“My house just exploded from the wind,” says Biloxi City Councilman George Lawrence, who represents the hardest-hit ward in East Biloxi. “Then came the water, and it swept everything else away.”

Stark remainders of death are still on display everywhere. On warm days, the stench of undiscovered pet carcasses still seeps out from under the ruins, and mud litters the landscape like dried lava flows. Sheets of plywood buckle over gashes in homes that stand split and crushed, their contents splayed about like guts from rotting bodies.

Someone’s desk, its fake wood paneling peeling off, peeks out the side of a torn home that is crumpled into an accordion-like sculpture. The sides of another house are ripped away, improbably leaving a clothes closet unscathed, its garments arranged on hangers as neatly as the day their owner disappeared.

Bits of dried cloth, their colors faded and coated with dried muck, hang rigidly over the trees, acting as sentinels guarding the ruins below. Birds don’t land here anymore.

At first glance, East Biloxi looks like a ghost town. But poke around a bit and people start emerging from inside their crushed houses, from tents pitched out back, or from some of the new FEMA trailers that have recently arrived. Most of the survivors still seem to be trying to just grasp the scope of what has happened to them. They are confused as to why so little help has yet arrived. And they’re angry.

Despite the rhetoric of government leaders, and large relief organizations, not to mention the massive media coverage in the weeks following the disaster, these people sense now that they are the leftovers, the ones who, if they are going to rebuild their lives, apparently will have to do it on their own.

Lee Smith is one of the locals who’s been waiting for months for help to arrive. “Till last week, every time you call them, they got a different lie to tell you,” says Smith, 55, recounting his efforts to get answers from his insurance company and from officials at FEMA. “I’ve just been waiting on them for something to happen.”

As others have noted, Katrina laid bare a dirty secret in America — a secret with many names. We know it’s about race and class but it’s about other things as well, things less easily labeled. The storm provided a visible reminder that progress in this country for some always comes at a cost to others. One thing about living in a society that regularly scrubs itself of its collective memory is we keep having to relearn the lessons of the past.

East Biloxi, and the other small towns of the Gulf Coast, as well as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, are places where the poor are poor in so many ways. They can’t read or write well, and don’t have the skills or clout to get what they need out of government bureaucracies or private insurance companies. They can’t see a way out of their traps. Lacking much effective political leadership or advocates, they are dependent on the good people still showing up, willing to help.

Smith, a homeowner, a single dad and a former construction worker, stands next to his small three-bedroom house, where — until the storm — he lived with his two teenage daughters. Now the house sits cracked and twisted on its foundation, filled with jumbled and ruined piles of his possessions. The sour odor of mold drifts out of his screened windows, causing him to edge further downstream.

Smith is a diabetic with high blood pressure and suffers from cancer that he has been told is terminal. He needs pain medications and oxygen canisters for breathing. Because of the mold, he can’t enter his house to take inventory of what is missing and what remains, for insurance claim purposes.

Looters stole one of Smith’s cars and ransacked his house after the storm. Knowing how ill he was, he’d recently poured his life savings into refurbishing the house (“so my girls would have something to fall back on”) and on rebuilding several vintage cars and trucks that are one true passion in his life.

But Smith says his insurance adjuster has told him his policy won’t cover most losses because the damage was caused by flooding, not the storm itself.

Smith’s case is hardly unique. Mississippi state officials estimate that there are 35,000 homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed but who did not have flood insurance. Meanwhile, the post-storm grace period for not paying their mortgages has ended, and efforts to extend them federal relief are stalled in Congress.

“The insurance companies, including mine, are telling us it was a flood,” says Councilman Lawrence. “But how can you have a hurricane without the wind? This isn’t a flood zone. It was wind-driven surge that did this damage.”

Into the vacuum, volunteers from the grass-roots nonprofit group Hands On USA are helping survivors put their lives back together. Cutting through the red tape of government and large relief organizations, Hands On USA volunteers are helping East Biloxi residents manage such day-to-day chores as clearing debris from their houses, finding temporary shelter and seeking counseling.

The group, which formed in Thailand last year after the devastating tsunami hit there, set up shop in a Biloxi church soon after Katrina blew ashore. “We immediately put out the word and the volunteers started pouring in,” Hands On USA co-director Dave Campbell explains. So far, more than 700 people from all over the U.S. and Canada have come down to work in Biloxi, some staying for just a weekend or a week, others hanging out for the duration.

“Our initial strategy was to stay just three months — to hit the beach like the Marines and then hand it off to the Army,” explains Campbell. “Only problem is, it doesn’t look like the Army is going to show up.”

Campbell adds that “soon after we got here it was clear there was a great mental health need. Leaving after three months would have had us pulling out between Thanksgiving and Christmas — not a good time to disappear on these people. So now we plan to stay until the end of January.”

In Lee Smith’s case, Hands On USA volunteers have succeeding in getting FEMA to deliver him a disabled-access trailer — after his own repeated attempts had failed.

Relief workers say that FEMA’s process for registering storm victims for trailers is confusing and has led to many cases where people like Smith have fallen through the cracks. Victims were asked such ambiguous question as: “Are you willing to relocate?” “Is your house livable?” “Has FEMA assessed your property?” Depending on their answers, many were denied trailers. Victims like Smith just grew more frustrated.

Every survivor presents a new story. William Michael Vanderberg, known to everyone as “Mike,” still seems traumatized by what happened when he tried to ride out the storm. He has a broken hand and cracked sunglasses, and his lips tremble when he talks. He keeps glancing over his shoulder at the Gulf of Mexico, less than a block away, as if he fears it may suddenly rear up once again.

“Susan, I ain’t seen her. She lived right over there,” he mumbles, pointing to a lot littered with debris, all that’s left of Susan’s house. “She’s out there, I reckon,” gesturing toward the Gulf.

He turns around. “I had four friends staying in a hotel, over about there. The hotel’s gone. I ain’t seen any of them, reckon they’re gone, too.”

Hands On USA volunteers discovered Mike recently living in his car. They bought him a tent, sleeping pad and sleeping bag, and helped him stake out a spot under a live oak tree. They also are helping him with FEMA, where he has a non-homeowner’s application on file for aid. In addition, they drove him to a doctor, who bandaged up his broken hand, and to a psychiatrist.

Mental health experts have indicated that antidepressant medications are needed for survivors showing signs of post-traumatic stress in the storm-ravaged areas. Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that some 500,000 people — both hurricane survivors and the emergency workers who helped them — may need mental health services.

In the midst of the devastation, larger relief organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army have been scaling down their efforts. They still have warehouses of supplies but no efficient way to distribute them to people in the poor communities of the Gulf Coast. Both still send out trucks with warm meals, and they are distributing boxes of clothes and other goods from certain centralized locations. But this will all end soon, according to local representatives of the two agencies. The Red Cross has already closed all of its shelters and the Salvation Army plans to stop its meal service before Christmas.

By contrast, Hands On USA is sending out teams every day to strip mold out of houses, remove debris, and demolish structures. (Several religious organizations also are on the scene, doing similar work.) Volunteer teams have cut up and removed hundreds of trees — live oaks, pines, magnolias, white birch, even a few pecans, though one volunteer estimates there is still “20 years of work left here.”

The biggest question hanging over East Biloxi is what will become of this place, once all the debris has been carted away, and the land is finally open for redevelopment. One answer is already evident.

Until Katrina, a series of large barges anchored offshore served as casinos, and were by far the largest employers in the area. When the storm pushed the barges ashore, they cut wide swaths over the land, taking out everything in their path. Today, they sit far inland, with more than a few flattened houses and possibly bodies still underneath.

Soon after the storm, local and state officials announced that from now on they will locate the casinos on land, within the first 800 feet of Biloxi’s shore. Some of this new development will cut directly into East Biloxi’s worst-hit sections.

Not surprisingly, rumors fly around these neighborhoods: “The remaining houses will all be flattened for new casinos. There won’t be a place for any of us to live around here anymore.”

The threat seems credible. Amid a total pre-storm population of about 50,000 in Biloxi, the casinos accounted for some 30,000 jobs. The first casino reopenings are scheduled for later this month.

