Q&A with Vietnam War scholar Larry Berman

Larry Berman's books include Perfect Spy, Lyndon Johnson's War, and the forthcoming Zumwalt. Berman is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and Founding Dean of the Honors College at Georgia State University.

Q: How have the lessons of Vietnam been applied, or ignored, in Iraq and Afghanistan?

A: Despite the passage of time, America’s war in Vietnam remains a metaphor for defeat but also an experience from which curious lessons and analogies have been drawn.  President Barack Obama, when ramping up the war in Afghanistan, explicitly rejected the Vietnam analogy, saying, “you have to learn lessons from history… each historical moment is different. You never step into the same historical river twice. And so Afghanistan is not Vietnam.”  The president went on to say that those who think Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and that it would be better to cut losses are “basing their argument on a false reading of history.” 

In T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” Eliot suggests that as one becomes older, the past ceases to be a mere sequence—or even development—because we accept popular or superficial explanations for what occurred and we thereby disown the past…leaving us with the experience but missing its meaning.  Thus, “the past has another pattern.” The United States is hoping to achieve in both countries [Iraq and Afghanistan] what it failed to do in Vietnam—create and sustain a government and political order that will be supported and fought for by its populace. 

In Vietnam, the United States backed a client regime that was unable to muster the political legitimacy or military skill necessary to survive after our withdrawal.   Vietnam should have given us a better grasp of how unstable military power is for low-intensity conflicts and how it often leaves us supporting regimes over which we have little leverage.   The Vietnam experience should have underscored the power of local circumstances and indigenous forces to resist transformation by an intervening power.  What the United States lacked in Vietnam was not persistence, not will, nor even good intentions, but rather understanding—of Vietnamese history, culture, values, motives and abilities. 

Many of the factors that made Vietnam a quagmire are all replicated in Afghanistan where the only counter-escalation open to our adversary has been broadening the insurgent base.  In Vietnam, the more troops we put in, the more Vietcong were recruited. The more we bombed, the stiffer their resolve became. Can support for the Taliban be related to the number of U.S. troops fighting on their soil? Can foreign troops provide locals the motivation to fight against their own countrymen for a foreign power?   What Afghan institutions—army, police, government—are strong enough to survive after we leave? I agree that many of the U.S. objectives in Vietnam were noble. I think that many U.S. officials and certainly many of the American soldiers and civilians who served in Vietnam were motivated by a genuine desire to advance the cause of freedom and to defeat tyranny. 

However, I also think that the nobility of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was compromised in innumerable ways by American hubris, ignorance and arrogance—qualities that often led the United States to fight and act in ways that were both counterproductive and morally deplorable.

Q: In your opinion, which president was most adept at applying lessons from the Vietnam War to his own decisions about whether to send troops into battle?

A: Allow me to use the technique employed by presidential candidates during debates and give an answer to a slightly different question.  I would say that Dwight Eisenhower’s decision not to intervene in Dienbienphu to save the encircled French garrison—the day we didn’t go to war. The Eisenhower process produced contingency plans and a wide range of options. Eisenhower regularly reformulated questions and broadened potential courses of action by considering tradeoffs and other considerations.  Eisenhower encouraged dissent and multiple-advocacy.  He understood that the worst place to send U.S. troops was to the jungles of Vietnam.

Q: What are the most striking changes you have seen over the years in Vietnam during your various trips there?

A: Vietnam is an extraordinary country to visit.  The greatest changes I have witnessed are in the area of education and the wide use of the prevalence of the English language and the number of English-language bookstores.  Of all the students I have taught, I most enjoy being in a classroom on a campus in Vietnam.  The students are so hungry to earn and appreciate the role of a teacher. English has become a commodity in Vietnam—those who speak it have a chance to earn a living for their family.

Q: Your book Perfect Spy focuses on Pham Xuan An, Time magazine reporter and North Vietnamese agent. What set of circumstances caused him to lead that double life?

A: All An ever wanted for the Vietnamese people was the chance to determine their own future, free from foreign interference. He was imbued with nationalist ideals of creating a new society based on social justice and economic equality. His dreams for the revolution turned out to be naïve and idealistic, but the power of his life story is driven by the noblest of goals for Vietnamese nationalism.  He would also pay a heavy price for holding onto his dreams. He had no idea back then that the Party he joined would turn into the brutal regime of 1975. He was not a hard-core party member and anyone who says otherwise is misinformed. He was, as Germaine Loc Swanson said, a communist by obligation. 

