Conversations with Clare Booth Luce; 2; Issues of Our Time

Conversations for the clear booth loose. Production number two, take number one, K-A-E-T 111368. The following program is distributed by NET, the public television network. Mrs. Claire Booth-Lews has been editor, playwright, author, congresswoman, ambassador to Italy, columnist, and so many other things I can't numerate them. It's a pleasure to welcome you again Mrs. Loose to another conversation.

My name is G. Homer Durham from Arizona State University, president and professor of political science. In a former conversation we discussed the crisis of public leadership. One of the tasks of leadership is to discern what is really going on in the world. And you suggested the importance of detecting the importance of science, of international collaboration, to get many other things. I wonder from your experience what are the real issues, are a real issue which underlies some of the concerns of our times. Many people would say the real issue in the world is communism. As I would say the urban crisis are the quarrel among nationalities and races and religions. Well what boils down from the standpoint of experience and history, what do you see Mrs. Loose? Well you know I like to tell college students when we begin to have a conversational group.

I like to tell them the legend of the speech. The speech was supposed in one legend to have asked young men five questions in any young man who could answer these five questions of the sphinct and make his answers consistent, had a philosophy and was deemed to be a proper leader. Now the five questions of the sphincts were what is false, military, moral, spiritual, what is property, in other words what's mine and what's yours, what is sex or if you prefer what is love, what is honor or a promise. If I promise you something today am I obliged to keep my promise at great cost to myself at another time and of course what is death, which is another way of saying what is God or life hereafter.

Now it's very amusing when you stop to think that all the questions that we ask ourselves in politics are in way attempts to answer one of these five questions, for example what we call communism is no more or less than the answer that Karl Marx gave to the question. What is property? Our Western world gives a different answer so that these are always the questions which concern us in politics as well as in our private lives, but to return. What are the deep issues which we are facing today? Well of course all of these but I wonder if what is sex and what is love is not a question that people are asking themselves and giving answers to that would have been unheard of in my youth.

I think that is quite possibly true and we are obsessed with that in many areas of life today. But I wonder if the issue doesn't go to something we're talking about a little bit ago it symbolized by the concern over law and order in our life and liberty. Is it what is really going on? Is it the conflict, the polarity between liberty and order? Well these two principles as you know are twinned but they are not the same liberty is not order and order is not liberty and it is the attempt of all men who should be who govern themselves to strike that perfect balance between order and liberty. Which allows them in an orderly and free way to make progress. Now obviously the communist thing puts its great emphasis on order and cares very little about liberty.

The United States and the West has put its great emphasis on liberty and has tended to lose the little track of the problem of order which is why today this question is so much in the forefront of everyone's mind and we're all clamoring for law which is an aspect of force. And for order because we've gone a little overboard in some areas on liberty. Force, property and even love our sex could be viewed from the standpoint of the conflict between liberty and order. Order in the family, order in society are freedom and license are unbridled liberty in the standpoint of relationships among the sexes.

You know your story about this thing suggests another literary analogy, Paradise Lost, Milton who cast the great issue of all time as the warfare between good and evil. But in a sense what Milton was also describing is a conflict between freedom and order and it is not Lucifer alone who is a disciple of liberty in Paradise Lost or he seems to be the superficial reader. There is a case to be made out for Michael and the other side in Paradise Lost for what you have just called orderly progress, the reconciliation of liberty with authority. Now if we agree on that as a fundamental issue this gets us into a number of interesting considerations say the problems of the ghetto today are the struggle of the black community to come into the mainstream of American life in our country.

And we speak of law and order as a public issue. Recently the Supreme Court of the United States made a very unpopular decision with some people, popular with others Miranda versus Arizona which seems to say that there must be law and justice for the poor man as well as for those who can afford counsel. In this relationship would you say that the Supreme Court has been the balance wheel between freedom, our liberty and order in our system? Is it the constitutional balance wheel that brings these principles into conjunction? So it is indeed supposed to be but from your own vast knowledge of history you know that one of the most difficult things to do is to make a piece of legislation or legal interpretation stand up before the community as an entirety is ready for it.

I think of St. Thomas Aquinas held very profoundly to the view that it was a good Democrat, that the ruler should not proceed to make advances however desirable until the majority of the population is ready for it. Because to do otherwise is to cause conflicts within the society which cannot be resolved and force masses of people to become what are called law breakers, you see. I do think that the majority of Americans, overwhelming majority of Americans are prepared and willing and many of them very, very eager to see our black people make progress, have opportunities in education and in making their livelihoods.

