Amy Goodman Interviews Robert Scheer
- From: "whistler" <whistler-ab@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 12 Jul 2006 13:15:39 -0700
My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton
- and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush
Amy Goodman Interviews Robert Scheer
DemocracyNow!
Monday 10 July 2006
We speak with veteran journalist and author Robert Scheer about his
new book, "Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter,
Bush I, Reagan and Clinton - and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George
W. Bush."
The Vietnam, War, North Korea, The Cold War and Presidential Power.
These are just a few of the topics that veteran journalist Robert
Scheer has reported on in his long career. From 1964 to 1969 he was
Vietnam correspondent, and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From
1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles
Times and in 1993 Scheer launched a nationally syndicated column based
at the LA Times where he was named a contributing editor.
Robert Scheer's column ran weekly for 12 years until November of
last year when he was fired. Scheer said publicly that he believed his
firing was due to ideological reasons and his steady criticism of the
Bush administration At the time, Scheer wrote on the Huffington Post
blog that "The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of
explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word
that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used
by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty
percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand
of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage
spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper
and my words tougher."
Scheer's column is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle. He
also recently launched the political blog, "Truthdig.com." His latest
book is called "Playing President: "My Close Encounters with Nixon,
Carter, Bush I and Clinton - and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George
W. Bush."
Amy Goodman: Robert Scheer joins us in our Firehouse studio today
in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now! It's good to have you with us.
First, the firing, because you're still writing. In fact, you're
probably known more now than before. Can you put it into the context of
what is happening to the press today?
Robert Scheer: Well, first of all, there's a lot of opportunity.
You know, AJ Liebling said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to
those who own one." Well, I now own at least half of one, along with
Zuade Kaufman, my publisher. So, you know, you can land on your feet,
your show, which, you know, a lot of us listen to, as mainstream media
now. And my wife, for instance, she's a deputy editor of the San
Francisco Chronicle, she sits in her parking lot listening to your show
before she goes into her meetings. So alternative media is no longer
really alternative, and we're no longer that dependant upon newspapers,
like the Los Angeles Times, for our information. You know, go to
BuzzFlash or The Nation or TruthOut or TruthDig. There are many, many
sites, as you're well aware. So, I don't want people to think, "Wow!
They were able to silence me." Nonsense.
Did they try to silence? Yes. The Tribune Company took over the Los
Angeles Times. There are issues of media conglomeration. This was a
newspaper that I had worked for for 30 years. The interviews in this
book, with the exception of the Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter,
were all done for the Los Angeles Times. I was nominated by the paper
some 20 times for Pulitzer Prizes. You know, I was a finalist. So, you
know, I had a very good relationship with this paper. Chicago Tribune,
the Tribune Company took it over. They're very conservative. The
publisher definitely was ideologically opposed to my view. I was
attacked by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, sometimes nightly on
O'Reilly. I mean, he called me the most dangerous columnist in the
world or something.
And I think that one of the problems is that I got it right. Now,
that doesn't give me any satisfaction. I would have been much happier
if we could go into Iraq, and democracy would flourish, there would be
no casualties, the oil revenue would pay for everything, the country
was reborn as a democracy. I mean, I think most people who are against
the war would have been very happy to have been proved wrong. But to
have had your column ended after you got it right all those years, it
shows where the paper is.
I think there's one other factor that should be mentioned. These
are businesses. Tribune Company owns television stations and newspapers
in the same market in Los Angeles, in Hartford and other places. They
only can do that now, because there's a waiver from the F.C.C., a
Bush-dominated outfit, the F.C.C., and the Congress did not pass the
bill that they wanted, which would allow them to have that ownership in
the same market. So they were defeated by Congress, these big
multimedia corporations, and they're very dependant upon favors from
the Bush administration. So aside from their own conservative politics
at the Tribune Company, they need this administration, and so it
doesn't take much to put pressure on them.
Amy Goodman: Let's talk about the presidents that you have
interviewed and known. But before we do that, on this issue of media
conglomeration, on the issue of what the press can say and what the
press can't say, the Bush administration lashed out at the New York
Times and other media outlets for their reports on the government's
secret monitoring of - well, the latest one, of international bank
transactions without court approval. President Bush himself strongly
denounced the disclosure of the program by the media.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Congress was briefed. And what we did was
fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is
disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the
United States of America. And for people to leak that program and for a
newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of
America.
