September 1981

SPAN 2 The Common Sense of "Human Rights"

by Irving Kristol

4

America's First Woman Supreme Court Judge

by Beth Kinsley

.

5

The Facts of Science Fiction

by Charles Nicol

10 How True to Science Is Science Fiction?

12 A World of Coal

by Ulf Lantzke

15 Expanding Use of Coal in India

by D.P. Kumar

18 "Her Honor, the Mayor"

21 "Let's Have a Meeting"

by Herbert E. Meyer

26

All the King's Men A Reconsideration by Nayantara Sahgal

28

Reflections on an Era

by Robert Penn Warren

33

A Law for All Seasons

by Elder Witt

36 Norman Mailer-The

Man and His Style

An Interview by Hilary Mills

40 Putting on a Good Show

44

On the Lighter .Side

45 Reappraisal of Arms Control

by Alexander Haig

Managing Editor Assistant Managing Editor

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Photographs: Front cover-lonathanBlair © National Geographic Society. Inside front cover-Chad Slattery. 5-Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive. 6-7~Pictures 1 to 4 © 1980 Lucasfilm, Ltd. All rights reserved: 1, 4-N ancy Moran; 3-George Whit~ar; 5-Christopher Springmann; 6-Warner Bros. 9-Metro-Goldwyn and Mayer, Inc. 1O-© 1978 Universal City Studios, Inc. 12-Louie Psihoyos© National Geographic Sotiety. 14,15, 17-Avinash Pasricha. 18-Clockwise from top left: Randy Leffingwell © Lensman Photos; © St. Petersburg Evening Independent; Bob Gorham © Lensman Photos; United Press Internation, al. 20 top-Michael E. Keating © Lensman Photos; bottom-Will McIntyre,IPeople Weekly © 1979 Time, Inc. 21,22,24, 25-cartoons reprinted from Fortune magazine. 30-31-The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 32-Copyright © 1967 Screen Gems, Inc. Inside back • cover top: San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau; center leftChristopher Springmann; cente~ right-San Diego Convention and I Visitors Bureau; bottom-,-Christopher Springmann. Back cover-Robert Phillips. Courtesy Exxon Corporation.

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Published by the International Communi~ationAgency, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New-Delhi 11000I, an behalf of the American Embassy., New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the'United States Government.

Printed by H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, , Haryana.

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For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: These lumps of coal inside a plastic gas can symbolize the challenge coal poses as an alternative source of energy for a fuel-starved world: The world has plenty of coal, but the problem lies in "pouring" it out for use. See pages 12-17.

Back cover: San Diego's beaches hold the promise of a holiday paradise.

See also page 49.

"I hope there will be a time," says fonner Cincinnati mayor Bobbie Sterne, "when women are just there and nobody's lining up to see how many there are." Few would disagree with her wish; but fewer still would think that time has arrived. So the count continues. That the number of American women holding mayoralty and other elective local offices rose from 7,944 in 1976 to 14,764 in 1980 (page 18) remains worth recording. The Cincinnati mayor's thought is certainly on the right track, because one of the most significant aspects of the political awakening of women in the United States is that they are concentrating on the same social and economic problems that concern men in similar positions. Not so long ago, their emphasis used to be on the so-called "women's issues" that tended to frame the "natural" area of their public activity. Happily, that is not so any more.

Hence President Reagan's appointment of Sandra Day 0' Connor a s the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States (see page 4 for an outline of her distinguished career) is of major significance. It breaks almost two centuries of exclusive male privilege in Reprinted with permission from Rothko Cartoons. Inc. the highest ranks of the judiciary in the Š 1980 by National Review.

United States.

Closely allied to this awareness of the right of women to play their part in public life is the continuity of the United States commitment to human rights, oddly highlighted by the new uses to which an old Act of 1871is being put today (page 33). Originally devised to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, it is now widely invoked in human rights cases totally unrelated to race. "Our polity," says Irving Kristol, commenting on the place of human rights in American foreign policy today (page 2), "after all, is founded on the idea of the individual's rights." Tempered as this must be by the imperatives of national interest, the continued importance of human rights in the making of U.S. foreign policy has been made amply clear by many¡ voices in the present administration. As President Reagan has said, "Putting people first has always been America's secret weapon."

Amongthose who have reiterated and expounded the American view of human rights is Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

I!er recent visit to India fonned an important part of the dialogue between India and the United States that continues uninterrupted despite differences of perception in particular areas of national interest. Anns control, particularly nuclear arms control, is a goal shared by both countries although perceived in different ways. U.S. policy in this respect has recently been redefined by Secretary of State Alexander Haig (page 45) in a speech of major importance.

Finally, political morality is the subject of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men. The background to the famous work is recalled by the author (page 28) and the novel itself discussed by a distinguished Indian writer who finds it "built to last."

- ..•M.P. I

THE COMMON

SENSE OF "HUMAN RIGHTS" The United States must integrate a conception of human rights into its , foreign policy.

"Our polity, after all, is founded on the idea of¡ an individual's rights."

Recently, NBC network news, informed us that the United States was contemplating sending arms to Pakistan, as part of a new military alliance. Immediately following the transmission of this bit of "hard news," we were further informed that Pakistan is a nation where the legal code still permits the public flogging of criminals and where the political opposition is repressed. In this way we were given notice by the media that an alliance with Pakistan creates a serious "human rights" problem for us.

Does it? To give a reasonable answer to that question would require thoughtful reflection on the whole issue of human rights, something that has not been a notable characteristic of current controversy. Instead, we have been treated mainly to vacuous moralism, hypocritical and tendentious exposes, and (more recently) a "hardheaded realism" that tends to evade the issue altogether.

If we in the United States are ever to integrate an idea of human rights into our foreign policy, as I think we must, Wf; f\r~ not goiqg abQ\lt it v~ry ~Ycc~~sfYlly I want to emphasize that we really must integrate a conception of human rights into our foreign policy-into our alliances, our military aid programs, our economic aid prog~ams, our cultural exchanges, etc.: Our polity, after all, is founded on the idea of an individual's rights. Our foreign policy, to the degree that it rubs this idea the wrong way, will be guilt-ridden, uncertain, lacking in self-confidence. The United States never has had, never can have, and in my view never should try to have, a purely "geopolitical" foreign policy. Elements of Realpolitik will-surely have to be incorporated into our foreign policy, as in all foreign policies. But such "realism" has to I

About the Author: Irving Kristol is professor of social thought at the New York University Graduate School of Business, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a member of the Wall Street Journal's Board of Contributors.

be conceived and expressed in a way that allows us to live, if a bit uncomfortably now and then, with our moral selves.

So how do we go about achieving the desirable and necessary integration? Are there principles governing any such integration? I think there are. Moreover, I do not think they are particularly esoteric principles discernible only to the sophisticated political philosopher. Rather, I believe they are already fully, if implicitly, possessed by American popular opinion, are in accord with the "common sense" upon which such opinion rests, but are badly in need of articulation.

Let us see if we can elucidate the principles that are needed successfully to incorporate the idea of human rights into American foreign policy. There are, I would say, five such principles.

(1) The American idea of human rights involves rights against government. It' is important to emphasize this because postwar liberalism has purposefully expanded the idea of human rights to include a whole spectrum of "entitlements," identified as "rights," that are to be satisfied by government. The various United Nations declarations and resolutions, which list as "human rights" such items as vacations with pay, maternity leave, full employment and free medical care, are illustrative of this tendency. The American Government, in its moments of silliness, has actually signed such declarations and resolutions. But the American people never have subscribed to any such nonsense.

Actually, it is a rather dangerous piece of nonsense.

Such a conception of "human rights" permits left-wing ideologues to claim that, while the United States has a better record than, say, the Soviet Union or Cuba in certain areas of human rights, these latter nations can claim superiority in other areas-so, in sum, there really is no absolute difference, no difference in principle, between us and them. Indeed, the whole point of such a radical expansion of the idea of "human rights" is to minimize the importance of individual liberty as. the keystone of that idea.

This permits dozens of nations to make solemn speeches

in th~ \l.N. in favQr Qf "human right:!" whi1~ blandly restricting and repressing individual liberty at home. It would be a blessing if the United States began to move openly and deliberately to dissociate itself from this U.N. smokescreen. That would assuredly cause an enormous flap, both at the U.N. and among our own liberal folk. But it would be well worth while.

(2) Rights against government are to be distinguished from democratic rights-Le., rights to participate in self-government. Though it is natural for Americans to wish to see all peoples govern themselves more or less as we do, it is obvious that the world is full of peoples who, as things now stand, are unable or unwilling to do so. The United States does have a missionary vocation for democracy-but only to the extent that our successful

example encourages others to emulate us.

It is not really for us to insist that any or every country should have free elections or universal suffrage-that is their affair. We do, however, have a historic mission to

"] disagree with the mann(!r in which you've addressed the issue, but] will defend to the death your right to so address it."

defend the rights of the individual against arbitrary or tyrannical government, whether that government expresses the popular will or (as is more often the case) does not.

It is a mission that has been an organic aspect of our very self-definition as a nation, ever since its origins.

(3) In reality, of course, there are always more complications, more shades and varieties of repression than abstractions about human rights can cope with. So it is useful to have a workable set of priorities in mind. It seems to me that there are four human rights which are of such prime significance to Americans that, when any nation violates them, we promptly have a problem in our relations with that nation. They are: • The practice of torture-not "harsh treatment" but literal torture-against political opponents is so fundamentally obnoxious as to be always and everywhere unacceptable to us. Torture is an assault on the metaphysical concept of human dignity itself, from which our belief in individual rights is derived. Where its presence has been demonstrated, we ought to make our disapproval clear in every possible way.

• The right to emigrate is the most basic of all individual rights, since it tends automatically to set limits to what an authoritarian or totalitarian regime can do. (The relative "liberalism" of Communist Yugoslavia is certainly connected with the freedom of emigration it permits.) I regard it as nothing less than a scandal that our representatives to the U.N. have, over the years, deliberately ignored this issue, presumably for fear of offending Soviet sensibilities.

• Religious toleration is an idea so fundamental to the American way of life, so rooted in American traditions, that we simply cannot be indifferent to violations of that idea. Mind you, I am talking about religious tolerationi.e., freedom from religious persecution-not religious equality and definitely not separation of church and state.

These last are American ideas, not necessarily exportable.

If a nation wishes to have a state-established religion, with special privileges, that is its affair. But freedom from religious persecution is a human right whose universality we must insist on.

Here again, our official and utter indifference to the

violation of this human right-an indifference so visible at the U.N.-is a major scandal. Why haven't those representatives at the U.N. criticized the current government of Iran for its vicious persecution of the Bahais? When was the last time those representatives denounced the Soviet Union for persecuting pious' Christians, Jews and Muslims? One suspects that this reflects the secular temper of the State Department, the media, the intellectual community. But we can be certain it does not reflect the temper of the American people .

• The rights of racial minorities were not always thought

by Americans to represent a fundamental human right, but they have unquestionably acquired that status in recent decades. A nation which fails to recognize those rights inhabits a different moral universe from us and is unacceptable as friend and ally. Again, as with religion, it is not a question of 'political rights but of civil rights. In America, we insist that racial and religious minorities are entitled to both classes of rights. But American practice may not be readily exportable to other multiracial or multireligious societies. In contrast, our idea of individual civil rights-involving access to due process of law and protection of an individual's property and personal security-is one which we indeed take to be universal.

(4) Recently, discussions of human rights have often hinged on the distinction between "totalitarian" and "authoritarian" countries. It is, I believe, a valid distinction and provides some rough guidelines for our human rights policies. Totalitarian states deny in principle our idea of human rights, and will tend habitually to violate all of them. Authoritarian regimes merely assert the irrelevance of our idea to their reality, and in both theory and practice will recognize at least some of the fundamental rights I have made reference to.

Under authoritarian regimes there is always some ground for hope for an evolution toward a more liberal system. (We have witnessed that very evolution in Spain.)

Totalitarian regimes exist precisely to rule out the possibility of any such evolution. Our attitudes toward these two very different kinds of illiberal system are bound to reflect these realities.

(5) In the real world of international power politics we are always forced, more frequently than we would like, to compromise our principles. There is nothing immoral about the American Government's bowing to this inevitability. What is wrong, however, is for the government not to explain candidly to its people exactly why it is doing so.

This may ruffle the. sensibilities of some foreign governments-but that is a price we should insist they be prepared to pay.

In extreme situations, of course, discussions of human rights become a luxury, and the governing principle then becomes: The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Just when a situation is so extreme it is not easy to say, short of actual armed conflict. There are not, thank goodness, many places in the world today where our foreign policy is entrapped in such dire extremity-which is why I believe that the issue of human rights is a real one :;ill.dhas to be integrated, better than it has been, into a realistic foreign

p~~.