“Nobody — the local, county or state government — wants to put anyone out of their home,” says Councilman Lawrence. “But it’s going to be hard for our people on minimum incomes to rebuild here now. Houses will cost $60,000 to $100,000. It’s hard to secure a loan.

“Our old way of life in Biloxi is gone,” he concludes. “What we got now is gaming. Where we lived will probably be a prime onshore gambling site now. We will lose a lot of the outer perimeter of East Biloxi.”

Now that it’s winter, cold fronts are sweeping down from the north, so volunteers from Hands On USA deliver blankets and coats, items the poor of East Biloxi used to own but now do not.

An elderly lady named Cora Reddix, in her 80s, answers a knock on her trailer door from some volunteers. Reddix lost her house and her car in Katrina. She also lost two toes to a gangrene infection that went too long untreated, so now she is virtually housebound, or trailer bound, with no way to get out and help herself.

Like almost everyone in these parts, Reddix is surprised that someone has come to help her. And grateful. Today’s delivery includes a new pillow, very nice, donated by somebody somewhere up north, and packaged up by Hands On USA volunteers earlier that morning.

“Oh my, thank you, ” says Reddix, tears in her eyes. “I’m livin’ uptown now!”

Hands On USA co-director Campbell, contemplating the limits of his group’s ability to help the residents of East Biloxi, and conscious that they will all be gone by the end of next month, says he is looking for ways to interest various political figures in their plight.

“After all,” he says, “one way or another these folks going to be on the social safety net of the system, however tattered.”

As I drive around the shattered Gulf Coast, an old Bob Dylan song keeps playing in my head:

Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds.
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken.

Katrina may have done all the physical damage down here, but there’s something much bigger that’s been broken too. That is the wrecking of a social services system that no longer takes care of the most vulnerable among us.

This hoary memory surfaced recently when I read that Bill Bradley has the same heart condition that I have, atrial fibrillation. Bradley said that on four occasions he has felt bad enough to cancel or delay his rigorous campaign schedule.

I can certainly relate: On that first occasion, my lunch mates drove me to a nearby emergency room, where a noticeably nonchalant M.D. listened through his stethoscope. “Your heart is beating out of rhythm a bit. Just try to relax. It should pass in a while.”

I let myself take a deep breath (until then I think I had been afraid to breathe deeply, lest my heart explode — though by breathing shallowly, I essentially caused myself to hyperventilate). Suddenly I realized that I probably could slow my own heart rate down, which is more or less what I then proceeded to do.

After a few more deep breaths, the episode had passed, and I felt normal again. The doctor explained I had just experienced cardiac arrhythmia, an irregular heart beat.

Press reports have raised questions about whether this will affect the public’s perception of Bradley’s ability to perform the duties of president, should he be elected this coming November. “It can’t help but hurt him,” said one commentator on a talk show I was half-listening to the other morning. “People will wonder if he can take the stress of the office.”

Tying the irregular heartbeat issue to stress was, in my experience at least, a perfectly accurate connection to make, although the idea that anyone would vote against Bradley for this little problem seems silly. Since that first episode at lunch long ago, I’ve experienced many such fluttery moments. In recent years, the incidents grew in frequency and severity until my physician recommended that I start taking a pill to regulate the heartbeats.

Since then, the problem has essentially disappeared.

Press reports about Bradley, who is just four years older than I am, suggest he experiences a rapid “speedup” in beats — the same as I did. When the rhythm gets out of whack, the beats seem to overtake each other, almost like racers on a track — and this is actually a pattern you can see on a printout of a electrocardiogram.

Bradley also takes medication to control this condition, and the most serious recent incident he’s reported came on a day when he says that he forgot to take his pill. When my own prescription ran out last week and I thought I was too busy to get it refilled immediately, sure enough, that damn fluttering feeling returned for me, too. Again, I could empathize.

According to the doctors, drinking coffee or alcohol can sometimes provoke arrhythmia, but maintaining a very heavy pace at work or dealing with personally stressful situations of any kind also seemed to bring the problem on for me — or they did until I started taking the medication. I don’t know if the former senator from New Jersey experiences it this way, but the worst part of these episodes was often the aftermath, when I’d feel very tired, which is not exactly convenient in the middle of, say, a long staff meeting — or when delivering a campaign speech.

So for me, at least, having this little problem led me to develop a type of self-discipline where I would try to will myself to stay as calm as possible in difficult circumstances. If this failed, and my heartbeat started racing out of control, I reverted to the slow, deep breathing I first learned years ago, and simply waited it out. In a bad case, I’d lie down and rest until it passed, although this has the unfortunate effect of seemingly making it easier to feel what is happening inside there, not to mention that lying down is not always possible, especially for a president.

Bradley, ex-athlete that he is, maintains what sounds to be a much more active exercise routine than I do these days, but I still play recreational sports and coach kids’ soccer, and this problem has never affected any of that. Running, hiking, skiing, swimming, sports of all kinds don’t seem to be any harder to do than they ever were.

Frankly, except for a few discrete episodes, this problem has never been much more than an irritation for me, like a stomach ache, a head cold, a minor burn; the normal discomforts of every day life. Compared to allergies, say, or even the hiccups, it’s nothing much to complain about.

Sometimes over the years, no doubt hoping to elicit a little reaction, I’ve mentioned the problem to friends. “Isn’t that what they used to call ‘palpitations,’” one of the first people I told asked.

“Ah yeah,” I would admit. “That’s right.” You see, it can be hard to get much respect for a malady so closely associated to romance novels. It’s like succumbing to a case of the vapors.

But, unlike that clueless commentator I overheard discussing Bradley’s palpitations as a political liability, the ex-senator and I know there are two million of us out there in America with this particular disability — and we therefore qualify as a little-noticed but certifiable constituency!

Move over, Sen. John McCain and your war veterans. Our guy Bradley has the cohort of a whole interest group of people with troubled hearts. And the one thing we sure know how to do is to swoon over our man.

Those are the folks who are just that close to this or that senator or inhabitant of the White House or well-known media personality. The shared assumption inside the Beltway is that the exercise of power through these established channels still matters — a lot.

Maybe so. But this faith in traditional, derived power adds an almost quaint air to the nation’s capital at the millennial moment. Such beliefs evaporate the further away from Washington one travels, of course, and are downright rare by the time you reach Silicon Valley, where increasing numbers of congressmen seem to be showing up these days, hands outstretched. The irony in this is that the belief that government’s day is coming to a close, that a rapid transformation of society is occurring via digital networks, has been an article of faith among the digerati for years.

Even the justice department’s aggressive counter-attack via the anti-trust suit against Microsoft has failed to change many minds in the wired world about government’s waning power. The only difference is that now tech money flows into the lobbyist firms clustered along K Street like champagne at an election party. As a line item, you might call it “insurance.”

As a direct result, however, Congress has suddenly reversed its traditional antagonism to high-tech and Internet issues (remember the Communications Decency Act?) to grant tax breaks for ecommerce and for R&D, to limit liability for stock volitility and Y2K computer failures, and to grant more job visas for immigrant workers. The war on encryption is virtually over, with the defeated National Security Agency in disarray, as Seymour Hersh documented recently in the New Yorker.

The fact that the new tech-friendly policies are furthering the development of a networked economy that undermines the traditional centralized authority of the nation-state itself is rarely mentioned. But if this era does indeed herald “the end of big government,” as Bill Clinton famously noted a few years back, where will that leave Washingtonians, the custodians of the old company store?

Perhaps the biggest public policy question facing our society as the millennium turns is barely being discussed inside the United States, though it hangs over everything here just like those winter storm clouds that hover but never seem to burst, and that is: “What’s the new role for government?”

In order to find a substantive discussion of this issue in the past year, you would have had to travel quite a ways beyond the Beltway — over to the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, where near the end of November there was what was called the Third Way Conference. President Clinton was there, along with other nascent globalists like Tony Blair (Britain), who’s just learned how to send e-mail; Gerhard Schroeder (Germany); Lionel Jospin (France); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil).