It was in the mid-1940s when the Communist Party recruited An. The Party chose his cover in journalism and developed a carefully scripted artificial life history. In the years prior to his American journey, An befriended Colonel Edward Lansdale’s covert CIA team. In fact, it was Lansdale himself who helped expedite An’s trip by having the Asia Foundation sponsor An’s studies in the United States. From 1957-59 An attended Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, majored in journalism, interned at the Sacramento Bee and then drove across the country for an internship at the United Nations. He learned so much about American culture and the American people--their compassion, generosity, way of thinking, and their freedoms. He often spoke of how Americans taught him a new way of thinking, a way of looking at the world that the Communist Party could not do. He also said that Americans taught him about humanity.  What makes An’s life story so interesting to me is that he apparently loved living his cover; being a correspondent for a free press was a dream come true in his vision of the revolution.

For over 20 years An lived a lie that he hoped would become his reality—working as a newspaper correspondent in a unified Vietnam. He developed enduring bonds of friendship with many prominent journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan and with members of the American intelligence community like William Colby and the legendary Edward Lansdale. An admired and respected the Americans he met in Vietnam as well as during his time in the States. He just believed that they had no business being in his country. He came to admire Americans for their way of thinking, their values and the freedoms they possessed. He wanted his children to be educated in America because that was the place he had learned about humanity.  At first, nothing was more difficult for me in writing about An’s life than trying to understand these friendships. In order to survive, An deceived those closest to him about his mission, yet hardly anyone rejected An when they learned he had been a communist spy. What kind of man can forge such enduring friendships based on a falsehood and, when the deception is unveiled, leave so few feeling betrayed?  Why is it that so many refused to believe they had been source material for their friend’s reports to Hanoi?

Q: You have a book coming out about Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. What is your take on his role during the Vietnam years?

A: Admiral Elmo Russell Zumwalt, the charismatic Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and “the Navy’s most popular leader since WWII” (Time) was a man who embodied honor, courage, and commitment to those under his command. In a naval career spanning 40 years, he rose to the top echelon of the U.S. Navy, as a commander of all Navy forces in Vietnam and then as CNO (1970-1974). His tenure came at a time of scandal and tumult, from the Soviets’ challenge to U.S. naval supremacy and a duplicitous endgame in Vietnam to Watergate and an admirals’ spy ring. Unlike many other senior naval officers, Zumwalt successfully enacted radical change, including the integration of the most racist branch of the military—an achievement that made him the target of bitter personal recriminations. His fight to modernize a technologically obsolete fleet pitted him against such formidable adversaries as Henry Kissinger and Hyman Rickover.

Ultimately, Zumwalt created a more egalitarian Navy as well as a smaller and modernized fleet better prepared to cope with a changing world—a policy that has helped keep the Navy a modern and relevant fighting force. But Zumwalt’s professional success was marred by personal loss, including the unwitting role he played in his son’s death from Agent Orange.  It was Zumwalt who issued the order to defoliate the jungles.  Retiring from the service in 1974, Zumwalt spearheaded a citizen education and mobilization effort to successfully help others in securing reparations for thousands of Vietnam veterans and their children. That activism earned him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by Bill Clinton in 1998. Today, his tombstone at the U.S. Naval Academy is inscribed with one word: Reformer.

Q: Anything else you think we should know?

A: The web sites are: http://www.zumwaltbook.com

   www.larrybermanperfectspy.com

 Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Larry Berman

Q&A with Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who previously spent 30 years with the CIA, is an expert on counter-terrorism, the Middle East, and South Asia. His books include "The Deadly Embrace."

Q: What role has the Vietnam War's legacy played in the Obama administration's debates on Afghanistan, and how absorbed has President Obama himself been with the lessons of recent history?

A: The Vietnam War and its legacy played an important role in President Obama’s debates on Afghanistan but perhaps less with the president himself than his older advisers.  The SRAP [special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan], Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who had served in Vietnam, probably was the most absorbed by the Vietnam legacy.  He understood the perils of a land war in Asia.  But Holbrooke was also the biggest advocate of a civilian surge of experts to try to build a better Afghan state, what many critics have since labeled a futile exercise in nation building. 

