Booknotes

Mr. HENRY GRUNWALD, AUTHOR, "ONE MAN'S AMERICA": My relationship with Marilyn Monroe was, as I--as I said in my book, unfortunately entirely platonic. It happened--I--I met her when I was in Hollywood on assignment--on another assignment, actually. I had to do a cover story on Ava Gardner. I went to a studio party which, to my great dismay, turned out to be a party for an all-male war picture, no beautiful women around, until Marily--this stu--stunning blonde appeared and heard about my complaint and said, `Well, God has sent me to make it up to you.' And then we became friends and--for a while, and then she was sort of swept away in--in her rising stardom, and we were a little bit in touch after that, but not much. I thought she was charming and, in a peculiar way, sort of innocent.

Mr. GRUNWALD: She was not innocent.

Mr. GRUNWALD: No, no, she wasn't--not on top of the bar. She was on top of her own living room coffee table dancing, and then a spoilsport press agent came in, caught up--because we had escaped the--the press agent, and he caught up with us, panting, and the--the--the evening was soon over.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Very little, actually. I mean, I--basically, when I first started writing for Time, I wrote foreign affairs, but I had a--sort of a show business background through my father, who was a librettist in Vienna. And I myself had a longstanding ambition of becoming a playwright. My editors knew about this, and so occasionally, when there was a--a special show business or movie or Broadway story to do, I might get the assignment. But all--overall, I never really spent all that much time in Hollywood.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I suppose, to some extent, it must have been ego--egotism. I hope there were better motives as well. I thought--and several publishers told me that they thought I had a fairly i--interesting life. And I observed, through my position at the time, a great many of the people and events of this century, so it seemed like a good idea to--to write about it.

Mr. GRUNWALD: No, this is my--this is my nurse, whose nickname was Tatya, which is sort of a German equivalent of nanny. And this was taken in a summer resort in Austria called Bahd Ischl, not too far from Salzburg. She was my--my very dear and beloved nurse and actually stayed with our household long beyond the time I needed a nurse.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I was born in Vienna.

Mr. GRUNWALD: What year? 1922.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Stayed in--stayed in Vienna until 1938. I was just 15 when we--when we were thrown out, basically, by the Nazis and--and left after the German takeover.

Mr. GRUNWALD: A picture of my mother here and my sister--my older sister.

Mr. GRUNWALD: My mother was quite beautiful, as I think you can tell from this picture. She was very--she was a little spartan. She was--she was very precise in her ways. She was disciplined, quite--quite charming when she wanted to be. And she was, in our household, sort of the arbiter of behavior, of morals and--and so on because my father, who was a playwright, as I said, and much given to the theater, did not really pay much attention to these things.

Mr. GRUNWALD: All right. A--as you know, the--the Germans, after many threats and so on, invaded--moved into Austria in nin--in--in March of 1938. We should have gotten out much sooner, but we--we didn't. When the Nazis moved in, my father, who was not political but a fairly prominent Jew in Vienna, was imprisoned. I was expelled from my school, along with all other Jewish students. Fortunately, by great good luck, my father did not wind up in a concentration camp. He was released eventually. And we were able--what I can only call--we were able to buy ourselves out of Austria. This was, at that time, a quasi-legal procedure; the German authorities always wanted to keep everything seemingly legal. And by more or less giving up our entire possessions, we were then allowed to leave. And we first went to Czechoslovakia, which was--we were very nearby--then to Paris. And in Paris, we felt safe for a couple of years until the Nazis appeared again, and then we decamped Paris as well.

Mr. GRUNWALD: After our departure of Paris, we did the--we followed the--what is almost the usual refugee route through Casablanca, Lisbon and then New York. Like, we arrived here on the S.S. Exeter on September 20th, 1940.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yeah.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I started at New York University probably in 1941 or '42, probably '42. I finished at NYU for--in three years because I--I attended summer sessions and--so it must have been '42. Yeah.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I studied philosophy. My original major had been journalism. I was rather disillusioned, however, in a very short time by the journalism school, and philosophy intrigued me and so I switched to that. I had the good fortune to study philosophy under two very interesting professors, namely Sidney Hook and James Burnham.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Both were former Communists. Sidney Hook was a--a convinced and rather courageous socialist who believed that socialism could exist within a democracy; that it was not necessarily--by no means necessarily a dictatorial system. He--he was--he was very impatient with metaphysics, with religion, with all that--with all that stuff. He believed in reason, in human reason, rationality.

