforcement have been starved by a lot of spending in social programs. But in terms of its friendliness to investment, openness to the world and its effort to deregulate and become competitive, they’ve done a very, very good job.

So there are good stories, but they are fighting a very strong status quo and that’s what makes reforming so hard.

Q: Is it the same old status quo -- a combination of the Catholic Church, the ruling class, too much socialism?

A: I think the emphasis on the church is a little bit overdone at this point. It’s one of those things that people have been saying and it’s repeated a lot because nominally speaking most of the region is Catholic. I would say that the way the status quo manifests itself is where the economic centers of power are.

For example, in a country like Argentina, labor has a lot of privileges that they don’t want to give up. You think of the status quo and the oligarchs as super-rich people against sort of these feudal slaves.

But in the case of Argentina, which has a fairly strong middle class, the labor laws are so rigid and make it so hard for businesses to hire and fire people and basically take away any flexibility that the economy might have. That’s harmed the country a lot but they haven’t been able to reform because the labor movement is so powerful.

That’s also true in Costa Rica. It’s true to a large extent in Mexico. Of course, on top of that you also have domestic producers who benefit when an economy is closed and there are very high import tariffs and those sorts of things.

Those elements have started to give in. Latin American economies are far less protectionist than they were 20 years ago. But they are still too closed. The reason they are closed is the same reason in this country we can’t open the sugar market.

It’s the same problem, basically; it’s a problem of human nature. I don’t think it is anything special about the Latin mentality. It’s just much more difficult to solve the problem when you have large gaps between the haves and the have-nots, because economic power is really political power.

Q: Is the pendulum in Latin and South American swinging back to the anti-American side of things?

A: Again, I would say that the region is really bifurcating. I think some of the most anti-American people are journalists -- maybe in this country --- so I think the anti-American activism might perhaps get overstated.

You always hear that Mexico has this sort of anti-Americanism and yet if you go to Mexico you really don’t feel it as an American. There are very activist groups that are very vocal about that.

In Costa Rico right now we are seeing a lot of anti-Americanism against the Central American Free Trade Agreement. In Argentina, after the collapse of the currency in 2001-2002, you saw a lot of anti-Americanism.

But my sense is that even in countries where the pro-market, classical-liberal view is not prevailing right now, you still have about 40 percent of the population that would vote for a free-market candidate. They may elect a left-of-center president but I think we should be careful not to just assume that the whole country falls into that category.

I meet a lot of young people in Latin America who are very interested in engaging with the world --- not just America, but with Europe an Asia --- and they are frustrated with their governments that want to maintain this isolationism.

Q: Who should we be most concerned about in the Americas?

A: I’d say it’s certainly Venezuela.

It’s very hard to know how anti-American Venezuelans are at this point because the government -- as the monopoly producer of the economy, with oil being so important -- is basically tied to almost everyone’s job.

Either you work for the (state) oil company or you work for someone else that the oil company buys or sells to. So people can be intimidated in terms of their politics because of their work. They can be told that they are going to lose their jobs and, in fact, there is some evidence that the government has in fact done that.

It’s very hard to know exactly how people there feel because I don’t think that speaking publicly is considered a safe thing to do in Venezuela. But the government is definitely very anti-America, very pro-Iranian.

The Venezuelan government is mismanaging the economy -- there’s no question about that. But they have a lot of discretionary income with oil at $80 a barrel. They have the potential to cause a lot of problems. They’ve been going through a weapons buildup and meddling in the politics around the region trying to fund militant activists.

Q: Is Hugo Chavez more dangerous because of his ideology or his money?

A: Well, I think it’s that combination. There are lots of left-wing ideologues in Latin America but they don’t have that kind of oil money and that’s why he’s the most dangerous. The president of Ecuador is equally extreme but he doesn’t have nearly the assets that Venezuela has.

Q: Are there Latin American countries friendly to us who will help us counter the influence of Chavez?

A: The Salvadoran government has been an ally for us. The Colombian government has been an ally for us. But most leaders in these countries don’t want to be seen as too pro-American. It’s not because they are hedging their bets or anything else, but these countries want to feel like they are sovereign.

If they look too much like they are throwing their whole lot in with the U.S., it makes it difficult for the leader. The problem with a lot of these countries is that they are not strong enough to stand up to Chavez on their own.

If the U.S. wants, for example, Colombia to stand up to Venezuela but Colombia can’t rely on the U.S. to send in the Marines or anything like that, then Colombia has to think for itself about the best way to deal with Venezuela. It can’t go too far out on that limb, because it knows that in the end it’s going to have to deal with the problems.