They are not prepared to see those gains made by violence and I think this is the crux of the matter how to help the black man to make progress and at the same time not throw society into series of rebellions and riot and the burnings all that we have witnessed. You mentioned burnings, you have been in some of the big cities as I have sometimes I thought that some parts of them should be burned. Well you know that's odd you should say that I was saying last night that there was a profound tragic wisdom in the attempt of the Negroes to burn their own houses because I do not think I do not believe that you can simply tinker.

Repaint, re-adorn, fix a pipe here or there in the slums. I think they must be raised and new buildings put up also. I think that the problem is not to make the ghetto a better living place for the black man because it would still remain the ghetto if he's forced to live in it. The problem is to empty the ghettos and disperse our Negro population throughout the nation just as our Irish Americans, our German Americans, our Jewish Americans are disperse. We must try to empty the slums rather than just tinker with the men attempt to rebuild them.

When I said of course that I felt that some places should be burned I didn't mean to incite to to riot or incendiary action. No, not at all. But as you say it better to raise them, the urban redevelopment has to be done according to some process of law and at the same time as you point out places have to be found for the people to go. Now how does this in our own context of American politics relate to this relationship between liberty and order? We have such a diversified country. The problem in Harlem, in Detroit, in Oakland, or in Watts, Los Angeles, as against the problem in Alabama or some rural community in the Middle West is quite different. And coming back to the crisis of leadership which we talked about in another conversation,

can you see a leader emerging and can you see a formula emerging aside from the ordinary formula of federal legislation, federal spending, urban redevelopment, new cities being established in a new model city program, to get at the problem of having equal justice under law in our country and our times? Well to return momentarily to the question of emptying the debtors. One awfully good thing that the Congress might do, I doubt it will, would be to equalize all benefits, welfare benefits, unemployment compensation, et cetera, throughout the nation. One of the reasons that our big city slums are bursting today is the migration from areas where the Negro has no benefits. To the big cities where he has more or thinks he has more.

So that's one thing that should be done. It seems to me also that great efforts should be made to make jobs not in the ghettos, but again outside of the ghettos to draw Negroes to them. Rural programs in really fine ones, in Alabama, Louisiana, the southern states, would draw the Negro back from these great unhealthy congregations that they have got together in our big cities. So it seems to me that the work has to be done almost outside of the ghettos, including models cities and towns, although I think that's a pipe dream myself on any great scale. Is federal action the basic tool we have?

Oh a federal action must be a basic tool of any federal nation which ours is. But there's the other thing which is private effort in this direction. And I'm sure that a president who would provide tax incentives to big business and small business people for on-job training and for the hiring of our black people and for the rebuilding of their houses and for building other houses in outlying area, anything that would encourage private capital to help solve this problem would be a wonderful thing. And I think that awareness of that is now growing in the United States. There's no doubt about it. It's a big business, especially big business,

bankers are making efforts vis-a-vis our black communities that would have been unheard of, unbelievable ten years ago. And by no means dispefel. You think public attitudes are ready to support this kind of national action? Are public attitudes still so diversified in this country? Say on the raised question that we have to do something about attitudes of people first. Are you think that people have made up their minds? There is a great deal of prejudice that's faces. But I think the majority, the effective majority, all the leadership groups throughout the United States, the churches, the businesses, the college presidents like yourself. The leaders of our great American community are determined as rapidly as they can

to help our black people advance. I believe that's true. I was interested in your reaction to it, although I think there are pockets of prejudice and bias, which are very challenging to all of us in church and state and community, which have to be faced and met. Part of this tension we have in government, and of course government, I take it, you would agree, as the means whereby we reconcile the tension between liberty and order. And the nature of the state is a very crucial element in the reconciliation of this. We have gone a long ways in reconciling urban and rural values through government and the question of race relations now with the Civil Rights Act and other legislation.

But we still have some very interesting phenomena in our national life, in the contemplation of public policy. And for one of a better area, let's talk about the South for a minute, the role of the South in American politics. It has been conservative, generally it has been rural, and those two values have also tended to provide an element in public policy making, which has been missing, say when the Democratic Party has had the majority. How do you see the true role of the South in American politics from this time forward, with the Civil War 100 years behind us, racial prejudice being eliminated, and so on, and the rural urban conflict? Well, you know when I was in Congress, that's some time ago. But I was very startled one day when two congressmen, one from the North,

the other from the South, literally tore one in another's hair, arguing about the Civil War, 100 years before, and they were still arguing about it. Well, the Civil War has still left a scar on the soul and the mind of the South, and this has been re-poisoned by the Black question. Nevertheless, I believe that the industrialization of the South, and it's going very, very rapidly, will tend to break down all these old Southern prejudices, which are obsolete and have no relevance to the modern world. I think that is happening, and if that happens, you will get in the South.

