 Thank you very much, Harry. Did I pull that cord? Is that what happened? Yeah, this is just straight. Thank you so much. I tried plugging in here and that one didn't work. Doesn't worry. Okay, all right. I'll get around here. Thank you. Tell me when you're ready. Okay. I'm ready. Okay. That's where you were. Well, I was saying that a week after the election, I went to see Scoop in his office. And he was fuming because he said that he had a young black man whom he was proposing for some relatively low level job in the New Carter administration and he couldn't even get him an interview. And he felt that he had been betrayed by Carter and that Carter was deliberately excluding his people from any contact with the administration. Well, as an officer of CDM, I had personally delivered the list of our recommendations to Tony Lake, who was an old friend from Johnson Days. He was then in the... When I was in the Johnson White House, he had been in the State Department working for Bill Bundy. And I gave him our list of recommendations, which turned out to be a black list. Nobody on that list was even interviewed. And it included the likes of all my colleagues from CDM, Gene Kirkpatrick, Gene Rostow, you name it. They were all in there. At some later point, I guess it was in June of that year of 1977, I was in New York doing some legal work. When I received a telephone call from Dick Holbrook, he was then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Pacific Affairs. And of course he and I had been office mates in the White House. And he said that he and Matt Nimitz, who was also a member of the White House staff under Johnson and with whom I had been very friendly in those days, Matt was then Counselor of the State Department, that they had decided that Matt would have oversight responsibility for the Micronesian status negotiations and that they wanted me to take the job. Well, as I later figured out, what had happened was that most of the work of the State Department fell under the aegis, the oversight responsibility of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But the Micronesian status negotiations involving territories of the U.S. fell under the Energy Committee, which covered interior in the Senate. And guess who was the chairman? Scoop. So my friends, Holbrook and Nimitz, decided, I guess, that the person to run those negotiations had to be someone who had Scoop's confidence. And so until the last six months of the Carter administration, there were only two Scoop people in the Carter administration. I was one of them and Jim Woolsey was the other. Jim was under Secretary of the Navy. That's how I got there. Matt Nimitz, during our time, worked for Joe Califano. Yes. Did you have any dealings with Joe at all? No, I didn't really. I had nothing to do with domestic policy and I only got to know Matt through the White House mess. Back to the convention in 1968, you went with Marvin. Yes. There's a lot of things that have been written, speculations about whether LBJ wanted to have an invitation to come to that convention. Marvin was probably as close to the president as anybody with the possible exception of Connolly. But do you have any reflections on that possibility or so? I was never informed of what the ultimate purpose was. Marvin, as you know, kept things pretty close to the vest. And he asked me to spend most of my time with the New York delegation. This, presumably on the theory that I knew a lot of the people I had been politically active in New York, as it turned out, there weren't many people that I knew in the New York delegation because they were all a completely different sort of Democrat than I was and they hadn't been active previously. However, I knew enough people there so that I was able to get a pretty good sense of what was going on inside the delegation. And it was not friendly to the point of view that was espoused by the Johnson administration or, for that matter, Humphrey. And I gave these reports to Marvin, along with other observations that I was able to make while I was there. It was pretty chaotic and people were speaking pretty freely, I guess, you might say. And I'm pretty sure that what I told him accorded with what he was hearing from others and that this was not friendly ground for the president. It wasn't for Humphrey. Did you then go on a campaign for Humphrey? I was not asked to and I was still in the government. Oh, yeah. So I couldn't very well. I mean, it was not an option. Do you get the going wisdom, at least as it is held by most of the people who write about it, is that the Vietnam War was wrong. You and I and some of the others hold a different view. But do you ever, how are you regarded these days by people who know your views or is that something that's ever even a matter of discussion? It sometimes is a matter of discussion. I would, I guess, clarify my views in this respect. I think it was a mistake to get involved in Vietnam the way we did in the first place. Once we were there, however, it was a whole different ballgame. The question that Johnson faced, that the country faced, was granted that we assume that it was a mistake to get as heavily involved in Vietnam of all places as we did. How did we get out? And that was the dilemma that faced Johnson, which was the subject of a chapter I just wrote for a book that our friend Sherwin Markman has organized that will be published this spring. And I tried to put the reader in Johnson's place when he took office. I think that Johnson felt, certainly I felt, that he had no choice but to proceed the way he did. And I think furthermore that if Nixon had been given the kind of support which he should have been given in his policies by Congress, the end might have been quite different. I think that the South Vietnamese collapse in May of 1975 was in very large part a function of their feeling of abandonment, that the U.S. was no longer behind them. Have you read McNamara's book? Yeah, well, I haven't read all parts of it. I've skimmed it and I've heard him. Do you have any observations on it? I think it's utterly sincere. And who am I to say that he should not hold the views that he did? It comes rather late. And I'm not sure