Clinton and Blair, bouyed at home by their robust economies, argued for a new role for government — empowering citizens through universal education and access to technology so all can participate fully in the new economy. They consider their philosophy “progressive governance,” i.e., not strictly a public sector nor a private sector option, which is to say, a Third Way.

France’s Jospin worried out loud: “I see that we have a new economy but it’s not going to sweep away history, it’s not going to sweep away the various social groupings and it must not sweep away the nation-state. I’ll accept a networked economy but I don’t want a world dominated by networks, because that will be run by the private sector.”

Clinton later agreed with Jospin’s position: “We’ll say yes to the market economy, but no to the market society.” He went on to say that “what we’re striving for is to replace a divided way of looking at politics and talking about our common lives with a unifying theory.”

Here in the capital, it is rare to hear such debates. Behind most of the Neoclassical facades on archaic government buildings, entire floors of bureaucrats continue to occupy themselves with matters of amazingly minimal relevance to most people’s lives.

The cumbersome insititutions of government have undergone remarkably little change this decade, even as the world around them has melted away to reveal a new one in formation — an economy where people switch jobs constantly, building private portfolios and networks they carry with them, joining informal teams to invent new opportunities, generating wealth through equity culture — all based on digitized information as the common currency of a post-industrial, post-ideological society in the making.

A world where, as Walter Wriston has noted, information can be literally more valuable than money; one where ideas based on scarcity are being replaced by new ideas based on abundance.

In its own odd way, Washington sits poised on the bleeding edge of all this change. No other town on the continent is so information-obsessed, which explains its “most wired” distinction. Washington is, and long has been, the candy store for information junkies, so much so that the emergence of searchable databases linked to each other represents a perfect virtual replica of the space that Washington, Inc., has long occupied in the physical world. (According to a year-end survey, the Washington area actually has more tech firms — 12,183 — than any other in the country, even Silicon Valley, which has 11,930.)

The biggest difference is that physical Washington with its hallowed corridors of power is built only for the insiders. The main business in this place is making sure that you’ve got equal access to Republicans and Democrats — everyone wants to be bi- and to have it both ways.

Until recently, therefore, anybody who told you they could detect the fine cuts of positioning separating, an Al Gore, say, from a George W. Bush, had been paying way too much attention, or was making a buck on the detail work. (That changed a bit when both candidates had to start articulating their positions due to unexpectedly strong challenges within their own parties.)

Still, there’s no ideology left here, nothing that can stand alone without a modifier, like “compassionate” conservatives who say they support faith-based organziations, or “pragmatic” liberals who say they support faith-based organizations.

As they slice and dice their way to the bank, the old hands in Washington don’t yet fully comprehend that their world is dying. Their old system, based on the hoarding of access to power and classified information, is crumbling; it’s being replaced by the new chaos of a frenzied trade in information by everybody.

Even that most hallowed insider transaction — campaign fundraising — is being subverted by the Internet. Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura used the Web to develop grassroots support for his unlikely campaign, helping him to raise hundreds of thousands in matching funds for much-needed television and radio ads. His eventual election was a shock to many journalists, though not necessarily on the Web.)

This year, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain has used the Internet to raise more than $1 million from his supporters at his Web site — which is one reason he has been able to challenge Bush for his party’s nomination.

In a move that perhaps was more than just another photo op, McCain and former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley joined hands across party lines earlier this month to pledge that if they win their parties’ nominations, they will enforce a ban on accepting “soft money” donations. Like McCain, Bradley has been successful raising money online, more so than the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Vice-President Gore.

Of all these candidates, Gore may be the one most aware of the need for a Third Way, though he seems too cautious a politician to do much about it. During Clinton’s final year in office, look for him to do a lot of talking of the sort he did in Florence; starting in 2001, as a civilian from his base in Little Rock, he certainly will be a leading international advocate for constructing a new civic culture.

Back here at the center of the empire, if you look closely, the marble atop the swamp in this fine old town shows evidence of hairline fractures, as it gradually is coming undone from the inside by the pink ethernet vines, T-1′s, and DSL that are creeping in under the red, white and blue carpeting from all sides.

Most of the inmates of the marble asylum remain, for now, blissfully unaware of the threat.

That too, however, will be changing.

In a wide-ranging interview, Choate also made it clear that they will not seek the assistance of Jesse Ventura, whom he criticizes for his controversial Playboy interview and also for seeking a “placeholder” candidate in 2000 so that Ventura himself can run in 2004.

By switching her faction’s support from Ventura to the Choate/Buchanan alliance, the left-wing Fulani has helped build what now appears to be the dominant group within the Reform Party, Choate says.

The party clearly has work to do. A poll reported by the New York Times Wednesday found that 53 percent of the public have an unfavorable view of the Reform Party, with only 26 percent favorable, and 21 percent expressing no opinion. The party faces an uphill battle to achieve its goal of getting 15-20 percent of the vote in the 2000 elections.

To do so, it will need to counter the sea of ridicule that has greeted Buchanan’s recent book arguing that the U.S. should not have declared war on Hitler, and the widespread belief that he is anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist and sexist. It must also get him on the ballot in all 50 states, raise its stated goal of $20 million in individual contributions (which are limited to $1,000 each) and get its candidate into the presidential debates.

And it has to do all this with Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot lurking in the background, possibly even opposing its efforts.

It is too soon to count the party out, however, for one simple reason: The Clinton scandals have demonstrated how much politics and entertainment have merged in our time. And as Al Gore competes with George W. Bush for the boring center, the Reform Party has become the best show in town.

It is, after all, the only political party in the universe featuring a paranoid billionaire (“the Republicans were going to sabotage my daughter’s wedding”); a former pro wrestler turned governor (“religion is for the weak-minded”); and gay-bashing commentator (“the poor homosexuals have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting its retribution”) who is called a “Hitler-lover” by his pompadoured casino owner rival (“the only men who say they want intelligent women can’t get models”) — a man who Wednesday’s New York Times poll found has the highest negative ratings ever measured for anyone in the history of polling.

It’s conceivable that the combination of entertainment value and $12.6 million in federal matching funds could make the Reform Party a significant factor in the 2000 election. If Buchanan wins the party’s nomination and takes enough votes away from presumed nominee George W. Bush, it could tip the election to his Democratic opponent, whether Al Gore or Bill Bradley. The party’s populist economics could also potentially attract significant support from those losing in today’s economy. And, if he succeeds in fighting his way in, the Reform Party candidate could be a major influence on the presidential debates. This is especially true of Buchanan, a natural debater in the format created by TV.

Then there is the sheer unpredictability factor. It seemed inconceivable just two years ago that a professional wrestler could beat a sitting attorney general who bore Minnesota’s most revered political name to become governor; or for that matter, that the president’s poll ratings could rise after revelations of adultery with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Although it seems most likely right now that the Reform Party will be consigned to a major role only on the late-night joke circuit, there is always the possibility that its candidate will end up getting more support than anyone now believes.

If the party does succeed, it will in no small part be due to Choate’s efforts. Choate, who ran as Ross Perot’s vice presidential candidate in 1996, is generally credited with bringing Buchanan into the party and is today perhaps its major power broker.

Choate’s odyssey has been an unusual one. An economist who identifies himself as an “insider’s insider,” he originally came to prominence in the 1970s by calling for repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure, a cause mainly championed by liberal Democrats and labor. He then became a prominent neo-liberal guru to a wide variety of politicians, notably Gary Hart, who in his 1984 presidential race championed Choate’s proposal for individual training accounts to allow workers to change jobs more easily.

In the late 1980s, while working for TRW in Washington, Choate took the fateful step that led him to break with the political establishment. He published a book, “Agents of Influence,” an international bestseller that accused a wide variety of Washington’s most prominent law firms, lobbyists and ex-politicians of betraying their country to foreign interests, especially Japan. He then joined forces with Perot, supporting his 1992 presidential run, before joining the ticket himself four years later.

