Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on October 10, 2001:

Haynes Johnson
Author, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years.

Thank you, Curtis [Mack], for that flattering introduction.  I can’t live up to it.  When you mentioned that I had been a reporter for about the last four decades, I really think I started with Ulysses S. Grant way back then, and I’ve seen a lot, but as someone once said about Napoleon’s sergeant: “I’ve seen a lot of wars but I don’t know much about strategy or tactics.”

I want to speak tonight, not a lecture, not even a talk. I want us to step back a minute and be very personal about this moment and how it relates to us in the room, the young people who are here that I met earlier -- and our future.  There has not been a moment like this in anyone’s life before.  Not a moment like this in the life of the country, 209 years.  It’s different in degree, in every possible relationship.  The uncertainty that people feel is correct to feel, because we don’t know what is going to come next.  We don’t know where this plays out, we don’t know what the consequences are.  We simply know it’s changed the United States.  If I were to retitle the book The Best of Times, and the decade of the boom years of the ’90s, I would call it The New America.  Everything starting from September 11th, post and after, was the old America, and this is the new America now. 

What I want to talk to you about tonight, and share some thoughts about, are the challenges that we face now and sort of how we got here and what it is about us as a people that is in our character.  We are not absent from crises in our history, or challenges in our history, but we’ve never had one just like this. There isn’t a time since 1812 when foreign armies fired on American soil, and that was a different period, I don’t remember that one pretty well.  It is a remarkable fact that, no matter how we look at the world, how fortunate we’ve been despite the blood-shed and traumas we’ve gone through in all our experiences as a country that we’ve never been attacked at home.  Pearl Harbor was not a state; it was a military engagement far away, and in all of World War II neither coast was attacked, nor in World War I, nor in Vietnam, nor in Korea.  You really have to go back to 1812, and that didn’t even count, or the Revolutionary War. 

So we’re in a very different period, and as the President properly reminds us, and all of the people in the Administration are properly reminding us, this is a period that doesn’t have a time ending to it.  We can’t think it’s John Wayne landing at Tarawa, or my father, as a correspondent on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, which he did as a war correspondent, on the decks of the Missouri where he was.  I have a picture of my own of my father looking right down on Douglas MacArthur on the decks of the Missouri on Tokyo Bay and the story that he wrote that day framed there, and the signed thing from MacArthur, Nimitz and Halsey and all the people on the ship.  I look at that and, on the other side of the wall I have a painting that was done when I covered the war between India and Pakistan in 1965 and it’s with the Jawa. 

I went to the front lines with the Pak soldiers to the plains of Punjab and then came back around through Rangoon to do the same thing with the Indian troops on that side, then went on to Kashmir and Afghanistan.  Those situations are worse today than they were in 1965, with nuclear weapons.  I remember after that tank battle on the plains of Punjab-- these are things I’ve thought a lot about recently -- we had tanks lined up over here, tanks lined up over there, firing at each other.  They were our tanks that we gave to the Indians and our tanks we gave to the Paks, and the planes that were striking me was an American plane we gave to some one of them when I was lying on the plains of Punjab.  I never quite felt exactly that we knew what we were doing at that point.  But it’s part of the backdrop.  I say this, mention this: how complex everything is.  There’s no simplicity in any of the incidents in which we are engaged in the world in which we live, our role in it or the process by which we forged the history that we now confront. 

The story I have tried to tell about the boom years is a social and cultural history -- a narrative history.   I was convinced when I started it [that it would be seen] as a very consequential period, much like the 1920s, because the United States was in a remarkably fortunate position.  We were experiencing the greatest economic boom ever.  Bigger than the ’20s, bigger than the 1880s, nothing like the advancement and proliferation of wealth—not for everybody, but astonishing changes played out against the backdrop of the most remarkable scientific, technological and medical revolution in our history, in the world’s history, which is accelerating even as we speak here.  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to educate myself about what those forces meant at places like Caltech, and talked to David Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate who is the president there, the greatest molecular biologist in the world.  It’s no longer physics that defines the world, the days of Oppenheimer and Einstein and so forth.  It’s molecular biology. 

