Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes 20140628

Have you started your next project . Guest i dont ever talk about my new stuff. Im kind of superstitious about it. I feel like its not going to happen if i do Start Talking about it so i will be hopefully with you in two or three more years with my new book. Host in the kingdom of ice. Here is the cover in Hampton Sides is the author. August of 2014 publication date. In this encore booknotes from october 2001 columnist and author midge decter discusses her memoir midge decter seven decades in love and war. Ms. Decter expresses her opinion on such topics as the relationship between the sexes come in the 1960s and 70s Womens Movement and communists. This is about an hour. Guest i would certainly have included it because certainly bringing about a change in the spirit of at least new york city and i think of the whole country. Cspan youand you talk about your life in here, all the different instances or things that happened in your life. Whwhere would you place that asin the importance of whats happened in this country . Guest well, i would place it with world war ii, when suddenly the whole nation was inspirited everybody was worried and everybody had someone to worry about, because it was an Enormous Army and every family had someone in it. But there was a feeling, a very american feeling, of by god, were on our way and well take care of things. it was very, veri was a kid, but it was very, very inspiriting. And this, curiously, in new york, at least, has had the same effect, though we havent done anything yet, but everybody waseverybody cared about everybody else. And its interesting, because in a curious way, new york was very cheerful in that way of feeling that everybody was together in this. But ive spoken to friends in washington and they all sounded plain depressed. Its a very different feeling in these two cities, or at least so it seemed to me. Cspan yyoure obviously ahavehave strong views about politics inin your life. What happened to those strong views among people in new york city, where you lived during this time . Guest well, they were all gungho about getting those terrorists and about this is the United States and, by god, were good and theyre bad. it was that kind of feeling. Thats why i likened it to world war ii, because that was the feeling everybody had. It was very simple. You knew who the bad guys were and you knew who the good guys were, and thatthat simplicity of feeling never came again, not in any of the subsequent wars or anything. Cspan why do you think that is the case . Guest well, i think a big, rich, powerful country that was getting richer and more powerful, people find it easy to take everything for granted and to feel that they have lots of leeway to do whatever they please and to think whatever they want. Andand, i mean, you know what we lived through with vietnam. And i myself was an opponent of the war in vietnam, but i was really horrified by the way my fellow opponents were conducting themselves. And, you know, theyre back again. The same people on the College Campuses are now yammering about peace and about this Imperialist Society and so on. Cspan what is it that leads some people to feel that way, in your opinion . Guest a lack of seriousness i used to call them the spoiled children of liberty, andand theyre back. There are not so many of them, i think. I havent taken a census, but theyre all on the campusesyale, city collegejust the ones i really know something about recently. Theyre all there, demonstrating and yammering, the professors and thetheir innocent and illinformed students. Cspan if i remember correctly, dont you live on the Upper West Side of new york . Guest not anymore. We used to live on thewe lived there for years and years. We raised our children there. But then when they all flew the coop, we moved to a smaller place on the east side. Cspan thats a highlyor wellknown liberal area of the world, Upper West Side. Guest the Upper West Side, so is the upper east side. Cspan so whatwhatever will. Guest . I can tell you. Cspan andandand you dont call yourself a liberal in the new sense . Guest no, i dont call myself a liberal anymore. Theres no point in it. For a long time we used to say, were the real liberals. Youre not the real liberals, but that was nonsense. Cspan the reason i bring that up is, what do you find the liberals of new york saying guest well, some of them were ignorant and some of them had a luxury that i didnt feel i had, partly bei think, because im a jew, andand also i went throughias i describe in here, at certain point in my life when i had very, very small children, i went through an orgy ofexcuse mereading concentration camp literature. And there werethere were the nazi camps about which we knew, but the soviet camps were just as bad, and there were more of them and there were more prisoners and they werethey were at it longer. Excuse me. They were at this game longer, the communists, and so they had a lot more slaughter to their credit. And to know about what was going on in the soviet union was to hate it. Cspan youby being here on booknotes, its the first time in the 13year history of this program weve ever had