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President Ronald Reagan broke almost two centuries of male " exclusivity in the high, est ranks of American ,'judiciary by naming Sandra Day O'Connor to serye on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Calling O'Connor i "a person for all \ seasons," President Reagan fulfilled a :: - ~ eam aign promise to ; 1 ., name a woman I to the high court at an early opportunity. No woman has sat on America's highest tribunal, which first convened in 1790.

The President has emphasized, however, that he did not appoint O'Connor because of her sex alone. "That would not be fair to women, nor to future generations of all Americans whose lives are so deeply affected by the decisions of the Court," he said. "Rather I pledged to appoint a woman who meets the very high standards I demand of all court appointees. I have identified such a person."

O'Connor, who currently sits on the Arizona Court of Appeals, the state's second highest court, said she would do her best "to serve the Court and this nation in a manner that will bring credit to the President, to my family and to all the people of this great nation."

At 51, O'Connor has a long background in law and politics. She was born in El Paso, Texas, to a ranching family.

She graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1950 and with a law degree two years later, in both cases with high honors.

While in law school, she also served as an editor on the Stanford Law Review and was made a member of the Order of the COIF, an hon0rary legal body.

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One of O'Connor's classmates at Stanford was John Jay O'Connor III, whom she married. He now practices law in Phoenix, Arizona. They have three sons.

Another classmate was William Rehnquist who is now a Supreme Court Justice. He graduated first in his law class. O'Connor was third.

Judge O'Connor spent six years in private practice in Arizona, then served as assistant attorney general for the state from 1965 through 1968. When an opening occurred in the Arizona Senate in 1969, she was temporarily appointed to fill the slot. Subsequently, she won election to two full terms and, in 1973, was elected majority leader.

"She was a super floor leader," said William Jacquin, a former state Senator who now heads the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. "She was devoted to the law by the nature of her own professionalism and was extraordinarily thorough in drafting legislation."

As a state Senator, O'Connor supported the Feperal Equal Rights Amendment and then cast several votes that were taken as "proabortion" by organizations that oppose abortion. O'Connor also attempted, unsuccessfully, to push through a public medical assistance program for Arizona. She promoted constitutional spending limits and supported opening governmental meetings to the public. Although her efforts for the Equal Rights Amendment failed, O'Connor established herself as one of Arizona's advocates for women and did succeed in repealing an old Arizona law that limited women to working eight hours a day.

"American women have lacked acertain amount of job opportunity and have failed to receive equal pay for equal work," O'Connor said during debate on the amendment. "I feel strongly that qualified women should involve themselves more than they do now. They

should be particularly anxious to seek appointments in government or to seek out qualified women for political offices."

In 1972, O'Connor served as a state cochairperson of the committee to reelect Richard Nixon as President.

She voluntarily left the legislature in 1974 to run for Superior Court -judge in Phoenix, Arizona. She served on that court until she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979.

Associates of O'Connor have praised her for what they call her intellect, organizational ability and the integrity of her conservative views; "An excellent legal scholar," said Arizona Supreme Court Justice Jack Hays, adding: "She tends to the conservative area, but she is sound legally and could surprise a lot of people."

John Kolbe, the political editor of the Phoenix Gazette, said O'Connor's "image is that of a moderate. She is very thoughtful. She is extremely bright and has a razor-sharp mind .... " The Arizona Bar AssoCiation ratings of Arizona judges listed O'Connor near the top, with a combined excellent-good rating of 81 percent in 1980.

U.S. Attorney General William French Smith said O'Connor was selected because she shared President Reagan's "overall judicial philosophy" of "restraint" and deference to the legislative branch in making the law.

A recently published law review article

by O'Connor lends some support to the Attorney General's view. The article, in the William and Mary Law Review, dealt with the relationship between state and federal courts. O'Connor cited with approval recent Supreme Court decisions requiring federal judges to defer to some initial determinations by state court judges. "There is no reason to assume that state court judges cannot and will not provide a hospitable forum in litigating federal constitutional questions."

The U.S. National Women's Political Caucus celebrated the nomination as proof that "women are breaking the barriers of nearly 200 years of exclusion from decision making in our nation." Iris Mitgarig, who chairs the group, said it "will be a major step in moving toward equal justice in every court in our land."

Asked in a survey of former Stanford University stud_ents for her professional aim in life, O'Connor once said: "Attempting to administer old-time 'justice' 0 in a modern age."

4bout the Author: Beth Kinsley is a SPAN correspondent in Washington, D. C.

HOW TRUE TO SCIENCE IS SCIENCE FICTION'

L

Silent Running portrays a world denuded of its vegetation by nuclear pollution. Bruce Dern (above) plays a botanist determined to save the remaininl? botanical specimens despite orders for their destruction.

This robot first crushes its master and then merges with him as they descend into the Black Hole, apparently for eternal damnation.

We have had a few good SF movies lately. They have translated mental journeys into visual metaphors, and offhandedly shown the dangers of science while rolling in it like happy dogs in rotten earth. The classic 2001 ended with a message of renewal and, specifically, rebirth, but we should remember that its dazzling visual effects represented the trauma of that rebirth. We should also remember the struggle between Dave Bowman (played by Keir Dullea) and the giant computer HAL (one letter in advance of IBM), a reminder that humanity must always remain in control of its destiny.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, its title taken from the writings of the astronomer Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, was a hard-science epic, a convincing scenario for contact with interstellar Aliens. One of its locations was Devils Tower, Wyoming's giant volcanic monolith-5 sfluare kilometers wide, 264 meters high-which was designated as the United States' first National Monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Flying to San Francisco several months ago, I looked down from over 12,000 meters and saw Devils Tower rising in splendid isolation. The top of the tower was a bright, slanted ellipse in the morning sunlight, while an immense shadow leaned behind it across miles of brush and prairie-dog holes. It seemed a likely landmark from outer space.

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek was disappointing because it was merely an expanded episode of a 1960s television series, but a better series is hard to imagine. Roddenberry's faith in science is so great that his film ended with the happy mating of man and machine. His great creation, Spock, however, tells a different story. Spock embodies the rational, scientific attitude, and refuses to recognize the human half of his heritage.

Repressing his origins, Spock inevitably breaks out into occasional storms of rage, depression, and love.

Beyond these achievements of hard-science SF lie the limitless possibilities of art, the human drama beneath a burning star. May our screens succeed in exploring it.

0 About the Author: Charles Nicol, a professor of English at Indiana State University, is a former editor of Science Fiction Studies.

"Ninety-five percent of all science fiction is junk," says writer Theodore Sturgeon. "But then," he adds, "ninety-five percent of everything is junk."

The problem arises with the fact that science fiction's 95 percent is displayed in highly visible, widely viewed media-TV and movies-where it influences the minds of millions. What is it conveying to them-science or nonsense?

Novelist and screenwriter David Gerrold once had an enlightening argument with the director of a SF film who, with cavalier disregard for Newton's laws, wanted to show rockets falling in the wei..ghtlessness of outer space. The director was unimpressed by Gerrold's-or Newton's-Iogic. "That's how it was done in Star Wars," he pointed out.

"Star Wars," Gerrold replied, "had that wrong too."

"Star Wars," the director retorted, citing the ultimate truth, "is grossing $200 million al the box office."

"That," Gerrold realized. "was the end of the argument."

Is science fiction then all nonsense? SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin puts it succinctly: "The truth is that science fiction is not true. It isn't science. It's fiction. But ... there is a reason for what happens in science fiction and it is a rational reason."

"Science fiction must not contradict what is known to be known," says another writer of the genre, S.R. Delaney.

Where, then, does that leave the falling rockets?

In the realm of "fantasy" or "space opera" would be Le Guin's answer. SF, she explains, is a world apart from these two. "Fantasy covers all imaginative fiction ... except SF and horror stories." And she describes space opera as "mindless, macho, miserably imaginative; but ... it can be lots of fun and very pretty."

SF, which "dreads absurdily and loves logic," must be able to answer the questions "Why?" and "How?" asked at any point in the story. If it can't, then it isn't SF, it's fantasy, which, as Le Guin puts it, "admits reasons unknown to Reason."

SCIENCE FICTION FILM FESTI' AL IN INDIA The many worlds that science fiction exploresranging from outer space to the inside of a human body-are illustrated in the following synopses of films being shown at a SF film festival currently touring New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.

Fantastic Voyage (1966) Director: Richard Fleischer Cast: Stephen Boyd. Raguel Welch, Arthur Kennedy, Edmond O'Brien A submarine and five crew members are shrunk to cell size and shot into the bloodstream of a famous scientist dying of brain damage. With one hour to go before they burst back into full size they have to travel through the body, reach the brain, repair the clot, and deal with an enemy agent planted among the crew.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Producer and director: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter A black monolith left on the moon by unknown beings some three million years ago, on discovery sends out a signal to Jupiter, and an expedition is organized to follow the signal and make contqct with whoever may be waiting. Guided by the computer HAL-9000, a spaceship

But such explanations, while they do ascribe a respectability to SF, stop short of crediting it with absolute scientific reliability. It is, after all, fiction. What sets it apart from other forms of fiction is that it is based on valid scientific evidence coupled with the speculation of the thinking mind. It respects the way science arrives at fact and then proceeds to turn those very facts into fiction-because SF "is about what hasn't happened, but might; or what will never happen, but this is what it might be like if it did .... Science fiction works with ideas ... a step from is to if, a reach of the imagination into the nonexistent. But it is not a leap into the impossible or absurd," to quote Le Guin again.

Is science fiction, then, a few steps ahead of the real science?

Rolf M. Sinclair, a physicist with the U.S. National Science Foundation, seems to agree: "Sometimes it's hard to tell the far-seeing scientist from the conservative science fiction writer."

SF, in fact, has had a fairly good record as a technological prophet. Jules Verne, of course, started it all. Arthur Clarke talked of communication satellites long ago. And George Orwell keeps getting proved right-Dr. David Goodman, a psychobiologist, has analyzed 137 of the predictions made by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four written in 1948: to date more than 100 have been realized.

But do these very facts of science fiction become unscientific fantasy when translated into films? Have films given SF a bad name in the scientific community? Several films have certainly shown a tendency to take liberties with facts and the known laws of science. Le Guin agrees that fantasy does often creep into SF and dismisses it as "just a bit of laziness on the author's part, sloppy or wishful thinking."

The prognosis, however, is good. Just as prominent scientists like Isaac Asimov have moved into the science fiction arena, so have respected filmmakers like Steven Spielberg. The results may make the dreams of the lovers of the genre come true-even if the stories don't.

Science has already benefited. From being rabidly antiscientist and monster-ridden (mad scientists and science gone astray were favorite themes of the early movies), SF movies now

begins the odyssey, a voyage of extraordinary daring, unexpected dangers, and with an incredible conclusion: THX 1138 (1971) Director and editor: George Lucas Cast: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley THX-1l38 takes us to the world of A.D. 2400 which is virtually ruled by a tyranny of computers. In the hermetic horror of the subterranean city of tomorrow, we watch a man's struggle to escape from computer-enforced drug addiction and life as a programmed automaton.

At the end he succeeds in breaking out of the underground hell; before the setting sun, he crawls along the earth, a distant red figure more ant than man.

Silent Running (1972) Director: Douglas Trumbull

Cast: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint By the early 21st century, all vegetation on earth has died from nuclear pollutioH, and the only botanical specimens left-in the form of experimental forests of fruits, plants and animals-are preserved under huge geodesic domes aboard the Valley Forge, a space (reighter manned by botanist Freeman Lowell. Ground control orders their destruction, but Lowell is determined to save them.

Sleeper (1973) Director: Woody Allen Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, John Beck, Bartlett Robinson Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) goes into the hospital for a minor operation in 1973 and ends up being frozen into a time, capsule bound for The Future. He doesn't ge,t thawed out until 2173, and he wakes up understandably con-

bring the layman to a closer understanding of pure science, albeit in an oversimplified way.

Paying a tribute to real life science and showing a healthy regard for research, the makers of Star Trek turned to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for a technical adviser-Jesco Von Puttkamer, one of the engineers responsible for developing Saturn V rockets.

"Getting technical accuracy into a futuristic script isn't as easy as it sounds," says Puttkamer. "Sometimes technical truth does not go hand in hand with dramatic impact. On these occasions both sides have to compromise, and we'd come up with scenes that would be basically accurate but would also possess a solid sense of drama." Star Trek is set in the 23rd century and it was Puttkamer's job to make the inevitable fantasy credible. Based on projections of today's trends and ideas, he produced a "thumbnail" history of the next 250 years to "develop" 23rd-century technology. He admits that a lot of wishful thinking is involved-but no scientist can really quarrel with that element in SF as long as the basic assumptions are valid.