Amy Goodman: That's President Bush. Robert Scheer, your response?
Robert Scheer:: First of all, if the war on terror is endless, you
could forget about democracy. If it's against any target he mentions,
if you could spread it - and you never win it, which is, I guess,
clearly what's involved here, because Iraq, of course, had nothing to
do with Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein was an opponent of bin Laden, bin
Laden did not have a base in Iraq. So this guy takes us to war in Iraq,
which is really the irritant. Now, he doesn't pursue the situation in
Afghanistan. In fact, he coddled the Taliban before 9/11. In my book, I
have columns. I wrote a column in May of '01, blasting the Bush
administration for ignoring the Taliban. I happen to be one of those in
the antiwar part of things who actually supported Clinton when he sent
the cruise missiles in to take out bin Laden. I had thought we had the
right to use Special Forces to go in for bin Laden. He had attacked
American embassies. He attacked ships. And so, I didn't see any need to
coddle the Taliban.
As a matter of fact, the one group in this country that
consistently raised questions about the Taliban was the Foundation for
Feminist Majority, Peg Yorkin and those folks. And that's where I
learned about it. And for five years they were telling us what's going
on in Afghanistan is extremely dangerous, first of all, to women and
girls, of course, who were treated in a most horrible way. But this was
also a place where terrorism was being sponsored. Also by Pakistan, our
other big buddies out there. And so, the pressure to do something about
bin Laden was coming more from the left than these so-called great
patriots on the right before 9/11.
And, you know, as I say, in the book I had a column I wrote in May,
blasting them for giving $44 million through the U.N. to the Taliban,
supposedly for suppressing the opium crop, which they didn't even do.
They were putting it in sheds to drive the price up. And six weeks
before 9/11, Christina Rocha from the State Department met with the
Taliban ambassador in Pakistan and congratulated him once again for his
great effort in the drug war. So this administration wasn't interested
in terrorism. They were interested in the drug war before 9/11. They
ignored all the warnings from Sandy Berger. They ignored the warnings
from the N.S.A.
So it's such garbage for this guy who ignored terrorism and then
misdirected the whole fight against terrorism to Iraq, and everything
else, has weakened our country, has alienated it. We need our allies.
We need France and England and Germany and Spain, you know, and all of
these countries. And you routinely attack their citizens. You attack
their governments when they agree with their citizens. He's weakened us
in that battle. Now, he says, "Well, this was all authorized by law."
Why don't they tell us what they're doing? If they're looking into our
personal banking records, if they're listening to our phone
conversations - we're supposed to live in a democracy - why don't you
tell us you want to do that?
Amy Goodman: Well, they say if they tell you, then they're telling
terrorists.
Robert Scheer:: Look, first of all, the terrorists are going to
believe the worst about this society. They think we spy on everything.
They think we kill everyone. They think - they don't believe that we
believe in democracy, right? They don't believe we have limits on our
government. I've never met any strong critic of the United States
anywhere in the world who gave us any credit for having limit on
government. So they think the worst, and they're not naive about that,
any serious terrorist.
But I think the American public has a right to know to what degree
their privacy is being invaded and then decide whether we want to pay
that price. That's, after all, what democracy is about.
But the really dangerous thing in what Bush said in that clip you
had, if you define the enemy as this vague terrorism thing, because we
still know very little about it - if you read the 9/11 Commission
Report, there's a disclaimer, a boxed disclaimer - I forget what page
it is, I think it's 176 - which says the whole narrative that we have
about al-Qaeda and these people who did this to us comes from so-called
key witnesses. The 9/11 Commission was not able to interview those
witnesses, nor were they able to interview the people who interviewed
the witnesses. So we have people like Cheney basically telling us we
have this sort of James Bond marriage with the Mafia, enemy of al-Qaeda
out there. We still don't know who the 15 Saudis were. We still have
not traced the money to the real sponsors. We still don't know the role
of Pakistan in this.