father, mother and son. And so that people can see what im talking about, i want to run a video clip of one person in your life that i want you to talk about. excerpt from march 28, 1999, booknotes mr. Norman podhoretz kerouacs girlfriend called me up and said, come down and have tea with us, which was a euphemism in greenwich village. And i got all dressed up in a suit and tie because i didnt want to seem to be going down to Enemy Territory in their uniform, as you might say, down in greenwich village. And i got there and we spentthe first day they wanted me to smoke marijuana with themthats what they meant by teaandand ii had no moral compunctions, but ii refused, and i was not gonna play the game by their rules. And we had this long and very intense argument, both about literature, you know, they accusing me of being philistine about theirtheir work and also about thethethethe doctrines that they were preaching through their literary works. And we got nowhere. I didnt convince them, they didnt convince me. And at a certain point in the evening i left with kerouac to go see somebody else. And as i left, ginsberg yelled at me, well get you through your children. i already had children, by the way. And he was an early outofthecloset homosexual and aand aand a preacher of the superiority of homosexuality to heterosexuality, so there was a double meaning in that. end of excerpt cspan theres a dedication in your book to the one but for whomshould we assume that. Guest i think you have to assume that, yes. Cspan wherewhere did you meet mr. Podhoretz . Guest oh, when we met, he was a kid, he was about 16 and i was his older friend. He used to cry on my shoulder. And then life took us apart. I got married and i had two children, and he went off to cambridge and then he was in the army. And then i got divorced and then we ended up working together in the same office, and. Cspan where . Guest at commentary magazine. And that was that. Cspan what year did you marry . Guest we married in 1956. Cspan when he was here, he said to me, please stop me because i tend to ramble. the only reason i mentioned that, heyou know, hehe has long answers to questions. You dont seem to be that way. You seem to have short answers to questions. Guest yes. Well, hehes a wonderful talker and hes a much more wonderful talker than i am, and i have spent more than 40 years listening to him with great pleasure. Cspan how often do you disagree, and on what kind of thing . Guest well, we disagreed for a while now and then about disciplining the children. Thats a kind of classic disagreement between a mother and a father, but it was more serious then because it was a bad time. But kidsit was getting to be a very bad time for kids, and he was right and i was wrong, and when i realized this, that was it. But otherwise, we havent really had any serious disagreements. Cspan not on politics. Guest not on politics. Cspan what were your disagreements about raising kids . Guest well, i was far more liberal, i was a classic 1950s mama, and that my children be happy and give evidence of being happy was the most important thing to me, which i think was true of all of us of my generation, and our children did not benefit from this one bit. Cspan why . Guest well, because we were supposed to represent the world to them and it was our job to teach them how to live in the world, not to change the world to conform to their very young and inexperienced and ignorant ideas. And he was terrific, because he didnt care what opinionwhat the common opinion was. He knew what he thought, and of course he was right. Cspan and you had two children by your first marriage and two by your second . Guest yes, right. Cspan letletslets look at one of those children, because hes the other person thats appeared on here. Guest my baby. excerpt from december 19, 1993, booknotes cspan your dedication is for my mother, i manned the lifeboat. For my father, to whom this not in any way a letter. And for tod lindberg, a paragon of friendship, wisdom and good cheer. whats athat all about . Mr. John podhoretz ok. Well, my mother and father are bothare both writers, and my mother wrote a book in 1976. Cspan your moms name . Mr. Podhoretz midge dectercalled liberal parents, radical children, the dedication to which was to my children man the lifeboats. so, my father, who was a writer named Norman Podhoretz, who has published many books and is the editor of commentary magazine, wrote a book in 1967 called making it, which is dedicated to me and my sisters. The dedication says to whom this is in many ways a letter. so my dedimymy dedication says this book is in no way a lettera letter to you. end of excerpt leonard where does the writing come from . Guest i dont know. Where does writing come from . It comes from very, very far back. Most writers arestart scribbling when theyre little kids, especially that one. God, he scribbled from the timepractically from the time he could form letters. And you usually start out wanting to be a poet because thats the easiest. You can write poems without knowing anything. And norman wrote poems longer than i did. I got over that very quickly. And i dont know where it comes from. Cspan three daughters. Do they write . Guest