The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Interview with Richard Strout

[Tease]

ROBERT MacNEIL [voice-over]: This man is not famous or powerful. His name is not a household name. But he occupies a unique place in the nation's journalism, and his partial retirement has attracted the kind of attention many famous and powerful men might envy.

[Titles]

MacNEIL: Good evening. Measured by the mega-audiences of television news and the great newspapers of the nation, the reach and readership of The New Republic magazine is very small. But for the last 40 years its small band of readers and sympathizers have been charmed and stirred by a weekly column bearing the initials TRB. Its author for those 40 years has been Richard L. Strout, now 85, and this week's column was his last. Strout has never been a thunderer, a doomsayer, a dealer in big scoops or exposes. But the realization that his quiet voice will be missing has made many people stop and reflect that something unusual and distinctive will now be gone from the nation's journalism. We thought it would be interesting to talk with the man who has, as Time magazine puts it, "watched at close hand one third of all American presidents." So, tonight, a conversation with Richard Strout, or TRB. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, when we called Richard Strout about interviewing him he said, "I'm saying the same corny stuff to everyone. I'm warning you; you're making a big mistake." Well, we persisted because if Richard Strout says anything corny here tonight, it will probably be the first corn he's uttered -- in public, at least -- in 62 years. Sixty-two years as a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, the last 40 of those years also as the semianonymous writer of The New Republic column, TRB. At the same roll-top desk he has been writing about what he's seen and heard in Washington for the Monitor, and what he thinks about it for The New Republic, and the subjects have been the news and history of the last six decades, from Teapot Dome to Watergate, World War II to Vietnam, Hiroshima to Pershing IIs in Europe, President Harding to President Reagan. The letters TRB stand for nothing, but the column as written by Strout since 1943, has stood for outspoken, old-fashioned liberalism -- New Deal liberalism, the liberalism of civil rights and gun control. Opposite his last TRB column this week there was a tribute to him from the editors of The New Republic entitled "An Irreplaceable Man." "For decades," they said, "Strout has been talking of retirement.He usually brought it up in the wintertime. But after each of these discussions, as always, the following Wednesday morning, the first person to enter The New Republic building would find a fat Christian Science Monitor envelope on the lobby floor with The New Republic scrawled on it in orange crayon. The envelope contained the week's column, typed on a sturdy manual typewriter with corrections and deletions marked in thick black pencil. And." wrote the editors, "by the time the cherry blossoms were in bloom the talk of retirement would have long been forgotten."

The cherry blossoms, as a matter of fact, were out in full glorious bloom this morning in Washington, and this time Richard Strout means it. Welcome, Mr. Strout. And you do mean it.

RICHARD L. STROUT: Thank you very much for your flattering introduction. I appreciate it.

LEHRER: Well, it was our -- just telling the truth. You deal in the truth; you know -- let me ask you this. Why? Why have you finally given up the column now.?

Mr. STROUT: Oh, it's just a matter of signals that are sent to me at 85 years old that it's probably time to think of not doing two full-time jobs simultaneously. I'm going back to what I trust will be one full-time job, but I'm afraid I can only handle one.

LEHRER: That's The Christian Science Monitor?

Mr. STROUT: That's the Monitor, yes.

LEHRER: And you're still going to keep the same pace there, doing daily reporting?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I hope to, yes. I don't know; one can't always say, but Washington is here. I am here in Washington; it's the greatest show on earth. It's the best drama I know. Every journalist in America wants to be here, or should want to be here. And it goes on and on. It's never-ending.

LEHRER: Do you buy that label I put on you -- an old-fashioned liberal?

Mr. STROUT: Oh, I suppose so. I don't know what the word "liberal" means anymore. I don't know what "conservative" means always.I'm conservative on a good many things. I am in favor of strictly limiting immigration. Some of my liberal friends would be very much against that. It would depend on the specific issue. I am against injustice. We all are. And if it touches my conscience, why, we ought to speak out against it.

LEHRER: But you don't see yourself anymore at least, then, as a liberal?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I do. I would consider myself a liberal, but I don't know what that means. I don't go out and follow a political party and say I'm a liberal. Name your issue, and then I would decide which side I was on.

LEHRER: Robin?

MacNEIL: Why do you think, Mr. Strout, that so many liberals -- particularly liberal intellectuals -- have swung over and become what are now called neo-conservatives? What's your feeling about them?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I'm not sure that your summary is correct. I don't know that they've changed. I suppose as people get older and they get money, why, they tend to be more conservative. They conserve their money. But there's always, thank God, a young crop of young people coming along. They're liberal; they're radical, perhaps.

