Conversations with Clare Booth Luce; 1; Public Leadership

Conversations with Clare Booth, Loose, Production 1, Take 1 K A E T 11 13 68. The following program is distributed by NET, the public television network. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is G. Homer Durham, President of Arizona State University and Professor of Political Science.

It's a pleasure to have with me on this program Mrs. Clare Booth Loose for these conversations with Clare Booth Loose. Mrs. Loose, there's always been a crisis of leadership. Nowadays people are speaking in terms of this crisis in our own country, local affairs, national affairs and throughout the world. We speak of it in terms of the conflict in Vietnam very often. In your judgment, in your experience as a keen observer of world events and world traveler and student, was the war in Vietnam a mistake? Oh, Dr. Durham, in my view, all wars are a mistake, a tragic mistake, a war signifies, of course, a breakdown in the diplomacy and the foreign policy of the country is involved. It means they have not been able to achieve their legitimate objective, short of war, or it means that they are out after illegitimate objectives.

So, in this framework, that war is politics in extremists, as the German Klaus bits called it, in this respect of cost the war in Vietnam was a serious mistake. A failure of politics, a failure of leadership, as well as a breakdown of events. What kinds of leadership do you think the present circumstances require in our own country? You've seen heads of states come and go as we all have in recent years, the dictators, of course the kings and the campers have passed away. We've seen Roosevelt with four terms in this country, a constitutional amendment limiting the presidency to two terms. And we have a situation today where many people avoid leadership positions, they want to be comfortable, they want to withdraw.

How are we going to train and develop the type of leadership who will stand up to the issues of the day, and when politics breaks down as in the Klaus bits formula, can proceed somehow rather to keep societies knitted together and the consensus of people's knitted together? Dr. Derm, I think men like yourself, presidents of universities are doing what they can to train the leaders of the future. The problems are so infinitely complex today, as they have never been in the world before, that it is a very severe strain on any man to lead even in a city, we're beginning to witness the breakdown now of our cities, and it's no easy thing to even develop a mayor of a city with leadership. But if I may venture to suggest one of the sad things about leaders all over the world today is that they have so little idea of science and technology.

You know, I read somewhere the other day I've heard it before that 95% of all the scientists who have ever lived in the history of the world are alive today. The real revolution of our times has not been communism, it has been the technological revolution, and I'm afraid that we have not yet the leaders who understand technological civilization. For example, in the U.S. Congress, I am told that there isn't a single scientist among our congressmen. The lawyers still dominate.

The lawyers and the, well mostly of course, the lawyers, businessmen, people from private life, but as of now there isn't a scientist. And I think it is going to take leaders with not perhaps scientists themselves, but with a very clear idea of the meaning of this technological revolution to keep the world at peace for the next 100 years. Your comment reminds me of the dilemma the British found themselves in a World War II with respect to night bombing and day bombing and whether or not the so-called saturation of bombing even helped the war effort against the Nazis. And the Churchill administration, you may recall this event from personal experience, had the conflict between C.P. Snow and the scientist as to how you bring science into government. And I think your point you make is a very telling one.

C.P. Snow is a very excellent little book, the two worlds in which he pointed out the impossibility or the difficulty of the humanistic mind in understanding the scientist and vice versa. And of course, war has been a great educator of leaders. I remember when I was in London during that period of the war, it was called the Phony War, when the British didn't think that the Germans really ever would attack France or England. I was launching with Churchill's scientific advisor, who was a wonderful old gentleman called Dr. Lindemann, known as the Prof, he later became Lord Charwell. Well, as we looked out of the window of Berkeley of the restaurant, Clarege's window, I said, oh, prof, what are those things up there? They were large, of course, enormous balloons. But still, they looked like toy balloons, and he said, well, you see, we've wring the city of London with these balloons so that the British, the German planes, if they attack, won't come in.

Well, I must say, I looked at him, an open-eyed amazement, I said, you don't seriously believe these balloons will keep aeroplanes out. Well, as of that moment, even the scientific advisor to Winston Churchill had no very clear idea of what an air attack on Great Britain would be. But that's going back a long way to prove a point that is, will be proved at Christmas time, really, when our spaceship will undertake to orbit the moon, or to fly around it, if it does not care to go into orbit. Now, what the meaning of that is, I'm not talking of the philosophical or the spiritual significance of man's conquest of the moon.