Burnham had also been a Communist, also left the party, also turned against communism and became much more of a right-wing ide--ideologue than--than B--than Hook was. Burnham wrote a number of interesting books. One of them, the best--perhaps--perhaps the best known was called "The Managerial Revolution," which foresaw a sort of quasi-dictatorial corporate state.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I first met Mortimer Adler when I was assigned to write a cover story about him. He was, at that point, engaged in an extraordinary enterprise. He had--he and Robert Hutchins had edited the so-called Great Books Series. They believed that--that it--that college education should really go back to the basic classics of what we now call the Western canon. And he then--after having published this--this collection of the Great Books, he decided to create what he called a syntopicon, which was basically a very detailed index to all the great ideas that were found in these Great Books. And I did a cover story about him when he was engaged in this huge enterprise, and we became friends.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I think their--their philo--their impact was c--was considerable, but ones--such impact is always conditioned by what is already inside oneself. I--I--from--from very early years on, I disliked communism because it seemed to me to be, frankly, not all that different from the Nazism that I had experienced as a child or as a young--as a teen-ager in--in Vienna. The--and also, I always felt that universal equality was unattainable, that the only way to--for--for all people to be equal is to--is f--is--to keep them equal is by force because people are not naturally equal. So communism was something that--that I really disliked a lot, and hearing from very different points of view about this from Hook and Burnham, that--that did reinforce my--my convictions about that.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I stayed in touch with him for quite a few years and not--I would see him from time to time. We corresponded a little bit, but I cannot, unfortunately, say that I was--we were very close in later years because we were different--leading different lives. I was very busy being--becoming and being a journalist and so on.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I did stay in touch with Mortimer Adler, anyway, longer than--than with--with Sidney Hook.

Mr. GRUNWALD: That's right.

Mr. GRUNWALD: That was 1944. I went to work for Time magazine as a part-time nighttime office boy at $13 for three nights, which, at the time, didn't seem so bad.

Mr. GRUNWALD: No, I did not have any military experience. I was, unfortunately, classified 4F.

Mr. GRUNWALD: It was pure accident. Well, first of all, I picked journalism because while I wanted to be a playwright, as I said before, I didn't think that playwriting would lead to sort of very early moneymaking, and I felt I needed to make some money to help my parents. And so I chose journalism as what I thought was at least a writing profession, even though not what I thought I wanted to do. Time was an accident. A very good friend of mine in college had gone to work as a part-time office boy. He said, `Look, it's a little--it's a little pocket money. It's a nice place, interesting people. You can make all the free phone calls you want. You can pick up a lot of stationery and pads and pencils and so on. It's fun. Try it.' And so I thought, `Well, why not?' I--I went, applied for a job and managed to get one.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I stayed on and off until I retired from Time Incorporated in 1987.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I--I--I--I shouldn't say `on and off.' That's--that's misleading. I left--I left Time--I was out of Time for one--for one relatively short period when the copy boy routine didn't seem very attractive after all and I didn't see much immediate chance for advancement. so I went to work for a labor newspaper. It was called the Trade Union Courier, which was quite exciting because I did everything. I did some reporting; I wrote editorials about the minimum wage and other exciting topics like that. And I also occasionally would fill in for the comp--for the compositor for--when he was drunk, which was quite often. And it was very exciting in those days to actually set type, lead type. And--but then I drifted back to Time and--and the rest--for the rest of my professional career just stayed there.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I was appointed by Ronald Reagan, reappointed by George Bush, and I stayed there for two years.

Mr. GRUNWALD: All the time.

Mr. GRUNWALD: It doesn't surprise me in the least. She's a very--in Washington and elsewhere, for that matter, a very well-known practitioner, a political consultant. She has been in the press a lot. And it is--it's a great delight to be known as Mandy's father.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I mean, it's only just because, for many years, she and my two other children were known as Henry Grunwald's children, so it's--it's--it's only--it's only fair.

Mr. GRUNWALD: My son Peter is in the movie business, and my daughter Lisa is a nov--is a journalist and novelist. She has, in fact, just published her third novel, which is called "New Year's Eve" and which, if I may put in a plug, I think is a very fine novel.