yes, they do. Leonard what kind of things do they write . Guest well, one has been the editor of the weekend magazine of the jerusalem postshe lives in jerusalemand one used to write editorials for the washington times, and she now does public relations. Cspan and the third . Guest the third writes seldom, though she writes very, very well, and she has become an artist, actually. She makes these wonderful ceramic tiles with pictures on them. Theyre wonderful. Cspan what has thethe written word done for you in your life and your husband and your son . And if you hadnt had it, how would your life have been different . Guest its hard to imagine what it would have been. I mean, this was what we did. It was also the way we made our livelihood, being a writer, being an editor. I didnt make much of a livelihood being a writer. I was a freelancer, and writing for highbrow magazines doesnt actually bring you much in the way of income. But we were all in that game and john, too, is an editor. Cspan what was the first thing you ever wrote . Guest the first thing i ever wrote. Hmm. The first thing i ever wrote seriously forand wathat was published was for commentary, and it was a review of a play onnot on broadway, off broadway. Cspan how did you get to commentary in the first place . Start at the beginning. Where were you born . Guest i was born in minnesota. Cspan what town . Guest in st. Paul, minnesota. I was the youngest of three girls and i wasi remember wantingdreaming of coming to new york from abthe time i was about six or seven years old. The first time i was brought to new york and i saw all theseall these people and the smells and the sights and the sounds, and ii never got over it, and i havent gotten over it to this day. Im still capable of, at dusk particularly, riding through central park in a taxi and saying to myself, look where you are. cspan what was so different about new york from st. Paul . Guest well, st. Paul was a very closeknit community. We were jews and the jews tended to live in a closeknit community, and everybody behaved in a certain way and everybody thought a certain way andi dont know. I justi was justi just longed for the big city. And i had no skills. I knew how to doi couldnt do anything. And when i had to go to work, the only thing i knew how to do was type, and not very well, and through a series of circumstances, i got a job on commentary as a secretary to the managing editor. And then i left to have two children, and then when i divorced, i went back there, this time to work as the secretary to the editor in chief. And its verytheres a funny story, because the managing editor for whom i worked was a friend of Norman Podhoretz. They had had a friendship, and norman was in germany in the army, and they were corresponding. And one day this man, robert warshow, wrote a letter to norman and said, theres someone here who says she knows you. Her name is midge decter, and if her typing ever improves she may be here when you get back. my typing never improved, but i was there anyway. Cspan how did you get to new york . Guest iwell, i blackmademailed my parents, actually, is what i did. I told them i wanted to study hebrew and i wanted to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary of america, where they had a college of hebrew studies, and there was no way they could say no to that. Cspan you say in your book that your mother and father met through zion, theirtheir mutual. Guest thats right. They were zionists and i was brought up a zionist. Cspan what does that mean . Guest that means that we cared about what was then palestine and the Jewish Community there and were hoping that that would be a National Home for the jews. And then came the holocaust and then that hope turned into something else. It turned into aa necessity and a demand and a passion. Cspan you say that you also went to dachau in your. Guest yes. That was in the late 60s, we went to germany on a. Cspan whyyou and your husband . Guest yeahon a junket, a group of us went, on some kind of junket. And they asked us where we wanted to go, and i sai wrote down a concentration camp. and i ti heard later that theour german hosts were very flustered by this request. They were not happy with it andbut they took us to dachau, which was basically the mostthe most attractive, if you want to put it that way, that was all cleaned up andand so on. But it was just as revealing as ifin its own way as if we had gone to auschwitz, which was much bigger and much worse. Cspan revealing in what way . Guest well, it was those ovens that got me. They werent much used in dachau. They were used only a little bit. But i hadi had this vision ofof a kind of great holocaust, some great fiery thing that the jews were thrown into. These were ovens like the size of a bakers oven, with a kind of shelf on which two people took a body, opened the door and pushed one body in. So it was very personal. It wasnt some big mass anything. Each one of those bodies was thrown into that oven by two people. That made it a very different image in my mind. Cspan did it change the nature of your trip then, once that visit was over . Guest well, no, it didnt, really. It confirmed all my feelings and my passions, but