After the unveiling of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War On Poverty," host William F. Buckley debates Michael Harrington, the author of "The Other America," on the issue of whether the United States government can assuage the hardships of impoverished citizens through federal initiatives.
Former senator Barry Goldwater dryly estimates and tabulates the Republican Party's 1968 electoral prospects. A deferential Buckley solicits Goldwater's thoughts on Medicare and executive power.
Taped on Sept 12, 1966 (New York City, NY) Between these two antagonists one might have expected a heated debate, but what we get instead is a serious discussion of sexual ethics in the latter part of the 20th century. HH: "The philosophy really I think is an anti-Puritanism, a response really to the puritan part of our culture...." WFB: "I'm not worrying about whether you reject Cotton Mather's accretions on the Mosaic Law, but whether you reject the Mosaic Law. Do you reject, for instance, monogamy? Do you reject the notion of sexual continence before marriage? ..." HH: "Well, I think what it really comes down to is an attempt to establish a ... new morality, and I really think that's what the American ... sexual revolution's really all about. It's an attempt to replace the old legalism. It's certainly not a rejection of monogamy as such, but very much an attempt- In the case of premarital sex, there really hasn't been any moral code in the past except simply that thou shalt not. And-" WFB: "Well, that's a code, isn't it?" HH: "Well, perhaps. I don't think it's a very realistic one." - The Firing Line Archives @ The Hoover Institute, Stanford University Guest(s): 1) Hefner, Hugh M. (Hugh Marston), 1926- - Editor and Publisher of Playboy YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kHlZxL9sucg
Taped on Dec 1, 1966 (New York City, NY) While many people had been skeptical of the Warren Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy, Mr. Lane's book was the first to lay out the argument seriously. He defends himself ably in this spirited exchange. ML: "I take really the same position Alfreda Scoby, one of the lawyers for the Warren Commission, takes, and that is, had Oswald lived, he could not have been proven guilty, had he faced trial, based upon the evidence the Commission was able to secure." WFB: "And of course Warren says that he was a practicing district attorney for ten or twelve years and he could have gotten a conviction in 48 hours with the evidence. You simply disagree with him professionally." ML: "That's nonsense. It would take longer than that to pick a jury, of course." WFB: "Do you think Warren should be impeached?" ML: "I don't think he should be impeached. I think the report should be impeached." -The Firing Line Archives @ The Hoover Institute, Stanford University Guest(s): 1) Lane, Mark. - lawyer, author of Rush to Judgment YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=19aLDtjNHPQ
We eventually get to Berkeley-where the Free Speech Movement and associated radicalisms had completely broken down academic discipline-but before that, we have a never-the-twain-shall-meet discussion of which views might and which might not, under the tenets of academic freedom, disqualify a scholar from being hired by a university.
Richard Nixon assays his 1968 electoral prospects, the 1964 fragmentation of the Republican Party, the perceived failure of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program, and the looming threat of third party candidates such as George Wallace.
Senator Mark Hatfield explains why he opposed Barry Goldwater's nomination in the 1964 Republican primary. He suggests the country evolve towards a parliamentary system and that politicians should be delegates ever beholden to voters.
Taped on January 8, 1968. Perhaps the economy had not yet truly reached the point of crisis, but it was beginning to feel the strain of President Johnson's attempts to keep the guns and butter coming at ever faster rates. This splendid economics lesson from one of the country's leading teachers begins with a little historical biography (Friedman: "Keynes, himself, was very much of a scientist. I think he was wrong on various things, but he certainly had a scientific approach. And indeed, I've always regarded it as a great tragedy that Keynes died when he did. Because one of his great capacities was flexibility"), and then goes on to the importance of monetary policy, how we might better handle taxation and welfare, and much else. Summary by Firing Line staff.
Norman Mailer appears on Firing Line to promote his book, "The Armies of the Night." Mailer's book retells the 1967 March on the Pentagon which included Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, and himself. Mailer discusses his support for Fidel Castro; the excessive propriety of left-wing intellectuals; the qualities of great men, and the journalistic inaccuracies of Time Magazine.