Choate, who in May will publish “Stealing Ideas,” a book on intellectual property, seems today to be enjoying life far more than when he was a mere policy wonk. He co-hosts a daily radio show with outgoing Reform Party chair Russ Verney, lives in a lovely rural area outside Washington with his wife Kay and clearly revels in his role as party kingmaker.

For many who knew Pat Choate in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the alliance with Pat Buchanan seems a strange one. As a person of enormous charm and knowledge about Washington’s ways, Choate clearly admires Buchanan and defends him with gusto. But the mystery is why the highly respected Choate, who once stood at the pinnacle of Washington’s policy establishment and still regards himself as a centrist, would so totally align himself with a right-wing social conservative.

Salon asked Choate to explain himself. If his answers represent a trend, then Buchanan may well end up having more influence over American politics than many would like to believe. In fact, if Buchanan succeeds in winning over more centrists like Choate in the year to come, the race for president will be a three-way affair.

You’ve just announced an unusual coalition to support Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination for president. What is it?

There are three co-chairs for the campaign — Bay Buchanan, Lenora Fulani and me. It’s a very nice balance. Lenora is a person of the left, Pat and Bay are persons of the right and, by and large, I’m a person of the center. We are putting together a left-right-center coalition, and we’re saying “OK, here are four items we all agree upon — trade policy, immigration, campaign reform and foreign policy.” Imagine this. Pat Buchanan and Lenora Fulani are going to walk through the streets of Harlem, taking our program to the inner city.

Lenora and I strongly disagree with Buchanan on the abortion issue, and we have a whole list of other items we disagree on. But we can’t do anything about even the items we agree on because we have a political system that is broken, that has been taken over by corporate interests. So our first overarching political priority, right-left-center, is real political reform.

What is your platform on political reform?

We have come to be governed by a corporate elite, who control and own both parties. That must be changed. You must open up democracy so it’s possible for people other than the Republicans and Democrats to run. We should have public financing and strictly limit private contributions to $1,000 — with no PAC money, no soft money, no corporate money, no foreign money, no dirty money. Only American voters should be permitted to finance our campaigns. We are going to run a $35 million campaign with no PAC money. We are going to run a straight campaign on public money and individual contributions. That’s the way it should be done.

Secondly, we should have a common standard in this country on what it takes to get on the ballot and run for federal office. Right now it’s balkanized into 50 states and D.C.

Third, we need real enforcement of the campaign laws that exist. We now have a sham called the Federal Election Commission, with three Republicans, three Democrats, and under law any campaign violations have to be dealt with by the FEC. And when the FEC deals with the issue, it usually dismisses major complaints against the two major parties. The general counsel of the FEC concluded that both the Clinton and Dole campaigns had major campaign violations in taking dirty money, foreign money and soft money. But by a 5-0 vote the commission rejected the advice of its own counsel and threw those away. We want the right of private civil action. If you’re a candidate and your opponent goes out and takes Chinese money, which is a violation of a federal law, you should have a right through civil action to sue and get redress on that. Under the current law you can’t have that.

What do you think of Buchanan’s comments at the 1992 Republican Convention, that “there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

There is a cultural war under way, inside the United States. The core of that cultural war is whether we shall be one nation. Shall we be a melting pot of a country, where we share a common interest, a common history, a common language? Or are we going to balkanize this country into a hyphenated America? That’s the issue, and it is destroying France, it is destroying Canada, it is destroying the Netherlands.

What about the social issues you disagree on? How can you justify working with Buchanan when he is so opposed to abortion, which you support?

You know, I don’t agree with him on the social issues at all. I ran pro-choice, as did Perot. But you take his five campaign stands that his campaign is going to be run on. Four of those are straight out of the Reform Party platform and his platform. And in politics, any time you get four out of five, you close the deal immediately.

What case can you make to socially liberal voters that Pat Buchanan would not be an anathema to them on issues like abortion?

Let’s say Pat was to succeed in putting in Supreme Court justices that would share his view, which is tough given the Senate. Their only remedy is to reverse Roe vs. Wade. Then it would become a democratic choice, a state-by-state choice. The furor on Roe vs. Wade is in part about the abortion issue. But it is also about the fact the decision took it out of the political process. Yeah, Pat Buchanan would try to overturn Roe vs. Wade. But it would then be democratically determined and, by the way, that is the way it should have been in the first place.

How do you respond to gay voters who are concerned about such Buchanan statements as “with 80,000 dead of AIDS, 3,000 more buried each month, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide”?

Pat’s wrong on that. AIDS is a virus and a disease, it’s not a moral judgment.

Do you support gay marriage?

If people want to have gay marriage, they should have gay marriages. Anybody that wants to have a relationship, want to say my benefits will go here and there, they should have the right to it.

What about Buchanan’s comment that “women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism. The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this, God is”?

I disagree with that, obviously. Look at who’s running the campaign, two women. I’ll tell you what the risk is on that statement, he runs the risk of being slapped on the side of the head by his sister Bay. And, by the way, the gender balance in the Reform Party is heavily for women — lots of women, smart, competent women, that in the other two parties are pushed aside. And, Jesus, they’re brilliant in this party.

Normally when a candidate runs for office he or she is trying to expand their base. But the perception from the outside is that Buchanan’s basic appeal is limited to a base of homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic white males.

That perception is wrong. First of all, we are going to very aggressively go out to bring blacks, Hispanics, minorities not only into the campaign but to vote for Buchanan. The person who is going to lead that effort is Dr. Lenora Fulani. Fulani is the first black woman to run for president on the ballot in 50 states, twice. She got a million signatures to put her on the ballot. She is a practicing Christian. She is a Ph.D. psychologist. She has done more for grass-roots democracy than any other person in the country, even Jesse Jackson.

And it’s a very simple message she’s taking. That you’ve been used by the Democratic Party for years, they’ve put into place programs that have widened the income and wealth gap inside this country. They have put into place a system that punished children of the poor, who are disproportionately black. They have put into place a system that aggressively punished single mothers, who are disproportionately black, and that they have not earned your respect or your vote.

What is your position on welfare reform?

Pat Buchanan is against the welfare-reform bill. What’s the purpose of welfare? Fundamentally, to get the money to the children. Now what does this bill do? It was punitive on the parents; and who does it hurt? The children. Bill and Hillary Clinton knew it. It was political expediency. They didn’t need to do that. They were going to beat Bob Dole enough. It was cheap politics.

How would you help minorities?

You’ve got to be reviving the schools. None of this nonsense of partial Head Start. You have real funding on that, you put your money into excellence, into schools with kids. You’ve also got to expand your college and other programs. You’ve got to give people who are going to work with their hands the same access as people going to college. Lots of people are not cut out to go to college, to learn a trade. It’s a very honest and significant way to make a living, you need to make role for them.

What role is Ross Perot taking at this point?

Totally neutral, in both statement and in fact. He’s running his business full-time. He replaced about most of the top management of Perot Systems a year ago and took it public. He is sending his son to Europe, they’re making a massive expansion there. So he is building and bankrolling a major electronic processing company.

He could have presumably stopped Buchanan if he wanted to.

He could have been the nominee if he wanted to. But Ross is neutral, he’s going to let the members of the party select their nominee.

The presumption was that when Jesse Ventura’s candidate, Jack Gargan, beat your candidate, Pat Benjamin, for party chair, this implied he had more support within the Reform Party than do you.

No, what swung the difference there was Lenora Fulani’s support. Ventura had Minnesota, some delegate strength. It was Lenora’s people who made the difference, Lenora swung it to Jesse, to break the influence and power of Russ Verney, the existing campaign chair.

How do you feel about Jesse Ventura?

I have an evolving attitude. I’ve had Jesse on my show several times and he’s a very likable, engaging guy. And, for all the World Wrestling Federation buffoonery, he’s really a hero. He served as a Navy SEAL, put his life on the line.

As a governor, I think he’s doing a pretty darn good job on the governing side of it. And he also did something enormously important for the Reform Party. Before Jesse there was a media embargo where they would only talk to Perot. The power, the real power, is the power to ignore. And he broke that media embargo. It was enormously helpful.