it didnt really, because the germans were just as nice as they could be. And theres a very funny story. We were being entertained in some very grand home in dusseldorf, and theour host had an enormous, wonderful art collection, and the hostess said, we were not hit at all during the war. None of these pictures was injured. and i said, oh, isnt that wonderful . i heard myself saying, oh, thats wonderful. and then i said, girl, youre in some kind of confusion here. cspan what about world war ii andand its overall impact on you and the country, and whatswhat was the last. Guest well, world war ii was the last really emotionally simple thing. We were in it. It was very big. Everybody was in it, everybody. People workedthey either worked for it or they were in the army. You know, tom brokaw has written these books calling them the greatest generation. they were not great. They were just ordinary people whom the government called on and who answered that call. And they hated the army and they groused and there were jokes about it. It wasnt that they were all saying, hooray. Lets go get them, at all. Its a miserable thing to be a san infantrymen in an army, especially in a bloody war like that. But they felt that they were being depended on by their country, and they were. And so they answered the call, grousing all the way, but it didnt matter. And, of course, everybody was working and everybody was involved and. Guest the holocaustdid you know about it during world war ii, or how much did you know . Guest yes, yes, noti didnt know all of it, but i knew about it. There were books and there werethere were books about what had gone on in germany, even at the beginning of the war, to the jews. And then little by little, onethere were people who now say, we didnt know, but thats nonsense. Everybody knew, including the us government, by 1943 maybe. Cspan so in 1943, you would have been a member of what Political Party and what would your politics have been . Guest well, i was a kid in high school, honestly. Cspan go beyond that, you know, another couple years. Guest well, i was a democrat. Everybody i knew was a democrat every jew in this country was a democrat and roosevelt was our god. He was gonna save us all and he wasits very hard toits hard to describe whatto others who dontwho werent there to experience it what this meant. And, of course, there were a lot of people in this country who really loathed roosevelt, but i didnt know any and i didnt meet any until i was very well grown and already had began to have a more complex idea about society than i had had then. But he was. Cspan are you still a registered democrat . Guest i am. Cspan and youyou at one point in the book talk about why. Guest well, being a registered democrat made mei mean, iii no longer believe in the Democratic Party at all, but two things. First of all, if youif you live in new york and there are primary campaigns, youre practically disenfranchised if youre not a democrat. You dont get toyour vote doesnt carry any weight. So thats one thing. Thats a ma less important thing than the fact that all my conservative friends had need of democrats. I served on a board and two commissions where, of course, you know, in washington there has to be an array of everybody and so i was very popular then with my conservative friends as a democrat. I was useful. So theythey told me, dont, dont, dont change your registration, and i never have. Cspan is that possibly one of those things that makes people cynical about politics, where youre really not a democrat, but you stay a democrat and they use you toin the appointment process . Guest well, i dont know. I suppose you could say its ai dont know. cynical is too strong a word, i think. Cspan . unintelligible . Guest its kind of. Cspan whawhat boards and what commissions did you serve on . Guest well, i served on the board of Radio Broadcasting to cuba. That. Cspan radio marti . Guest yeah, radio marti. That wasthat was the most important one. And then there was a president ial commission on hunger which was. Cspan which president . Guest that was reagan. It was quite early in his administration, but it was reallyit was a kind of boondoggle in the sense that there were all sorts of claims that there were starving people all over the United States, the poor were beingyou know, their faces were being ground. And so it was decided that there should bethe president should appoint a commission to go around and examine this question. And it wasit was very pleasant and it was nonsense, basically. Cspan but in the middle of all this, you not only worked for commentary, which by the way, for someone whos never read it iswhatwhat is it about, the magazine . Guest commentary is a monthly publishedformerly published by the American Jewish committee and now only partly sponsored by the American Jewish committee, which is a monthly of general, political, cultural and social interests with some emphasis on those things that are of special interest to jews. Cspan like what . Whats of special interest to jews . Guest well, right now the state of israel is a very special interest to jews. Cspan you think that will ever work over there . Guest well, ever is a very big word, and i have