What that means to the future of the world is genetics and cloning.  I’ve spent a lot of time with people like Greg Ventner when he was just starting a little firm called Celera in Rockville, Maryland.  He had left NIH, the National Institutes of Health, where he worked on the human genome project.  He left to found his own company and engaged in the great race to decode the book of life, and he won that race.  I remember having wonderful conversations with Greg about [how] we would look back on this period, all the remarkable advantages and stunning discoveries that were taking place, literally changing life as we know it and we’re just on the cusp of this.  Hundreds of years later we will look back on this period with the potential of extending life.  Demographers tell us that in another fifty years we Americans, unless we just blow ourselves up, will live to 150, a huge cohort.  I don’t know if you want to live to 150.  I don’t know what that means exactly, but I don’t think anybody else has figured it out either, except the consequences are immense.  What kind of life do you lead?  Who pays for the health care costs?  If you think we have problems now, think about that in an aging society with the costs of that.  So these are the kinds of things, and I asked Greg, “What do you think?  The advantages are clear, but what are the risks?”  He said, “The greatest risks in history are who controls the technology, who controls the genetic implanting, who controls the cloning, who decides who gets what wondrous this or that.”  We weren’t focusing on them as a people but we were making astonishing advances. 

I also think that this period that now has come to a cataclysmic exclamation point ending a distinct era in our history as of September 11th is one of those times that we look back on and we’ll say we had the best opportunities in all of our history to look ahead and decide what it is we wanted to do with all the great things we have as a people: prosperous, energetic, gone through the traumas of the past twenty-thirty years, Vietnam, Watergate, all in the past, dissension over that kind of tearing, the civil rights struggle over the one greatest extension of liberties ever, women’s rights, gay rights, across-the-board a great expansion of liberty in this country that we take for granted.  We hardly think how it all happened, but it’s changed the matrix of the country and we just sort of take it for granted. 

The Cold War was over.  We were the only superpower, and we were impregnable, invulnerable and untouchable.  The tragedy is, in my view, and the more I watch the chronicle of the times, that rather than focusing our energies on the kinds of long-term questions of science and medicine and technology that posed real questions… and, much more significantly, looking at the world in which we live, the forces that are creating the times that will change us and challenge us in the future -- how did we educate our people to what those challenges would be and what they’re going to be inevitably, did we do that?  And the answer is no, we didn’t.  We allowed ourselves to be wallowing in scandal and entertainment and endless cycles of stories. 

My business, the news business, had the most shameful period in its history.  I’m glad my father is not alive to see the performance of much of the press in the last ten to twelve years.  Trivializing, sensationalizing, cheapening, not all of it -- it’s easy to give a blanket indictment -- but I think it’s fair to say that it did.  The fragmenting of the audience so that we had these continual soap opera spectacles -- O.J., I don’t have to remind anybody here about the O.J. spectacle.  It took more attention and coverage than any event in American history to that moment—that single trial—and it created new audiences.  So we tuned in.  The people you saw shouting back and forth then began to play out their own themes on other things.  JonBenet, and then there was Monica, does anybody remember Monica?  And what was it right up to September 10th?  Chandra and Gary Condit.  As if they were the most significant acts, stories that should define the preoccupation of a talented, energetic and wise people.  And we allowed ourselves to be diverted.  We went through the impeachment process and all that. 

There’s no point getting into that, except to say that there were two illusions that affected the country in that period.  One was a belief, very widely held.  I have spent more than twenty years in the Silicon Valley, and I went back, connecting with my friends there, and the people who have this wonder entrepreneurial spirit, creators of so much of our high technology and all of that, and the view that they have of the future.  The sense was that we had created a new economy and we’d repealed the forces of history.  In the boom years and the bubble years, there was no downside.  We’d repealed the market forces, much like the ’20s, when people bought on margin and little shoe-shine people went out and plunged themselves and mortgaged themselves.  We had the same sense that somehow this was a new economy and a new world that was unstoppable and uncheckable.  It was an illusion.  Bubbles do burst, speculative bubbles have always affected the world that way.  Shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, but that was the first quake, the bursting of bubbles.