Holbrooke was also worried about the comparison of [Afghan President] Hamid Karzai to Vietnam’s corrupt generals, yet he was also unable to find a way to prevent Karzai from engaging in massive vote fraud in the 2009 elections.  So the lessons of Vietnam played out in Afghanistan but not always in a straight line.  The president, who is younger than most of his senior advisers, I think is less concerned by the Vietnam analogy simply because it resonates less with him.  I suspect the one aspect of the Vietnam legacy that most impacted the president was his concern that decisions not go on autopilot, that we constantly reassess our assumptions and progress at every stage.  He told me from the beginning days of his administration that he would do periodic second looks and reassessments to ensure truly smart policy, not simply more of the same.  And that is what he has done. 

Q: In early 2009, President Obama asked you to head a review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. As the review progressed, how big a factor was the issue of cost, given that the country was in a recession?

A: The cost issue was immensely important.  Let’s face facts; we are broke as a nation.  Our military expenditures have grown out of control.  We have a military that has grown used to constant increases in its budget and to waging war at any price.  When I briefed [Obama] on Air Force One in March 2009 on the review I told him it cost a minimum of a quarter million dollars to send one American soldier to Afghanistan for a year (some estimates are much higher), but it cost less than $12,000 to put an Afghan soldier on the battlefield for a year.  Even if we doubled the Afghan’s pay, the savings are obvious.  It was a light-bulb moment for the president; he got it.  

Obama has said it more than once: the country he wants to build is not Afghanistan; it is America.  But the president did not inherit a blank slate in 2009.  He inherited a war we were losing and an enemy, Al Qaeda, that was getting stronger, not weaker, in Pakistan.  He embarked on a policy aimed at a clear goal: disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda. Most of that is done in Pakistan, but to do that we need a base in Afghanistan because Pakistan won’t help us.  That is also why he agreed to a 10-year strategic partnership agreement with Karzai last May to give the U.S. access to Afghan bases after 2014 to conduct counter-terrorism missions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.   I suspect Governor Romney will want the same agreement if he is elected.

Q: What would you see as a "good enough" outcome in Afghanistan, and where does Pakistan figure in that outcome?

A: The core of Obama’s policy in Afghanistan is to build an Afghan army strong enough to contain the Taliban insurgency without NATO combat units.  We should have started doing that in 2002, but instead we went to Iraq and built their army.  When Obama inherited a disaster in 2009 we began for the first time to seriously build an Afghan army and police that can contain the Taliban.  We knew it would take five years during which NATO forces would have to do most of the work.  It is a big gamble; no one knows if the Afghans will maintain cohesion after we draw down.  The president and his generals are betting it will.  

Pakistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda are betting it won’t.  The Afghan Taliban is Pakistan’s proxy in Afghanistan.  The Pakistani army and intelligence service provides the Taliban with a sanctuary and safe haven in Pakistan.  They help them raise money. They provide strategic and tactical guidance for their missions.  While I was chairing our strategic review in early 2009, we knew the Taliban and the ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] were holding their own strategy review in Quetta, Pakistan.  [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar and the ISI met directly. The ISI’s bet is we will cut and run sooner rather than later; then their proxy will take over most of Afghanistan.  Pakistan is too important to us for many reasons (the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal is one) to ignore, but they are a very difficult and problematic interlocutor as long as the army calls the shots in Islamabad.

Q: You spent many years with the CIA. Has the CIA's relationship with the military changed over the years, and if so, how?

A: The CIA and the military grow closer when we are engaged in major combat operations.  In wartime, the CIA rightly supports the war fighters.  So our largest stations in history can be found in Saigon, Baghdad and now Kabul.  The longer the war, the bigger the station. When the fighting stops, the relationship remains robust but is not so all-consuming.  Covert operations in “peacetime” don’t always need a big footprint.  The first Afghan war, against the Soviet 40th Red Army, was run by a CIA program that never had more than a hundred people working on it and a station in Islamabad that was fairly small.  

Q: Since the end of the Vietnam War, has there been a particular time at which its legacy was especially strong or especially weak when it came to presidential decisions on sending troops to war?

A: I think the Vietnam legacy was almost forgotten in the Bush 43 first term.  Or perhaps consciously rejected by [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld.  We embarked on a war in Iraq with little or no serious discussion of the consequences, especially for the Afghan mission.  We paid a terrible price.      

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Bruce Riedel

Q&A with Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution

Michael O'Hanlon is director of research and senior fellow in Brookings' foreign policy program. His most recent books are Bending History and The Wounded Giant.

Q: What would you see as a "good enough" outcome in Afghanistan?