He also made it clear that the Reform Party is composed of thousands of us. It’s not just Ross Perot. Yes, he put up the money, he provided the leadership, but the rest of us really own the party. Up until Jesse it was “Ross Perot’s Reform Party,” like Ross Perot’s car, Ross Perot’s company. After Jesse it’s never been that way again. It’s now just the Reform Party. It was a major accomplishment.

The problem with Jesse is that he was catapulted into the position of a national figure before he had the experience to handle it. When you’re in national politics, there is no tougher game. I mean it’s laughable when Donald Trump talks about all the tough New York real-estate guys he dealt with. They’re minnows compared to the sharks in this pool.

So Jesse vastly overexposed himself, and he never should have done the Playboy interview.

What’s your problem with the Playboy interview?

Jesse destroyed a major part of his base, both in Minnesota and nationally, with his interview. And in the process of doing that he destroyed a major portion of his influence within the Reform Party. His comments on religion and his seemingly condoning the Tailhook scandal, though he’s equivocal in that part of the interview. But many people have interpreted that as being down on women. Those two things are killers.

But even prior to that, why was there a conflict between his side and your side?

Control. It’s just about politics. Jesse clearly wants to run for president in the year 2004. Part of the convention he made with the people of Minnesota is that he would not run in 2000. So basically he wanted a stand-in, a Lowell Weicker or God knows who, to hold the seat until the year 2004. But you can’t do that in politics. People don’t vote for somebody who’s holding your chair. You’re either in it full bore to win or you’re out of it. I mean, how many votes would Lowell Weicker get as a place-sitter? I mean give me a break.

Are there any differences in issues between you and Ventura?

Yeah, very different positions on trade and immigration, for example. He’s very libertarian. But I really think we’re past all that to be honest with you, I mean I think all of that is pre-Playboy.

Do you think he should leave the party?

My view is he made a major mistake, and he should be allowed to deal with it himself. But on the other hand Russ Verney has a positional responsibility. If he’s calling for the resignation of Clinton, he should equally apply it to our own party.

How can you believe that Pat Buchanan can be a viable candidate, given that politics is perception, and the perception right now is that he is anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist and racist?

Where does the charge hit? In the media, entertainment world, the intellectual community, Washington, New York and so forth. The way you deal with it is you just have to slog it out, literally, criticism after criticism, by putting it into context.

Well, let’s slog it out on anti-Semitism, the charge that’s attracted the most attention. We live in a sound-bite culture, and Buchanan’s are that he blamed the Gulf War on the Israeli defense ministry and its “amen corner” in the U.S., referred to Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory,” opposed Western intervention to stop Hitler whom he called a “great man,” denied that the diesel engines at Treblinka could have killed people, supported Reagan’s Bitberg speech, defends accused concentration camp guards, and has criticized Harvard for having too many Jews and Asians. Add it all up and Jews are worried. How do you respond?

Pat Buchanan is not anti-Semitic. Incidentally, none of this came out till he opposed the war in Iraq. Then suddenly he was an anti-Semite. Since then his critics take snippets, they can’t point to whole sentences and paragraphs to support this vile demonization. It’s McCarthyism from the left.

What about when he said, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East, the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States”? He also focused on Abe Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger; all Jews as William Buckley has noted. Why didn’t he mention George Bush, Jim Baker, the Pentagon and the many other non-Jews who were far more responsible for the war?

He had a whole list of names. They focused on Safire, Rosenthal, Perle, Kissinger, Krauthammer, but he had a longer list including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. He had a whole series of institutions. They narrowed it down to that.

Is Congress Israeli-occupied territory?

I think it’s a funny line and he does, too. It goes back to Menachim Begin at Camp David. He told Carter, “You take care of the Palestinians, I will take care of Congress.” Carter was shocked. I’ve done a book on lobbying, AIPAC is one of the most powerful lobbies in this country. These are Americans, it’s totally legitimate, they have the right to petition their government. But it’s not legitimate to deny that that lobby is significant. That’s the criticism. It’s a statement of fact.

Was Hitler a “great man”?

The quote was in a review of John Toland’s biography of Adolph Hitler. The critics have reached the point they don’t even put in the ellipses. The first part of the sentence says that, to be sure, Adolph Hitler was an anti-Semite, racist, monster and so on, though at the same time he was so and so. He’s paraphrasing Toland in his book.

What about the diesel fuel that he says didn’t kill people at Treblinka?

That gets to the charge he denies the Holocaust. There is not one such statement anywhere by Pat Buchanan. Time and time again he has condemned Hitler and the Holocaust. Since his critics can’t find whole sentences, they find code words like “Wall Street bankers.” Wall Street bankers has been a criticism of Wall Street that goes back to William Jennings Bryan and his “Crown of Gold” speech. The other code word they accuse him of is “Goldman Sachs” in his criticism of the Mexican buyout. But they never mention who was the lead banker for Mexico who got bailed out when they ran up $18 billion in bad debt. It was Goldman Sachs, it was Bob Rubin.

That’s the criticism. It’s a legitimate criticism, not a code word. Let me ask a question: Why are people so willing to believe charges that are so easily disproved? What is going on here is demonization that cuts off free speech and cheapens the charge of anti-Semitism. It seems to me that the Jewish community should be the first to say we want this charge to be real when it is applied and not as specious as this.

Elie Wiesel condemned Buchanan, claiming he told him he supported Reagan’s Bitberg speech.

The trip to Bitberg was laid on before Pat Buchanan came to the White House. He was not there; it was Michael Deaver.

Why, of all the oppressed people in the world, does he focus on people accused of being concentration-camp commanders like John Demjanjuk?

Were I a Jew I would respect Pat Buchanan for that, for a very simple reason. Who was the leading defender of Alfred Dreyfus? It was Victor Hugo. One writer took a man that the rest of the country hated. It recalls Frederick Douglass’ line about Lincoln: “He had the courage to speak out in the faces of prejudice and few men have that.” Demjanjuk was taken, stripped of his citizenship, taken to Israel and tried. It turned out the U.S. Justice Department had the wrong man. The Israeli Supreme Court so ruled. Now it took a lot of courage to defend an innocent man in the face of the attacks on Pat Buchanan.

What about the statement, “Now we really know who gets the shaft at Harvard — white Christians.” He’s charged that too many Harvard students are Jews and Asians. Do you agree that Harvard is biased against white Christians?

No, I don’t think it’s biased against white Christians. I think it is following set-asides and affirmative action. His point is you should be there by merit, period. Whatever the numbers come out by merit, that’s fine.

But affirmative action and set-asides don’t favor Jews and Asians.

His point is there are quotas, and there is affirmative action, and there are set-asides at Harvard.

But he singled out Asians and Jews.

Well, he singled them out because they are the beneficiaries. They’re there. But it was an argument against quotas.

But there’s no quota for Asians and Jews at Harvard. That doesn’t make any sense. Which raises another question. Few people are going to get into all this detail. Who’s going to defend Buchanan on all of this? It’s not enough to put on yarmulkes.

No, he wouldn’t do that. What he should do are things like the meeting that occurred five or six weeks ago, when I invited 12 to 13 of the leading Jewish members of our party. I asked they all read the book, take a look at all the criticism. We spent Sunday afternoon with Pat Buchanan. They are tough cookies, but they all came away saying he’s not an anti-Semite.

How many people are in the national headquarters of the Reform Party?

A couple, plus lawyers, accountants that we hire. They have a small budget to pay for Russ Verney, the Reform Party chairman, maybe $150,000 to $200,000; in that range. But you know, the Democrat and Republican parties are 19th century artifacts. They’re set up for very different times, when you had ward healers. You don’t need the buildings, the 30,000 staffers or whatever.

The Reform Party is in many ways the first cyber-party, because we have thousands of people who are on these various Internet mailing lists, to whom we send our stuff, and they go out and campaign.

How many people wake up every morning and do something that day for the Reform Party?

Hundreds, hundreds, hundreds. You work at home, you’re fully informed through the Net, you’re able to communicate with vast numbers. You don’t need the print room, you don’t need the mail room. You write your message, you check it, you send it out and it’s gone.