to pray that it will because there aretheres a whole community of people there, and they are americas only reliable allies in that part of the world, although the United States is notat this point is not behaving as if they are. They are, and theyre under terrible pressure to make peace with people who dont want to make peace with them. And my daughteri have four grandchildren there and i worry about them plenty. Cspan what is the draw for a jew to israel . Guest well, itsi guess its different for different jews, but it isits their historic place. Its where judaism started. Its where they were. They had a kingdom there. Then they got scattered. But every single saturday morning in synagogue they pray to see the place and to return to the place, and they remember it andyou know, so it never really left jewish consciousness. The only jews for whom it didnt matter were those who didnt like being jews very much. Cspan what was the draw for your daughter to live there instead of, say, living in the United States . And youve had more than one daughter live there . Guest well, theyno. There wereall three of them went there. One went for a year and another went for two years, but theythey werent going stay. They came back. But this one went to go to school there. Cspan her name . Guest her name is ruthor ruthie, actually. Thats what everybody calls her and what happened she went to the university and she met a boy. Cspan what university . Guest the Hebrew University at jerusalem, and she met a boy and she married him and that was that. Cspan to this day. Guest and she is a real citizen of that country. Cspan what does it mean to be jewish . Guest that is a question in answer to which volumes, libraries, oceans of words have been written. Cspan what does it mean to you . Guest what does it mean to me . It means a connection with this long history. And i do have some religious feelings. I mean, by religious jews, they wouldnt consider me one, but i do have some feeling about this and its a long thing. And then theres this other thing. Theits an issue of pride after the holocaust to remain a jew. They tried to wipe us out. Well, by god, the hell with them. Thatthats a verythats a very big part of this impulse, i think, now. I dont know what will happen to jews in the future. That wont be part of theiri thinki dont think that will be part of their feeling about this, perhaps. But itsits thousands of years. Its not so easy to escape that. Cspan you said earlier that youre not so sure about the United States commitment to israel. Guest well, i mean, of course, the United States has been committed to israel and has been very important, but at this point, the United States is out toto make a coalition with the very people whose terrorist forces have been battering israel since it became a state. Thereve been five wars and how many intifadahs . And i wentyou know, and i heard that they were going to talk to syria, which is a great sponsor of terrorism, in order to include syria in this great coalition. And, of course, now the line is on the part of people who are unfriendly to israel that its because of americas commitment to israel that were now being terrorized by the terrorists, which is nonsense. Cspan what if, for some reason or other, it was proved that that was the reason . And itand it became that thatwhether you liked it or not, that was the issue . How would you solve it then if these folks that live in syria and gaza and. Guest well, i wouldnt sthe only way i could solve it is so say, this is crazy. You do not temporize with beastly people, because ifif theyre not coming after you now, theyll ce after you later. Thats what id say. And theres one corner of western civilization in that area, and thats israel, and it isits a western country, and its a democracy, and were supposed to be for that. Cspan howbutbut again, how would you solve this problem if youif somebody turned this over to you and said, midge decter, weve got to solve this problem one way or the other or its gonna bethis neverthis stuff is never gonna stop. what would do you do . Guest well, the first thing would i do is take out saddam hussein. Thats Unfinished Business that should have happened during the gulf war. Cspan take him personally out . Guest take him and his government personally out. Cspan kill them . Guest yes, or imprisonget them out of power. Which would, by now, mean killing them. And their stheir guard and their supporters and so on, get them out of there. It wasnt for israel that we went to fight that war. Cspan what did we do it for . Guest well, the ostensible reason was to get them out of kuwait, but itthat wasthat country was a source of terrible antiwestern agitation andand plotting and building weapons and all that. It was the enemy. We do have enemies, you know, and we went to war against this one andand stopped. Cspan how far would you go . If youre gonna kill innocent civilians in the process, what do you do about that . Guest we killed a lot of innocent civilians. Thats what war does. Thats what war does. We killed a lot of innocent germans and a lot of innocent japanese, after all. And would have had it come to that, killed a lot of other innocent people, if that war had gone