The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; 5132; Robert Muller Interview

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening and Happy New Year. The turn of the year and the turn of the decade`ve brought out the prophets and pundits and experts to tell us of the unresolved problems and crises and scarcities that lie ahead and the general tone this year seems to be long on despondency and short on inspiration. Vermont Royster summed up the mood in the Wall Street Journal last week: "It isn`t easy this season," he said, "to look around the world and find much cause for joy or hope for the dream Christmas symbolizes: the coming of peace on earth and goodwill among men." And after listing all the things that`re wrong with our world he added, "It`s hardly surprising, then, that men should sometimes grow despondent and be tempted to think this the worst of times." Well, we thought we`d take a different tack and deliberately push you into the `80s with a man with a different message. He is Robert Muller and he is secretary to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Tonight, the shocking views of a naked optimist. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, they call Robert Muller "the U.N.`s prophet of hope", the man who sees sunshine when others see clouds, who hears music when others hear noise. He grew up in a small town in Lorraine on the German- French border, his father was a hatmaker, his mother a questioner of newspapers, his grandfather a passer-on of wisdom. As a boy, Robert Muller had seem members of his family have to fight on both sides of World War I, during the Second World War the same. Robert at age twenty joining the French Resistance, finally being captured by the Nazis and imprisoned.

After the war he went back to school, getting degrees in both law and economics; in 1948 he went to work as an intern for the United Nations and he`s been there ever since holding a series of executive positions including that of director of the Secretary General`s Office under U Thant. Robert Muller speaks five languages, lives with his wife and four children in a farmhouse north of New York City and spreads his message of hope and happiness wherever he goes. He put that message in a book published last year called Most Of All, They Taught Me Happiness; in a forward to the book, Norman Cousins suggested it would do us all good to meet Robert Muller particularly at a time when it`s fashionable to declare that the entire metabolism of history has gone berserk. So, meet Robert Muller. He`s with Robin in New York. Robin?

MacNEIL: Good evening. In your speeches and writings you rather flaunt your optimism, if I may say so, as though it were a religion that you discovered. Where did it come from?

ROBERT MULLER: I would say that probably by nature I was inclined to a positive view towards life. I remember as a little child I found that life was really divine, it was beautiful, nature was beautiful, people were interesting, beautiful. But this was then changed very rapidly because I came from a region where we saw war after war. My grandfather had five nationalities without leaving his village; in the picture album of my father I saw that once he was wearing a German uniform, then a French uniform and I couldn`t understand that, we just lived on the border that we had to hate the people on the other side. Then in `38, `39 the whole region was invaded by the troops; our city was evacuated twice and then I found myself in exactly the same situation as the rest of the family, half of them on the German side, myself in the French Underground, my father in prison and I saw during the war some incredible horrors at the age of seventeen. And nevertheless I think it was precisely during the worst periods of the war that I discovered that in order to survive I had to believe in survival; I had to switch myself on to the point of believing that I could get out of the worst situations. One of the stories I tell in my little book on happiness is that how I was about to be captured by the Germans; they had surrounded the hotel, there was no way of getting out, a man from the Underground came to see me in the attics and he said, "Look, there is no chance of escape." And I said to myself, "If there is one moment in my life where I have to smile, to look at this as being an extraordinary situation and maybe then I would find the way of getting out." And I think this changed my whole attitude; instead of panicking and doing the wrong thing, I was beginning to think, "Look, couldn`t I play some trick to those Germans? Wouldn`t it be fantastic if young man of seventeen could escape from the whole bunch?" And I were thinking very calmly and there it came: do the one thing that they would not expect you to do.

MacNEIL: What`d you do?

HULLER: And I did it. It was just to change my hair, take off my glasses, change a little bit my appearance and to walk down the staircases and there I saw a whole group of people who were officials taking out of the hotel rooms -- was a hotel converted into an administration during the war -- and I saw some shiny spots which were the Germans, they were bald, I didn`t see very well without my glasses, they were holding my secretary, shaking her saying, "If you don`t tell us where Parizot is (that was my false name at the time), we`re going to shoot you." And I walked to the group and I talked to my secretary and I said, "Look, Miss, what`s the whole turmoil about?" And she said very calmly, "They`re looking for Mr. Parizot." I said, "Parizot, but I just saw him on the third floor. And the Germans run upstairs, "Schnell, hinauf1" "Get him`.", you know? And then after awhile I walked out of the -- through the cellars of the hotel and it proved to me that you have to believe that things can be done.

MacNEIL: There was another moment during the war which you write about, a rather even more fraught moment where suddenly you describe yourself deciding to devote your life to the kind of career you have. Would you describe that rioment?