And we’re all volunteers. As I said in accepting the co-chair of the Buchanan campaign, “I accept this in the tradition of the Reform Party as a non-paid volunteer.” Now how much would I charge for 2,000 hours of my time per year? We have hundreds of people like that.

What’s the scenario for the 2000 election?

Depending where the states are, you need 38 percent to win the presidency. That’s your low number, you shoot for 41, 42 percent. Pat’s going to get 10-15 percent right off the bat from the social conservatives; he’ll just pull them straight out of what was the Republican Party because the Republicans have gone left; Gary Bauer will not be on that ticket.

He will pull another 10 or 15 percent out of the traditional Democratic Party; the Democratic Party is going right. It’s gone dramatically right with Al From and the Democratic Leadership Council.

He’ll get the independent vote. He’ll do very well with the 18-35 year-old generation. Perot did super with them. It was Jesse Ventura’s best cohort. This is the generation that filters through TV. What they’re looking for is conviction politics. They might not agree, but they want to know, “do you really believe this?” Well, the one thing you can say about Buchanan is we won’t have a pollster, we don’t need one. This is what we believe and that’s it.

Are you implying you might win the election?

I’m serious. Yes, that’s the way we’re running the campaign, to win the election. A good place to go back and take a look was the 1996 Michigan primary, which were open primaries. Times were good in Michigan in 1996, they were booming. Buchanan drew 34 percent of the total vote. Now we bring in the independent voter, the new voter.

Have you thought about any vice presidential candidates yet?

Fundamentally, you need somebody that can draw heavily into the Democratic base like [former congresswoman] Marcy Kaptur, though she hasn’t been approached. A Democrat with solid labor ties, who was there on the trade issues, economic nationalism and foreign policy.

What would be your goals short of winning the presidency?

If you don’t win in 2000, that you can win in 2004. We need to
win 25 percent of the vote. That gives you $75 million to $80 million for 2004.

What percent of the vote would you regard as a defeat?

Anything under 15 to 20 percent.

You have to get on the ballot in 30 more states for Buchanan to become the Reform Party nominee. What’s involved?

It varies state by state. Overall, we have to get about 600,000 signatures. You’ve got to get it done by July. It won’t be easy, it’s going to require a lot of work, but we’ve got Matt Sawyer, who did the stuff for Perot, hired full-time. We’ll do it. There’s no question about that.

When would you receive the $12 million?

After Aug. 13, after you’re designated the nominee of the party by the convention in Long Beach.

How much money will you have?

We’ll raise about $20 million, from individual contributions up to $1000. With the public money, that will give us $30 million to $35 million, which is all we need. Here’s what you’ll never see in our campaign. You’ll not see 737s and 747s hired. You’ll not see two hairdressers, a million aides, a staff of pollsters and speech writers. You will see a lot of this campaign using commercial flights. And when you sum all that up, we will use our money competitively with the major parties.

You won 8.6 percent of the vote in 1996. Do you think Buchanan will be able to do better than that this time?

Absolutely. It’s a function of the debates. Half the voters in America make up their minds on the debates. If Perot and I had been in the debates, we’d have beaten Dole.

Do you think you’ll be able to get into the debates?

Absolutely.

Why can’t they exclude you again?

I’ll tell you what, we will sue them, we will chase George Bush and Al Gore all over the country on this. If they’re unwilling to debate Pat Buchanan, a certified third-party candidate, they’re unfit to be president.

So they could exclude you, but you’ll try to build political pressure to force them to do it.

If the debate commission excludes us, we’re just going to take it straight to the other two candidates and say, “Hey, quit hiding behind the skirts of the debate commission here.” Or with George Bush, I mean, “Your mommy can’t protect you here anymore, come on out.”

Have you been designated by the FEC as a national political party?

There’s only three. We are designated in 1997. Now if they want to set something for other parties, let them do it.

You say your left-center-right coalition agrees on foreign policy. What’s your position there?

The U.S. should not commit the nation to war unless there’s a vital interest. And any time we do commit war, it should be done with the support of the American people through a vote of the U.S. Congress.

As you know, Buchanan’s comments implying the U.S. should not have fought Hitler have created a firestorm. Do you believe it was wrong for the West, with the benefit of hindsight, not to have stopped Hitler from going into the Rhineland and to have signed the Munich agreement?

The West should have stopped him from going into the Rhineland. But that was France and Great Britain’s responsibility, because they were the guarantors of the peace there.

We have become the France and Great Britain of the modern world, that is the world’s greatest power. What responsibilities do we have?

There are places where you would send troops. You would not tolerate China invading Japan or Taiwan, or Russia breaking into Eastern Europe. But you don’t go as the bouncer in every bar fight every place in the world.

Buchanan says that he has written his book to fight U.S. interventionism abroad. You seem to be saying, “Let them die in Rwanda, let them die in Kosovo.” Unless we are directly attacked we don’t have any role to play abroad in stopping genocide, in stopping crimes against humanity?

We don’t. We didn’t stop genocide in China, Russia, Africa, Tibet. We’re saying we should not send our men and women to die or put their lives at risk unless one, it’s in our vital national interest. And, two, the Congress declares we should go.

So you’re saying that even if we know a million people are about to be killed in a Rwanda, the U.S. should not intervene on the grounds that genocide or international crimes against humanity are being committed?

Yeah. It’s a horrible circumstance. However, you have major powers in Europe, France, Germany, Great Britain. You have Russia, who was supporting one side in the Serbian war. They have a responsibility too. And no, I would be very honest, I wouldn’t send Americans to take the risk of death there, and neither would Buchanan. It’s a great crime, a great crime. But others have responsibility.

And would you bomb there, even if it didn’t put American troops at risk?

No, I wouldn’t be out bombing.

You are very much nationalists. Einstein said nationalism was the measles of mankind. How do you respond?

I would say if one was to take a totally rational view, he was absolutely correct. But we wind up with emotionalism dominating so much of the world. Why is there a fight in Northern Ireland, between the Protestants and the Catholics? Why is there a fight inside Belgium? Why is there a fight in the Balkans? Because we have regionalism, we have religion, we have ancient animosities, we have tribalism.

And we have nationalism.

And we have nationalism. But in a real sense when you can find a real cohesive national state, you have less conflict.

How do you justify pushing American interests when we clearly need to think more globally in the 21st century?

We’re the people who actually brought the concept of democracy alive from Greece into being, who made real the concept of human rights. We have the least sexist and racist society in the world. We give the greatest emphasis to merit and individual accomplishment. We’re the only society in the world that says the creativity of your mind belongs to you, not society. We’ve best integrated different cultures, different people, into one country. We have generated most of the technological innovations in the world, and been generous enough to share them with the rest of the world. When they’re clicking the ballpoint pen, it was invented here. When they’re looking at a television, it’s here. When they’re on the Internet, it came from here.

Now, if we as a society want to dilute that, then we’re going to dilute our social accomplishments, our democracy, our rate of technological innovation, and whatever force of good we stand for in the world. So I think there are compelling arguments here to value a society that provides this kind of moral force and leadership.

What do you think of Vaclav Havel’s argument that we need more global and less nationalistic thinking?

Fundamentally they are arguing for elitism and against democracy. Because these global institutions are less democratic. You have a core of the elites who run it. They are unaccountable. I believe very much in grass-roots democracy. I think people should have a role in choosing their leaders, and that means to hold their leadership accountable. And under that kind of theory, you don’t have it.

What are the other issues your coalition agrees on?

On trade, we should have absolute reciprocity with other countries, and must maintain a strong and viable manufacturing base inside the United States.

On immigration, we cannot have a country of hyphenated Americans. We must once again be the melting pot on which this country was founded. We need a breathing spell, as we’ve had many times in our history, to assimilate existing immigrants into this country. We should bring in a quarter of a million a year and stop illegal immigration. We should become again a country where everyone speaks English. Every culture that has this kind of hyphenation blows apart. It’s our strength, the melting pot.

I’ve talked to a lot of people in this town who are saying, “Why is Pat Choate, whom we know is not a right-winger, pushing this right-wing nut Buchanan?” That’s the basic vibe. Are you seriously arguing that you think the combined forces of the Internet and Lenora Fulani will overcome these forces against you, and that you can escape being seen as a nut?