One shot that Puttkamer h-as changed for reasops of authenticity, showed a spaceship zooming past the rings of Saturn. "When Voyager sent back those wonderful shots of Jupiter, I had Douglas Trunbull [the special-effect wizard] look at the photos." Within a few weeks, the locale was switched from an imaginary Saturn to a real Jupiter. "You'll see a wonderfully accurate portrayal of one of the planets in our solar system," says Puttkamer.

"It will be animated and done with special effects, of course, but totally realistic ... the emotional impact of the scene is overwhelming.

This is science fact."

Is all today's science fiction tomorrow's fact? Even science cannot answer that one. In fact, it is answers that science yet has to give that form the core of SF. The world's shortest SF story,

by Fredric Brown, contains just two sentences: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door. ... " Science fiction, a reviewer concluded, is about whatever was knocking.

-A.D.

fused. On the run from the authoritarian authorities, he is forced to disguise himself as a robot, is assisted by a 200-yearold Volkswagen and a boat of slightly more futuristic gadgets, outsmarting the government agents, who are trying to zap him with their instant brain-washer, at every turn, finally overthrowing the whole thing single-handedly.

Zardoz (1974) Director: John Boorman Cast: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, John Alderton It is the year 2293 in a postcataclysmic world. Sealed off from a polluted "outside" world of warring "brutals" and "exterminators" the ever-youthful elite known as the "eternals," led by the beautiful Consuella, are coneerned with the growing internal decay of their "brave new world."

When Zed, an unexpectedly resourceful leader of the barbarian

"exterminators," is permitted entry into their Vortex the longsuppressed death wish takes over.

A compelling vision of the pOSSIble future.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Cary Guffey A child's toy monkey, activated by the energy beamed from the flying saucers into a rural horne, isthe first sign of alien presence.

Roy, an electrician sent out t() investigate the power failure caused by the UFOs, is terrified as the dashboard of his truck suddenly goes haywire. His experience with the UFOs turns his life inside out and leads him through a series of adventurescornie and catastrophic-to an ultimate rendezvous with creatures from beyond the stars. 0

exporting countries, grouped in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), could, in the medium to long term, produce approximately 40-45 million barrels per day (mb/d) and that this meant that a significam gap between oil export availabilities and the demand levels of consuming countries might not emerge until at least the late 1980s. Even in 1979, however, the best estimate by lEA of OPEC oil production had been

by ULF LANTZKE reduced to 38 mb/d. Today, we foresee It appears that world coal production that such production may well be held to must at least triple by the end of this a level not much above 35 mb/d, with a century if we are to have adequate energy likely situation of no growth, or next to supplies to accommodate even moderate no growt.h, in OPEC oil exports hencelevels of economic growth. forth. In essence, this means that if Such a level of increased coal use overall energy demand continues to inwould require the movement in world crease, it will have to be met increasingly trade of at least 700 million tons of coal a with our own resources and ingenuity, a year-the energy equivalent of about 9.5 harsh reality not readily accepted. million barrels of oil per day (the current Thus, even. on optimistic assumptions level of oil production from Saudi Araabout some of the underlying energy. bia). It would require an annual coal supply and demand factors, oil supplies production increase of 5 percent. In cannot meet projected demand. The quantitative terms these are major "gap" could grow from relatively minor targets, yet they are modest in terms of shortfalls in 1985 to 10 mb/d in 1990 and the vital objective of assuring the future 28 mb/d in 2000, even if between now and of the world economy. the year 2000: We have the tools at hand to achieve • economic growth is moderate (3.4 such expansion. Coal is widely available; . percent per year); the technology for coal production, trans• the energy/GNP growth ratio is report, use and conversion into synthetics is duced from historical levels of 1.0 to 0.8, known and is constantly improving. Why, reflecting gains in conservation; then, does further growth of this promis• OPEC production goes up to 38 ing fuel seem to be stalled? mb/d; This is a difficult question. To answer it • coal use and production are douone must inspect each part of the coal bled; system-from production to transport to • natural gas use and production ,are eventual use, domestically and internadoubled; tionally. The potential is clearly there.

• nuclear energy increases 12-fold.

There are several available means by The major limitation is our abiiity to handle the difficult institutional, political which the large differences between deand environmental issues. All are solv- sired energy demand and expected supply can be reconciled over the longer term. able; none have easy solutions.

Energy demand can be reduced through The elements of the world energy market reaction to limited supplies leadbalance are now, I believe, generally ing to sharply higher energy prices, which understood by those who seek seriously would result in either more efficient use to assess the present situation and future of energy or a slowdown of economic prospects. In particular, the International activity, or a combination of these. AddiEnergy Agency (lEA), bringing together 20 nafions within the Organization for tionally, energy supplies can be increased beyond those assumed in the scenario.

Economic Cooperation and DevelopThe key point is that, if effective action ment (OECD), has produced a series of is not taken on the demand or supply progressively more pessimistic appraisals. side, the only outcome will be lower Alas, while these are apparently accepted by leading governments, their implica- economic growth. Both the industrialized countries and developing countries that tions have not sunk in to the requisite lack oil would be faced with a situation of degree in the public opinion of central virtual economic standstill, with growth nations, including the United States.

As recently as three years ago, most rates far below those of the postwar observers believed that the major oil- period, and in the case of the developing

A tremendous expansion in the use and production of coal is fundamental to solving the present energy crisis which threatens the world's economic and political stability, says, a coal expert:

countries barely above anticipated population growth rates. A world of reduced growth seems to appeal to some who take their present good fortune for granted; to others less fortunate, and indeed to the political stability and security of the world as a whole, the result can only be described as critical and potentially disastrous.

So it is to avoid such a prospect that one must look extremely hard at the potential areas of increased energy supply within this time frame. Given the uncertainties which surround nuclear power development, the limited number of available sites for hydropower, the embryonic state of development of other solar energy technologies (whatever their ultimate potential beyond 2000), and the' grave uncertainties about additional oil and natural gas resources, the conclusion is inescapable that a tremendous expansion in the use and production of coal is fundamental.

In the study Steam Coal Prospects to 2000, published in late 1978 by the International Energy Agency, the potential for future coal production, use and trade was explored. Several different scenarios for future coal activity were examined. The "reference" case, which assumes present policy and a 50 percent real oil price rise over 1978 levels by 2000, showed a doubling of OECD coal demand by the year 2000-from current levels of 1,000 million metric tons of coal equivalent (mtce) to 2,100. World trade of coal in this case would amount to 504 mtce by the year 2000. If, however, coal development policies are accelerated, coal demand in the OECD would reach 2,600 mtce by 2000. Compared to the reference case, such an enlarged coal case would result in a reduction of the world energy gap in the year 2000, referred to earlier, by some 500 mtce or about seven million barrels a day of oil equivalent.

World coal trade in this "accelerated coal use" case would be on the order of 700 mtce (of which 195 mtce would be trade in metallurgical coal).

There are numerous reasons why coal can become the most significant substitute fuel for oil. First, reserves are abundant and widely dispersed. It is estimated that the world has recoverable reserves of 640,000 million tons-enough for 250 years of consumption at present levels.

Second, coal is in wide use today. In 1978 coal provided about 30 percent of the world's energy.

The fact that coal starts from such a broad base has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, technology is known throughout the coal chain, from the mine ultimately to the consumer. Constraints are relatively easy to identify; strategies can be developed to overcome them.

On the other hand, expanded coal use is frequently regarded as a return to the past. It raises important environmental and safety issues, and in some quarters it has the reputation of being a fuel limited by the ways it can be used.

Yet coal is, in many respects, much more adaptable than other alternatives. The major initial possibility for increased use of coal as an energy source (apart from metallurgical use by the iron and steel industry) is in the electricitygeneration and industrial sectors. Already it provides 40 percent of OECD electricity, and its use in industrial processes is increasing again. Apart from feedstock requirements and processes requiring extremely clean fuels or precise temperature control, coal could potentially supply a large portion of the industrial sector's direct heat and process steam requirements currently supplied by oil and gas.

Over the longer term, new combustion technologies as well as coal conversion into synthetic gas or liquid fuels will promote greater penetration of coal into other markets. The uses of coal are limited only by our imagination as to how to transform this abundant resource into practical use.

Third, even before the recent escalation of oil prices, coal was economically competitive with oil. For example, a few years ago a coal plant with full desulfurization facilities could produce base load electricity at an average total cost during the first 20 years of operation 30 percent less in the United States and 15 percent less in coal-importing regions than the electricity produced in an oil-fired plant over the same period.

Whether these cost comparisons would continue into the future is of course debatable. The relatively large untapped resource base of coal would suggest that costs might be held reasonably constant.

Yet some observers believe that coal prices are primarily a function of world oil prices, that coal production and transportation costs will rise more rapidly as output increases or that the increased market power of those participating in

The major constraint to coal development "is our inability to handle the institutional, political and environmental issues. All are solvable; none have easy solutions." the coal supply chain will allow a wider margin between coal costs and coal prices in the future.

All of these factors may indeed operate to increase the price of coal in the future.

Rising oil prices can affect the price of coal both directly (through increasing production and transportation costs) and indirectly (by increasing demand). But oil prices are unlikely to be the main determinant of coal prices as some believeand of course the widespread shift to lower cost coal, where it can subs!itute for oil, will tend to limit the rate of oil price increases in the future. Rather, the major determinant of future coal prices is likely to be the extent of effective competition among coal suppliers and coaltransporting systems.

It is at least hopeful that competitive forces in the international coal markets are today strong. The resource base is widespread and abundant, and there is a lack of corporate concentration and few institutional restraints to entry and competition. Furthermore, the promised development of new coal burning, cleaning and blending technologies will allow greater use of a wider variety of coal types leading to increased competition among coal suppliers.

Fourth, large-scale expansion of coal consumption, production and trade would have a major and positive impact on overall economic activity. Demand for coal mining, processing, transportation and combustion equipment, and ancillary demands could trigger economic regeneration in centers where coal will be produced, processed, shipped and consumed.

There are, however, very great problems to be overcome. To begin with, many utilities, industries and public authorities are locked into energy systems, infrastructures and cost/pricing structures which evolved during the era of rapid oil growth. Decisions to switch from oil to

coal will present complications of structural reform.

In the case of power generation-an obvious sector where coal can effectively substitute for oil-outright prohibition of the construction of new oil-fired power plants may not be immediately possible in all countries, although Germany has implemented such a system, requiring that all new power plants be designed to provide their base loads by other fuels.

Restructuring of refineries may also prove to be a constraint. In addition, boiler conversion is a difficult and timely task. Space is often a limiting factor to quick coal retrofitting; added handling equipment, coal crushers, and environmental equipment are all required.

But in time it should be possible to accomplish the required structural adaptations.

Industry faces similar problems to those encountered by utilities. It takes a great deal of effort in industry to convert oil-fired boilers to coal; it is (and was) much easier the other way round. Conversion to coal in many cases requires the use of different boilers and heat exchangers, as well as allocation of space for the coal pile, installation of coalhandling equipment, provisions for ash collection and disposal, dust control, and other environmental equipment.

The substitution possibilities and ease of conversion between oil and gas currently provide industry with flexibility and security minus the high capital expenditure required for conversion to coal. The relatively low price of natural gas in some existing long-term contracts and the regulated price of natural gas in certain markets also reduce the incentive for coal substitution in the near term.

Nevertheless, coal is currently a competitive fuel in large-scale industrial boilers for electrical generation and process steam, and in certain heat applications.

In the longer term, successful commercialization of fluidized bed combustion technology, and improvements in coal cleaning, blending and distribution systems will help resolve some of the current environmental constraints, space limitations and other objections to industrial coal substitution.

Beyond the problems of transition and adjustment, a longer term constraint is how to greatly expand coal production, trade and use in an environmentally acceptable manner. This problem is par(Text continued on page 16)

E~panding Use of Coal in India The rising prices of oil have hit India hard, as they have other nations. India produces 12 million metric tons (mt) of oil annually, but has to import another 20 million mt to meet the nation's requirements. This costs Rs. 5,400 crore-or 45 percent of the country's total import bill. This dependency on imported oil shows signs of becoming more crippling in the years to come.

Assuming an economic growth rate of 5.1 percent an annum and a commercial energy growth of 6 percent, the projected demand for oil in India will be of the order of 75 million mt annually by 2000 A.D. Even if India is able to increase indigenous oil production from its present 12 million mt to 30 million mt by then, it will still be necessary to import 45 million metric tons of oil-a prohibitive proposition.

Realizing this, India has drawn a number of ambitious plans to qevelop alternative sources of energy-nuclear power, hydropower, solar energy and, most important, coal.

Coal, which provides 40 percent of India's total energy needs, is the country's most abundant energy source.

Ranking sixth in the world in coal production-after the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Poland and the United Kingdom, in that orderIndia is estimated to have coal reserves of 111,600 million mt.

More important, the rate of finding new coal reserves in the country is one of the highest in the world. By using latest exploration technology, India is adding 1,000 million mt a year to its geologically proven reserves.