So, yes, there's a problem of terrorism in the world. There's
always been terrorism. There will be terrorism. You have to deal with
it surgically. You have to deal with it in a serious way. This
administration is not serious. So why should we accept that they're
invading our privacies and that somehow it's going to make us stronger?
No, it's going to make us weaker.
Amy Goodman:You mentioned President Bush supporting the Taliban
before attacking Afghanistan. But you go way back. And now I want to
talk about the presidents you've interviewed. For example, Jimmy
Carter. You're the reporter who did the famous interview in Playboy
magazine, where he talked about lust in his heart, and I want to ask
you about that, but also you have been dogged in your pursuit of Carter
around the issue of the Taliban and Afghanistan.
Robert Scheer: Yeah, let me just say something about objectivity
and whether you're coming from the left or the right. I have blurbs on
the back of my book from Richard Nixon, Nancy Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Okay, I actually did a profile - I interviewed Richard Nixon. I did a
profile of him. And then after I did that, it was '84, I evaluated his
administration. I got a very nice letter from Nixon, asking me to come
- offering to talk to me, that he appreciated my analysis. So I think
we can be good historians on the left, as well as on the right or the
center. I mean, and I like to think I get the stuff straight, you know,
that it holds up.
Now, in the case of Jimmy Carter, I was very surprised when this
book came back from - with the galleys and all the new stuff I had
written, that I actually am much tougher on Carter than I was on Nixon.
And that isn't because I was a critic of Nixon. He killed a lot of
people in Vietnam. It was a horror. But he escalated a democratic war.
And when I was interviewing Carter for Playboy, I was very concerned
about another hawkish Democrat. After all, Carter came across - two
things. We think the Republicans are the ones who started this
fundamentalist religion claptrap, you know? It was Jimmy Carter. He's
the one who talked about, you know, "I'm a born-again Christian. I pray
all the time. I do this," etc.
So the reason I was interested in interviewing him was, you know,
what does that mean? Are you going to have a literal interpretation of
scripture? Are you going to impose it on the rest of us? So the
questions, the Falwell-type questions, the Pat Robertson, really
started with Jimmy Carter. And the reason that Carter was willing to be
interviewed by Playboy is he was having a lot of trouble with his base
in the Democratic Party, so he wanted to assure more liberal people
that he wasn't. And, in fact, his answer to the lust question was a
very good one, very good interpretation of his Christian views. He's
very tolerant, and he was still pro-choice, and he wasn't going to
impose this on everyone, and so forth.
What was controversial in that interview was, I said, "Well, wait a
minute, but the Democrats have created a lot of mischief." And we now
think - you know, it's as bad as George W., and he's unquestionably the
worst modern president. He's the perfectly electronically transmitted
president. There is no there there. He's a captive of the neo-con. I
accept all that. He's part of this - you know, he's taken over by this
cabal of Cheney and Rumsfeld. I think this guy is doing tremendous
damage, and he's in a league all his own. That's why the others didn't
prepare me. At least the others knew a lot about the world, had
experience, had brains about this, cared. This guy had the platinum
American Express card and didn't even want to see Paris or London. He
stayed in China for three days. So this guy's indifferent to the world,
and now he's going to change the whole world. A very ominous
combination.
But going back to the Carter interview, what I thought was very
controversial in that interview, ignored by the media, because they
have this salacious interest in lust and all that, I said, "Look, the
Democrats gave us Vietnam." And, by the way, you know, looking at those
clips from Baghdad, everybody, they say, "Oh, we can never talk about
Vietnam. It has nothing to do." It's not true. You know, we went into
Vietnam as part of a religious division. Everybody forgets Ngo Dinh
Diem was a Catholic, that 10% of the country was Catholic, that this
was a Catholic-Buddhist issue, quite aside from whether it was an
east-west issue, you know? And remember the Buddhist monks were burning
themselves and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, religious tension,
nationalist tension, there are parallels there.
But with Carter, I say, "Look, Lyndon Johnson gave us this war.
It's true Nixon escalated it." I said, "But, you know, you're coming on
very hawkish here. Why won't you do the same?" And he said, "I will
never lie to the American people the way Lyndon Johnson did." That was
Jimmy Carter. Now, he had already gotten the party nomination at that
point. Lady Bird Johnson - I was on the plane with Jimmy Carter as part
of the press. When we landed in Dallas, Lady Bird would not meet with
him, you know, because he had made that statement. And I thought that
was the serious news.