MULLER: Yes, well, I think my parent -- my father was a hatmaker and his dream was that I would become a doctor because that was a social promotion in our town. But, again, during the Underground at one point I saw, coming back from a patrol, I saw twenty-four young Germans killed, shot by my own group while I was absent. I wanted to find out why and it was explained to me that the group had found a barrack in which dozens of Frenchmen had been taken from the prison of Monluc in Lyons and had been burned with gasoline and they found only charred bodies with jaws with nails in the jaws -- one of those horror stories of the war. And in retaliation the commander of my group had killed those young people, and they were people they were looking like me. They had their dreams, they had their mothers, I couldn`t feel any hatred for them, they were not even soldiers, they were members of the arbeitsdienst, and I said, "Look here, you have all these youths, no future dea3-anU-probably nobody will ever tell their parents where they lay buried." So it was at that time that I really said to myself, "This is a crazy world; I have to change my course and instead of becoming a medical doctor, I want to work for Ueace." So that was a determination that happened at this particular moment and, again, it was a dream and that moment. How could I ever fulfill this dream?

MacNEIL: It is now January 1st, 1980 and we have a new decade in front of us. What is there to a professional optimist to be optimistic about in the 1980s in this world?

MULLER: In the first place, I think that we will not see any world war. In other words, the increasing appeasement which has taken place in the world over the last few years will continue. Of course, to you this might come as a surprising statement, but...

MacNEIL: By appeasement, you mean peace-making, do you where the...?

MULLER: In other words, in the first place a global conflagration is out of question. Today governments are much too sophisticated to get to this point which would be ruinous for everybody. But in addition to this, there will be conflicts and mostly among the younger nations who do not have the wisdom and the experience in dealing with international problems. But even these conflicts, my view is that they will be shorter, they will be less intensive and they will be less numerous. And I would -- and ten years from now, if you have your program, we might sit and look at the statistics and see whether what I said is true or not. But increasingly a new conflict is smothered rather rapidly by the international community and the reactions of other nations; it is no longer so easy to get into an adventure. The most difficult conflicts are those which have been around for a long time like the Middle East, like Cyprus. But the new ones do no longer escalate. I think there is a great professionalism among nations now on the world conflicts and I believe that in the `80s we will have conflicts, no doubt about that. There are many border disputes in this world but they will be less intensive, less frequent, and they will not lead to any world war or escalation.

MacNEIL: Let`s pursue these things with Jim. Jim?

LEHRER: What about the competition in arms and other areas between the Super Powers, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union? Does that -- isn`t that kind of a gloomy prospect as we go into the `80s?

MULLER:` On that one I would not be optimistic in view of the fact that for every major world problem you have to have a reasonable time span and when it comes to armaments I do not believe that there`s going to be very great progress in disarmament before at least another twenty to thirty years. But what we will see in the `80s is the slowing down of the pendulum. In other words, there has been a very rapid acceleration in armaments expenditures and sales and with the SALT agreements there is the beginning of a slowing down of the rate of increase. In other words, it continues to increase but increases at a slower rate and I believe that in the not-too-distant future we will see a moderate increase in defense expenditures but we are far from disarmament.

LEHRER: What about the competition in other areas as we are seeing now, say, with the Soviet Union`s heavy involvement in Afghanistan, the United States` heavy involvement in the past in Southeast Asia, competition now in the -- and still in the Southeast Asia only now it`s between the Soviet Union and China. You don`t see any of these -- are any of these what you would call minor conflicts erupting into something larger?

MULLER: Well-, we have had these eruptions and conflicts all along the line where the Soviet Union zone of interest and the American zone of interest touched. It went from Finland down to via Germany to the Middle East to Korea. This was really the area of conflicts between the Super Powers and there will continue to be areas of irritation but I think that both parties have learned that the game is too costly and that in those last thirty-five years, they really have not made any great progress in one direction or the other. So this is why they`re going to watch each other very carefully; they will not allow the other party to make progress and we will have flare-ups of this sort but, again, I do not believe that this will be leading to actual military involvement.

LEHRER I found your attitude about reading newspapers and watching news programs on television very interesting, you just seem to ignore them and their had news. Is that so?

MULLER: Well, it`s a lesson I got from my mother; my mother when I was young always read the newspapers from a very distance and she was very suspicious and I asked her once why she did so and she said, "Look, boy, as long as I`ve lived, the newspapers have always had bad news. So every day they`re bad, in war and in peace, and the only thing is that I`m having a glance at it to see if it doesn`t come too close to my own family. "So I have kept a little bit of this suspicion and I have also learned over the years from my work in the United Nations where I knew actual situations that the public was being irritated by the media and that there is, perhaps, a natural inclination of the media to see very dramatic events everywhere when they are not so dramatic at all.