A: That Afghanistan not again be a sanctuary from which major terrorist attacks can be mounted against the United States or its allies.  Alas, we thought that such a relatively modest goal could be accomplished with a relatively modest effort--hence the "light footprint" of 2002 through 2006 or so, to say nothing of our pulling out of Afghanistan entirely in 1989 once the Soviets were defeated there.  We were wrong.  Achieving a robust counterterrorist objective requires some level of counterinsurgency and state building, it would appear.

Q: How affected do you think the Obama administration has been by the Vietnam War's legacy when it comes to their decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq?

A:  I think it was very important for President Obama to avoid the risk of quagmire by capping the size and duration of his commitment to Afghanistan even as he announced troop increases on December 1, 2009 (for the second time that year).  There was a certain logic to this.  There was also, alas, a counterproductive effect, as it made many Afghans and Pakistanis doubt the real sincerity of his commitment.  I think we could have handled the messaging much better, in fact, even if the policy, while a bit rushed, was not fundamentally wrongheaded.

Q: Your book "A Wounded Giant" deals with the issue of defense spending at a time of economic trouble. What do you believe should be done to maintain an effective military during difficult economic times?

A:  This is of course a big question.  The simplest slogan I'd fall back on is that defense should do its part to contribute to a spirit of shared sacrifice across all parts of government spending. Alas that is not really happening now because taxes and entitlements are basically getting a pass in the current debate.  Defense should not be cut disproportionately because it is needed and its effects are sometimes subtle--you miss an adequate defense when it is gone more than you constantly sense its benefits when it's there.

Q: In your book "Bending History," you and your colleagues analyze President Obama's foreign policy. How would you compare his approach to that of Mitt Romney? 

A:  Overall they are not that different at first blush, I don't think.  But Governor Romney seems too negative on Russia, a bit too reflexively hawkish on Iran (though part of that is probably campaign rhetoric), and too unwilling to have defense contribute meaningfully to deficit reduction (this is actually the part of his stated foreign policy that concerns me most, given the degree of my anxiety about deficits and the debt as not just economic but also foreign policy problems).

Q: Do you think the George W. Bush administration was affected by the Vietnam legacy when making its foreign-policy decisions, and if so, how?

A:  In a sense they may have been affected but in a dysfunctional way.  Powell and a few others hadn't forgotten Vietnam as we know from the Powell Doctrine and so forth. But the neocons were too anxious to forget it, move beyond it--believing the Powell Doctrine was too constraining, with some justification--but as a result, the neocons badly overcompensated (assuming the Iraq war would be easy for example).  And communications within the administration broke down between these two camps.  I'd say the effect was mostly regrettable and harmful.

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Michael O'Hanlon

Q&A with writer Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason's bestselling 1985 novel "In Country" deals with the lasting impact of the Vietnam War on a teenage girl and her family.

Q:  How did you come up with the idea for the characters and the story you write about in “In Country”?

A: I didn't start with the notion to write a novel about Vietnam. I backed into it, along the route of discovery typical to the practice of writing fiction.  I had a set of characters--Sam, her uncle Emmett, her boyfriend Lonnie, and her mother, Irene. But I didn't know what their story was. They intrigued me and I followed their antics for a while, trying to find out where they were going.  Where was Sam's father? Emmett was a bit strange, a loner, an eccentric.  Why was he wearing a skirt? I decided he was a Vietnam vet but was hesitant to go further. 

Then one day it hit me--Sam's father had been killed in Vietnam just before she was born.  At that moment I realized that she was in the first wave of the children of Vietnam vets who were coming of age and starting to ask questions.  That's when I knew there was an important story, a timeless tale.  The search for the father.  Telemachus searching for Odysseus after the Trojan War.  This time it was Vietnam. And she was a girl.  This process of writing--searching for the story, allowing the characters to develop in the imagination and letting them lead you into places you might not have thought of--is essential to many novelists, most of whom would be stumped if they had to sit down and write a list of ideas or an outline. 

In this case, I was at first intimidated by the challenge of writing about Vietnam.  After all, I hadn't been there.  I didn't even know anyone who had been there.  It took a long time of trial and error, of searching, to get into what it was about the war that left its marks on the family. So it wasn't ideas. It was more to do with imagery, behavior, memory.  The beautiful egret that Emmett remembers from the rice paddies. The songs that Sam is attracted to, the "Born in the USA" album by Springsteen.  I didn't consult books on the history of the war. Mostly I read oral histories and memoirs. Several prominent memoirs and oral histories appeared in the early eighties, as the Memorial was urged into being and veterans began to speak out. The voices in those books --such as "Charlie Company," "Everything We Had," and Mark Baker's "Nam,"--were riveting and alive. There was a common experience, a common language.  I could hear their voices as they reported their time in country.