Mr. GRUNWALD: We disagree on politics and sort of political philosophy a good deal. We are--we are quite polite to each other and I think we understand each other's viewpoints without necessarily agreeing with--with it. I think it's also fair to say that Mandy has calmed down a little bit from the point of view of--of her sort of Democratic enthusiasm, but she is--capital D--but she remains a loyal Democrat and has--has several other good Democratic candidates.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I didn't necessarily want to get--to get my political ideas through to them, and if I--if I tried, I certainly didn't succeed because they are all dec--considerably more liberal than I am--not that I consider myself an archreactionary, but they are more liberal than I am. Mostly, I wanted them to be good students. I wanted them to read and be interested in--in literature and in public affairs, too. Obviously, I gave them my opinions about a lot m--a lot of issues, but they didn't necessarily stick. And I certainly didn't try in any real way to indoctrinate them. I think that's--that's foolish.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I wrote it because I discovered that this particular disease that I have, which is called macular degeneration, which I had not heard about until about five years ago--literally not heard about--I found that a great many people whom I ran into either had it, too, or had relatives, aunts, parents and so on, who had it. And there was a con--great degree of interest in it. And also--that--that's the main reason I wrote it. A very minor and perhaps trivial reason is that I got tired of explaining to people why I didn't recognize them at a party or why I had difficulty signing a restaurant check. I thought I would just explain it once and for all. But the f--I'm being slightly jocular now. Bois--basically, I did it because I wanted to--to tell people what it was like to have this problem and what it was all about. For some reason that I can't quite explain, not a great deal had ever been written about this in the popular press.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, looking at you now, I see the outline of your face as a bit of a blur. I am not sure that I can see whether you are at this moment smiling or frowning or something in between. I can see the outline of your suit. You are holding something which, I take it, is a book--I know that because you held it up before--couldn't identify it exactly now. A lot of--a lot of it has to do with light. I mean, if--if the lights were on you in a somewhat--in a somewhat different way, I would prob--or if I were closer to you, I could see you better.

Mr. GRUNWALD: My most difficult--the most difficult change, of course, was--involved reading. I was always, of course, a passionate reader and also professionally needed to read. Reading became, at first, almost impossible, and so I had to--I mean, you--I--I could read with a great--great deal of magnification with one of those closed-circuit television cameras--was very cumbersome. And so I started to mostly listen to books on tape or--and/or I had people to help me. They would read selected newspaper stories for me and magazine stories, and I would li--listen to them on a--on a Walkman. But that does change one's life. The inability to suddenly pick up a book and browse is--is very difficult. I recently had a slight improvement so that I can actually now read again with strong light and not for too long because it gets tiring. But I--it is a--it's a great improvement.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, about halfway through I had increasing difficulty with the word processor, which I actually love. And so I was able to persuade a la--a woman whom I'd known before and who had worked for Vanity Fair and then moved to Hawaii--I persuaded her to come back to New York--she--I think she was a little bit of ti--tired of Hawaii--and to go to work for me. And I would dictate to her. She would read things back to me. I would dictate again; I would correct, edit and so on. But basically, that is how I wrote the book.

Now she would also print out pages for me in slightly larger type which I could see and--and fiddle with. But it took, on her part--and her na--by the way, happens to be Sarah Lewis, and she is--she's quite marvelous. She--she was very, very patient about all this; we both had to be very patient. And that's how I wrote the book.

Now when I told this to Bill Buckley, who is a friend of mine and, by the way, a great computer addict, I would almost say, he said, `Well, I can't believe that when you dictate, it won't sound different from what you actually typed or put on the--on the word processor.' But I think I can say that it--there's really--it's really different--difficult, if not impossible, to see the difference because I kept going over it and over it to make sure that it was--that it sounded right.

