Programs - The Institute of Politics at Harvard University

1987-1988
Institute of Politics
John F. Kennedy School
of Government
Harvard University
PROCEEDINGS
Institute of Politics
1987-88
John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Harvard University
FOREWORD
The year 1987-88 has seen the process of transition at the Institute continue as Director Dick Thornburgh and Deputy Director David Runkel steered existing programs
toward a greater emphasis on electoral politics and implemented new programs with
the same emphasis.
This tenth edition of Proceedings contains a selection of readings excerpted from
speeches, panel discussions, debates, books and articles and a complete roster of 1987-88
programs and participants. The selected readings provide a sense of the actors encountered and the issues discussed; the programs section identifies both the scope
and the personnel of the Institute's yearly undertakings.
Encouragement of the democratic process continues through the variety of educational programs the Institute sponsors—fellowships and study groups, conferences
and debates, internships and research projects—and by providing a setting for formal
and informal discourse. Students, politicians, teachers, activists, theorists and policy
makers come together to break bread, study and debate public policy issues at informal luncheons and suppers, faculty study groups, training programs and seminars
and in the public affairs forum.
Examination of the electoral process during this presidential campaign year is reflected
in the many "Campaign '88" activities undertaken or co-sponsored by the Institute,
including interviews of the primary campaign candidates, the Campaign '88 database
and compilation of voter registration information by the members of the Student Advisory Committee, public addresses, panel discussions and debates in the Forum and
study groups on campaign issues. A meeting/reunion of women former fellows convened to begin looking at possible future roles for the Institute in encouraging and
developing opportunities for women to run for public office, highlighting the Institute's increased interest in the role of women in electoral politics.
In academic year 1987-88, the Institute continued to demonstrate interest in both
domestic politics and issues of international and foreign policy import with programs
which included the biennial newly-elected mayors seminar, panel discussions on welfare reform, AIDS, black politics in the South, two major addresses on energy policy
by the prime minister of Norway and the former president of Venezuela; addresses
by representatives of both sides of the conflict in Nicaragua, the Sandinista government and the resistance movement or "contras"; a speech on the Iran/Contra initiative; a debate on the Mideast; and an address on the crisis in Panama.
Anne Doyle Kenney
Editor
DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE
It hardly seems possible that an entire
year has gone by since my appointment to
be director of the Institute of Politics. It has
been a lively year that is only partially
documented in this issue of Proceedings.
Durmg the year, I have enjoyed countless
discussions with those who have been involved in Institute programs described in
the following pages-the Forums, study
groups, conferences, meetings, suppers.
brown bag lunches. I'\'othing has given me
greater pleasure, however, than the opportunity to talk with and exchange ideas with
the tudents who have been active in our
programs and others who have stopped by
my office. Undergraduates, as well as those
enrolled at the John F. Kennedy School of
Government and the other professional schools at Han"acd, have a keen interest in
our political and governmental system. Our Student Advisory Committee is composed
of a remarkable collection of budding politicians, including several who actively \vorked
in the 1988 presidential campaign. I have learned from them, as I hope they have leamed
from my experience as a political candidate and governor of one of our largest states.
I expect our nation will hear from these students in the future.
I have also had the opportunity this year to represent the Institute at numerous meetings around the country as well as during a visit to Mexico in company with the
Mason Fellows of the Kennedy School. In my visits with more than a dozen Harvard
alumni clubs, I found a great deal of interest in and support for the activities of the
Institute as well as fond memories of our activities by former SAC members and others
who participated in Institute programs while on campus.
As the deadline approaches for this edition of Proceedings, I have taken a leave of
absence to assume the position of Attorney General of the Untted States. Befitting
the unique role of the Institute of Politics in our country's polihcallife, the presidential
election of 1988 could well have a direct impact on my future at the Institute!
I hope that you will review the 1987-88 edition of Proceedings to get a flavor of the
new and contmuing programs of the Institute. Proceedings reflects the work product
of the talented, energetic and devoted Institute staff who made my job easier and my
year more fulfilling.
Dick Thornburgh
D,,('(hlr
August 12. 1988
I. Readings
Readings
CONTENTS
CAMPAIGN '88
11
Conversations with the Candidates
by Bruce Babbitt, Robert Dole, Michael Dukakis,
Pete du Pont, Richard Gephardt, Albert Gore,
Alexander Haig, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson, Jack Kfmp,
Pat Robertson, Paul Simon, with
Marvin Kalb and members of the Forum audience
23
The Role of the Press
by Edward M. Kennedy, Maxine Isaacs,
Walter Mondale and Edward M, Fouhy
31
Different Challenges
by Dick Thomburgh
33
Return to Liberalism?
by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
39
Central America: In Search of Peace
by Oscar Arias Sanchez, Alfredo Cesar,
Julio Icaza, and Roberto Eisenmann
47
Energy Policy: North and South
by Gro Harlem Brundtland and Carlos Andres Perez
51
Dialogue on Northern Ireland
by Charles J. Haughey, TD.
CHALLENGES FOR THE NATION
54
Black Politics and the South
by Lottie Shackleford and Mike Espy
57
Disabilities: The Search for Civil Rights
by Edward M. Kennedy, Jr. and Josef Reum
60
Hispanics in Transition
by Willie Velasquez
62
Reforming Welfare
by Bill Clinton, Mike Castle, Blanche Bernstein,
Nathan Glazer and Ruth Massinga
69
The Politics of AIDS
by June E. Osbom, M.D. and Arnold S. Relman, M.D.
FOREIGN POLICY IN PROCESS
73
Retrospective on the Cuban Missile Crisis
by Fedor Burlatsky, Joseph S. Nye, Jr.,
and Robert S. McNamara
76
Uses of Military Power
by Caspar W. Weinberger
78
The Iran Initiative
by Michael Ledeen
81
Through Different Eyes
by Hyman Bookbinder and James Abourezk
INSTITUTE VOICES
85
Personal Perspectives on Politics
by Alan Karcher, Harriet Michel
and Clarence J. "Bud" Brown
88
Nuclear Winter
by Jonathan Miller
90
Communications Revolution?
by Jeffrey B. Abramson, F. Christopher Arterton
and Gary R. Orren
Campaign '88
Conversations with the Candidates
by Bruce Babbitt, Robert Dole, Michael Dukakis, Pete du Pont,
Richard Gephardt, Albert Gore, Alexander Haig, Gary Hart,
Jesse Jackson, Jack Kemp, Pat Robertson, Paul Simon,
with Marvin Kalb and members of the Forum audience.
Between November 3, 1987 and January 17, 1988, all of the Democratic and Republican candidates
for the nomination f}r president—except Vice President George Bush—participated in a series of interviews,
"Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb," held in the ARCO Forum of Public Af^irs. Each intervieiv was folloived by a question and answer period ivhich included questions by three pre-arranged questioners—but
not pre-arranged questions. The series, supported by a grant from the Neiv York Stock Exchange Foundation, xoas co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics and the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and WGBH-TV Boston. It was broadcast
on many Public Broadcasting System stations and was included in the 1987-88 Forum radio series. Mr
Kalb, fonner chief diplomatic correspondent fjr NBC Neu'S, is director of the Shorenstein Barone Center.
Following are brief edited excerpts from the intervieius.
11/3/87 — Democratic candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson, Minister; founder and president. Operation PUSH
MARVIN KALB: It is November 9, 1988, a little over a year from now, and you have
been elected president of the United States. What are the first three things you would
like to do?
JACKSON: We should convene members of the House and Senate and in a bipartisan
way drive this budget deficit down, get some grip on our trade imbalance, reach beyond that to key financial leaders on Wall and Lasalle Streets, key governors, and have
a bipartisan Camp David economic summit meeting. ... It is significant to me that
we stop drugs from coming into this country, stop jobs from going out which means
economic stability at home and have a foreign policy that is coherent, that will lend
itself to peace and justice in the world. I would project a foreign policy doctrine that
would have three basic components: first, support and strengthen international law;
second, support self-determination and human rights; third, economic alternatives
for the debt crisis of the Third World.
KALB: If you do not get the nomination, what is it that you want of the Party's nominee,
of the Democratic Party?
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Campaign '88
JACKSON: We must expand the Party, turn the mainstream into a flowing river, because a stream is too narrow, enough people can't get in. The key to victory is expansion. The second key is to build a broad-based coalition, whether paper workers in
Jay, Maine or meatpackers in Wisconsin or farmers in Greenville, Iowa, or urban Americans. I have pulled together the most diverse body of Democrats of anybody running
for the nomination. A third key is to change our priorities to put jobs, peace and justice
in their proper perspective. ... I'd expect others to have, uppermost, the ability to expand our party, with more participation, to build a coalition and put together priorities that will make a difference on the tables of the average American fami'y. They
fear the exportation of jobs and the importation of drugs. They fear the cutback in
educational opportunities for our children and the lack of affordable housing. Those
are the bread-and-butter issues that are the sum and substance of the Democratic Party.
With that consensus, we can together win this election.
11/8/87 — Republican candidate Pfcte du Pont, former Governor of Delaware
KALB: You've used the word 'conservative.' How important are such descriptions now
for really defining what somebody thinks?
DU PONT: I use the word conservative to refer to the values that the majority of the
people in this country share, a belief that the individual is more important than government; a belief that the traditional American family is kind of a glue that holds our
society together; the belief that American democracy is morally superior to Soviet communism, that they're not equivalent in any way, that there's a difference. I refer to
the view that in America government's job is to create opportunity for individuals
so they can seize hold of it and that the market economy is what makes America unique
and successful—not the government we have. Those are values that all of us share,
that are, I think—with a small "c"—conservative. ... Taxes don't lower budget deficits,
because they slow economic growth. I've not met, in my campaign, a single family
in America that claims they're undertaxed.
KALB: Do you feel that the effort to reduce the budget deficit should be the prime
preoccupation of your administration?
DU PONT: No. Because we haven't got a crisis, we have a challenge. ... We need, first
of all, a high growth economy so people can work, and we have one. We need a low
inflation economy so people's savings are worth something, and we have one.
America isn't falling apart. We have the best-performing economy of any nation in
the world, and the preoccupation of the Pete du Pont administration is going to be
to keep taxes down, keep inflation down, and try to further peel back regulations that
stop entrepreneurial people from creating opportunity, and thus make the whole great.
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Campaign 'h
Claire Fleming [Chair, Student Advisory Committee, Institute of Politics]:
Two questions. Would you increase funding for college loans so that students would
have more choice of where they could attend school? And, do you believe in merit
pay for teachers?
DU PONT: I believe that a good teacher ought to be paid more than a not-so-good
teacher. That encourages people to become better teachers. Everyone else working
in other jobs is evaluted on merit; teachers can be too. I also believe no American should
be denied the opportunity for a college education because they don't have the money.
1 would set up a national schooling and training bank to allow young Americans coming out of high school, or somewhat older Americans who may want to return to school,
or a 45-year old laid-off automobile worker who needs a new skill to get a new job,
to borrow the money they need to go to school, with the government guaranteeing
the loan. That would ensure access for everyone in America who wants to go to college or go back to college.
11/15/87 — Republican candidate General Alexander Haig, USA (Ret.), former Secretary of State, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe
KALB: Under what circumstances would you feel that you could commit American
forces to combat?
HAIG; Clearly, the vital interest of the American people must be involved, not only
in a subjective way but in a fairly clearly recognized way and with the consensus that's
established before such a decision is made, including participation by the legislature.
KALB: Would you be able to use nuclear weapons in defense of American interests?
HAIG: If the United States ever conveyed the impression to the Soviet Union, or to
our Allies who depend on our guarantees, that this is not a possibility, we might as
well wrap up and come home and get ready for what could be a major challenge from
the Soviet Union. No responsible public official should make such a statement. ...
I'm fascinated by the nuclear dialogue in America because it lurches from the moral
question of the kind you just asked to war-fighting scenarios. George Bush, in our
debate at Houston, said, "Your grandchildren and mine will want to know how many
nuclear weapons we have done away with." That's the wrong question. My grandchildren and your grandchildren will want to know how many wars did we prevent?
These nuclear questions and this posture that the American leader takes are critically
intertwined with our ability to prevent conflict. They just cannot be dealt with in isolation, with the kind of question that you asked. I'll tell you another thing—to reassure you about my martial air—I do believe there are things work fighting for.
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Campaign '88
KALB: Where do you stand on the Strategic Defense Initiative [SDl]?
HAIG: 1 support SDI because I believe we don't have the luxury of turning over a
monopoly in outer space to the Soviet Union which has been actively engaged there
for the last 20 years—as, incidentally, have we. But, I was appalled when the President
gave that speech in March of 1983. He oversold it, undercut our deterrent, made it
harder rather than easier to get the resources that a president will need to really conduct prudent SDl research and development. More importantly he distorted the arms
control dialogue by hyping this SDI system and politicizing an issue which never should
be politicized. You never politicize the profound. National security issues must be
bipartisan and totally devoid of political ax grinding or posturing.
11/22/87 — Democratic candidate Richard Gephardt, U S. Representative from Missouri
KALB; Does it worry you that people have the impression that you are not passionate
about issues, that you are not capable of arousing passion in the electorate?
RICHARD GEPHARDT: I'm running because I want our country to meet the challenges
facing us, which, I believe, are considerable. 1 have probably worked harder in the
Congress than anybody in this race, in either party, for issues and causes that I believe
in—tax reform, trade, improving the health care system, keeping social security strong,
doing something about the energy issues we face, a nuclear test ban treaty, fighting
aid to the 'Contras.'... There's a difference between being ideological and having strong
feelings and sometimes getting something done. I'm a person that likes to get things
done.
KALB: What do you think about the validity, the wisdom and logic of the process
that you are experiencing and that we are just watching?
GEPHARDT: It has some logic and I think it has some merit. It starts in small places,
Iowa, New Hampshire. You can argue about whether it should start in other places,
about whether the starting place should be moved around. It does allow someone
who's unknown, like myself and probably most of the other candidates, to get into
the race. ... We Democrats cannot win the presidency without winning our share of
the South and our share of the West.
KALB: You mentioned trade. You are quoted as saying that 80 percent of the trade
deficit is our own fault.
GEPHARDT: The majority of the problem may not be unopened markets. We face
tremendous challenges to be excellent economically, to be productive, to be strong
in a world marketplace. One of the places to start is to be able to say to American
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Campaign '88
business and American workers, "We've constructed a level playing field for you. You
have a fair chance if you can make good products to go into the world marketplace
and sell these products." We can't say that with a straight face today. ... It's trying to
construct what should be, a world common market where trade between aii countries
is as fair and as free as it is between the states of the United States. ... The goal is
to get a world common market. We've got to get other countries to open up to a much
greater degree. ... I'm trying to open markets, not close them. I'm trying to get us
a world common market, not shut down the American market, to get off the labels
and stop trying to scare one another with ghosts from the past.... We're the only country
in the world trying to be the best economically and the best militarily at the same
time. We're now in a world marketplace where we are competing against countries
who often have a standard of living that is much lower than ours. So the goal for us
is how to remain strong from a security and economic standpoint and how to compete
in a world marketplace and hold our standard of living.
GEPHARUT: We have the cart before the horse. We use the military first rather than last.
11/24/87 — Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts
DUKAKIS: What we've demonstrated is that you can take public resources, combine
them with private initiative, and literally transform an economy That's the kind of
aggressive economic leadership we have to have in this country, beginning with somebody who knows how you balance budgets, how you make tough choices on spending, but also can put together a strategy for growth which will be successful, which
will create jobs and economic opportunity for all of our citizens.
KALB: One of the jokes about Michael Dukakis is that he never met a weapon system
he liked, that he's never met a defense budget that he wouldn't like to cut.
DUKAKIS: I want this country to have a strong national defense, I'm not sure, after
the expenditure of billions and billions of dollars, that we have it. I'm very concerned
about what's happened to our conventional defense capability. We have a massive
nuclear deterrent and we need a nuclear deterrent.... In the face of the kind of severe
fiscal difficulty that this country is in, defense budgets are not going to grow over the
next year or two or theee. So the next president must make some hard choices within
a fairly fixed defense budget. Given the strength of our nuclear deterrent, when those
choices are made, I think we've got to put some resources into strengthening conventional defense capabilities.... Just to keep the defense budget stable is going to require
some significant cuts in weapons systems. I'd cut "star wars" back to where it was
before the President announced his initiative in 1983.1 think it's a fantasy. I don't think
it is worth the expenditure of the money that is involved. ... In any event, testing it
and deploying it is illegal under the Antiballistic Missile Treaty [ABMl, and I don't
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Campaign '88
think the country ought to be engaging in unlawful activity, particularly under a treaty
which we pushed on the Soviet Union and which was our initiative. I wouldn't do
"star wars." I wouldn't do $18 billion supercarriers. I wouldn't spend $50 billion on
the Minuteman missile. I wouldn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a threehour space plane from Washington to Tokyo.
DUKAKIS: Shame on us [the Democrats] if we lose [this election] given the economic
mess and the managerial mess and some unbelievably bad foreign policy decisions
we've had over the course of the past seven years.
DUKAKIS: We need strong and aggressive economic leadership in the White House
beginning in 1989. That means getting our fiscal house in order by making tough choices
on spending, by putting in place and leading an aggressive strategy for economic growth
and job creation, by going out and getting new revenue, beginning with the $110 billion in federal taxes owed that aren't being paid. I can't rule out new taxes; no serious
candidate for the presidency should, but that's where you begin, and by getting interest rates down. Every percentage point reduction in interest saves another $15 billion in the federal deficit. ... We've got to invest in needed public infrastructure, in
good schools and good skills, in technology, in regional development.
Q. [audience]: Would you raise taxes?
DUKAKIS: I might, but not until I had tried to collect every single dime I could of
the $110 billion in taxes owed that aren't being paid.
DUKAKIS: I abhor discrimination against anybody—race, ethnicity, sexual preference,
gender—that's why I'm working very hard right now to see if we can get a civil rights
bill through the legislature which will prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual
preference.
12/6/87 — Democratic candidate Paul Simon, U. S. Senator from Illinois
SIMON: There are three priorities in spending, priorities that have to fit within the
$1 trillion that is now part of the federal budget. The jobs program would cost $3 billion, I think, at the most—$5 billion in gross—because you save some on welfare and
other things. ... The jobs program, education, and long-term care for seniors, those
are the three priorities.
KALB: Would a Simon administration devote itself primarily to the achievement of
arms control agreements with the Soviet Union?
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Campaign '88
SIMON; That has to be a major item on the agenda. But we also have to recognize
that if there is an unthinkable World War III, it is unlikely to happen as World War
II started, with one superpower attacking another. It is much more likely to happen
as World War I did, with some incident somewhere. You have to use the tools of diplomacy in Central America, in the Middle East, in the Persian Gulf—wherever—to prevent
an eruption. I think that also has to be very much on the foreign policy agenda.
Francis Bator [Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy John F.
Kennedy School of Government]:
How is it possible that a sensible level-headed fellow like Paul Simon advocates a rule
that is as foolish, even dangerous, as a balanced budget amendment to the federal
Constitution?
SIMON: First, it's interesting that Thomas Jefferson, in 1796, wrote a letter in which
he said, 'Tf I could just add one amendment to the Consitution, it would be to require
a balanced budget." But he wanted a rigid one. I do not favor a rigid one but one that
says you to have a 60% vote. We cannot continue to have interest just mushroom. The
fastest-growing item in the budget is interest. ... Not only are we squeezing out our
ability through increased interest payments to respond to education, health care and
other things, but there is a massive redistribution of wealth that takes place.
Mary Jo Bane [Director, Center for Health and Human Resources Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government]:
Can you help me understand how a jobs program could deal with the serious problems
of people in the cities who have not been part of the labor market, not very well trained,
and so on?
SIMON: We move into any community and we say to people, "If you've been out
of work for five weeks, then we will give you a job 32 hours a week at the minimum
wage in a project selected by local people. There's a screening process. If you can't
read and write, we're going to get you into a program. If you can't speak the English
language, we'll get you into a class. If you have no marketable skills, we'll try to help
you." So we invest in our people and lift them. We finally face a choice of paying people for doing nothing or paying people for doing something. I'm conservative. I want
to pay people for doing something.
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Campaign '88
12/20/87 — Republican candidate Pat Robertson, Baptist minister; founder, Christian
Broadcasting Network
KALB: Do you feel that a nuclear war is inevitable?
ROBERTSON: I feel just the opposite, 1 don't think the Soviets will ever begin a nuclear
war against America, and 1 don't think we'll ever start one against them. I think we
both recognize the terrible dangers to both of our populations that would come from
nuclear war. What I'm more concerned about is the type of blackmail that could come
from overwhelming superiority. The nuclear balance has kept us from a world war
at least in the years since World War II, and although 1 hate the nuclear terror, nevertheless, it has restrained the superpowers. I hope we can keep some kind of balance so
that we will still be restrained in the future.
KALB: Of the couple of trillion dollars that the United States is in debt, how much
of that, if you can be specific, would you simply declare null and void?
ROBERTSON: That can't be done. We have to honor the debts that we have. I certainly
think that as a nation we should do something about paying it off. ... We're piling
debt on top of debt, and there's going to be an awful crash unless we have some
rational means of doing it. ... The way to do it, first of all, is to begin a series of budget
cuts. ... In fiscal year 1991,1 would go for a balanced budget. We could do it by cutting
spending as opposed to raising at least the marginal tax rates. ... I'm a conservative
in so far as I believe in certain fundamental principles, but I'm a conservative with
a human, compassionate face.
Kris Kobach [member. Student Advisory Committee, Institute of Politics]:
Where, specifically, would you find enough waste to balance the budget, and how
would you cut it out?
ROBERTSON: We will never cut the budget and get rid of the waste until we get a
Congress with enough guts to stand up to special interest groups. As long as we have
special interest groups with their money, with their PACS, with their enormous political power, the general average Joe in the general population doesn't stand a chance.
12/20/87 — Democratic candidate Albert Gore, U. 5. Senator from Tennessee
CORE: I've been trying, in my campaign, to talk about social justice, economic progress,
and a strong American role in the world.
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Campaign '88
GORE: I think it's critical to have a president with experience in arms control, the
U.S./Soviet relationship and foreign policy in general, in order to take advantage of
what could be an historic opportunity for accomplishing the very transition that is
so essential if we're going to move from the post-1945 era to a new era wherein we
can concentrate on the human agenda, rather than continue to see the world as a whole
spend $1 trillion a year on new ways to kill people.
GORE: The Democratic Party used to have a consensus on the fact that our nation
must play a strong role in the world. During and after the Vietnam War, a certain neoisolationist impulse understandably became a part of our national dialogue which has
not yet been put in proper perspective in the Democratic Party. We've got to put that
in perspective, we've got to learn the correct lessons from Vietnam and avoid learning
the wrong lessons from Vietnam.
GORE: First, we have to have a realization that sacrifice will be necessary and we must
have a president who is willing to fight for the average working man and woman as
those sacrifices are allocated. Second, we have to have a realization that the challenge
is not to suddenly balance the budget in one, two or three years, but to re-establish
confidence in our ability to exercise some control over fiscal policy and our economic
destiny. Third, we must recognize that it is essentially a political challenge. We must
have leadership from a president personally involved. ... That's going to mean cutting
spending, and not just on the military side, but wasteful spending intentionally overlooked by the Reagan administration even as they've cut too deeply in other areas.
It will involve a recognition that we will have to continue making investments in areas
like education to build for a competitive America in the future. And, we've got to have
additional revenue.
12/23/87 — Republican candidate Jack Kemp, U. S. Representative from Buffalo, New
York
KEMP: The purpose of cutting tax rates back in the 1970s and 1980s was to get the
economy growing again, to strengthen the dollar, to encourage entreprenurial capitalism
as a solution to creating more jobs in America. To that extent, I think it's worked, ...
The straw breaking the camel's back of the world economy is that there is no currency
on this earth upon which you can depend over time to retain its value. We must have
a currency here and throughout the world that can be stabilized, can be honest, sound,
predictable, and bring down interest rates for ourselves, for the Third World, for our
trading partners, and to get the global economy growing again. ... Getting back to
a sound, honest stable dollar will not cure the world's problems, but it will give us
low, long-term interest rates and it will help us help the Third World begin to buy
something from Massachusetts or from lowa~to pick two states.
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Campaign '88
KALB: Do you believe that the budget deficit is the single most important problem
facing this country?
KEMP: The budget deficit is a reflection of our problems, not necessarily the cause
of the problem. ... The answer to balancing the budget is not to raise taxes, it's to put
a lid on spending, ... get our dollar stabilized so long-term interest rates will come
down to the normal level of four or five percent.
KALB: You don't feel to any degree that supply-side economic theories which you
and others share are principally responsible for the massive budget deficit, the trade
deficit, the fact that we have now become the largest debtor nation in the world?
KEMP: That's just nonsense. It's single-entry bookkeeping.... While the deficit is $140
billion or so, the gross national product under those tax cuts has grown from less than
$2 trillion to $4.5 trillion. We're headed for $5 trillion. We have to get the deficit down
but not by raising taxes. The deficit is not a revenue problem, it's a spending problem.
KEMP: I don't favor, at least in our lifetime, the total elimination of the nuclear deterrent.
1/3/88 — Democratic candidate Gary Hart, former U. S. Senator from Colorado
KALB: Would you raise taxes?
HART: I would raise revenues on the grounds that there's no other way we're going
to get the deficit down and finance investments in this economy.
HART: I said my campaign was based on three words: invest, reform and engage.
I would add a fourth, service. The investment is to rebuild the basic foundation of
this nation's economy, our manufacturing base, our energy production, our agricultural production, our education system first and foremost including job training, and
finally, our research and laboratory base for new innovation.
HART: 1 have confessed my errors and sins, if you will, in a way, 1 don't think any
national leader has done in a long time. I've apologized to my family and just about
everybody else. There comes a point beyond which people either accept or do not
accept that, ... I have tried very hard, over the course of a 50-year lifetime to live as
straightforwardly and honestly as 1 can. ... We've got to have realistic standards for
our leadership. I don't want to be held to any lower standard than our best presidents,
but I don't want to be held to any higher standard either. ... The historic standard
for 200 years has been that a leader's, a public person's, private life was private until
it affected their ability to govern. ... 1 made a mistake. 1 have categorized it as a damn
fool mistake. The question on the part of the American people is whether that mistake
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Campaign '88
disqualifies me from leading the country. Only the American people can decide and
that's why I got back into this race. And, it has, by the way, not disqualified leaders
in the past.
1/10/88 — Democratic candidate Bruce Babbitt, former Governor of Arizona
BABBITT: The important thing is the deficit. We've had a long run in this country of
candidates who are ignoring the issue and, obviously, compromising our economic
future. A lot less important than the kind of tax is having the guts to say the word,
say we have to cut expenditures and raise taxes.... What's unreasonable about saying
we should subject Social Security benefits to taxation for those who can afford to pay
it? Why should the Mellons and the duPonts have tax exempt benefits? Does that make
sense? Avoid this mindless kind of cutting and say, in the progressive tradition, we
can provide benefits to people who need them, and build tanks that work, and defense
systems that make sense.
BABBITT: We have to move as far as we can toward a posture of 'no first use'. We are
not in a position to make an absolute pledge, particularly in Europe. An absolute pledge
compromises deterrence. The problem is we've gone in the opposite direction in
Europe and the point is not being debated. How can the United States of America
put itself in the position of a NATO strategy which says that in the event, unlikely
though it may be, of an outbreak of hostilities, we'll be firing nuclear weapons and
escalating to Armegeddon in the first week of a conventional war? The reason is that
we've become over-reliant on cheap nuclear weapons and we've abandoned our responsibility to think carefully about the conventional defense of Europe.
1/17/88 — Republican candidate, Robert Dole, U. S. Senator from Kansas
KALB: What, on the plus side, can you tell the students in this graduate school of
government about the kind of thing they can look forward to in working in public
service?
BOB DOLE: I know many here are interested in public service. There are a lot of opportunities not only to help other people but to play pivotal roles in our relationships
with other countries around the world.
KALB: What about on the down side?
DOLE: Well, you have to have fairly thick skin, particularly if you get into politics.
My mother could never understand those nasty letters to the editor that people wrote
about me, or the ones I wrote about others.
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Campaign '88
KALB: Isn't there a clear inconsistency between your frequent appeals for compassion and a voting record that is so conservative on the very issues that would help
people who are underprivileged?
DOLE: I am conservative. I don't want to suggest otherwise. I think you can be conservative and still be sensitive and compassionate. If we are going to build the Republican party as I want to build it, then we're going to reach out and bring more people
in. I don't want to be hide-bound. I don't want to be inflexible.
KALB: As president, could you delegate responsibility?
DOLE: I wouldn't turn it over to some Colonel. I believe that if you are the boss you
ought to have all the information. I'm the one running for office, not Colonel North
or Admiral Poindexter. They don't have the right to say what they're going to withhold
from me if I'm elected president. I don't have a right to tell the American people, "I
can deny this because nobody told me what was supposed to be." And Ronald
Reagan accepted that responsibility. Yes, I want to delegate. I'm not going to be Jimmy
Carter and check people in and out on the tennis court. I am going to know what
is going on in the White House whether down in the basement or upstairs.
DOLE: I have said as specifically as I could that we don't need to raise tax rates. We
had tax reform in 1986—took a lot of things away from a lot of people. We said we
were going to lower the rates and then we said we ought to freeze the rates, raise the
rates. Let's let the rates trigger in at the lowest possible rate.
Q: [audience): How would you change our current disability policies in the areas of
employment, or education, et cetera?
DOLE: 1 don't want to sound self-serving, but I think just having me in the White
House would change the attitudes of a lot of people. I think you'd have a lot of private
sector people willing to take a look at people with disabilities. Not that mine's that
severe, but I've had one. I think I could help just from the standpoint of being in the
bully pulpit, letting people know there are 35 million Americans out there with disabilities who are just like the rest of us. Maybe they can't walk or talk, but they can
think and produce.
DOLE: If I could have my way for a couple of days as president, I could figure out
a pretty good budget—if I didn't have to send it to Congress.
We could reduce spending and send the right signals around the world. The budget
freeze is fair 1 find that most Americans, regardless of party-and I have a tot of support from Independents and Democrats—say this is fair across the board. The only
exception being low income, food stamps. Medicare, older Americans' programs,
whatever If we have $150 billion in real savings over a three-year period, we're send-
22
Campaigrt '88
ing a strong signal lo markets and around the world
The best policy would be to kick out the bad programs and maybe increase others.
The debt is almost $2.5 trillion. We have to deal with it or we are robbing our grandchildren of opportunities they should have in the future.
The Role of the Press
by Edward M. Kennedy, Maxine Isaacs, Walter Mondale
and Edward M. Fouhy
Following are edited excerpts from public addresses by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Walter F. Mondale
and Edward M. Fouhy and from introductory remarks by Maxine Isaacs prior to Mr. Mondale's address.
Senator Kennedy's address was delivered in the Forum on November 30, 1987 at "A Tribute to Senator
Edward M. Kennedy: 25 Years of Public Service." His address was followed by remarks in tribute to Senator
Kennedy by Graham T. Allison, Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government; Derek Bok, President
of Harvard University; Ronald H. Brozvn, Esq., chair of the Institute of Politics Senior Advisory Committee and former chief counsel to the Democratic National Committee; Claire Fleming, 1987 chair of the Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee; Paul Holtzman, 1982 vice chair of the Student Advisory
Committee; Jonathan Moore, Ambassador-at-Large and U. S. Coordinatorpr Refugee Affairs. U. S. Department of Stale, former director (1974-1986) of the Institute of Politics; Richard E. Neustadl, Douglas Dillon
Professor of Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, founding director (ISBS-WTl) of the
Institute of Politics; Dick Tlwrnburgh, director. Institute of Politics.
Vice President Mondale's address, "Presidential Politics and the Press," icns delivered on November 10,
1987 in the Forum and was followed by a discussion with Harvard students. Other participants were Andrea Mitchell, national affairs correspondent at NBC Nexvs and Maxine Isaacs, fall 1987 Fellow of the Institute of Politics, former press secretary to Vice President Mondale and deputy manager and press secretarif,
1984 Mondale for President campaign.
Mr. Fouhy's address tons delivered on March 3. 1988 at the Harvard University Model Student Congress. Mr Fouhy, spring 1988 Felloiv of the Institute of Politics and former director of the political neivs
division at NBC, Washington bureau chief for ABC Neivs. director of neivs at CBS, executive producer
of "NBC Nightly Neivs," is executive producer. Campaign '88 Commission on Presidential Debates.
EDWARD M. KENNEDY: The Kennedy School not only bears John Kennedy's name,
but carries forward his conviction that the power of ideas can enrich, refine, and rein
in the ideas of power. He would have appreciated the fact that the School now encompasses the study of the press and its impact on politics and public policy. For he saw
newspapers and television increasingly becoming mechanisms for hurrying h i s t o r y means to sit in judgment on events only hours old. Even more now than in the 1960s
the press is becoming explicitly judgmental, and therefore, more directly influential.
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Campaign '88
I would like to reflect on all this in the context of the present national campaign.
No element of our politics is more important: a presidential election is more than a
game, a melodrama, or a mini-series. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are
in the midst of deciding how the most powerful nation on earth will conduct itself
over the next four years. And the choices made during that period will have consequences for decades to come.
In the remarks that follow, I do not intend to be comprehensive, nor do I pretend
to be entirely objective—no one who has been a presidential candidate ever could be.
But my experience in national campaigns, winning and losing, from 1960 to 1980, has
left me with a very real sense of a widening gap between the real issues and the reporting; a feeling that the voters are not seeing candidates whole or clearly, but through
a journalistic lens increasingly honed to the prism of People magazine or "Entertainment Tonight." I think I speak for many Americans when I suggest that there are some
things very wrong with the process. Let me discuss three concerns—and how they
are affecting the Democratic primary campaign.
First, our attention appears to be riveted on politics at the expense of issues.
To some extent that has always been the case. But this year, probably because two
candidates were driven from the race early, we have experienced a primary election
level of coverage long before there were any primaries or caucuses to cover. This could
be useful if it was used to tell us, in specific terms, what candidates actually think.
Instead, staff shake-ups, major and minor alike, command more space than a major
speech. Stories of palace intrigue inside campaigns, involving names most of the public
never heard of, and squabbles none of the public care about, fill columns of newsprint
with material that isn't really news. Serious candidates can be all but read out of the
race before a single election is run.
Bruce Babbitt has a thoughtful and courageous approach to questions like Third
World debt, but voters hardly know it at all. There is little room for that in newspaper
coverage which often seems designed primarily as a campaign manager's newsletter.
So Governor Babbitt is probably best known in Iowa for riding a bicycle across the
state. He realized the relative press value of discussing the danger of a banking collapse versus pedaling his ten-speed into Des Moines—and you can't blame him for
acting accordingly.
In a similar vein, the Reverend Jesse Jackson has advanced alternative policies in
areas ranging from relations with Cuba to the agricultural economy. You don't have
to agree with him to recognize the seriousness of his views. But most voters haven't
read a word about most of the Jackson platform. The reports they see essentially rehash the same old stories—what percentage of the black vote will he hold, who will
be hurt by his candidacy, and how he will act at the convention—speculation on which
I suspect he himself has spent very little time.
The campaign has become a grinding cattle show, in which all the incentives are
to play for short-term advantage. The ways to win debates is to plan out the best oneliner—to search for your own best version of "There you go again," or "I paid for that
microphone." Thus, Al Gore, who has something important to say about national secu-
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Campaign '88
rity, could hardly be heard on the subject until he finally met the demand for political
shorthand, for terms like "liberal litmus test/' and "soft" or "hard" on defense.