My Vietnam vet characters came alive in my imagination because of those eloquent voices telling about the hell they had been through. When they told what it was like to arrive in Vietnam, they all had the same reference points--the heat, the smell, the thousand-yard stare on the faces of the GIs boarding the plane to return to the US.  The whole thing was something they shared, but it was difficult to tell people who hadn't been there.

Q: Do you think things have changed for Vietnam veterans since “In Country” was published in 1985, and if so, how?

A: Since 1985 the Vietnam vets have gained visibility, a position in the community. The Memorial was the greatest factor.  The NEA began a program called Operation Homecoming to welcome the GIs home from Iraq and Afghanistan.  It was meant to show that the country had learned something since the Vietnam War.  We would welcome our guys home, not spit on them. Operation Homecoming offered a series of writing workshops at military bases to help the returning GIs deal with their experience by writing about it. To a large extent this program was successful, and an anthology of poems and stories and memoirs was published. I participated in 2004 by leading a workshop at Camp Lejeune.  But what was dismaying to me was that this program that was supposed to help the GIs make a transition back to "the world" was being thwarted --the GIs were being sent back on more than one tour of duty.

Q: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial plays a major role in “In Country.” Why did you choose to highlight it, and what impact do you think the memorial has had over the years?

A: In the first chapter of "In Country" the characters are traveling to the Memorial. And then the novel flashes back to what led up to the trip. But I had basically written the novel before I knew the Memorial would play a part in it.  My husband and I went to the Memorial one day in the rain.  As we were walking down the Mall from the Capitol toward the Memorial, I could hear the characters talking as if they were coming along with me. I could imagine just what they would be saying and thinking if they were on this trip.  And when I got to the Memorial, I saw it through their eyes.  It was very emotional, very real, immediate.  The visual imagery was strong. And then I saw my own name on the wall--Bobby G. Mason.  Someone named Bobby Mason had died in Vietnam.

Perhaps it was then that I realized that I had a right to tell this story even though I hadn't been to Vietnam.  It was every American's story. I was crying, in the rain. The scene almost wrote itself. The impact of the Memorial has been so strong.  There are thousands of personal, private events taking place in front of the wall. Just the load of mementoes left there is powerful enough. If you go in the summer, late in the day, you can feel how warm the stone is, radiating heat like something alive.

Q: You have written about the enduring legacy of war in some of your other books as well. What draws you to that topic, and are there themes you hope the reader takes away after finishing one or more of your books?

A: I'm not entirely sure why I'm drawn to writing about war. As I said, I haven't been there.  One of my first short stories was called "Shiloh," and the characters go to the Civil War battleground, but they are ignorant of its history. I've never been there myself, and I'm interested in the way we tend to lose our history. I think a novel needs to have a hard substance at its heart.  It should encompass something serious and universal. And war is the most problematic of themes. 

My questions are Sam's adolescent questions--how can this happen? Why? Who in his right mind would want to go to war? How do we get so deep into it that we can't get out?  This is endlessly frustrating. My sensibility is pacifistic and squeamish. War! What is it good for?  At the same time, there you have it.  The great subject. The Trojan War. The Napoleonic Wars. The World Wars. Will it ever end?

I was drawn to World War II in my current novel, "The Girl in the Blue Beret," which pays homage to the Europeans who risked their lives to shelter fallen Allied aviators.  In looking at this war, I found all the elements of danger, risk, romance, and urgency that make war irresistible as subject matter. I was forced to ask myself what I would have done in those circumstances. And I don't know the answer. I hope I would rise to the occasion. "War! What is it good for?" is a different question when it comes to Hitler.

Themes and take away:  Those are two terms that don't quite suit my sensibility as a novelist because I don't like to reduce a story to a tag or abstraction. I hope the reader will remember images and scenes from "In Country"--like Emmett talking about the egret, or Sam talking to the portrait of her father about how he missed the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album and Watergate, or Sam's grandmother climbing the ladder at the Memorial to touch her son's name.  A history book can tell you about battles and strategies, but this is what a novel can do.

Q: What project are you working on now?