Noam Chomsky defends his criticism of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia and contextualizes several arguments put forth in his work "American Power and the New Mandarins." Buckley ascribes a self-righteous tenor to Chomsky's views and chides him for omitting Vietcong terror in his book. They debate whether a state can behave disinterestedly in the international arena and whether the United States is an imperialist power.
A superb conversation that ranges from Vietnam and crime in the streets to the beginning of the Cold War and the difficulty many Americans had in believing that the Soviet Union, our recent ally in World War II, wasn't a democracy in the same sense as the United States.
A serious, though sometimes heated, discussion that begins with who bears responsibility for the Mylai massacre.
The road back from socialism, that is. Both guests had been Angry Young Men.
Moments before the taping began, Mrs. Friedan told WFB that she had saved one of his sisters from disciplinary action at Smith College thirty years earlier. Thus handicapped he has trouble gaining momentum against this force of nature, who sweeps through the economics of housekeeping, the liberation of men from "the masculine mystique" of "bear-killing, big-muscle Ernest Hemingway," and the "right of every woman to control her own body."
A luminous discussion of the ethics and practicalities of nuclear deterrence with a man who is as much a philosopher as a physicist.
For this first installment of Firing Line broadcast on public television, we have as our guests two men actively seeking to dump President Nixon. Mr. Lowenstein's organization had voted in favor of impeaching him for high crimes and misdemeanors-no, not Watergate, which was still more than a year away, but rather his conduct of the war in Vietnam. For the same reason, Mr. McCloskey had announced that he would challenge the President for the 1972 Republican nomination.
In his 1971 State of the Union message, President Nixon had proposed his revenue-sharing plan--federal grants to the individual states, as opposed to the Federal Government's continuing to run local programs.
Mr. Buckley begins by telling us that he had recently received a letter from three Marine officers stationed at Quantico, Virginia, all Vietnam veterans, all concerned about media coverage of "atrocities and war crimes allegedly committed in the Republic of Vietnam." The three officers, our guests on this show, state that they never witnessed or were told at close hand of any such incidents.
As WFB relates in his introduction, MIT had decided in 1969 that no one who had defended Lyndon Johnson's policies in Vietnam could continue to claim the privileges of academic freedom there, and so Mr. Rostow had gone off to Texas, where he was working on a book about President Johnson.
A few days ago at the United Nations, Mr. Buckley begins, "the General Assembly made a decision which has been widely acknowledged as the most important in its history": to admit Communist China and expel Taiwan.
As Mr. Buckley frames the question, "When last heard from, Congress had before it 59 separate bills designed to provide 59 varieties of protection for newsmen." These "shield laws" were politically explosive; the Pentagon Papers and the leaks that prompted President Nixon to authorize the Plumbers had been front-page news for much of his Administration.
Admiral Shepard's unequivocal answer to the title question is: Yes, it was worth the effort to send men to the Moon. Does that mean we should go back to the Moon again, or try to go on to Mars?
In Mr. Foot's previous appearance on Firing Line (#75), the themes were economic, and what principally emerged was Mr. Foot's absolute commitment to socialism. Here, discussing comparative British and American scandals (while Watergate was still less than half over, a British sex scandal had been dispatched in weeks), he is less predictable, and all the more interesting.
Sir Alec had been Britain's--the West's, really--point man at the Helsinki Conference (formally, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), and he had spoken strongly on the need for the Soviet Union to offer more than "pious declarations" on behalf of freedom and to take positive steps towards "freedom of movement of people and ideas." However, many observers felt that he had not demanded enough in the way of concrete actions. Was Sir Alec being overly cautious, or was he being reasonable?
As Mr. Buckley recounts in his introduction, the Watergate hostilities, which had already been in the headlines for more than a year, had just escalated with the Saturday Night Massacre. Our guest had been fired for refusing to fire Independent Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and he here speaks knowledgeably about the legal and moral ramifications and the probable next steps.
Senator Muskie's Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations had just commissioned the Lou Harris organization to conduct a poll on Americans' knowledge of and confidence in their country's institutions. The results on both counts were, as WFB relates them, pretty depressing. The bulk of the hour is spent--sometimes heatedly--analyzing the poll and debating how close it comes to reality.