Most of these promising developments are, however, a recent phenomenon. Although coal is India's primary fuel and energy resource and so vital to the nation's economy, the coal industry had been neglected for long.

Contributing to the neglect was the availability of cheap oil until 1973 when its price started to skyrocket.

As a first important step toward modernization and rationalization, the Indian Government nationalized the coal industry in 1971 by taking over the various constituents of the Bharat Coking Coal Company. In another major

First of the four coal-based superthermal power stations being set up by the Indian National Thermal Power Corporation with aid from the World Bank, Singrauli power plant in Uttar Pradesh will generate 2, 000 MW of power when fully operational.

move in 1973, the government took over all the noncoking coal mines, and set up Coal India Limited as the holding company for the nationalized coal industry.

At the time of nationalization (197274), coal production in India stood at about 76-78 million mt. The output shot up to 99.68 million mt in 1975, 104 million mt in 1979 and 114 million mt in 1980. The 1981 target is 121 million mt.

Projections for the future are even more ambitious: 160 million mt by 1985, 220 million mt by 1990, and some 400 million mt by the year 2000.

"We must quadruple our coal production by the year 2000," says Vikram Mahajan, Minister of State for Energy.

"For, in view of the prohibitive cost of imported oil, we have to rely more and more on coal for our energy needs. To achieve this ambitious target, and to be able to use coal in a manner that is not detrimental to the environment," the minister adds, "we are mechanizing the coal industry in a big way-through our own research and development efforts and also by importing coal technology."

Rightly so, for a vastly increased use of coal calls for a number of technological prerequisites.

First, coal is dirty and polluting;

better ways to burn and use coal must be developed. India plans to set up a one-million-ton coal liquefaction plant for converting coal into synthetic oil.

Eventually India hopes to increase the country's liquefaction capacity to 10 million mt per annum. As the present liquefaction technology is not very efficient and is highly capital intensive, few nations are producing synthetic oil.

However, the United States is actively engaged in improving the coalliquefaction technology. Once that is achieved, the conversion of coal into oil, which does not pollute the air, will become commonplace. On a modest scale, India is converting coal into synthetic gas which is also nonpolluting.

The second major drawback of coal is its bulk. Unlike oil, coal is hard to transport. To overcome this problem, India plans to lay slurry pipelines for coal transportation. Two routes for slurry pipelines being examined currently are from Singrauli Coalfields to Haryana and from Central Coalfields in Bihar to Gujarat.

Besides, the four superthermal power plants-each with a capacity of 2,000 MW-being set up near pitheads at Singrauli, Uttar 'Pradesh; Korba, Madhya Pradesh; Ramagundam, Andhra Pradesh; and Farakka, West Bengal, will do away with the problem of transporting coal: It is easier and cheaper to transmit electric power than coal. In the second phase, another four coal-based power plants-each with a 4,000-MW capacity-will be built in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh (two) and Orissa. There are plans to set up yet another power plant in Andhra Pradesh.

Coal-based fertiliz~r plants are also being established near coal mines. Two such large fertilizer plants have already been set up near the low-grade coal mines in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.

India's efforts at stepping up coal production and developing other energy sources will bring nearer the day of self-sufficiency in energy needs and sustain the country's economic development.

About the Author: D.P. Kumar is a special representative of The Statesman, New Delhi.

ticularly acute for surface mines, which tip or the expense of transporting it back must be relied upon for a very substantial into the mine will have to be incurred. proportion of increased global coal pro- Acid mine drainage and the residue from duction, especially in the United States, any local cleaning are additional probCanada and Australia. Surface mining lems requiring control. Existing techimposes considerable demands on' the niques and new technology under d~vellocal environment, so that rigid control (}pment, incluping'the u~e'of new fluidized over material movement, restoration of combustion technology to burn waste at the topsoil and landscaping of the mine the mine mouth to produce useful power, area must be maintained. can make these problems manageable.

Perhaps the world's most impressive Next, there is the problem of solid coal development with regard to com- wastes at the combustion site. A 1,000munity and environmental concerns megawatt (electric) power plant may exists in the Rhine area of Germany. have to dispose of 320,000 tons per year During the last three decades, more than of ash, and on a national basis the United 50 communities west of Cologne contain- States and Canada would have !in ash ing more than 24,000 inhabitants have production of over 100 million tons per been relocated to make room for mines. year by 2000 on foreseen levels of coal The major coal developer in this region is . use. the Rheinische Braunkohlenwerke, or But such a level does not pose serious Rheinbraun which owns almost all of obstacles. Fly ash can be used to make West Germany's 56,000 million tons of cement, and is also used in road construcbrown coal reserves. tion. Another solution which has been A sophisticated system to protect com- adopted in Japan, and which could find munities and individuals has been estab- application eisewhere, is to use the ash lished; before mining begins, extensive for creating new industrial sites in shallow planning and consultations occur over water offshore. months or years between company execuMore serious is the problem of pollutives, government officials and repretion, especially from sulfur oxides. One sentatives of the local population. The might suppose that this problem, already company has never had a major open-pit substantial, would grow proportionately coal mine project rejected and has an with much greater coal use. However, extraordinarily successful record in re- this is not necessarily so.

The technology for keeping sulfur locating populations to their satisfaction.

In short, experience does suggest that oxide emissions to environmentally acif the need for increased production is ceptaole levels is available and in use accepted, and a prqcedure for consulta- today. The problem is primarily one of tion with the local populatioh developed, cost-at the estimated target levels of it is now politically and technologically U.S. coal production and use, the inpossible to deal with the environmental stallation of regenerable flue gas desulproblems associated with surface mining. furization capacity would involve an In the case of deep mining, which will estimated cost of about $35,000 million still have to provide substantial amounts (in 1978 dollars), or 20 percent of the at least in the United States, the problem estimated power station construction bill. of safety is a major one; in Britain today, Finally, there are a number of environit is estimated that deep coal mining mental concerns surrounding the expanentails a loss of¡ life at the rate of one sion of synfuel plants for producing liquid person for every two million tons of coal fuels from coal. The water requirements mined, while U.S. experience is roughly for such plants are very large, and in comparable. Plainly, every effort must be many parts of the United States the made to reduce these figures. adequacy of water supplies for other uses Deep coal mining also has its own is already marginal. But there should be environmental problems. The disposal enough areas where the problem is manproblem for solid waste is severe. The ageable to make a start, apd over time it amount of spoil per ton of coal produced should be possible to develop technolovaries greatly from mine to mine, but the gies that minimize water usage. quantity might be 3d percent of the coal A possible longer term and more proproduced. Only some of this is likely to found objection to increased reliance on be marketable as land fill, and ultimately energy from fossil fuel combustion (not the material has to be spread as a surfac.e just coal combustion) is doubt about the I

inherent ability of the earth's environment to absorb and recycle the carbon dioxide produced, and about the consequent effect on the earth's climate.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has steadily increased from about 313 particles per million by volume (ppmv) in 1958 to 334 ppmv in 1978.

Continuing increase might cause a "greenhouse effect" by altering the radiation balance of the atmosphere. A global temperature increase and major climatic changes might result.

At present concentrations of carbon dioxide, no global temperature rise has been detected above the "noise level" of natural variations. Some computer models, based on necessarily very uncertain assumptions, predict that, if the CO2 level in the atmosphere were to double in the next century, the temperature would rise by 2° C in the tropics and !V C at the poles and there would be a 7 percent increase in average precipitation and evaporation.

CO2 production from greatly increased coal consumption may turn out to be a long-term problem if coal use were likely to continue indefinitely at high rates. So far, the evidence seems too weak to prevent coal from playing a major part in the energy supply over the next 50 years, but there is a continual need for careful study of the level of carbon dioxide.

Closely related to the environmental issue is that of coal transport. Efficient, economic and environmentally acceptable coal transportation systems must be developed that can service expanded trade and use. This will be particularly challenging in the United States where both unit trains and slurry pipelines must be used to move the West's vast coal reserves to market.

Major problems must be resolved.

Railways are restricted by the topography of the route and there may be environmental objections to greatly increased traffic from residents along the route.

Slurry pipelines need a ton of water for each ton of coal and so are restricted to regions with adequate water supply at the origin; and there are considerable environmental problems in disposing of the dirty water at the destination.

In addition to' moving coal within the country, strategies for major export of coal from the United States will have to include plans for broadening the country's export capacity. Massive efforts will 0

have to be made to develop and expand deep-water port facilities for loading, receiving and transshipment to handle increased trade volumes and large carriers.

In sum, the expansion of coal production and use does entail serious environmental problems, and acceptable solutions to these (and to the problem of adequate tran~portation) will entail very great expenditures as well as some additional technological innovation. The impact will inevitably be particularly great in areas of greatly increased production.

The essential political problem is to minimize these destructive effects. The capacity to do this through intelligent planning and investment clearly exists.

The problem is to persuade people in affected regions to take a national (and indeed a global) view which recognizes that failure to make the coal available would have equally, if not more, severe impact on other local communities. And if such communities lack the energy needed to manufacture the clothes, machinery and automobiles, and to produce and process food, those local communities in potential coal-producing regions would suffer just as much as others.

This fundamental interrelationship between producers and consumers of energy is in many respects at the heart of the energy problem both within individual nations and among the nations that might produce and consume coal through international trade.

The most basic problem is the development of confidence between major coalconsuming countries and major coalproducing countries. For the United States and Australia, the potentially largest coal exporters among the industrial nations, secure access to coal markets in Western Europe and Japan is a vital first step to obtaining sufficient capital for the building of coal export infrastructures.

Similarly, European and Japanese utilities willtend to be nervous about building up reliance on coal exporters from these areas without adequate assurance that such exports, particularly those negotiated under long-term contracts, will not be subject to arbitrary controls.

The emergence of coal as a key commodity in world trade would have wider consequences beyond the scope of energy considerations, encompassing economic and political factors as well. The fact that specific energy-policy strategies may en-

"The uses of coal are limited only by our imagination as to how to transform this abundant resource into practical use. " hance or hinder a nation's freedom in matters of broader economic policy, or in the conduct of its foreign relations, is well known to all nations. The Western industrial nations, either as regional groups or collectively, have a common interest in ensuring that energy issues do not constrain world economic growth or cause conflict in political or strategic relations.

By satisfying a large proportion of their energy demand from an alternative energy source, industrial countries would also be responding to the expressed desire on the part of OPEC and non-OPEC developing countries to moderate growth in demand for oil imports. In addition, the development of a world coal market would facilitate the efforts of developing countries to include it as a credible energy alternative in their own supply planning and thus further contribute to reduced tension in the world oil market.

In addition to a number of developing countries that are also potential coal producers on a significant scale-India, Colombia, Mozambique, Venezuelarecent developments in China offer the prospect of possible active Chinese participation in the world coal market. Indeed, there already are indications that China is counting on coal export revenues to help finance foreign currency purchases of plant and technology imports.

Coal's impact on world trade would be considerable. Even at 1980's prices, a volume of 700 million tons moving in international trade would represent about $300 million worth of trade in 1978 dollars. The evolution of a much larger world coal market and infrastructure would stimulate world economic integration. Linking the major industrialized

and industrializing areas of the world through substantial trade in a key energy commodity would reduce the present instability due 'to the unbalanced world oil market.

Strong coal policy action will have a positive effect on political relations. At first sight it may appear that there is very little connection between the rather technical issue of promoting coal programs and overall political relations among nations. But this is to ignore the alternative of conflict and tension due to energy supply and price difficulties that are certain to arise if coal is not developed at a pace sufficiently fast to provide adequate alternative supply. One has only to imagine the'disastrous impaCt of competitive bidding-up of scarce oil supplies (the famous scramble for oil) to realize that political relations and cohesion among leading industrial nations could not survive unscathed.

It is now over seven years since the 1973-74 energy crisis transformed our perceptions of the world energy situation.

Some progress has been made sirice 1973, including conservation gains, new oil production emerging from the North Sea and Alaska, and a serious discussion in the United States on energy coupled with some legislative action.

However, recent events in Iran and the subsequent Irani-Iraqi conflict have again forcefully revealed the extent of the world's vulnerability. We must honestly face the insufficiency of our actions to date; measures adopted have proved to be too leisurely or too weak. It is now time for political leaders in governments and legislatures to halt the promotion of various sectional or regional interests at the expense of others and to wake up to the grave peril to the world's economic and political system threatened by the present energy situation.

The vast potential of coal makes active coal development a central element in any strategy to re~e th~ inter~ational energy problem. Constramts eXIst, but they can be overcome. Expanded coal utilization, production and trade is a major challenge. Success will bring benefits- not only in terms of increased energy security, but also in the form of concrete and real benefits to global economies and political systems.