A: Nothing big. I'm returning to short fiction. I'm not eager to write about war again very soon! "The Girl in the Blue Beret" was a huge undertaking for me, and I am still involved with it in various ways.  In writing it, I met members of the French Resistance who had aided Allied aviators during the War.  These friendships were unexpected--precious and rewarding. So you might say my current project is learning French!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Perhaps this would be of interest: When a movie of "In Country" was filmed, in 1988, in my hometown in western Kentucky, the local Vietnam Veterans chapter was just getting organized. Some of the guys hadn't talked about the war, even to their wives.  Suddenly the movies had come to town, wanting the vets to be part of their own story on film--as actors and advisors. This was a profound experience for many of them.  Their experience was validated.  They were heard. They provided memorabilia for a scene in the movie.  Fifteen years later, they had a reunion, and they brought their scrapbooks and memorabilia from the summer of 1988, when the movie was made. And then they watched the movie.

Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Q&A with journalist Dan Rather

Dan Rather, a longtime CBS News anchor and correspondent, now hosts HDNet's "Dan Rather Reports." His new book is titled "Rather Outspoken."

Q: As someone who covered the Vietnam War as well as subsequent conflicts, how did the relationship between the military and the press change over the years? How did it remain the same?

A: In many ways, the relationship has changed greatly. In general, correspondents and news organizations have far less access to combat operations and Americans who fight in them than was the case in Vietnam.  The Defense Department and the military allow less access and now much more tightly control who gets to go where, when and talk to whom-- in fighting areas, military field headquarters and in Washington.  Fair to say, in many cases, news organizations are less committed to extended and thorough coverage of war zones --and overall war efforts--than during the Vietnam era. 

High costs, reduced resources (including personnel, overseas bureaus) and, I am sorry to say, a loss of commitment to public service by the owners of major media are among the reasons. The idea that a national-distribution news organization--whether print or electronic--is a public trust and therefore an owner should try to meet the responsibilities of that trust has pretty much disappeared.  For example, the idea that a major television and radio network should be operated at least some of the time in the PUBLIC interest--in service of the public--as opposed to only for the benefit of principal owners and share-holders is gone.  This is a major change. 

It affects all coverage, but war coverage is one of the places it hits hardest. Foreign coverage in general suffers greatly. It's less expensive and easier to put four people in a room shouting at one another about a war (whether any of them have ever been to the war, or any war) than it is to staff bureaus and send correspondents into combat on a sustained basis. It's also less controversial, less likely to get the owning company into trouble with whatever powers-that-be in Washington (whether, at any given time, they be Republican- or Democrat-led).

Among what hasn't changed is this: the general population tends to view wars through the prism of their own prejudices.  Those prejudices often are created and manipulated by national politicians, who too often do it for their own partisan political purposes. This is made easier since only a tiny percentage of the overall population now has any close family member in uniform and/or actually fighting (to say nothing of the fact that it is made even easier for office-holders since very few of them have first-circle family members in the service now). 

Q: Who was the most interesting president for you to cover, and why?

A: Richard Nixon because: a) he became the only president in history to resign the office. b) he became that due to having led a widespread criminal conspiracy from the Oval Office (this made him what the grand jury officially called an “unindicted co-conspirator” in criminal activity). c) this all became a constitutional crisis, which tested the validity and integrity of our treasured “checks and balances” system of separation of powers.  Covering this as it unfolded over a period of years also put the role of the press as the “fourth estate” to a hard test. It was not pleasant, and there certainly was no joy in covering it.  But it sure was interesting.

Q: How important do you think military service is for a president?

A: Important but not imperative. My opinion is that it helps but it is not absolutely necessary. I do think a president, if he hasn’t had military service, should have studied military history (especially the ancient Greeks and Romans and more modern military affairs). Also I think it would be a good idea if he saw the movies “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Full Metal Jacket” plus a documentary or two about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Q: In your new book, “Rather Outspoken,” you discuss the controversy over the 2004 “60 Minutes” story on President Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam era, and your later decision to sue your longtime employer, CBS. What are your feelings today about the documents relating to Bush’s service that were called into question, and about CBS?

A: My feelings today are exactly as I wrote them in detail in the book. We reported a true story.

Q: As someone who’s been in the news business for 60 years, what do you imagine it will look like 60 years from now?

A: It’s difficult to imagine that far out. If you go back and look at the world 60 years ago, all of the technology today would have been unimaginable. That being said, I do believe that there will be a market for quality news of integrity and good story telling. How that is delivered and consumed is anybody’s guess.  I hope that the American tradition of journalists believing in, and the public supporting, a free and independent press -- truly independent, fiercely independent when necessary –- as the red beating heart of democracy will continue.

 Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.

Dan Rather