But what the scientific fallout from this may mean in the political world, as well as the industrial world, we have no conception. The technological revolution is going very fast. I like to think that it is going so fast, that it is going in the end to make anything else but international cooperation meaningless and fruitless. I think you've laid out two significant points for us to consider in the future, the relationship leader must bear to the scientific community, and the leader must have his eye on the inevitability of the international community coming together and cooperating. I think the point about Mr. Churchill is a telling one, because we tend to think of him in the past as a great leader, and yet the advice that Linderman Lord Charwell gave him, evident was the wrong advice in the light of history.

Well, he had no other basis at that moment, I suppose, for comparison. But you know all sorts of things are happening. Now, we're all overheard, almost one sometimes fear one's heard too much about air pollution. Well, I'm building a little house out in Hanululu, and I was remarking to one of my scientific friends that, thank heavens, be a long time before Hanululu would suffer from the smile which incidentally is already getting to be a very heavy blanket over Phoenix. And I said a bit long time before we have that problem in Hanululu, and he smiled, and he said, now, he said, do you know that if what we all hope will happen someday for their own sakes, the Chinese should become industrialized. And if there should be as many automobiles in China, as they are, say in the United States, that all the pollution from China's automobiles, China's factories would arrive on the tailwinds in Hanululu.

So you see, it really is one world, and the moment any country becomes industrialized, it can so to speak without wanting to, in any case, attack the lungs, not of its own citizens, but of citizens thousands of miles away. Well, it is problems like air pollution, water pollution, traffic, all of these problems, which must be considered as a very important part of politics, if we are not going to be in very serious difficulties in the years ahead. In the light of these points, do you feel that the Russians in their leadership circles are co-opting science, making better use of science, science utilization than in the western countries?

Well, I don't think so for a moment. I sometimes tremble to think what would happen if the Iron Curtain never came down, because the Russian people are in a very industrious people. There are great many of them, and if ever once they were to become free capitalistic society, I think we would have very, very serious competition from them. I think our system, the competitive system, can outproduce any system in the world, or the Russians have done spectacular things in the outer space, but that is at what cost we do not know to the ordinary welfare of their people. Although visitors to Russia assure us that the people living way these Russians live is infinitely lower than that of the average Americans.

The Russians seem to abandon the cul-de-personality and the dependence upon the single leader to some extent. In the United States, the Constitution created the presidency, which imposes on a single individual, an enormous responsibility, as the Constitution says, the executive power shall be vested in a president. Do you think a single man can carry the burdens of the American presidency in the future, or how could the American presidency be organized, so that the human being who bears that responsibility, that's great set of power now in Washington for this nation, with its great material resources, and much of the world? Of course, there have been a thousand in one studies, as you know well, and what should be done to reorganize the American government, and make it more efficient.

President Hoover, some 15 or 20 years ago, the Hoover Commission, tried to find ways of making the presidency, the Congress, and all the agencies of our government more efficient. Of course, what you run into are the vested interests of the people who already hold the jobs. Now, from my point of view, I think it is absurd and dangerous to the United States, that there should not be a retiring age for congressmen and senators. I mean, granted some men at 75, more alert, more valuable, more intelligent than other men at 45, the actual fact that we all know is that after, say, 65, certainly after 70, people can no longer bear the pressures as they did when they were young. So I, if I were trying to reorganize the government, now this doesn't quite answer your question on the burdens of the presidency, but as part of that, we can say that an effective Congress would greatly like his burdens.

Well, we should have a retirement age for congressmen and senators. Also, I think one little thing that many times been suggested in ought to be done, is that defeated presidential candidates should be given honorary seats on the floor of the Senate. I think it's ridiculous to think that a man is able to represent a great party in the United States, and should not be able thereafter to make his voice heard after he's been chosen as a party leader. The same thing is to form a president. I think they should be honorary senators without the capacity to vote, perhaps, to break a tie. Those are only two of the small things that would help to make the Senate and the Congress and consequently the presidency more efficient.

Good money people think that the hill is sinking, that is the Congress, that there has not been any important legislation originated within the halls of Congress, say since the Taft Hartley Act, which Senator Taft undoubtedly originated and helped produce. That the center of legislation now is in the White House at the other end of the mall, and that the burden of both executing the law is now joined with the burden of formulating the proposals to go to Congress. And so I wonder if restricting the age of congressman and senators, making Congress more efficient, would really add to the shifting balance of authority in our system, if we don't have to find the remedies down at the White House at the other end of the Capitol. Well, after all, whether the president initiates the legislation or not, the president has to rely very heavily on the Congress for those committee studies on which the legislation is based.