All of which leads to my second concern: what issues coverage there is now comes
largely in the form of labels—and if the candidates won't supply them, then the press
corps will. It is easier to deal in caricature than complexity, and while there are journalistic exceptions, too many reporters have taken the easy way out.
For example, while I do not fully agree with Dick Gephardt on his trade bill, to dismiss it as "protectionist" is to miss the reality. It is in fact a complex proposal, involving a series of steps, which could result in lowering trade barriers. The bill deserves
to be debated in detail, not on the basis of stereotypes. And it ought to be read at
least by those who are writing about it.
In the same spirit, those who are writing about Mike Dukakis ought to listen to what
he has actually said. In terms of the Massachusetts miracle, he never has claimed he
did it all. It is simply not relevant to object that national trends played a vital part
or that others have helped shape the miracle—the Governor knows that and has never
suggested otherwise. His role is not an all-or-nothing proposition; but it was and is
a central role, in which he has pioneered new ideas and incentives for economic development. Where is the detailed coverage of that?
As the campaign wears on, sifting the political news on page after page, relegating
issues to an occasional obligatory story, another phenomenon—which is my third
concern—comes to pervade the process. Candidates are raised up—only to be torn
down—and to justify that, the whole field is falsely characterized as unimpressive
and unsubstantial.
It is now happening to Paul Simon. He is a man of principle—and not simply because he refused to give up his bow tie, which the press then took to as a prize visual.
We have seen a rush of stories revealing in reproachful terms that he doesn't have
a plan to pay for every proposal he has ever made. That is hardly news about him—or
virtually any candidate in this field or in my memory. When was the last time a platform was enacted whole into law?
If there is a peak journalism this year, that is its common chord. And as each candidate's season passes, much of the press, in self-fulfilling disappointment, renews the
suggestion that they are all dwarfs anyway. The complaint that there were giants in
other days, running in other campaigns—amplified by the question: "Where are they
now?'—represents a deep disregard for history. Often the giants, too, were at first dismissed as dwarfs in their own time,
Lincoln was derided as a party hack, with no executive experience. And the assault
came not only from enemies, but from those who should have been his friends. Wendell Phillips assailed him as a "huckster," and William Lloyd Garrison called him a
"coward" who would block emancipation.
Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed by Walter Lippmann as an "amiable man" of no
consequence. The Neio Republic weighed in that he was "not a man of great intellectual
force or supreme moral stamina"—which sounds like some of what The New Republic
writes about candidates today. Come forward a generation, to 1960, and Walter Lipp-
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Campaign '^
mann does it again. He urges that John Kennedy step aside so Adlai Stevenson can
be drafted.
Obviously, in 1987, there are many who have forgotten history, for they are surely
repeating it. But now the message of mediocrity is applied to a field of candidates,
is woven like a thread through most of the coverage, and magnified by the increasingly powerful technology of the information age.
People and politicians, candidates and non-candidates alike, are left asking: Is this
any way to pick a President?"
Journalists, no matter how they act, will inevitably influence the process. The Heisenberg principle applies to presidential politics as well as physics: observing an event
changes it. Nor would any of us want a press corps reporting only the facade of the
camp.iign. But here are some things I think we can do;
First, candidates should be able to discuss campaign coverage without fear of being
assailed as "whiners" or agents of repression. I see no prospect for a resurgence of
Agnewism; 1 do see a reason for an honest dialogue founded on mutual respect.
At the same time, the press can resist the rationalization that all news is fit to print
that has appeared anywhere else, in any barely respectable newspaper. There are
hard questions here, but they are no excuses for not settling easy ones. Newspapers
don't have to decide all the circumstances under which it's proper to follow someone
around in order to decide that it's time to cover issues more seriously and more
thoroughly. Handicapping the race is irresistible, but it should not be the ceaselessly
beating heart of campaign journalism.
Finally, we can approach presidential elections with at least a minimal sense of consequence and history. Theodore White told us what went on inside a campaign, but
he also related it to what went on in other generations and other campaigns. And
those who borrow his approach should not leave half of it behind.
As the pace of events carries us past Iowa and New Hampshire and Super Tuesday,
as Tiitie and Neiusioeek and the networks feature and celebrate the winner, we will hear
no more of dwarfs—and the result, no matter what it is, will appear to have been
inevitable—or at least expected. It is always easier to read the tea leaves after the cup
is drained. But I also hope that we will continue to think about how the tea was brewed,
about the roles we all played—politicians and press as well as voters. When the subject is presidential politics, in 1988 we are all teachers, and we are all students, and
we have a lot to learn.
MAXINE ISAACS: 1 want to tell you a story about 1984. Because of the decent instincts
of Walter Mondale and because of the belief that people have the right, the press have
the right, to question anyone who wants to be President, which we've learned has
become a fairly radical notion, we created what we now refer to as "reporter heaven"
during the 1984 Mondale campaign. The reporters had almost unlimited access not
just to Mondale but to the senior officials in the campaign. They were able to stop
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Campaign '88
Mr. Mondale any time they had a question. The result was that he was doing press
conferences in addition to most of the media markets we visited.
We were up against an opponent who granted no access to the press, who had a
very disciplined staff, and who really exercised total control, not only of his own message, but because of the difference between the two campaigns, over the whole agenda of the campaign. We got lost in the stories that were created really by our own
accessibility. If I could do it over again, I would advise that we be slightly less accessible, exercise more control over the message and try to give the voters a clearer impression of who Walter Mondale is. He deserved that and was short-changed in not being
able to come across as clearly as he deserved.
WALTER MONDALE: After a quarter of a century in public life, I must say I end my
years in elective office more than ever a believer in the system of free journalism. And,
in this era of the pained personal confession, I want to make my contribution. As much
as it hurts, I like journalists—not all of them, not every day, but most of the time. Most
of my concerns are with the process and with the system in which journalists are required to do their work. Do we have enough competition so that the public can hear
it all? Basically, I would say yes. But at the same time, I'm bothered by what I believe
to be the inclination of the networks, locked as they are in fierce competition, to soften
their edge when hitting a popular target. I'm also bothered by the limited time of their
news slots which discourages depth and breadth and which I believe is also dictated
by competitive pressures.
News coverage and politics are increasingly influenced by the marketing trade. In
fact, I think politics is now in a new era that will be called the age of the marketer.
And I hate every bit of it. The new kings of politics are the pollsters, the film-makers,
the political consultants, focus group organizers, computer mail experts, and of course
the fundraisers that make it all happen. If this process continues, it will cheapen politics, weaken our public leadership, and reward the shallow. What will happen to substance if this continues?
Market surveys do not tell you what we should be doing. I ran headlong into that
in the last campaign. I was talking about reducing the deficit. My opponent, who has
good marketers around him, declared during the first debate that those deficits would
disappear through growth. Solutions are being delayed because the marketers want
us to believe there are no tough alternatives. If the leaders of the American media,
and our political leaders, flee to the marketers and away from reality, how are we ever
to solve our problems? How does this nation ever avoid reality and at the same time
solve its most difficult problems? You can't do it in your family, you can't do it in your
local communities, you can't do it in your state and you can't do it nationally or internationally either. The very beginning of responsible leadership begins with the leader
who will stand up and tell us the truth and together as Americans we will face reality
and solve those problems. Absent that, our nation will pay, and continue to pay, a
dreadful price.
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Campaign
Compounding this problem is the growing practice in which candidates are successfully ducking accountability to the press. What is the cost of ducking from one's
responsibility as a candidate or as President? The sad fact is, and I've checked this
with several journalists and gotten exactly the same response from each of them, that
the answer is that today there is no downside at all to avoiding that responsibility.
In fact it is a plus. What is the reward for being accountable to the press? The answer
is the same—none. In fact, you pay a big price. Because of that, because of the success
of the strategy, we're going to see more and more of it.
I believe, first, there ought to be an agreement between the two major parties that
there would be six, five, four, major debates, and each debate should deal with a specific
topic, a major topic. Let the American people find out about our abilities, about our
understanding, our vision, about our direction. I believe the American people have
said that is what they want. Many many millions watch debates because they know
they are an uncontrived environment, that marketers can't get to the candidates, that
if they're stupid it's too late. Not even makeup helps, as one of the candidates determined. It's the only place where viewers just might find out enough about a candidate's personal character as well as about issues of substance.
Second, I would try right now to get each of these candidates to agree to at least
one monthly news conference. Not to do that verges on the unpatriotic. That office
does not belong to the President, it belongs to the American people. It's our business
and we have a right to know what the President is doing with our affairs—and he
has a responsibility to respond. Maxine tells me that one of the key concerns of her
students, sometimes expressed in anger, is what is perceived to be excessive personal
nosiness by the press, the personal questions. I am not sure that my answer will be
well received here tonight but 1 don't think there are any bad question. 1 think there
are only bad answers. People who seek high office must be prepared to take the heat
or they shouldn't run.
I don't care where you are, what the organization, you want to know whether a person's wrapped tight before putting him in a position of responsibility. Is that person
able, honest, strong, both physically and mentally healthy? These are the most important questions of all because if the answer is no it's like a banker had only one p r o b l e m he embezzled. You are not going to get around that. The American people want to
know about a person's character.
In a Parliamentary system, colleagues who know one another pick their leader—
whom they know. The system, while imperfect, assures much sounder answers to
these character questions. In the old days when the party establishment picked candidates in those old smoked-filled rooms, as flawed as that was they too were making
choices from among candidates that they knew personally. But today, thanks to the
reforms of the '70s, many of which I support, candidates simply announce and then
go to the public. How do you know who they really are? From their ads? The public
is understandably skeptical about what is being said.
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Campaign '88
EDWARD M. FOUHY: I am sitting out this presidential campaign, leaching about it
rather than covering it as I have done for so many years. Next Tuesday, "Super Tuesday," the 1988 presidential campaign will reach the climatic stage of this early phase
as 14 southern and border states—and others from Massachusetts to Washington state
to American Somoa—will elect delegates to the national nominating conventions. There
are still five days of campaigning and negative television commercials to go so predictions are hazardous, but it appears possible that the nomination of Republican candidate George Bush may be inevitable, and even that the Democratic field may be
narrowed to just two candidates.
In part those outcomes and others will swing on how the press interprets the results.
The press is playing a central role now that concerns me and is, I think, worth thinking about as you gather this week for this Model Congress. Let's look first at a little
background on the part the press has played in our history.
We don't really know much about the first newspaper ever published. It probably
was an innocuous sheet put out by a printer who had some time on his hands and
the soul of a gossip. We do know that in 1641 a London printer named John Thomas
began publishing a newspaper called Diurnal Occurances. Its self-assigned task was
to cover Parliament, as the British counterpart to our Congress was known then—and
is now. Mr. Thomas' first employee, Samuel Peck, was assigned to take down the
speeches made on the floor of Parliament. A colleague of Mr. Peck's, a writer whose
work has survived but whose name has not, wrote a description of Peck, saying he
was "a bald-headed buzzard with long runnagate legs." I don't see anyone here who
is suffering from baldness—at least not yet—and my dictionary doesn't tell me what
runnagate means, but those of you who will be acting as members of the press corps
over the next few day might pause now and again to reflect on your spiritual ancestor,
Samuel Peck.
In England, the government and the press have been adversaries over the years and
other spiritual forebears— Thomas Hittin, John Tewksbury, Richard Bayfield—were
executed for things they printed in their newspapers. Elizabeth Mallett, the first woman publisher whose name appears in the annals of the history of journalism, was intimidated and driven out of the business in 1702 because she printed news that
displeased the King. The first press was established here in America thanks to the
work of a nonconformist clergyman, Joseph Glover, who came to Boston in 1634, looked
around and decided what the colony needed was a college and a press. He returned
to England, resigned from his ministry in Surrey, recruited the printer, Stephen Daye,
andbundledhisfamilyand the Daye family aboard a Boston-bound ship. Clergyman
Glover died enroute, but Daye and his two sons set up the press. The college was
already operating when they arrived, although it wasn't named until a benefactor,
John Harvard, bequeathed it his library and half his fortune a year later.
In one of those delicious historical accidents that make soap opera writers smile,
some years later Reverend Glover's widow married President Dunster of Harvard College and the press came under the umbrella of the college—where it has been ever
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Campaign '88
since. So we see that Harvard has a long tradition of association with printers and
the press and the freedom to express ideas.
In this country too, editors and publishers have been threatened, jailed, even executed for things they wrote that displeased the authorities. The history of the press
here has been raucous, sometimes bloody, sometimes even disgraceful as when it curried favor with the political party in power. But for the most part our press functions
much as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and the other Founders thought it should function—providing people with the information they need to
make intelligent choices about who should govern them.
The press acts as a watch dog, barking furiously when the government starts to do
things it probably should not do. It has evolved from a few beleaguered little printing
shops putting out papers when the commercial printing business was slow to today's
multimillion dollar communications comglomerates which publish newspapers, books,
and magazines and own radio and television stations. It is pervasive and persuasive.
In a massive national survey financed a few years ago by The Los Angeles Times, 85
percent of respondents said they were favorably inclined toward their local newspaper
and television station. An 85 percent approval rating! That's darn good, especially when
you consider that only 72 percent were favorably inclined toward Congress and that
one of the most popular Presidents in our history, Ronald Reagan, had the approval
of just 71 percent. Yet, a substantial number of people, nearly a majority, saw the press
as being politically biased and paying loo much attention to bad news. An amazing
number, three out of four, feel the press invades people's privacy. Most people felt
that their local reporters, print and broadcast, do a good job and two out three saw
press citicism, or the threat of it, keeping government officials from doing things they
should not do.
So, everything is rosy. Right? Wrong. The press is in great danger of losing some
of the public approval that it now has and must continue to have in order to keep
its singular freedom. Think of it. The press is the only private business protected by
the First Amendment. So, with high approval ratings, as the survey showed, what
is the problem? It is that the press, a private institution with its own value system,
has become the fulcrum in the presidential nominating process, a role for which it
is ill-suited.
In every other democracy in the world, political parties nominate senior members,
usually people who have won local elections and served with distinction in some branch
of government. To assure their own long term survival, parties are motivated to put
their best people into the arena. Candidates are judged by their peers, the only kind
of judgment that is really effective. The parties then slug it out. The press role is that
of spectator and reporter—the role it should play and is equipped to play by training
and by tradition.
In this country, it is different. Candidates select themselves. They may be people
who have served in government with distinction, or they may be people with name
recognition but no experience in government, who have never held any elective office
or any position within their party. In the absence of a party machinery to winnow
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'88
out the merely ambitious from the truly electable, the press is called upon to play
a role in the nominating process. The press is neither equipped for nor comfortable
in that role.
The press Is cacophonous, it speaks in many voices—as it should. It is often wrong,
because it aspires to tell the truth and truth is elusive. The press is adversarial, selfrighteous, quick to anger, paranoid about criticism, all of which are qualities that make
it particularly unsuited for the role of political arbiter. To be fair, the press did not seek
the role; it has been thrust into it. The tension between press and candidates, who
chafe under the system even though they have contributed to it, rises to the surface
occasionally, as it did recently in the testy exchange between Vice President Bush and
anchorman Dan Rather. I cringe when that happens because the press must have the
approval and esteem of the public if it is to continue to enjoy its First Amendment
rights and privileges. The quickest way to lose those rights is to thrust itself into the
middle of a partisan debate at the height of a political campaign.
One last thought. Under our Constitution, the people, not the government, are sovereign. That is the genius of our system. If the system is to continue to work, the press
must be free to report the information people need to make the decisions they are
called upon to make in a democracy and free to play the watchdog role I mentioned
before. The road to restriction on press feeedom is a road that passes through a valley
marked with a road sign that says, "Danger! Political Curves Ahead."
Different Challenges
by Dick Thornburgh
The foiton'iug article appeared ill the November 1987 edition i>/Harvard Political Review under the title,
"Thoui^hts on the 1988 Campaign." Dick Thornburgh was appointed United States Attornei/ General in
late summer 1988, is Director-oi\-leave oj the Institute of Politics and a former two-term Governor of Pen}iSi/lvania.
The nation's two major political parties face far different challenges going into next
year's presidential campaign. Both, to be sure, must select candidates to face the
issues of the post-Reagan era.
But Democrats, in addition to selecting their candidate, must as well agree upon
a philosophy and a message to carry to the electorate next year. This is, I believe, a
much more challenging task.
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Campaign '88
While there are some healthy differences of opinion within their ranks, Republicans, after nearly eight years of control of the presidency, are in basic agreement on
their centra! themes. The basic planks of the Reagan platform are: a strong national
defense; economic growth with low taxes; less government which governs considerably less; more authority for state and local governments; tough attitudes toward those
who break the law; social programs focused upon those most in need; a recognition
of the importance of the individual citizen in contrast to the special interests.
The Republican task next year will be to select a ticket from a field of able candidates
who can move our country forward, based upon the accomplishments of the Reagan
Administration. And those accomplishments are substantial—lower taxes, interest rates
and unemployment; the longest peacetime economic expansion in our nation's history; a stronger defense which is respected around the world; and significant movements toward nuclear arms reduction and peace in Central America—to name but a few.
On the Democratic side, there is no basic agreement on what the party stands for,
and the announced candidates often appear to disagree on important matters of principle. Are the Democrats neo-liberals or neo-conservatives? Would they impose a new
lax-and-spend, big-government era in the mold of FDR's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society or are they no-tax-increase "managers" bent on out-performing
the GOP?
Would they be strong on defense or for heavy cuts indefensespending? Would they
impose protectionist high tariffs or quotas on imports or are they free traders?
These and a host of other issues must be resolved by the Democrats in 1988 in addition to going through the candidate selection process. The choice on the Republican
side is easier—find the candidate who can best carry forward the party's basic principles into the post-Reagan era. That candidate, whoever it will be, has a good chance
to be a winner, I believe.
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'88
Return to Liberalism?
by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The fo!lowing is excerpted from "Left, Right, Center: Liberalism and Conservatism in 1388, a debate between Arthur M. Schlesinger, ]r. Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, City University of Neio
York and Kevin P. Phillips, editor and publisher of The American Political Reporter and author of PostConservative America which was held in the ARCO forum of Public Affairs on February 26, 1988.
Other participants were Albert H. Canlril, 1987-88 Research Fellow at the Institute of PoUtics (introduction) and Dick Thornburg, Director of the Institute of Politics (moderator).
I know that it remains fashionable to say that liberalism is too discredited by its record
in recent years even to contemplate a comeback. Such assertions are puzzling. They
assume that liberals were responsible for everything that happened to the republic
from 1961 till Ronald Reagan rode his white horse into Washington in 1981. In fact,
there has not been a liberal administration in Washington since the Great Society
vanished into the Vietnam quagmire in 1966. Nixon a liberal? Ford a liberal? Carter,
the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland and almost as
assiduous a critic of affirmative government as Reagan himself, a liberal? Someone
must be kidding. We have not had a liberal government for more than 20 years. For
belter or for worse, conservative government is responsible for our present condition.
I do not suggest, however, that liberals were infallible when they were running the
country. As the next liberal hour impends, one must hope that American liberals have
learned something both from their own last experience in power and even maybe from
the Reaganite critique of liberalism.
I will begin with foreign affairs; for, as John Kennedy used to say, domestic policy
can only defeat us but foreign policy can kill us. And let me stipulate that a liberal
foreign policy, in my view, implies a national-interest, balance-of-power approach to
international affairs in the tradition of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, with the further stipulation that military force is only one, and often not the most crucial, element
in the balance of power and with the conviction that the restraint of the nuclear arms
race is the supreme issue of our age.
Liberals, I believe, have learned painful international lessons from their last tour
in power. The Bay of Pigs and Vietnam were not in vain. Reaganites often quote those
grandiloquent words from Kennedy's inaugural about paying any price, bearing any
burden, meeting any hardship, supporting any friend, opposing any foe to assure
the survival and success of liberty. But Kennedy on 20 January 1961 was responding
to the even more grandiloquent speech Khrushchev had given a fortnight earlier about
the inevitable triumph of communism. He set forth his truer view ten months later
in his address at the University of Washington (16 November 1961) when he said: "We
must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that
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we are only six percent of the world's population—that we cannot impose our will
upon the other 94 percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse
each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world
problem."
In the same speech Kennedy laid out standards for a liberal foreign policy. We cannot, he said, defend freedom in the world "without restraints imposed by the very
freedoms we seek to protect. We cannot, as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises.
We cannot, ., tell different stories to different audiences foreign and domestic, friendly
and hostile, We cannot abandon the slow processes of consulting with our allies to
match the swift expediencies of those who merely dictate to their satellites. We can
neither abandon nor control the international organization in which we now cast less
than one percent of the vote in the General Assembly . . . We send arms to other
peoples—just as we send them the ideals of democracy in which we believe—but we
cannot send them the will to use those arms or to abide by those ideals."
What we learn from the Reaganite critique of a liberal foreign policy, I think, is how
sound those standards are. Reaganism represents a denial of the idea that there are
limits on American power and wisdom. If only we stand tall enough, Reagan assures
us, we will shape the destiny of the planet-and do so, as he once put it, "all by our
little selves." Military might, exercised at our own will or caprice, is deemed the answer to political perplexities. Reaganite unilateralism is the form traditional isolationism
assumes in America's period as a world power. It breeds disregard for allies, for treaties
and for international law, With its commitment to unilateralism, disinformation, covert
action, sneak military attacks, a nation acting as a law unto itself, the Reaganite foreign policy has earned the indictment of the Regius Professor of Modern History at
Oxford and a notable military historian, Michael Howard. The Reagan theory of "acting like a superpower," Sir Michael observes, is that the United States "should imitate
the Soviet Union in rejecting all the constraints on international behavior that had
been so painfully built up within the international community over the last three
hundred years/'^
Twenty-five years ago the Soviet Union was still on the move as an agressive power.
But now, so far as I can see, the old Cold War is finished. The great communist powers, in severe economic trouble as a result of their own internal contradictions, are
today renouncing the economics of communism, discovering virtue in free markets
and seeking, in Gorbachev's improbable words, to unshackle "grass-roots initiative."
Communism, as the world has known it, Is a burnt-out faith. When a president of
the United States can call Marxist Nicaragua, a desperately poor country with a population of less then three million, "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national
security" of the republic, one can only wonder what Bonzo has been smoking.
Because the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, we cannot expect
to attain all our international objectives by ourselves alone. We must learn to work
with other nations to advance our purposes. We must see the world of law as in the
American interest. We must regard military action as the last, not the first, resort. We
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must seize the new opportunities for negotiation to press for the reduction of nuclear
stockpiles. And a liberal foreign policy must understand that our major vulnerability
in the years ahead may be not military but economic.
The United States under Ronald Reagan has lived considerably beyond its means—
an indulgence made possible by the influx of foreign capital into the American economy, In half a dozen years he marvelously succeeded in transforming the United States
from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor. Never before in American history has the American economy been so much at the mercy of decisions taken
by foreigners. "The United States," Felix Rohatyn has said, "has lost its position as
an independent power." Reaganism has left the republic "a first-rate military power
and a second-rate economic power."^ And, as Michael Howard points out, "There is
little comfort in a situation where the economy is in ruins but defenses remain intact,
for under such circumstances defenses do not remain intact for very long."^
It is this situation that has led Paul Kennedy to warn that the United States, like
other world powers before it, may well have succumbed to "imperial overstretch'—
that is, the assumption of military and political commitments beyond its power to fulfill. Now imperial overstretch is a real problem, but it is a remediable problem. It need
not be an inexorable cause of national decay. Japan and Germany have survived not
only imperial overstretch but devasting military defeat to become mighty economic
forces in the contemporary world. The United States still has the ideological, scientific and technological dynamisn, the political and economic resilience, the diverse and
resourceful population, the robust national ideals that, if joined to creative statecraft,
can make it a world leader for years to come.
A new liberal administration must regard the redress of America's international
economic vulnerability as a top priority in foreign policy. This will mean the adjustment and reduction of our military and political commitments, the realistic sharing
of burdens with the allies to whom we have been supplying protection and the replacement of military bluster by diplomatic skill in this era when negotiation suddenly holds
out more promise than it has done for over half a century. But it will mean above all
a policy of national renovation at home.
Here again we must consider the two questions: what liberals have learned from
their last experience in power and what they have learned from the Reaganite critique
of liberalism. I suppose that the defining mark of American liberalism in this century
has been the commitment to affirmative government as one of the means by which
a free people helps the helpless and promotes the general welfare. Where Reaganism
denounces government as the problem, liberalism has seen government as a vital element in the solution.
I find little in the record of affirmative government since 1933 to justify the Reaganite
assault. Nor was Reagan elected in 1980 because the voters accepted his laissez-faire
creed. He was elected because the voters could not abide the thought of four more
years of Jimmy Carter; and he was re-elected in 1984 because his deficits had produced,
in the best Keynesian style, a recovery from the recession of 1981-82. Nor do I think
I am alone in this favorable assessment of affirmative government. However much
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polls may show dislike of big government in the abstract, they also show hearty support for the services and securities big government provides—as David Stockman
discovered to his dismay.
They further show, however, a distinct desire that these services be provided efficiently, economically and humanely. Sometimes government intervenes too much.
Its regulations become pointlessly intrusive. Its programs miscarry. Exasperations
accumulate—and lead to the private-interest phase in the political cycle. The Reagan
counterrevolution may well have been a bracing experience for the American government, usefully purging the national system of assorted encrustations, excesses and
vested interests. But an emetic is not a cure. And Reaganism, while tapping and inflaming the accumulated exasperations, has quite failed to transform them into a revolution against the affirmative state.
Like his conservation predecessors, Reagan aimed to shrink the role of government.
Unlike the others, he discovered a way to do it. His innovation was to use tax reduction and defense spending to create vast budgetary deficits and then to use deficits
to force the cutback of social programs. "We can lecture our children about extravagance
until we run out of voice and breath"as he put it. "Or we can cut their extravagance
by simply reducing their allowance." Reagan's contrived deficits will hobble liberal
successors until they can succeed in putting our fiscal house into some kind of order.
The Reagan strategy will have a further—and ironic—consequence. His deficits not
only deny government easy resort to social spending. They also deny government
the resort to fiscal stimulus in the event of recession. Fiscal medicine is less effective
as the deficit grows. As with drugs, when you increase the dose too much it may become lethal. Keynesianism is a conservative policy because it deals in economic aggregates and leaves the structure of private economic decision intact. With Ronald
Reagan eliminating the fiscal stimulus, the only recourse in the next economic crisis
will be direct government intervention. So Reaganism may well end by opening the
door to the planned economy.
Other national problems call for a return to affirmative government. Let me list a
few: the need for education that will equip Americans for a high-technology era and
restore American productivity and competitiveness in world markets; the need to retrain
workers dispossessed by the flight of industry to the Third World; the need to rebuild
the nation's infrastructure, that network of highways, railroads, bridges, tunnels, harbors, waterways, sewage systems on which our quality of life depends; the need to
give racial minorities economic opportunity and social justice; the need to bring education and employment into the ghettos; the need to rescue the homeless and the
underclass; the need to provide health care for all Americans; the need to reform our
casino economy and to subject stock exchange chicanery and unbridled speculation
to effective public regulation. These are all needs the republic must meet if it is to
play a role in the future. None of them can be met by the laissez-faire marketplace.
These needs arise, moreover, at a time when the economic margins for maneuver
and for error are contracting. Liberal leadership will have to rise above those worthy
special interests—labor, women, blacks, old folks and the rest—that have become their
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electoral refuge and regain a commanding national vision of the problems and prospects
of the republic. Liberals might well renew the idea of a "concert of interests" so compellingly advanced by Franklin Rossevelt half a century ago. "I am not speaking of
an economic life completely planned and regimented," FDR said. "I am speaking of
the necessity, however, in those imperative interferences with the economic life of the
Nation that there be a real community of interest, not only among the sections of this
great country, but among its economic units."The public interest, Roosevelt emphasized, must dominate. "To do otherwise is to go from group to group in the country,
promising temporary and often times inexpedient things... .Each unit of it must think
of itself as part of a greater whole; one piece in a large design."**
We live in an age that presses upon the limits of resources. The logic of such an
age is not competition but coordination, a working partnership among government,
business and labor and directed toward economic growth and equity. The essence
of the process must be consultation, negotiation and legislation, not edict or decree.
If there is to be a binding common purpose to protect the general interest against the
scramble of organized private interest, government, as the unit most directly accountable to the people, must always be the senior partner.
Government is not a sovereign remedy. The fewer responsibilities loaded on the
national authority, the better it will be able to discharge those it cannot escape. The
more responsibilities that can be discharged by the market or local or voluntary initiative, the better. The national government should intervene only when local and private efforts manifestly fail to promote the general welfare. But when such efforts do
fail, then government must accept the obligation to act. The idea of a public-private
partnership in managing the economy does not win applause in all quarters. The right
denounces it as statism, the left as corporatism. Yet in view of the instabilities and
inequities produced by the laissez-faire market and the horrors produced by total state
ownership, what alternative for those who cherish democracy is there to experimentation with forms of government-business-labor coordination in a free economy? This,
at any rate, is the direction which it seems to me the project of national renovation
must take.
"America," Woodrow Wilson wrote a century ago, "is now sauntering through her
resources and through the mazes of her politics with easy nonchalance; but presently
there will come a time when she will be surprised to find herself grown old—a country crowded, strained, perplexed,—and when she will be obliged...to pull herself
together, adopt a new regiment of life, husband her resources, concentrate her strength,
steady her methods, sober her views, restrict her vagaries, trust her best, not her average, members. That will be the time of change."^
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'88
T h e t i m e of c h a n g e foreseen by W o o d r o w Wilson will s o o n b e u p o n u s . This is t h e
challenge t h a t liberalism m u s t h a v e t h e intelligence, n e r v e a n d d e t e r m i n a t i o n to a d d r e s s in t h e d e c a d e of o p p o r t u n i t y i m m e d i a t e l y a h e a d .
' Michael Howard, "A European Perspective on Reagan," Foreign Af^irs, America and the World
1987-88.
^ Felix Rohatyn, "Restoring American Independence," Nezv York Revieziwf Books, 18 February 1988.
^ Michael Howard, 'A European Perspective on Reagan," Foreign Affairs, America and the World
1987-88.
' Franklin D. Roosevelt, Public Papers . . . 1918-1932 (New York, 1938), 632, 782, 784.
5 Woodrow Wilson, "Bryce's American Commonwealth: A Review," Ihlitical Science Quarterly, March
1889.
38
International Perspectives
Central America: In Search of Peace
by Oscar Arias Sanchez, Julio Icaza,
Alfredo Cesar and Roberto Eisenmann
During 1987-88, the Institute of Politics sponsored several programs dealing with issues of peace and conflict in Central America, Following are edited excerpts from four public addresses delivered in the ARCO
Forum of Public Affairs. Dr. Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of Costa Rica and author of the Arias Peace
Plan spoke September 24, 1987 on "The Central American Situation and the Peace Plan." Ambassador
fulio Icaza, Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations from Nicaragua spoke January 27,
1988 on "The Peace Process and Economic Change in Nicaragua: The Sandinista Perspective." Alfredo
Cesar, Director of the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance spoke Janaury 28, 1988 on "Democracy in Nicaragua:
The Resistance Perspective." Roberto Eisenmann, editor-in-exiie of La Prensa of Panama City spoke April
14, 1988 on "The Crisis in Panama."
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ; The peace plan signed in Guatemala City fosters reconciliation wherever brothers are killing each other. We have asked for dialogue and for
amnesty. We want a cease-fire as quickly as possible. We are asking for democratization to be achieved within a fixed time period. We have asked for free elections that
reflect the true will of the majority of the people. We demand that all powers interfering in the region suspend their military aid. We want a guarantee that the territory
of no country will be used as a springboard for aggression against another. We seek
a reduction of armaments. We ask for national and international supervision of the
compliance with the agreement from the Contradora Group and the Support Group
and from the Secretaries General of the United Nations and the Organization of American States. We are proposing guidelines for the evaluation of progress toward peace.
We affirm that in democracy and freedom we will return to the development path
that will lead us to lasting peace. These points reflect years of work of the Contadora
Group and carry the weight of a century of democracy and freedom of my people.
The peace agreement is an open road. We have undertaken in good faith to work
for peace. We have given ourselves deadlines. In particular, we have established common goals to achieve. Some of them we will achieve before the deadlines, and others
may take longer. We will not fall into a trap set by someone who shows us a calendar
every day, anxious to bury the last hope, anxious to close the last door. We will not
give up our effort to make reason prevail and to promote reconciliation, dialogue and
democracy in Central America.
I am not blind to the might of the forces opposing us. It is easy to predict defeat.
I have taken the Costan Rican road that leads me to build, the road that requires more
effort and more imagination and more strength as the obstacle gets greater. We are
an unarmed people, and we do not want war.
Since the signing of the peace plan there have been further developments. The five
Central American countries are engaged in dialogue. Their presidents, ministers, and
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International Perspectives
technical staffs are talking. This has not happened in years. The guerrillas and the
government of EI Salvador want to start talking to each other again. La Prensa has been
reopened again without censorship in Nicaragua. Committees of national reconciliation have been established. Yet other developments betray a hopefulness that we Central Americans would like to nurture. I am sure that if all the democracies united to
search for peace by nonmilitary, diplomatic and political means, we would succeed
in our purpose.
I have often said that peace and development go hand in hand. We desperately need
peace because we urgently need development. There are injustices to address that
can wait no longer. An alliance of the American democracies is essential to peace in
Central America. If we stand united, the challenge, though difficult, can be met.
Separately, we risk watching how the war intensifies.
Years ago, when 1 was a university student, I was judged on my examinations by
men who were wise and severe. Today I am being judged by men who want peace
and an end to their hunger. I have never abandonded the ideals I embraced in the
university classroom. 1 feel that I am still being judged by the same teacher. The sage
of yesterday is the people of today.
Dear friends, I urge you never to abandon the ideals you now share, never to disassociate what you study today from what you do tomorrow in order to make society
more just. I have learned that he who fights for ideals is never defeated. We can always
start over, our heads held high, when the struggle is for peace, for development and
for democracy.
JULIO ICAZA: From the 7th of August, 1987 to the 15th of January, 1988, Nicaragua
took several steps in compliance with the Guatemala Agreements, the so-called Arias
Peace Plan. We appointed Cardinal Obando y Bravo, one of the main opposition figures,
as head of the National Commission in charge of verifying the commitments of an
internal commission. We reopened La Prensa, and Radio Catolica, and abolished press
censorship. We also freed close to 1000 political prisoners and opened indirect talks
with the Contras with the purpose of achieving a cease-fire. At the same time, two
laws were approved by our National Assembly, one declaring a broad amnesty and
the other one lifting the stale of emergency, both conditioned on the verification by
the internal commission that all outside support for the regular forces of Contras has
ceased. I must point out that these conditions were explicitly contemplated in the
Arias peace plan which established the concept of simultaneity for compliance with
the different commitments. We were not obliged to open direct talks with the Contras
because the Arias plan does not require such action.
During this period of time, the International Commission kept on working. They
traveled several limes to the region, analyzed the reports submitted by the governments and met with national commissions on opposition parlies. They also devoted
a good deal of their time to exploring the possibilities for the establishment of an in
situ verification mechanism, an effort blocked by the Honduran govermenl. Finally,
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International Perspectives
they prepared an extensive, accurate and objective report on compliance with the
Gualamala Agreements that was delivered to the five Central American presidents
on the occasion of the San Jose summit only two weeks ago.
Before the San Jose summit, the U. S. administration sent [National Security Advisor Lt. Gen.) Colin Powell and [Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American
Affairs] Elliot Abrams to meet with the governments of Guatamala, Honduras,
El Salvador and Costa Rica. The aim was to get a formal declaration by those governments on the failure of the Arias plan due to lack of compliance by the Nicaraguan
government. If they refused to do so, the administration threatened them with the
withdrawal of all economic aid. Despite this blackmail, the San Jose summit took place
and had concrete results.