And I still think it's the serious news now about Democrats.
There's a question I want to raise about somebody like Hillary Clinton.
It's why I think history matters. Democrats can give us wars, you know?
Democrats can play the false patriotism card. There's no assurance that
a Democratic candidate who is elected will not move to the right of
Bush on intervention, warmongering, playing to the military-industrial
complex, so I am very concerned that we have a choice in the
congressional elections, that we have a choice for the next
presidential elections, and that we have candidates who at least will
recognize this war for the monstrosity that it is.
Amy Goodman: So you're saying the Republicans escalated Democrats'
wars, like Nixon escalating the war from Johnson, from Kennedy. Carter,
though, you haven't talked about the Mujahideen.
Robert Scheer: Oh, I'm sorry. By the way, it's not just escalated.
You know, Eisenhower was a pretty peace-oriented president. Truman was
a pretty hawkish. I would argue, if we had more time, I would argue
Truman had a lot to do with getting the Cold War going. Gore Vidal has
a very good essay at the beginning of my book, a forward, where he
makes that point. You know, Truman kind of wrapped it up. Eisenhower
provided the first break in the Cold War, by bringing Khrushchev to the
United States, in humanizing the Soviets; and then Nixon, by making the
opening to China; and then Reagan, even meeting in Reykjavik with
Gorbachev and acknowledging that nuclear weapons are a horror. So I
wont accept that Republicans just escalate. Republicans, at least when
they were more moderate, they were maybe even more isolationist, they
sometimes brought sanity to the debate. We don't have that now. We have
- all these Republicans have gone off the neoconservative deep end.
But bringing it to the point of Carter, yes. After 9/11, everyone
went, "Where did this happen? Where did these people come from, these
Muslim fundamentalists?" Now, clearly, we know where they came from.
They came from Afghanistan. That's where they were based. How did bin
Laden get to Afghanistan? Why isn't that the question that everyone
asks? What was the guy doing there? What were these other fanatics
doing in Afghanistan? Well, Jimmy Carter is this guy, and in the book I
quote Bob Dole back in 1980. I happened to interview Dole, because he
was a - I used to do all these interviews of presidential candidates
for the L.A. Times. California is important to presidential aspirants.
And also print used to matter a great deal. So, you know, I got a lot
of time with him. I spent - I don't know what, seven hours with Reagan,
six hours with Carter, that sort of thing.
And I interviewed Bob Dole and all the guys who didn't make it. And
Bob Dole said, "What's this big" - this was 1980. He said, "What's this
big Afghanistan thing?" He said, "I think they're using it as a ploy to
take attention away from the Iranian hostage crisis, which they had not
been able to resolve, and from their domestic economic problems and the
price of oil, and so forth." He said, "The Soviets have always had a
great deal of influence in Afghanistan. It's right on their border.
They got along with the king and everything. They've been there for
seven, eight months with this secular guy in Kabul. You know, and why
is this suddenly the biggest thing?" This is Bob Dole said that. He
said, "I think it's a ploy to take attention away from their problems."
And sure enough, in 1988, Zbigniew Brzezinski told Nouvel
Observateur, he said, "We wanted to give the Soviets their Vietnam." It
was very cynical. It was once again foreign mischief for domestic
advantage. And then, that's when Jimmy Carter said, "We're not going to
the Olympics in Moscow, and this is the worst thing to ever happen."
It's all stuff that Zbigniew ignored. Cy Vance, who was really his
Secretary of State, favors Zbigniew Brzezinski. And Carter made this
big deal about Afghanistan, and then he said, "We have to support these
freedom fighters, the Mujahideen." And they began this process of
recruiting them from all over the world. And then Reagan came in, and
he accelerated that. He actually had a Freedom Fighter Day.
Amy Goodman: And you had Brzezinski famously saying about the
Mujahideen, "What's a few riled-up Muslims?"
Robert Scheer: That's right.
Amy Goodman: As they were supporting the Mujahideen.