The second one is much more difficult, and that was America’s view of the world itself.  What were the forces in the world outside of our borders and how well did we focus?  Our leaders, our political leaders of both parties, were wrapped up and absorbed in attacks back and forth in Washington.  Those of you who know Washington so well, and I’ve worked out of there since ever president since Eisenhower, there’s nobody honestly who has worked inside that city in the last ten years that’s come away with any sense of pride in the performance of the political system and the way in which it had become so rapacious and so venomous and so destructive and the great disparagement of public service and people not willing to serve, and so forth.  This is not a new phenomenon.  We’ve been paying that price for a very long time, and it got worse in the period we’re talking about.

[There were] forces in the world that we were not really dwelling on or focusing on, certainly not in the press.  It’s fascinating to see that the major bureaus cut back almost entirely on their bureaus overseas.  So did the newspapers.  There are only three papers in the country that actually have foreign correspondents.  One is here, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times, that’s it.  That’s it.  That’s the portrait of the world, and the rest of what the world sees in the portrait that’s drawn from them is much more of the entertainment culture and the fragmentation.  I was fascinated to see, three or four days after September 11th, there was a story in the New York Times on page C9 that said the networks were thinking of reinstituting and reopening some of their bureaus overseas.  They’re putting the money back into coverage of foreign affairs, which they hadn’t done.  I must say in fairness it’s very easy to lash and criticize and be caustic about your own business, which I am but I think the coverage since September 11th has been the best since the Kennedy administration: measured, serious, thoughtful, eloquent, informed, wide-ranging, not speculative, not given to rumors, very careful.  I think there’s a lesson in that for us. 

The illusion of our omnipotence, our invulnerability, was the most cruel of all because there was the belief that we had somehow arrived at a point in history where we had repealed the forces of history, not just the market forces.  There were serious people writing serious books about the end of history.  That we were in this new era, that America was Rex and there was no question where we were going, and it was a Western capitalistic world that was transcendent and preeminent and predominant and it was inevitable.  And the other kinds of conflicts that had strained the history of the world were in the past -- history was over.  That is not a lesson of history, it is not the lesson of the ’90s or at any point.  The 20th century was the bloodiest of all centuries in terms of casualties and warfare, and it seems that, rather than being invulnerable, we, in fact, are far more vulnerable than the rest. 

I don’t like to read things that I’ve written, but I want to read you [something] just so you don’t think I’m making it up now. When I finished this five-year attempt to look at our country I took the final chapter -- it’s not a narrative, it’s an epilogue -- in which I tried to look forward.  Henry Adams, my favorite historian, said the task of a historian is to try to look ahead fifty years and see what are the forces that are being created that the society will have to deal with that will change our lives and that a wise and mature and thoughtful and serious society should try to attend to.  I took it that there are lots of lessons, growing out of the ’90s.  In the next to the last page I said the following about these kinds of lessons and challenges:  

“At the millennium, the world faces rising tensions between its have and have not components, growing threats of terrorism accelerated by the dispersal of weapons of mass destruction and previously divided fundamentalists in Western industrial societies.  The fanaticism of extremist elements in some of these societies was demonstrated shockingly by a mindless act of historical destructiveness in Afghanistan in March 2001.   In spite of anguished protests worldwide, the ruling Taliban movement there ordered the demolition of priceless ancient art in the form of two magnificent giant Buddha statues carved out of a mountainside that has stood watch over the Bamyan Valley for 1500 years.  This act of cultural barbarism, carried out in the name of Islamic religious fundamentalism but rejected by most Islamic leaders and scholars, was a powerful reminder that, no matter how great the promise of the new technological world, human beings continue to face the same kinds of problems that have plagued societies throughout history.   It was yet another reminder that the millennial world is far from stable.  Indeed, given the evidence of bloody new conflicts growing out of unresolved ancient religious and ethnic hatreds, plus the capacity of smaller groups to sow mass terror through possession of those weapons of mass destruction.   The 21st century world holds the potential of being even more dangerous than was the 20th century world during the long Cold War period.” 