The International Commission's report clearly recognized the efforts made by the
Nicaraguan government, in spite of the state of war, toward democratization. On the
other hand, it uncovered the tragic situation of the peoples of El Salvador, Honduras
and Guatamala, victims of systematic human rights violations and the burdens imposed on those governments by the militaries, the de facto powers in those countries.
Moreover, point 21 of the report stated clearly that, "Despite the call made by the Central American presidents, it is still the policy and practice of the U. S. government
to give assistance, military in particular, to the regular forces who are acting against
the Nicaraguan government. A definite halt to such assistance continues to be an indispensable condition for the success of the peace efforts and the process as a whole."
The report also contained two specific recommendations for the presidents. One,
the establishment of an in situ verification mechanism viewed as a sine qua non condition for the functioning of the Commission. Two, drafting a kind of calendar for
actions to be negotiated and adopted by the governments as a way out of the stalemate
created by the lack of agreement on the concept of simultaneity. As a result of the
San Jose summit, the validity of the commitments agreed upon in Guatamala five
months before was violated. The concept of simultaneity was replaced by the concept
of immediate and unilateral compliance. In this regard, the San Jose declaration says,
"Because they are not entirely satisfied with the level of compliance with the Esquipulas commitments, the presidents undertake to meet the unconditional and unilateral
commitments that oblige the governments to total and inexcusable compliance. These
include a dialogue, talks to arrange a cease-fire, a general amnesty and above all,
democratization, which necessarily includes the lifting of any state of emergency, complete freedom of the press, political pluralism, and putting an end to the Special
Tribunal."
Despite Nicaragua's strong objections, the functions of verification were given to
an executive commission comprised by the five Central American foreign ministers.
We consider, in this regard, that the principle that no one can be judge and defendant
at the same time must be respected. Therefore, Nicaragua has already asked the Secretaries General of the United Nations and of the Organization of American States, as
well as Contradora and its Support Group, to verify Nicaragua's compliance with the
Guatemala and San Jose Accords. We think that verification must be carried out by
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International Perspectives
an independant and objective body such as the International Commission originally
created in Guatemala.
According to the agreement reached at the San Jose Summit, the Nicaraguan Government lifted the state of emergency and abolished the Special Tribunal. We also agreed
to include two senior Nicaraguan officials in continuing to negotiate a cease-fire with
the Contras. The next round of talks are going to take place tomorrow in San Jose,
Costa Rica. In accordance with the Guatemala Accords, these negotiations will be on
specific military matters related to a cease-fire. Once a cease-fire is agreed upon, and
the Contras accept the amnesty, they will be able to participate fully and freely in the
national dialogue already underway with the civic opposition with the purpose of
discussing political matters. Moreover, as soon as a cease-fire is achieved, we will declare
an amnesty for all political prisoners. If we fail to achieve such a cease-fire, we have
offered to send these prisoners to countries outside of Central America willing to accept them and they will be able to come back to Nicaragua as soon as the war is ended
Furthermore, the Nicaraguan delegation announced in San Jose two new proposals
to enhance the prospect of achieving a cease-fire with the Contras and incorporating
them into the political life of the country with irrevocable guarantees that they will
enjoy full political rights and civil liberties. These will include the right to organize
a new political party or join the existing parties and participate fully in free and fair
national and municipal elections. First, Nicaragua proposed the establishment of a
special international commission to assure that these rights and liberties are fully enjoyed by all Contras who elect to compete for power politically, rather than militarily.
The international commission would be composed of representatives of the following
organizations: The United Nations, the Organization of American States, Contradora
or its Support Group, the Christian Democrat International, The Liberal International, The Socialist International, The Republican Party of the United States, and the
Democratic Party of the United States. These organizations would ensure that
Nicaragua's commitment to full democratization, set forth in the Esquipulas Accords,
are fulfilled and that all Contras who renounce the use of military force, will enjoy
full democratic rights.
ALFREDO CESAR: The Central American peace plan affirms two things: One, that
only democracy can bring peace to the rrgion and two, that democracy will not be
obtained by military means. I will repeat that because it is fundamental. Number one
says that only democracy will bring peace to Central America and number two says
that democracy will not be obtained by military means. This must sound to you like
a contradiction, that a member of an armed force in a civil war would declare that
this objective cannot be brought about by the use of arms. The principle holds true
only in one case, and that is if democracy is the objective of the group. The quiet strength,
the legitimacy, of democracy lies in its requirement of consent that is independent
of all force. It is consensus that makes for a society at peace. The failure to elicit that
consent is the most corrosive element at work on any regime built on the pillars of
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hiteniational Perspectives
compulsion, intimidation, alienation and subordination of due process to the agenda
of the state. One does not achieve consensus by cramming treatises on democracy,
no matter how excellently reasoned, down other persons throats with a bayonet.
Democracy that is true to it's name comes about by political settlements, not by military ones.
So much for theory. In practice, the conditions for a political settlement sometimes
become visible only after there is no doubt as to what the outcome of the military
contest will be. This is why the strategy of the Nicaraguan Resistance comprises both
military and political policies. The objective of our military strategy is to reclaim our
rightful seat at the bargaining table. The combatants and supporters of the Resistance,
Nicaraguans each and every one of us, have been forced to the very serious step of
armed struggle because the Sandinista regime felt confident of its strength to deprive
us of our fair voice in the process of governing our collective destiny. We want the
military struggle to pass to the political arena as quickly as possible. This means a
cease-fire and negotiations for democratic reforms. All along, we have been prepared
for dialogue with the realistic elements of the Sandinista Front, hoping that they would
step forward and recognize that we are Nicaraguans too, that they cannot afford to
continue denying us that seat.
The problems of Nicaragua are complex, like those of any developing country. If
Nicaragua is to achieve full nationhood, these problems will have to be addressed
by the energies and talents of all Nicaraguans. The revolution of 1979 sought a democratic
consensus, but it must be an inconclusive consensus as long as the nine Commandantes of the FSLN remain obstinate in the belief that they are the only ones that know
the whole solution for Nicaragua. They will stand in the way of all solutions. They
will be, in fact, the problem—which is at bottom political.
The military strategy of the Resistance calls for creating the conditions in which the
question of democratic political change can and must be addressed. By contrast, the
strategic objective of the Sandinista regime has never centered around a project of
negotiations with Nicaraguans. Quite the contrary. Externally, their entire diplomatic
and propagandistic effort has radiated from the concept that such a project must never
be contemplated, that the issue of dialogue among Nicaraguans must never be faced.
That is why we in the Resistance are referred to as "mercenaries." That is why the
parties and groups of the internal opposition in Nicaragua are referred to as "the dupes
of the mercenaries." That is why Mr. Martinez refused to appear on this platform with
me tonight to discuss our differences in an open debate. It would be impossible for
us to reach any agreement on our similarities as Nicaraguans since the regime forbids
him from recognizing that 1 am also a Nicaraguan. In the Sandinista program, some
Nicaraguans are more than others; others are not at all.
The exclusive quality of Sandinista power structures have turned the revolutionary
program of 1979 to the service of a parody of consensus. As Tomas Borge repeats to
his militants, "Nicaragua is a free country; anyone can leave who wants to." The
monolithic front presented to the outside world by the Sandinistas has been purchased
at the price of war and massive exile. The maintainance of a revolutionary status quo
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International Perspectives
means constant militancy and intimidation by an army of petty bureaucrats with vested interest in tension and the highest population of political prisoners per capita in
Latin America after Cuba. When we marched into Managua after the fall of Somoza,
there were some eight hundred political prisoners in Somoza's jails. Today we know
of at least 9,000. At the height of the war against Somoza, there were perhaps 2,000
Nicaraguans living in exile abroad. Today there are over 500,000 out of a nation of 3
million.
Internally, the Sandinista objective has been simply to strangle any power or atomize
any association which does not function on the basis of hierarchies radiating directly
to the state. The notion of independence, of self-reliance, is anathema to them. Lines,
ranks, and collectives are the order of the day. The most chilling testimony given by
Major Miranda of the Sandinista program involved the peasants. In order to end the
resistance, says Miranda, the Sandinista leadership knows that it must eliminate virtually the entire peasant class, as it has been doing. It is small wonder that the
Nicaraguan Resistance is a movement with, to use Marxist terminology, a social base,
that is to say a movement whose origins are found in a social class, most notably the
peasants of north, south, and central Nicaragua, and the Miskitos of the Atlantic coast.
Such a status quo can be maintained only through the use of force. Last year it became
evident that Sandinista control of these regions, comprising eight-tenths of Nicaragua's
territory, rested on the strategic advantage given them by the squadron of around 40
MI24 and 25 and MI18 attack and general purpose Soviet helicopters. The boundaries
of Sandinista authority coincided with the range of Sandinista artillary in Nicaragua.
On paper there is universal consensus but in fact there is no choice for Nicaragua
in that democracy is the only path. In signing the Esquipulas Agreement, Daniel Ortega
implicitly recognized that the basis on which his power has rested for the last eight
years is unacceptable. Yet behind this facade of semantic unity, absolutely incompatible conceptions of the role of public consent are at work. The Sandinistas call their
project democratic, meaning of course the Marxist/Leninist model of the so-called popular democracies, for example, North Korea, Bulgaria, and so forth, with whom they
have the closest ties. Our view is that only a pluralistic democracy can bring stability
to Nicaraguan society. The model we point to is a country like our neighbor Costa
Rica. The truth is that if the Nicaraguans are to survive as a people, pluralistic democracy
is an objective necessity for us.
The Marxist/Leninist project of the Sandinista regime is, on the one hand, a radically centralizing movement. Yet at the same time, it has unleashed centrifugal forces
of devastating strength on Nicaraguan society. From a revolution that unified, this
has become a regime whose goal is the atomization of Nicaraguan society. The goal
of the Sandinista party is the ultimate subordination to the Army-Party-State complex
and the revolutionary status quo of all levels of civil society which intervene between
the individual and the state. This is what we mean by totalitarianism. In the new
Nicaragua, there can be no private purposes, only revolutionary purposes, by which
is meant Sandinista. This passionate fear of the independent individual, and in par-
44
International Perspectives
ticular, collective expression, this compulsion for regimentation and control over
every aspect of individual life has indeed made it impossible to live in Nicaragua.
ALBERTO EISENMANN: In 1968, Panama had a military coup eleven days after a new
president took over with a very large mandate from the people. That was our first
experience with a military government. Our police force rapidly became a military
institution. The coup and the military government received the whole-hearted support of the United States government for many reasons, the simplest one to explain
being that the Canal Treaty relationship was already in the air and U. S. policy makers
believed it was easier to negotiate with a one-man government than a democratic government. After twenty years of military rule, there are two new political phenomenon
emerging, one in the opposition and one in the regime. The opposition is very clearly
a spontaneous eruption from the people that had very clear intentions of using as
its vehicle non-violent protests, possibly the first example of non-violent struggle in
Latin America and truly the result of the genius of the people, because it was non-led.
Those of us who believe profoundly in democracy believe in the genius of the people, that the people normally know much better than the elites what is best for them.
The opposition chose non-violence because it is our tradition as a people to be nonviolent and chose also to be non-partisan. The flag of the movement is white so there
can be no doubt that no political party is being represented.
This movement started in the middle class. You can read in the press that this is
the revolution of the middle class as if there was something wrong with that, but
every revolution in the history of the world, including the Soviet Revolution, started
in the middle class. In time, the movement permeated upwards to include elites, the
business class, and also permeated downwards to include all classes. A class solidarity has come about within the movement that will make for a better Panama when
this crisis is over.
Right from the start the movement went directly to the heart of the matter unlike
other protest movements which had been skirting the issue. The movement said Noriega
must go and has also called for total sacrifice by the Panamanian people which has
been necessary as we are now in the eleventh month of consistent and persistent
protests.
On the regime side, the new political phenomenon is what I call narco-militarism.
It has destroyed our institutions, made our people poorer, sold our country to the
drug lords and, worst of all, has an economy all its own quite distinct from the economy of the country. Panama can literally become a wasteland and narco-militarism continue as long as that wasteland is still theirs. It is an enterprise that functions quite
efficiently. As always, those that are part of the Mafia cannot leave the Mafia. If
Noreiga gets on an airplane tomorrow, the contract on him is out immediately. He
knows that so he has enormous incentive to say what he knows, especially after the
U.S. drug indictments against him. If Noreiga flew to Madrid tomorrow, a week would
not go by before the U.S. government would contact him or he would contact the U.S.
45
luternational Perspectives
government. The conversation would be more or less, "What can I tell you to get these
indictments off my back?" So, he cannot move even if he wanted to.
There are academic studies of dictatorial regimes heading toward democratic regimes
with lists of conditions necessary for such change to occur. I'll point to those I consider
most important. First, there must be a severe legitimacy crisis resented by the people
and demonstrated on a daily basis. Second, the regime must be totally exhausted
without any capability of building a national project supported by a majority of the
people, Third, the economy must turn political with business groups realizing that
economic solutions are not possible without prior political solutions. Fourth, professional groups—teachers, doctors, students, women's groups—must be pressing for
political change. Fifth, there must be an institutional crisis within the armed forces
or the power base of the dictatorship. Sixth, all forces opposed to the regime must
form an alliance with flexibility that comes from the recognition that the regime will
not fall tomorrow. Seventh, international forces must isolate the regime.
There is no doubt that all of those conditions are met in Panama today. Why is the
man still there? It is because of this new political phenonmenon, the narco-militarism,
a condition that has yet to be added to academic study lists. The fact is that he can't
leave, he has to be forced out. This is not a Marcos or a Duvalier because of the narco
ingredient.
The U. S. actively supported the regime for 19 years, with Noriega in essence becoming the U. S. administration's pet thug in Latin America. There has been an evoluhon of the U.S. position, especially in the last two years. There were secret hearings
in the Senate regarding Noriega which only a few knew about. Marvin Kalb on NBC
and Sy Hersh in The New York Times did present the Noriega criminal enterprise for
the first time. But nothing happened until after the eruption of the opposition movement and then the number of U. S. and international press reports was enormous
and coverage is still very active. Because of press reports, two extremely aggressive
Senate resolutions from Senators from the entire political spectrum and awakened
public opinion, the U. S. administration became embarrassed of their Noriega relationship. Noriega was not doing anything different but now the people knew who
Noriega was. When it became necessary to take some concrete initiatives, the administration went into total disarray, incoherence, indecisiveness or, as one Senator called
it, cowardice. The State Department is very aggressive and the hawks continue to work
actively with Noriega today. The CIA continues to be very protective of Noriega. The
Pentagon is very indecisive, on the fence, unable to accept that the Panama defense
force which they helped create and arm is now the enemy. The NSC follows the Pentagon position. The conclusion of the opposition forces and of Noriega is that the U.S.
government makes noises, gives the appearance of action, but that both can be completely ignored with no danger, and that it is possible to outwit the United States as
long as you don't directly confront them.
Panamanians are born with a love-hate relationship with the United States. Love
because we knew that we were much better off than most of our neighbors due to
our relationship with the U. S. Hate because of the overpowering presence of the
46
International
Perspectives
U. S. in Panama (nine U S . military bases, a U. S. Submarine Command) and because
of the support for 20 long years of this military dictatorship. Some people feared a
Panamanian backlash to the heavy-handed anti-Noriega rhetoric from Washington,
but just the opposite began to happen. As people perceived the changing U. S. position, they began to shift their position and applaud U. S. action. Now due to the incoherence and lack of follow-through in U. S. policy, there is a backlash of resentment.
People feel you created this monster, you make noises, but we just continue to suffer.
What does the immediate future hold? I think that we Panamanians will continue
to struggle, to make the country totally ungovernable for Noriega. We still have not
been able to achieve the paralysis of the government bureaucracy although we are
getting closer. Noriega is having trouble paying their salaries. As to the armed forces,
as we conduct more and more demonstrations, we hope for change similar to what
occurred in other countries, like Iran, change from the bottom up, soldiers finally taking off their uniforms and joining the people. If we achieve that, the Panamanian defense
force will dissolve. Our objective is the demilitarization of Panama, both by Panama
and by the U. S. We seek a Costa Rican formula. I end with a quote from a Harvard
Nieman Fellow from South Africa, the late Percy Qoboza, "For evil to succeed, it takes
far too many good people to keep quiet and stand by."
Energy Policy: North and South
by Gro Harlem Brundtland and Carlos Andres Perez
The A. ). Meyer Memorial Lecture in Intenmtionai Energy Policy was established in 1986 by the Energy
and Environmental Policy Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government. On September IS, 1987, the
second annuallecture. "The Politics of Oil: A Vieivfrom Nonvay." was delivered by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of f^onvay. On April 19, 1988, the 1988 lecture, "Energy, Cooperation and Development: A Vieiv from the South," was delivered by Carlos Andres Perez, former President of Venezuela and
candidate for reelection in the Venezuelan presidential election in December 1988. Following are edited excerpts from the two lectures.
GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND: "You can disregard the possibility of there being oil
on the continental shelf off the Norwegian coast." That was the considered expert
opinion which the Norwegian government received in 1958. Eleven years later the first
commercial oil discovery was made at the Ekofisk field. By 1975, Norway was a net
exporter of oil and two years later Norwegian natural gas was being pipelined to Great
Britain and to Central Europe.
47
International Perspectives
As a producer and an exporter of oil, we share many common interests with other
oil exporting countries in and outside of OPEC. We see challenges that must be resolved
through global cooperation across traditional economic and political affiliations. It is
not only in Norway's self interest to pursue such interrelations, both in our foreign
and petroleum policy, but in the best long-term interest of all countries. The greatest
challenges still lie ahead of us as exploration and development activities move into
increasingly hostile and difficult areas. We must find technologically safe and costeffective solutions to the problems posed by natural conditions as we penetrate increasing depths under severe climatic conditions.
The major area of future exploration is up north in the Barents Sea which is an area
of considerable political interest. A solution to the unresolved questions concerning
delimitation of the Norwegian and the Soviet continental shelf in the Barents Sea would
contribute greatly to stability and orderly management in these areas. Norway maintains that according to international law the delimitation must be based on the median line. The Soviet Union maintains that the so-called sector line shoud apply. The
size of the disputed area is of a magnitude comparable to Colorado. In the ongoing
negotiations we have indicated our willingness to find a compromise, but so far the
Soviet Union has not responded to this.
It should not be denied that the oil industry is characterized by a production capacity which far exceeds the consumption demand. However, capacity level should not
be the guideline to employ for a non-renewable resource where future needs must
be taken into account. This could lead to a misinterpretation of future energy balances
and overexplcitation of petroleum resources. Policies should be guided by the need
to conserve oil for future generations and by concern for the environmental impact
of burning fossil fuels. Governments have a clear responsibility here. Considering the
expected scarcity of oil in the longer run, this energy source should, as far as possible,
be saved for use in vital sectors and where it is difficult to find alternatives.
In 1986, Norway's production of natural gas exceeded 2.5 billion cubic feet per day.
Our proven reserves can sustain today's level of production for about 100 years. Exploration activities are likely to expand these prospects. All Norwegian gas is exported
to Great Britain and western Europe and is equal to about 11 percent of Europe's gas
consumption. Gas contracts have long-term implications not only for the commercial
parties but in a foreign policy context as well. They require investments in infrastructure and have a lifespan that links buyers and sellers together in a broader political,
economic and security policy framework.
This year the World Commission on Environment and Development, which was
set up by the United Nations, issued its report after 900 days of work. It has been
my privilege to chair this independent commission, whose report will be considered
by the General Assembly of the United Nations for the first time this fall. The report,
"Our Common Future," a document of political consensus is the result of a broad process
of analysis, learning and debate by commissioners from 21 countries, developing and
48
International Perspectives
developed, oil exporting and oil importing, who managed to reach unanimity. It is
not a scientific report but had the benefit of the best available scientific evidence and
minds.
The Commission noted the decisiveness of energy supplies to economic development and the fight against poverty and stressed the importance of energy policy decisions taking place on an environmentally sound basis. Energy consumption is the
source of our most serious environmental problems: acidification of forests and lakes,
warming of the atmosphere, deforestation in the Third World and the danger of
radiation.
Differences in energy consumption between North and South are vast. A person
in the industrialized world uses 80 times as much energy as a person in Southern
Africa. More than half the world's population relies on fuelwood for cooking, light
and heat. A safe and environmentally sound energy program that will sustain human
progress into the distant future is clearly called for. New dimensions of political will
and international cooperation are required. Developing countries will need much more
energy to continue to develop while we in the North must strive to stabilize our energy consumption. Some energy studies indicate that we can reduce our consumption
by up to 50 percent and still obtain the same benefits—if nations would make energy
efficiency the cutting edge of their energy policies.
In order to ensure the necessary investments in energy conservation and in the development of alternative sources of energy, the Commission recommends that oil prices
be stabilized at a reasonable level and that new mechanisms for encouraging dialogue
between consumers and producers be explored. Far more funds must be allocated
to research in new and renewable sources. Broad international cooperation is needed
to direct, guide and fund the large-scale research necessary.
The Commission is sounding an alarm, but it does not paint a gloomy picture of
the future. Quite the contrary. We believe that human resources and ingenuity and
our capacity to address the issues in a responsible concerted manner have never been
greater and that we can indeed solve both energy and environmental problems in a
new era of economic growth—an era in which economy and ecology are merged at
all levels of decison-making and where there is a more equitable distribution of wealth
within and among nations.
CARLOS ANDRES PEREZ: It should go without saying that if international cooperation is essential in a world of growing interdependence, it is inexcusable if we do not
promote such cooperation within our own hemisphere. Historical reasons as well as
self-interest demand this of us.
Our proven reserves of conventional crude oils have tripled and now stand at 60
billion barrels. This and the vitality of our nationalized oil industry give Venezuela
a unique strategic position and underwrite its future as a secure and trustworthy oil
supplier. Additionally, the immense recoverable reserves of the Orinoco Oil Belt, estimated at over 250 billion barrels, also have a high strategic value within the hemisphere.
49
International Perspectives
This is significant given the considerable reduction in U.S. recoverable reserves and
your country's growing dependence upon imported oil.
There is, therefore, ample scope for strengthening the traditional cooperation in energy matters between our two countries. Throughout the 65 years of Venezuelan oil history, my country has delivered some 25 billion barrels of oil to the United States, a
volume that amounts to more than 50% of our total accrued production. This has been
reflected in a relationship both stable and progressive between our two countries, one
that has adapted to the circumstances of war and of peace, as well as to periods of
prosperity and moments of crisis. It is perhaps worth remembering here what Venezuelan supplies meant to the United States during the oil embargo.
But there are elements that worry us. We have followed with interest the free trade
agreement concluded between Canada and the United States. Obviously, we are in
favor of increasing the well-being of friendly nations and the relations between their
peoples. What would be unacceptable to us is that such agreements should be used
in practice as instruments of discrimination against our country.
Venezuelans still remember the unfair treatment we received from the United States
when the program of oil quotas was in place between 1959 and 1973. That program
resulted in preferential treatment for Canadian crude oil, which was exempted from
licensing requirements applied to Venezuela.
We are also greatly concerned with the possibility of the approval of a tax on imported oil. This is a recurring theme, resulting from the justifiable debate in this country
over the persistence of your trade and fiscal deficits as well as the need to raise domestic oil prices. An oil import fee may produce temporarily positive effects in the sense
desired.
However, such a measure would be counterproductive regarding international cooperation, particularly within this hemisphere. It can also be shown that the costs falling
upon foreign producers would be greater than the benefits accruing to the U.S. The
plain fact is that world welfare would suffer adverse effects notwithstanding any benefits
to the U.S., which in any case would be no more than transient. Since it would weaken
the Venezuelan oil industry I do not hesitate in defining it, ipso facto, as strategically
dangerous for the U.S.
It needs to be remembered that it has basically been due to oil revenues that we
have been able to meet our international financial obligations promptly. Since 1982,
Venezuela has paid more than $30 billion to service its foreign debt; a sum equivalent
to Venezuela's oil income accruing over the last three years.
Our capacity to pay is without doubt strongly determined by the operations of our
national oil industry. As President Jaime Lusinchi said some time ago, we were lent
money on the strength of our oil income and by that same measure we shall pay it back.
Regarding hemispheric cooperation and particularly the ways for tackling oil and
energy problems of the hemisphere, I have kept up a continuing dialogue with various distinguished friends in the U.S. Among these individuals is Senator Bill Bradley,
a man of wide and realistic vision in international affairs.
On every occasion when Venezuela has shown interest in some form of agreement
for the hemisphere, the U.S. was not receptive. Conversely, when the U.S. has shown
50
International
Perspectives
interest, we were not responsive. I consider that the theme is a very important one
and am convinced that we should both seek to advance the definition of our common
interest with a view to strengthening our efforts at mutual cooperation.
In these conversations to which I have referred, I have encountered a great stimulus
when I reflect upon the potential for and viability of hemisphere cooperation. There
is widespread and growing recognition in this country of the important role played
by Venezuelan oil in supplying the energy needs of the U.S. We must take great care
to ensure that irreparable damage to the cooperative relationship between our two
countries does not occur. Adoption of an oil import fee could cause such damage.
Dialogue on Northern Ireland
by Charles J, Haughey
Charles }. Haughey, T.D.. Prime Minister, Republic of Ireland, spoke In the Forum on "Reflections
Democracy," on April 22, 1988. This article is excerpted from his speech.
The challenge that we face over Northern Ireland is to create a solution that will
restore political cohesion through the exercise of self-determination by the Irish people. This will not be created overnight and though there are no analogies with the
problems other countries have faced there are no instant formulae that can be summoned to our assistance. Violence must first cease as it can have no place in the building of the Ireland of the future that we desire. There will have to be a deliberate and
careful asembling of the elements of a solution, a cautious and prudent assessment
of how the various elements might interlock with each other, and a conscious cultivation of a sense of shared identity and collective purpose among the various parties
in search of a solution.
In my view many of these elements were contained in the Report of the New Ireland
Forum, which represents the agreed position of all the democratic Nationalist parties
North and South. The Forum envisaged new constitutional arrangements which would
accommodate the differing traditions in Ireland in a unity which had been achieved
by consent. That is the outcome that this Government is committed to work for.
To achieve lasting peace and stability in Northern Ireland as well as reconciliation
requires that the substance of the issues at stake be addressed. Temporary, ad hoc
solutions, crisis management or horrified response or reaction to the latest atrocity
are not enough. Political developments in recent years have been influenced mainly
51
Intematiorml Perspectives
by the Anglo-Irish process initialed at a meeting between the British Prime Minister
and myself at Dublin Castle in December 1980. It is clearly the responsibility of the
two Governments involved, the Irish and British, to create a framework within which
progress and political dialogue can take place.
The problem involves what was called in the communique issued after that meeting
the totality of the relationships between the two islands. There followed the AngloIrish Agreement of November 1985, about which my party had reservations because
of its constitutional implications. On coming into office my Government accepted it
as an internationally binding agreement signed between two sovereign Governments
and we set about using to the full the mechanisms of the agreement, particularly the
Intergovernmental Conference and the Secretariat, to bring about any improvement
that was possible in the situation of the people of Northern Ireland, and in particular
the nationalist people.
The Intergovernmental Conference offers scope to confront a long agenda of issues;
issues that are both difficult and divisive. But let me isolate those issues which I believe have a particular resonance here in the United States, because of American experience and sensitivities. These are: the administration of justice, the upholding of
the rule of law, and fair employment.
In the United States the debates that surround judicial nominations, particularly
nominations to the Supreme Court, are of great length and seriousness, because of
the conviction that prevails in this republic that the lives of citizens in a democracy
are shaped in an important and fundamental way by the manner in which justice is
administered. This perception is widely shared in Ireland and attention is focussed
intensely on the administration of justice in Northern Ireland. The defects in the administration of justice are seen as symptomatic of an inadequate society, and the operation of the non-jury Diplock Courts, for example, have an effect well beyond the ranks
of those who are ever likely to appear before such courts.
Democratic parliaments today have cause to be concerned about the control and
methods of operation of their own and other countries intelligence services and security forces. They see increasingly the need for democratic supervision and the need
for governments to uphold without fear of favour the rule of law. It cannot be acceptable that perversion of the course of justice by officers of the state should be publicly
acknowledged and then left at that. While the United States is justly proud of its free
institutions, it has not allowed that pride to stand in the way of investigating and dealing with any infringements of the law or the Constitution. On the contrary, the strength
of American democracy lies in the lengths to which its representatives are prepared
to go to uphold the rule of law and the belief that a democratic state must never in
combatting its enemies depart from the high ground of moral rectitude.
Of basic importance too where modern concepts of democracy are concerned is the
equal access to employment by all sections of the community. Experience of civil rights
in the United States in the '60s brought the fair employment issue here to the centre
of national concern. During the administrations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, vigorous methods were devised to combat racial prejudice in em-
52
fntemalional Perspectives
ployment. The methods devised here in the U.S. might not always be the best adapted
to suit the somewhat different circumstances of Northern Ireland but, nevertheless,
the heightened consciousness of employment equality issues which resulted from the
trauma of the 1960s in the U.S. must also be brought to bear in Northern Ireland and
a sense of real urgency created.
The nationalist community in Northern Ireland has been discriminated against in
employment for too long. It is intolerable that nationalists still remain over twice as
likely to be unemployed as unionists. Improvements are contemplated but there is
an urgent need for comprehensive and effective legislation that will have clear and
visible results.
Though the long shadows of the tragedy of Northern Ireland does fall over too many
aspects of life in Ireland and affects the quality of Anglo-Irish relations, it must be
understood that in the Republic of Ireland by contrast democracy has long grown to
full maturity. Ireland as a modern parliamentary democracy plays a modest but
honourable role in international affairs as an enlightened member of the community
of nations.
53
Challenges for the Nation
Black Politics and the South
by Lottie Shackelford
and Mike Espy
following are edited excerpts from a panel discussion. "Black Palilicat Emergence in The American South,"
held in the Forum on October 15,1987. Panelists were Margaret Edes, authorof Pree At Last: What Really
Happened when Civil Rights Came to Southern Politics; U. S. Representative Mike Espy of
Mississippi; Mayor Harvey Gantt of Charlotte, North Carolina; U. S. Representulive John Leiois of
Georgia; Mayor Lottie Shackelford of Little Rock, Arkansas; atid Thelma Duggin. fall 1987 Felloiv of the
Institute of Politics and fonrjer Special Assistant to President Reagan (moderator)
LOTTIE SHACKELFORD: From a historical point of view, a better title for tonight's
discussion would be, "Reasserting Black Political Power," or " Black Political Reemergence in the South." The first reconstruction occured after the Civil War. In Little Rock
it was referred to as a period of Radical Republican rule and the city's black community experienced a period of representation that today remains unequaled. In the 1870's
Little Rock's city council was composed of four blacks and four whites, a racial pattern
that continued for several years. The city's black population increased from 23 percent
in 1860 to 43 percent by 1870. We had true black folk heroes, such as Mifflin Gibbs,
elected in 1873 to be the first black municipal judge in the United States and was later
the U.S. Consul in Madagascar, and Isaac Gillam who joined the Union Army in Little
Rock three days after the occupation of the city, was elected in 1877 to the city council
and elected in 1878 to the House of Representatives. Then came the collapse of reconstruction and the true, trying history of the black struggle for parity.
One hundred years is a long time to wait, but wait we have for the second reconstruction which began in the 1960's. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to "a partial
realization of a dream deferred." 1 think of it as black folks' reentry or reemergence
in the American South after three quarters of a century of exclusion. In 1962 Leroy
Johnson became the first black elected to the Georgia Senate since Reconstruction and
Henry Frye in North Carolina became the first black Assistant U. S. District Attorney.
The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and year-round voter registration campaigns gave the black electorate sizable increases. In 1940 there were only 250,000 to
275,000 black voters registered in the states of the old Conferederacy. By 1966 those
numbers had increased to more than 2 million. Prior to the Voting Rights Act only
72 elected officials existed in all eleven Southern states. The 1970's was a decade of
the black politicians coming of age with over 6,000 black elected officials by mid-decade
and Congressional victories by the Barbara Jordans and the Andrew Youngs of the
world.
The beginning of the era of black political involvement came on the heels of civil
rights ascendency. In his book Plural but Ecjual, Harold Cruse points to a shift during
54
Challenges for the Nation
the '70s from the politics of civil rights to the politics of black rights. He saw it as a
failure not to create an independent black political party. Cruse claims there were three
black conventions designed to do this, one in Gary, Indiana, one in Cincinnati, and
one in 74 in Little Rock, Arkansas. They all failed. The idea of creating a black political
party was not entirely new of course. The idea was clearly expressed in 1916 by W. E. B.
DuBois who believed that "self-defense knows no nice hesitation. The American negro,
must either vote as a unit, or continue to be politically emasculated as at present."
In making the preservation of the second reconstruction a top priority, we must find
answers for some of the following problems:
• First, how do we correct consequences of the past? We must use the experiences
and wisdom aquired to impact the present and the future. We will all have to work
very hard and not abandon the ship that has brought blacks so many years of trials,
tribulation and discrimination. As Coretta King said, "We must remember, celebrate^
renew, act, to narrow the gap between ideal and the harsh reality of the world in
which millions are still without opportunity, peace and justice. So we must strive
for liberty which will abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, and
class over class. I personally feel that liberty is not only a means to a higher politcal
end, but liberty itself is the highest political end."
• Second, how do we make the political system more responsive to the aspirations
of recently enfranchized blacks without creating a new form of racial polarization?
We must relate the new participation of blacks to the political process and to the
achievement of broader economic objectives. We must get on with the business
of civility and finding justice.
• Third, while playing on the Southern sense of community how do we get it to include more than just one race? Ways must be found to have whites expand their
sense of community.
• Fourth, how do we keep from falling prey to the South's long tradition of spinning
myths about itself? The new South of today has convinced itself it has reached a
new economic Utopia, but In spite of racial progress, race is still a factor and we
must remember that. Such mythology merely encourages a new polarization based
on the distortion of black progress and on a defensiveness similar to that which
has haunted the South during most of its history.
Another myth, explored in the book Black Political Parties, by Hanes Walton, Jr., is
that black politicians can solve the problems that beset black people. Headlines imply
that if black politicians fail to eradicate major problems like poverty, political alienation, and unmployment, that it is a failure of blackness and the agility, skill, and political sophistication of black people. This tragic myth, born of heavy emphasis on the
electoral approach to politics, has pushed blacks to inhuman sacrifices and suffering
to obtain the ballot and elect their own officials. Attaining the right to vote and electing
black officials is not necessarily the only answer. Politics is not always the art of the
possible. What is possible and is happening in the South and all across the nation
is a spirit which says we can work together, not race against race or class against class,
but a spirit of true working together, a spirit which leads all citizens of every race to
55
Challenges for the Nation
work together more earnestly and productively in new community building, finding
ways for the uplifting of all of our communities and of our nation as a whole.
MIKE ESPY: As the only black member from a rural district, I bring a different perspective to the Congressional Black Caucus. My district is very rural. It starts about
thirty miles south of Memphis and goes two hundred miles south to Natchez, starting
on the banks of the Mississippi River on the west and going over a hundred and fifty
miles east. I represent 503,000 people according to the 1980 Census. The largest city
is Greenville with about 60,000 people—a bustling metropolis compared to the rest
of the district. As a candidate, it's very difficult organizing and raising money because
television is not much of a factor and it is just sweat and blood and bringing out the vote.
The Caucus has only three members that come from districts without a guaranteed
majority of blacks, Ron Dellums from Berkeley, Alan Wheat from Missouri and myself. My district is 52 percent black. The 1980 Census suggests 58 percent but high
agricultural-sector unemployment makes it 52 percent before assessing downward for
age, registration and turnout of black voters which would make it come to about 48
percent.