Robert Scheer: And he said that quite late in the day, also,
similar things, quite late in the day. I mean, if you want to go to the
origin of 9/11 - you know, we're recording this, I think, blocks, what,
ten blocks away from the World Trade Center - you know, where does this
stuff - unintended consequences. You know, it's always so easy to throw
and say - what did the New York Times say? - throw some country against
the wall. It's so easy to intervene. Everybody says, "Oh, you don't
have the courage to make war." Well, it takes no courage to make war,
particularly if you're not going to go and your children are not going
to go. What courage is that? You know, but the unintended consequences,
stuff happening now, you see that bloodshed in the clips you had from
Iraq today. 50 years from now, somebody's going to blow up some cafe in
Manhattan, and maybe with a primitive nuclear weapon and take out
Manhattan, and it's going to be avenging some dangerous, mischievous
thing that we did now.
That's what happened - by the way, Iran keeps coming under the
radar. Where did Iran come from? There was a guy named Mohammed
Mossadegh back in early 1950s, secular in Iran, popular. He dared to
nationalize the Italian oil company. He was moving against the English
oil companies, started that process.
Amy Goodman: British Petroleum
Robert Scheer: Yeah, British Petroleum. The C.I.A. overthrows this
guy. I remember, for the L.A. Times, I interviewed Kermit Roosevelt,
who actually brought in the money. I did one of the first stories on
that. You know, Kermit Roosevelt, he was dying in a hospital in
Washington. He told me the whole story. And, you know, did Kermit
Roosevelt - no, it was just fun. He went in there with, what, $28
million, bought a mob in the bazaar and started a riot, and they
overthrew this guy. Unintended consequences. You get rid of Mohammed
Mossadegh, who was a secular leader, you end up with the Shah. You sell
him all this junk he can't use, you know, airplanes and everything. He
then has to raise the price of oil. You get rid of him, because he was
active in OPEC. And you get the Ayatollahs.
Amy Goodman: And Kermit Roosevelt was the grandson of Teddy
Roosevelt.
Robert Scheer: Right. And now you go into Iraq. Unintended
consequences. You knock out a secular dictator, and you replace him
with the proteges of the Ayatollahs in Iran.
Amy Goodman: Robert Scheer, we're going to have to break, but we'll
come back to you. Robert Scheer is the author of Playing President: My
Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton, and
How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. We'll talk more about
his encounters with these presidents in a minute.
[break]
Amy Goodman: Our guest is Robert Scheer, columnist with the Los
Angeles Times for more than a decade, a columnist for years, one of the
editors of Ramparts, has written a number of books. His latest is
called Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush
I, Reagan and Clinton, and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W.
Bush. You went to North Korea.
Robert Scheer: Yeah, Eldridge Cleaver, actually, when he got out of
jail, was a writer for Ramparts magazine, and he arranged a trip. My
interest really was not so much North Korea. I wanted to go to China
and North Vietnam.
Amy Goodman: This was when?
Robert Scheer: China was then in the Cultural Revolution, 1969,
while we started doing it - yeah, 1969. I think around '69-'70. And so,
we went to North Korea, and then we also went through China, and then
we went to North Vietnam, which had been bombed in carpet-bombing and
all that. And then we went back through China. So the exciting part of
that trip was, I got to see China during the Cultural Revolution, when
in this country they were still describing China as, you know, the
little red ants and they were going to conquer San Diego. And they were
- the whole reason for the Vietnam War was supposedly going to China.
And you could tell then, this didn't have to be.
And Richard Nixon, to bless him in that respect, even before
becoming president, before meeting Henry Kissinger, he said, "This is
ridiculous. Communism is nationalist. The Chinese and Russian and
Yugoslav and Cuban and - none of these communists get along, and the
Koreans and the Vietnamese, and we can do business with them." And then
he opened up to China, and that's when the Cold War started.
So we were there, actually, as a witness to history, and we
happened to - we were in North Korea, you know, and we had gone in
there. And it was a very strange place. North Korea actually had been
fairly successful during the sort of Stalinist build-up of heavy
industry. But now they were collapsing. Even then, in the late '60s,
they were collapsing. It was a horror. And, you know, you could see
this thing was - what do they call it? - the hermetic state. It was
awful. It was just awful, as opposed to North Vietnam, where - you
know, China, under the Cultural Revolution, was no pleasant place,
either, and was scary.