LEHRER: Are the people being irritated by the media or being irritated by the medias report on what`s happening in the world?

MJLLER: Well, I don`t know...

LEHRER: How do you separate the two?

MULLER: Well, I give you an example: I was political advisor to the troops of Cyprus and when I was at home I looked at the TV or the newspapers and it seemed that if -- as if Cyprus was going to render the rest of the world bloody. And when I got there to Cyprus I was advisor to a general and there I saw every day reports about so many shots having been shot into one direction or the other direction and I tried to find out why this was such a big affair for the rest of the world. There were young people, they had rifles, they were like myself in the Underground, we liked to shoot once in awhile. And you had there newspaper people who were anxious to hunt for the news and as a matter of fact things calmed down when one day I went down to the bar and saw the journalists and they tell me, "Mr. Muller, what`s going to happen during this next six months?" And I said, "Nothing at all." Said, "Why?" Said, "Because they`re going to come to the Security Council and I`m sure that they both have orders from Athens and Ankara to be very nice boys." And about a week later all the journalists packed the nice little cars of the Herald Tribune, they all disappeared, and indeed for the following six months where I was there it was pretty peaceful. of course, I had guessed right but to a certain extent I was glad as political advisor that in the period which was going to be a period of pacification we wouldn`t have world reports that would exaggerate every little incident.

LEHRER: Well, what are you saying finally about reading the newspapers, that it`s not as bad as the newspapers portray it to be, ignore the bad news, or what? What`s your one-sentence advice to others on how to read a newspaper?

MULLER: My message is very simple, is that the newspapers should also carry good news. The proportion of bad news is much too high and I think the world is not all bad; there`re four billion three hundred people who wake up in the morning; there`re many of them who`re happy, who go about-for example, at this precise moment there is no war on this planet; all I can see is guerrillas in Viet -- in Cambodia and guerrillas in Afghanistan but otherwise Rhodesia was just settled, we are here on the lst of January, 1980, we`re at the point where I would like some newspaper to say, "Look, let`s thank God that despite of all the troubles, but at this moment there is no war on this planet." But you do not see that anywhere.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Of course, in Cambodia there is mass starvation at the moment. You would not want to see that ignored, would you?

MULLER: Well, it is not ignored. As a matter of fact, something great has happened in Cambodia is that these people didn`t want to recognize any-they didn`t want to hear anything of the international community, they didn`t want to have anyone from the Red Cross or the United Nations come to help them and we have seen the miracle that now they have accepted so that Red Cross aid is flowing in, United Nations aid is flowing in, there has been a tremendous response to the appeal by Secretary General Waldheim for help.

It is like with the refugee situation in Vietnam. I think we have over the last year we have also had some successes and I think that it is good also in order to give people hope that things can be done to recognize that there is also such a thing called "success".

MacNEIL: What about areas like -- apart from, as it were, narrowly located incidences of starvation in Cambodia -- what about the food situation and the population situation for the world over the next decade?

MULLER: Well, here the situation is improving. What happened to this world is very simple is that in the 1970s we suddenly realized all `round that we were on the course that could not continue. We didn`t know in nine teen hundred-fifty what the world population was, we were so primitive on this planet. And then when the figures were assembled, we discovered there were about 2.5 billion people; then later on the demographers did surveys and nations organized themselves, they had a census, because the last census of any magnitude was the census done by the Romans at the time of Jesus Christ. Since then, there`d been nothing. So that, looking at the figures suddenly they discovered that there was a population explosion which was due to the fact that the children were no longer dying -- it`s not that they had more children but with medicine, health moving in, the children were not dying. The result is that today more than half of the people in the poorer countries are less than eighteen years old. They were born after the fifties, they were saved and, of course, they`re highly reproductive. But now what has happened and which is very significant is that a few years ago the figures were getting worse, worse and worse. I remember that whenever I made a speech somewhere I asked the demographers what is the next projection for the year 2,000 and each time they revised it upward by about thirty, forty or fifty million people. Today when I call them, each time I get a downward revision which means that the pendulum of population increase is beginning to slow down and two years ago the figures which I was given for the world population in the year 2,000 was seven billion. The figure I get today is only 6.2 billion. Now, that`s an enormous amount of more people -- no doubt about it -- but it shows that one of these global dangers which we didn`t see it because we were not accustomed on this planet to think in global terms, that this is now beginning to improve.

MacNEIL: But can you only see that improvement when you look at the global averages, for instance, can you be optimistic if you`re a member of a Third -- citizen of a Third World country which is hit by the enormous in crease in energy prices and you`re not producing any petroleum yourself, like Jamaica, for instance. How can you, as an ordinary Jamaican, be optimistic about the `80s with petroleum prices soaring and so on? Do you have to think -- sit in the United Nations building and look out over the world as a whole unit to be optimistic?