I served in Congress for a number of terms, and I do know that the more thought that is given to legislation, the more time that is spent in committee and listening to witnesses, et cetera, et cetera, the better chance you have of getting a sound piece of legislation plus the fact that all legislation in a democratic country tends to be the most viable compromise. No one ever gets an ideal piece of legislation out of the Congress, or for that matter, out of the White House. As for the president himself, heavens, the burdens of the presidency in the time of travail and revolution and fantastic change, these burdens in times like now are impossible for any man really to carry by himself.

I'm certain that you are familiar with the patterns that Mr. Eisenhower developed in the White House, the staffing patterns which receives some much public comment, and also the use of the National Security Council, the Forest All Act of 47, which he inherited from the Truman administration, the National Security Council, blending military and foreign policy advice in one body to aid the president in that important task of leadership. But the President administration and the Kennedy administration seemed to abandon the National Security Council. Mr. Kennedy used McGeorge Bundy and a small group in the White House, and Mr. Johnson seems to have used four men, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Treasury, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a Tuesday luncheon pattern meeting. And I suppose that each man has to use his own devices. As you look into the future, from your standpoint of the benefit of a view from Congress and the appreciation of the personal burdens which one human being carries, I still would like to press you a little bit further on, how can you see the American presidency functioning effectively?

From the standpoint of providing leadership in our system, I don't, for my own part, see Congress developing the capability to provide national leadership. It falls back on the President somehow. And this, to me, raises the question, how can the President organize his time, his staff in order to carry out this role? Well, President Eisenhower, as you pointed out, his career as a professional soldier, had adjusted his mind and all his habits to the staff pattern of executing orders and of carrying out things, and perhaps the proof of the pudding that it worked well is that there were no wars in Eisenhower's regime, although there were a number of crises abroad. If we have time, I'd like to tell you an amusing story of how my knowledge of the staffing habits, the way Eisenhower conducted his office, did avoid a war.

Last year that, please do. Well, at this time of which I speak, I was ambassador to Italy. And there was in, between Italy and Yugoslavia, a piece of territory, not a great deal larger than a golf course, called Chiesta. This had been given to the Yugoslavs at the end of the war, but it was being held by American and British soldiers pending some final disposition of the question. Now, T.S. was a simple city to the Italian. They wanted T.S. back. I know sooner arrived in Italy that I then I found out that this small city, which most Americans knew nothing about, was the bottom question in every Italian's mind.

What was going to happen to Chiesta? And I saw it was a lengthy process of finally admitting this to myself that if Chiesta wasn't returned to the Italians, no other US objective could be reached in Italy at that time. They weren't in the United Nations. They were holding up on all their NATO commitments, et cetera, et cetera. Then suddenly the question flared up, Italian troops marched to the T.S. border. Yugoslavs on their side marched to the border with the British and the American in between. And there seemed every reason to believe that a war would break out because of that.

Now meanwhile, my embassy had been sending literally pounds of cables back to the State Department trying to get this question put on the agenda of the National Security Council so that they would enable us, me in Italy and my opposite number in Yugoslavia to begin to try to solve it. I don't know what happened to all of those messages except to say that this was a moment in the world when many areas were considered crisis areas and they did not consider the T.S. was as important in the Mediterranean as we knew it to be. Someone mentioned to me, and General Eisenhower tells this story in his last memoir, that General Eisenhower never read anything since he had come into, well, since he'd become a staff officer now since he was president, that could not be distilled the

number of it, the guts of it, the heart of it, on one piece of paper. Well, I said I'm going to get one piece of paper on his desk. And I sat down at my typewriter myself. I spent three or four days trying to explain the complexity of T.S. on one sheet of paper and then suddenly it dawned on me. I wrote, not one sheet of paper, about 12 lines, was sent safe hand to the president. The president then walked into the Security Council and said, gentlemen, I have here a message from our ambassador from Rome. And this is called, and he looked at it, Security Council listened, and he said, for the want of a two penny town called T.S.

And what I had written, or rewritten was that own nursery poem, for the want of T.S. an election was lost. For the want of the election, an Italian prime minister was lost. For the want of a prime minister, NATO was lost. For the want of NATO, Italy was lost. For the want of Italy, America might be lost, all for the want of a two penny town. They got the message. They said, proceed to settle it if you can. And after many diplomatic negotiations, we solved the T.S. question. The only territorial question solved, without a world war, since the turn of the century, because I understood Eisenhower's way that he conducted his office.

It's an excellent case study of not only leadership, but communication and organization. And I think the world perhaps owes you something, Mrs. Luce, for your ability in suggesting and condensing that message into the nursery rhyme format. Thank you very much. This is NET, the public television network.

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