By contrast, North Vietnam was a place where people were fighting
for their independence, and they supported their leadership. And, you
know, we've seen the result. North Korea is a case of a seriously
arrested development. They got caught up in the whole Cold War. They
got involved in this dynasty, crazy dynasty.
And I think that the policy - right now it's interesting. These
days, the Bush administration is talking about diplomacy. They've
suddenly rediscovered diplomacy. And I think it's very important to
follow the lead of the South Koreans and the Chinese and not back North
Korea even further into a corner, because that's when they'll be
dangerous. And what they've really asked for is one-on-one talks with
the United States - I don't know why we've always resisted that - and,
I think, normalization. We've seen it with China. We should do it with
Cuba. The great enemy of any totalitarian regime is normalization and
trade. We should have done it with Saddam Hussein. Boycotts don't work.
They work in certain isolated situations, where you have some
potential. But in the main, the best way to bring about freedom in a
society is to normalize, have tourism, have trade, have contact. That's
what we should be doing with Korea. And South Korea has been on that
track. They've extended the rail line. They have tourist facilities.
You've got to bring them into the modern period. But, you know, life is
a horror for the Korean people. And I think isolating them further is
going to make life more miserable.
You know, as far as the military threat, that, I think, is very
much being exaggerated. For example, we've coddled Pakistan and India
now in post-9/11. You know, Pakistan, India, that's the real nuclear
arms race. India just test-fired a rocket that could hit China.
Amy Goodman: This weekend.
Robert Scheer: Yeah. What are the Chinese supposed to think about
them? They've had historic problems with India. India and Pakistan
could easily go to war at some point. We don't know what's going to
happen in Pakistan. Very unstable regime. We know Khan in Pakistan is
the one who gave North Korea their key technological material. We know
they did the same with Iran. So if there's been serious proliferation
of nuclear weapons, it didn't come from Korea, it came from Pakistan,
okay? Instead of punishing Pakistan, if that's what they want to do,
they coddled Pakistan. They dropped the boycott. Now they've embraced
India. We're going to exchange nuclear material with India. So it's
okay for one nation to have rocket tests and develop these weapons and
not for another.
You have to take a clear position, which this administration is not
willing to do, which is that nuclear weapons, which we are, by the way,
the main ones in the world developing. We're the - also, also, people
should remember. Everybody says, "Well, if it's a democracy, let them
have nuclear weapons." We're the only ones who have ever used nuclear
weapons. We're the only ones, this democracy, our great democracy, and
I happen to love this country. I love this freedom and democracy. The
fact is we are the ones who killed innocent people, men, women and
children, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, weapons that
should have never been used, should have never been developed in the
first place, you know? And so, yes, these weapons are inherently
threatening to all of civilization. If that had been a nuclear weapon
at the World Trade Center, even the most primitive kind of the
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you wouldn't have a Manhattan, and we wouldn't be
having this conversation. There wouldn't be a democracy of any kind in
this country.
Amy Goodman: We're talking to Robert Scheer, author of Playing
President. You interviewed George Bush, the first. You interviewed
George H.W. Bush.
Robert Scheer: Yeah, that was an alarming - in fact, it was 1980,
and it knocked him out of the election. He was the frontrunner. He had
won Iowa. I got on a little airplane with him. And because it was the
L.A. Times, and blah, blah, you know, and he was a supremely confident
man, establishment cool, I think I call it. And I asked him, I said,
"What are you going to do - you're calling for even more nuclear
weapons? What are you going to do with these weapons? What does it
matter, whether we have 3% more or 5% more than the Russians? What do
you do with them? You already have these, you know, 5,000 of these
things, and they have it, and you can make the radioactive rubble
bounce."
He said, "Well, that's true if you don't believe that nuclear war
is winnable. And he believed nuclear war is winnable. He thought the
Soviets believed it was winnable. Well, we had abandoned that idea. We
assumed that mutual assured destruction. We assume these were not
useable. And here was Bush, pretending to be on top of it all, talking
about winnable nuclear war, because he had been listening to these
people who wanted to develop a war-fighting capability. That was a very
dangerous - I wrote a book about this, With Enough Shovels: Reagan,
Bush and Nuclear War. It was a very dangerous tendency.