Richard Nixon was probably the most vilified politician of our time. Ronald Reagan was vilified as somebody who was a dead, finished person. If you can break through to the American people — and say he’s not a right-wing nut, that he’s really speaking for many of the same things that concern you, that the reason you’re getting this level of vilification is because he truly is a threat to the established order and many of the other elites who are unable to argue their points — just as Nixon and Ronald Reagan won, he can win.

The “if” is what we’re asking about, though. Is the Internet strong enough to get the message out?

There’s much easier and faster access to the public today than there was in 1980. You have 1,000-plus radio talk shows that didn’t exist then. Two million people read Salon magazine. It becomes additive. One of the great changes in American politics is there are no longer three networks that control access to the American people.

Are you saying you can pull this off in the year 2000?

Yes. Do you think I’d be doing this for no money, if I didn’t think I could do it? I wouldn’t.

In the film, Bergman is cast favorably as a man of his word, the moral force who eventually persuades Wallace to come around to the side of good — a detail Wallace has
vociferously
challenged. But those of us who have worked closely with Bergman over the years know him as one of the premier
reporters of his time. (I’ve collaborated
with him on and off since 1972, at Rolling Stone magazine and the Center for Investigative Reporting,
as well as on televised reports for “20/20,” “60 Minutes” and PBS, and also as co-lecturers
at the University of California).

A dogged, rough character who will go almost
anywhere in pursuit of his story, Bergman also is a committed intellectual
who has made a mission of spreading awareness of what he calls the “grammar
of television” to as large an audience as possible. In this way, he’s also an
activist, one who believes in using the media to reveal
how power is exercised, in the pursuit (though he is far too gruff and macho to
ever admit this, even to a friend) of truth and justice. I interviewed him Thursday, a few hours
before the Washington premier of “The Insider.”

How are you?

I’m pretty good, now that Mike [Wallace] has surrendered.

Surrendered?

Yeah, in the New York Times yesterday. He said that he’s been hearing from people that the
movie is pretty good and he doesn’t look so bad after all. And he’s decided that he’s now at
peace.

Zeroing in on Mike for a minute …

Mike has given up.

Yeah, I want to get to that. But, just matching movie with reality for a
little bit here — did his “I’m with you, Don” quote in the movie [implying Wallace's complicity with his boss, Don Hewitt, in withholding the tobacco story] really happen?

No.

OK, so that would be one of the events that captures what you call
“the emotional and philosophical honesty” of the film?

Look, there’s many things in the film that did not happen, and in fact,
much of the film is the reconstruction of a time line. So that if you watch
it closely as to certain developments, it’s not logical.

I said to Michael Mann, “What is this?” And he said it’s
not a documentary. It’s a dramatization of the events.
And its a very effective — in my opinion — vehicle for expressing both
the emotional — particularly the emotional — and psychological aspects of
doing this kind of work and being in this kind of situation.

If it had been done in the chronological order as a documentary, I
doubt anybody would watch it. It would be like what the CBS lawyers said to
me when they signed off and released me to work on this movie. They said
– to paraphrase them — “Have fun working on the movie. We know it’s a very
complicated story where there’s no death or violence, so it’s unlikely ever
to be made.”

Looks like they were wrong.

I guess.

I would assume one of those philosophically honest aspects was
the fear that seems to have been the galvanizing emotion behind Mike and Don’s decision to
initially side with the corporate guys. I’d
like to hear you talk about that, that corporate big-foot possibility.

Well, I mean the bottom line in all of this is that the company came
over to news division and said, “Whether you believe them or not, what you
guys are doing is going to result in a tobacco company owning CBS.”

Did you believe that?

No.

And so they were … blackmailing?

The presentation that was made by the general counsel was very, very
persuasive, and it did not truck any dissent.

I see.

You couldn’t … if you said something, various questions were raised and
[the corporate counsel] just kept saying, “No, that won’t make any difference
and that won’t make any difference” and so forth.

And so in terms of what went on with Mike and Don, they were sort
of, if you will … they say they were sort of overwhelmed.

The general counsel presented it
with the veneer that there would be a three-week period where this was all
going to be considered by outside counsel. It wasn’t permanent. Yet
certain things happened in the following week that convinced me that that
was just bullshit — including them ordering me out of [whistle-blower Jeffrey] Wigand’s house when I went back to him
to sort of fact-check things.

The second thing that was going on here that
was different from whatever Mike or Don or anyone else was considering was
that I’m the one who had the intensive personal contact with Wigand and his
family over a long period of time. So I’m the one who has to bear, if you
will, the personal, emotional price of what this might mean for him.
As well as the ethical question of having done a lot to try to get him
to tell his story and help him tell his story.

So you’d invested yourself.

Invested? I was in a situation where — if I had, for instance, gone
public and denounced what was going on, I endangered revealing
my source. So I was caught in a situation where even if I did go
public, I realized — being, as Morley Safer liked to point out to me, “just
a producer” — I could easily be damaged from behind by my colleagues saying,
“Well, he’s off the reservation, and there are all kinds of other factors
here that he doesn’t even know about.”

And what would that have done? It wouldn’t have helped Wigand’s
credibility. That’s for sure. So, it was a difficult balancing act at
that point. But there’s no question that Mike and Don, from the period of
these first meetings until the middle of October, which would be two weeks
after quote “the final decision,” had no intention of ever making any of
this public, had no intention of lifting a finger to help Wigand. Just the
opposite. The company had said, “Don’t go near him, don’t help him.”

It’s only when they realized that if they cut Wigand loose — which is
what they had done — that the story itself, that is, the substance of what
he had to say about Brown & Williamson, was going to come out anyway.

So they were going to lose the story — part of which appeared on
the front page of the Wall Street Journal — and eventually the story would come out
that they killed the story. So that’s when they began maneuvering. Don began maneuvering to figure out a way to
do “a censored version.” Which is not accurately portrayed in the movie. But it’s a complication
that’s very difficult to explicate.

It sounds like when it became clear that others were going to get the
story and he was going to lose the story, Don’s journalistic chops kicked in.

To a certain extent. But there was the problem of how to spin it. At that
point, assuming that more of the story came out, and my reporting back to
them that Wigand was now talking to the Wall Street Journal, it would come
out eventually that they had killed the story.

And why did Wigand start talking to the Wall Street Journal?

Well, because he was no longer obligated just to talk to us. And because,
in the middle of August, he had put his name on the witness list for ABC
and their libel suit. And then ABC folded. So he was hanging out there to
dry anyway by ABC already, and their lawyers. And so reporters were calling
him. Byron Levin of the L.A. Times was calling him, Alex Friedman was
calling him. And he would say to me, “Should I talk to these people?” And
I said, “No, no. We’re going to do the story. Don’t talk to them.” And
then when we’re not doing the story, he calls me and says, “Should I talk
to this woman?” And I said, “I guess you should, because we’re not doing
the story.”

It seems you had to go through this difficult personal transformation from the
journalist who has managed whistle-blowers all your career to being one yourself.

In a manner of speaking, my final act as a whistle-blower in this is the
movie. Because, in the movie, it’s clear I leaked the story to the New York Times
that made it all public. You know, so that is true. The other thing
that’s happened is that — and this is a matter of luck and the fact that a
lot of people stood up and did the right thing — is that the movie
undermines any attempt to simply spin this as an anomaly.

The reality is, inside the business — especially the network television
news business — it’s self-censored, mostly. And when push comes to
shove, it’s censored. And that’s when it has to deal particularly with
stories that involved institutions that are the same size or larger –
private institutions, public institutions, governments, spy agencies —
they’re all fair game. But in the world where multinational megacorporations
are the new and growing power center, don’t expect to see much critical coverage
on network television.

The fictional treatment reveals that structural reality. Is that really what you’re
proudest of in this film?

I’m proudest for Michael Mann and Eric Roth, and the people involved
in making the film, that they were actually able to get this film not only
made, but distributed.