An unusually lucid discussion of a tangled situation. In reply to Mr. Buckley's question--"Now, if something can last between 1921 and 1968, why can't it last out the balance of the century?"--Mr. Hume gives a masterly account of the threads that came together in the late Sixties to produce the violence that led, in 1972, to Britain's suspending Stormont and assuming direct rule of Northern Ireland.
Mr. Wurf, the leader of the fastest-growing union in the United States, answers the title question with an emphatic Yes. Mr. Buckley, citing "public figures ranging from Calvin Coolidge to Franklin Roosevelt," answers with an equally emphatic No. A heated but frequently illuminating debate that keeps returning to a recent strike by some of Baltimore's policemen after the mayor had refused any form of arbitration.
In 1972 the Nixon Administration had made an agreement to sell grain to the Soviet Union that, as WFB puts it, "Mr. Earl Butz, our Secretary of Agriculture, proudly announced [as] the largest grain deal in four thousand years." The immediate result was to help our farmers, our trade balance--and of course the Russians, in that Year of Detente. The result over the next two years had been sharp rises in our own food prices, over and above the general inflation we were suffering.
Soon after the Arab states clapped on their embargo and then boosted the price of oil by 400 per cent, WFB reminds us, President Nixon appointed William E. Simon energy czar, "and the American people were introduced to ... [this] cyclone from Wall Street who bedazzled the Congress, the bureaucracy, and the press, and got us through the winter." But oil was still $10 a barrel, and where do we go from here?
Mr. Udall, WFB begins by telling us, is running for President, and "a number of Democrats ... see in him someone who could bridge the gap between, say, the McGovern wing of the party and the Muskie-Humphrey wing." (Historical piquancy: the others whom WFB mentions as serious candidates for 1976 are Henry Jackson, George Wallace, and Lloyd Bentsen.) But the substance of the conversation is on Mr. Udall's principal preoccupations: energy and the environment.
Although Mr. Kissinger said it ever so carefully in his famous interview, Mr. Buckley begins, "his words were, 'I am not saying that there's no circumstance where we would not use force, but it is one thing to use it in the case of a dispute over price; it's another where there's some actual strangulation of the industrialized world.'
Mr. Schlesinger had served in a variety of positions in the Nixon Administration, remaining in the last of those after Mr. Nixon succumbed to Watergate. The discussion here begins with South Vietnam, which had just fallen to the Communists, and moves through the Persian Gulf and Soviet power generally, to broader questions such as the difficulties of foreign policy in a democracy.
In a show taped just a few weeks after Squeaky Fromme's attempt on Gerald Ford's life, WFB engages his guest--who had prosecuted Charles Manson and his "family" for the murders of Sharon Tate et al. six years earlier--in an absorbing exploration of the Manson phenomenon: to what extent it grew out of the Sixties culture; whether executing Manson might have put an end to his cult; how Manson resembles and differs from Hitler.
The author of A Ford, Not a Lincoln is in a state of cheerful despair about the future of democracy in America. A wide-ranging discussion of the way our candidates are chosen nowadays and of the press's failure to hold them accountable.
Mr. Rifkin's organization was pressing for the continuation of the American Revolution via the complete socialization of the United States; as WFB puts it, "Probably the most publicized maneuver of the People's Bicentennial Commission is the offering of huge cash awards--$25,000 is the posted figure--to any wife of a major corporation executive, or any employee, who can produce evidence sufficient to put major corporation executives in jail for violating something or other."
The day before this taping, Jimmy Carter had defeated Gerald Ford for the Presidency; furthermore, in Congress, most of the Democratic freshmen originally elected in the Watergate year of 1974 had been re-elected. These three old pros give us a tour, rich in detail, of the policies and personalities.
Mao Tse-tung had died in September, and his widow, Chiang Ching, had been denounced as one of the Gang of Four and imprisoned. "As we sit here," WFB begins, "it is not absolutely known even whether the widow of Mao Tse-tung is alive or dead. Every manner of crime is imputed to her, and it is even whispered that she permitted the music of Beethoven into the death chamber of her husband." What will the incoming Carter Administration do about it all? What should it do?