By contrast, Reagan, who had been being dismissed as this bumpkin,
didn't make that extremist statement, and suddenly Reagan knocked
George Bush's father out of the race at that time. He was very angry,
tried to get me fired. Plenty of people tried to get my fired at the
L.A. Times. The only one that succeeded was O'Reilly and these people.
But at that time, Otis Chandler took me aside. George Bush came
into the building, and he complained about me. It was interesting. He
said, "Are you going to bring up Reagan's age?" And he said, "No, I
won't. But could Reagan, could Ronald Reagan put up with that nasty
questioning from Scheer here?" You know, and fact is, Reagan did. I
interviewed Reagan before he was governor, when he was governor, after
he was governor, when he was a candidate. I had a very good
relationship with Reagan. And Nancy Reagan distributed one of my major
pieces on him at the Reagan Library towards the end of his life. I got
along quite well with Reagan. I didn't agree with him. But I certainly
felt he knew what he was talking about it and had strong views, and we
can discuss it, and that sort of thing.
Amy Goodman: And how does he compare to Bush today, George W. Bush?
Robert Scheer: Well, my point in that subtitle, which you've read a
few times, that they did not prepare me for Bush, is all of these
people had led a life, okay? Reagan had been born in the Depression.
His father lost his job. He went to work for the New Deal. Reagan had
had to scratch his way through college and get jobs and make a living.
He was the head of a union. He had actually had to work his way up in
Hollywood. He cared about the issues. He cared about what was going on.
He followed what was going on in the world.
This was certainly true of Richard Nixon, who was the best prepared
president. He had been vice president. Richard Nixon, you could say,
"Bulgaria." He would tell you the five different factions in Bulgaria,
you know, where they stood and what their history was. He would have
been able to tell you the whole story I just told you about Mossadegh.
He would have known it in great detail. It doesn't mean he did the
right thing. He had the opening to China. He still killed millions of
people in Indochina, stopping communism while he was drinking Mai Tais
with Mao Tse-tung. So he was still capable of enormous dangerous
contradictions.
Clinton, obviously the smartest, maybe the smartest of all of our
politicians. The reason he wrote a letter criticizing me is, I called
him a right-of-center. I said he'll be remembered as a great president,
but a right-of-center president, bringing us back to the center. I
would say that this - in physics, they say quantitative change suddenly
produces a qualitative change. You heat water, it becomes steam.
We've had the trivialization of our politics going on ever since we
had electronic media. We've had the photo-ops and the dumbing down and
the one-liners, and everything. But it hit a critical mass with George
W. He is the first perfectly electronically transmitted president.
There is no there there. Here is a guy who came in, he wasn't even the
one his father wanted to be president. He had no real interest. He -
you know, we don't pick senators because they have a track record. We
pick governors from states where governors don't do anything, like
Jimmy Carter from Georgia, George W. from Texas.
So here was a guy who must have arrived that first day thinking,
"How did I get here? What do I do?" And he basically turned it over to
people he thought would allow him to one-up his father, that great
psychological drama that we're suffering through, and he turned it over
to Cheney and to Rumsfeld and to the neo-cons, which is a real cabal.
They've been meeting together. They've been preparing position papers
together.
We have lots of good documentaries now out on this. Greenwald's
Uncovered, I think, is an excellent one. The other one I saw the other
night, Hijacking 9/11. There are many of these things. They're right.
People have a right to question how this happened. But clearly, these
people hijacked the government with a very narrow ideological view.
They excluded the old establishment, the Brent Scowcrofts and that
group. And they went in a very dangerous direction. He went along with
them, because there is no there there. There is no George W. Bush. Here
is a person who is totally disinterested in the world, uneducated. I'm
not saying he's stupid. I don't think he's stupid. He's crafty as hell,
but he projects well on television. And that's the real big problem. He
is the perfect "what, me worry?" president.
Amy Goodman: Well, Robert Scheer, I want to thank you for being
with us. Robert Scheer, columnist for many years, fired from the Los
Angeles Times, now writing at the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as
at his website, TruthDig. And his new book is called Playing President:
My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton, and
How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush.
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