Then I go on in the last two concluding paragraphs to talk about what we are to make of this extraordinary period.  I say it was the best of times and, of course, as you know, that’s entirely an ironic title.  The Book of The Month Club picked this as their main selection; and they pointed out to readers that it’s an ironic title.  I don’t think they had to say that, but I use the Dickensian quote: “It was the best of times, the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” all leading up to where we are now.  If the lessons are that we repealed the market forces, of course, that story was over before September 10th.

The final lesson, if there is one, and I went back to quote someone that I didn’t actually cover actually, Mr. Voltaire, but I thought if he had a pretty wise, as he was wont to do, reminder.  “History” he said, “never repeats itself; man always does.”  It is that kind of challenge we are now facing.   By the way, I am not a pessimist.  I’m absolutely an optimist about what this country’s capacities and energies and talents are. But we cannot afford to let ourselves float through the ether of the time thinking we’re cut off from the rest of the currents of the world or at home.  We’ve got to do a better job of our reporting, we’ve got to do a better job of our educating, we’ve got to do a better job of celebrating the best in us.  That means public service and the proper role of government, not big government, not liberal government, whatever, but the proper role of talented public servants. We see now what public service means: that it’s firemen and policemen and nurses and public school teachers.  The people that are trying to forge those young people in the back [of the room] for the future. 

I think the challenge is extraordinary.  I think we’re up to it.  It won’t be easy, and we’ve got to change the way we think and the way we act.  We’ve got to put aside our illusions and we’ve got to sort of unite, not in just a flag-waving moment, which is fine, but that could be a temporary moment.  We have to understand what it is we want to do to educate ourselves to face the challenges and ameliorate the problems in the world.  We won’t resolve all the hatreds, but does it mean forging new coalitions?  Yes.  [Does] it means a worldwide effort in common interests?  Yes, it means that.  It means operating differently in almost every possible way than we have done before.  That’s an enormous challenge, and I must say that I think the country understands that.

Just one last reminder.  We all have our memories of these events of the last four weeks that are indelible pictures in our heads, as Lippmann said, of what we see and how it changes the way we see the world and the shocking events that have transpired and may yet transpire.  I went to New York about four days after the episode.  Took the train up.  I don’t normally, [but] planes weren’t flying from National Airport, and I got the train.  When I got to Penn Station, being an old reporter, I just thought, “My God, I was supposed to go to a Princeton Club thing.”  They were publishing a book on an anthology of nonfiction writing.  I said, I’ll go to that later.  I got a cab driver.  I said, “I’ll pay you a lot of money.  I want you to get me as close as you can to the World Trade Center.”  It was a Pakistani driver, who talked the entire time.  “I wanted to hang bin Laden upside down,” and he had flags flying all over.  Stereotypes did not work in the case of this Pakistani driver.  Because there was a police caravan ahead of us, we sped down the Westside highway, flew right along.  I grew up in Manhattan, right by the waterfront. We saw these cranes such as I’ve never seen before, and the derricks, and inch after inch after inch the dump trucks, and the fire trucks, the emergency trucks and the pictures of the police and the firemen sitting there -- this was 5:15 on a brilliant day  -- just covered with soot and so forth, this was five days after.  The closer we got, as you know the island narrows down there, and there, down there in the center, you could see these other wonderful buildings rising up, and the Statute of Liberty was right up there.  You looked in there, and the closer we got to it, there was this remarkable scene of people, young people, they were high school and college students lining the other side of the roadway, cheering all the passing policemen and firemen, with water bottles, passing them out, handmade signs, you’ve seen them on television, but seeing it in person was overpowering.  “Our Angels,” “Bless our Heroes,” and those young faces gave me an enormous sense of hope, because they were united with everybody else at the moment.

I don’t think it’s transitory.  When you finally got down to look at the scene, there was this huge hole in the center of the Wall Street area and the smoke was filling it as if a vacuum had been filled.  I can’t tell you, I can’t even write it, I don’t even like to talk about it.  It was something I’ll never forget.  It was the kind of thing, you had a sense that something had happened and that those young people cheering and those firemen and so forth were in a sort of unity.  If we can hold on to that, we’ll be fine.

Thank you very much.