In Hollywood film history, it’s hard to think of another
political-economic critique of a major industry like the media.

Yeah. I don’t think that this is what I would call an in-depth political
critique. It’s not a documentary or a polemic. But through the structure
that Michael Mann has chosen to tell the story — which is really about two
people — those concepts are the overarching theme.

Michael wasn’t trying to make a pseudo-documentary. So he’s not looking
for complex pieces of information that he’s going to throw
into one fact. There was some criticism in the New Yorker, for instance, and
arguments that I had with him, you know — “What about the criminal
investigation? What about the Tisch family? That’s not explained in the
movie.”

But it’s a story, it’s a movie. I think everyone will agree who sees it,
no matter whether you like the movie or not, the movie makes you
uncomfortable. It makes you psychologically, emotionally uncomfortable
because of the level of tension that’s maintained for so long.

More like a play.

And the acting of Russell Crowe is just phenomenal. You get the sense of
Wigand, of an average American with various neuroses, trying to
make it and being confronted with these objective realities.

Did you ever think your life would be a movie?

[Laughs.] Only when I took the wrong drug.

What happened was, normally in these situations, in the network television
world, when they happen, the usual progression — and there were a lot of
unusual things here from the beginning, such as they were trying to kill it
even before it got broadcast — is that the producer walks the plank. And
given the structure of the organization, that’s how you know that, in fact,
the on-camera person is not the real reporter.

So in this situation, what’s first of all unusual is that I survived it. I mean, if you look
at it from one perspective, by the time the story got on the air and shortly thereafter,
I could’ve had anything I wanted at CBS News.

The reason you survived is that you had a long and valuable career
there, and they weren’t going to cash it in just yet.

Well, they were ready to cash it in. I don’t know. I mean, if Mike
Wallace is to be believed, he told me one day not to come to the office
because Don Hewitt was going to fire me. That happened a number of times.

So the reality is that a lot of other people did things which are not
explained in the movie. They just sort of happened in the movie. And
because they did things, it changed the lay of the land. And because I was
in a sense lucky enough to survive — and by survive I mean survive with
my job, survive with my reputation — I then felt obligated, now that Wigand
is taken care of, to make it clear what the issues were here.

Now, it’s unfortunate that, in the movie-making process, a lot of these people who
did things are not included in the story. Some are in the acknowledgements
that run at the end in the credits, which is something that I asked for and
Michael Mann did.

And because of what other people did while I was in the middle of this,
it worked out. And so, in some ways, I felt this obligation to make sure
that people understood what was really going on here, not just from an
emotional point of view, from a human point of view, but also from the overriding issue which confronts the media and journalism, which is that
network television news is censored. Mostly self-censored, and it won’t do
that story. So, in a sense you have to go to Hollywood to do that story.
I mean, you could do it in a journalism review, you could do it in a
variety of magazines as an article, but the general audience who watches
television, the mass audience, would not hear about it.

Do you feel this film is going to change that reality?

I think that this film will make it more difficult for anybody to use
the concept of tortious interference ever again, to interfere with a story
being fully reported.

And I think this story will make it very difficult for anybody to believe
ever again that a network television news organization does not take
commercial consequences into consideration before they will do a story, or
how it influences what reporting they will do. So at least those issues
are on the table.

This is consistent with your personal agenda over
the years, to deconstruct the grammar of television.

Network television news is never going to do a story showing the audience what
goes into doing a magazine segment on “60 Minutes.”

So in many ways, this film is surfacing in almost an educational
way what you’ve been a student of in your own career for 20 years, and
you’ve been frustrated finding a way to get this out.

What is out is — Mike Wallace didn’t go out and do the ground-level reporting to do the Hezbollah. He points out in retort that there is another guy, Jim Hogan, who will
actually be at the screening tonight, an old friend of mine, who we hired
as the leg man to go first. I went second. And Mike went third. That’s
the way the business works. The audience doesn’t know that.

Let’s talk about you and Mike. Has there been any reconciliation
personally?

I have to put it this way. The first story, the first shoot, in 1983,
something goes wrong. Mike takes me out in the parking lot and reams me
out in front of everybody. That’s how our relationship began. And it appears that’s how it’s ending. Except this time, he can’t order me into the parking lot.

So how does that make you feel?

I was sad that … Well, I felt a number of different ways. He started
screaming a year and a half ago. He refused to take my advice a year and
a half ago to stop screaming and to try to have a rational discussion with
the people involved. He ignored it. He became vindictive and abusive and
would not listen. So I decided I wasn’t going to talk to him.

I waited six months, I set up a meeting with him to help open up communication. I
felt we accomplished something at that meeting. It took place in early
February of this year. Four months later, he’s back at it, talking about
the meeting that we had, this private meeting, and spinning it so it looks
like I’m coming on my hands and knees …

… asking for a job? That’s what they had in Brill’s Content.

They never asked me about it.

That piece basically says, Lowell is trying to make himself the star
of this.

Here’s the irony in all of it. Twenty-one years a network television
news producer, someone is trying to tell me that I’m trying to get too much
credit? Anybody who reports on this and asks Mike Wallace, “Haven’t you been
getting the credit for the work of other people for however many years?” he’ll respond,
“Well, I wrote a book, and in the book, there’s four paragraphs about my producers.”

So, in a very blunt way, this is simply a matter of projection,
psychologically?

He just said it the other day, he said, “The problem with Lowell isn’t
that he has penis envy, it’s microphone envy.” I mean, he’s nuts.

Where were Morley, Harry, Andy and Ed? Ed just barely appeared and then
disappeared. Why were they cut out?

I don’t know why they were cut out of the movie. It’s not a
documentary. Morley’s role in this is public record. He denounced me and
Mike publicly. And then later I asked him, “How can you say these things
and not have called me even or talked to me?” He said he didn’t need to
talk to me because I was Mike’s producer and you talk to Mike. That gives
you an idea of the class relationship.

And Ed was briefed on this before it all became public, and his reaction to me was he wanted it all to go away. Leslie Stahl didn’t know until it became public. She’s been the
most stand-up. And [Steve] Croft didn’t know anything until it became public, and
he said nothing until the piece actually, eventually, got on the air. And
then he said, “What’s the big controversy? We put the piece on, didn’t
we?” So, I think I said at the time that during the roughest period,
no correspondent called to wish me luck.

Does Don come through accurately as the Don Hewitt you know, and as the man who
built “60 Minutes,” in this film?

No.

So what is lacking for people to really understand
and appreciate him? Is there another movie to be made?

No. The movie is not about Don Hewitt and Mike Wallace and “60 Minutes.”
That’s not the central focus of the movie. It has become the central focus
of the publicity, because Mike Wallace has chosen to go ballistic without
seeing the movie. It’s not a good idea to review movies that you haven’t
seen. You wind up doing what Mike did yesterday in the New York Times. You should say,
“Yeah, well maybe I’ll wait until I see it.”

So now that everybody will see it, what will be your future with
the “60 Minutes” people?

I don’t know. I don’t have any future.

You don’t have any intention of getting back together with them in any way?

There’s a movie coming out tonight. There’s been this
huge public thing, there’s an article in today’s Newsday, you know, with
Vern Gay, where he quotes [my wife] Sharon as saying its hard to think of how we would
get back together. As far as I’m concerned, there are certain issues here,
and they’re issues that the rank-and-file people at “60 Minutes” know are
true.

I have made no effort, and I will make no effort, to go to work for
“60 Minutes.” I was asked to get involved in “60 Minutes II.” I agreed to try
and do that. Mike and Don put the kibosh on that. And that was over a year
ago, and now I’m off on another incarnation. I’ve got a New York Times job, and
I’ve got a four-hour documentary coming for PBS. And I may do a book just simply to
lay a lot of this out so that it’s not subject to the kind of disinformation and smear
which is starting to happen. But other than that, I’m overwhelmed. I’ve got a lot going on.

At the end of the day, do you think it’s possible for a person working in the media
to actually make things better in the world, or do you feel that …

Give me a break. I can’t answer a question like that.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist, Lowell?

I’m an asshole. You know that.