0 About the Author: UI! Lantzke is executive director, International Energy Agency, Paris.

ttttHer Honor

dhe' Mayor"

Breaking many a myth on the way, women are making it to the top in several American city governments. an steadily increasing number of American cities, "His Honor, the Mayor" is giving way to "Her Honor, the Mayor." The number of American women holding the mayoralty and other elective local offices rose from 7,944 in 1976 to 14,764 in 1980. Thirteen of the women mayors preside over cities with populations of more than 100,OUO.The total number of women holding elective office at all levels of government in the United States in 1980 was 16,529.

Most of the women mayors-like most of their male counterparts-are little known outside the towns and cities they .administer; but three of them-Jane Byrne of Chicago, Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco and Lila Cockrell, formerly mayor of San Antonio-are well-known powers in national politics. The other large cities with women mayors are Long Beach, Pasadena, San Jose and Sunnyvale in California; Fort Lauderdale and St. Petersburg in Florida; Honolulu in Hawaii; Austin in Texas;. Phoenix in Arizona; Lincoln in Nebraska; and Oklahoma City in Oklahoma.

The trend among voters to put more and more women in top political positions is paralleled by the rise in the number of women who run for office but don't make it. In Indiana, 20 women were on ballots for mayoralties in 1980. "Women are becoming much more aware of their abilities and they're not afraid any more to go forward," says Molly Rucker, president of the Indiana Women's Political Caucus.

Most of the women vying for political office have already worked on school boards, city councils or as volunteers for civic groups such as the nonpartisan League of Women Voters (which counts many men as well as women among its members). Some analysts have concluded that women candidates are often perceived by voters as less tainted by partisan politics than men are likely to be. Gretta Dewald, director of the women's division of the Democratic National Committee, contends that women "are viewed as more caring and more likely to insist on good government."

However debatable the reasons for the increasing rate of success among women candidates, it is indisputable that more and more American women are choosing public service as their goal. One of the most significant aspects of their political awakening is that they are concentrating on the same social and economic problems that concern their male counterparts, rather than on so-called "women's issues." (Similarly, male candidates are speaking out on issues formerly considered primarily of interest to women.)

Women running for local offices in America's diverse and troubled cities know they are in rough territory, but they tackle the issues head on-as shown in the following brief reports on the experiences of eight women mayors, past and present.

I

JANE BYRNE: Any problems Chicago's male-dominated establishment has had in adjusting to her, says Jane Byrne, 47, mayor of the United States' third largest city, should be chalked up to politics, not to her sex.

Wife of a reporter-turned-publicist and mother of a college-age daughter, Byrne says a major goal of her administration is to improve the quality of life through better housing

and schools. She argues that if neighborhoods "are left to decay, this city will decay. We cannot, we will not, let this happen."

A recent typically flamboyant move of hers in this direction hit national headlines in the United States. A few months ago the mayor and her husband temporarily moved from their swank apartment to a rundown housing project in an area known only for its poverty and high crime rate. She also announced that she planned to keep apartments for herself in several other housing projects in troubled areas and to move into them occasionally. Even her detractors who have labeled this a melodramatic publicity stunt admit that it has helped start clean-up operations in the crime-ridden area.

Byrne served nine years as the city's commissioner of consumer sales. For now, she' disclaims interest in state or national office, saying, "I'm pretty busy just getting this house in order."

CORINNE FREEMAN: A leader in the League of Women Voters, Corinne Freeman reached the point where she thought she knew as much about issues as elected officials. She decided then and there that "it was time to stop telling people what to do and to do it yourself. And I did."

Freeman, a Republican, won the race for mayor by a narrow margin in 1977 and was re-elected in 1979 with 87 percent of the votes.

The mayor, who says her age is "nobody's business but mine," likes serving in local government and claims no higher political aspirations. She prides herself on keeping her office open to the public. "I can't always help," she says, "but I always try."

Mother of two grown sons, the mayor believes that politics offers a "marvelous opportunity for women."

PATIENCE.LATTING: "People are beginning to evaluate women and their capabilities on the basis of performance rather than gender," says Patience Latting. She should know.

The 62-year-old grandmother is only the second mayor in Oklahoma City'S history to be elected to a third term. Latting has won high marks for her toughness, especially in handling a police strike in 1975. Yet she recalls that at first "some doubts were expressed as to whether a woman could do the job." Like many women politicians, Latting was a leader in the parentteacher group and the League of Women Voters before seeking office.

"Women are no longer simply helping males get elected," she says, "although they still do the hard day-to-day work of the campaigns. Women are realizing they are qualified to serve in office. " HELEN BOOSALIS: Lincoln's peppery mayor Helen Boosalis was returned for a second term in 1979 after a campaign in which she went head to head with members of the city council. Herself a former council member, she branded as "a giveaway" the council's move to lease the municipal hospital to a private group. The majority of voters sided with her.

A strong advocate of comprehensive planning, the 61-year-

old Democrat also has had differences with development and real-estate interests. "I am not a part of the business establishment," she says. "1 am completely independent."

The wife of a University of Nebraska professor and a former president of the local League of Women Voters, Boosalis explains her bent for politics by saying: "I view running for office as an extension of my civic duty."

pendence {or local governments, she has spoken out against efforts to make cities dependent on larger political entities.

"We are sick to death of being administrative provinces of the Federal Government, and we want to avoid becoming administrative provinces of state government," she declares. "We are the grass roots; we represent a ¡lot of people very, very dir~tly," she said at a recent Senate hearing.

MARGARET HANCE: "Women in politIcs have proven across the country that they do a very effective job," asserts Margaret Hance, who is serving her third term as mayor of Phoenix. "People aren't afraid of us any more. They realize that we can be administrators, too, and that cities don't disappear under a woman mayor." , After her husband died in 1970, Hance became involved in _ politics, serving on the city council before winning the top job in 1975. She was re-elected in 1977 and in 1979.

The 58-year-old Republican, who runs as an independent, is proud of improvements she has helped bring about in a transportation system that she calls "the biggest problem in Phoenix."

Hance is a member of President Reagan's Federalism Advisory Committee and chairperson of the Finance. Administration and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of the National League of Cities. A firm believer In inde-

LILA COCKRELL: After withstanding the scrutiny of San Antonio voters during a long apprenticeship as a city council member and three times in races for mayor, Lila Cockrell bowed out of the race this year-even though, to quote The New York Times, her three two-year terms had established her as a "virtually unbeatable candidate."

Under her leadership, San Antonio, long one of the poorest American cities, began showing signs of an economic resurgence. Cockrell's firm handling of situations-whether city problems or political opponents-made Henry G. Cisneros (then a councilman, now the mayor) say after one referendum, "She just beat the hell out of us. It was a hard lesson." She changed the mood in the city council from confrontation to accommodation-Cisneros ultimately became an -ally.

When garbage collectors went on strike, Cockrell backed the city manager's firing of workers who refused to go back to their jobs.

The 59-year-old mother of two grown daughters says: "Many times women are more patient and willing to listen longer to understand background and facts. We frequently see the more human side of issues related to people and their concerns."

BOBBIE STERNE: Cincinnati's former mayor Bobbie Sterne won't ever forget the first time she campaigned from the back of an open convertible.

"I'm a dignified, middle-aged matron. What am I doing here?" the 61-year-old widow recalls asking herself.

A former Army nurse who had long been active in local volunteer work, Sterne is best known for her interest in human services and support of "women's issues" such as the Equal Rights Amendment. She looks forward to the time when women "accept half the responsibility for running this country."

"I hope there will be a time," she adds, "when there's no body count, when women are just there and nobody's lining up to see how many there are."

ISABELLA CANNON: Raleigh in North Carolina has had two years' (1977 -79) experience of what has affectionately been called "granny power." Isabella Cannon was 73 when she was elected mayor in 1977.

The retired college-library administrator, who has been a widow since 1954, ran an unconventional campaign in which her youthful supporters wore T-shirts sporting a cannon with flowers coming out of it. She defeated the incumbent in a major upset, thanks to backing by younger voters and blacks.

Long active in civic affairs, Cannon during her term as mayor worked hard at involving citizens in developing a long-term plan for the growth of North Carolina's capital.

She says that being mayor was "the most fantastically exciting time I've ever had" and adds, "I see no reason why a woman can't be a governor or President of the United States. I urge them to get involved."

0

~~Lets Have aMeeting"

by HERBERT

.

,,'

~

-'I

E, MEYER

Executives spend almost 70 percent of their work life in meetings. Are meetings, then, a vital management tool? While some executives cringe at the thought of yet another meeting, others consider them an essential part of the growing trend toward management by consensusand not by command.

o even the most casual observer of business, it's obvious that executives spend a lot of their time in meetings. Just how much time, however, may come as something of a jolt. The president of Quaker Oats Company, William Smithburg, says meetings chew up more than 50 percent of his time.

Frank Considine, the chief executive of National Can Corporation, puts the figure at 60 percent. And by no stretch of the imagination can these executives be dismissed as meeting freaks. According to a study of managerial, work time by Professor Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, executives are as gregarious

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as geese, spending on average 69 percent of their work life in meetings with two or more o,ther people.

In light of these statistics, one might assume that executives consider meetings to be the most efficient, effective use of their valuable time-a vital management tool, as it were, for which 'no adequate substitute exists. One would be wrong by a country mile. In a survey published about two years ago by Alec Mackenzie & Associates, executives from nine nations including the United States ranked "meetings" as the fourth-biggest time waster of all-the first three being telephone interruptions, drop-in visitors, and

ineffective delegation.

Alas, the chances for relief are bleak.

To the contrary, a majority of American executives interviewed for this article say it is their strong impression that during the last few years the amount of time they spend in meetings has been steadily i,ncreasing. They attribute this increase to the changing nature of business itself.

And they add-more in sorrow than in anger-that today's trend toward more and more meetings shows no signs of leveling off., let alone reversing.

In the broadest sense, there are only two types of meetings: ad hoc and scheduled. The ad hoc type is described this way by Andrew M. Rouse, executive vice-president of INA Corporation and a keen observer of corporate behavior: "You arrive at the office and discover ~hat you have some kind of problemno, better call it a situation, Sometimes you don't know if it's really a problem. In any case, you call a meeting. You may do it to get more information.

Or you may do it to alert others to what you already know." Calling an ad hoc meeting, says Rouse, "is like turning on the ignition in your car. It gets the machine going. If nothing else, you alert people to the fact that something is up-that a decision is forthcoming in which they may be expected to play a part."

As a rule, ad hoc meetings take precedence over other activities; when you are summoned to one you cancel or postpone whatever you had' planned to do. Since ad hoc meetings are invariably called on short notice, attendance depends largely on who happens to, be around. Ad hoc meetings can last anywhere from three minutes to several days, in the case of major catastrophes, such as the destruction of a plant.

Scheduled meetings are a different thing entirely. By definition they are set up in advance, which means that those who are invited usually manage to be present. Many of these meetings occur at regularly spaced intervals-for example, the monthly board-of-directors meeting, the Monday-morning staff meeting. In general, the more senior an executive becomes, the more scheduled meetings he is required to attend. Top-level executives in the United States attend so many scheduled meetings these days that by early January their calendars are blocked out all the way through the following December. .

Scheduled meetings are much more formal than ad hoc ones. They must be, since their purpose is to conduct the company's regular business-to consider basic issues and to reach decisions that will set the company's course. Agendas and other materials are circulated well in advance. Often the participants will be the same from one meeting to the next, for instance, directors or department heads. This gives a continuity to scheduled meetings-a group memory and accountability, so to speak.

At many large American companies large portions of scheduled meetings are devoted to very formal, carefully orchestrated presentations by executives who may have spent hours, days, even weeks preparing and rehearsing their speeches.

Ambitious executives have long recognized that these presentations can be as important to their own futures as to the

future of their companies. Indeed, one of the oldest maxims in business is that he who sparkles as a presenter will rocket upward in the corporate hierarchy. op-level executives pin today's trend toward more and more meetings-of both types-on the changing nature of business itself.

A. Wright Elliott, senior vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank, cites the growing complexity of corporations as a major factor. "The average corporation today is offering a wide variety of products and services in a wide variety of markets," Elliott explains. "No one person can be expert in everything, so to make good decisions you need the participation of more and more executives."

Quite a few executives say that public distrust of the business community has led to a protective spawning of a lot of

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corporate committees. Richard S. Sheetz, chairman of Park-Ohio Industries, notes that as the number of government regulations in the United States has exploded in recent years, so too has the number of meetings necessary to assure compliance. M. Brock Weir, chairman of Cleveland Trust Company, points out that many of today's corporate directors serve on oversight groups such as audit committees and antidiscrimination committees that simply did not exist a few years back. Weir, who thinks that the main effect of most meetings is to, hold down executives' productivity, is not at all sanguine about the prospects for relief: "Society demands the credibility that comes from consensus decisions."