Mr. GRUNWALD: No, it cannot be cured. It can be stabilized, and I hope that it is now stable. It ha--was stabilized partly through laser treatment. It--the improvement I mentioned before had a lot to do with a cataract which aggravated the condition and which has now been removed and replaced. But it cannot--it cannot, by the--according to the current state of medical knowledge, cannot be improved.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I--I do that very little now because, as I said, it's--it's fairly--things are fairly stable now. And if things are getting worse, I notice it even without this little device. The device is a small card with a grid on it, and I looked at it regularly during the period when things were getting--wh--when things were still progressing. And if the lines on this little grid waver--seem to waver or if the dot in the center of the grid is invisible, then you know you're in--you're in--in more trouble than you were before.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Right.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I think it had something do with the fact that Henry Luce was still around and still very vigorous. He died--he died four years later. It had something to do with the fact that--that the American public still felt that it needed to be informed, to be well-informed, in order to be with it, to b--to be a good citizen or even a good cocktail party guest. I think the desire for information paradoxically has declined as more and more information is now available to us from all kinds of sources. It surrounds us. It jumps at us from t--from television and from the Internet and so on.

Also, this was before--it's not exactly connected with Time, but it was--this moment was before the assassination of John Kennedy. And without being too sentimental or too romantic about it, I do think that that assassination caused a--a kind of crack in the American spirit, in the American mood. And the--the '60s, with all their turmoil and their--their denigration of--of American values and so on forward, '63 was just before that happened, and I think, therefore, a magazine like Time had a lot of authority still and a lot of appeal.

Mr. GRUNWALD: In 1963 I was a senior editor, I believe, in charge of--yes, in charge of foreign affairs.

Mr. GRUNWALD: The best job I had and, in a sense, the most important to me was being managing editor of Time. Time is a--was and is a wonderful instrument for an editor or, for that matter, for a writer. And being able to shape that magazine every week, to decide on its covers, to decide what stories were in, what stories were out, how they should be--how they should be covered was, you know, really un--incredibly exciting. I moved on later on to become editor in chief of all the Time Inc. publications, which certainly, in terms of importance--general importance was very much import--very important, indeed. But I must confess that the personal satisfaction of hands-on editing was greater than the--the satisfaction that you get out of editing o--or supervising a lot of different magazines from a slightly greater remove.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I think Time magazine today is g--is very good. I think it has a lot of difficulties, along with most other publications, where I think one of the difficulties is that the--for one reason or another, the essence of the newsmagazine, which was very rigorous departmentalization or compartmentalization--national affairs, foreign news, so on and so forth--has begun to fade somewhat. It's still there in a vestigial form, but it isn't--isn't very evident anymore. It does not--it no longer has the sense of summary, of wrapping up all the im--most of the important news of the week in one package. I say this not because I want to criticize my successors but because I think the mood, the attitude of the audience have changed, so that editing Time today or, I suspect, any--any other news publication has become much, much more difficult.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, you must understand that I was not an intimate of theirs, although I became quite friendly with Mrs. Luce after her husband died. And she, I think, had mellowed considerably. She had been a very prickly lady. The relationship between the two--you know, we found out things about them that we--since then that we didn't--the only their intimate friends knew at the time, certainly not the staff.

Their marriage was unconventional. They both led, to some extent, quite separate lives with affairs and--and all that. But I have to say that Luce always seemed extremely proud of--of her when she got a--when she got a new job. For instance, when she became ambassador to Italy, he was very, very proud of her and he made what was, undoubtedly, something of a sacrifice by living half the year in Rome in her shadow, as it were. I mean, it--it's difficult to think of Henry Luce as being in a--in anybody's shadow, but she was the ambassador and he had--you know, he was the spouse. He did this because I think he admired her and, in hi--in his way, loved her.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, his politics were very Republican. They were not reactionary, at least not in my opinion, but they w--they were fairly solidly conservative. One indication of where he stood came when Lyndon Johnson and--and Goldwater ran against each other. Clare Luce backed Goldwater and Henry Luce, though a Republican, really preferred Johnson--Lyndon Johnson. So I repeat, he was a conservative, but not--not a--not what we would--now would call an extreme rightist by any means.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I think he would think that Time magazine is probably a bit too liberal by his--by his--by his standards and perhaps, more than that, not terribly consistent because Time, for perfectly good reasons which I do not want to second-guess, now prints opinions of all--of every stripe. You might find a very liberal essay one week; you might find a very conservative essay another week. The--the--the notion that Time should have a consistent--a more or less consistent philosophical and political line has disappeared, and I don't think he would like that. He might be persuaded it is necessary for all kinds of reasons, but he--I don't think he would like it.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Whittaker Chambers, yes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes, he was my boss at one time. He was the editor who first gave me a crack at writing when I was a copy boy there. I then went to work as a writer, partly--part of the time under him, then under others. And he was a remarkable man, needless to say.