MacNEIL: Do you think that what's roughly called the liberal philosophy, that the pendulum is going to swing back, and that that will again be in the political ascendancy in this country?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I don't know whether it'll be in the ascendancy, but yes, I think at the present time we have a very amiable and attractive president in the White House, and I think he's also quite conservative, and we can tell that he is. But I think this -- I think that's a passing phase.

MacNEIL: Why a passing phase?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I think that the United States gets smaller and smaller. It gets closer together all the time. And I think the question is whether the government should take responsibility for certain things and looking after certain people. And I think that that -- I think that was what Franklin Roosevelt brought in with the New Deal, and I think that it may have gone too far in some respects. But I think this -- I think it's coming back again simply because there has to be somebody who look after the unemployed and the poor people.

MacNEIL: Do you think it's been healthy for the political thought of this country to have a reaction against many liberal assumptions like the role of government?

Mr. STROUT: Well, that's too general. I would have to decide what particular thing you're talking about. Yes, I think it could be carried so far, but I would hate to see it -- I would hate to see it go any further or not to have a swing back.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Who do you consider the great liberal political thinkers of your lifetime?

Mr. STROUT: Well, Franklin Roosevelt, without a doubt. He was the greatest President that I ever saw. When I came down here as a young man I went to the Oval Office, and there behind the desk was Warren G. Harding, and God knows he was no liberal. He was a tragic figure because he was not fitted to be the President and he knew he was not fitted to be the President. And then I've seen them come; reporters stay on.Presidents come, they go.

LEHRER: Why was Roosevelt so great, just because of what he did, or was there more to it than that?

Mr. STROUT: Well, he was great because he was great personally, but also he had two great crises, two great changes that came. Europe had gone in for social welfare and we had not gone into it. And then the collapse of the stock market came, and it was obvious that the state had to step in. That was waiting; that was a reform that had to come.The other thing just as extraordinary as that was -- that was the Pearl Harbor. When I came to Washington we knew we were isolationists then. Nobody didn't dare attack us, and then on that fatal Sunday, why, they did attack us and we all -- the reporters all went for the beeline down to the White House. I passed the evening of Pearl Harbor in the White House, and then under the portico of the White House, when the congressmen and the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee came in, and they came in silently and crushed.And Borah, my old friend, the great isolationist, he was dead then, but Hiram Johnson was there, the great -- and he walked in, and we were so awed by the situation we didn't even try to ask him any questions. There was this man who had staked his whole lifetime on the belief that we should be isolationist, and here he was with this crowd that went into the White House where they were told by the President just how many ships had been sunk. We didn't know that, of course.Roosevelt went before a joint session of Congress the next day. I shall always remember that evening. There was a little crescent moon; it was between the -- behind the trees there on Pennsylvania Avenue, and there was a crowd. There's always a crowd in a great moment of American history that gathers in front of the White House. That crowd is just part of the setting. And there, sure enough, that crowd was there. And around 11:30 somebody down in the crowd tried to sing "America the Beautiful," and they couldn't sing it. Tears came to my eyes. That was the end. I knew it was the end of an era. It was the end of an era.

LEHRER: Robin?

MacNEIL: How do you assess Mr. REAGAN AS A PRESIDENT SO FAR?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I'm writing about him all the time, and I think I'd prefer not to go too far into it. I think he is one of the most attractive men I've known. I like him. When he -- after the assassin tried to kill him, he lay there on the -- in the gutter and he made -- he cracked jokes about the wound that he'd received. That was -- that was noble. We can never take that away from him. I disagree with him very largely on a great many matters, and I worry about him.But my job is to worry, I suppose. And I think that that indirectly has conveyed my feelings.

MacNEIL: Why do you worry about him?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I don't know whether he's going to be able to reach an agreement with Russia on the nuclear war and so forth, and he has this angry feeling about Russia. He says violent things about them, things that I would not think a president who was trying to reach an accord and save the world from a nuclear holocaust would say about the rival. Even the harsh things that the Russians say have not gone as far as what Mr. Reagan has done.

MacNEIL: We had a gentleman on this program last night who said, "Well, yoy don't have to worry about that harsh rhetoric because there are private communications channels with the Russians, and they really understand that it isn't as serious as some of the public utterances." Do you have an observation on that?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I think probably in a part way, but no, I strongly disagree with that. I think that is folly.I think we ought to work out some sort of an agreement with Russia if we can, by trade perhaps, or by other things. That was a fiasco, the President's effort to prevent the gas pipeline from Siberia -- to get our allies to go along with that. They just laughed at that. We have to take our allies along with us, and I don't know whether Mr. Reagan is going to be able to do that.

LEHRER: You know, Mr. Strout, a lot of people, not only here but particularly in Europe, are very worried about the possibility of nuclear war. Personally do you think it's possible that we could have a nuclear war?