Guest: Robert J. Dole
In Mrs. Thatcher's second appearance on Firing Line, two years before she would take up the reins of government, the conversation turns to the state of democracy in present-day Britain.
Mrs. Ulanovskaya speaks slowly and with a very heavy accent, but it's worth the effort to hear the story she has to tell--of her husband's connection with Stalin, of her work as a spy in the United States (one of her agents was Whittaker Chambers), of her disenchantment and banishment to Gulag.
In Mrs. Schlafly's previous appearance on Firing Line the topic (the Equal Rights Amendment) was one on which host and guest were in substantial agreement. Not so here, and the discussion, always lively, occasionally erupts.
This two-hour debate, the first one done specially for Firing Line, is said to have influenced the subsequent Senate debate on the treaties-and also Mr. Reagan's electability as President two years thence. Each principal was to bring two seconds and a military expert; Mr. Bunker was present to answer any technical questions about the treaties. The result was at once a brilliant duel and a model of civilized discourse on an emotional topic. Two samples: WFB: "Well, let me ask you to give me the answer to a question which you cannot document, but in which I permit you to consult only your insight. Would you guess that the Panamanian people would prefer, or not prefer, to exercise sovereignty over their own territory? Take as long as you want to answer that." RR: "I was just sitting here wishing that I had with me the transcript of the impassioned plea that was made to United States senators at a meeting of the Civil Council a week or so ago in Panama.... The speaker was a black-a Panamanian, not an American. His father, a West Indian, worked on the Canal, in building the Canal. The speaker had worked all his life on the Canal, and his impassioned plea was, even though he was a Panamanian, 'Don't! Don't do this! Don't ratify those treaties!' "... WFB: "Do you mean, Would President Carter, as Commander in Chief-" PJB: "And would the Senate support him?" WFB: "-would he assert American rights in the Panama Canal? In my judgment he would. Yes, sir." PJB: "... With regard to South African and Chilean vessels, or vessels going to and from those two pariah countries?" WFB: "We have a guarantee that antedates this treaty to see to it that nondiscriminatory passage is guaranteed. It's the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty." PJB: "Right, but do you think American Marines would go in to guarantee passage to vessels headed for South Africa?"
Guests: Im Vin, Leo Cherne
Guest: Joseph Duffey
The question of how much immigration we should allow and what criteria should be used for admission was the subject of sporadic debate, but suddenly it had hit the public consciousness that we had some large number of immigrants--3 million? 8 million? 12 million?--who had by-passed the admission process altogether.
As WFB sets the stage, "Mr. George Gallup has passed along the word that the American public is in a mood to consider alternatives to the present leadership, and seldom in American political history has there been such a stampede of patriots willing to come to the aid of their country."
Guests: Mark J. Green, Robert Bleiberg
Candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976 had praised "Cabinet government." President Carter in 1979 had fired three of his Cabinet officers. This hour offers an often surprising look at how the modern Executive Branch works.
Messrs. Gilder and Lekachman mostly talk past each other
A bracing discussion of the tax plan that President Reagan had just unveiled.
William A. Rusher, Michael Kramer
Nov 12, 1981 (New York City, NY) Mr. Sowell had taken a great deal of flak from the establishment for his dissection of cliches about racial discrimination, but he simply makes his points and defies anyone to misunderstand him: "People often say that I'm denying that there's racism. On the contrary, racism exists everywhere around the world, down through history. That's one of the reasons it's hard to use it as an empirical explanation for anything. In the United States, for example, Puerto Ricans have lower incomes than blacks. I don't know of anyone who believes Puerto Ricans encounter more discrimination than blacks. Obviously there must be something else involved besides discrimination." ... Examiner* Harriet Pilpel: "Are you against labor unions?" Mr. Sowell: "You asked what were some of the factors that stood in the way of black economic progress, and I said that one of them was the labor union. That is a fact, and I'm simply reporting facts, not prejudices." - The Firing Line Archives @ The Hoover Institute, Stanford University
With a favorite Firing Line guest, a serious discussion of the nature of angels and what Mr. Adler calls "angelistic fallacies." An angel, he points out, is "a purely spiritual being, a mind without a body"; he quotes Thomas Aquinas's explanation that angels must assume a body to appear on earth--"as you would assume a coat or a mask when you go to a masquerade ball"--"because they must make a sensible appearance to the human beings that they are carrying God's messages to."