We must continue running for offices in districts with a majority of black voters but
there are also many marginal districts and offices where we must run, that involve
a whole different set of techniques as in my congressional race. Winning the margin
means galvanizing the black base, bringing it out, making sure it's there while being
very careful not to alienate the white community. It's really tough but we can learn
these lessons and field candidates that can appeal to the mainstream white constituency. Such victories yield large rewards in terms of increasing black membership
in Congress, and in offices throughout the South.
We have a position. Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives which was
a very, very powerful position held by a 'good ol' boy.' The Speaker made all the appointments of chairmen of various committees, hand picked the rules committee which
is the traffic cop of legislation, had a substantial say on the budget, had access to the
state airplane and all—until last January when we had sort of a revolution. I'm not
speaking only about my election. We had a set of reform-minded legislators, black
and white, that said we've been working in the vineyards here, we haven't been recognized, we're going to change the rules of the game. Over a period of time they acted
to take away the yoke the Speaker had around everyone's neck, substantially reduce
his power, institute a system of checks and balances. Seeing what was coming the
Speaker elected to retire as Speaker—and from the House. He wasn't really known
as an enlightened man but he made a statement that I certainly will remember. He
said that the winds of change are blowing across Mississippi. Those winds of change
are blowing forcefully not just across Mississippi but all across the South.
56
Challenges for the Nation
Disabilities: The Search for Civil Rights
by Edward M. Kennedy, Jr.,
and Josef Reum
On Decembers, 1987, EdimrdM. Kennedy, jr.. Executive Director of Facing the Challenge and fosef Reum.
Assistant Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Retardation were participants in a panel discussion, "Hieing the Challenge: Consideration ofDisabihly Issues," held in the ARCO Forum of Public
Affairs. Other participants were John Chappell, Deputy Commissioner, hAassachusetts Rehabilitation Commission; Marc Maurer, President, National Federation of the Blind; Clay McDowell, co-founder, Access
Alaska; and Mark Sakaley, chairman. Project Inclusion, fohn F. Kennedy School of Government (moderator). Folloioing are edited excerpts from the remarks of Mr. Kennedy and Mr Reum.
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, JR.: There are three points that I'd like to underscore this
evening. First, people with disabilities should be considered a minority group, like
other groups who have been left out of our society. Only when we are so recognized
can we obtain our full place and rightful citizenship. Second, we need to dismantle
policies which perpetuate dependency and perpetuate segregation. Third, and most
important, we need to work together as a group. Here tonight we have individuals
representing a number of different disabilities with separate needs and different issues. We're not going to make any progress in our civil rights movement until we can
frame those issues and work together.
We have goals and dreams just like everybody else, but unfortunately to have a disability in this society means to be not expected to go to school, not expected to work,
not expected even to have a family. It's not a physical or mental condition that constitutes our greatest handicap, it's society itself and the outdated policies and practices
that keep people out and hold people back. Our struggle is the same type of civil rights
struggle that has gone before. People with disabilities are still educated in separate
schools, still can't get into restaurants. To a person with a mobility impairment, seeing
a set of stairs, even here at Harvard or around the city of Boston, is like seeing a sign
saying "Whites Only"
We come from all different kinds of backgrounds—rich and poor, black and white.
Some of the things that really tie us together are a history of misunderstanding and
fear and segregation. We have a common social history and common goals of acceptance and dignity but I believe that there are greater things that bring us together than
separate us. The history of people with disabilities can really be characterized in two
words; isolation and segregation. People fear us, hold all these different notions and
myths, at least in part because the disabled have been isolated, have not been a visible
and viable part of the community. Our whole rights movement began as a result of
that isolation and segregation.
57
Challenges for the Nation
Many things have happened during the last ten years that have genuinely improved
the lives of people with disabilities. As I said, people with disabilities have not been
expected to get a job. That has changed. The movement has begun to take hold and
society has started to see that people with disabilities deserve to become full members
of society. The very fact that we're having a forum here this evening points to change.
People with disabilities can contribute, can be creative, can have a say in the affairs
of the community.
We have many different issues, basic bread and butter issues; education, transportation, accessible affordable housing—all of them interrelated. A person with a disability is twice as likely to fall below the federal poverty line, twice as likely to be illiterate.
Sixty-five percent of the disabled who are able and willing to work can't find jobs—65
percent. A disabled white man who does find a job will earn 40 percent less that his
able-bodied counterpart; 88 percent less if he is black and disabled. We face not just
architectural barriers, but attitudinal ones as well.
High health care costs affect everyone. One dollar of every $12 spent on social welfare programs—tax money from all of us—is spent for people with disabilities, spent
to subsidize discrimination, to keep people dependent. That has to stop. What are
we going to do in the next 10 to 20 years as the senior citizen population doubles?
They will not be able to ride on accessible public transportation or go into restaurants.
We will all eventually be affected. So we must work together, recognize these are fundamental civil rights issues and work to dismantle existing policies.
JOSEPH REUM: Eighteen of every 100 children born are going to have'a disability.
We are in a growth industry. The way that we ignore the realities of alcohol and pregnancy and what we're doing to our environment means that more and more children
with disabilities are being born. At the same time, technology has advanced so that
children who lived only a matter of weeks just five years ago can now expect to see
60. Earlier this summer, along with some of the Kennedy family, 1 participated as network television for the first time ever depicted people with mental retardation in a
way that expressed dignity, appropriate kinds of behavior, activity and enjoyment,
happiness and friendship and socialization. Too often we're portrayed going out to
overcome some tremendous issue, a little bigger than life, like angels. Many of you
already know we are not exactly angels.
How many of you have seen the advertisement for Coca Cola that has to do with
the arms deal? There's a child, sitting at a table in what looks like the Hall of Congress,
and she says "I am the hope of the world, I am the future" and then other children
file in behind her and sing, kids of every size and color and shape—not a single one
of them disabled. Of course, of those hundred children, eighteen would in reality
be disabled. We need to think about how public policy can affect the quality of life
for those hundred people, make it better than ever before.
People with mental retardation are perhaps the least visible, because they're not
asked to participate. There are very few people who are assistant commissioners for
58
Challenges for the Nation
departments that happen to be mentally retarded. But there are articulate people with
mental retardation who are going around presenting their own cases, talking about
themselves, participating in choices about their lives. There are people moving out
of institutions into communities, becoming your neighbors.
You might have read of the Little League team here in Massachusetts, a team of boys
and girls with disabilities, that was being disenfranchised by the Little League Corporation of America because the team members were said to be an insurance risk and
to need skilled coaches. They were being coached by their parents. 1 mean, who could
know less about children with disabilities than their parents? Right? The people of
Massachusetts including Senator John Kerry and many others decided that was terrible, that everyone should be able to play Little League baseball—the ail-American sport.
The Little League Corporation decided not only to back that team but to make it a
model for the nation. We lost that battle because we still had a segregated team, a
model for 1945, not 1988.
1 work at a job where 1 am supposed to make sure that the system works for people
with Down's Syndrome. Last year, as a student here at the Kennedy School, 1 discovered case studies. At 9:00 a.m. 1 would get a packet of paper about four and onehalf inches thick, weighing about twelve pounds and be told to have it read by 12:00
noon and have all my notes and ideas prepared of what the case is going to do. A
case study is like telling half a story: so and so drives down the road, stops the car,
opens the door, steps out, a car comes racing by at 75 mites per hour, and screech—the
case stops. Each morning 1 would think to myself about a case I might write: I am
interested in having a child. I visit the genetic checking zone and am told the child
is going to have a disability, Down's Syndrome. I've got to decide. Do 1 want to have
that child? Do 1 believe enough in the system that I'm working with, the things that
I'm doing, that I'll go ahead and have that child? A scary question.
59
Challenges for the
Nation
Hispanics in Transition
by Willie Velasquez
The following article is excerpted from the remarks of Willie Velasquez, founder and Executive Director
of the Southzoest Voter Registration and Education Project, San Antonio. Texas and a former Fellow of
the Institute of Politics. Mr Velasquez participated in a panel discussion, "Hispanics in the Political Process:
A Growing Influence," on March 2, 1988 in the Forum. Other participants were City Councillor Maria
A. BerrioTaba of San Antonio; Harry Pachon, Executive Director, National Association ofLati7W Elected
and Appointed Officials; Mayor Xavier Suarez of Miami, Florida; Frank Del Olmo, Nieman Fellow &
columnist forThe Los Angeles Times (moderator). The panel was co-sponsored by the Journal of Hispanic
Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Last Sunday we were in San Antonio with about 75 leaders from 15 towns, training
those leaders as we begin the voter registration drives for the coming city council elections in Texas in May. All of those leaders would agree that the group that is not registering, that is participating the least in the electoral process, is the Mexicans. When 1
ask some of those people why it is that Mexicans don't register to vote, they have several
ideas including some which I first met in my college textbook: 1) it's because of education; 2) they are an atomized society, they don't wort: well together and so you can't
have a registration drive; 3) they come from a country that doesn't have a long history
of democratic processes; 4) after all they're a combination of Spaniards and Indians
so what do you expect from those kind? They say Mexicans may be the first race to
never integrate themselves into the American democratic process. When I tell them
about the U. S. Census Bureau study that showed that Mexicans are the fastest growing registration group in the country, then that turns everything around.
We must ask why it is that for a hundred and some odd years Mexicans didn't register
and didn't vote. 1 contend that Mexicans always wanted to register, to vote, to participate, were ashamed when they didn't register and vote, felt bad about it. Consider
a typical rural south Texas county, Medina County—42 percent Mexicano, adjacent
to San Antonio, not so isolated. The Mexicans in Medina county had never won an
election.
Medina county had not redistricted since 1896. It had a whole tradition of drawing
the lines, deciding where Mexicans ought to live, where blacks ought to live, and they
weren't supposed to change, to move, so no Mexican had ever won. Ever. Put yourself
in the shoes of people living there. For 84 years, 1896 to 1980, never winning an election. If you're Mexican, and you are 42 percent of the population, and you never win
an election, you're going to get depressed about the political process.
The problem was not that the Mexicans didn't want to register and vote. The problem
was that there was outrageous racial gerrymandering, malapportionment, election
schemes. They couldn't win. We had worked there before but we stated working there
60
Challenges for the Natioit
intensively in 1980. We brought lawsuits against school boards, city councils, county
commissions. The last one was settled last week. Of 86 lawsuits we brought, we've
won 85—the 86th is on appeal and we are going to win that one too. The very first
election after all those lawsuits, the Mexicans won.
Well who cares, really, about one county? But the first 66 counties in a row that we
looked at throughout the Southwest were all gerrymandered against Mexicans. We
didn't find one county gerrymandered for Mexicans. Well, 66 to zero is beyond the
range of statistical probability It doesn't happen. So you fix the election system, make
it conform to the American Constitution and you see a remarkable change.
What happened has happened many many times before in this country when an
immigrant group comes in. What you're really seeing is the entrance of a large group
of people who for many years did not participate in the electoral process. What you're
seeing is a transition of a very large group of people—the latest update from the Census Bureau is 18,096,000—entering into the American political process.
Is all this really for Mexicanos, really getting Mexicanos elected? In 1974 there were
1,566 Mexicano elected officials. By 1984, there were 2,861—an increase of 82 percent.
What you are seeing is a transition from powerlessness to power. We need to look
at this transition. We ought to continue the suits—they're crucial. We need to continue
the registration drive and the study.
Also, we need to ask, what is the meaning of this for Mexicans? The whole discussion has to change. The discussion now has to focus on what is going to be our contribution. Going back to the time, 1521, 1519, when an indigenous people did do
something. Looking at the chronicles, you will find they put a lot of emphasis on education, on justice, on high standards for the people they appointed to tribal government in Mexico. That's what the Mexican electorate is now demanding. They will say
it's brilliant, wonderful that we've got 2,861 elected officials but there are a few we
ought to get rid of. Two or three more are not crucial, so we have to get rid of those
that aren't measuring up and be firm about that because the Mexican contribution
must be of highest standards.
Willie Velasquez died on June 15, 1988 at the age of 44 as a result of cancer. He will
be missed by his friends at the Institute of Politics and in the political world.
61
Challenges for the Nation
Reforming Welfare
by Bill Clinton, Mike Castle, Blanche Bernstein,
Nathan Glazer and Ruth Massinga
The inaugural program of the Center jar Health and Human Resources Policy at the John F. Kennedy School
of Government was a panel discussion, "The Politics of Welfare Refjrm," on November 5, 1957 in the
Forum, co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics. Participants included Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas;
Governor Mike Castle ofDelaivare; Blanche Bernstein, author of The Politics of Welfare Reform: The
New York Experience; Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Social Structure, Harvard University:
Ruth Massinga. Secretary of the Maryland Department of Human Reasources; and Mary jo Bane, Director
of the neiv Center (moderator). Following are edited excerpts from that discussion.
BILL CLINTON: For the last eight years people have debated how you could get more
welfare recipients into the work force and at the same time help kids who are in at-risk
families. In March of 1986 the then chairman of the National Governors'
Association, Lamar Alexander, told me that the White House was thinking of putting
together some sort of working group on welfare reform and that he thought the governors should too. Governor Castle and I were enticed into co-chairing this effort which
has now become the work of our adult lives. The task was to try to come up with
welfare reform proposals for the governors. In the summer of that year 1 became chairman of the Governors' Association and asked Mike to take over the Welfare Reform
Task Force which he did. Earlier this year, February 1987, the governors adopted a welfare reform position which essentially had the following elements:
• One, it mandated that in every case a welfare recipient sign a contract with the
state setting forth what responsibilities the recipient should assume in return for
getting the money.
• Two, every recipient who had a child age three or more had to, in return for the
money, engage in a program of education, training and work.
• Three, the state's responsiblities were;
a.) to provide a case management system. That is very important. For people in
social work it's a big issue. How you administer this program is terribly
important.
b.) to provide adequate funds for education and training so that people don't just
go through some sort of hocum job search process. A lot of these people are
functionally illiterate. The program would take people who were really willing
to learn to read and write. There has to be some money there for going to school,
getting training, getting skills.
c.) that no one would ever be penalized by going into the work force because there
would be transitional benefits—Medicaid coverage for the children and some
child care provision, if necessary.
62
Challenges for the Nation
•
Four, strengthening our child support enforcement efforts. We've gotten better in
the last few years. We still have a very long way to go in improving to the maximum
possible extent our child support collection efforts.
Let me enumerate the differences between the While House, the Senate and the
House:
• First, one-half of the states don't cover unemployed parents with welfare—there
can't be a father in a home that gets any AFDC payments. Half of the states do—26,
24. The Senate bill and the House bill mandate unemployed parent coverage; the
White House is adamantly opposed.
• Second, how much, how mandatory, should the education and training services
be? What should be the match of state and federal?. How much money should be
spent on all of that?
• Third, how many waivers, how many programs should the states be able to dismantle, collapse, put the money together and spend it however they want on lowincome people? The Senate bill has a lot of waivers in it, the House bill does not.
The Michel bill is a waiver bill. The White House bill is a waiver bill. The White
House position is to just give everybody all the waivers they want, experiment for
five years, and see what happens. Our position is, we're for waivers as long as they're
not used to undermine the income of iow-income mothers and their children. But
we know enough now to put in place this basic framework.
• Fourth and finally, where should we trigger the mandatory participation in the education, training, and job part of the program? Governor Caine of New Jersey who
has also been a very active leader in this area, got approval to mandate that mothers
with children 2 years old or over participate if appropriate quality day care is available. The administration wants to go down to six months. The present law is six
years. We split the difference at three years.
MIKE CASTLE: The relationship between the governor and the voters in Delaware
is relevant to this issue. Delaware is a small state where there is a long tradition of
open doors and direct contact between politicians and the people they represent. People think nothing of stopping me on the street, as I walk from my residence in Dover
to my office, and demanding an explanation for what I have done or telling me what
they think about this issue or that issue. So I have a pretty good idea of how my voters,
whether they are bankers or construction workers, feel about issues in general, and
welfare reform in particular. They support welfare reform. They want it to work whether
they are responding to the stereotype of welfare loafers, or endorsing the idea of expanding opportunities and helping make people self-sufficient and productive. They
do not support the broad range of changes that have been shoved under reform's umbrella; they support a purer form of welfare reform.
The mandate is to eliminate the disincentives to work and to break the cycle of poverty
and failure that forces generation after generation onto welfare. They are not that different from other states' experiences. In Delaware, 95 percent of AFDC cases were female-
63
Challenges for the Nation
headed households, more than half of were black, 60 percent had dropped out of school.
Most of the 17 million welfare recipients nationwide are women, many are black, many
are forced to confront an increasingly sophisticated work place with inadequate education and training.
There are good economic reasons to solve this problem but there are equally g o o d belter—moral and social reasons. We talk about inalienable rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. Let's make sure that people have the opportunity to exercise
those rights. No one is saying that the governors' welfare reform package, or Senator
Moynihan's or Congressman Downey's, is going to make this world a perfect place
to be. Welfare reform is just part of the solution. A lot of my efforts in Delaware have
gone toward prevention. More and more we try to intervene before there is a problem
by helping small children who don't have enough to eat or who are cold at night or
who can't sleep because their parents are fighting or who have trouble learning or
who need medical attention their parents can't afford. We do this by identifying kids
who are potential dropouts, drug abusers, teen parents, and juvenile offenders, and
by creating programs to keep them on track. If all that works, 20 years from now our
welfare roles will be substantially shorter, our costs will be lower, our businesses will
have more and better educated employees, the United States will be more competitive
in international markets.
Early intervention won't help today's welfare mother nor will it end welfare. We will
always need some sort of program of support for families unable to turn elsewhere.
As long as the current system exists we are condemning millions of women and their
children to deadend lives. We have a system which punishes, no—forbids— initiative
and self-sufficiency.
We live in a world where the average citizen goes to great lengths to make sure he
or she has adequate medical coverage, yet we insist that women newly off welfare
exist without it, that their children's lives and health are entirely at the mercy of luck
in a hospital which takes charity cases. We live in a world where many women interview prospective day-care operators before their children are born to make sure that
their children will have good care, but low-income mothers are lucky to find affordable day care let alone demand high standards. We fund training programs for welfare
recipients but then tell them they can't participate because they don't meet our standards. Worse, we stifle initiative among the people who are most intimately involved
in welfare, those at the state level, by imposing national guidelines that often don't
apply at the state level.
The question is whether there is a mandate for a new round of expensive social programs or whether it is for a change in the philosophy of how we deliver existing programs. We need to change the attitude of state social workers who often see themselves
simply as pay masters so that they will see themselves as guides and helpers bringing
individuals from financial hardship to self-sufficiency. The decision to reform welfare
should be just t h a t - n o t a sweeping increase in government spending in the name
of reform.
64
Challenges for the Nation
This nation was built on the work ethic but for half a century government policy
has run directly counter to that ethic. We propose to make this policy reflect one of
America's most fundamental beliefs by providing opportunities for individuals to get
off welfare, to achieve self-respect and independence, by providing a helping hand
instead of a handout.
BLANCHE BERNSTEIN: Analysts have taken comfort from the decline in the welfare
case load in the 1970s and '80s, have seen it as evidence that the availability of welfare
has little impact on incentives to work, or on teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock
births. I would suggest that the reason for the decline was not sociological or economic but more effective administrative measures. It was only in 1973 that most states began a serious effort to reduce ineligibilty in the case load. It stood at about 18
percent—with the overpayment rate around 27 percent. The full panopoly of measures to reduce ineligibility was not in place until the early '80s. The rate began to edge
down in the mid-70s and finally was reduced to a reasonable level of 4 to 5 percent
in the mid-80s. These administrative measures accounted for the declining and then
relatively stable case load despite an increase in unemployment from the mid-'70s to
the mid-80s and other problems in the society. It was during the '60s up to 1971, when
unemployment
dropped from 6 percent at the beginning of the decade to 3 to 4 percent at the end,
that the welfare case load quadrupled. I note this to stress the importance of effective
administration, and indeed, of administrative feasibility in any welfare reform proposals.
Current welfare proposals—and there are many of them in the Congress and a variety of national and local welfare organizations—whatever their differences conform
in their stress on imposing stricter work requirements on welfare recipients and
enforcing the obligation for child support from the absent parent. I strongly favor both
these efforts, but I would caution that we should not expect too much too soon. Many
welfare clients, AFDC mothers, lack sufficient education and training to obtain more
than relatively unskilled jobs. Efforts to improve these skills will be time consuming
and not always successful. 1 am also troubled by the resurgence of the notion that
there should be an income incentive for AFDC mothers to take jobs. That such a proposal
should come from Mayor Koch of New York City astonishes me. I trust that we will
stay with the current proposals that ensure that no AFDC family will lose money by
taking a job even is this requires some continuing supplementation of earnings to ensure an income not less than the welfare standard including noncash benefits such
as food stamps and health care.
I also am in favor of the proposal which is in several of the bills before the House
and Senate for mandatory guidelines for setting levels of child support. We really should
get the courts out of that business. In principle, I favor immediate wage withholding
for child support but I am concerned about the administrative feasibility of the withholding proposal and hope that it will be carefully considered. I made this point to
a New York congressman recently. He thought it could be left to welfare administra-
65
Challenges for the Nation
tors. As a former administrator, 1 not only think this would be a mistake, I recoiled
from his comment with, i think, a suitable grimace on my face. It really must be looked
at to see if it can work. We can make things worse than they are now. It's always possible.
What is missing from current welfare reform proposals is any concentrated effort
to break the cycle of poverty and dependency by focusing on the children. All our
focus has been on the mothers. There are about 8 million children on welfare in the
United States—about one-third are under 6, roughly one-third are 6 to 12, and roughly one-third over that. One of the failures of the welfare system is that it has done
little to improve the care and upbringing of these children, leaving that task exclusively to the mother, often a teenage mother, completely disregarding her obvious limitations for the task. In the event that current projections of the increase in female-headed
families proves correct—and absent a major countereffort they probably will be correct—
we can only anticipate an intensification of all the problems associated with children
in poor, female-headed families: teenage pregnancies, school dropouts, and other serious forms of social misbehavior.
The key to success is early intervention to ensure good nutrition, adequate health
services, early childhood education, an effort to ensure not only a head start but that
we help the child to master, grade by grade, the elementary school curriculum so that
we do not need to begin remediation at the high school and the college level, when
it becomes very expensive, and only modestly successful. The welfare system should
not continue to ignore these problems. Welfare reform should contain provisions for
local welfare departments, in cooperation with the school system, to provide the necessary services to promote the sound development of the children on welfare. It will
cost money, but it will be the best investment we can make.
NATHAN GLAZER: The present moment in welfare reform is fascinating if one contrasts it to the period from 1969 to 1979, the period that runs from the Nixon/
Moynihan family assistance plan to the Carter program for better jobs and income.
That period has been characterized as using an incentive approach to welfare. People
would be lured out of dependency by economic incentives so that earning money did
not mean that welfare grants were cut. It ran into terrible problems because the incentives meant rising income for welfare recipient families which could place a working
welfare family ahead of a working poor family which never received welfare. We could
never figure out how to solve the unfairness of that problem. Also it was very expensive.
The idea of the incentive approach was that we would eliminate both compulsion
in welfare, requirement to work, and stigma in welfare, the distinction between the
welfare family and the working poor family. We never used the terms income maintenance, guaranteed income, negative income tax, but that's what we were talking
about particularly when we set a national level of need and when we tried to determine the rate at which welfare would go down with earned income. The ambition
was to make welfare "a machine that would go by itself." People would calculate their
needs and either send the government what they owe—positive income tax—or get
66
Challenges for the Nation
back what they were owed for minimal support—the negative income tax. The program was never implemented because we cannot make welfare a machine that will
run by itself.
Theory held that welfare recipients—not all, but many—differ from non-welfare
recipients not only in that they have less money but because they became 'behaviourly addicted' to welfare. 'Behaviour adaptation' meant thai they came to avoid or fear
work and that fathers came to depend on welfare to support their children and even
to provide some support for themselves through the mothers of their children. Now
there is a new consensus afoot, best defined by the idea of responsibility, obligation
of those on welfare—as well as of a right to welfare. There is a right to welfare; the
Supreme Court has ruled often. The rhetoric in most of the new proposals emphasizes obligation and responsiblity rather than rights—a striking change from the late
1960s and '70s.
Senator Moy nihan puts in first place the requirement that fathers support their children. It is rhetorically significant that it's first. Establish paternity. The father is going
to be responsible for that child for 18 years, no matter how old he is, or who he is.
Ninety percent of us accept that idea. Now we've got to get the other ten percent to
accept it too. The mechanisms won't be simple. They need blood tests. They need
a social security card. But it's a good idea. The proposals also call for a system of regular deductions from earnings for child support. Can it be managed administratively?
Probably not in New York. But it's worth trying.
Second, the proposals talk about obligation. Parents, including single parents, must
be put back to work. That's a hard thing. Moynihan's report cites statistics showing
that 72 percent of mothers of children between the ages of 6 and 18 years are in the
labor force. Over one-half of all mothers with children under age 3 are in the labor
force. Yet only five percent of mothers receiving AFCD are in the labor force; something is wrong. So the argument is to help them out, give them training and child care.
Third, suppose you can't get the money from the fathers and suppose the mothers
can't get a job, can't earn anything. Then, you supplement the family's income in order to support the children. The interesting thing is Moynihan puts it third, not first.
I don't know if it will make a practical difference but I think rhetorically it's important.
RUTH MASSINGA: At a hearing we held in Maryland this past summer, a woman
who had been around the horn, so to speak, in public welfare and had been a welfare
rights activist in the 1970s, spoke up in an impassioned way. She said, "Ruth, make
sure this time you do it right." Her first statement about how to do it right was about
the importance of education, of remediation for young mothers who are coming on
welfare. It is critical that we hear the point of view of people who are receiving public
welfare. Their views about the prospects for reform such as you've seen here in Massachusetts and in other stales where state monies have begun to be invested to turn
the welfare system from a dependency system to a human development system are
quite remarkable. In Maryland this year for the first time we invested state money,
67
Challenges for the Nation
$7.5 million, for an 18-month period. In the first nine months of the program, we've
enrolled, on a volunteer basis, many more people than we anticipated.
Welfare reform immediately transcends the welfare system itself and deals with the
organization of all of our human resource programs and with the concerns we have
for developing human investments for the future. We must seek to do it right. The
notion of welfare reform with state and federal partnerships is a critical one and all
of the bills before the Congress now speak to that partnership. But the necessary infrastructure is going to require a major investment of dollars—in a lot of different ways.
Child care is not cheap for middle-income wage earners who get tax credits. It should
not be considered to be cheap for the welfare recipients whom we're trying to assist.
What happens to the children in the here and now and in the long run is an issue
which has to be addressed. Transportation is another major problem. Some of our
cities and states need to pay considerable attention to interurban mass transit because
we've got to be able to make sure people get to the jobs.
We cannot eliminate major portions of the services systems that are critical for poor
people and for the labor force that we're attempting to stimulate. The issue of money
makes the prospects for welfare reform in the near term somewhat depressing. The
politics of deficits and deficit reduction will transcend the politics of the remarkable
consensus that we've reached in the near term. None of the bills now before the Congress begins to speak to the amount of investment that was being discussed in the
mid-1970s, so the federal dollars that we're talking about are relatively modest and
the outcome is relatively modest. But it is important for us to begin.
As we look at what is happening with deficit reduction and how we posture ourselves to the rest of the world, welfare reform dollars may become subsumed. We will
need to look to the states where, ironically, the investments of capital are being made
and experimentation is going forward and continue to learn from what the states are
doing as we shape an improved human investment system for the nation.
68
Challenges for the
Nation
The Politics of AIDS
by June E. Osborn, M.D.
and Arnold S. Relman, M.D.
A panel discussion, "AIDS As a Rtlitical Issue in Campaign '88," the^urth annual S. A. Kauftnan Memorial
Lecture series program, was held in the Forum of the John F. Kennedy School of Government on April
27, 1988, co-sponsored by the S. A. Kaufman Memorial Lecture Foundation and the Boston University
School of Medicine. Participants included David Baltimore, Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biological Medical Resean:h, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the National Academy of Science
Commission on a National Strategy for AIDS; June E. Osborn, M.D.. Dean, School of Public Health,
Unii?ersity of Michigan and advisor on AIDS tofodemlagencies, private foundations and the World Health
Organization; David Pickford, diagnosed with AIDS, July, 1987; Beny Primm, M. D.. Executive Director,
Addiction, Research & Treatment Corporation, New York, President of the Urban Resource Institute, member of the President's Commission on AIDS, and Conferee. March 1988 White House Conference for a Drug
Free America; Arnold S. Relman, M.D., Editor, New England Journal of Medicine, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Senior Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital; and Marvin Kalb,
Director, Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press. Politics and Public Policy (moderator). Following
are edited excerpts from the remarks by Dr. Osborn and Dr. Relman.
DR. OSBORN: AIDS hasn't become a topic for discussion in Campaign '88 for two
reasons—one good, one bad. The good reason is that it made a poor topic for discourse during the primaries when considerable effort was made to find narrow divisions of opinion and make large differences out of small ones. That would have been
too bad with AIDS because AIDS is too big an issue. I hope David [Baltimore] is wrong
about it being ducked all the way through November of '88. If so, they won't manage
to duck it much beyond then because the AIDS epidemic is going to dominate the
next presidency. I hope that there are wise people running for that office who will
recognize that and be brave. It's a topic that one in political life has to be brave about
because it involves all sorts of unmentionable words and unseemly sorts of behaviors
in the eyes of the so-called "majority." It also involves universal behaviors and the
majority we need to be thinking about is the human family. It involves all of us and
will—for the rest of our lives and if we are not thoughtful it could dominate our
children's lives.
We have an extraordinary opportunity to take advantage of the magnificent biomedical
scientific advances of the last several decades. There are only two really new things
about the AIDS epidemic. One is the virus and the horrendous disease it causes and
two is that for the first time in human history we have sufficient information about
the virus and its behavior in populations, its ways of transmitting and ways by which
it can't transmit. Despite the lack of a vaccine we are in a position right now to counsel
our children about how to avoid this virus. You couldn't do that with polio or with
influenza. No vaccine will ever be as good as avoidance. For some time now we have
69
Challenges for the Nation
had in hand the information with which to abort this epidemic. It is a moral shame
that anybody gets infected tomorrow out of ignorance.
Usually the first and second things that happen in countries that have AIDS, or
have the worry that they might begin to have AIDS, is the launching of a national
education campaign with every medium available, every resource available, sometimes even beyond the resources that seem to be available. Every country in the civilized world has done that in response to this epidemic—except the United States. People
like me, and others who comment to me, who travel outside this country find themselves upon returning almost ashamed that we, at the epicenter of this epidemic, are
so silent for our people. It is very difficult to rationalize. Jim Kern at the Center for
Disease Control said at a meeting about a year ago, "You know, in 1990 people are
going to be shaking their fists at us saying, 'Why didn't you tell us?'" That's my great
concern. A wise politician in this campaign will know that 1990 is much too close to
be silent. I think if I were a Democrat campaigning for office, I'd know exactly what
to say because I share David's startled shock at the leadership of silence. It hasn't been
a passive silence, it's been an active one. There was AIDS written into this year's State
of the Union address when 50,000 people were already diagnosed with the disease.
The reference was taken out at the eleventh hour. Now we have 60,000 diagnosed cases.
We could at least have had the decency to notice when we went past the number of
people killed in the Vietnam war. Yet that was silently acknowledged as well. There
has been virtually no official recognition that anything unusual is happening.
David's scenario worries me terribly. As the epidemic sinks—as do so many other
public health-threatening behaviors—into groups which have not had the educational opportunity of the privileged group, as it becomes over-represented in the so-called
"underclass," it could be the most horrible scenario that I can think of, that we decide
that maybe 40,000 cases a year isn't so bad, especially since it's not in the mainstream,
whatever the "mainstream" may be, and therefore we can tolerate it. We have something happening in this country that I think is inconsistent with what this country
was supposed to be about. We have people grieving secretly because they've lost sons
and daughters to AIDS and they don't dare say so for fear of losing their jobs by sense
of contamination. Now all of that is horrifying even in the absolute. When you know
that the virus cannot be spread except by voluntary, private, consentual behavior—
and it constitutes no risk to others—it becomes a shocking manifestation of something
that's gone wrong in this society.
As far as political issues go, if we want to find out where the passions lie, it is in
favor of the human family and against the kind of social divisiveness that we won't
be able to tolerate throughout the next presidential term. This is a very important time
to start insishng that it be discussed in the campaign of 1988.
DR. RELMAN: The number of new infections continues to be quite massive. In the
next five to ten years we're going to see very large numbers of people who are sick
and needing care. We're going to be using all the resources that we can bring to bear.
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Challenges for the Nation
The city of New York predicts, on the basis of its experience thus far, that within two
or three years it may be spending as much $2 billion a year for the care of AIDS
patients within New York City, that something on the order of 5000 hospital beds will
be occupied by AIDS patients. New York does have an unusually heavy burden as
does San Francisco, but those kinds of numbers must make everyone pause. This is
the most important health care problem that New York faces today, the number one
problem. And I worry that not enough attention has been paid. The lack of leadership
at the federal level is appalling. I agree with my colleagues who say that will and must
change with the next administration.
Whoever is in the While House after November will have to deal with this problem.
First, it's a question of education. Dr. Osborn is quite right. We know enough now
to prevent the spread of this disease. Nevertheless, the disease continues to spread
because we simply have not gone all out in an effective way to tell people at risk what
they must know in order to avoid infecting themselves or, if they are infected, infecting others. We simply must have more leadership and more direction for an educational campaign. The federal government is spending a lot of money on scientific
research but not nearly enough on an effective public education campaign.
Second is the question of cost. We're talking about a bill which in three or four years
may be $10 to $15 to $20 billion. Who is going to pay? Most people who have AIDS
have no insurance or are underinsured. Dr. Primm is quite correct that AIDS is, in
one sense, just another subspecies of the general problem of inadequate care for the
poor, for minorities. We have a growing sector of our population, maybe 15 percent,
who are inadequately insured or have no insurance and who are getting only marginal health care at best. AIDS victims are among those people. Who is going to take
care of them? This is an urgent question, one which we must face.
Third is the question of dealing with the one million or so people in this country
who are IV drug abusers, maybe as many as half of whom, 40 to 70 percent, already
have AIDS and are spreading AIDS to other drug abusers, to their sexual partners
and to their children. How do we deal with that problem? Again, Dr. Primm alluded
to the fact that it's a totally inadequate approach to drug abuse. It would be laughable
were it not so tragic—'Just Say No"! What we need to do—immediately—is to try to
get as many addicts as we can into treatment programs. It is appalling that we talk
about a war against drug abuse and we simply do not provide enough opportunity
for people who want to be treated. There are long waiting lists of drug addicts who
want to be in treatment programs and cannot. There are not enough places and not
enough money. There is talk about the clean needle program but that doesn't really
make much sense. It's much cheaper to treat people and get them off dependence
on IV drugs than it is to give them clean needles. What we need is a whole new realistic approach to the drug addiction problem.
Fourth is the question of testing and reporting and case finding. We have to face
the fact that here is a disease which is, to a very considerable extent, sexually
transmitted—not entirely, it's transmitted by blood and by needles—yet it is reportable only in its clinical manifestations. The law says the doctors are supposed to report
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Challenges for the Nation
patients who have clinical AIDS but they don't have to report people who are seropositive. They don't have to have any follow-up information. If a doctor finds somebody has syphilis or gonorrhea or other sexually transmitted infection, by public health
regulations they are expected to follow up—contacts, treatment, reporting those who
do not get adequately treated. For AIDS, they don't have that at all.