MULLER: Well, it was as a -- I know this situation very well because I happen to be the secretary of the North-South negotiations so that this is a problem with which I deal every day. And as a matter of fact, during this General Assembly there was one great breakthrough which is the fact that the General Assembly has decided to have another round of North-South negotiations and that this time energy including petroleum would be included. Now, a year ago we all thought that the OPEC countries would stand away no energy discussion in United Nations, no negotiations on this issue. And it was countries like Jamaica, like India and others, that convinced their colleagues from the developing countries to come to the negotiating table so that this is going to take place. That`s quite a big new event that comes out of this General Assembly.

MacNEIL: Why is another conference a breakthrough -- holding another conference?

MULLER: Ah, because in these conferences you come to agreements; you might very well during a conference like this come to agreement on a moderate slow progressive increase in petroleum prices, in return of commodity agreements on products which are of interest to the developing countries like coffee, cocoa, copper, etc., etc.

MacNEIL: Jim?

LEHRER: You`re very high on the United Nations, obviously, and what it has accomplished. Others, as you know, are not; right now the word is that the future of the U.N. may be at stake in how it resolves this situation in Iran. Do you agree with that?

MULLER: Not at all. I think that the U.N. is here to stay were it only for the fact that no government would be able to come to a conference table and create a new international organization. They know it all; they have to make it work; it is an imperfect organization; if you would ask a few good minds to sit down and draft a planetary organization for Planet Earth they would certain not come out with the Charter of the U.N. But this is all we got and it cost the Second World War, the blood of the people dead in order to get as much as the Charter of the U.N. And therefore, governments know perfectly that we have to make it work and as far as I`m concerned, I am increasingly optimistic about the organization; it is a very different organization from the one I knew when I came as a - immediately after the war; at that time I had little hope.

Today this organization is really helping the planet to overcome all its divisions because you have so many divisions. It`s not only between nations, it`s between the black and the white, between the north and the south, between generations. You have every conceivable conflict and competition -- you spoke about competition before and it is the role of this organization to build bridges, to bring them to the conference table, to have them listen to each other and the mere fact that they are listening to each other makes them learn that the other party might also have a point and, as a result, because I`ve been now in United Nations for a total of thirty-two years, I have seen many miracles happen, things which I would not have felt possible in nineteen hundred forty-eight. when I joined it. So that I see there humanity grope for its destiny on the little planet. We have now investigated this planet for the first time from every possible global angle, from outer space, the atmosphere, the climates, the season, the oceans, the arable land, we know how many people we can feed, energy, water, the crust of the earth, the atomic energy, microbiology -- there`s a whole Copernican beautiful view of our place in the universe that has emerged from all these conferences held at the U.N. and by the thirty-two specialized agencies we have. The same has happened for the human species, we know today how many we are, we had just an international children`s year to look at the children all around the world; we`re going to have an international conference on the elderly in nineteen hundred eighty-two; in `81 we`re going to have an international year on the world`s four hundred fifty million handicapped; we know how many literates and illiterates there are; we know about the situation of the health of the people all around the world; we know so many things which we have never known before and this is, in my opinion, to the credit of governments to have created this series of organizations at least to show us what our planet is and to help us go into a new age.

LEHRER: All right. Robin?

MacNEIL: You`ve lived in this country a long time, Mr. Muller, has this country lost its what used to be regarded as its inherent optimism? Why do you feel that pessimism is so fashionable right now?

MULLER: I would say that, indeed, and I have written about this also that I remember when coming to this country that the great thing about it is the faith in humanity, the faith in future, even at that time, the great faith in United Nations which was a product of America. I think it was wonderful to see people have this faith, businessmen saw the future very bright and as a result by seeing it bright, of course, they achieve many things. Then, I think with Vietnam was the racial issue and then in nineteen hundred seventy it was the global crisis that came to the fore; we are now in a situation where the American Dream has to be reformulated. It can no longer be a dream of unlimited growth, changing everything, demolishing everything and replacing it by new things; there are limits to science, there are limits to technology, there are limits to the number of roads you can build. And we have now entered into an age where the entire world has to think where it is going to go and what kind of a world population, what kind of a life we want to have. And this rethinking has not been done in the United States. It is almost as if people wanted the former dream to continue and see that it cannot continue because now you have inflation, you have the resources problems. But what are these problems? They`re very simple, they are the pressures which originate from the fact that we are four billion three hundred million people and that everybody wants more and more and more. And, of course, the resources cannot follow.

MacNEIL: We have to leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

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