In the early days, I did not know all that much about his Communist past. I found him very kind as an editor. Once, when I was in the middle of a cover story--a difficult cover story and had an attack of total panic, he sent me to the movies to relax, which very few editors I know would have done. He had some--he told some very funny stories about his life and was extremely warm and soft in speaking of his children and his wife. But he was naturally a--a very ferocious anti-Communist and r--got into a lot of trouble with Time foreign correspondents who, in those years, still thought--many of whom still thought that the Soviet Union was essentially a benign and potentially democratic country and that criticizing the Soviet Union was an act--a strike against peace. He didn't believe that. He felt that the Soviets were what they, in fact, were. And many--many of his correspondents, like John Hersey and others, were furious.

Gradually, he drifted--he was moved to other--to other areas of the magazine, but needless to say I think his reading of the Soviet Union has been proved r--quite right.

Mr. GRUNWALD: No, he did not hire me. The man who hired me was the--was the managing editor at that time, a gentleman named T.S. Matthews, who, when I was an office boy, said he would give me a chance to try out as a writer, but warned me that if I failed, I could not go back to being a c--a copy boy. And I took that chance.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes, that's right. Because...

Mr. GRUNWALD: Oh, yes. There was a--there was a--a relatively small group of--of friends--perhaps I should say a cell of friends--who believed in Whitaker Chambers and stuck up for him. But I must say we were in the minority. Most of the staff disliked him for various reasons, and they were--they were reasons I could understand why people might distrust and dislike him. He was a slightly strange man, he was mysterious, he was conspiratorial. And he certainly had a--a very checkered past. It was sometimes difficult to stick up for him, and I'm not trying to suggest here that I sort of went up and down crusading for him, but I defended him when I had a chance and believed in him.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, the way this happened was that some years ago while I was in the midst of writing this book, I thought I should finally talk to--to Hiss with whom--with whom I had never talked before. And through mutual friends we a--we arranged a conversation. It was a telephone conversation because he was then too sick, really, and too old to want to receive new people. And we talked about a lot of different things and naturally about the Hiss case and he defended himself and--as always, and said that Chambers was paranoid or briefed by the FBI or something like that.

He was totally--he was--he was totally consistent with what he had always said and to me totally unconvincing. The Wall Street Journal picked the--picked the excerpt because Hiss had just died and it was a kind of memoir of what he was like in his later years.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yeah.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I was actually quite surprised to see the--this matter surface in the--in--in connection with--with Lake, because I really thought that the vast majority of people--people, including people who originally believed in Hiss, had come around under the pressure of a great deal of evidence to finally believing--or accepting the fact that Hiss did, in fact--did lie. I think you have to remember that Hiss was a--a--the very model of an enlightened American bureaucrat. He was a Brahman really. He stood for everything that seemed to be good and--and--and decent--the United Nations and all kinds of other good things.

Chambers was somewhat quite tarnished. He had lied. He admitted he had lied. He had distorted things. He was not a very--objectively speaking, he was not--he did not seem like a very trustworthy character. And, above all, this goes back a long way, but these things do have ripples even into the present. I think a lot of--a lot of Democrats felt that--that--that Chambers, in attacking Hiss, was attacking the New Deal. He was attacking the whole legacy of the New Deal and felt, therefore, that they really had to defend Hiss. It has to do with what we used to call anti anti-communism. A lot of--a lot of people in this country, a lot of liberals especially, just had a very hard--had a very difficult time accepting the notion that communism was not progressive, because it had always been kind of moralist, considered as, quote, "progressive." And even now it is sometimes difficult for them to let go of that.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yeah.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, he was very--he--Chambers was actually quite disappointed by Nixon, didn't think he had--I mean--that he had the--the mettle to be--to be a good--a good leader of the country--of the Republican Party or the--the country. I--I thought that Nixon--I possibly thought a little better of him, actually. I thought Nixon was brilliant. He was unquestionably paranoid, and he was ultimately a tragic figure if tragedy means that a man with great gifts--great intellectual gifts destroyed himself, which he did. It--he did a lot with Kissinger in foreign policy. I think he certainly contributed to the whole different relationship with China and ultimately with the Soviet Union. But then he--he got himself entangled in Watergate and that was a disaster.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I've been around m--some more than others, but I--I certainly knew Kennedy slightly. I knew Johnson a little bit, not very well, and not very fondly, I might say. I--I knew Mr. Ford. I knew Jimmy Carter reasonably well. I knew Nixon, as I said. I knew Reagan...