on. Cspan whats the second. Guest itswar is notthe war aint beanbag, if i could borrow the phrasephrase from mr. Dooley. Cspan what is the second thing you would do . Take out saddam hussein. Guest yes, and i would do whati would do what Paul Wolfowitz said we have to do. We have to get rid of all those governments that give house room to terrorists. Cspan syria . Guest syriaabsolutely syria, and iran. Cspan but if you go into syria, who do you take out . Guest you take out the ruling party. Cspan the king . Guest absolutely. Cspan not the king. I didnt mean the king. You know thesorry. Guest well, theres no king there. I meanyes. You take outyou take out the ruling party. I mean, you know, its not pleasant. This stuff is not dancing around the maypole. This is serious business, and you have to do very nasty things. And i say this knowing that as a woman, i would not be on the front lines of this. Cspan who should be on the front lines of it . Guest well, the american soldiers. Cspan no women . Guest oh, no, never. Im against that. Cspan why . Guest well, im sure, first of all, that they interfere with the warfare. Second of all, there has to be some difference. Women have the thing they have to do, which is to look after other things. They have to look after children. The worstthe most obscene thipicture i ever saw on this subject was on the front page of the yew york post whenthe day there was a big shipment of people to saudi arabia during Desert Shield and there was a picture of a woman in full field dress with a helmet and all kissing the head of a babymust have beenlooked about three months old, being held in the arms of its father. Now theres something wrong with a society where the father is holding the baby and the mother is going off to war. I dontit seems to me selfevident. I dont know why we have to. Cspan you know, though, in israel it could happen. Guest no. They startedthey tried. Girls are drafted in israel, but theyre nottheyto begin with, they were going to be in combat and the men all said, no, get them out of here because it interferes with our capacity to fight because were worried about them all the time and if we hear them screaming or something, we cant go on. so the girls in the israeli army do other things. They run the radios and the communications and things like that, which are not combat jobs. Cspan so go back to the israel situation. What would you do about the arafatpalestinian situation . What would you do about him . Guest well, i mean, theyve beenthey set him up. The israelis foolishly set him up as the leader with whom theyre going to deal, and he canthe cant give them peace and he cant make a deal with them and he doesnt want to make deal with them. So whatwhatwhat i would do about him is ignore him and keep my powder dry and wait until maybe someday somebody who really means to make peace would come along. Cspan but what is peace, do you think, to a palestinian . Guest well, they by and large depend on israel for their livelihood at this point. The palestinians come into israel and make a living. Peace would be their decision to stoptoto make ato reach a real settlement, which they havent shown the least bit of interest in doing. Cspan do they get their own state . Guest i guess theyd have to get their own state, but theythey cant have their own state now. This man, arafat, and his Palestinian Authority aretheyretheyre being paid for by america and also by israel, and the guns that those socalled policemen who are really arafats army have, were put in their hands by israel at a point when they really thought they had a deal, and they dont so what they have to do is keep their powder dry and combat palestinian terrorism as best they can. Theyre not bad at it. For every bombing you hear about, there are probably three or four youthat have been put off. Cspan as you know, a number of the terroristsi dont know what the number waswere egyptians, andyou know, and this whole camp david agreement and everything, we give the egyptians Something Like 2 billion. Guest yes, thats right. Cspan . A year to keep peace with israel. What do you think of all that . Guest well, the egyptians arethey play a very dirty game. They are the center of antisemitic propaganda maybe in the whole world now. And they made a Peace Agreement and so far they havent gone to war, though theyre now making funny momotions in the sinai. And they did very well making peace with israel. They got the whole sinai back and the oil wells and all that. And the government of egypt is quite weak and being pushed around by these terrorists, and its a very bad situation. But i think if youif you started bringing them down in other places, then they would be weakened in egypt. Cspan go back to thetheyouryour earlier premise. You say that the terrorism thats going on has nothingdoes it have nothing to do with israel . Guest well, they practice it against israel if they could, but theythey hate us. You know, thats something that americans are very poor at understanding. They really hate us. Cspan hate jews or hate americans . Guest hate americans. Hate westerners. Cspan how many . What do you think the percentage of the arabs in this world hate americans . Guest i dont know. Probably