The argument is that if we try to apply such policies to patients with AIDS it would
be a very perjorative and punitive thing because of the tremendous stigma. But we
have to consider whether we're ever going to prevent the spread of AIDS with
epidemiologic methodology without some such program of identifying those who
are infected and counselling them and identifying their contacts, doing it in the way
which protects their social status, protects their confidentiality, does not stigmatize
them. We're going to have to have very strong laws which protect the rights of AIDS
victims but allow us to find cases and do what we can to prevent spread.
Finally is the issue of medical obligation. As a physician, I am much interested and
much concerned by the fact that many doctors feel that they don't have any obligation
to take care of patients with AIDS. There's a debate going on in the medical profession, very sharply divided opinion as to how much risk there is, does the risk outweigh the professional obligation of doctors to take care of patients who need their
help. These are some of the public issues that are going to have to be debated in public. We are going to have to have lots of advice, expert advice. We need leadership
from government. We've done remarkably well so far without federal leadership but
as the problem gets more and more widespread, and more and more complicated,
more and more expensive, as the burden on American society gets heavier and heavier, we simply must have federal leadership.
I think that the press, if I may say so, has been derelict. The press has not been
asking the candidates the hard questions. We have a right to know what our candidates plan to do. The press doesn't want to ask those questions. I think that we ought
to demand that those questions be asked. I think that we ought to tell our leaders
in Washington that this is an essential responsibility of government. There are lots
of problems. We have some answers already but we still need more answers and we
need federal leadership. While I agree that so far it has not been a campaign issue,
I also feel that it must become a campaign issue. I am not content to wait until the
next president is installed in office. I think that we the people ought to demand that
the questions be asked and that candidates tell us now what they think and why. We
cannot avoid asking those questions.
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Foreign Policy in Process
Retrospective on the Cuban Missile Crisis
by Fedor Burlatsky, Joseph S. Nye, Jr.,
and Robert S. McNamara
On October 11-13, 1987, the US-Soviet Conference on The Cuban Missile Crisis was held in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. One session of the conference was an address in the ARCO Forum of Public Affairs by
McGeorge Bundy Professor of History, New York University and former Special Assistant for National
Security to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Respondent was Fedor Burlatsky, Chief, Philosophy Department, Social Sciences Institute, Moscow and former speechwriter for General Secretary Nikita Krushchev.
The session also included comments by Graham T. Allison, Dean, John E Kennedy School of Government
and by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Director, Center for Science and International Affairs who was moderator for
the event and pr all of the conference sessions. Following are edited excerpts from Pro^ssor Burlatsky's
response. Professor Nye's comments and comments by Robert S. McNamara, former U. S. Secretary of
Defense who was a participant in the conference and a member of the audience.
FEDOR BURLATSKY: The Cuban Missile Crisis is a very important case in the history
of our century, maybe the only time when there was a real danger of nuclear conflict.
Therefore, we must take some lessons from this conflict. Many of my colleagues here
ask me about the reasons why Krushchev placed our missiles in Cuba. One opinion
about it is that it was a manifestation of a sort of socialist pluralism, our wish to help
the Cuban leadership with defense because of what happened on the occasion of the
Bay of Pigs. That was one reason, but it's a second reason that I try to explain to my
collegues, that this was maybe the first step, from Krushchev's point of view, to real
parity real strategic parity. Kruschev explained that when he asked, "Why do the Americans have the right to surround us with so many bases, including the base near our
border in Turkey, and we do not have the right to do the same thing to the Americans?" From my point of view, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a very bad thing that
had good results. What I mean is that both sides understood that nuclear war is an
impossible thing. Not only that, but John Kennedy and Krushchev understood that
both of them didn't want a war. Maybe it is strange to you because many people in
the West were waiting for Russian tanks to attack West European countries. But we
were waiting, after the Second World War, for the American atomic blow, especially
when we had no atomic weapons and especially when you had such great superiority
in nuclear weapons. During the crisis, both sides understood that there were no crazy
men on the other side who want war.
I have a great respect for John Kennedy and for Krushchev who did so much to
prevent a nuclear war. Krushchev had only one thing in his mind, to do everything
during the crisis to prevent such a war, especially because each leader didn't push
the other side into a comer and both gave possibilities for the other side to compromise,
to make mutual concessions. There is only one point in which we disagree with my
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friend "Mac" Bundy, that is about John Kennedy's announcement about the 23rd of
October. I have the feeling that during the crisis if John Kennedy made the same announcement in a secret way and used, for example, secret conversations with Gromyko,
that that might have been able to prevent such a deep nuclear crisis. Maybe I'm wrong,
and my American colleague can disagree, but I believe that such direct relations were
very important during that time.
About the second lesson, the superiority. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Americans had five thousand warheads. We had only three hundred. In spite of this,
John Kennedy couldn't use that superiority. These are excellent lessons for today because now we have approximately, both sides, 25,000 warheads. Why we need so many
nobody understands. This arsenal, this military competition—and I must emphasize
that I like very much McNamara's idea of going back to a low level first of all, maybe
one hundred or two hundred or three hundred warheads on both sides, to parity.
That would be a very useful first step to Gorbachev's idea of eliminating all nuclear
weapons.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the beginning of a new way of thinking. Maybe John
Kennedy's death and Kruschev's disappearance from the political arena was an historical
tragedy, because we lost twenty-five years and continued the military competition which
destroyed security for both sides. ... Last and maybe a great paradox, the fate of all
humanity was in the hands of two or three persons during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
especially John F. Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev.
JOSEPH S. NYE, JR.: "Mac" Bundy and Graham Allison have both stressed, over
the last two days, the lessons of misperception and miscommunications between the
two powers before '62. Two things have stuck out in my mind. One is the importance
of personality, the non-rational or almost irrational aspects of psychology which came
from our Soviet friends. Basically, there were some deep emotional questions on
Kruschev's side that played a role that was greater than I, at least, had realized. Was
this compounded by something that should be well known to Americans, that when
you have an operation that is held in extreme secrecy, with just a few people involved,
you cut yourself off from your expertise? You cut yourself off from your Americanist,
or on our side, your Sovietologist, with the net result that there is a larger scope, personal and emotional dimensions, playing a role. I had not picked that up from our
earlier session.
The other was the number of things that go wrong in large organizations that are
not known or controlled from the top. For example, when Bob McNamara said in Florida
this spring that he hadn't realized that the decision to raise the alert level of the American forces was carried out in the clear by the American Commander, rather than as
it normally would be, in code, that was quite striking. Certainly the Soviets might
have noticed the difference in the message or at least in the procedure. What was interesting in this session was to learn that equivalent things happened on the Soviet
side. The Soviet military viewed that they could control it, that it would be workable,
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Foreign Policy in Process
that they could install the missiles quickly without discovery. So, some of it relied
upon characteristics that were neither Soviet nor American but common to large, complex organizations. We talk about "Murphy's Law" being the first law of government:
what can go wrong will go wrong. It's interesting to discover that there's also a "Murphski's Law." In any case, we have all profited enormously from our Soviet friends, from
what we've learned in the past two days.
ROBERT S. MCNAMARA: I think we who have participated in these 15 hours of discussion these last two days have learned two things: First, you cannot manage a crisis,
meaning a military confrontation between the two great powers or between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. There is absolutely no way. It is impossible to initiate action and
do so with high confidence that you can predict the consequences of that action. What
we have learned is, and 1 think this is true of the Soviets as well as ourselves, we cannot control these huge masses, these huge organizations, these military machines.
This is not because they are not disciplined—not at all. They are highly disciplined.
It is simply that we are human. We are fallible. We are a function of misinformation,
miscalculation, misjudgement, emotion in periods of crisis. You cannot manage a crisis with assurance that you can avoid unacceptable consequences. In a nuclear age
unacceptable consequences mean the destruction of civilization. We have 25,000 warheads on each side. We have the strategy, at least in the West, that contemplates the
use of those warheads under certain circumstances. We have war plans that provide
for that, exercises that train the troops in the use of those warheads. No human mind
has conceived of, there exists no plan on paper that assures that initiation by either
side of the use of nuclear weapons will benefit that society. On the contrary, there
is high probability that initiation by either side of the use of nuclear weapons will
destroy our civilization. So, the first lesson is you cannot manage a crisis, a military
confrontation between East and West, with high probability of avoiding that consequence.
Therefore, the second lesson is, you must learn to avoid crisis. What we've learned
today is that crises are a function of misperception. Sergei [Mikoyan]* said today and
these are his exact words, "I am just beginning to believe that you did not intend to
invade Cuba in 1962 or thereabouts." I can tell you, we had absolutely no intention to
invade Cuba and I guarantee you that President Kennedy would not have invaded,
and I'm certain that "Mac" [Bundy] and Ted {Sorensen]* and I would have strongly
recommended against it. But if we had recommended to do it he would not have done
it—absolutely no chance of it. Why did Sergei think that? Why is he, as he said, just
beginning to believe otherwise. For many, many reasons. Economically, we'd isolated
Cuba, politically we'd isolated Cuba. The Congress was saying we cannot tolerate this
center of Marxist/Leninism in this hemisphere. We carried out military exercises near
it and what you didn't know, but what the Soviets knew, was we carried on a program
of covert action, named "Mongoose," which was designed to weaken if not destroy
Castro. Now why shouldn't they have thought we were likely to engage in a program
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Foreign Polio/ in Process
to destroy Cuba? The point is that this is a tragedy. It really is a tragedy. They had
that misperception. We had—^ave—the misperception, most of our population has
the misperception—I think it is a misperception—that the Soviets are bound on a course
of aggression against Western Europe. How else can you justify their conventional
forces in Europe? A total imbalance in East versus West. Tanks—I don't know the number, two or three times the number of tanks in NATO. How else can you justify that
other than by aggression? This is what we see. I am absolutely convinced that they
do not plan aggression against the West. So, how do you justify it? By two things;
One, they lost 20 million people in World War II because they weren't prepared. They
are absolutely determined to never again face that risk. Two, they have a bunch of
stupid damn planners in their Defense Department, as do we, as did 1, who buy things
they don't need. It's a fact, and the problem is it leads to misperception. The point
I want to conclude on is simply that we must try to avoid crises and what the last two
days have told me and what I leave with is a tremendous feeling of confidence. Now,
I am not a US-Soviet expert. Many of my colleagues are. Many in the audience are.
I am not. But for the first time in the 27 years that I have been observing US-Soviet
relations, I feel a degree of confidence that there is an opportunity, not a certainty,
an opportunity, to probe for actions that can reduce the political tension between us.
That is the way to avoid crisis. I hope this government, and if not this government
then the next government, will move to probe that opportunity.
*Sergei Mikoyan, Editor-in-Chief, Magazine America Latina, Moscow
Theodore C. Sorensen, former Special Counsel to President Kennedy
Uses of Military Power
by Caspar W. Weinberger
On December 5, 1987 former U. S. Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger delivered the 1987 Pollack
Lecture, "Uses of Military Power: A Retrospective," in the Forum. Following is an edited excerpt from
his remarks.
It is both a cliche and a truth that it is in the hearts and minds of oppressed peoples
that the battles must be won. So my caution on the use of military forces is intentional. The world has an endless array of potential conflicts in which we might conceivably play a useful role. The theory that the mere presence of American troops, in num-
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Foreign Policy in Process
bers insufficient to defeat aggressors, may make some slight difference is not enough
to ask young men and women to risk their lives. The fact that a limited United States
presence might provide some limited diplomatic leverage is not enough to ask our
troops to be ready to die. I think we have to learn from the tragic loss of life in Beirut.
We were asked there to have an American force, as part of an international military
group, interpose itself between withdrawing armies—the Syrians and the Israelis. Unfortunately, of course, the withdrawal agreement was never signed, never entered into.
So the international force could never do what it was sized and what it was tasked
to do. Their mission required them to be, and be recognized as, peacekeepers. We
knew that if conditions deteriorated—as they did—so that they were in danger, and
if, because of the actions of warring nations or the anarchical tribes which roam all
over Lebanon their peacekeeping mission could not be realized, then it would be necessary either to add sufficiently to the number of our troops and equip them for combat
to defeat any enemy, any kind of contingency there, or to withdraw them. And it's
a deep tragedy that we did not get them out before terrorism killed so many.
According to the doctrines that developed in the '50s and early '60s, limited war
was essentially a diplomatic instrument. It was a tool for bargaining with the enemy.
As such it had to be centrally directed by the political leadership. It had to be applied
with very precise controls. Gradual application of American forces was what was talked
about and that was combined with a threat of escalation, and to the next step up the
ladder and, according to these theorists, that would persuade America's opponents
to accept a settlement while they avoided strategic defeat. As you may have guessed
I think this is terribly, dangerously faulty reasoning. For one thing, the American government does not have the clear conventional and strategic superiority under which a
threat of escalation could be made. Nor is it workable now, if it ever was, because
of the increasing Congressional limitations which restrict the fine tuning or precise
controls that are required. We always have to bear in mind that we do not have a political system such as the Soviet system in which two or three people in Washington can
escalate an American force, as two or three people in the Kremlin can do overnight.
The military force that is political, however strong and however effective, will always remain a relatively blunt instrument. It's absurd really to ignore these domestic,
political realities in an age of mass communications in a democratic society. The fatal
flaw of the theories of the fifties, it seems to me, was their neglect of the domestic
political realities of American democracy. I've always counselled against the indiscriminate use of our combat troops as a regular and customary part of our diplomatic efforts. They endanger the single most critical element of a successful democracy
which is a strong consensus and an agreement of our basic purpose.
I think a very profound principal of a representative democracy is what the Chinese
philosopher. Sun Tze, described 2000 years ago as moral influence. By that he meant,
as he said, that which causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders. Democratic
governments derive their power through consensus building, and some such consensus, in my judgement, has to underlie the formulation of all foreign policies, especially the use of force. The Vietnam policy that we followed was not sustained by that
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consensus. There was a statement made by one of my predecessors for whom I have
great admiration and respect, former Defense Secretary McNamara, the longest serving Defense Secretary. He said, and this is a direct quotation, "The greatest contribution that Vietnam is making—right or wrong is beside the point—is that it is developing
an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity
of arousing the public ire." And I have to add without the intention to win. President
Johnson soon found out, much to his regret, that the pubHc ire was aroused.
The voice of America begins at the grassroots. In effect, you can't do that, no matter
how you try to hide it with enormous budgetary expenditures for domestic programs
that are politically more popular, and which in my judgement caused the beginnings
of the inflation that we are only now trying to get a hold on. If in democracies you
are going to use force, you have to mobilize, you have to sustain the national will.
This may be another of the real lessons of Vietnam.
Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, said that the republican principle demands that
the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom
they entrust the management of their affairs. Democracies, I think, are always led by
force of persuasion and not by the persuasion of force. Democracy's beacon is not
military force but it's devotion to human rights, to individual freedom. Leaders must
have the courage to lead, and there must be a consensus from the people for any policy to succeed, no matter what the issues, no matter how right it may seem to specialists
or to the leaders themselves.
The Iran Initiative
by Michael Ledeen
Michael Ledeen, former consultant, Nationai Security/ Council and co-author of DebaclezThe American
Failure in Iran, delivered a public address. "The Inside Story of the Iran Initiative," oti December 14,
1987. Following are edited excerpts from the question and answer period luhich followed his address.
Q: What I have understood so far, from what you have been saying about what happened, what went wrong, in the White House [regarding Iran-Contra] is that Reagan
was uninterested in substantive or daring policy, that Colonel North got things done
and was there so Reagan turned to him, and that the bureaucracy caused 'immobilism'
or that the people in the bureaucracy were incompetent. Is my impression correct and
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Foreign Policy in Process
how would you improve the policy-making process in the White House in order to
avoid similar problems?
MICHAEL LEDEEN: You left out number one, the passion for the hostages which
was the driving passion for the whole thing. Reagan really cared about the hostages.
There is no short cure for our national problems. The basic reason why we don't have
people who know enough about the world is because our educational system is terribly inadequate. You all hear about the test scores and about people who are quizzed
about geography and history. The last horrifying story—they can't really all be true—
was that more than half the sophomores at the University of South Carolina, a fine
university, could not place the date of the Civil War within fifty years. Even if was
only 30 percent, it's terrifying. Graduates of this educational system cannot be magically transformed into foreign policy experts simply by sitting in the Department of
State or the National Security Council. I think it was [former Secretary of State]
Kissinger who pointed out that the cultural baggage you bring into those jobs is the
cultural baggage you take out because the only opportunity to learn involves operational things, how to work the bureaucracy, how to write a proper memorandum, who
your enemies are in the other agencies and how to defeat or outwit them. There aren't
enough hours in the day to learn a basic understanding of reality.
First, we need better educated Americans and second, we need accountability across
the board. Right now, no one is accountable on the most fundemental level. There
is no reward for taking risk and succeeding; there is no punishment for doing nothing
and failing. We need incentives and some kinds of punishment for failure. Third, we
have to make it possible to recruit talented people into government who do not fall
into the two categories from which most political appointees now come, people who
are so rich that they can afford the governmental salaries or people so low on the totem pole that they see what they are getting as an improvement.
Q: Could you comment on whether you thought it was a good idea to actually try
to strike a deal for hostages.
L: I thought it was a terrible idea.
Q: But that was your assignment?
L: No, my assignment paradoxically was to study Iran. In May of 19851 went to Israel
to ask Peres if the Israelis knew anthing about Iran and if so would they share their
knowledge with us because we were interested in Iran and had found out we knew
nothing. Peres set up a study group inside his government to share with me the information that Israel had on Iran and we set up one in Washington to exchange information. About this time Ghorbanifar emerged, so I happened to be there when he came
forward with all these various initiatives. For the first several months I was the intermediary and attended the meetings. From lime to time, I would speak up and tell
people what I thought about things, that we should get out of the hostage business
as quickly as possible and worry about the political problems. That is probably why
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people started inventing rumors about me about late fall of '85, rumors that I was taking money. I was removed by the end of November. All of my finances for the last
ten years have now been investigated by the Special Prosecutor, the Select Committees, the FBI, the IRS—not only my finances but my children's finances including Daniel
who turned one a week ago. They still can't find the money. There are two choices:
either I never got it—which is what I think—or whoever gave it to me hid it so carefully
that not even those people can find it.
Q: We've heard a lot of distrubing information about the President. You obviously
worked close to him, if you haven't actually dealt with him. What the insider's view
on Ronald Reagan? Is he actually in touch and does he work longer hours than the
press says?
L: He doesn't work longer hour than the press says. In all honesty, I'm not sure that
working long hours is indispensable to being a good president. I'm no longer as sure
as I used to be about what one wants in a President. I will say, being slightly more
provocative than 1 normally try to be, that Reagan, in terms of his style of presidency,
comes pretty close to being ideal by my standards. That is, I want a forest president
not a trees president. Forced to chose between a Reagan-style president and a
Carter-style president—where Carter always got immersed in every detail of every
decision—it's one hundred times better to have a Reagan. The problem with Reagan
is that he doesn't know much of anything about the world but that's true of almost
any politician. ... What you need in the presidency is someone with sound instincts,
with a basic understanding about the world, someone who knows the parameters
within which he wants policy to function. You can always get someone who knows
to be Secretary of State, you don't need him for president.
Look at the position of the Soviets right now. They're out of money, oil prices are
going to drop even more because of Iran, diamonds aren't bringing in the money that
they used to. Eastern Europe is in complete collapse: Romania may fall from one week
to the next as they face their second winter with no heat and no light and no electricity; Poland rejected glasnost; Czechoslovakia is a basket case; Hungary, the model of
the new socialism, is a failure and is in virtual default. Afghanistan is in big trouble;
the desperate offensive in Angola lost; Nicaragua is not setting any worlds records
for anything except misery in Latin America. And this President sits there and smiles
and smiles and says well we'll make friends. An aggressive anlicommunist would say
there is a new era opening marked by the collapse of the Communist system. All the
symptoms are there. A president who took foreign policy seriously would be scratching his head right now wondering how to manage the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Q: You mentioned the existence of Iranian dissidence as assessed by Ghorbanifar. Could
you tell us more about these people, who they are, are they Americans, are they from
the Bazaar, are they religious people? What policy would you support? Do you think
that the United States should have supported restoring the regime with support from
this dissident element?
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L: My view is that the United States should support democratic revolution. That is
what I am for and I tend to be quite active on that. If it turned out that there were
a better option in Iran, Iranians who would be better than the present ones and wanted a bit of support from us, if that checked out, then I think we should have been
inclined to offer support. Who were they? There was a long list of names of people.
It was a cross-section of the institutions of contemporary Iranian society. The people
with whom I met were extremely high-ranking people in the regime. These are not
people from the Bazaar or people from remote tribes. They were people from Teheran
in positons of power today. One could take seriously, in theory at least, that they were
going to try to change things. Were they serious about doing it and if so, would they
have been in a position to do anything about it? 1 don't know. Can't answer that.
Through Different Eyes
by Hyman Bookbinder
and James Abourezk
On December 10.1987, Hyman Bookbinder, Special Representative, American Jewish Committee and author
o/Through Different Eyes, and James Abourezk, former U. S. Senator from North Dakota and founder
and chairman of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination league, participated in a debate in the Forum
entitled, "Through Different Eyes: U. S. Policy in the Middle East." Following are edited excerpts from
that debate.
HYMAN BOOKBINDER: In 1967, after the Six Day War, the Arab world might have
said okay, we provoked the war, we got licked, but now the Israelis say and the United
Nations, through its resolutions, says get together, don't just have a cease-fire, sign
a peace treaty, decide on the borders, and negotiate a Palestinian entity. But the Arab
world again said no-no recognitions, no negotiations, no Israeli state-and the opportunity was missed. For 19 years, between 1948 and 1967, the West Bank was not held
or occupied or administered by Israel. It was occupied by Jordan, an Arab state. All
that Arab state had to do was to say, "Okay, Palestinians on the West Bank, you can
have your state." They didn't do it, and no Arab state and no Senator Abourezk asked
Jordan to do it. So there hasn't been a Palestinian state. There were terribly deprived
Palestinian refugees, most of them kept in camps because the Arab world preferred
to use them as political cannon fodder rather than give them the kind of help and
relief the Jewish state was giving Jews who were thrown out of Arab states.
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Today it's more difficult to reach that objective-but not impossible. If the entities
that must be involved in the decision, including the Palestinians themselves, and the
state of Israel because it has important concerns of security, the state of Jordan because
Jordan has more Palestinians even than the West Bank, the United Nations in some
appropriate way, say the time has come for full self-government, I'd be the first to cheer.
But 1 do not accept nor advocate a simple-minded, simplistic slogan, "Just sit down
with the PLO and negotiate a Palestinian state." Life isn't that easy. Justice isn't so easily achieved. Jordan itself, King Hussein and other major Arab elements, but surely
King Hussein, have at least as much problem with a PLO Palestinian state as does
the state of Israel. So something other than that has to be achieved.
Under the Camp David accords, had they been implemented, had both the Arabs
and Israel been more forthcoming, we might have had for at least these last nine years
a very generous, forthright kind of independence, self-governance if not a full state.
Perhaps by now we might even have had a full state because under the accords, which
provided for autonomy, the arrangement was that after five years of satisfactory
autonomy everything would be on the table for further negotiations. It's painful, mindboggling, to realize that we are now in the tenth year since Camp David and that wasn't
even tried.
Finally now there is another movement that isn't a very hopeful one, but there is
still the possibility of resuming the peace process. Under former Prime Minister Peres
there was a proposal, which he is still advocating, still hoping to get his own country
to support. The United States is more or less supporting it-more or less. The idea is
to have a curtain opener, an international framework for resuming the peace process
and then move on to direct negotiations. We ought to look with approval for that kind
of a well-controlled, well-prepared international curtain opener for negotiations. Even
if there were a general conceptual agreement on doing that, the problem is that if one
insists that that conference, that negotiation must or should include the present PLO
without any changes in its charter, without any changes in its attitude, it's a non-starter.
It won't happen.
The United States, under George Shultz' leadership has been trying to feel out Palestinians to see if there is a way, other than explicit top PLO leadership participation,
some formula that would permit genuine Palestinian participation in the process but
not necessarily Mr. Arafat himself unless Mr. Arafat and the PLO accede to eminently
reasonable conditions. Our country, not Israel, says if you, the PLO, want to be recognized by us, you've got to do two things. First, say out loud, as Mr. Sadat did, that
Israel exists and has a right to exist. Second, say out loud that you've given orders
that your people no longer bomb food markets and school buses and airports. We
will then recognize you as a legitimate representative. The fact that you say you are
considered a legitimate representative doesn't mean anything. We have to consider
you. There's the impasse. I hope we can overcome it.
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JAMES ABOUREZK: Mr. Bookbinder says that if the Arabs had not said no in 1917,
in 1948, in 1967, and in 1978 during Camp David, they might have had a Palestinian
state now. What he does not tell you is that in 1918, when the Palestinians were not
a state, they had been colonized for 400 years by the Turks. When they were released
from that colonization, by virtue of their agreement, they were asked by the British
authorities to help them in their war against the Turks-which they did. They were
promised their independence. That promise was broken because there were Zionist
political machinations going on in London. Instead of giving the Palestinians their
independence, within a few short years, Britain granted independence to all the other
states that came under their control after World War I—all except Palestine—because
they had an agreement with the Zionist leadership to allow Jewish immigration with
the idea of an eventual Jewish state being created in Palestine.
We're basically dealing with a white settler regime coming in to colonize and occupy
the little brown people in Palestine. We would say that if this was happening in Central America or South Africa or Rhodesia, as it did happen. We would say that if it
were happening in Asia. But because of the considerable public relations skills of
Israel and its lobby here in the United States, what we say instead is that Israel fought
for its independence in 1948, independence from what? They came in, brought in Jews,
many tragic refugees from Hitler's persecution. The Zionist leadership brought them
in, told most of them that there were no people here in Palestine, gave them guns,
and said, "All right, let's fight for our independence from the British."
They essentially deprived the Palestinians of their own statehood, deprived them
of their land, evicted 750,000 of them. The founders of Israel wanted to create a democratic state which they could not do if they left the Arab majority there. So they drove
enough Arabs out through Jewish terrorist groups terrorizing the villages, the villagers,
people in rural areas, through people leaving to get away from the fighting, leaving
in fear for their lives. They refused to let them come back because the Zionist leadership wanted to create a state with a majority of Jews—and they did. So much for the
argument that the Arabs said no. If somebody came to your home and said, "\ want
at least half of what you have," would you say no or would you say yes? Just ask yourself that question. I agree with "Bookie'—the Arabs did say no. I would have said no
and so would you have.
Ben Gurion did not want only what the U. N. had decided to give Israel in the partition plan which was, incidentally, non-binding. Ben Gurion wanted all of Palestine.
That just came out in documents released recently by the Israeli government, by none
other than Menachim Begin and it was very interesting the way itcame out—including
Ben Gurion's war diary. When Begin invaded Lebanon in 1982, the Labor Party began
to criticize him. He said, "I'm doing above the counter what you Labor Party people
did under the counter back in 1948. To prove it, he released all these documents which
became the public record. All the researchers went right for them. I read about them
in a book written by an Israeli peace activist, Simha Flapan, who died in April of this
year. He was editor of New Outlook, and wrote a book. The Birth of Israel: Myths and
Realities, which indicated the plan of Ben Gurion and his people to take all of Pales-
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tine, to goad the Arabs into war knowing that they could defeat them. In fact they
did, as we know.
I find it incredible, absolutely unbelievable, and I have studied this problem for years,
to find that the people who were so dram^atically victimized have today been made
the villains of the Middle East. The Israeh's who in fact have been the villains of the
Middle East from the beginning have been made the underdog of the Middle East.
You have to give the Israeli lobby and the Israeli government tremendous credit for
the public relations skill they've displayed in that respect.
Is our continuing support of Israel in America's best interest? When 1 ask, "Do you
support Israel?," or "Do you support Israel's right to exist?," it's like asking a question
that has both oranges and apples in one basket. Because you might want to support
Israel and I don't have any objection to America supporting Israel—I want you to hear
that—but I do have an objection to America and American taxpayers supporting
Israel's territorial objectives. I say, let Israel stay behind the pre-1967 borders. Let them
stay there in peace. But let not America support the continued territorial aquisition
with the money that we send there, with the political support and the military support that we send. Let's put a stop to that. ...
What is in America's best interest is to put a peaceful and just end to that conflict.
We do that by dealing with all of the parties to the conflict, not some of them. The
proposal by Peres is to have an international conference but with Palestinians chosen
by Israel as the negotiator. But what Shamir says is no conference and no compromise
on territories. Two weeks ago in The New York Times he said, "territorial compromise
is not the way to peace in the Middle East." He's against it all together. George Shultz
has been going around carrying water for the Labor Party position, trying to get Palestinians who are not PLO officials involved in negotiations, to select them as negotiators. That's what Peres wants to do. We are the most powerful country in the world
acting like a banana republic. George Shultz, instead of carrying water for the Israel
government should be saying what our position ought to be.
Whether you like the PLO or not or think Yasar Arafat is beautiful or not, the fact
remains that the PLO represents the Palestinians. Nobody can really refute that. They
can talk all around it but they can't really refute it. They have to be party to the
negotiations. Israel has to be a party, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, all of the countries in the
Arab world who want to make peace, and most of them do, with the United States
and the Soviet Union underwriting this kind of a conference. If you accept George
Shultz' position, and Peres' position, that they'll talk with Jordan, slice it off as a salami, as they sliced Egypt off, then you're still going to have Palestinian refugees in the
diaspora, and those under occupation. There's still going to be trouble and suffering
and death and bloodshed. That's what we have to put an end to.
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Personal Perspectives on Politics
by Alan Karcher, Harriet Michel
and Clarence J. "Bud" Brown
During the first week of each semester, the newly-arrived Fellows of the Institute of Politics participate
in a Forum panel discussion, "Personal Perspectives on Fblitics," designed both to introduce the Fellows
to the Harvard community and to provide a setting where Fellows might reflect on the personal experiences
that have shaped their lives, the choices they have made and their careers in the public sector. Following
are brief excerpts from the 1987-88 Felloios' panels. Alan Karcher, Minority leader and former Speaker,
New Jersey General Assembly was a Fellow in fall 1987. Harriet Michel, former President, Neiu York Urban
League and Clarence Brown, former Deputy Secretary, U. S. Department of Commerce were Fellows in
spring 1988
ALAN KARCHER: Having been here for two days now reminds me of the last time
I spent two days at Harvard in 1963. I was here with the Rutgers football team—we
lost. Later, as Speaker of the New Jersey House, remembering those days here and
losing to Harvard, I saw to it that we provided more money so Rutgers could have
an upgraded football schedule. As a token of appreciation, Ed Bloustein, the president of Rutgers, had a jersey made for me—same jersey, same number, 64—and had
my name put on the back. I loved it, wore it to all the home games while I was Speaker. 1 was just very, very fond of that jersey. Then, in November 1985, after putting a
lot of my heart and soul in building up the tradition of the speakership, I suddenly
became the minority leader. Right after the election my family, insisting I would feel
better, urged me to go to the Rutgers game. I just wanted to sit there and be miserable
but they finally talked me into it. As I got dressed I realized that the sleeves of my
jersey were way down past my fingertips and the bottom of the shirt was way down
past my knees. I turned to my son, who's about 17, and I said, "Tim, how did this
jersey get stretched all out of shape? It's twice as large as it used to be." He looked
at me said, "Dad, you're going to have to get used to it. You're not such a big man
anymore."
I learned a very important lesson playing football at Rutgers. Truly, I wasn't very
good. 1 went to my Dad and said, "I don't play much, I'm not very good, really not
cut out for it." He said," Don't quit. Show me a good loser, I'll show you a steady loser.
Show me a quitter and I'll show you a quitter for all of his life." So I learned a lesson
that I have applied to politics. When you get knocked down, stand back up. It seems
awfully simple but it's profound as well. When you get knocked down, stand back up.
My Dad was in politics and I just sort of learned politics from the cradle on. He
served in the New Jersey legislature during the Depression as did one of his uncles
before him. As I got into my teen years, he taught me everything about how to get
elected, that is, in counter-distinction to why you should be in office. He taught me
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Not to indicate that I come from an area where there's class warfare, but I do represent
a very industrial district, a very ethnic district, a very poor district with a lot of just
plain folks who work every day for a living. My Dad represented them in his day,
and he represented them also as an attorney He taught me that those who are rich
and powerful, those w h o already have wealth and all the prerogatives that go with
it, those who can buy the very best, those who will have the best attorneys, the best
public relations firms, the best advertising, who will have everything on their s i d e that they didn't need me. But the working people, the people who do not have a voice,
the people who just are out there, the ordinary people of this world, those people
need somebody like me and that 1 should stand up and speak for them. The underdogs of this world need people who will be intent and will fight and work hard for
their interests, he told me, and that when I would have to make a choice—as 1 would
have to because there would be lots of people out there ready to seduce with big money
and big offers in corporate law—to make that choice for the ordinarly people. That's
when I started to learn the why of why it's important to be elected.
During one of the last conversations my Dad and I had about politics, he said, "You
know, it all boils down to something very simple, that you were taught in school and
that 1 was taught in school. There is an obligation. Somebody has to do it. As long
as there are needful thing to be done, somebody has to stand up and talk about them.
Somebody has to advocate them. Somebody has to articulate them. It all boils down
to feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless and comforting the afflicted."
HARRIET MICHEL: In 19581 was plucked from a small steel town outside Pittsburgh
and landed as an exchange student in a small community riorth of the Artie Circle
in Norway. There I was so exotic that people literally would rub my skin to see if my
color came off and would want to clip pieces of my hair because it was so dark. I lived
with the family of the local sheriff where every evening all of the townsmen came
together to discuss current events. One night there was a broadcast in English from
Russia about the civil rights incident in Little Rock. The townsmen all were very curious. As the first black person they had ever met, I was asked to comment, but race
relations was not one of the things we thought much about or discussed while 1 was
growing up in western Pennsylvania. So at 17, I found myself in the position of
articulating the hopes, problems, aspirations, dreams of the black community to a
broader community. That experience set me on a path so that I have continued to do
that in my life.
In college 1 was doubly exotic—both black and an exchange student who had travelled
and lived abroad among students from small Pennsylvania farms. Juniata College is
a small Church of Brethren college in Huntington, Pennsylvania where for four years
I was the only black person—on campus or in the town. I was there because they were
seeking to integrate and had given me a full scholarship. I was often asked what country I was from because in order to accept me they needed to make me into something
else than a person like themselves from western Pennsylvania. Again I spent my time
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explaining the issues, hopes, dreams, aspirations of the black community to a fairly
unsophisticated larger community.
Like most people in politics, my life, my career can be seen as serendipitous. Much
depends on timing. Despite having never run for public office, I have been lucky enough
to be in positions where my feelings and thoughts have greatly influenced the development of public policy. While here at Harvard, at the Institute, I look forward to
continuing to share my thoughts and ideas with you, especially on the leadership
crisis in the black community and the important crossroads we are at, issues I will
be raising in the study group I wil be teaching on black leadership.
BUD BROWN: My entry into politics resulted from the fact that my father could not
get the permission of his parents to get married before the age of 21. He did get married the day after he turned 21. He was unemployed so my grandfather, a loyal community servant—as was his sister—and a good Republican ward heeler, contacted the
Ohio secretary of state, who was from our county, and told him my father needed
a job. That political loyalty paid off and my dad got a job as Ohio State Statistician.
He took advantage of his opportunity because two years later, at the age of 23, he was
Lieutenant Governor of Ohio. In the primary of 1918 he had campaigned all over the
state against five other candidates all of them over the age of 60, which at that time
was serious old age. Two years later. Governor James Cox was the Democratic nominee
for President and Warren Harding, the U. S. Senator from Ohio, was the Republican
candidate. Harding, from Marion, Ohio, ran a front porch campaign which gave my
father another opportunity. He became acquainted with the Republican hierarchy of
the country as they all came to Marion to greet Harding. Later my father served a term
as Ohio Secretary of Stale, started his own newspaper business, ran twice for Governor and was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in the 1938 election.