Zbigniew K. Brzezinski
How can a country spend as much time and money on education as ours does and produce declining literacy and numeracy?
Mr. Barzini has the depth of a scholar and the facility of a journalist. Agree with him or not that Europe "should have one common foreign policy, one common defense policy, and one financial policy," he is a joy to listen to.
This show starts with the narrow question of how bilingual education is supposed to work and how it in fact works; but it very quickly broadens and deepens into an exploration of what holds the American society together--and whether it deserves to be held together.
In 1970 the wife and daughters of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald--a Green Beret stationed at Fort Bragg--were killed. The chain of evidence eventually led to MacDonald himself, and despite testimony at the pre-trial hearings by Drs. Sadoff and Halleck to the effect that it was all but inconceivable that he was the murderer, he was tried and convicted.
On the evening of February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down in Harlem--"not by Ku Klux Klan agents," as WFB reminds us, "but by agents of Elijah Muhammad, the reigning Black Muslim leader."
Could the Strategic Defense Initiative really work? Wouldn't it destabilize relations with the Soviet Union? Dr. Keyworth's technical credentials are unassailable, and he proves able to explain difficult concepts so that non-physicists can grasp them.
William A. Rusher, Jim Leach
Mr. Braley is a slow and deliberate talker, and so this show lacks the energy of some. But many of the insights are acute. RB: "Watergate was a foreign affair. By that I mean the origins of Watergate and the passion aroused by Watergate was a passion not directed specifically against the instances of Watergate, but against the Administration that continued to pursue the Vietnam War against the advice of the New York Times and its allies."
Taped on 12/11/1984. The 1984 election suggested, as WFB puts it, "the collapse of liberalism as we have known it during the past half century," and he asks his two guests, one on the right, the other on the far left, where liberalism is likely to go from here. Messrs. Hitchens and Tyrrell actually talk more about the past than about the future, and it is illuminating (when they don't indulge in billingsgate) to get such different takes on the same set of events. CH: "I believe that the American Left, in starting the civil-rights movement for black Americans, in combating an unjust war in Indochina, and in beginning the emancipation of women ... changed the way everyone thinks and the way everyone lives ... the whole world is in debt to the American Left for these three enterprises." RET: "In the Sixties and Seventies the liberals achieved most of the things they set out to achieve, particularly welfare and civil rights, and then were overtaken by a lust for power. They refused to notice that they had indeed achieved these things ..." - The Firing Line Archives @ The Hoover Institute, Stanford University
Harriet Pilpel, Andrea Dworkin
A deeply honest exploration of a very painful subject. All three guests have spent time in Vietnam (Mr. Butterfield was there on April 29, 1975, the day Saigon fell); all have studied the political and military history. They and their host all agree that, as Mr. Butterfield phrases it, "We didn't lose the war on the battlefield, we just left."
The Reagan Administration and Congress had been going back and forth over funding for the Nicaraguan Contras, who were fighting the Marxist Sandinistas (and, as we would learn about a year after this show was taped, some members of the Administration had decided to take matters into their own hands).
Stephen J. Solarz, Henry J. Hyde
An absorbing show but painful, both because of the grisly subject matter (the 1977 rape-murders of ten young women in Southern California) and because of the controversial role played by Dr. Watkins in the investigation and trial, and the merciless interrogation of him here by Mr. O'Brien on the question whether one of the Stranglers had a multiple personality.
The main thing wrong with the parties -- according to Mr. Peters, the coiner of the term "neo-liberal" -- is that they're, well, partisan: that they put their gain as a group ahead of an honest look at the issues. And the "reforms" of the Seventies have only made things worse.