Mr. GRUNWALD: ...and Bush slightly.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes. I knew--I knew Mrs. Reagan really sort of one of those--accidentally. We met a few times at unofficial occasions. And then she wan--my children decided to give me a 60th surprise birthday party and it was a surprise. And an even greater surprise was--came when the cake was rolled in and the person rolling in the cake was Mrs. Reagan, who had been induced by--by a f--by a mutual friend, Mike Wallace--Her husband, the president, was out of the country--to come to this party. And needless to say, that cemented our friendship--friendship is per--pur--yes, fran--I--I guess I could say a friendship further, even though she managed to back into the birthday cake, which was a bit of a mishap at that party.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yeah, he did, indeed. He did, indeed.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, it worked this way: I was about to retire from--from Time Incorporated at the mandatory retirement age, and everybody was sort of--not everybody, but many of my friends were playing the game of `What's g--what's Henry going to do next?' And I had started negotiating with a syndicate to perhaps do a column or something like that. But Mike and another friend of mine, the late Richard Clurman, thought, `Hey, the Embassy in Vienna is em--is open, and why wouldn't Henry make a good ambassador to Austria?'

So Mike got on the phone and called Mrs. Reagan, and I guess Mrs. Reagan must have dropped a few suggestions. And the next thing I knew, Howard Baker, who was then chief of staff to Mr. Reagan, called me and suggested this to me. And I had some hesitation about accepting it for a variety of reasons, but in the end decided that the--the symmetry of it all, going back to the country from tha--from which I had been expelled was simply too good to--to miss. And also, there were some--Austria's, obviously, not a terribly important country in world terms, but it--there were a couple of fascinating problems then going on there which needed handling, mostly the presidency of Kurt Waldheim, that really needed handling if one took any ca--any interest in US/Austrian relations.

Most of the Iron Curtain was beginning to crack, and I had a hunch that I would be able to watch that process very--very well from Vienna.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, it's a bust of--I believe of my father.

Mr. GRUNWALD: He was, as I said earlier, a quite well-known librettist in Austria. He wrote many of the lyrics for many, many songs which virtually--are virtually folk songs in--in Austria to this day. He was, as I said earlier, along with the rest of our family, driven from Austria, loved America, never could quite--never could really make it here as a writer, although he tried, because his English wasn't good enough; never wanted to go back to Austria, a country about which he was--had gotten quite bitter. But when I was ambassador there and I think partly out of genuine feeling for his work, but also, I think, frankly, in an attempt to flatter the American ambassador, the very decent and very excellent mayor of--then mayor of Vienna suggested that a park be named for my father and I then suggested that I would commission a bust from an Austrian sculptor that would be placed there. That's the story.

Mr. MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, AUTHOR, "MEMOIRS": (Through Translator) Because it was unusual. Before me, that never happened. If they answered questions, they did that in writing. They received questions in writing and then they answered questions and gave them to reporters. But there were never the kind of exchanges in which I was ready to engage. (End of excerpt)

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes, I was there for that interview and he's essentially right. I'd been there several years before for an interview with Brezhnev who did, in fact, give answers in writing. I managed to persuade him to answer a few questions off the cuff, but it--they were not--they were not very relaxed or very revealing. Gorbachev really had a conversation with us and was extremely forthcoming. And I hate to say it, but I think he was also rather naive because he clearly thought that he could repair, he could fix communism by adding a few, more or less, capitalist or free market gadgets to this not-very-well-functioning engine; and, of course, he was quite wrong about that.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes. Yes. Well, I mean, glasnost had--had already been talked about a lot, and I think we--we--we were wondering--I don't think that we knew--but we were wondering whether he was doing this in the right order because he--he had gl--glasnost was relatively easy to achieve. You kind of just took off the controls--or many of the controls. I think the--the economy, perestroika, was much more difficult, and you could get a lot of people to argue still that perestroika should have happened first, as, in fact, it has happened in China. But I have to say that I had no idea then, or for quite a number of years after that, that Mr. Gorbachev would preside over the liquidation of the Communist empire.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, Deng Xiao--Deng Xiaoping impressed me the most in--in a way. I was very impressed by a number of--several Israeli and--and Arab leaders. I think in the Arab world, the outstanding leader was and is King Hussein of Jordan. I think--I think Golda Mire--was a--Meir was extraordinary, although I think she c--she could perhaps have had peace at a--at one time much earlier, but that's a--we'll never be sure about that. And I think in--I don't want to get into comparative remarks about American presidents. They've all had their pluses and minuses.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I met her at NYU when we were both undergraduates. We were married in 1952 and we were married for 28 years before she died of--of cancer.