which McNamara I admire the most. The one who was there under Johnson or the one who had second thoughts about the war. But whatever it is, I find the whole thing to be weird. I just don't understand how a person could have been responsible for what he was and then so completely see the thing from the other side. Did you ever have any dealings with Mrs. Johnson? Minimal. I mean, during those times. Then I've gotten to know her a little bit. I have enormous admiration for her. I don't know anybody who does it, as a matter of fact. Peter, did anything else occur to you that on those days or anything else that you'd like to reflect on? Well, yeah, a few things. Before we started to tape this, we talked about the atmosphere of the White House. As a junior staffer, as I was then, I thought it was simply wonderful. I had never experienced anything quite like the atmosphere of the White House in those days. And as I said earlier, I've had a chance to reflect on some of the successor White Houses. And I don't find anything to compare to it. I think there was a feeling of camaraderie, of mutual support and absence of backbiting, at least in my experience, which is, if not unique, then certainly very unusual for an operation operating at that level. And I particularly got to like the Texans there. And a lot of others. For me, it was in many respects the high point of my life. I mean, I've done perhaps more responsible things since then, but nothing that I felt as deeply engaged in or anything or any president that so commanded my loyalty and respect as Johnson. As far as Vietnam is concerned, obviously an agonizing experience for any of us who were involved in it. But I can't help thinking that if things had been done differently in certain key respects, the outcome might have been quite different. I do not see how Johnson could have done anything different than what he did, with one exception. And that is his relationship with the uniformed military. I don't think he was well-served by the military. The quality of advice that he received, I think, was in the spirit of can-do, and did not weigh the difficulties and carefully consider alternative paths. And I blame my own boss, to some extent, for some of that. Comer. He was so can-do. There was nothing we couldn't do if we just tried hard enough. And I know that in that respect, many of my colleagues, particularly those who served in Vietnam full-time, see it differently. But that was my impression. A lot of lost opportunities. And a lot of misadvice. When I asked you that question, you said a few things. You mentioned a couple of things. Do you have anything else to reflect on? I'd ask the specific question if I knew how to do it. Well, it was the whole question of the president's withdrawal. He decided not to run again. I thought then that that was a mistake. I still think so. As much as I liked and admired Hubert Humphrey, I don't think he was up to the job the way Johnson was. And that Johnson, with all of the opposition there was to him, might have won if he had run. And again, things might have been so different if he had. Mrs. Johnson's reflection on that is that he was extremely worried that he would not be able to hold the country together. And that that was the main motivating fact that persuaded him not to run again. Oh, it's ironic when you think of who he was succeeded by. Right. Are you active in politics at all now? To some extent, yes. You asked me how I'm seen, that I can't answer, of course, authoritatively, but I think I'm seen as a hardliner in foreign policy and as a reasonably conservative Democrat, which I suppose I am, and have been deeply marked by my experience in the Johnson administration. I guess we all, as we get over, we begin to react more and more to what happened to us earlier in life. I'm no exception. But I have been troubled throughout my personal, political and professional career by the spectacle of the division of the Democratic Party that stems from those days. And I see it reappearing again. I see it reappearing about the war, and the war which I presume will be fought with Iraq and so many other foreign policy issues. The party is torn by its left and its right. Republicans offer very little comfort to those of us who find ourselves on the right of the Democratic Party because there's such a gulf between us on domestic policy. In many respects, I find myself more comfortable with Republicans on foreign policy issues than most Democrats. But on domestic policy, there's just no way to reconcile the differences. So therefore, perhaps along with many other Americans, I find myself a politically active person who is content with neither party. Do you think President Bush has made a case for a going to war? Definitely. And I'm distressed to see how many Democrats are looking for some way out. But on the horizon now, what Democrat appears that you think you'd be interested in seeing a challenge push for the presidency? Well, I've signed up with Joe Lieberman. And I must say, quite frankly, I am distressed that some of my friends sort of assume that I would support Joe Lieberman, not because of his views, but because he's Jewish. And that isn't it at all. I admire Joe for being up front about his Jewishness, which is something new in our national politics. But I really agree with his foreign policy views and most of his domestic policy views as well. I'm also much attracted by John Edwards of North Carolina. I had the privilege of spending an evening with him once about a year ago over dinner. He and his wife and my wife and I and another couple. And I found him to be an enormously attractive, intelligent, well-informed person. But with the experience that we've had since the Johnson administration, with so many candidates and in some cases presidents who have never been around the track before, I think his time has not yet come. I trust and indeed hope that at some time in the future it will. But he's not ready to be president yet. Okay. If you were called upon to identify yourself, would you say you're still a school-jaxon Democrat? Absolutely. 100%. That's a good way to wind it up. Peter's been very, very, very good, I think. Good interview with that.