Mr. Buckley reveals that on Mr. Schorr's previous visit to Firing Line, as a fellow guest with the author of a book on language and politics (#S695), he had asked if he might return solo sometime to talk about his fifty years in journalism. The hour is less volatile than one might expect given his career.
A radiant hour with a man who has spent half a century at the highest levels of nuclear physics and has never checked his conscience at the laboratory door.
Taped on Jan 19, 1988 (New York City, NY) Dr. Paul, a former Republican, is the Libertarian Party's candidate for President, and he proves, in this energetic exchange, to be a well-spoken exponent of the libertarian creed. WFB: "As somebody who occasionally calls himself a libertarian, I regret the extent to which the libertarian position is discredited by a kind of reductionism that is simply incompatible with social life. You want to destroy the FBI, for instance. Why?" RP: "Well, we could point out, first, that the first 125 years of this country existed without an FBI. That came about, I believe, during the First World War. The CIA is a really recent phenomenon, 1947." WFB: "Well, we existed 125 years without an airplane, too." - The Firing Line Archives @ The Hoover Institute, Stanford University http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/programView2.php?programID=1168 YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UyzrYJtJ6Vc
Hustler had published a satire which included Jerry Falwell having sexual relations with his own mother, and Mr. Falwell had sued. Some had expected the Rehnquist Court to take the opportunity to modify the "New York Times rule" on libel suits involving public figures, but instead of softening the rule it held that obvious satire does not constitute "reckless disregard for the truth."
A calmer discussion than one might have expected, given the strong differences between the two guests, but solidly informative on a topic that has increasingly come to the fore in our own country.
Broadcast live. Much had happened behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains: perestroika and glasnost, the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, a loosening of controls in China followed by Tiananmen Square. Does it all add up to an end to the Cold War?
This show that includes part of the rehearsal of a harpsichord concerto Mr. Buckley would play with the Phoenix Symphony the following night. But first, a lively discussion of the music world, here and there, past and present.
The Berlin Wall had just come down, and this rich discussion with three men who were behind the scenes in Washington and London starts with the erection of the Wall in 1961.
Even before the Gorbachev regime had disintegrated, there was talk of restoring the Russian monarchy, and Prince Nicholas's was one of the names often mentioned. Here he speaks movingly and informatively of the country he regards as his homeland, although his parents had fled before he was born.
We're in Switzerland, Mr. Buckley begins, "unquestionably the smallest nation to exercise such influence ... since the heyday of Portugal and Athens." The mystery is how the country not only survives but prospers when "it seems to violate all the rules."
Taped on May 22, 1990 (New York City, NY) Not as many fireworks as one might have expected from these two friendly antagonists--both guests being Britons who have spent much of their working lives in the United States--but an amusing look at the present state of the "special relationship." CH: "Why can't I go into a supermarket without seeing a picture of Princess Diana, whom I left England to get away from? ... If I go back to England, what do I get? McDonald's hamburgers and American nuclear bases." ... JO: "The reason why the Americans always wanted the British in the European Community was because they would represent [the Americans'] thought, the ideas of free trade and free markets, which would mean that the Community would never be closed to American goods and American capital." Guest(s): 1) Hitchens, Christopher. - columnist for The Nation, author of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies 2) O'Sullivan, John. - Editor of National Review, former domestic-policy advisor to Prime Minister Thatcher Moderator: 1) Kinsley, Michael E., Senior Editor at The New Republic, co-host of CNN's Crossfire
The semi-annual frolic in which the guests question their host, except that our guests this time seem less interested in tripping up Mr. Buckley than in finding out just what these puzzling conservatives do believe.
Firing Line had celebrated its 20th anniversary with three hour-long anthologies. For the 25th, the excerpts are triple-distilled into one glorious half-hour, framed by brief comments by Messrs. Buckley and Kinsley.
The rape trial of William Kennedy Smith the previous fall had kept the nation's cartoonists in clover--and its feminists, who tend to be Kennedy-lovers, in a state of trauma--for two months. In contrast, this is a civil and productive discussion of why--feminism apart--rape is such a difficult crime to prosecute justly.