Mr. GRUNWALD: She died in 1981.

Mr. GRUNWALD: She was extremely vivacious, very optimistic and upbeat. In that sense she formed the contrast to me, because I tend to be rather pessimistic or at least, if not pessimistic, cautious. She was--she loved art, she loved traveling, she loved shopping, I have to say it. She loved shopping for antiques, especially at auctions. And she knew her mind very well. She was rarely in doubt about anything. Again, that is--that was a contrast to me, because I have a relatively slow time making up my mind and I weigh things back and forth a good deal. She was, above all, I think, good. I know that--that sounds like a strange word, but my sister always said that about her. I rarely heard her say anything nasty about other people. She disliked other people, and she disliked them very quickly. She might say, `Well, I just don't like this fellow,' but she wasn't nasty about it.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Before--before I was 60, yeah. I was--she was--actually, I was 58 and she was 57.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, the first impact was dreadful. It was--it was extremely depressing and I felt totally--totally sort of cut off from everything that had been going on before. On the other hand, there were my children who were a great--a great comfort, although suffering themselves having lost her. There was my work, which was extremely important. And then after about a year or so, I learned, once again, to be a bachelor in New York, which, frankly, isn't all bad. And--but it got a little boring and I felt that I really would like to get married again and I was very fortunate then in meeting my present wife.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I met her at a party in New York.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, we dated for, I guess, about two or three years. That, again, comes back to the--to the notion that I have a slow ti--it takes me awhile to--to make up my mind.

Mr. GRUNWALD: We married--it'll be 10 years in May, May 1 of this year, of this coming--of this year and...

Mr. GRUNWALD: That's correct.

Mr. GRUNWALD: And she was a very good ambassador, I might add.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, first I will tell you that you can do--that you can do it in two ways. You can do it strictly for fun, go to a lot of parties and let the--much of the work be done by your DCM, the deputy chief of mission, or you can take it seriously and--and really work at it. Working at it means different things. Working at it means getting along with the State Department bureaucracy, which is excruciatingly slow and does not give answers to questions or to a request for guidance very quickly. Working at it means having a really good relationship with your staff--obviously, that would be true of any executive--and caring--caring about what they do and, I would say, especially the--especially the people--in my case the Austrians, who were working for the American Embassy and who did wonderful work, and to whom attention must be paid.

Beyond that, I have to say that you are a public relations man. You are--part of the work that I did was, of course, reporting, which was close to what I'd done before, but a lot of it was special pleading. It was trying to put American policies in--in--in their best light without--without lying but--but giving them the best possible interpretation and putting a good face on your--on your Embassy and on your country. That is the great difference between--between diplomacy and journalism.