Mr. STROUT: Oh, I am very worried too, but I have worries that go beyond that. I think that within 10 years we're going to have -- I fear that there is going to be a terrorist group that will simply say, "We have the nuclear bomb," and you know, young people in colleges now, they can create the nuclear bomb. We had breakfast with Senator Proxmire the other day. He told of a son of a Princeton professor, he had solved the problem. All he needs is a little -- what is the fuel, plutonium?

LEHRER: Plutonium, yeah.

Mr. STROUT: Plutonium, and he's got the bomb. What are we going to do in 10 years from now when that word goes out? Are we all going to be hostage to this threat? I think people are so frightened of it they don't talk about it. There's nothing in the papers about it, but it worries me.

LEHRER: Well, what can be done about it?

Mr. STROUT: I don't know what can be done about it. No time in history of the world has anything been like this, except unless it was some very primitive society where two warlike neighbors were content to annihilate the others. But what do we do about it? I suppose the sensible thing to do is if we're so -- we can see the folly of what we're doing, is to reach some sort of an accord with the Russians, if we can. But in a year or two I don't know how far this will proliferate.

LEHRER: You mentioned President Reagan. Let me ask about Jimmy Carter. You have been almost a lonely voice in saying nice things about Jimmy Carter and his presidency. Why are you so alone on that, do you think?

Mr. STROUT: I don't think I'm alone on that. I disagree with that. We don't know what he would have done.He made a mistake on the Cuban missile crisis, I suppose. He helped precipitate us into Vietnam. He was a charming, attractive man. He gave romance to the White House. He --

LEHRER: I meant Jimmy Carter. You're talking about John Kennedy, right.

Mr. STROUT: Oh, I thought you meant Kennedy.

LEHRER: No, no. Go ahead. That's all right. Go ahead.

Mr. STROUT: No, no. Well, let's go on with Carter. Yes, I like Carter. I liked him very much. I wrote an enthusiastic piece about him after the Camp David accord, and he liked it very much. He invited me and my wife into the White House, and that's a very flattering thing. And flattering will get you a long way with me.

LEHRER: You think he is going to be remembered as a good president?

Mr. STROUT: Why, yes, I think so. I was very strongly in favor of the Panama Treaty. He put that thing through himself. He certainly did the very best he could on that Middle Eastern situation. It hasn't been his fault that that thing hasn't worked out.He had his faults. But I think we have a very odd way of selecting our presidents. That's one of the things that I would quarrel with. Imagine putting in a man as head of this government who is against Washington! On the face of it that's a crazy thing. And we get people who don't know very much about Washington. Our latest two presidents are that way, and yet we put them in as head of government.

LEHRER: Robin?

MacNEIL: Is the system of choosing presidents resulting in a change in the quality of presidents over the 60 years you've been watching this happen?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I worry about that very much, and it's too long a subject to go into, but I think you can have one statistic on the thing. The last five presidential elections, each time the percentage of people who bothered to vote has gone down. It's been like a flight of stairs. In this latest election, 1980, I think the percentage who voted was only -- I think it was a little under 45% who bothered to vote. Now, in Europe recently there have been elections over there where 90% of the people bothered to vote. This is something the matter with our system in which the people shrug their shoulders and say "it doesn't matter whether I vote or not." And I fear this declining interest in our politics. I think something should be done about it.

MacNEIL: How do you explain it, Mr. Strout?

Mr. STROUT: Well, I think our system of government isn't as dramatic as it should be. I was in London last summer, and I was in the newspaper press gallery. I looked down, and there below me on one side were the conservatives, on the other side were the Labor and the opposing parties. There was Mrs. Thatcher answering questions, and there was the opposition putting questions to her and debating there. It was as dramatic as you could imagine. And here, why, of course, as journalists it's very flattering to be picked to ask the President questions, but why should I be asking him questions? Why shouldn't it be Tip O'Neill who asked questions, or somebody else, and have that drama? Then you tend to identify yourself with the one -- I think there's been a decay in the discipline of the parties.

MacNEIL: You've written a lot about your admiration for the parliamentary system as being more efficient than the separation of powers. Do you see any prospect of the American constitutional system changing?

Mr. STROUT: I don't, no. That's a discouraging thing about it. I think that our founding fathers, they created a form of government that was magnificent for the first hundred years, very good for the next 50 years, and at the present time, why, I'm beginning to think that it's not in keeping with the -- with other democracies. We are the only government -- the only democracy that has this form of government of separation of powers.

LEHRER: And you think we have a worse government as a result?

Mr. STROUT: I think we have a deadlock here and a stalemate. I give one example. The President is still trying to get his budget through. In Canada, in Holland or somewhere the prime minister presents his budget, and it's taken for granted that it will be passed. If they change so much as a line in the budget, why, they have an election and then they bring somebody in as head of state who can get his budget passed. I think that's a good system. You know who's in charge then. I look around as a journalist here in Washington and, well, we all know, we read the papers. Who is in charge? I don't know.