I think a lot of countries -- and I’ve been told this privately -- are afraid of Hugo Chavez and that’s why you don’t necessarily see them extremely vocal against him. The most important thing in Latin America is for these countries to grow economically. That’s the biggest antidote to Hugo Chavez.

Q: What are your politics and how do they affect your coverage of the Americas?

A: I would say I am almost a libertarian --- not quite. Libertarianism means different things to different people. But Bob Bartley, who passed away a couple of years ago and was editor of The Wall Street Journal (and its editorial pages) for many years, used to say that “we believe in free markets and free people.”

That pretty captures my politics. I’m very pro-immigrant. I think the migrants are an asset to this country. I think we should figure out what’s wrong with our immigration system that we haven’t been able to respond to the demand for labor in this country in a way that would allow these people to come and work here legally.

I know that in New York City, the city would be dead without them. They’re fantastic. So that’s an example of my belief in free markets and free people.

Q: At home and abroad.

A: At home and abroad, yeah. I’m just looking at this regulation study from the World Bank and basically when you heap a lot of government regulations on an entrepreneur, that person is less free. I think we should work to be as free as possible and have a small government. Morally, that is a superior system because it allows people to decide their own destiny -- and that’s a basic human right.

Q: Can you give us a hint of what you’ll be talking about here Friday?

A: Basically, my main point would be that we -- people who believe in liberty and freedom and the rule of law -- often get upset when we see Hugo Chavez. But I think we need to think about what were the circumstances that made it so possible to walk into that situation and become president of that country.

There was a reason he was elected -- people were really thoroughly disgusted with the corruption and the abuse of power on the part of people who refer to themselves as small “d” democrats, who pretended to believe in the constitution and the rule of law and property rights but in fact did not.

They abused that power to their own benefit. That has happened over and over again in so-called democracies.

If we are going to combat the Hugo Chavezes, we have to think about what is the system that provides not equality of outcome but equality under the law for people. When we fail to deliver on that promise, we create the circumstances for people like Hugo Chavez.

The West Wing’s” presidential debate episode earlier this month must have thought the left side of Alan Alda’s brain had been taken over by Milton Friedman.

One minute Alda was advocating school choice and saying people of underdeveloped countries would benefit from being exploited by Nike factories.

The next he was mocking global warming hysterics and arguing in favor of drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

On live TV, in front of nearly 10 million Americans, Alan Alda — the card-carrying Hollywood liberal-humanist — was saying wildly un-Democrat stuff like “I believe in the free market” and “The government didn’t make the Prius the hottest car in Hollywood, the market did.”

It was not Alda’s inner conservative/libertarian finally breaking free. He was playing Sen. Arnold Vinick, the fictional Republican presidential candidate on “The West Wing,” the NBC White House poli-drama whose ratings and left-wing bias are no longer as solid as they used to be.

Alda had those good words for free enterprise put into his liberal mouth by Lawrence O’Donnell, “West Wing’s” executive producer and highly partisan MSNBC political analyst.

O’Donnell, who used to work for Sen. Patrick Moynihan and proudly calls himself a “practical European socialist,” wrote the script for the debate episode.

I recently (Nov. 8, 2005) talked to O’Donnell, who was working on “The West Wing” somewhere deep in Hollywood.

Q: How do you define Alan Alda’s character’s politics?

A: It’s very simple. He’s a ”California Republican.” He’s a statewide-elected senator in California. You cannot get elected statewide in California and be pro-life. That is not possible. So he is a moderate on abortion. He’s pro-choice but he’s against partial birth abortion. And that’s the only thing in his politics, as we’ve constructed it, that separates him from what is now considered the winning side of the Republican Party nationally.

Q: What about all that Milton Friedman free-market stuff?

A: The country doesn’t like it. The country basically likes the simplicity of “Those damn oil companies are charging too much for gasoline, let’s do something about that.” The country has not been educated that you create a bigger problem by trying to do something about high gas prices. So the country is very susceptible to rhetoric that it doesn’t even think of as liberal.

Q: It’s populist economics.

A: Right. They don’t think of it as liberal if you say “Those oil companies are charging way too much money and we should do something about it.” They think that makes sense.

So American liberal rhetoric, in general, has much more appeal than certainly the free market does. The free-market position actually doesn’t have a lot of rhetoric that goes along with it. It has a lot of logic and it has a lot of rational analysis that you need a fair amount of education to do. Unfortunately, I suspect it takes almost at least a college level of education in economics to fully embrace the market’s power or to fully go that way.