But the trend toward group decisionmaking antedates the flood of new government regulations. American business has been moving away from rigid, authoritarian command structures throughout the postwar period. The complexity of, the large corporation, and the many power centers within it, are part of the reason, but only part. The true source of the change is society itself. As the American family became less authoritarian, other institutions in the society, were inevitably affected. Younger executives have proved to be more powerful agents of. change than any edict out of Washington.

"There is a definite trend these days toward fewer and fewer followers," says George S. Dively, honorary chairman of Harris Corporation and one,of the American business community's most respected elder statesmen. "Everyone wants to be part of the action."

Dively's perception is strongly seconded by Thomas MacAvoy, president of Corning Glass Works. "Younger people won't put up with being kept in the dark," MacAvoy observes. "You can't spring decisions on them and expect them to be happy." In his view, senior executives must expect to pay dearly for keeping today's young executives outside the decisionmaking process. "You have got to give young people a chance to participate," he warns. "If you decide you're not going to operate this way, you're not going to keep smart people."

The advantages of decision by consensus are important ones-as the Japanese have long understood. A command from the top that the executives down the line disagree with may well be ignored or,

even worse, carried out in ways guaranteed to demonstrate that it just won't work. Even the crustiest old authoritarian would go along with this general convincing is better proposition-that than commanding. The problem is that convincing takes time-and, of course, meetings.

Executives generally agree that, the core 'problem with meetings is not so much the amount of time they absorb, as the amount of time they waste. More precisely, executives agree that what messes up so many meetings is everybody

"Executives generally agree that the core problem with meetings is not so much the amount of time they absorb, as the amount of time they waste."

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efse's inability to perform effectively and efficiently before an audience. Human nature being what it is, the executive has not yet been born who will concede that he, personally, is a dud at meetings; that he himself has ever lost control of a group or, worse, wasted time at somebody else's meeting by rambling on and on, entranced by the music of his own voice.

To be sure, the specific skills that an executive must have to perform wel} at meetings have long been understood.

Indeed, scores of management consultants and business-school professors have put bread on their tables by outlining these skills in hundreds of books and articles. In brief, what's needed to run a successful meetin"g is an ability to choose the right people, to guide them briskly through the business at hand, and then to send them on their way before the session can degenerate into a shouting match.

"The trick is knowing when to stop it," says Harris Corporation's George Dively.

"Once people start arguing and committing themselves to specific policies and actions, you have used up the creativity of the group. Unless the chairman is asleep, he's got to stop the meeting then and there."

As for the participants, what they need is an ability to think on their feet, to make their cases clearly and briefly, to

convince doubters that their fears are groundless, to disagree agreeably, and above all to shut up when there is nothing more to say.

A few top executives cling to the notion that someone who lacks these skills simply can't be helped. "An individual couldn't be too smart if he hasn't learned .to communicate," says J. Peter Grace, chief executive of W.R. Grace & Company. "It's like a major-league ballplayer who can't hit-it's too big a flaw to overcome with a little practice in the batting cage." Grace's pet peeve is the executive who doesn't know when to shut up: "It isn't that the man has nothing to say. It's that what he has to say is only of marginal value. It isn't worth the time he takes to say it." (Grace, who describes himself as an "antimeetings person," claims that he lets-them occupy no more than 8 to 10 percent of his time-a feat that would earn him a niche in The Guinness Book uf World Records. But in this instance a usually precise executive may be engaging in a bit of wishful thinking; two of Grace's top executives insist that meetings consume nearly half their boss' time.)

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oday it seems that a majority of chief executives believe that "meetings skills" can indeed be learned. At one time or another during the last few years, more than half the world's largest companies have hired outside experts to teach these skills. For example, a number of American companies including Eaton Corporation, Armco Incorporated, and Union Carbide have sent wave after wave of executives to Communispond Incorporated, the big New York-based speech/communications outfit, for lessons in how to give effective presentations and handle oneself in groups. Other companies, such as Corning Glass Works, regularly bring outside experts to their headquarters offices ,!nd then encourage executives to sign up for assorted workshops and lectures.

Quite a few American companies are building inhouse units whose express purpose is to make meetings work better.

At Union Carbide, for example, executives who must make presentations of one sort or another are encouraged to check in first with Deane B. Turner of the corporate employee-relations department. Turner will help the executive prepare his speech, design whatever au-

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"This meeting has belm dragging on so long I think he should grant permission for a visit from our loved ones."

diovisual aids might be needed, and he will even run the executive through a few rehearsals.

Obviously it is in Union Carbide's interest for its executives to give a smooth and convincing performance before the U.S. Congress or when making a pitch for new business. But why should the company help its executives do a selling job on Carbide itself? The theory is that if

all internal presentations are equally expert, then the proposals will be judged on their merits. "We have lots of technical1 trained people at Union Carbide," Turner explains. "They tend to be unskilled at telling a story. My job is to help."

At Chase Manhattan Bank, the use of inhouse experts has become more of a requirement than an option. The bank has a four-person "special presentations

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"Your presentation was splendid, Potter. . . . Most especially that delightful little jingle you sang."

group" that does nothing but work with executives who are scheduled to make formal pitches of one sort or another. Of course, the content of the presentation is entirely the responsibility of the executive. But as Senior V.P. Wright Elliott puts it, "We don't expect all our executives to be skilled presenters. So there are experts available to help."

The executive tells members of the special-presentations group what it is he wants to say, and these experts will then do everything from writing the text to walking the executive through his presentation in the very room in which he is scheduled to perform. No less a personage than Board Chairman David Rockefeller' now submits to this discipline.

Recently, he worked with the group to prepare and rehearse a presentation he made at the board meeting about the bank's long-range strategic plans.

Some American companies are even going so far as to bring in "meetings mercenaries" -outside experts who organize and then actually run internal meetings. The theory behind this technique is that executives will speak more freely, and more creatively, at meetings run by outsiders than at those run by their regUlar bosses.

IIbrief, then~as an article about meetings should be-the trend is toward more meetings, but more pungent and productive ones. In pursuit of this desirable end, even deceit will be allowed. Tom MacAvoy of CornIng Glass Works wears an alarm watch, and he says he has mastered the art of setting it without being seen. When he feels that a meeting has gone on long enough, he sets the alarm to go off five minutes later.

When the beep sounds, MacAvoy feigns distress, mutters apologies, and brings the proceedings to a close-or, at least, his participation in them.

Some time-conscious executives have lately been buying a gadget called "the Consensor" to keep meetings rolling forward. Invented by William W. Simmons, a former director of exploratory planning for I.B.M. Corporation, the Consensor is, in essence, a sophisticated, computerized vote-taking system; it enables the chairman of a meeting to brush past the points everybody more or less agrees on and spend the group's time on the key, disputed issues.

The device works like this: Each par-

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"Well, gentlemen, that concludes my views on the subject. Naturally, we'd like to hear any opposing views, but I'm due at the gym. "

ticipant is given an electronic box about the size of a hand calculator. It has two big dials; the bottom one can be set anywhere from zero to 10 and the top one has settings that range from zero to 100.

You turn the bottom dial to indicate whether you support or oppose the proposal under discussion~.2ero is strong opposition; 10 is strong support. Then you turn the top dial to weight the value of your own opinion-zero means you aren't at all knowledgeable about the issue; 100 means you're an expert.

When the participants have set both their dials, the meeting chairman punches a button on his console that then tabulates the votes, weights them, and flashes the group's collective judgment on a large TV-type screen. Executives in A. T. & T.'s rate-and-tariff division have used the Consensor to evaluate the performances of division employees-who of course were not present during the session. The

device has also been used at one time or another by executives. at Du Pont and at Monsanto Corporation. On newer models of the Consensor, its inventor has included an item that may be the most revolutionary breakthrough of all toward shorter meetings. A chairman can punch in the annual salaries of all those present, and every six minutes the rapidly mounting "cost" of the meeting flashes on the screeh.

Finally, in the mood that now prevails, it should be noted that some topflight managers think the aversion to meetings can be carried too far. Frank Considine, whose reign at National Can Corporation has combined openness and decisiveness to a remarkable degree, puts the case for meetings this way: "A meeting is really a peer-level review. It's very revealing.

You see how someone thinks on his feet, how he answers a difficult question, and whether he is an orderly thinker." INA's

Andrew Rouse adds this thought: "What most executives fail to realize is that the purpose of a meeting-in a sense, the only purpose-is to save time. In other words, you call a meeting only when you are convinced that in the long run, the alternative to calling the meeting will be more time-consuming than the meeting itself." Executives who make decisions without benefit of their colleagues' advice, Rouse warns, run a risk of mak: ing bad decisions that will cost both time and money to rectify.

Rouse even confesses that he enjoys a well-run meeting, and he thinks any executive worth his salt should enjoy them too: "Obviously, there are meetings that waste time. But it's a mistake to say that meetings are a waste of time in business.

Meetings are business."

About the Author: Herbert E. Meyer is an associate editor of Fortune magazine.

All the Kings Men The novel that is bl:liIt to last need have nothing to recommend it but the breath of life. And reading Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men for the first time 35 years after it was published, I find it very much alive. This is a view decidedly not shared by critic Saul Maloff, who demolished it with great thoroughness eight years ago, consigning its national reputation and its award of the Pulitzer Prize to "human error and bad judgment." Since perfection is not what sustains fiction, we have to look perhaps even to its faults for the reasons that elevated this work to a classic, and the magic it still weaves.

The American South has moved on since the 1920s and 1930s setting of the novel, but this is no ~tatic period piece. It captures the turbulence of a section¡of America too close for comfort to its past, and unconfident about its future-a region far from high technology, affluence and the American mainstream. "The local I rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawed across the cotton country," "the flies cruising around the room," "half a dozen hens wallowed and fluffed and cuck-cucked in the dust"-these phrases evoke more than the sleepy rural backdrop for Willie Stark's rise from farm boy to state governor.

Mere local color would have been dryas dust by now. The book's staying power derives from the fact that this is where the Southern present came from, and the ghosts were buried, not deep beneath the surface and still to be reckoned with.

A legacy, either national or personal, may well be more burden than blessing, as Jack Burden (surely a symbolic name) who is the protagonist, and narrator of Stark's story and his own, makes clear. Stark's adventures end in his assassination, while Burden finds his way to a merely endurable state of affairs-a no-pleasure, no-pain plateau that enables him to live in a rarefied calm, since happiness has eluded him. If Stark represents the incipient violence of his region, Burden seems to embody the Southerner's whole complex relationship with the South. Kentucky-born Robert Penn Warren told an interviewer in Paris during the 1950s, "America was based on a big promise ... the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem." The South has been the crucible of America's promi~e of freedom and equality, and its most powerful writers have vividly dramatized the troubled consciousness this has bred. Burden's sense of guilt is not proclaimed. We have to assume it when he abruptly abandons the biography he is writing (for his doctoral thesis in history) of an ancestor, Cass Mastern, killed in the Civil War. He gives up the thesis and everything connected with it, walking away from the apartment, the room, and the des-k upon which his voluminous notes and the Mastern journals are piled, never to return. His landlady later packages these and mails them to . him, but the parcel. remains unopened. The Cass Mastern episode, remote in time from the rest of the book, and devoid of its rhetoric and flourish, is a novel within a novel. Passages exquisite in their precision give a brutal awareness of the dehumanizing effects of slavery on a culture built upon it: Mr. Simms ... grasped the girl by the shoulder to swing her slowly around for a complete view. Then he seized one of her wrists and lifted the arm to shoulder level and worked it back and forth a couple. of times to show the supple articulation, saying "Yeah." That done, he drew the arm forward, holding it toward the Frenchman. the hand hanging limply from the wrist which he held .... "'Yeah." Mr. Simms said, "look at thilt-air hand. Ain't no lady got a littler. ~eensier hand. And round and soft, yeah?"

A RECONSIDERATION

by NAYANTARA SAHGAL

"Ain't she got nothen else round and soft?" one of the men at the door called, and the others laughed.

"Yeah," Mr. Simms said, and leaned to take the hem of her dress, which with a delicate flirting motion he lifted higher than her waist ... forcing her to turn ... until her small buttocks were toward the door. "Round and soft~ boys," Mr. Simms said, and gave her a good whack on the near buttock to make the flesh tremble. "Ever git yore hand on anything rounder ner softer, boys?" he demanded. "Hit's a cushion, r declare. And shake like sweet jelly."

In the story Cass Mastern sets his own slaves free, woefully aware that this does not solve the problem. He goes to war as a common soldier, as penance for his own and his society's sins, and dies of his wounds. Burden, deprived of such clear-cut action, buries his anxieties by turning his back on his thesis. "Or perhaps he laid aside the journal of Cass Mastern ... because he was afraid to understand, for what might be understood there was a reproach to him."

The rest of the book, in "spoken" American, is a different reading experience altogether. The characters are drawn with a heavy hand, for distinctness but also for satire, an unusual combination since the satirical generally relies on the subtle.