LEHRER: As a journalist do you think that we journalists do a very good job of informing the American people what is going on here, even if it's a deadlock?

Mr. STROUT: I think we do, yes. I do. I think Washington is the most open capital in the world, and of course as a journalist I like that. There are leaks, sure, but the White House leaks a lot of things, too. I think the system as far as the journalists go can do it. I think we do a pretty good job -- much better, I think, than we did when I came here. When I came here we had the press lords; we had Hearst and McCormic, and others, and they would send down -- I know this for a fact. They would send down orders to the kind of a story they wanted from Washington. They called Roosevelt names, which was all right; I didn't object to that. But I don't think that could happen now, and I think the thing that saves us from that is television, because I think the public can see for themselves what's going on here, so they couldn't get away with it quite so hard. If they have their opinions, they put them on the editorial page, but they don't put them into the news columns.

LEHRER: You think television has been a healthy development in journalism in this country?

Mr. STROUT: Yes and no, I think so.I think the great fault of television, from my way of looking at it, is its tendency to trivialize news, to make it in bulletins and one sentences and so forth. You can't get your news that way. You've got to have interpretive journalism. Let me see. I think journalism has improved in one way.I don't think Joe McCarthy could get away with what he got away with. I went right through that with McCarthy.We had, in those days we were so objective we leaned over backward.And when Joe said that he held in his hand a list of Communists in the State Department, why, the journalists today would say, "He claimed this; he alleged this, but he didn't show us the list, and so and so disputes this," and so forth. In those days we would have waited until the next day. I don't think McCarthy could have got away with quite that form.

LEHRER: Robin?

MacNEIL: One theme you've hammered away at in your columns has been the lack of gun control in this country. What solution do you see to that problem?

Mr. STROUT: Well, that fits in with the other thing. Again and again they've taken polls about gun control. It's obvious, I believe, from these polls, if we can believe them, that 60 or 70 percent favor gun control, and yet there's a violent militant lobby that's fighting it, and they can defeat certain candidates who advocate it. So I think that democracy is not working. I think that the majority of people want gun control, and we're not getting it. Every other country that I know if, every democracy, has gun control. In a recent year they had 55 handgun murders in Canada; they had 54 in England; and in the same year they had, oh, I think it was 50,000 or so in this -- I'm not sure of that last figure, but it was in the thousands in this country of gun murders. That's just an American -- if you know a European who comes over here and he inquires about these murders, he's ashamed; he's abashed.

LEHRER: Now, Mr. Strout, you have just expressed a strong opinion to Robin on gun control. Now, as of this week, the TRB column, where you've been expressing this and other strong opinions -- you're not going to be able to do that anymore.

Mr. STROUT: That's right.

LEHRER: You going to miss that?

Mr. STROUT: Yes, certainly, of course I will. I will also miss -- I will not miss the fact that I spent 12 Hours once a week in writing that miserable column. [laughter] And at my age, why, it's -- I don't quite know how it's going to turn out.

LEHRER: What are you going to do when you get mad about something next time?

Mr. STROUT: I don't know. I've been thinking about that today. This is the day I would normally write my column, and I'd normally make notes. This'd probably be something I'd put in the column, and I've been making mental notes. I don't quite know what will happen.

LEHRER: On a Tuesday you would write it --

Mr. STROUT: I'd write it and I'd leave it over there at the office, yes.

LEHRER: And what -- anything occurred to you, or were you able to say, "Oh, wait a minute, I don't have to do that today," or was it so automatic that these thoughts started coming to you?

Mr. STROUT: Well, you're asking a very intimate and rather personal question, but I think also it should be put in that in the last few months halfway through writing the miserable column I have said, "This is enough. I've had it. Let some other younger man come along."

LEHRER: But you -- when you first started writing this, it was a closely held secret that you were TRB.

Mr. STROUT: Yes, I inherited it from my dear friend Ken Crawford, who was one of the finest men I ever knew.

LEHRER: How did it finally get out, and why did it get out that you were writing it?

Mr. STROUT: Oh, you don't keep secrets in Washington, and you kept them less now than you did in those days. Then it was a rather much more casual business, I think, and I think that was more or less of a secret for about five years, which is extraordinary. Yes, you couldn't keep anything like that secret nowadays.

LEHRER: Does it bother you to be known by your initials? Oh, yes, he's not Richard Strout; he's TRB?

Mr. STROUT: No, I'm flattered by it. No, it's very nice. I've been doing it so long, and no, I like it.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Yes, Mr. Strout, thank you very much for joining us. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That's all for tonight. We will be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.