Q: So you weren’t faking it when you were writing that dialogue. You actually believe this stuff — or just understand it?

A: Yes. I believe (the late supply-side economist) Jude Winniski’s arguments about how high tax rates damage the economies of poor African countries. But what I would not want to suggest about it is, if we fixed the tax rates, everything is going to be OK.

The other huge problem that Africa has is American agriculture subsidies, which are a disastrous policy, I believe, on every level, in terms of what it does to poverty internationally, in terms of what it does to our misallocation of resources here. I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t majored in economics in college. I just wouldn’t.

I was in discussion with one of our cast members about the African tax rates, for example. In the Vinick speech where it said “the Nike plant” -- I specifically wrote “Nike.” The cast member said, “Are you saying that poor African countries would be better off if they had a Nike plant?” I said, “Let me be very clear what I am saying: What I’m saying is that those countries would be lucky if they could get some really exploitive sweatshops in there.”

Q: I think there’s a libertarian in you trying to get out.

A: No, no, no. I’m a European socialist, believe me - I’m far to the left. But I understand. I’m a kind of practical socialist. I know we failed. A lot of our ideas have failed, so I’m not with them anymore. I’m willing to take from a grab-bag of stuff that works.

I said, I very specifically said ‘Nike,’ because I want you to think about it as a sweatshop. I don’t happen to think it is, but I want you to think of it that way. I want you to think they’re an evil employer and that that country would be lucky to have an evil employer - that would be a huge step up for them.”

So she’s trying to process this. And I try to make it simple for her. I say, “Here’s my position: My position is slavery is better than death. Employment is better than slavery. That exploitative wages are better than nothing. And that a fair wage and justice is the ideal.”

She can’t accept any sentence that isn’t about the fair wage and the ideal. Literally and truly. She’s a very, very, smart woman. She couldn’t process what I was talking about. She couldn’t process that one penny is better than zero. There are children in the world who would be lucky - lucky - to be employed 12 hours a day in exploitive child labor situations where they are making 10 cents a day.

Unfortunately, I think respect for the market seems to be something that I have not seen anyone derive outside education. I haven’t seen people gravitate toward a natural respect for the market.

And it doesn’t have rhetoric to go with it. I think the rhetoric Vinick used about it was about the best I’ve heard - especially the Prius argument, by the way, which was designed specifically for Hollywood liberals, but no one told them to.

Where Vinick was talking about the market most clearly was in the energy discussion, when they talk about government support for alternative forms of energy. And Vinick starts with, “I don’t think politicians are going to be very good at picking energy sources. And then he says “The government didn’t shift us from using shale oil to using the oil discovered under the ground.”

That to me is the ultimate example in today’s discussion about where we are on energy. The market’s the only thing that’s ever going to take us from oil to something else.

Q: Will the Alda character do a better job of carrying through on his rhetoric and principles than Bush II has done?

A: Yes. I think Vinick would be a libertarian’s favorite president. Not that libertarians will ever come close to being satisfied with a president. (laughs) He’s not going to abolish Social Security, but I think he would be the most responsible deliverer of what Republicans say they are about.

Q: Many people watching are probably being introduced to these free-market arguments for the first time - they have never heard them stated so clearly and so well. Are you at all worried that you are subverting the Democratic Party in the real world?

A: No. I don’t think the Democratic Party needs to be an opponent of pharmaceutical companies. I mean, look, I worked on the Democratic side of the Senate. I believe everything in the debate that the Republican candidate said about the pharmaceutical companies.

I don’t think that is a necessary component of liberalism, attacking pharmaceutical companies. It seems to me one of the most juvenile components of it. We have a lot of great and responsible American corporations who are delivering great things to the world and American liberalism has to get in sync with that and not sound so anti-business.

Q: So you’re teaching Hollywood something?

A: Yeah. Listen, I’ll tell you this: Plenty of people working right here at “The West Wing” in the heart of Hollywood liberalism have changed their minds about drilling in ANWAR after hearing Sen. Arnold Vinick talk about it.

This Vinick character has changed a lot of the thinking of people around the show and is showing them ways about thinking about issues. And there is an increasing list of agreements that liberal friends of mine are having with Republican free-marketer Arnold Vinick, the fictional character.

I guess it is because he has found a way of saying these things that politicians have not found.

Nov. 15, 1995

My other Buckley material:

Fox News star and talk-show host Sean Hannity will make a live appearance before his faithful followers in Pittsburgh Feb. 25 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center -- without Alan Colmes.