So I lived and breathed politics within my family and I learned three basic lessons:
First, keep yourself independent enough and strong enough to always be able to "look
them in the eye and tell them to go to hell." Second, have your own business or profession so that you have something to fall back on if politics fails you or you fail politics.
Third, try always to do the best you can.
With my father as the congressman from our district, all the good jobs were taken,
so at 25, to be independent of the family newspaper business, I bought my own weekly paper, and then at 38, when my father died, I ran for his congressional seat, was
elected, and served for 17 years. In the House, I was active in economic policy and
in energy policy but with the election of President Reagan, the leadership in those
areas shifted from the Congress to the White House. I decided to leave and in 1982
ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Ohio. We've talked tonight about timing. If I'd won
that election, I would not have had the opportunity to serve as Deputy Secretary of
Commerce.
When I went to Washington with my father after he was first elected to the Congress, we went from a very isolationist district in Ohio. At that time the center of polit-
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ics was in the state capitals and in the local communities. Time has changed that and
the center now is in the national capital. At the Commerce Department, I witnessed
the shifting of economic decisions away from our national capital to the international
arena. A few months ago, on October 19th, all the stock markets of the world collapsed literally on the same day, perhaps sequentially but one after another they all
reacted. Today we really are in one world economically. So Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president in 1940, was well before his time when he wrote One
World, a book I read when I was 13 years of age.
Nuclear Winter
by Jonathan Miller
The following is a shorter version of an article which appeared in the November 1987 Harvard Political
Review under the title, "The "Fall"-ing of Nuclear Winter." johnathan Miller '88-89. is Editor Emeritus
of HPR.
The idea of nuclear winter found its origin in the study during the past two decades.
In 1971, the Mariner space probe of Mars brought back evidence that Martian dust
storms surrounded the planet, and dust in the upper atmosphere of the planet tended to absorb sunlight and cool the planet's surface. Later that decade, a study was
conducted on the effects of the explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815.
It found that material which was sprayed into the air obscured the sunlight, leading
to such temperature declines that 1816 came to be known in the United States and
in Europe as "the year without a summer." More recently, in the early WSCs, scientists
developed the hypothesis that one or more of the mass extinctions demonstrated in
the geological record, such as that of the dinosaurs, were caused by the impact of an
asteroid or comet shooting immense amounts of dust into the atmosphere, effectively
blocking solar radiation.
The feasibility of man's extinction, to proponents of the nuclear winter scenario,
makes it necessary for the superpowers to initiate great policy changes. The compelling reason for change is that the nuclear winter theory suggests that no country can
"win," or even survive any nuclear exchange, attacking many notions shared by nuclear
strategy planners in the United States and the Soviet Union. Even in a situation where
one superpower attacks the other without retaliation, the nuclear winter thesis contends that the environmental and biological effects could destroy even the aggressor
nation, not to mention every uninvolved country. As a result, war planners have a
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tremendous dilemma; either they plan to win the war and risk nuclear winter, or they
must abandon the possible use of these weapons.
Solutions to the nuclear winter problem have come from both sides of the political
spectrum. A liberal view has been embodied in the arguments of Carl Sagan of the
TTAPS* group. In his Foreign Affairs article, "Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe,"
which was released simultaneously withthe original TX^PS report, Sagan offers several
remedies to protect human civilization from the threats of nuclear winter. First, he
argues that governments should change their current nuclear arsenal to lower yielding, higher accuracy weapons, which would enable a superpower to knock out a strategic target without creating enough smoke to trigger nuclear winter. But more essential,
claims Sagan, the superpowers must reduce their nuclear arsenals by at least 90 percent. Only when the megatonnage of explosive power is reduced to a level under a
specified "threshold," can the world be safe from the nuclear winter threat.
Conservative thinkers and government officials have put the problem into a different perspective. Although the Department of Defense refused to consider the policy
implications of nuclear winter to this point, it and the Department of Energy have
spent around $5.5 million for research on the theory. Moreover, supporters of the
Reagan's administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), including former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, have adopted the nuclear winter scenario to garner public support for research and development of the proposal. Since SDI would,
in theory, have the capability to intercept and destroy oncoming nuclear missies, supporters claim the threat of nuclear winter could be diminished, as much explosive
power would be destroyed in space.
Critics have claimed that the nuclear winter theory distracted many scientists and
much of the public from the more important implications of nuclear war. However,
this distraction is far outweighed by the theory's generation of public interest toward
the important issues raised by the TTAPS report. Educators and the media should
seize this opportunity to not only expose the nuclear winter thesis, but also the NCAR*
report and more current findings. Scientists should continue to explore the environmental impact of nuclear war and develop new methods and models to predict more
accurately the outcome of a nuclear exchange. And as the superpowers near an historic arms control agreement, they must be mindful that their nuclear policy is grounded
in fact not fiction. For on an issue of such magnitude, to base a decision on imprecise
data would be an unforgivable error. The world may not end in either fire or ice; however,
the misery and death that could occur is enough for us to reexamine our policies and
our principles.
*TTAPS: From the first initial of the last names of the five scientists who introduced
the nuclear winter theory: Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, Sagan.
*NCAR: National Center for Atmospheric Research
Institute Voices
Communications Revolution?
by Jeffrey B. Abramson, E Christopher Arterton
and Gary R. Orren
The Electronic Commonwealth; The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic Politics
by Jeffrey B. Abramson, F. Christopher Arterton and Gary R. Orren, published in 1988 by Basic Books,
NewYork, resulted from the Institute of Politics research project. "New Communications Technology, Public Policy, and Democratic Values," undertaken five years ago with support from the John and Mary R.
Markle Foundation. The project was overseen by a pculty study group chaired by losephS. Nye., Jr., Director, Center for Science and International Affairs and Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs,
John F. Kennedy School of Government. Thepllmving is a brief excerpt from the first chapter of the book.
The concensus is that American society is in the midst of a "communications revolution." The principal evidence of this revolution is that information itself is now the
major product of the American economy. As a consequence of this shift from an industrial to an information economy, all kinds of "future shocks" are predicted. Some
of the more common predictions about the new media's revolutionary potential are
as follows:
• The Gutenberg empire of print is in its last days, as the new technology of videotex
accomplishes the electronic publication of newspapers, books, and encyclopedias on
the home television monitor.
• The three commercial television networks will rapidly lose their audience share to
cable competitors and to home use of prerecorded videocassettes. This loss of audience
share may be so great as to threaten the survival of network programming as we now
know it.
• The survival of movie theaters is also in jeopardy, as Hollywood adjusts to the new
distribution patterns wrought by video-cassettes and by pay cable services such as
Home Box Office (HBO).
• Electronic shopping and banking from the home will increase rapidly in popularity,
as computer devices make it more convenient to shop and bank over the telephone
or television.
• The traditional place of the free public library in American culture will suffer a decline,
as information increasingly becomes available only in data base form and at a price.
• Political campaigning will take on a new look, as candidates become more adroit
in using the "narrowcast" capabilities of such new media as cable television and computerized direct mail. The current television campaign requires candidates to "broadcast" one and the same message across an entire metropolitan area. Future campaigns
will find candidates tailoring their message to specific audiences selected by computer
or to particular audiences watching a Hispanic cable channel or Christian cable network or black entertinament channel.
90
Institute Voices
• Television evangelists will increasingly mobilize their electronic congregations for
political purposes, thereby putting potentially divisive religious issues at the center
of campaign strategy.
• The rapidity of new polling technology will undermine patience with the cumbersome procedures of representative democracy and shift the political process toward
more direct, democratic forms.
ERRATA
Proceedings 1986-87:
—The editor regrets the omission of attribution of a quotation in "Morally Adrift" by
Marian Wright Edelman, page 85. The text should have read . . . They also reflect a
growing recognition expressed well by former Harvard Law Professor Louis Sohn that:
"The future belongs not to those who have the largest number of weapons of mass
destruction, but to those who can best solve their own economic and social problems
and can provide a beacon of hope for the rest of humanity that all nations' problems
can be similarly solved."
—In the article by Li Miao, the editor regrets the error which appears in the Readings
Table of Contents, the title on page 27, and the text on page 30. The correct phrase
is "China is building socialism with Chinese characteristics."
91
II. Programs
Programs
CONTENTS
ADMINISTRATION AND ADVISORY COMMITTEES
97
Administration and Staff
97
Senior Advisory Committee
98
Faculty Advisory Committee
STUDENT PROGRAM
99
Student Advisory Committee
100
Student Study Groups
107
Institute Suppers
108
Summer Research Awards
109
Public Affairs Internships
116
Visiting Fellows
117
Harvard Political Review
122
Student Projects
THE FELLOWS PROGRAM
125
Panel on Fellowships
125
Fellows' Alumni Advisory Committee
126
Institute Fellows
127
Fellows Luncheon Speakers
128
Adjunct Fellow
129
Research Fellows
THE FACULTY STUDIES PROGRAM
130
New Communications Technology Public Policy,
and Democratic Values
131
Public Opinion Polls and Federal Policymaking
132
Project on Elected Politicians
PROFESSIONAL STUDY PROGRAM
AND SPECIAL PROJECTS
134 Seminar on Transition and Leadership
for Newly-Elected Mayors
136 Meeting/Reunion of Women Former Fellows
138 Meetings Hosted
140 THE FORUM
Administration and
Advisory Committees
Administration and Staff
Derek Curtis Bok, President, Harvard University
Graham T. Allison, Dean, John E Kennedy School of Government
Dick Thomburgh, Director, Institute of Politics
Lisa Belsky, Financial Assistant; Research Assistant, Project on
Public Opnion Polls and Policymaking
Albert H. Cantril, Research Fellow
Anne Carballo, Part-time Assistant
Nancy Dietz, Student Program Coordinator
Theresa Donovan, Fellows Program Coordinator; Associate Director, spring
Dennis Galvam, Receptionist, spring
Jennifer Jordan, Forum Coordinator
Anne Doyle Kenney, Office and Publications Coordinator
Yin Man Lam, Assistant Receptionist
Mary MdTigue, Assistant Director, summer 1987
Naomi Notman, Forum Assistant
Wendy M. O'Donnell, Research Director, Project on Public
Opinion Polls and Policymaking, summer 1987
Karen Romero, Receptionist, fall
David Runkel, Deputy Director
Bruce Snydei^ Media Services Assistant, spring
Linda Stames, Secretary to the Director
Elizabeth Suntken, Conference and Development Coordinator
Susan A. Wunderlee, Media Services Coordinator
Senior Advisory Committee
Ronald H. Brown, Esq., (Chair)
Honorable Barber B. Conable, Jr.
Honorable John C. Culver
Mrs. Katharine Graham
Milton S. Gwirtzman, Esq.
Honorable Edward M. Kennedy
Mr. John Kennedy
Professor George C. Lodge
Honorable Robert S. McNamara
Honorable Warren Rudman
Honorable Shirley Williams
97
Administration and Advisory Committees
Faculty Advisory Committee
Francis M. Bator, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political
Economy (Chair)
Samuel H. Beer, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Emeritus
Robert M. Coles, Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities
Philip B. Heymann, Professor of Law
Stanley H. Hoffmann, C Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France
Mark H. Moore, Daniel & Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy
and Management
Richard E. Neustadt, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government
Daniel Steine^ Vice President and General Counsel to the University
Robert B. Stobaugh, Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration
Dick Thomburgh, Director, Institute of Politics (ex officio)
98
Student Program
Student Advisory Committee (SAC)
Claire, Fleming, Chair ^11
Jill Neptune, Vice Chair, fall
John Bendei^ Chair, spring
Michael Labson, Vice Chair spring
Committee Chairs:
Communications: Gerry Cardinale, fall; Brian Brooks, spring
Fellows: Rosa Eckstein
Internships: Justin Daniels, fall; K3a-a Armstrong, spring
Visiting Fellows: Dane Smith, fiill; Annor Ackah, spring
Projects: Michael Labson, fall; Alexander Slusky, spring
Study Groups: Kathy Keough, fall; Don Ridings, spring
Research Awards: Michael Labson
1987-88 SAC Members:
Annor Ackah '89
Allen Adier '89
Kyra Armstrong '89
Matthew Baldwin KSG
Jeffrey Bartel '88
Laurence Belfer '88
John Bender '88
Dan Berger '89
Eric A. Berman '88
Anne Bonaparte HBS
Brian Brooks '91
Gerry Cardinale '89
Claudia Cummins '88
Justin Daniels '89
Shari Davis KSG
John DeFigueiredo '88
James Delaplane '89
Loryn Dunn '90
Rosa Eckstein '88
Claire Fleming '88
Chris Ford '89
Martin Gitlin KSG/HLS
Bruce Goldberger '91
Kim Gutschow '88
Juliette Kayyem '91
Kathy Keough '89
Kris Kobach '88
Stephen Klasen '91
Alan Krischer '91
John II Kwan '90
Michael Labson '89
David Laibson '88
Michael Levitt '90
Karen Levy '89
Doug Menges HBS
Jonathan Miller '89
Eric Mindich '88
Kimberly Morgan '91
Jill Neptune '88
Heejoon Flark '90
David ReHig '89
Don Ridings '90
Arthur Rublin '89
Pfeter Sidebottom HBS
Sara Sievers '90
Alexander Slusky '89
Dane Smith '88
Robert Speyer '91
Norman Williams '91
Michael Zubrensky '88
99
The Student Program
Student Study Groups
Fall 1987
"The Social Democratic Alternative in North America: The Canadian Experience"
David Barrett, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former member. Legislative Assembly,
Premier and Minister of Finance (1972-75), British Columbia, Canada
Guests:
Marc Eliesen, Chairman, Manitoba Hydro Corporation
Harry Flieschman, Manager, Norman Thomas for President campaigns
Howard H. Hiatt, M.D,, former Dean, School of Public Health, Harvard University
Marjorie Nichols, Political Correspondent, Ottawa Citizen
Lynn Williams, President, United Steel Workers of America
"The Role of Trade Associations and the Political Process/'
Jack W. Carlson, Fellow, Institute of Politics; Executive Director,
American Association of Retired Persons; former Chief Executive Officer,
National Association of Realtors, Chief Economist, U.S. Office of
Management and Budget
Guests:
John Rother, Director of Legislation, Research and Public Policy, American Association
of Retired Persons
Jerri Wetle, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Health Policy,
Harvard Medical School
David Wise, Professor of Political Economy, John F. Kennedy School of Government
"Political Satire in the 1980's;'
Howie Can; columnist. The Boston Herald, Boston Magazine; commentator,
"News at Ten," WLVI-TV Boston
Guests:
Albert L. "Dapper" O'Neil, Member-at-large, Boston City Council
"The New South: Looking Toward 1988 and Beyond/'
Thelma Duggin, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former special assistant to
President Reagan (19814983), southern field coordinator. Republican National Committee
Guests:
Shirley Dennis, Director of Women's Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor
Donna Greenwald, Executive Assistant to Carroll Hubbard,
Member, U. S. House of Representatives (D-KY)
Jim Johnson, Managing Director, Shearson Lehman Brothers, Inc.;
Manager, 1984 Mondale for President campaign
Bill Lacey, Manager, 1988 Dole for President campaign
100
The Student Program
William L. Lucas^ former Director of Community Affairs, U. S. Census Bureau
Eunice Thomas, National Grand Basileus, Zeta Phi Beta
Shirley Wiseman, Vice President/Treasurer, National Association of Home Builders
"The Basics: Structure & Management of a Political Campaign/'
Timothy Gens, Director of Development and Public Affairs, Massachusetts Bay
Transportation Authority: political consultant, federal, state and local government
Guests:
Irwin "Tubby" Harrison, Harrison and Goldberg, political consultants
Deborah Katz, Deputy Executive Director, Democratic National Committee
Thomas Kiley, Marttila and KHey, political consultants
James B. King, Vice President for State and Community Affairs, Northeastern University
John Marttila, President, Marttila and Kiley, political consultants
Dan Payne, President, Payne and Associates
Frank Philips, correspondent. The Boston Globe
Michael Shea, Consultant, Payne and Associates
Paul Shone, President, Shone and Associates
Ken Swope, Ken Swope & Associates, Inc., media consultants to Democrats
"The Press and the '88 Presidential Campaign,"
Maxine Isaacs, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former press secretary to
Vice President Walter Mondale, deputy manager and press secretary, 1984 Mondale for
President campaign
Guests:
Dan Balz, National Editor, The Washington Post
Robert Beckel, Manager, 1984 Mondale for President campaign
John Buckley, Press Secretary, 1988 Kemp for President campaign
Dayton Duncan, Deputy Press Secretary, 1984 Mondale for President campaign
Don Foley, Press Secretary, 1988 Gephardt for President campaign
Andrea Mitchell, White House Correspondent, NBC News
Walter F. Mondale, 'Esq., Partner, Vinson & Elkins; former U. S. Vice President;
1984 Democratic presidential candidate
David Nyhan, columnist. The Boston Globe
Tom Oliphant, reporter, The Boston Globe
Larry Rasky, Press Secretary, 1988 Biden for President campaign
Edward Rollins, Manager, 1984 Reagan Presidential Reelection campaign
Bob Schieffei; Chief Washington Correspondent, CBS News
David Shribman, reporter. The Wall Street Journal
Kevin Sweeney, Press Secretary, 1988 Hart for President campaign
Margaret Warner, correspondent, Newsweek magazine
101
The Student Program
"Rites of Passage: How Legislation is Enacted"
Alan J. Karcher, Esq., fellow, Institute of Politics; Minority Leader,
former Speaker, New Jersey General Assembly (D-19th district)
Guests:
Raymond Durkin, Chairman, New Jersey Democratic State Committee
Harol Hodes, former Chief of Staff, Office of Governor Brendan T Byrne, New Jersey
Robert Van Buren, Chief Executive Officer, Midlantic Bank
"Surviving Power: The Impact of Personalit/'
Xandra Kayden, political scientist, founder and Director, Women's Action Program,
U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare
Guests:
John Ehriichman, Assistant for Domestic Affairs, Counsel to the President,
Nixon Administration
John Flannery, President, The November Company
Kevin Harrington, former President, Massachusetts State Senate
Micho Spring, President, Boston Telecommunications, Inc.
Kevin White, former Mayor of Boston (1968-1984)
Adam Yarmolinsky, Provost, University of Maryland
Abraham Zaieznick, Konosuke Matsushutz Professor of Leadership,
Harvard Business School
"The Stump Speech: Marketing a Candidate"
Melissa Ludtke, correspondent. Time magazine; speechwriter and issues director,
Joseph P. Kennedy III (D-MA) 1986 Congressional campaign
Guests:
David Broder, syndicated columnist, The Washington Post
William Bulger, President, Massachusetts State Senate
"Conflict Resolution: The Art of Negotiation"
Frederick Mayei> Research Fellow, Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government;
Co-director, Harvard Negotiation Roundtable
No Guests:
"Ethics in Government: Setting the Standard"
Marilyn O'Connell, Esq., Director of Investigations, Massachusetts State
Ethics Commission; former associate, Sellers, Conner & Cuneo, Washington, D.C.
102
The Student Program
Guests:
Robert A. Cordy, former Assistant U. S. Attorney; former Chief,
Enforcement Division, Massachusetts State Ethics Commission
Colin Diver, Associate Dean, Boston University School of Law
Thomas Gallaghei^ former Member, Massachusetts House of Representatives
Richard E. Lyng, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Lee Regan, Director, Public Education, Massachusetts State Ethics Commission
"The Politics of Trade"
Raymond Vernon, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus;
former director. Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Guests:
Steve Beckman, economist. International Union, United Auto Workers
Lawrence Fox, Vice President, National Association of Manufacturers
Joesph A. Greenwald, former U. S. Representative, Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), and European Economic Community (EEC)
Arthur Gundesheim, Director, International Affairs, Amalgamated Clothing and
Textile Workers Union (ACTWU)
Stephen Haggard, Associate Professor of Government, Harvard University
Dr. David Morrissy, economist, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
Robert L. Paarlberg, Associate Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College
Spring 1988
"Changing Technologies and the World Economy"
Clarence J. "Bud" Brown, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former Deputy Secretary,
U. S. Department of Commerce (1983-1988), Member, U. S. House of
Representatives (1965-1983) (R-OH), Ohio Republican Gubernatorial candidate (1982)
Guests:
Ernest Ambler, Director, National Bureau of Standards, U. S. Department of Commerce
Stephen Entin, Deputy Assistant Secretary/Economic Policy, U, S. Department
of the Treasury
C. J. Chen, Deputy, Cooperative Council for North American Affairs
Gregg Fawkes, Director, Office of Commercial Space Programs, U. S. Department
of Commerce
Peter Patton, Chairman, Consortium for Supercomputer Research, St. Paul, Minnesota
Scott Whitlock, Vice President, Honda of America
Gregor Zore, First Secretary, Embassy of Yugoslavia, Washington, D. C.
"So You Want to be President?"
Geraldine Ferraro, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former Democratic Vice Presidential
nominee (1984), Member, U. S. House of Representatives (1979-1984) (D-NY)
103
The Student Program
Guests:
Celinda Lake, former Political Director, The Yeomen's Campaign Fund
Susan LaSalla, Producer, ABC-TV News, Chicago
Jerry Lewis, Member, U. S. House of Representatives (R-CA)
Dottie Lynch, political editor, CBS~TV News
Scott Miller, President, Sawyer/Miller Group, media consultants
Mary Rose Oakai; Member, U. S. House of Representatives (D-OH)
Francis O'Brien, Press Secretary, 1984 Geraldine Ferraro Vice Presidential campaign
Norman Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
"The Press and the Primaries: Campaign '88"
Edward Fouhy, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former Director, political news division, NBC-TV;
Washington bureau chief ABC-TV News; Director, news division, CBS-TV;
Executive Producer, NBC Nightly News
Guests:
Michael Barone, editorial writer. The Washington Post; editor. Almanac of
American Politics
Ken Bode, political reporter, NBC-TV News
Richard Cohen, former political editor, CBS-TV News
James Dickenson, political reporter, The Washington Post
Albert R. Hunt, Washington Bureau Chief The Wall Street Journal
Connie Kastelnik, field producer, NBC-TV News, Boston
Susan La Salla, field producer, ABC-TV News, Chicago
Warren Mitofsky, Director, Election and Survey Unit, CBS News
Roger Mudd, special correspondent, "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," PBS
Dan Payne, political consultant, 1988 Dukakis for President campaign
John Elobinson, political reporter, Washington Bureau, The Boston Globe
Mark Shields, political analyst; syndicated columnist, Washington Post Syndicate
Sander Vanocur, senior correspondent, ABC News
"Group Dynamics: The Politics of Power and Personality"
Bruce Greenspan, Visiting Lecturer, Tufts University; Chief Administrative Assistant
to Francis Doris, Member, Massachusetts State Senate (D-Suffolk/Essex/Middlesex district)
Guests:
Arline Isaacson, Co-chair, Massachusetts Gay and lesbian Political Caucus
"The Politics of Pregnancy"
Michelle Harrison, M.D., Psychiatrist/Family Physician; Vice President,
American Medical Women's Association; expert witness and writer on
women's health issues
104
The Student Program
Guests:
George Annas, Professor, Boston University School of Public Health
Ruth Hubbard, Professor of Biology, Harvard University
Alan J. Karcher, Fellow, Institute of Politics; Minority Leader, former Speaker,
New Jersey General Assembly
Stanley Sagov, M.D., Department of Family and Community Medicine,
University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester
"Affordable Housing and the Homeless"
Marcia Lamb, Assistant Secretary for Housing, Massachusetts Executive Office of
Communities and Development; former Director of Development,
Kentucky Housing Finance Agency
Guests:
Ann Anderson, Director, Rental Assistance Programs, Massachusetts Executive Office
of Communities and Development
Patrick Clancy, Executive Director, Greater Boston Community Development Corporation
Joseph Corcoran, Chairman, Corcoran Jennison Companies, Inc,
Steve Day, Commissioner, Boston Department of Mental Health
Ellen Gallagher, Director, Families in Transition, Boston Young Women's
Christian Association (YWCA)
Mary Giammarino, Special Assistant to the Secretary, Massachusetts Executive
Office of Communities and Development
Joan Goody, Member, Goody, Clancy & Associates, Inc., Architects
Robert Kuehn, President, Housing Economics, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Betty McManus, Executive Director, Housing Authority, Acton, Massachusetts
Marlin Murdock, Chairman, Housing Authority, Acton Massachusetts
Joan Patterson, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Public Housing Operations,
Massachusetts Executive Office of Communities and Development
John Rosenthal, Vice President, Rosenthal Group
Michael Stegman, Professor, City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina
John Stockard, Commissioner, Cambridge Housing Authority
Daniel Wuenschel, Executive Director, Cambridge Housing Authority
Cesar Zapata, Director, Sharp Program, Massachusetts Executive Office of
Communities and Development
"Emerging Patterns in Black Leadership: Challenge to Mainstream Blacks"
Harriet Michel, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former President, New York Urban League,
consultant, U. S. Departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development
Guests:
Reverend Calvin Butts, Pastor, Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York
Reverend Ben Chavis, Executive Director, Commission for Racial Justice,
United Church of Christ
105
The Student Program
Douglas Glasgow; Vice President, Washington Operations, National Urban League
Joyce Ladner, Professor, School of Social Work, Howard University
Chuck Stone, Senior Editor, Philadelphia Daily News
Roger Wilkins, Senior Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D. C.
"New Strategies for Planning and Managing Cities"
John H. Smith, Fellow, Institute of Politics; Mayor, Prichard, Alabama; President,
National Conference of Black Mayors; Secretary-General, World Conference of Mayors
Guests:
Michelle Kouroma, Executive Director, National Conference of Black Mayors
Ron Leverett, Mayor, Prairie View, Texas
Gerald Nadler, Chairman, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
University of Southern California
Lee Veistandig, President, Verstandig and Associates
"War and Conflict in the Middle East"
Sherman Teichman, Visiting Lecturer, Tufts University; former Middle East
correspondent; Organizer, 1987 symposium on the West Bank and Gaza Strip
Guests:
Robin Wright, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Souad Dajani, Fellow, Center for the Study of Non-Violent Sanctions, Harvard University
Sara Roy, Fellow, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Sami Mohammed Al-Faraj, Lecturer, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,
Tufts University
"Policy and Politics of the U.S. Space Program"
Todd Watkins, Ph.D. candidate, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program and
Fellow, CenterforScience and International Affairs, John F Kennedy School of Government
Guests:
Ashton B. Carter, Associate Director, Center for Science and International Affoirs,
John F. Kennedy School of Government
George B. Field, Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy,
Harvard University Observatory
Dr. John M. Logsdon, Director, Space Policy Institute, George Washington University
Kenneth S. Pederson, Deputy Associate Administrator for External Relations,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Marc E. Vaucher, Programs Manager, NASA Center for Space Policy, Inc.
"Current Affairs Dinner Table"
Jim Barron, Esq., political writer; former reporter, WGBH-FM; national political
writer, The Boston Phoenix
106
The Student Program
Guests:
Dan Payne, media advisor, 1988 Dukakis for President Campaign
Crocker Snow, publisher and editor, World Paper
Ken Swope, Ken Swope & Associates, Inc., media consultants to Democrats
Minoni Tamba, Consul General of Japan in Boston
Wayne Davis, Associate Director, Harvard Negotiation Project
Bruce Stokes, correspondent, National Journal
"Who's Up and Who's Down: "Brown Bag" Lunch Discussion, State-by-State
Primary Results"
Dick Thomburgh, Director, Institute of Politics; former Governor of Pennyslvania
David Runkel, Deputy Director, Institute of Politics; former political reporter,
The Philadelphia Bulletin
"Seminar Series on International Labor and Economic Issues"
Heinz Kluncker, ferry Wurf Fellow; former President, Public Services
and Transport Workers Union, Stuttgart, Germany
Institute Suppers
Institute suppers, scheduled twice each week in conjunction with the study
group program, bring together for informal discourse study group leaders
and their guests, current and former fellows and staff and representatives
from the arenas of electoral politics, public affairs, the media, and academia.
The agenda for supper includes a brief talk and discussion led by a study
group guest speaker. 1987-88 guest speakers were:
Fall 1987
October 13
October 14
October 20
October 21
David Broder, syndicated columnist. The Washington Post
Steve Beckman, International Economist, United Auto Workers
David Yepsen, political editor, Des Moines Register
Lawrence Fox, Vice-President, National Association
of Manufacturers
October 27:
William Bulgei; President, Massachusetts State Senate
Eunice Thomas, organizer, Black Women's Political
October 28:
Empowerment Conference
November 3; Bob Schieffe^ Chief Washington Correspondent, CBS News
November 4: Marjorie Nichols, Political Correspondent, Ottawa Citizen
November 11: Joseph A. Greenwald, former U.S. Representative to the
OECD and the EEC
107
The Student Program
Spring 1988
February 16: Mark A. Peterson, Assistant Professor of Government,
Harvard University
February 17: AI Hunt, Washington Bureau Chief, The Wall Street Journal
February 23: Michael Stegman, Chairman, Dqyartmenf of City and
Regional Planning, University of North Carolina
February 24: Crocker Snow, President, World Paper
Dr. Douglas Glasgow, National Urban league
March 1:
Mark Shields, political analyst; syndicated columnist,
March 2:
Washington Post Syndicate
Celinda Lake, former Political Director, Women's Campaign Fund
March 8:
Alan J, Karcheii Esq., Fellow, Institute of Politics; minority
March 9:
Leader, former Speaker, New Jersey General Assembly
Gregg Fawkes, Director, Office of Commercial Space Programs,
March 15:
U. S. Department of Commerce
Sander Vanocur, senior correspondent, ABC News
March 16
Dottie Lynch, political editor, CBS-TV News
March 22
Ron Leverett, mayor, Prairie View, Texas
March 23
Roger Mudd, Special Correspondent, "MacNeil/Lehrer
April 6:
NewsHour"
Gregor Zore, Economic Counsellor, Embassy of the Socialist
April 12:
Republic of Yugoslavia, Washington, D.C. and
C.J. Chen, Deputy Secretary, Coordination Council for
North American Affairs
Michael Barone, co-author. The Almanac of American
AprU 13:
Politics
Summer Research Awards
The Institute of Politics offers Summer Research Awards to Harvard
undergraduates for fieidwork contributing to senior theses relating to
American politics and public policy issues.
1987 recipients and their topics were:
Melissa Bayer '88 (Government), "The Issue of Race in Electoral Politics:
A Case Study of Racial Gerrymandering in Chicago"
Scott Easton '88 (Government), "Arab-Americans and the American
Political Process: A Case Study in Minority Politics"
Paul Kim '88 (History and Science), "Metropolitan District Commission and
the Boston Harbor Islands State Park: A Case Study ofResou rces Management"
108
The Student Program
John Lambros '87-88 (Government), "Interest Croups and Agricultural
Polia/-Making in the 1980's: A Comparative Study of the Forces
Affecting the Dairy Policies of the United States and Great Britain"
Mark Levine '57-85 (Economics), "Macroeconomic Factors Behind the
Financial Crisis of Grain Farmers in the United Sstates"
Marie Park '87-88 (Government), "How Critical Legal Studies Theory
Has Evolved with the Introduction of Feminist Jurisprudence"
Jason Ravitz '88 (Sociology/Pyschology), "Black Ministers in Boston:
A Variety of Poltical Roles"
Soroush Shehabi '87--88 (International Relations), "International
Ecological Management: National Interest and Cognitive Presumptions as
Sources of Policy Divergence Between the United States and Europe"
Kevin Saltzman '88 (American History), "The Precursors of American
Space Policy in the Activities of the Truman Administration"
William Whelan '88 (Social Studies), "A Cross-National Study of
Politically Disaffected Youth Subcultures"
Public Affairs Internships
The Institute offers several programs for Harvard under-graduates in support of student participation in public sector internships and in public
affairs, including:
• Information—provided in conjunction with the Harvard Office of Career
Services—about internship and employment opportunities in American
politics and public affairs.
• The Summer Stipend Program—providing supplementary funds in support of public sector internships enabling undergraduates to accept unpaid or underpaid summer jobs in federal, state, and local government
and in public affairs agencies.
• The Summer-in-Washington Program—provides information and
assistance for students seeking summer housing in the Washington, D.C.
area and hosts a speakers series, intellectual, athletic and social activities
for Harvard students working and living during the summer in Washington and its environs.
• The Summer-in-Boston Program—presents a speakers series, social events
and excursions to places of political interest for students and others studying, working or living in the Boston area during the eight-week Harvard
Summer School session.
• Seminars and workshops—bringing together Institute Fellows, public sector
professionals, intern supervisors and former interns for panel discussions
109
The Student Program
which cover topics such as internship availability, requirements, hiring
practices and recruitment, skills needed, office protocol, opportunities
for job enhancement and advancement and tips about summer living and
resources available in the District of Columbia area.
The Externship Program—enabling Harvard students to witness—by
"shadowing" for one or more days during spring break week—the day-today responsibilities of a professional in government, the media, or public
sector agencies.
Summer Stipends
1987 summer stipend recipients and their employers were:
John T. Bailey '88: legal Services Program of Northern Indiana, Inc.
Nancy Brune '90: Office of Mayor Henry Cisneros, San Antonio, Texas
Helen L. Chubin '90: Office of U. S. Representative Peter Kostmayer (D-PA),
Washington, D.C.
Zachary D. Coleman '89/90: Office of U. S. Representative
I Alex McMillan (R-hJC), Washington, D. C.
James M, Delaplane, Jr. '89, District Office of U. S. Senator
Arlen Specter (R-PA), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
David T. Goldberg, '87: NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,
New York City
Lewison Lem Lee '89: District Office of U. S. Representative
Barbara Boxer (D-CA), San Francisco, California
Louisa Lund '89: Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington, D. C.
Cheryl Nelson '89: Capital Punishment Project, NAACP Legal Defense Fund,
New York City
Christopher Y. Pham '89: Office of U. S. Representative
Robert K. Doman (R-CA), Washington. D. C.
Anne Turner Robinson '88: Governmental Studies Program,
The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
Janet Maren Sansgaard '88: Prairiefire, Des Moines, Iowa
Tim Shavers '89: Tennessee Sentencing Commission, Nashville, Tennessee
Adan Brent Siegel '90: Greater Sheepshead Bay Development Corporation,
Brooklyn, N.Y.
April A. E. Tash '89: Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future,
Washington, D.C.
Christine Webber '88: Office of U. S. Representative Barney Frank,
Washington, D. C.