There is no subtlety here, yet the heavy mixture works. Pickled in acid, these characters-full flesh and blood, not caricatureFill keep indefinitely. Doc, who owns the drugstore in Stark's home town, draws "five Cokes too many" for the returning governor and his retinue, ii-nhis feverish desire to please. " 'It's on the house,' Doc uttered croakingly with what strength was left in him after the rapture." Doc is believable. There are so many like him in the world outside Mason City. And though there are not so many, indeed any, others like Tiny Duffy, Sugar Boy O'Sheean, or Sadie Burke, all of whom only a slice of America could produce, they have an aggressive reality that is impossible to deny; they cannot be compressed into stereotype~. They do not illustratv either virtue or its opposite.

Jack Burden is struggling with himself. Stark becomes ruthless and vulgar when he realizes he is dealing with ruthless and vulgar adversaries. Life leaves no one untainted who has not the courage to choose right. And not even the upright Judge Irwin has that courage. Each character is as much a vignette as a person. Stark's son, Tom, a football hero corrupted by adulation, is a victim as well as a resonant symbol of the legendary sport subculture that produces such victims. All these are here to stay, much as Dickens' Uriah Heep will always and everywhere mean obsequiousness.

It is hard to imagine any other than exaggerated characters in this particular story. Unlike the novel of Southern gentry/ decaying mansions, here is one that brings the reader up sharp against an uncompromising mentality-the type that earlier preferred secession and war to the abolition of slavery. Even the shadows and nuances that envelop Burden are quite relentless. Not surprising when history is on one's doorstep, not something that happened long ago. Warren, now 76, remembers that his father was old enough to vote when the last full-scale battle against American Indians was (ought.

If the story invents its characters, it invents its style, too. The third sentence, 12 lines long, prepares us for .the breathless pace: "You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you .... " There is the

Critic Nayantara Sahgal, herself a novelist, hails Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men as a work "that is built to last." And in the next article, Warren recalls the time, place and people that inspired his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. hammer blow of repetition in the dialogue, and imagery, too. It is too planned and persistent to be what Maloff calls "torrents of overblown creative writing."

Is this really a "political" novel? The choice of a politician as a central character gives it a political framework. But the questions are about right and wrong, though tailored to fit the time, region and Stark's progress from earnestness to cynical pragmatism. His assassin does not kill him for political reasons, but because the governor has taken his sister as his mistress.

Corruption is conceived not so much as part of the political process, but of the human process-unless men choose correctly. If instead of a politician Stark had been a pugnacious, hell-bent-on-glory tycoon with a subservient empire around him, the moral concerns of the novel would have remained the same. Burden is the unalterable factor. "Burden got there by accident," Warren said in his Paris interview. "He was only a sentence or two in the first version-the verse play from which the novel developed .... When after two years I picked up the verse version and began to fool with a novel, the unnamed newspaperman became the narrator. It turned out, in away, that what he thought about the story was more important than the story .... He made it possible for me to control it." Burden is then the key to Warren, whose entire output has contributed to a'literature acutely aware of its heritage and the contradictions, not merely to do with slavery, within it. The advent of industry after World War I, th~ dislocation of familiar patterns of life, a new climate of racial tension, all exposed gut situations and emotions for fiction to explore. "The good work," said Warren in 1970, "is always the drama of the writer's identity with and struggle against his time." Beneath a tough exterior, Burden represents both.

H

eis a young man, but he lives in the past, which, ancestral or personal, has little succor for him. The man he believes is his father leaves home when he is a child. His mother's husbands continue to come and go. His beloved refuses to marry him and later becomes Stark's mistress, while his own marriage is a disastrous failure. He half despises himself for working for Stark, a highly controversial figure. His only reliable landmark is Judge Irwin, whom he drives to suicide when on Stark's order he digs up the "dirt" in the respected judge's background and discovers a serious blot on his career. He then learns through his mother's agonized reaction that this was his real father. If Burden is thoroughly mixed up, that is understandable. But need he carryon about it quite as fulsomely as he does? The introspective trend in fiction gained enormously from the century's new psychiatric knowledge, and War-Len has obviously reveled in his use of introspection. But it is hard to conclude, as Maloff does, that the self-questioning is overdone in prose and plot. The whine of neurosis is not very interesting, but that is not what Jack Burden conveys. The neurosis is much older than Burden. It is his society that has fallen from grace and whose spiritual and emotional debris he seems to be carrying around, cutting him off effectively even from himself. A writer writes about the same things all his life, and Warren has pursued his search for meaning through poetry, fiction, essays, criticism and teaching.

Perhaps Warren the Poet frames the issue most succinctly: "My eyes fill with tears. I have lived Long without being able To make adequate communication."

As to language, what is too much in terms of a national prose' and or'atory that have consciously reached for extravagance?

The early patriots fed rich rhetoric into the American bloodstream. "Give me liberty or give me death" and "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote" may not have been the exact words of Patrick Henry and John Adams respectively, but these are the words that survive and are cherished. In 1834 Dr. Daniel Drake, speaking at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, said, "Ought not the literature of a free people to be declamatory? Should it not exhort and animate? .. Would yeu rouse men to voluntary action, on great public projects, you must make their fancy and feeling glow under your presentations .... " Religious revival played its part, too, in linguistic extravagance. The American temperament is not low key, nor does its creativity, by and large, run to brevity and understatement. Even the terseness of the New Englander is different in kind from these: He chooses not to say very nmch, rather than saying with restraint all that has to be said. Modern American expression is long past its florid early oratory, but once in a while its leaps and sparks serve as a reminder of that oral tradition. Warren's novel has a speaker-to-listener, rather than a written quality. Lift the lid off this narrative in another 30 years, and it will still have the same immediacy,- buzz with the same furious life.

The spoken impact is most electric in the political passages.

Willie Stark is based on Huey Long, who rose to leadership through his rousing and often crude populist style. Stark has a similar approach to his electorate, conducting an anecdotal, folksy, avowedly democratic dialogue with his audiences in a delivery that is a blend of harangue, hypnosis and cozy chat. His extempore speech from the courthouse steps on his return to Mason City, replete with theatrical Piiuses, voice effects, and lively repartee from the crowd, begins: "I'm not going to make any speech .... I didn't come here to make any speech. I came up here to go out and see my pappy, and see if he's got anything left in the smokehouse fit to eat. I'm gonna say: Pappy, now what about all that smoked sausage you wuz bragging about, what about all that ham you wuz bragging about last winter .. ,."¡

It is a ritual Mason City expects of its home-grown celebrity, and this brand of earthy, face-to-face public relations is probably one of the book's most interesting features for those uninitiated into the mystique of American politics. Stark strikes a more universal chord when, some years removed from the "untroubled and pure" face he entered politics with, he says, "Sure, I got a bunch of crooks, around here, but they're too lily-livered to get very crooked. I got my eye on 'em. And do I deliver the state something? I damned well do." The contingencies of power have chiseled his ethics to suit his purpose. The problem of ends and means is never difficult to resolve at the political level. Ends must be served, and the means found to serve them. Moral dilemmas are not so easily settled. Warren's characters are the products of a history that they and their forebears have been responsible for shaping. They must reap its rewards and punishments. It is this dimension beyond its political saga that gives the book its stature and sustains its purpose, that of redefining life and values in the light of a common, and in part devastating, experience.

0 About the Author: Novelist, political writer and scholar, Nayantara Sahgal is now in Washington on a fellowship with the Wilson Center.

Reflections on an Era All the King's Men's ruthless and dynamic hero was fictional but he was more than a creation of Robert Penn Warren's imagination. The novel began, says Warren, "when I entered the orbit of Huey Long." Here he recalls the political drama of the 1930s' Louisiana and its controversial governor and senator Long, mirrored in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Thirty-five years ago, All the King's Men was published. With any event in your life, you know more after 35 years than after one. True, you may know less in some ways. Time does not necessarily improve memory. But in the course of time, strange odds and ends--or even fundamental facts not recognized in the noonday sun-may, out of blank idleness of a later mind, rise up, trailing God knows what, like a half-rotten log disturbed in a creek bed trailing algae, patched with moss, clung to by some strange, snaillike creatures, with a rusty length of barbed wire still nailed to it.

What rises so gratuitously out of the deep of time may be a set of relationships and connections of which you had been unaware when things were fresh. The unconscious thing may, years later, become startlingly conscious, seemingly by accident. That is why it is always hard to say precisely when and how a book-or any thing else-"began."

I might, in a certain kind of accuracy, be arbitrary and say that All the King's Men began when, in September 1934, I moved to Baton Rouge, to teach at the Louisiana State University (LSU) and thus entered the orbit of Huey P. Long, This sketch by Nand Katyal portrays All the King's Men',s author Robert Penn Warren (foreground) and his inspiration, Huey Long.

who had previously been for me only an occasional headline. But, in another sense, it is more accurate for me to begin by saying that for three years earlier, in the darkness of the early Depression, I had been at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, back in the days when Nashville was the scene of the purest melodrama, political, financial and personal. I had watched that melodrama with absorbed interest, and it was the germ of a novel of mine written after !he first version of All the King's Men, a play, was in manuscript, and published before the final version of All the King's Men was finished. That is, when I entered Louisiana, my imagination was already trapped in speculation about the struggle for power in a world of politics-specifically in a Southern state.

Louisiana was to present something much more complex than the Tennessee situation, which was more old-fashioned, the perennial story of greed, ambition, vanity and deception behind a facade of Southern mythology. But Louisiana became a parable of a worldwide situation, with deeper historical reverberations.

No novel of any kind was in my mind as I drove a earful of suitcases, crates and gear down toward Baton Rouge and the job I so sorely needed and had been lucky enough to get. Huey Long's university was "hiring." All other universities were

"firing," and I had just been fired. I had been assured that Huey would not mess with my classroom, that he wanted a "good" university almost as much as he wanted a winning football team.

In my first year there, in a large class of sophomores, a hulking brute of a young man turned rude and offensive on several occasions, and I finally ordered him to get up and leave the room and never come back. He left with insulting casualness.

After class I was surrounded by a group of curious, horrified, astounded or sympathetic students. I had, they told me, just thrown out so-and-so, who was a star of the football team. That, however, was the last I heard of it. A man as smart as Huey, who was well aware that the American Association of University Professors would like nothing better than to blacklist his university, had no need to mess with classrooms.

But the classroom runs ahead of our real concern. I had, unwittingly, encountered the real concern on the roadside as I drove south. After I had crossed the northern Louisiana line, probably on the second day of the journey, fate gave me a passenger. He was a somewhat aging fellow, unshaven, missing a toofh or two, with tobacco juice oozing from the gap where a tooth had been, not quite as ragged as a tramp, skin baked to leather, the kind of rural drifter born in some

shack with a roof you could see stars through at night, living at the end of a road in which, come the fall rains, a wagon would mire to the axle, especially with the kind of half-starved mules that would be trying to pull it. He was "poor white trash."

He was a citizen of Louisiana, and he probably couldn't write his name. Or barely.

He was also a portent and a sage, as I was to decide later and write in a comment on All the King's Men long after it was first published. He was what made Huey possible. He was what Huey had been smart enough to see would make him possible. He was what people in offices in the Capitol at Baton Rouge, or in drawing rooms in New Orleans, or in the shade of the live oaks of a plantation garden had never thought about at all.

He was also my introduction to the legendry of Huey. He told me how Huey would build you a road. How he would build you bridges with no toll. How he was going to fix your teeth free. He told me what Huey had said to a certain "son-a-bitch."

Then he vengefully spat.

"That Huey," he said, "he gits 'em tole, and tole straight."

Later on, I was to hear that phrase over and over. Huey was, indeed, a wit, a stand-up comic, a tale teller, a master of vituperation and high rhetoric, a master of many "lingos," a murderous debater.

In 1935, the university celebrated its 75th anniversary, the celebration including an enormous formal luncheon with many guests notable beyond the confines of the state: deans of famous institutions, journalists, writers, politicians.

At the high table were seats for the president of the university, ambassadors of countries that had influenced the history of Louisiana, various academics of stature, plus a few types I can't remember. Suddenly, when the hall was nearly full but the high table was still vacant, Huey appeared at one end. He strode along behind the table, apparently looking for place cards. When he reached a location near the middle of the table, he leaned slightly forward, swept some cutlery and such aside, giving the impression that he was just making a place for himself, wherever the hell his place card was, and sat down, all as calmly as though coming into his own kitchen late at night for a snack.

A waiter or two straightened out things, the great figures appropriate for the high table arrived and rather lumberingly the invocation and the formal events proceeded.

At some point the president, quite naturally, called on H uey

for a few words. Huey was in top form, or near. About all I remember is this, my paraphrase: "People say I steal. Well, all politicians steal. I steal. But a lot of what I stole has spilled over in no-toll bridges, hospitals-and to build this university."