Hannity is co-host of Fox's successful "Hannity and Colmes" and his 3-6 p.m. talk show is heard on 500 radio stations, including Pittsburgh's WPGB 104.7 FM. Fresh from his trip to San Francisco and the U.S.-Mexican border near San Diego, he called me Thursday night from New York City.

Q: Have we seen the end of the Dick Cheney shooting-spree story?

A: No. I don't think so, only because it's got to make it through the Sunday news cycle. I think after that it'll probably go away. From all that we've seen, it just seems like a terrible accident ... . I thought he came across as very sincere in Brit Hume's interview.

Q: What else do we need to know?

A: Yeah. This is now day five of the conspiracy. Now it's like, "Did he consume alcohol?" I think it's really representative of the divide that's really going on now in Washington. I think there is a lot of Bush-Cheney hatred out there. A lot of it is rooted in the disagreements over the war.

From my standpoint, I don't think there is any more important issue. We're in the middle of World War III. We have an enemy that wants to destroy New York, Pittsburgh, Philly, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas and everything in between.

And yet we have a country that's divided over the fundamental issue in fighting and winning that war. It's somewhat frightening at times for me.

Q: President Bush has a lot of criticism on immigration from the right side of the Republican Party -- he's too easy on immigrants, people don't like his amnesty plan ...

A: I don't like it. I've been very outspoken about it. Look, when it comes to the war on terror, this is the right president in the right place at the right time with a backbone of steel. And I say that all the time. That doesn't mean that we agree on everything.

I think we have expanded government too much, but my biggest criticism is on the issue of the border. The No. 1 area of vulnerability and susceptibility we have to terror, and terrorists getting into this country, is at our nation's own borders.

Q: What does it mean when you say you're coming to "Hannitize" Pittsburgh?

A: I'm coming to persuade those who perhaps are on the wrong side of the issues to come over to the right side. Honestly, it's just a show we've put together. We've done it in many, many cities around the country. It's a lot of fun.

People are going to laugh. We're going to make fun of our favorite liberals, from Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton to Al Gore. We'll talk about serous substantive issues and just have a good time.

Q: How do you define your politics?

A: I consider myself a Reagan conservative: Less government interference in our lives, lower taxes to stimulate economic growth and prosperity, a strong stand against evil in our time -- you know, "The Evil Empire," "Tear down this wall," Trust but verify" -- and building up the toughest military on the face of this earth.

Q: Talk radio has been a powerful weapon for conservatives and an important antidote to the liberal mainstream media for 20 years. Do you think it has peaked or become stale in any way?

A: I think it's only just begun. I think we're seeing it in cities like Pittsburgh. I think you're going to see more and more talk radio on the FM band -- personality-driven, issue-oriented radio for a baby boom generation that is coming of age and cares more about its world and politics.

I think 9/11 has reconfigured all political discussion in this country... . What you see is that more and more people have sought out alternative sources of information. I think that really defines why Fox is so successful and why talk radio is so successful.

Q: You've been accused of being too supportive and too uncritical of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. How do you defend yourself -- not necessarily from liberals but ...

A: Accused by who?

Q: Libertarians, hard-core conservatives ...

A: My libertarian friends? I've debated them at length too. You know what? I have more opposition on my program -- radio and TV -- than any other conservative I know.

Charlie Rangel is on on a regular basis, Paul Begala, Alan (Colmes), James Carville -- whatever liberal you want to name, they've probably been on my program. They have access to me regularly and we have more debate both on radio and TV than anybody else I know.

I proudly defend a president who took the toughest stand against evil in our time. On the issues that I disagree with him, I've been as outspoken as if Bill Clinton was president. It's funny. There are those who want to minimize the impact or the effectiveness of people who do support the president and more specifically the war. I'm proud of supporting him on the war ... .

Q: Ed Feulner, president of The Heritage Foundation, was in town this week and he's arguing that too many conservatives and Republicans have fallen in love with big government, big spending and government power.

A: It's funny. I just spoke before The Heritage Foundation maybe about two months ago, and I made that very point during that speech. I do have honest disagreements.

What I think our audience wants on Fox and on talk radio is honest analysis. They don't want a bunch of Kool-Aid drinkers regurgitating back whatever the party line is.

I give them that honesty every day... . Ed is right. The growth of government has gotten out of control. I blame the Congress more than I blame even the administration. In that case they've become too entrenched in their own power.

They've become Democratic light. I think they need to go back to the principles that got them into those positions of power in the first place.

Q: What's the main message that you'll be bringing to the Pittsburgh audience next Saturday?

A: Hope. Hope that Reagan conservatism is on the rise and that we're going to win the war on terror and that Hillary will never be elected president of this country.