fairly high. Devout, devout muslims. Because look at us. Our women walk around half naked. They work side by side with men all these things, which are anan insult to islamic practice. They dont like our civilization. Cspan are theyare some of our practices an insult to you . Guest to me . Cspan yeah. Well, you write about your friend Betty Friedan in here and the feminine mystique and those changes. Guest oh, well, that. Thats different. Those are different. Those are different. Yes, they arethey arei just think that thatsBetty Friedan and the Womens Movement have done very bad things to american women and american men as a consequence. Cspan tell us some of those things. Guest thats a different issue. Cspan different entirely . Guest yes, different entirely. Well, you see, this is a difficultthis modern period is a difficult time for women. Its also a time full of opportunity. And the opportunity was not given them by the Womens Movement that stormed around. The opportunity was created for women by medical technology, among other things. They are in Better Health and they stay alive longer and they stay young and strong and they donttheyre not sapped by having a dozen children, and so on. Nowand this has given them new freedom, and freedom brings difficulties and fears, especially if its entirely unprecedented. And so what you want to do to these women is give them courage, not say to them, you are oppressed. Youve been oppressed for 12,000 years. Men are your oppressors, whether theyre your husbands or your bosses or your teachers or all that. Its all nonsense. That wasnt what it was. And theyvetheyve made women very unhappy, actually, by doing this. Cspan how do you know theyre unhappy . Guest well, thetheres the evidence of the women in their late 30s and 40s who are now desperately looking for husbands, or unable to find husbands, have discoveredguess what . They want to have children. They never knew this before because their heads were so rattled with this stupid propaganda. And it gets very hard to have children when youre that age. And by then, thereve beentheres been so much warfare against men that the men are quite skittish. And the relations between the sexes are dreadful, for no reason. And i also felt that, you know, you look around the world, theres so much suffering all over the place, and women suffer and maybe they suffer more than men in africa and in muslim countries. And then you look at american women. Theyre healthy, theyre vital, theyre employed, they are educated, and for them to claim that theyve been oppressed is justits immoral. Cspan you dont think men have oppressed women in any way . Guest no. Nature oppressed them insofar as they were oppressed, though i wouldnt use that word. I mean, thats crazy. It was the nature of things that prevented them from doing a lot of things that they now do. Cspan when you look back at your own career, you had commentary, you had harpers. For how longhow long were you are harpers . Guest about five years. Cspan what else did you do in the professional world . Guest well, very brief time i was at the saturday review. That wasthat wasthat was not. Cspan norman cousins. Guest yes. And i like him. Hes a very nice man and we got along, but we couldnt work together. Were just too far apart on everything. And i was supposed to be his managing editor, you know. So it didnt work. Cspan he is very liberal and the news team. Guest yes, yes, he is. And he waswas a big environmentalist and i thought it was a lot of nonsense, and so we just didnt see eye to eye. It was a silly thing for me to do to take that job and it was silly for him to hire me and we both understood that quickly, so we parted amicably. And then i went to work as a book publisher. Cspan where . Guest at basic books. Cspan howd you get along there . Guest oh, i got along fine. I meanexcept that iyou know, i made myself an apprentice inin middle age. I was suddenly an apprentice again. So i had to start all over again like a big dumb beginner, which i found kind of uncomfortable. But then after a while, i caught on and it was ok, except by then, as i write in this book, i was such a passionate ideologue that i was no good for Book Publishing after a while either because Book Publishers are supposed to be entirely neutral politically. Theyre supposed to publish whatever they think will sell. Its a business, and so i got myself out of that. Cspan howthis is your fourth book, fifth book . Guest this is my fourth book. Cspan fourth book. Reganbooks, harpercollins. Guest yes. Cspan how did youhow is it that judith regan published this book . What led to this . Guest youd have to ask her i wrote it. I gave it to my agent. My agent showed it around. Cspan what did youwhat did you want to say in thisi mean. Guest judith regan bought it. Cspan . What was the purpose of the book . What was your challenge here . Guest well, the purpose of the book was to say that i think having lived through all these various periods, i learned something about being a woman and about being a mother, although it took me a long time, and about being an american. And so i thought, well, you know, imim getting old and ive gone through all these various stages. The one thats