110
The Student Program
Summer-in-Washington Program
The 1987 Summer-in-Washington Program, coordinated by Susanna Kim
'87, provided, during April and May, general and specific information on summer housing in the District of Columbia area, and hosted, during June, July
and August, the following speakers and events:
• Program Receptions, April 23 & 24, 1987 (Institute Living Room)
• Bon Voyage Party, May 14, 1987 {Goodman Conference Room)
• Picnic with Princeton and Duke Universities summer programs {Montrose
Park)
• Annual reception, June 24, 1987, for Harvard and University of
Pennsylvania students, hosted by Massachusetts Congressman
Barney Frank and Pennsylvania Congressman Tom Foglietta (Rayburn
House Office Building)
• Meeting and discussison, June 30, 1987, with Bob Squiei; founder and
President, The Communications Company; political commentator, NBC
News; media consultant to political candidates; Emmy Award-winning
filmmaker( Mr. Squier's office)
• Meeting and discussion, July 8, 1987, with Ben Bradlee, executive editor,
The Washington Post (Mr. Bradlee's office)
• Theatre trip, July 9, 1987, to Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
to see "Sherlock's Last Case," preceded by a reception at the Kennedy
Center and followed by a visit with actor Frank Langella
• Panel discussion, July 13, 1987, "How Washington Works," with
Archie D. Barrett, House Armed Services Committee, discussing
committee work
Douglas R. Cannon, special advisor, U. S. Department of Education,
discussing the political appointment process
Dorothy Cecelski, Director, Office of State Committees; Secretary,
National Governing Board, Common Cause, discussing lobbying and
its role in making public policy
William Malone, Esq., Washington, D. C. attorney, discussing the role
of lawyers in government
Al Sanoff, senior editor, U. S. News & World Report, discussing the
role and influence of the press in government (Rayburn House
Office Building)
• Meeting and discussion, July 14, 1987, with Admiral Stansfield Turner,
former Director, Central Intelligence Agency, discussing the past and
future of the intelligence community {hosted by Sasha Field '90)
• Meeting and discussion, July 16, 1987, with Iowa Congressman Fred
Grandy (Longworth House Office Building)
111
The Student Program
Picnic, July 18,1987, hosted by Washington, D. C. Harvard Club including
tour of 17th/18ty century Manor House, trail walks, and music and
sports (Wilderness Farms, Maryland)
Career Panel, July 20, 1987, with Harvard alumni
Dale Curtis, press secretary to Congressman Sherwood Boehlert
a n d former member. S t u d e n t Advisory Committee, Institute of
Politics, discussing working on Capitol Hill and seeking full time
jobs in Washington
Lenann McCookey, manager/partner marketing, MCI discussing
women in business and juggling family and career
Leonard Pfeiffer IV, Vice President, Korn/Ferry International, executive
search agency, discussing jobs in business
Meetings and discussion, July 22 and August 5, 1987, with Congresswoman Pat Schroeder
Meeting and discussion, July 23, 1987, with Paul Nitze, Ambassadorat-Large and Special Advisor on Arms Control to President Reagan
and Ambassador Nitze's aide, Mike Stafford (State Department)
Trip to Mount Vernon, July 25, 1987
Meeting and discussion, July 27, 1987, with Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger and tour of the Pentagosi with Mr. Weinberger's
aide. Captain William Miller (the Pentagon)
Annual informational meeting, July 28, 1987, with discussion and
question-and-answer session on life and politics in Washington, D. C ,
with Mark Talisman^ Director, Council of Jewish Federations;
advisor to the Summer-in-Washington Program (Mr. Talisman's office)
Reception, July 29, 1987, hosted by the Embassy of Mexico and meeting
and discussion with Jorge Pinto, Minister of Economic Affairs
PBS Film, July 30, 1987, "The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from
the Czechoslovak State Collection," shown l ^ Project Judaica Foundation, with discussion of the artifacts and the film by Mark Talisman,
Director, Council of Jewish Federations (Dirksen House Office Building)
All-college trip, August 1, 1987, to King's Dominion Amusement Park
Briefing, August 3, 1987, on the Soviet-Afghanistan War by Charles
Norchi, director. Project on War Crimes in Afghanistan, and
Marin Strmecki, research associate to Zbigniew Brezhinski (Center
for Strategic and International Studies)
Meeting and discussion, August 6,1987, with Senator Edward M. Kermedy
(Senator Kennedy's office)
Farewell party, August 7, 1987 (hosted by Susie Kim and the Summerin-Washington Program)
112
The Student Program
Bagel brunch and lesson in bagel-making, August 9, 1987, with Mark
Talisman, advisor, Summer-in-Washington Program; Director, Council
of Jewish Federations (Mr. Talisman's home)
Softball games against Princeton, Michigan State, Stanford, University
of Pennsylvania, Duke, Berkeley, Yale
Summer-in-Boston Program
The 1987 Summer-in-Boston Program, coordinated by Michael Pahie '89,
hosted the following activities during the Harvard Summer School term:
Introductory Meeting, July 1, 1987, with remarks by
Anne Doyle Kenney, Internship and Publications Coordinator, Institute of
Politics
Mike Pahre, Coordinator, Summer~in-Boston Program
Dick Thornburgh, Director, Institute of Politics (Room 280)
Political Tour of Downtown Boston including tour of Massachusetts State
House, old Boston City Hall, other historic points of interest and ending with
a visit to the original "Bailey's" ice cream shoppe, July 6, 1987, with
Tour Guide and Narrator, Lawrence S. DiCara, Esq., member,
Panel on fellowships, Institute of Politics; former member, Boston City Council
"Star Wars: SDl and the Feasibility of Directed Energy Weapons," July 8,
1987, a panel discussion, with
Nicolaas Bloembergen, Professor and Co-Chairman of APS Study on
Directed Energy Weapons
Lt. CoL Peter Worden, Senior Policy Analyst, Office of Science and Technology,
Executive Office of the President
Richard H. Haass, lecturer in Public Policy, fohn F, Kennedy School
of Government (moderator) (Forum)
"The Wreck of the American Economy and the Rise of Japan," July 14,1987,
a public address by Robert B. Reich, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F.
Kennedy School of Government (Room 150)
"No Smoking Allowed: Public Policy and the Cambridge Smoking Law,"
July 15, 1987, a panel discussion, with
Dr. Lewis Rambo, Director of Personnel, Arthur D. Little, Inc.
Nancy A. Rigotti, M.D., Associate Director, Institute for the
Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy
113
The Student Program
David Sullivan, member, Cambridge City Council
Wayne Sharpe, President, Cambridge Chamber of Commerce (moderator)
(Room 140)
Tour of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum July 25,1987
Tour Guide: Shelley Summer, Director of Public Relations, Kennedy Library
"Running for Office: Challenges Facing Today's Politicians/' July 28,1987,
a panel discussion, with
Julie Belaga, Lecturer, John R Kennedy School of Government;
former member, Connecticut House of Representatives
Stuart Halsan, member, Washington State Senate
Dick Thornburgh, Director, Institute of Politics; former
Governor of Pennsylvania
James B. King, Vice President for Public and Community Relations,
Northeastern University (moderator) (Room 140)
"The Future of Covert Operations after the Iran/Contra Scandal," August
5, 1987, a discussion between two former staff members of the National
Security Council
Gregory F, Treverton, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Pfeter B. Zimmerman, Associate Dean and Director, Executive Training Program,
John F. Kennedy School of Government (Room 140)
"The 1988 Presidential Campaign: Journalists Discuss the Candidates,"
August 12, 1987, a panel discussion, with
Hendrik Hertzberg, Fellow, John Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government;
former editor, The New Republic
Judy Jarvis, producer and host, "Point-of-View," WLVI-TV Boston
Marvin Kalb, Director, John Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy, John K Kennedy School of Government;
former host, "Meet the Press" NBC-TV (moderator) (Starr Auditorium)
"Weekly Political Film Series," co-sponsored t^ the Forum and the Summerin-Boston Program
Films shown were: "The Candidate," "The Man Who Fell to Earth,"
"Inherit the Wind," "Nashville," "War Games," "The Magic Christian,"
"Silkwood," "Gallipoli/'
Series arrangements and logistics by Lydia Krek, Forum Assistant,
Institute of Politics
114
The Student Program
Fall Workshop
A Public Sector Internship Workshop, December 8, 1987, presented information on topics of interest to potential interns, including: strategies for locating public sector internship opportunities, federal vs. state and local
internships, developing necessary skills, expectations of employers, office
protocol, and insights of former public sector professionals and a former student intern.
Panelists were:
Albert Cantril, Research Fellow, Institute of Politics; former President,
Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc.
Carla L. Mortensen, Assistant Director/Government and Public Affairs,
Office of Career Services, Harvard University
Adam Brent Siegel '89, 1987 summer intern, Greater Sheepshead Bay
Development Corporation, Brooklyn, New York
Don Ridings '90, member. Student Advisory Committee,
Institute of Politics (moderator)
Externships
The March 1988 Externship Program paired 19 public sector professionals
in Boston, New York and Washington, D. C. with Harvard undergraduates.
Externship hosts and students were:
Elizabeth Bartle, Press Assistant, 1988 Dukakis for President campaign,
Boston (Rachna Dhanda)
Laura D. Blackburne, Esq., President and Chief Executive Officer,
Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution, New York City
(Marc J. Blitz)
Jeff Brosnan, Vice President of Human Resources, Public Development
Corporation, New York City (Michael Levitt)
Marilyn J. Flood, Executive Director, Commission on the Status of Women,
New York City (Marc David Jaffe)
David R. Gergen, Editor, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C
(Benjamin Miller)
Ellen Hume, White House Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal,
Washington, D. C. (Daniel Berger)
Gregory Kaladjian, Executive Deputy Commissioner, Human Resources
Administration, New York City (Mario Mancuso)
Katherine S. Legg, Executive Deputy Administrator, Human Resources
Administration, New York City (Ellen Chubin)
Christopher Lydon, Anchor/Reporter, WGBH-TV, Boston (Shari Davis)
Robert McFarland, Bureau Chief NBC News, Washington, D. C.
(C. Everett Vann)
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The Student Program
John Marks, Executive Director, Search for Common Ground,
Washington, D.C. (Antonia Estrada)
Ruth Messinger, Member, City Council, New York City (Bruce Goldbergcr)
R. Susan Motley, Executive Deputy Administrator, Human Resources
Administration, New York City (Jeff Cooper)
Michael Press, Assistant Commissioner, Office of Business Development,
New York City (Michael Levitt)
The Honorable Warren Rudman, Member, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.
(Daniel Ahn)
Diedee Runkel, Director of Public Affairs. The Peace Corps,
Washington, D.C. (Donald Fishman)
Frederick Schaffei; Chief Litigating Counsel, Law Department,
New York City (Michael Goldhaber)
Jim Slattery, Member, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.
(Dale Peterson)
Judy Woodruff, Chief Washington Correspondent, MacNeil/Lehrer
NewsHour, Washington, D. C. (Todd Flynn)
Heffernan Visiting Fellows
The Dennis B. and Elizabeth B. Heffernan Visiting Fellows Program brings
prominent public men and women to Harvard for brief visits designed to
provide maximum contact with the Harvard community and with undergraduate and graduate students in particular. A public address in the ARCO
Forum of Public Affairs is often one of the highlights of the program.
The 1987-88 Visiting Fellow was:
Denis Healey, Member, House of Commons, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Minister of Defense and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Great
Britain. Activities during Mr. Healey's visit (April 25-28,1988) included lunch
with members of the Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee; meetings with associates of the Center for International Affairs, members of the
Avoiding Nuclear War Project, European students, faculty members, and
representatives of undergraduate student organizations; an interview with
the Harvard Political Review; and participation in a discusssion on "Thatcherism: A Resuigence of Conservatism?" in the Government department course
on Contemporay British Politics.
116
The Student Program
Harvard Political Review
The Harvard Political Review, a journal of political analysis, is published by
the Student Advisory Committee of the Institute.
1987-88 officers and staff were:
David Blume, Contributing Staff
Mary Bodnick, Cover Story Editor, fall '87
Chloe Breyei; Contributing Staff, 1/88; Production Manager, 3/88
Karla Delgado, Contributing Staff, 10/87; Departments Editor, 11/87, spring '88
Christopher A. Ford, Managing Editor/Issue Editor, 10/87; Cover Story Editor, 11/87
Contributing Editor, 1/88; Contributing Staff, 3/88
Scott Frewing, Contributing Staff
Ametta Girardeau, Contributing Staff, fall '87
Jeff Glueck, Contributing Staff, 1/88; Cover Story Editor, 3/88
Solomon Goldfarb, Contributing Staff
Meredith Golomb, Outside Submissions Editor, fall '87; Contributing Staff, 1/88
Francisco Gonzalez, Contributing Staff
James Grosjean, Contributing Staff, 1/88; Camp. Director, 3/88
Ozan Gurel, Contributing Staff, 10/87; Advertising Manager, 11/87, 1/88;
Business Manager, 3/88
Cherie Harder, Contributing Staff, 1/88; Outside Submissions Editor, 3/88
David C. Hsu, Contributing Editor, 11/87; Contributing Staff 10/87, spring '88
Juliiette Kaj^em, Contributing Staff, 1/88; Outside Submissions Editor, 3/88
Stephan Klasen, Contributing Staff, 1/88; Assistant Managing Editor, 3/88
Peter Klibanoff, Issue Assistant Editor/Departments Editor 10/87;
Managing Editor, 11/87, spring '88
Kris Kobach, Contributing Staff, fall '87, 1/88
Peter Kozinets, Contributing Staff, 1/88; Circulation Manager, 3/88
Karen Levy, Contributing Staff, 10/87; Advertising Manager, 11/87, 1/88;
Publisher, 3/88
Alex Luchenitsei; Contributing Staff, spring '88
Amos Meron, Business Manager, fall '87, 1/88
Jonathan Miller, Issue 'Editor, 10/87; Editor-in-Chief, 11/87, 1/88;
Editor Emeritus, 3/88
Michael Mitzenmacher, Contributing Staff, spring '88
Ellen Noonan, Contributing Staff, fall '87
Raymond Nomizu, Circulation Manager, 3/88
Ian Ogilvie, Contributing Staff, 11/87, 1/88
Steve Papkin, Contributing Staff, 10/87; Book Reviews Editor 11/87, spring '88
Michael Park, Contributing Staff, 10/87
Javier Pferez, Contributing Staff, fall '87, 1/88
David Rettig, Editor-in-Chief (on leave), 10/87
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The Student Program
Maxwell Rovner, Issue Assistant Editor, 10/87; Assistant Managing Editor,
11/87, 1/88; Editor-in-Chief, 3/88
Arthur Rublin, Publisher, W87, 1/88
Jonathan Savett, Contributing Staff, fall '87, 1/88
Bill Vesterman, Circulation Manager, 2/88; Advertising Manager, 3/88
Norman Williams, Contributing Staff, 1/88; Departments Editor, 3/88
Solomon Woods, Contributing Staff, spring '88
Mike Zubrensky, Publisher, 10/87; Publisher Emeritus, 11/87;
Contributing Staff, spring '88
Five issues of HPR were published during the 1986-87 academic year.
Articles included:
VOLUME 14/NUMBER 4: October 1987
Cover: The Politics of Hace
"Righting Past Wrongs: The Debate Over Affirmative Action"
Peter Kilbanoff
"Rearing Its Ugly Head: Campus Racism in the 1980's," Maxwell Rovner
"Streets of Gold: The Myth of the 'Model Minority/" Curtis Chang
Features:
"Let Us Go Together on the Road to Peace," An Address by
Oscar Arias
Interview with Milton Goleman
Interview with Tipper Gore
Vital Statistics
Opinion;
"Robert Bork and his Critics: Rejection would be an Injustice,"
Christopher A. Ford
"Will the Real Robert Bork Please Stand Up?" Michael Zubrensky
Departments:
"South Korea: Economic Development and an Uncertain Future,"
Solomon Goldfarb
"South Africa's Imposed Peace: The Unlikely Prospects for
Revolution/' Kris Kobach
"Shaking Hands, Kissing Babies: Campaign '88 Heats Up in Iowa
"Kinnock's Labour's Lost: Will He Ever Win?" Steve Pipkin
118
The Student Program
VOLUME 15/NUMBER 1: NOVEMBER 1987
Cover: Campaign '88: The Republicans
"Reaching for the Center: Bush and Dole Chart a Moderate
Course," David Blume
"Struggling to be Reagan's Protege: Kemp and DuPont Fight
for the Right" Steve Papkin
"Reflections on the Front Runners: The Role of Image in the
'88 Campaign," Kris Kobach
"Thoughts on the 1988 Campaign," Governor Richard Thornburgh
Features:
The Republicans on the Issues
Vital Statistics
Opinion:
"Playing with Fire: America Pursues a Dangerous Policy in Gulf,"
Michael Mitzenmacher
"Protecting Our Interests: Why the U. S. Belongs in the Gulf,"
Christopher A. Ford
Departments:
"Trouble in the Philippines: Cory Aquino Struggles with the
Military" Karla Delgado
"The 'Fall-ing of Nuclear Winter: A Model Comes into Question,"
Jonathan Miller
"Striking a Balance: The American and Soviets Inch Towards
an Agreement," Stephan Klasen
Book Review:
Total Justice by Lawrence M. Friedman, "Examining Law in a
Changing Society," Pfeter Klibanoff
VOLUME 15/NUMBER 2: JANUARY 1988
Cover: Campaign '88: The Democrats
"Limping Towards the Finish Line: The Long, Warped Road to
the Nomination," David Blume
Interview with Walter Mondale
"Taxation and no Nomination?: Economic Policy Divides the
Candidates," Pfeter Kozinets
"Morality and the Media: Character vs. Issues in the '88 Campaign,"
Norman Williams
"Deadlock in Atlanta?: Omens of a Brokered Democratic
Convention," Alex Luchenitser
119
The Student Program
Features:
The Democrats on the Issues
Interview with Warren Rudman
Interview with John Kenneth Galbraith
Vital Statistics
Departments:
"The Wright Policy?: Reagan, Congress and Nicaragua"
Michael Mitzenmacher
"Dangerous Dependence: Oil as a Factor in National Security"
Raymond Nomizu
"A Nation Divided—Germany's Reunification: Does it Loom on
the Horizon?" James Grosjean
"The Navajo's Challenge: The 'Long Walk' to Self-Sufficiency"
Cherie Harder
Book Review:
A House of III Repute, edited by Dan Renberg, "The Corruption of
Absolute Power/' Steve Papkin
VOLUME 15/NUMBER 3: MARCH 1988
Cover: The NATO Alliance
'A Challenge for NATO: Can the Alliance Survive Disarmament?"
Stephan Klasen
"Trouble in the Family: Is European Anti-Americanism on the Rise?'
Jeff Glueck
"Overstaying Our Welcome: The U. S. Fears for its Bases
in Europe," Raymond Nomizu
"Assessing the Adversary," David Hsu
"A European Alternative?: Britain and France Retain their
Nuclear Option," Alex Luchenitser
Features:
Interview with Alfredo Cesar
Intrview with Carlos Tunnermann
Vital Statistics
Opinion
"Why I Support the INF Treaty," Helmut Schmidt
"Europeans Distrust the INF Agreement," Giles Merrilt
120
The Student Program
Departments:
"Moving Towards Democracy: Prospects for Reform in South
Korea," Solomon Woods
"The Queen Bees: Iowa and New Hampshire," Norman Williams
"The End in Sight?: Soviets Prepare to Leave Afghanistan,"
Chloe Breycr
"Examining Our Options: The U. S. Takes a New Look at
UNESCO," Karla Delgado
Book Review:
"The Making of a Public Servant," Dukakis and the Reform Impulse,
by Richard Gaines and Michael Segal, Steve Papkin
VOLUME 15/NUMBER 4: MAY 1988
Cover: The U.S. Electorate: Pivotal Groups and Their Political Power
"America's New Political Machine?," Alex Luchenitser
"A Bipartisan Rise to Prominence," Peter Kozinets
"Winning the Game?/' James Grosjean
"Newfound Activism," Steve Papkin
Features:
Interview with Billy Melvin, Executive Director,
National Association of Evangelicals
Interview with Toney Anaya, former Governor of New Mexico
Opinion:
The Reagan Legacy
"The Return of Leadership," David ReHig
"Illusion of Grandeur," Chloe Breyer and Stephan Klasen
Departments:
"Pressure on Panama," Francisco Gonzalez and Raymond Nomizu
"No Solution in Sight," Juliette Kayyem and Stephan Klasen
"Renewing the Pledge," Jeff Glueck
Book Review:
Squandering Eden: Africa at the Edge, Christopher A. Ford
121
The Student Program
Student Projects
During academic year 1987-88, the Projects Committee continued its sponsorship of educational programs including panel discussions on the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), gun control legislation, and food
policy in Africa, a leadership conference for high school students, a nuclear
war crisis simulation and a series of breakfast meetings with Harvard University professors.
Projects included:
"Personal Perspectives on Politics," September 16,1987, a panel discussion
with the Fall 1987 Fellows of the Institute of Politics, including:
David Barrett, former Member, Legislative Assembly, Premier and
Minister of Finance (1972-75), British Columbia, Canada
Jack W. Carlson, Executive Director, American Association of Retired Persons;
former Chief Executive Officer, National Association of Realtors,
Chief Economist, U. S. Office of Management and Budget
Thelma Duggin, former Special Assistant to President Reagan (1981-1983),
Southern field coordinator. Republican National Committee
Maxine Isaacs, former Press Secretary to Vice President Mandate;
Deputy Manager and press secretary, 1984 Mondale for President campaign
Alan Karcher, Esq., Minority Leader and former Speaker,
New Jersey General Assembly
Dick Thomburgh, Director, Institute of Politics; former Governor of
Pennsylvania (moderator)
"Effective Leadership: Doing Your Job," December 4,1987, a one-day training conference for student leaders, co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Education, Greater Boston Region. Sessions included:
Opening Remarks: Jacqueline Smith, member. Greater Boston
Student Advisory Council; chair, conference task force
Introduction: Dick Thomburgh, Director, Institute of Politics;
former Governor of Pennsylvania
Keynote Address: Jean McGuire member, Boston School Committee
(Longfellow Hall, Harvard University)
"Who has Responsibility for the Homeless in Cambridge?," December 8,
1987, a panel discussion with:
Tom Boland, local political activist
Philip Mangano, Coordinator of Emergency Services, Cambridge
Bill Walsh, member, Cambridge City Council
Alice Wolf, Vice Mayor, City of Cambridge
Jonathan Kaufman, staff writer. The Boston Globe (moderator)
(Starr Auditorium/Belfer Center)
122
The Student Program
"Who's in Charge?: A Debate on the War Powers Act," December 16,1987,
with:
Mike Glennon, former Counsel, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Monroe Leigh, former Counsel to the President, ford Administmtion
William G. Mille^ former Counsel, Senate Intelligence Committee
Mark Peterson, Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University
(moderator)
"Personal Perspectives on Politics," February 4,1988, a panel discussion with
the Spring 1988 Fellows of the Institute of Politics, including:
Clarence J. "Bud" Brown, former Deputy Secretary, U. S. Department
of Commerce (1983-1988); Member, U. S. House of Representatives (R-OH)
(1965-1983); Ohio Republican Gubernatorial candidate (1982)
Geraldine Ferraio, 1984 Vice Presidential nominee; former Member,
U. S. House of Representatives (D-NY) (1979-1984)
Edward Fouhy, former Director, political news division, NBC-TV;
Chief, Washington bureau, ABC-TV News; Director, news division, CBS-TV;
Executive Producer, NBC Nightly News
Heinz Klunckei^ ferry Wurf Fellow; former President, Public Services
and Transport Workers Union, Stuttgart, Germany
Harriet Michel, former President, New York Urban League;
consultant, U. S. Department of Labor and U. S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development
John Smith, Mayor, Prichard, Alabama; President, National
Conference of Black Mayors; Secretary-General, World Conference
of Mayors
Dick Thornburgh, Director, Institute of Politics; former Governor
of Pennsylvania (moderator)
"Does Gun Control Work?," February 10, 1988, a panel discussion on gun
control in Florida and Massachusetts with:
George A. Bachrach, Attorney; former Massachusetts State Senator
Sarah Brady, member. Handgun Control, Inc.
Richard Gardiner, spokesman. National Rifle Association
Dexter Lehtinen, Florida State Senator
H. W. Pferry, Jr., Assistant Professor of Government,
Harvard University (moderator) (Starr Auditorium/Belfer Center)
"Negotiating Peace: the INF Treaty and Beyond," February 24,1988, a panel
discussion with:
Frank Gaffney, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Policy
123
The Student Program
Adam M. Garfinkle, Coordinator, Political Studies Program,
Foreign Polio/ Research Institute
Richard N. Haass, Lecturer in Public Polio/, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
John Ledlie, Chief Press Officer, British Defense Ministr}/;
Fellow, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Graham T. Allison, Dean, Kennedy School of Government (moderator)
A reception and discussion following "Left, Right, Center: The Condition
of Liberalism and Conservatism in 1988," February 26, 1988, a debate, with
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Kevin P. Phillips (see The Forum)
"What Can Be Done About Hunger in Africa?," April 14,1988, a panel discussion with:
Jose Aponte, Director of International Services, American Red Cross
Brian Kline, Deputy Director, Africa Technical Resources Bureau,
U. S. Agency for International Development
James McCann, Assistant Director, African Studies Center, Boston University
Mahmoud Tamim, Counsel, Embassy of Sudan, Washington, D.C
Richard Goldman, Fellow, Harvard Institute for International Development
(moderator) (Starr Auditorium/Belfer Center)
Second annual Nuclear War Crisis Simulation, April 16, 1988, created by
the Rand Corporation, with participants role playing as top level officials of
the governments of the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. and utilizing computer analysis for strategic decision making.
Luncheon presentation and discussion, May 9,1988, with Ed Buck, organizer, grassroots movement to recall former Governor Evan Mecham of
Arizona. (Institute of Politics/Good man Conference Room)
Campaign '88 Database
During 1987-88 the Student Advisory Committee continued to compile and
develop the Campaign '88 Database—a resource for Harvard students interested in working on the 1988 presidential campaign.
Questionnaires completed for all the Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates provide addressses and telephone numbers for local and
national campaign headquarters, availability of paid and volunteer positions,
application procedures and names of principal campaign staff responsible
for areas such as press relations and issues development
Also available to potential student campaign workers are position papers
and other information provided by the candidates, as well as the names and
addresses of the on-campus representatives for each campaign.
124
The Fellows Program
The program for fellows is central to the Institute's dual commitment to
encourage student interest and competence in public life and to develop more
effective ways in which the academic and political communities may share
their resources.
The program for fellows was originally designed to offer a chance for reass e s s m e n t a n d p e r s o n a l e n r i c h m e n t to i n d i v i d u a l s in politics a n d
government—particularly those described as "in-and-outers"—who might feel
the need for this opportunity and benefit from it. Although this original purpose still exists, fellows have become increasingly involved in the other programs of the Institute, as well as in other areas of the Kennedy School and
the University. Significant emphasis is now placed on a fellow's contribution
to the Institute and to the Harvard community during the term of residence.
Panel on Fellowships
Lawrence S. DiCara, Esq.
Archie Epps
Susan Estrich (on leave)
Dan Fenn
Lance M. Liebman, Chair
Richard J. Light
Michael Lipsky
Ernest R. May
Nicholas T. Mitropoulos
Richard E. Neustadt
Don K. Price
John Shattuck
Students/fall
Claire Fleming
Jill Neptune
Students/spring
John Bender
Michael Labson
Fellows' Alumni Advisory Committee
Julia Chang Bloch, spring
Robert Bradford
Alvin J. Brunstein, Chair
Bernard R. Gifford
Stephen H. Hess
Patricia Keefer, spring
David Keene
125
The Fellows Program
Evelyn Murphy
Martin F. Nolan
Philip J. Rutledge
Mark E. Talisman
Chase Untermeyer, spring
Institute Fellows
Fall
David Barrett, former member. Legislative Assembly, Premier and Minister
of Finance (1972-76), British Columbia, Canada. Mr. Barrett led a study
group entitled 'The Nev^f Social Democratic Experience/' His project was
a study of a guaranteed annual income in the post industrial state.
Jack W. Carlson, Executive Director, American Association of Retired Persons; former Chief Executive Officer, National Association of Realtors; Chief
Economist, U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Mr Carlson led a study
group entitled "The Role of Trade Associations in the Political Process."
His research project—a collaborative effort involving several people from
different areas of the University—addressed issues and concerns of senior
citizens.
Thelma Duggin, former special assistant to President Reagan (1981-1983),
southern field coordinator, Republican National Committee. Ms. Duggin
led a study group entitled "Emerging Trends in Southern Politics: Who
Can Win in 1988?" Her independent research project was a study of a variety of training programs in the employment sector.
Maxine Isaacs, former press secretary to Vice President Walter Mondale,
deputy manager and press secretary, 1984 Mondale for President campaign. Ms. Isaacs led a study group entitled "The Press and the '88
Presidential Campaign." Her project involved a study of the relationship
between international communications and diplomacy.
Alan Karcher, Esq., Minority Leader, former Speaker, New Jersey General
Assembly (D-19th district). Mr. Karcher led a study group entitled "Rights
of Passage: A Candid Look at the Legislature." For his project of independent research he wrote on insurance reform.
Spring
Clarence J. "Bud" Brown, former Deputy Secretary, U S. Department of Commerce (1983-1988), Member, U. S. House of Representatives (R-OH)
(1965-1983), Ohio Republican Gubernatorial candidate (1982). At the
Institute Mr. Brown led a study group entitled "Changing Technologies
and the World Economy." His project was a study of world trade markets.
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The fellows Program
Geraldine Ferraro, former Democratic Vice Presidential nominee (1984), Member, U S. House of Representatives {1979-1984) (D-NY). Ms. Rrraro led
a study group at the Institute entitled "So You Want to be President". For
her project she began to research and write a book about the press and
the right to privacy.
Edward Fouhy/ former Director, political news division, NBC-TV; Washington bureau chief, ABC-TV News; Director, news division, CBS-TV; Executive Producer, NBC Nightly News. Mr. Fouhy led a study group entitled
"The Press and the Primaries: Campaign '88." He began research on a
writing project on the Vietnam War.
Heinz Kluncker, former President, Public Services and Transport Workers
Union, Stuttgart, Germany. Mr. Kluncker, Jerry Wurf Fellow, led a fourpart seminar on labor issues and wrote a major speech for delivery at a
dinner in his honor hosted by the Harvard Trade Union Program. The
speech is to be published in a pamphlet in fall of 1988.
Harriet Michel, former President, New York Urban League (1983-1988), consultant, U S. Departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development. Ms. Michel led a study group entitled "Emerging Patterns in Black
Leadership: Challenge to Mainstream Blacks." For her project she began
work on an article looking at the development of black leadership since
the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
JohnH. Smith, Mayor, Prichard, Alabama, 1981-present; President, National
Conference of Black Mayors; Secretary-General, World Conference of
Mayors. Mr. Smith led a study group entitled "New Strategies for Planning and Managing Our Cities." For his project he examined cities with
predominantly black populations and evaluated how services can best be
delivered to them.
Fellows Luncheon Speakers
Weekly luncheons with members of the Harvard community and other distinguished guests have become a tradition of the Fellows program. Guests
this year included:
Fall
Francis M. Bato^ Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy,
John R I^nnedy School of Government
Robert Blackwill, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Martha Field, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics,
Emeritus, Harvard University
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The Fellows Program
Steven Kelman, Professor of Public Policy, John K Kennedy
School of Government
Eugene Mallove, Chief Science Writer, MIT News Office
Gary Orren, Associate Professor of Public Policy, John R Kennedy
School of Government
Robert Reich, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Ross Terrill, author, China expert
Lunch with the Nieman Foundation Fellows, hosted by curator
Howard Simons
Spring
Graham T. Allison, Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Francis M. Bato^ Ford Foundation Professor of International Political
Economy, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Derrick Bell, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Kurt Campbell, Associate Director, Center for Science and
International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
David Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History and
Professor of American Civilization, Harvard University
Anthony Lewis, columnist. The New York Times
Padraig O'Malley, Editor, New England Public Polio/ journal,
McCormack Institute, University of Massachusetts/Boston
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Director, Center for Science and International Affairs,
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Lunch with the Nieman Foundation Fellows
Adjunct Fellow
Stephen Kay, former General Partner, Goldman Sachs & Co., held an appointment as a 1988 Fellow of the Business and Government Center of the
John F. Kennedy School of Government and as an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Politics. He participated in the program for resident Fellows and
taught a fall 1988 Institute Study Group on "The Washington/Wall Street Connection."
During the term of his fellowship, Mr. Kay has been working on the design
and implementation of a program specifically for senior private sector executives interested in pursuing careers in the public sector and on a proposal
for a fellowship program at the Center for Business a n d Government
modeled on the fellows program at the Institute of Politics.
A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, Mr. Kay has
held appointments as a member of the Harvard Committee on University
128
The Fellows Program
Resources, president of the Harvard Business School Association of Boston,
director of the Harvard Alumni Association, president of the Association's
Committee to Nominate Overseers and has been a member of numerous community and civic organizations.
Research Fellows
The Institute of Politics occasionally offers Research Fellow appointments
to individuals who provide special program support or conduct research while
affiliated with the Institute. In recent years, research fellows have provided
support in areas such as media-politics and have researched topics such as
bureaucracy, politics and policy, campaign finance, momentum in presidential primaries, new communications technologies, presidential transition, and
regulatory reform.
Albert H. Cantril, Institute Fellow, Fall 1986 and Spring 1987, former President, Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc. and National Council on Public Polls, held an appointment as a Research Fellow from September 1987
through May 1988. During the term of his appointment, Mr. Cantril continued
to research the problem of making the "liberal agenda" more competitive in
rhetorical politics and coordinated two events, a debate on "Liberalism and
Conservatism," February 26,1988, with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Kevin
Phillips, the transcript of which was edited and published in a pamphlet,
and a panel discussion on "The Mood of the American Electorate," April 4,
1988, with William R. Hamilton, Andrew Kohut, Everett C. Ladd and Arthur
H. Miller. Both events were held in the ARCO Forum of Public Affairs, John
F Kennedy School of Government.
129
The Faculty Studies Program
The faculty studies program draws practitioners and scholars to the Institute to examine critical political and policy issues with an eye to innovative
problem solving. The insights resulting from their work are distributed by
the Institute to the widest possible audience.
The program brings together individuals from a variety of disciplines and
professions to think and work collectively on issues of substantive public concern. These issues may be limited to a single question or to on-going examination of a policy topic. Topics covered include: ethics in public life, legislative
reapportionment, national intelligence activities. Presidential transition. Vice
Presidential selection, campaign finance, how the press affects federal
policymaking, new communications technologies and public opinion and
polling. Many publications, including a number of books, have resulted from
Institute faculty studies.
New Communications Technology,
Public Policy, and Democratic Values
Scholars and commentators have been heralding the advent of an "information revolution" for some time. Although the extent of such a revolution
has been widely debated, one need only look at the effects of both large satellites and small computers in our offices and homes to know that the ways
in which we receive and transmit information are changing rapidly. The project
on New Communications Technology, Public Policy, and Democratic Values
was undertaken five years ago with support from the John and Mary R.
Markle Foundation, to examine how these new methods of communications
are affecting the ways in which we are governed and how we, as citizens,
choose to participate in our democracy.
The project, which was overseen by a faculty study group composed of
political and media practitioners and scholars, developed materials on common characteristics shared by the new media technologies and on how these
technologies now and in the future might change the conduct of electoral
politics, governance, and citizen participation.
In the book which resulted from the project. The Electronic Comtnonzoealth:
The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic Politics, by Jeffrey R. Abramson, F. Christopher Arterton and Gary Orren {NY: Basic, 1988), the authors
raise a number of questions for both citizens and officials which require serious consideration as we move further into this new era.
The Faculty Study Group included;
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Director, Center for Science and International Affairs
and Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs,
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Chair
Jeffrey B. Abramson, Research Fellow, Institute of Politics;
Assistant Professor of Politics, Brandeis University;
Assistant District Attorney, Middlesex County, Massachusetts
130
The Faculty Studies Program
Daniel Bell, Henry Ford 11 Professor of Social Sciences, Harvard University
Stephen J. Bieyei; Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
Les Brown, Senior Vice President/editorial development, Channels of
Communication, New York
John Deardourff, Chairman of the Board, Bailey, Deardourff & Associates,
Inc., McLean, Virginia
Heruy Geiler, Director, Center for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C.
David Geigen, Editor-at-Large, U.S. News & World Report
Winthrop KnowUon, President, Knowlton Associates, Inc., Cambridge,
Massachusetts; former Director, Center for Business and Government,
John F Kennedy School of Government
Richard Levine, Vice President, Information Services Group,
Dow Jones & Company, Inc., Princeton, N.J.