I think a two-party system, which we've not had before, justice we have in the North, and I think that'll be a very healthy thing for the American body politic. You think the Republican Party, for example, has a future in the state like Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, not just the presidential race, but down to county supervisors and the state legislatures and so forth? Well, it doesn't seem to have much of a future at this moment, but it goes slowly, but there's far less prejudice in the South than there was 10 years ago. I hope that friends of the South don't think that we're belaboring this as a region. It is a region in our country that has had a great deal of discussion, and there are many positive values which hardly ever come into discussion about the melancholic problems of the South.

But when I'd like to press a little further, Mrs. Loose, is in connection with the problem of producing national leadership again, and national consensus. And the South, throughout our history, has always held a sort of veto or a suspensive veto over the choosing of a president, particularly down through 1936, when no person could be the Democratic nominee unless he had two-thirds of the Democratic National Convention and the old two-thirds rule in effect, meant that no one could be president of the United States from the Democratic Party unless he had the endorsement and approval of a sufficient segment of the South. Now since 1936, and the majority principle prevailing the Democratic National Convention, we have seen the phenomena such as the the Dixie crats of 1948, Mr. Thurmond's candidacy, and repeated expressions of that up through the election of 1968 with

Governor Wallace. Do you see a time coming when the influence of the South and the choice for president will be less? And do you also see the time when the electoral college might be abandoned as a necessary development in maintaining flexible, intelligent government as the means of freedom in order? Well as to the electoral college, I have now voted, I hate to tell you, for how many presidents, and there has never been a presidential election in my memory, where there were in dozens, hundreds, millions of words devoted by the newspapers and the columnists to the fact that the electoral system was obsolete. As soon as the election is over, the tendency is to forget it. The question is not revived until shortly before the next election when it's too

late to change it, and they go on doing the same thing. So I'm not very sanguine about any change in the electoral college. When you say, do I think the time will come when the opinion of the South will not have to be taken into consideration. I hope the time never comes when the opinion of the South, the West, the North, and the East will not be taken into consideration. The opinion of any large area, region of our country, is very valuable. And we mustn't get into the habit of mine, which I forgive me, I don't wish to sound partisan, some of our New York liberals, our eastern seaport liberals, hold to, that any president who has the approval

of the South is no darn good. I think that's just as intolerant as the southern view that any presidential candidate who hasn't got a southerner on the ticket is no darn good, you see. So I would like to see I'd like to see an end to the civil war. You have known personally a good many presidents of the United States, some of whom receive overwhelming majorities like Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Eisenhower, some of whom receive less than a majority like Mr. Truman, Mr. Kennedy, and Mr. Nixon. Do you feel that a president can function at the apex for American leadership with the results you hope for, bringing the country together, all sections?

With less than a overwhelming majority or at least a working majority in both houses of Congress and in the popular vote? Well, you did not mention that the greatest majority of a piled up at least within my memory was piled up by President Lyndon Johnson and at the end of his campaign and at the time of his inauguration I think that everyone agreed that he had the largest consensus that any president has had in this century. This did not enable him to pull the country together on the contrary. Opinion was so divided that he felt obliged to resign or rather not to run for a second term. Now Mr. Nixon's election,

like Mr. Kennedy, has been a very nip and tuck affair and he does not seem to have a united country. Nevertheless, what unites the country are a set of circumstances that are tolerable with which they all can happily live. This isn't always a question of leadership. Now in that connection I'd like to tell you an amusing story about. So Winston Churchill, he came to visit me in Sicily after his retirement and I was ambassador in Rome and he was taking a vacation in Sicily so I went down to spend a weekend with him and Mrs. Churchill and dinner he said, well he said my dear child, I haven't seen you in some years. He said, what have you been writing?

Well I said, Sir Winston, the last thing I wrote was a small booklet, a lecture that I had given called the quality of greatness, the purpose of leadership. And Sir Winston said to me, and what did you say, leadership to Sicily? And I said, well it's a Winston, I said leadership men. Congratulations. This is NET, the public television network.

Nationwide distribution of the preceding program is a service of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This is NET, the public television network.