This show -- the first in an election-year series -- is accurately described as a mini-debate: there are no big opening or closing statements, but instead of the informal give-and-take of a regular Firing Line, the participants take turns cross-examining each other, as in the middle portion of a formal debate. Good fun even if there aren't many surprises.
A year earlier Vice President Quayle had publicly complained about the litigiousness of American society, and Mr. Starr--whose name six years later would, for better or for worse, become a household word--had undertaken to draw up a program of reforms. He skillfully makes the case for his proposals, Mr. Glasser equally skillfully makes the case against, and Messrs. Buckley and Taggart keep the discussion on course.
Mr. Green's book, according to his host, "devotes a chapter of modest size to every problem in America with the possible exception of original sin."
Taped on Apr 27, 1993 (New York City, NY) As Mr. Buckley points out, the rising rate of illegitimacy (17 per cent among whites currently, 62 per cent among blacks) is an issue not only morally, but also in terms of its fostering other pathologies--crime, illiteracy, drug use. Mr. Blankenhorn is earnest rather than sparkling, but he has a lot to say. "In our interviews we've found the most severe critics of the current welfare system to be the people who are on it. They'll tell you in unequivocal terms that it is a pretty terrible thing, and they'll tell you that one of the terrible things about it is that it's part of a system that effectively keeps men out of family life." Guest(s): 1) Blankenhorn, David. - President of the Institute for American Values http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/programView2.php?programID=1361
Our guests approach the title questions obliquely but profoundly, getting at what liberal education is and who should receive it by talking about how liberal education is done.
Mr. Pinker's new book had infuriated linguistic conservatives--among whom, count WFB--but in this relaxed conversation, host and guest agree as much as they disagree.
To the title question, Mr. Heston would give a qualified No. There are, he says, "far more young conservatives among actors and writers and directors now," and Hollywood does respond, though slowly, to public pressure--so that, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "a depiction of a minister or a priest doesn't have to show him as a bigamist or an adulterer or a sodomist." Still, Hollywood is a left-wing place.
Mr. Koch had recently reflected publicly on the work of a professor who had found that the incidence of crime among young black men who were married and working was no higher than that among young white men. So how do we get young black men to marry and work?
Firing Line had looked at the O.J. Simpson trial in midstream (#S1053) and now comes back for the aftermath.
This is not a debate, since Messrs. Beck and Stein both strongly urge controls on immigration, and Mr. Buckley agrees with them much of the way. However, our guests are both deeply knowledgeable and explain clearly how the immigration laws have been changed in recent decades--a matter of which most Americans are unaware.
Traditionally, it was manufacturers who pressed for tariffs and other barriers to trade; in recent years, Mr. Jasinowski tells us, most of them have seen the light, whereas the unions and their friends "for reasons that are not altogether clear ... have chosen to protect the status quo." An energetic discussion of the history and theory of free trade, and why we need to do better than 2 1/2 per cent growth.
The scholarly Mr. Siegman and the explosive Mr. Zion could hardly be more different in manner, but this time--unlike on some of Mr. Zion's earlier Firing Line appearances--the conversation does connect. Consensus is not and could not be reached, but we get a clear idea of the opposing positions on Prime Minister Netanyahu's rejection of certain Clinton Administration proposals.
The Paula Jones case had put sexual harassment on the front pages, and our guests, in this second follow-up to the ACLU debate, have a spirited exchange on the specific and the general question.
After the black American in Texas was mutilated and killed, Mr. Buckley begins, "and the gay student in Wyoming also mutilated and killed, President Clinton asked for increased federal dominion over hate crimes. Is there a need, let alone a philosophical justification, for such a thing, or was Mr. Clinton's call nothing more than what George Will designated as moral pork barrel?"
This two-hour debate, the first one done specially for Firing Line, is said to have influenced the subsequent Senate debate on the treaties-and also Mr. Reagan's electability as President two years thence. Each principal was to bring two seconds and a military expert; Mr. Bunker was present to answer any technical questions about the treaties. The result was at once a brilliant duel and a model of civilized discourse on an emotional topic.