Jonathan Moore, Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Rufugee Affairs,
U.S. Department of State; former Director, Institute of Politics,
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Roger Mudd, special correspondent and essayist, "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour"
W. Russell Neuman, Director, Research Program on Communications
Policy and Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Richard M. Neustadt, consultant, Private Satellite Network, Inc., New York
Michael Sandel, Professor of Government, Harvard University
Public Opinion Polls and
Federal Policymaking
Over the past two decades, the use of public opinion polls by federal officials has increased greatly, especially in relation to their policymaking repsonsibilities. Relatively little is known, however, about the character, actual
extent or impact of this activity. To address these questions, the Institute of
Politics received a grant from the CBS Foundation to conduct a two-year study
of Public Opinion Polls and Federal Policymaking.
The research has focused on three areas:
• Development of an inventory of practice and activity of the use of public
opinion polls at the federal level, including the White House, executive
branch agencies and the Congress;
• Understanding the impacts the use of polling data may have on federal
decisionmaking and policy outcomes;
• Beginning to chart the implications and consequences of the use of polls
for governance in our society.
The study is being overseen by a faculty study group composed of scholars
and practitioners from the fields of government and polling. Originally sched-
131
The Faculty Studies Program
uled for completion at the end of 1987, the project has been extended through
1988. A manuscript resulting from the work is expected to be published.
Christopher Arterton, principal investigator; chair, faculty study group
Lisa Belsky, research assistant
Wendy M. O'Donnell, research director
Members of the faculty study group are:
Christopher Arterton, Dean, Graduate School of Political Management,
New York
Michael E. Baroody, Assistant Secretary for Policy, U. S. Department of Labor
Andrew Feinstein, Staff Director, Subcommittee on Civil Service,
Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, U. S. House of Representatives
Karlyn Keene, Editor, PubHc Opinion
Steven Kelman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Andrew Kohut, President, The Gallup Organization
Martin A. Linsky, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Gary R. Orren, Associate Professor of Public F^licy and Associate Director,
Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy,
John F. Kennedy School of Government
William Morrill, President, Mathtech
William Schneider; Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Project on Elected Politicians
Elected politicians in the United States are much discussed but little understood. Although regularly mentioned on nightly television newscasts and
in the print media, they are seldom the subject of academic research. The
election, presence and decision-making of politicians are what make us a
representative democracy yet a great disparity exists between the central importance in our system of government and the peripheral importance in our
scholarship on elected officials. Further, the relationship between politicians
and the nation's citizens, which is the hallmark of representative democracy,
is not now a healthy one. Citizens register an ever-lowering trust in and respect
for the institutions of government, attitudes which can cause serious disability and breakdown of the nation's polity.
On December 13-14,1987, the Institute of Politics convened a two-day meeting
of noted scholars to foster an exchange of ideas on further development of
a proposal for a program of research and teaching on this important subject
and to undertake a preliminary examination on how best to design and implement such a project. Discussion at the meeting focused on the current
state of research, future research needs, the use of personal observation as
132
The Faculty Studies Program
research methodology, the need to teach this methodology, and the particular role the Institute of Polihcs might play in the project. Specific proposals
included development of a Center for the Study of Elected Politicians to undertake a research and teaching program in this area with the goal of attracting a greater quantity and quality of persons to seek elected office.
Participants were:
Thad Beyle, Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina/
Chapel Hill
Carl Brauer, Director, Public/Private Careers Project, Center for Business
and Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Kenan Professor of Political Science,
University of Rochester
Linda Fowler, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science,
Syracuse University
Richard Hall, Assistant Professor, Institute of Public Policy Studies,
University of Michigan
Gary Jacobson, Professor of Political Science, University of
California at San Diego
Charles O. Jones, Academic Professor E, S. Government and Foreign Affairs,
University of Virginia
Burdett Loomis, Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Kansas
Sandy L. Maisel, Visiting Professor of Government, Harvard University
Richafd E. Neustadt, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government,
John R Kennedy School of Government
Gary Orren, Associate Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Mark Peterson, Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University
H. Douglas Price, Professor of Government, Harvard University
Kenneth Shepsle, Professor of Government, Harvard University
Sidney Verba, Director, Harvard University Library
133
Professional Study Program
and Special Projects
Seminar on Transition and Leadership
for Newly-Elected Mayors
November 18-22, 1987
The Institute, with the U. S. Conference of Mayors, conducted an intensive
four-day seminar for newly-elected mayors with support from Sears,
Roebuck and Co. and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
The seminar, with the purpose of assisting new mayors in making optimal
use of the transition period and the crucial early months in office, was designed
to provide insight and instruction on several substantive policy areas and
to encourage interaction among newly-elected mayors, incumbent mayors,
and urban experts. Discussion topics included the transition process, labor
and press relations, economic and community development, and intergovernmental relations, and three topics introduced for the first time this year—the
politics of being mayor, a discussion of land use and planning, and a consideration of the mayor's response to the AIDS crisis.
Participants in the November 1987 seminar, the seventh in a series held biennially since 1975, were:
Victor Ashe, Knoxville, Tennessee
Thomas Barnes, Gary, Indiana
Emile Beaulieu, Manchester, New Hampshire
Robert Bennett, Livonia, Michigan
Matt Collier, Flint, Michigan
Ygnacio Garza, Brownsville, Texas
Patrick Halpin, County Executive, Suffolk County, New York
Paul Helmke, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Jonathan Howes, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Joseph Keman, South Bend, Indiana
Sue Myrick, Charlotte, North Carolina
Vic Nussbaum, Jr., Greensboro, North Carolina
Carrie Saxon Perry, Hartford, Connecticut
Donald Plusquellic, Akron, Ohio
Lee Robinson, Macon, Georgia
Brian Sarault, Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore, Maryland
Larry Stone, Sunnyvale, California
Thomas Volgy, Tucson, Arizona
Nicholas Wasicsko, Yonkers, New York
134
Professional Study Program and Special Projects
The faculty included:
Jerry Abramson, Mayor, Louisville, Kentucky
Freda Ackerman, Executive Vice President and Director,
Public Finance Department, Moody's Investor Service, New York
Sidney Barthelemy, Mayor, New Orleans, Louisiana
Sheryl Baxter, Vice President, Real Estate ^search Corp., Chicago, Illinois
Thomas Cochran, Executive Director, US Conference of Mayors
Kathleen Connell, President, Connell Associates, Los Angeles, California
William Doebele, Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design,
Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Ronald F. Ferguson, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Olivia Ann Golden, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F Kennedy
School of Government
John Gunthei^ former Executive Director, U. S. Conference of Mayors
Ira Jackson, Director of External Affairs, Bank of Boston
Jerold Kayden, Professor, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Gwen King, Assistant to President Reagan for Intergovernmental Affairs
David KuecMe, Professor of Education, Harvard University
George Latimei; Mayor, Saint Paul, Minnesota
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, Baker Professor of Public Management,
John E Kennedy School of Government
Martin A. Linsky, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F Kennedy School of Government
Daniel Malachuk, Jr., Partner, Arthur Young & Co.. Washington, D. C
Thirman Milne^ former Mayor, Hartford, Connecticut
Mark H. Moore, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy
and Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Patrick Murphy, Director, Police Policy Board, U. S. Conference of Mayors
Elizabeth C. Reveal, Administrative Dean, John F Kennedy School of Government
Marc Roberts, Director, Executive Programs, Health Policy and Management
and Professor of Political Economy, School of Public Health, Harvard University
John Rousakis, Mayor, Savannah, Georgia
John Smith, Mayor, Prichard, Alabama
Marilyn Swartz-Lloyd, Director, Economic Development and
Industrial Corp., Boston
Daniel Whitehurst, President, Whitehurst, California, Inc.,
Fresno, California
Kathy Whitmire, Mayor, Houston, Texas
135
Professional Study Program and Special Projects
Administrative Staff:
U. S. Conference of Mayors:
Katharine Kretchmer-Wayland, Executive Assistant to the Director
Tom McClimon, Director, Institute for Urban and Regional Economic Analysis
Institute of Politics:
John Bender '89, Student Coordinator
Janice Hearty, Curriculum Coordinators
Martha Lester, Curriculum Coordinators
David Runkel, Deputy Director
Elizabeth Suntken, Administrative Coordinator
Meeting/Reunion of Women
Former Fellows
April 24-25, 1988
Since the inception of the Institute of Politics in the fall of 1966, there have
been some sixty women fellows, all of w h o m were invited to attend a meeting and reunion in April at the Institute. The meeting opened on April 24th
with a reunion dinner hosted by Institute director Dick Thomburgh. Meeting sessions on April 25th were held in the Goodman Conference Room of
the Institute. Discussion centered on the topic of how best the Institute can
further the cause of women in politics, looking especially at a proposal to
create a clearinghouse of information useful to women candidates for political office. The consensus of the participants was to convene a conference during spring 1989 for campaign '88 women candidates—winners and losers.
The conference would provide an opportunity to gather feedback from and
foster an exchange of information among experienced women campaigners.
Meeting/reunion participants were:
Carole Piirsons Bailey (spring 78), former Executive Director,
U.S, Privacy Protection Study Commission
Julie Belaga, (spring '87), Lecturer, John F. Kennedy School of Government;
former member, Connecticut House of Representatives
Laura Blackburne, Esq. (spring '83), President and Chief Executive Officer,
Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution, Inc., New York
Mary McCauley Burrows, (spring '84), Director's Office, Department of
Human Resources, Salem, Oregon; former member, Oregon House
of Representatives
Arkie Byrd, Esq. (fall '83), Attorney, Mays and Crutcher, Little Rock, Arkansas;
former Staff Attorney, V<iomen's Legal Defense Fund
136
Professional Study Program and Special Projects
Susan Catania (spring '83), Susan (2atania Consulting, Chicago, Illinois;
former member, Illinois House of Representatives
Thelma Duggin (fail '87), President, AV Consultants, Washington, D.C.;
former Coordinator for Minority Affairs and Special Assistant to Elizabeth Dole,
U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
Elisabeth Griffith (spring '77), Headmistress-designate,
The Madeira School, Mclean, Virginia; former Vice Chair, the National
Women's Political Caucus
Maxine Isaacs (fall '87), student, Johns Hopkins University School of
Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C.; former Press Secretary
to Vice President Walter Mondale
Patricia Keefer (fall '80), Consultant, National Democratic Institute,
Washington, D.C.; former Vice President and Director of Field Operations,
Common (Zause
Kathleen Sullivan Kelley (spring '86), Colorado grain farmer;
former member, Colorado House of Representatives
Ann McBride (fiill '86), Senior Vice President and Chief lobbyist. Common Cause
Susan McLane (fiill 79), member. New Hampshire State Senate
Tanya Melich (spring '80), President, Political Issues Management,
New York; former President, National Women's Education Fund
Harriet Michel (spring '88), former President, New York Urban League
Cleta Deatherage Mitchell, Esq. (fall '81), Attorney, Oklahoma;
former member, Oklahoma House of Representative.
Carolyn Mosby (foil '86), member, Indiana State Senate;
former member, Executive Committee, National Black Caucus of State Legislators
Mary Lou Munts (foil '84), Director, Commissioner of Public Utilities,
Wisconsin; former member, Wisconsin House of Representatives
Karen Paget (foil '85), Director, (Zalifomia Policy Seminar,
University of California
Audrey Rowe (foil '84), Special Assistant to the Mayor for Human Resources,
Washington, D.C.
Cathleen Douglas Stone, Esq. (spring '84); Attorney, Boston, Massachusetts
Administration Staff, Institute of Politics
Theresa Donovan, Associate Director
Susan Shaei; consultant, proposal for Women Candidates Clearinghouse
Elizabeth Suntken, Administrative Coordinator
Dick Thornburgh, Director
137
Professional Study Program and Special Projects
Meetings Hosted
In keeping with the ongoing interest of the Institute in fostering links between the worlds of politics and academia, the Institute this year hosted three
meetings of political organizations, the Council of State Governments, the
International Institute for Women's Political Leadership and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation.
Council of State Governments
Annual Meeting,
December 5-7, 1987
In conjunction with the meeting, the Institute of Politics organized a focus
session on "New Technology Horizons: The Impact on State Economic
Development."
Panelists included:
Lou Glazer, Deputi/ Director, Michigan Department of Commerce
Walter H. Plosila, President, Montgomery County High Technology Council
Alden Raine, Director, Massachusetts Governor's Office of Economic Development
David Osborne, author 0/Economic Competitiveness: The States Take
the Lead (moderator)
International Institute for
Women's Political Leadership
Organizational Meeting,
March 22-24, 1988
First Chair: Geraldine Ferraro, spring '87 Fellow. Institute of Politics
In conjunction with the meeting, the Institute of Politics sponsored a panel
discussion on March 24th in the ARCO Forum of Public Affairs on the topic,
"Women as Political Leaders Worldwide." Panelists included several members of the International Institute for Women's Political Leadership. (See The
Forum)
138
Professional Study Program and Special Projects
Women in Leadership:
Issues of Leadership and Management
for Women Legislative Leaders
June 22-25, 1988
Presented by:
Institute of Politics
State Legislative Leaders Foundation
Sessions topics:
Leadership and Authority
Managing Executive Branch Relations
Press Relations
Faculty:
Olivia A. Golden, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Martin A. Linsky, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
Among the 75 participants and observers were women in legislative leadership positions in Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia,
Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico,
Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont and Wyoming, as well
as legislative counsel and lobbyists for business, representatives from private foundations, women's political organizations and academic institutions
dealing with issues of women in politics.
139
The Forum
The ARCO Forum of Public Affairs is a multi-tiered amphitheater located
in the heart of the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Littauer building. It serves, as Edward M. Kennedy remarked in his dedication address,
as a "crossroads by day and a meeting place by night, an arena for debate
where democracy can come alive, a forum where citizens can meet with presidents and kings, or poets debate with secretaries of defense."
The Institute of Politics administers all formal programs held in the Forum.
Selected programs [indicated by (+) below] were broadcast on National
Public Radio, a project co-sponsored by WGBH Boston.
1987-88 Forum events included:
"Keeping the Peace in Troubled Times: The Role of the United Nations in
Conflict Resolution," September 12, 1987, nationwide teleconference broadcast live via satellite from New York, co-sponsored by the United Nations
Association of Greater Boston, with:
New York Panelists:
Michael Armacost, U. S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs
Philip Habib, U. S. Special Envoy to Central America and the Middle East
James O. C. Jonah, United Nations Assistant Secretary General/
Field Operations and External Support Activities
Cyrus Vance, U. S. Secretary of State, 1977-1980, Carter Administration
Boston panelists:
Lincoln Bloomfield, Program Chairman, United Nations Association;
Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Roger Fisher, Williston Professor of Law, Harvard Law School;
author, Getting to Yes: Reaching Agreement Without Giving In
Marshall Goldman, Associate Director, Russian Research Center,
Harvard University; Professor of Economics, Wellesley College
Dan Fenn, Chairman, United Nations Association of Greater Boston;
President, Ford Hall Forum (moderator)
"Personal Perspectives on Politics," September 16,1987, a panel discussion,
with the fall 1987 Fellows of the Institute of Politics, co-sponsored by the
Student Advisory Committee (see Student Program, Special Projects)
Mandela, September 17, 1987, Boston Premiere of HBO film—biographical
depiction of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela
'The Politics of Oil: The View from Norway," September 18, 1987, second
annual A. J. Meyer Memorial Lecture in International Energy Policy by Gro
Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, co-sponsored by the Energy
and Environmental Policy Center, John R Kennedy School of Government
"What Chance for Peace in the Middle East?," September 21, 1987, an
address by Shimon Pferes, Foreign Minister of Israel
140
The Forum
(+) "The Central American Situation and the Peace Agreement," September 24,1987, an address by Dr. Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of Costa Rica
"Who Has Legitimacy in Nicaragua: What Should U.S. Policy Be Towards
the Sandinista Government?," October 1,1987, a debate, co-sponsored by the
Student Advisory Committee (see Student Program, Special Projects)
"The Resolution and Significance of the Cuban Missile Crisis," October 13,
1987, an address by McGeorge Bundy, Professor of History, New York University; former National Security Advisor to President Kennedy
Followed by a panel discussion, with:
Graham T. Allison, Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Fedor Burlatsky, Editor, Literary Gazette, Moscow; Chief, Department of
Philosophy, Social Sciences Institute, Moscow; former speechwriter for
General Secretary Nikita Krushchev
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Director, Center for Science and International Affairs
and Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, John F. Kennedy
School of Government (moderator)
(+) Asserting Political Power: Black Political Emergence in the American
South/' October 15, 1987, a panel discussion, with:
Margaret Edes, author. Free At Last: What Really Happened when Civil
Rights Came to Southern Politics
Mike Espy, Member, U.S. House of Representatives (D-MS)
Harvey Gantt, Mayor, Charlotte, North Carolina
John Lewis, Member, U.S. House of Representatives (D-GA)
Lottie Shackelford, Mayor, Little Rock, Arkansas
Thelma Duggin, Fellow, Institute of Politics; Special Assistant to
President Reagan, 1981-1983; former Southern Field Coordinator,
Republican National Committee (moderator)
"Governing Jeruselem," October 20, 1987, an address by Teddy KoUeck,
Mayor of Jeruselem
"The Politics of Non-Violence/' October 29, 1987, an address by Ron Paul,
Libertarian Candidate for President; former Member, U. S. House of Representatives (R-TX)
* A conversation with Jesse Jackson, Democratic Candidate for President,
November 1, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
"Declining Industries in America," November 2, 1987, a panel dicussion,
with:
Daniel Oliver; Chairman, Federal Trade Commission
Doug Ross, Economic Advisor to Governor James J, Blanchard of Michigan
141
The Forum
Elizabeth Smith, Legislative and Political Director, Amalgamated Clothing
and Textile Workers Union
Fred Smith, Director, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Robert B. Reich, Lecturer in Public Polio/, John E Kennedy School
of Government; author. Tales of a New America (moderator)
{+) "The Politics of Welfare Reform," November 5,1987, a panel discussion,
inaugurating and co-sponsored by the Center for Health and H u m a n
Resources Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, with:
Blanche Bernstein, author, The Politics of Welfare: The New York
City Experience
Mike Castle, Governor of Delaware
Bill Clinton, Governor of Arkansas
Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Social Structure, Harvard University
Ruth Massinga, Secretary, Maryland Department of Human Resources
Mary Jo Bane, Director, Center for Health and Human Resources Policy (moderator)
* A conversation with Pete duPont, Republican Candidate for President,
November 8, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
"Tales From A Time of Terror: Exposing the Stalin Myth," November 9,1987,
an address by Anatoly Rybakov, author. Children of the Arbat, co-sponsored
by the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
A Dialogue with Students:
"Presidential Politics and The Press," November 10, 1987, an address by
Walter Mondale, former U. S. Vice President and 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, followed by discussion with Vice President Mondale; Harvard
students; Andrea Mitchell, National Affairs Correspondent, NBC-TV-News;
and Maxine Isaacs, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former press secretary to Vice
President Mondale and Deputy Manager and press secretary, Mondale for
President campaign (moderator).
(+) * A Conversation with Alexander Haig, Republican Candidate for President, November 15, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
"Women Candidates: Personal Perspectives on Running," November 19,
1987, a panel discussion, with:
Joanne Collins, member, City Council, Kansas City, Missouri
Sue Myrick, Mayor-elect, Charlotte, North Carolina
Carrie Saxon Perry, Mayor-elect, Hartford, Connecticut
Kathryn Whitmire, Mayor, Houston, Texas
Susan Shaer, consultant. Institute of Politics; former President,
Massachusetts League of Women Voters (moderator)
142
The Forum
* A conversation with Richard Gephardt, Democratic Candidate for President, November 20, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
* A conversation with Michael Dukakis, Democratic Candidate for President, November 23, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
An evening with friends, "A Tribute to Senator Edward M. Kennedy: 25
years in Public Service" November 30, 1987, with an address reflecting on
the role of the media in national campaigns by Edward M. Kennedy, United
States Senator (D-MA), followed by remarks in tribute to Senator Kennedy by:
Graham T. Allison, Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Derek Bok, President, Harvard University
Ronald H. Brown, Esq., Chair, Senior Advisory Committee, Institute of
Politics; former Chief Counsel, Democratic National Committee
Claire Fleming, 1987 Chair, Student Advisory Committee, Institute of Politics
Paul Holtzman, 1982 Vice Chair, Student Advisory Committee, Institute
of Politics
Jonathan Moore, Ambassador-at-Large and U. S. Coordinator for Refugee
Affairs, U. S. Department of State; former Director, Institute of Politics
(1974-1986)
Richard E. Neustadt, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, John R
Kennedy School of Government; former Director, Institute of Politics
(1966-1971)
Dick Thomburgh, Director, Institute of Politics
"Uses of Military Power: A Retrospective," December 3, 1987, annual
Pollack Lecture, by Caspar W. Weinberger, former Secretary of Defense,
Reagan Administration
* A conversation with Riul Simon, Democratic Candidate for President,
December 6, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
"Traveling by Air: How Safe Are You?," December 7, 1987, a panel discussion, with:
Langhom Bond, former Commissioner, Federal Aviation Administration
John Galipault, Director, Air Safety Institute
John O'Brien, Director, Engineering & Air Safety Department,
Air Line Pilots Association, International
Edmund Pinto, Senior Vice President, Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association
Billy Smyers, Area Supervisor, Air Traffic Control, Federal Aviation Administration
Joseph P. Kalt, Member, President's Commission on Air Safety;
Research Fellow, Energy and Environmental Policy Center and Professor of
Political Economy, fohn F. Kennedy School of Government (moderator)
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The Forum
{+) "Redress and Reparations for Japanese Americans: A Constitutional
Issue for All Americans," December 8,1987, a panel discussion, co-sponsored
by the Asian Caucus, John F. Kennedy School of Government, with
Angus Macbeth, Commission on Y/artime Relocation and Internment
Norman Mineta, Member, U.S. House of Representatives (D-CA)
Norman D. Shumway, Member, U.S. House of Representatives (K-C4)
Grayce Uyehara, Executive Director, Japanese American Citizens League
William Marutani, Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment;
Judge (Ret.) (moderator)
"Facing the Challenge: Consideration of Disability Issues," December 9,
1987, a panel discussion, with:
John Chappell, Deputy Commissioner, Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission
Edward M. Kennedy, Jr., Executive Director, Facing the Challenge
Marc Maurer, President, National Fedemtion of the Blind
Clay McDowell, co-founder, Access Alaska
Josef Reum, Assistant Commissioner, Massachusetts Department of Retardation
Mark Sakaley, chairman. Project Inclusion, John F. Kennedy School of
Government, (moderator)
(+) "Through Different Eyes: U.S. Policy in the Middle East," December
10, 1987, a debate, with;
James Abourezk, founder and Chairman, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
League; former Member, U. S. Senate (D-ND)
Hyman Bookbinder, Special Representative, American Jewish Committee
* A conversation with Pat Robertson, Republican Candidate for President,
December 13, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
"The Inside Story of the Iran Initiative," December 14, 1987, an address by
Michael Ledeen, former Consultant, National Security Council; co-author.
Debacle: The American Failure in Iran
Innovations in State and Local Government Awards Program Ceremony,
December 15, 1987. The Program is administered by the State, Local and
Intergovernmental Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
"Who's In Charge?: A Debate on the War Powers Act," December 16,1987,
co-sponsored by the Student Advisory Committee {see Student Program,
Special Projects)
* A conversation with Al Gore, Democratic Candidate for President,
December 20, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
* A conversation with Jack Kemp, Republican Candidate for President,
December 23, 1987, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
144
The Forum
* A conversation with Gary Hart, Democratic Candidate for President, January 3, 1988, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
* A conversation with Bruce Babbitt, Democratic Candidate for President,
January 10, 1988, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
* A conversation with Robert Dole, Republican Candidate for President,
January 17, 1988, Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb series
"The Peace Process and Economic Change in Nicaragua: The Sandinista
Perspective," January 27,1988, an address by Julio Icaza, Deputy Permanent
Representative to The United Nations, Republic of Nicaragua
"Democracy in Nicaragua: The Resistance Perspective," January 28, 1988,
an address by Alfredo Cesar, Director, Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance
("Contras")
"Personal Perspectives on Politics," February 4, 1988, a panel discussion,
with the spring 1988 Fellows of the Institute of Politics, co-sponsored by the
Student Advisory Committee (see Student Program, Special Projects)
"Major Changes in Congress and American Politics," February 8, 1988, an
address by Dan Rostenkowski, Member, U S. House of Representatives
(D-IL); Chairman, House Ways & Means Committee
Vietnam, the Roshamon Effect," February 10, 1988, Annual Nieman Fellows Joe Alex Morris, Jr. Memorial Lecture for International Journalism by
Harrison Salisbury, Journalist and Author
"Negotiating Peace: The INF Treaty and Beyond," February 24,1988, a panel
discussion, with:
Frank Gaffney, Visiting Scholar, Defense and Security Policy Studies,
American Enterprise Institute; former Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Securijty Policy
Adam M, Garfinkle, co-ordinator, Political Studies Program,
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Richard N. Haass, Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy
School of Government
John Ledlie, chief press officer, British Defense Ministry
Graham T. Allison, Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government (moderator)
(+) "Left, Right, Center: Liberalism and Conservatism in 1988," February
26, 1988, a debate, with;
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities,
City University of New York, and
Kevin P. Phillips, editor and publisher. The American Political Reporter; author,
Post-Conservative America
145
The Forum
Introduction: Albert H. Cantril, Research Fellow, Institute of Politics, 1987-88;
fellow, Institute of Politics, 1986-87; author, Public PoHcy Analyst
Dick Thomburgh, Director, Institute of Politics (moderator)
"The Independent Counsel: Prosecutor or Persecutor?," February 29,1988,
a panel discussion, with:
John Bolton, Assistant U.S. Attorney General
L. Gordon Crovitz, Assistant Editor, Editorial Page, The Wall Street Journal
Philip B. Heymann, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Fred Wertheimer, President and CEO, Common Cause; author.
Common Cause Manual on Money and Politics; principal lobbyist on
campaign finance reform
Dick Thornburgh, Director, Institute of Politics;formerU. S. Attorney General/
Criminal Division (moderator)
(+) "Hispanics in the Political Process: A Growing Influence," March 2,
1988, a panel discussion, co-sponsored by the Journal of Hispanic Policy, with:
Maria A. Berriozabal, member. City Council, San Antonio, Texas
Harry Pachon, Executive Director, National Association of Latino Elected
and Appointed Officials
Xavier Suarez, Mayor of Miami, Florida
Willie Velasquez, Executive Director, Southwest Voter Registration and
Education Project, San Antonio, Texas; former Fellow, Institute of Politics
Frank Del Olmo, Nieman Fellow & columnist. The Los Angeles Times
(moderator)
"American Pictures: Images of the American Underclass," March 7, 1988,
slide presentation, produced by Jacob Holdt, co-sponsored by the Hispanic,
Black and Asian Caucuses, John F. Kennedy School of Government
"Lessons for the International Monetary Reform," March 11, 1988, Albert
H. Gordon Lecture by Paul Volcker, Chairman, Federal Reserve Board,
1979-1987
(+) "Gay and Lesbian Rights: A Political Agenda for the Future," March
14, 1988, a panel discussion, with;
Virginia M. Apuzzo, Deputy Commissioner, New York State Consumer
Protection Board
Harry Britt, City Supervisor, San Francisco, California
Barney Frank, Member, U. S. House of Representatives (D-MA)
Pat Norman, National Co-Chair, 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and
Gay Rights
John Boswell, Professor of History, Yale University (moderator)
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, March 18, 1988, Boston premiere
of HBO film—perspective on the Vietnam war
146
The Ix)rum
"Women as Political Leaders Worldwide," March 24, 1988, session of
organizational conference. International Institute of Women Political Leaders, a panel discussion, with;
Astrid Heiberg, Member of Parliament Norway
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, former Minister of Finance, Liberia,
{currently in exile in the United States)
Carmen Saenz de Phillips, National Party, Chile
Sue Wood, National Party, New Zealand
Geraldine Ferraro, Fellow, Institute of Politics; 1984 Vice-Presidential nominee
(moderator)
"The Crisis in Panama/' April 14,1988, an address by Roberto Eisenmann,
editor-in-exile. La Prensa, Panama City
"Energy, Cooperation & Development: A View from the South," April 19,
1988, third annual A. J. Meyer Memorial Lecture in International Energy Policy,
by Carlos Andres Perez, member of Senate and former President of \fenezuela,
co-sponsored by the Energy and Environmental Policy Center, John F Kennedy
School of Government
"The Mood of the Electorate," April 20, 1988, a panel discussion, with
William R. Hamilton, President, Hamilton, Frederick & Schneiders,
political polling and market opinion research
Andrew Kohut, President, The Gallup Organization
Everett C. Ladd, Director, The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
Arthur H. Miller, Director, Mid-West Poll
Albert H. Canlril, 1987-88 Research Fellow, Institute of Politics;
former President, Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc. (moderator)
"The American Underclass: Inner-City Ghettos and the Norms of Citizenship," April 26,1988, annual Godkin Lecture by William Julius Wilson, Lucy
Flower Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, University of Chicago
"AIDS As A Political Issue in Campaign '88," April 27,1988, a panel discussion, co-sponsored by the S. A. Kaufman Memorial Lecture Foundation and
Boston University School of Medicine with:
David Baltimore, Director, Whitehead Institute, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
JuneE. Osbom, M.D., Dean, School of Public Health, University of Michigan,
former member. National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine
Task Force on AIDS
David Pickford, diagnosed with AIDS, July, 1987
147
The Forum
Beny Primm, M.D., Executive Director, Addiction, Research & Treatment
Corporation, New York; Member, President's Commission on AIDS;
Conferee, March 1988 White House Conference for a Drug Free America
Arnold S. Relman, M.D., Editor, New England Journal of Medicine
Marvin Kalb, Director, ]oan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press.
Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government (moderator)
"Peace in the Middle East: Addressing the Issue of Palestine," April 19,1988,
opening session of a two-day conference, co-sponsored by Harvard/Radcliffe
Amnesty International, a panel discussion, with:
f^Aseei Aruri, Professor of PQlitical Science, Southeastern Massachusetts University
Irene Gendzier, Professor of History and Political Science, Boston University
Joseph Gerson, Peace Secretary, American Friends Service Committee
Ian Lustick, Professor of Political Science, Dartmouth College
Kamal Ahmad '88, student. Harvard College (moderator)
"VOTE NO!." Bicentennial re-examination of the U S. Constitution: 1788
& 1988, May 2,1988, one-man dramatic presentation by Thomas Schall; directed by Tom BuUard; adapted by Robert Blecker, Professor, New York Law
School
"Beyond Nuclear Deterrence?: Fateful Visions/' May 3, 1988, a panel discussion with the editors of Fateful Visions:
Albert Camesale, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Public Policy and
Academic Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Director, Center for Science and International Affairs
and Ford Foundation Professor of International Security, John f. Kennedy
School of Government
Graham T. Allison, Dean, John F, Kennedy School of Government (modemtor)
"Covering Gorbachev's Russia: Then and Now," May 4,1988, a panel discussion, co-sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy, John R Kennedy School of Government, with:
Whitman Bassow, author, The Moscow Correspondents;
former correspondent, UPI and Newsweek
Celestine Bohlen, reporter. The Washington Post,
recently returned from U.S.S.R.
Nicholas Daniloff, Fellow, Joan Shorenscein Barone Center;
former Moscow Bureau Chief U. S. News & World Report
Stuart Loory, former Moscow correspondent, Cable News Network
Marvin Kalb, Director, Joan Shorenstein Barone Center (moderator)
"Famine in Ethiopia and the International Response; Emergency Relief or
A Strategy for Development?," May 11,1988, a panel discussion, co-sponsored
by the Kennedy School of Government International Development Group,
148
The forum
Harvard Institute for International Development, Center for International
Affairs, and the International Relief/Development Project of the Graduate
School of Education, with:
Roni Brauman, M.D., President, Medecins Sans Frontieres
(Doctors Without Borders), Paris, France
Jason Clay, Director of Research, Cultural Survival, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Trevor Gordon-Somers, Deputy Director, Regional Bureau for Africa
David Holdridge, Senior Director for Africa, Catholic Relief Services
James Kelly, former Director of Operations, U. S. Interagency
Africa Famine Task Force
Mary Anderson, Co-director, International R£lief/Development Project,
Harvard Graduate School of Education (moderator)
"The Press and the Presidency: The Primary Battle," May 18,1988, a panel
discussion, with:
John Buckley, consultant on election coverage, CBS-TV; former Press Secretary,
1988 Kemp for President Campaign
Terry Michael, Special Assistant for Communications, 1988 Democratic
National Convention; former Director of Communications,
Paul Simon for President Committee
Thomas Oliphant, Washington correspondent. The Boston Globe
Lesley Stahl, National Affairs Correspondent, CBS^TV News
Margaret Garrard Warner, White House and political correspondent,
Newsweek magazine
Edward Fouhy, Fellow, Institute of Politics; former Political Director,
NBC-TV News; former executive, ABC-TV, CBS-TV (moderator)
"The Ethics of Public Service," June 7,1988, an address to the 1988 graduating class of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, by Robert G.
Torricelli, member, U. S. House of Representatives (D-NJ); MPA-KSG '80;
advocate, universal national service for American youth
"Robert F. Kennedy^s Vision of Public Service," June 8,1988, a panel discussion, with
Peter Edelmann, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center;
former legislative assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy
Michael Kennedy, President, Citizens Energy Corporation;
son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy
Richard E. Neustadt, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government,
John F. Kennedy School of Government; former Consultant to Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson
Arthur M. Schlesingeiv Jr., Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities,
City University of New York; author, Robert Kennedy and His Times
Graham T. Allison, Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government (moderator)
149
The Porum
"Technology's Children: Challenges and Policy Development," June 23,
1988, session of national conference of "Project School Care," The Children's
Hospital/Boston, co-sponsored by Harvard Medical School, a panel discussion, with:
Comments by John F. Kerry, Member, U. S. Senate (D-MA)
Panelists:
Betsy Anderson, Project Director, Collaboration Among Parents and Health
Care Professionals, The Federation for Children with Special Needs
Vince Hutchins, M. D., Deputy Director, Maternal and Child Health, U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services
Robert Mastei^ M.D., Boston University School of Public Health; former
Director, Massachusetts Medicaid (moderator)
A session of the "East-West Workshop on Common Security," Cambridge,
Massachusetts, sponsored by Institute for Peace and International Security,
Cambridge, Massachusetts; Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy,
Hamburg, Federal Republic of Germany and USSR-USA Society, Moscow:
"End of the Cold War?!: Perestroika in East-West Relations," June 29,1988,
a panel discussion, with:
Mark D. W, Bdington, Research Associate, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nikita Zagladin, Professor, Department of World Politics,
Academy of Social Sciences, Moscow
Everett I. Mendelsohn, President; Institutepr Peace and International Security;
Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University (moderator)
followed by remarks and discussion with visiting scholars:
Ildar Akhtamzyan, Reader/Candidate in History, Institute of International
Relations, Moscow State University
Wol^ang Biermann, Advisor!Military and Security, Social Democratic Party,
Bonn, federal Republic of Germany
Pal Dunay, Institute law Department, Eotvos Lorand University,
Budapest, Hungary
Laura Reed, Doctoral Candidate, Center pr International Studies,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wolfjgang Schwarz, InstituteforInternational Politics and Economy,
Berlin, Democratic Republic of Germany
* The series Candidates '88 with Marvin Kalb was co-produced and broadcast by WGBH-TV Boston; co-sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Barone
Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School
of Government and underwritten by The New York Stock Exchange
Foundation, Inc.
150