Mr. GRUNWALD: My relationship to him was minimal. As you know, or as many--many viewers will still remember, he was put on something called the American watch list. It was a list of people who were not supposed to be admitted to the United States because of past Nazi contacts. This created a tremendous upset in Austria because, after all, he was their democratically elected president, and many Austrians felt that he hadn't done anything that other people hadn't done. He was part of the German army in the--in the Balkans, but he had lied about it. And our law, the watch list law, was very loosely drawn. He--he clearly fell into that category, so what I had to do was to be correct with him. I had to see him only on official occasions, diplomatic receptions and so on and otherwise avoid personal contact, which was very difficult, because he wanted personal contact. He would often send emissaries to me suggesting perhaps a little dinner to talk about the world situation and so on. All that I had to resist while remaining polite an--and while persuading the Austrians that we had nothing against Austria but that it was a--purely a matter of Mr. Waldheim's past. So it was a kind of a balancing act, which to tell you the absolute truth, I found quite interesting.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, partly because I found memory is a very--is a very odd thing. I mean, there are some things I had totally forgotten and other things, somehow or other, for no reason, that I can figure out do stick in one's mind. But beyond that, I'm one of those people who have a very hard time throwing away anything. I kept letters that I had written. I kept letters that had been written to me. I kept memoranda. I made many notes on various occasions. Certainly, I took a lot of notes when I traveled, when I interviewed people. I also took notes when I met interesting people, I thought--that I thought were interesting in New York. And together with some stories that I had written and so on, all this together enabled me to recreate quite a lot of the past, including quotes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Yes.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, if I might quarrel with you slightly, I didn't really finish the book that way. I--I swing back to a somewhat more optimistic tone and prediction toward the end of this--of this afterword. But the fact is that what I've described there is exactly what happened. I had been in Europe for three years. Europe, in many ways, is a--is a safer--somewhat safer, somewhat more serene place than--than certainly New York City--not universally so. And at the same time, I felt myself more American while serving in Europe than at any other time, because you miss your country. You feel terribly hurt--literally hurt, at least I did, when I read bad things about my country, when I read--when I was aware of these conditions. And coming back and seeing this, all of a sudden, you have a very hard time assimilating this--this reality--and it is a reality or was a reality at that time--with what I basically believe this country to be, which is that it is a great and good country. So the contrast between this experience and my basic belief in America and my knowledge of the--the good things in America was painful.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I don't think that it's possible to quantify evil. I mean, evil can range from the Holocaust, which is beyond measuring, to very--very more--very much more minor things. But the point is that the world makes no sense, life makes no sense unless you accept the fact that there is such a thing as evil and that it has to be fought and resisted and that it is not caused entirely by or even mostly by environment or a bad upbringing or even, you know, other forms of evil like child abuse and so on. There is something in human nature that is irreducibly evil and has to be argued with, controlled ….I mean, cajoled. It has to be controlled.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I--I find that the--the--the--I would think that the present situation in the United States is somewhat more hopeful than this particular passage that you read--that you read from my book would indicate. I think not only has New York somewhat improved, but many other things have, too. What worries me about the United States is two things above all others. One is the state of our education. When I came to this country a--as an immigrant, I was delighted by an American high school, by the freedom that I had there, by the freedom to think for myself, to work for myself, so on, which was totally different from the rote-learning discipline of a--of my European school. But now we have gone, as we often do, much too far with a good thing, and I think that education now has become increasingly empty of real education, of real learning. A lot of this, I'm afraid, has to do with the legacy, distorted a lot, of John Dewey, who believed in learning for--for life, living, not for academic--not so much f--primarily for academic achievement. We've--we've taken that up all beyond any reason.

The other thing is tribalism. The other thing is the fact that so many ethnic groups, ra--racist groups, religious groups, are most of all interested in their, quote, "rights"--their own rights, their community rights, not necessarily their rights as individuals, but the rights as a member of a community, which tends to draw attention away from--an effort away from what is good for the country as a whole. And we must, if not eliminate tribalism, which is probably impossible, but at least soften it and find ways of--of various tribes, as I call them, to live together more--more productively and more constructively.

Mr. GRUNWALD: I don't think I have--I have evidence that I can put in scientific terms. My evidence is simply having traveled, having observed a great many other countries--and I find that in almost all other countries that I've ever been to, whether in Europe or in Asia, the traditional forms of, `You know your place. Your father did this and, therefore, you will do this, too,' or `You are not educated in (foreign language spoken); therefore, you're not going to become a minister.' These restrictions, these inflexibilities are enormously strong, still, in--in most other countries, and they are not here. This country, for all its faults, which are considerable--for--for all its faults, has more flexibility. It is easier to move in this country from job to job, from--from social level to social level, than anything that I've ever experienced.

Mr. GRUNWALD: Well, I think in fairness, the socialist countries--the social democratic countries of Europe and northern Europe have tried very hard. They have tried very hard to create prosperity and equality and so forth, except that in the end, however well-intentioned these attempts were, they didn't work. They were--they were too expensive. They--mor--all of them, almost, more or less, went broke, and they tried, in my--in my view, in somewhat the wrong way.