the most distorted in peoples memories is the 50s. And i thought i would dotry to do a little justice to the 50s, which was a muchinsulted decade, even by the people who lived through the 50s themselves. And everybodythethethe betting line on the 50s is that it was a big materialisticwhen i think aboutwhen i think about us postwar. We were the postwar grownups and we berated ourselves for being materialistic. And when i think about the people who are in their 30s now, i have to laugh. I mean, so we were buying washing machines with our big materialism and houses and sort of making a life. Butso it wasit was much denigrated era. And i thought id say, you know, we were people and we were doing this and we were doing that, but we were leading our lives and we werent oppressed andnor were we conformists. We were just trying to get along after a big war. Cspan back around to today and what weve been talking about throughout the program. Again, the current state of the United States and the israeli situation. How you gonna solve this problem . I dont mean you personally, but how are we as a country gonna solve the israeli problem. Or can we . What impact should wewhatwhat should we do to make it happen . Guest well, i think whenwhen george bushgeorge w. Bush became president and announced that seeing what clinseeing what clintons activismhe was not going to be a activist with ishe was just going to let the situation go in israel. We all said, hooray, because american interference, political interference and Foreign Policy interference has not been helpful. Not a bit. And, look, the peacemaking that clinton was involved in resulted in israelis offering the palestinians everything, everything; more than they can possibly afford to do fromfrom the point of view of their security, and he turned it down that should have been message enough to leave it alone. But instead now bush is getting interested in israel, too. And thats verythats very bad. Cspan do you think they think that thats part of whats going on in the world with the terrorists and all . Guest i think that colin powell, who believes in making this coalition, very important to have this coalition, which thwarted us in the gulf war and will thwart us again, but he believes in it and hes convinced bush of it, i guess. And they think that israel is an impediment to the coalition, but thethe coalition is crazy in the first place. Cspan can we do it by ourself . Guest we can certainly do it with nato, and nato is on board i dont know what we need those guys for. Cspan what if you bomb and take out whatever you have to take out in the situation and youve made all the arab countries mad . Guest the saudis werent mad when we went to war against saddam hussein. Itsitsits childish to think that. Theyre notthey have business among themselves and theyre not all friends. Theyre notthere isnt some big political unity called islam. And arabs are not even the majority of muslims in the world, you know. And were big and they depend on us. And we can say, cut it out, but we never do. Excuse me. Cspan at the end of your book on the last page on a postscript you say, i am certain that part of our deep discomfort in this comfortable of all possible worlds has to do with our having fallen into a potentially very dangerous combination of arrogance and deep bewilderment. what do you mean . Guest well, i think were living as people have never lived before. Never. Excuse me. And we dont know our way. We dont know how to do this. We dont know how to live into our 90s. We dont know how to live without physical suffering. We dont know how to accept hardship, and when it comes it feels like an injustice. The things that people lived with always throughout history, wewe find ourselves cut off from the sources of human wisdom and experience because this life is so new and we are bewildered i think we are. Cspan youve been married to Norman Podhoretz now for. Guest fortysix years. Cspan has it gotten better with age . Guest oh, yes. Oh, yes. Cspan what about motherhood . Better with age . Guest well, mymy daughters have honored me greatly. They really have. Theyre all mothers and theyre wonderful mothers, and i feel honored by that. Cspan you say in the book you think youre gonna live to have greatgrandchildren. Guest well, i think about it, but thats greed. Cspan this is the cover of the book, an old wifes tale my seven decades in love and war. Our guest has been midge decter thank you very much. Exploring the life of the first celebrity general looking at shermans military strategy and personal and professional relationships. Matthews steward examines the philosophical thinking of americas Founding Fathers in natures god, the radical origins of the American Republic joshua horowitz, cofounder and publisher of living planet books reports on the u. S. Naval technology that has an intensely driven whales on the beaches. More of the whales. Look for these titles in bookstores this coming weekend watch for the authors in the near future on book tv and on booktv. Org. Now on book tv from book expo america publishing industrys annual trade show, jake halpern discusses his soontobe published book bad paper chasing debt from wall street to the underworld