There was more, and better. .That was the only time I ever saw Huey (except perhaps once in a passing car). In one sense I wasn't really much interested in him as a man. My guess is that he was a remarkable set of contradictions, still baffling to biographers. But I had a great interest in what Huey did in his world, and a greater interest in Huey as a focus of myth. Without this gift for attracting myth he would not have been the power he was, for good and evil. And this gift was fused, indissolubly, with his dramatic sense, with his varying roles and perhaps, ultimately, with the atmosphere of violence which he generated.

Rumors of violence were constant.

You heard that conspiracies for assassination had been formed, that the straws had been drawn. There was, for instance, an anti-Long group called the Square Dealers, organized (as we can now read on the sober pages of history) in squads and companies, armed, baying for blood. On one occasion, a man I assumed was a Square Dealer showed me his new sawedoff shotgun, loaded. How the young man-a filling-station operator-fondled the polished stock! Not long after, at legal hearings, a presumptive spy in the organization reported lurid plottings. The National Guard imposed martial law.

Long announced a conspiracy of assassination and no doubt believed it. There does not seem to be any overwhelming reason for disbelief, even if such conspirators had no direct connection whatsoever with the eventual assassin, young Dr. Carl Weiss, an able and intelligent member of the medical profession.

Meanwhile, before the fatal shot, you heard the argument among true believers that Long, in that moribund and selfsatisfied state of Louisiana, had chosen the only means to deliver his social goods. But this was, of course, the alibi of all grabbers of power everywhere. It was said all around Louisiana, and I, in certain moods, may well have said it myself. True, it was the alibi of Mussolini and Hitler, and every communist and fellow traveler loved to mouth the cliche that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. (And that was to be their alibi for Stalin after the Moscow Trials a year or so later.) As for Huey's motives, good or bad, the question was soon to become academic.

The slug from the

The stormy life of one man, Huey Long, inspired a novel, All the King's Men. Thirty-five years after its publication, the novel has inspired a stage adaptation-Willie Stark (above), which had its world premiere earlier this year at Washington, D.C.

little Belgian revolver of Dr. Weiss relegated the question to history.

Meanwhile, if you were living in Louisiana, you knew you were living in history defining itself before your eyes.

And you knew that you were not seeing a half-drunk hick buffoon performing an old routine, but were witnessing a drama which was a version of the world's drama, and the drama of history, too, the old drama of power and ethics.

How many factors, and facts, flow strangely together as I look back on those days. One of my duties was to teach a senior Shakespeare class, and in Shakespeare that question of power and ethics-and the question of determination in history-is frequent and vivid. I read Shakespeare, and many books about him, with a growing thought of Hueywho, behind his mask of idiotic or vulgar clowning, might suddenly be brilliant, inevitable, ruthless. And I was not alone.

There were the students I remember when we came to Julius Caesar and the day I lectured, no doubt in a bumbling fashion, on the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of Caesarism. For once in my life, I had an audience spellbound and breathless. That was in early 1935, at the height of violent commotion in the state and with Huey very rambunctiously alive.

And his daughter Rose discreetly in the back row in my class. (Rose, I may interpolate, was extremely intelligent.

She never spoke, and I never addressed a question to her, but her papers were always deservedly "A".) .

Huey was, in various ways, totally contemptuous of what many of his opponents would call legitimacy. He lived in terms of power, and for him ends seemed to justify means. He was, I suppose you might say, an extreme exponent of the "realistic view" of law, the "sociological view" that law is not sacrosanct revelation from on high, but grows out of the needs of a changing society. He might well have carried that attitude to the extent of treating the constitution with the respect usually reserved for Scott's Tissue.

And here I may add that in the decade of the 1930s I was reading William James, instinctively led, I suppose, to try to see the difference between philosophical pragmatism and that unphilosophical pragmatism represented

by Bolingbroke-or Huey. Or by Mussolini, who, as I seem to remember, regarded himself as a kind of disciple of the gentle William.

I was also reading such things as Machiavelli, Dante and Burckhardt on the Italian Renaissance, on tyranny and

power-not prompted by a thought of Huey, except incidentally, but to provide background for a graduate seminar in nondramatic Elizabethan literature.

Back in September 1935, driving across Nevada on my way back from California to Louisiana, I stopped at a desert filling station, and the operator, seeing the plates on my car, said: "They done shot that feller of yours, that Huey. Heard it on the radio." At filling station after station, the Louisianp plates drew attention. Especially after the death, a little group of idlers would gather to talk about "your fellow." Almost always the views were favorable to Huey-that "feller that might do somethin'."

These idlers of the Depression were unphilosophical pragmatists. What would that have meant in 1936, the election year, if Huey had been alive? But by then, there was only the "legitimate" Landon, powerless against an expert in power.

The death of Huey did not relieve the mind of only the incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It also relieved the "Long machine" of the burden of Huey.

Long had not been a looter. He had been concerned with power, and had ways of raising money for his purposes. There was, for instance, the famous "deduct box," so named because much of the fortune it presumably contained came from forced deductions from salaries of state employees; and the box was always in Huey's personal possession. No doubt, there was some general "looting" in the machine. There is the story that Huey, sitting in the midst of his cronies and lickspittles, in an hour of ease, regarded them all, shook his head sadly and remarked: "You know, if! died, you'd all go to jail, you just couldn't keep your hands from grabbing anything loose."

Time was to prove that he read them like a book.

As forthe Kingfish himself, though he lived high, all the powers of WashingtQn, including the Internal Revenue Service, with the President breathing hot down their necks, could never pin any charge on Huey. Only with the Kingfish dead did the holiday of big looting begin. Even the university was a center, with tales of cattle rustling from the Agricultural College for private estates, of a health official of the university charging $5,000 worth of Scotch whisky at a favored drugstore as "serum," ofauniversity contractor putting gold fixtures in bathrooms of his own "little mansion." And it was reported that the president of LSU, with a Ph.D. from one of our most famous teachers colleges, was idiotic enough to forge the

name of a dead governor on bonds dated after that governor's death, these bonds to be used as collateral in the educator's financial speculations. No loose cash was safe; not even federal money for student aid.

Not long after, he and the new governor were in the penitentiary, along with a crew of their ilk. And the cold muzzles of revolvers had beeh put to more than one anguished temple.

By that time 1 had actually begun basic work on what was eventually to become All the King's Men, and as 1 sat through the commencement 1 had the odd impression that 1was looking at an epilogue of my own project. That project had suddenly taken a first, cloudy shape in the spring of 1937, as 1 sat on the porch of a little house back of a sleazy tourist court and filling station, a house where lived Albert Erskine, one of my colleagues on the Southern Review and later my editor¡, and John Palmer, then a graduate student and an appointed Rhodes scholar (later a naval officer in two wars and a dean at Yale).

What struck me that afternoon was that 1 might write a verse play out of my observations and speculations. So 1 tried to tell my friends what 1 had in mind, and even as 1 talked a new idea came. There would be choruses, with each chorus a special group drawn into the orbit of the "Boss." At that moment 1 could specify only two of the choruses: one of uniformed state constabularies, with their beloved motorcyCles and revolvers, in love with violence; one of surgeons, clothed in white, in love equally with healing and with technology. The account did not seem to absorb the attention of my friends.

Nor did it absorb me, except at moments.< 1 was teaching, writing a novel (having lately received an award from Houghton Mifflin)-to be my first published novel, Night Rider. And poems kept popping up, too. And 1was involved in protracted conversation with Cleanth Brooks about poetry (and his scrupulous criticism of my own pieces as they came along), and deep in the actual collaboration with him on a textbook, Understanding Poetry ..Not to mention work with my friends on the Southern Review.

But Night Rider got finished, and in 1939, on a Guggenheim fellowship, I fled to Italy to gaze at real fascism in action, carrying notes and scribbled sections of my play. In Rome, in December of that

As soon as 1 read it, 1 knew what dissatisfied me. The idea that I'd had' about the choruses back in the spring of 1937 had not been developed suffiCiently, and it was the key 1 had overlooked. 1 now saw that my man of power, Talos, had power because he could fulfill some need, some emptiness, of those around him-or far off. 1 saw that if this idea was part of the center of the action, a play would never serve. The thing had to be "told" in the "voice" of one of the characters whose emptiness Talos fulfilled, but a character intelligent enough to understand everything except himself; 1 kept looking at the play. 1 saw the man.

He was an unnamed character, not appearing until near the end, a newspaperman, a boyhood friend of Adam Stanton, whom he now greets (with reference to the good times they had had in summers by the sea, in innocent boyhood)--this while Stanton, pistol in Hollywood's version of pocket, is waiting for Talos to come out of the legislative chamber. The boyhood Warren's novel was declared friend-and his name 1 suddenly knewBest Picture of 1949. was Jack Burden.

B,roderick Crawford' won the So 1 had my pattern for the world best actor award for his around Talos-who was to become Wilportrayal of the stormy career lie Stark. Burden was the most complex that ended with an assassin's bullet. example, and the most simple was Sugar , Boy, the stuttering little chauffeur and ---------------gunman for the Boss, who, when Stalk is year, with, on a couple of occasions, boot dead, mourns him, saying: "He could heels of Benito's Black Shirts clacking on t-t-t-talk so good." 1 worked at the thing the cobbles of Via Aurelia Safi outside in Minneapolis (distance from the scene my window, 1 finished the draft. 1 sent and time giving me perspective); then in copies to several friends, including Allen Washington, where, in the summer of Tate, Kenneth Burke (I think), and 1944, 1 had gone to the Library of Francis Fergusson. Having fled Italy in Congress to "the Chair of Poetry" (in M~ 1940, when 1 had inside information which 1 wrote some fiction); then in New from/~n Italian friend that Mussolini London, Connecticut, in the summer of would enter the war in early June, I went 1945, where on a couple of nights great to Bennington, Vermont, where every fleets of bombers, roaring, sky-filling day Francis gave me a seminar on drama constellations returning from Europe and and 1 worked at revision. The name of victory, shook the house; then in.an attic the hero was Willie Talos, and the title was room of the library of the University of Proud Flesh-¡a philosophical pun with Minnesota. which I was then well pleased.

The book appeared on August 19. The I was not well pleased with the play. I first major review took it to be an dumped it into a drawer, went back to apologia for fascism. writing poems and a novel (a relic of Well.

0 Nashville), sold my house in the country Further the deponent saith not. some miles from Baton Rouge (with its beautiful grove of live oaks with Spanish About the Author: In a career spanning five moss, where I had contentedly thought of decades. Robert Penn Warren has written 10 spending the rest of my days), moved to novels, 13 collections of poetry, 8 books on the University of Minnesota, and one nonfiction and criticism, one play and two Saturday morning, in the late winter or textbooks. The awards won by him include three early spring of 1943, took Proud Flesh Pulitzers and the Medal of Freedom. His most recent book is Being Here (poetry). out of a drawer.

CLaw eason Passed more than a hundred years ago, the u.s. Civil Rights Act of 1871 serves today as one of the most effective instruments for protecting the constitutional rights of Americans.

ld laws, if based upon sound principles, can experience a resurgence years after their original passage, as judges apply them to modern cases. Several plaintiffs in the last two decades have strengthened ~e protection of individual rights in the United States by using an antique law, the Civil Rights Act, of 1871, to challenge the actions of public officials.

Chicago police had broken into the home of James Monroe and harassed his family. New York City rules had forced Jane Monell to stop working when she was seven months pregnant.

Maine state officials had denied several children of Joline and Lionel Thiboutot the full Social Security ben'efits to which they were entitled.

These individuals eventually won their cases in the U.S. Supreme Court in decisions that have had an effect far beyond the facts of the cases themselves. For with these rulings, the Supreme Court converted the almost-forgotten 1871 law into a powerful new weapon against abuse of power. More than a century after its passage by Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1871 has become an effective instrument for legal action by individuals who feel that public officials have violated their rights.

The qvil War (1861-65) is widely regarded as the single·

most tragic experience of U.S. history. Its aftermath was manyfaceted. One of its effects was to increase greatly the power of the central government in relation to state governments.

Congress, exercising this new authority, asserted for the national government a role as protector of the rights of individuals. Until the Civil War, that function had been left entirely to the states.

Congress provided a firm basis for the new role by adding three amendments to the Constitution. With the concurrence of three-fourths of the state legislatures, Congress declared that: • Slavery, the "peculiar institution" whi'th had ignited the war, was abolished (13th Amendment).

• Every person born or naturalized in the United States was a U.S. citizen. This was the first constitutional definition of U.S. citizenship. It settled a long-running debate over whether former slaves could be citizens: They could (14th Amendment).

• States were forbidden to violate the privileges or immunities of citizens; to deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law; or to deny any person the equal protection of the law (14th Amendment).

• All governments were prohibited from restricting the right of any male citizen to vote because of race, color, or the fact that he had previously been a slave (15th Amendment).

Congress realized that it would take more than new language in the Constitution to change the ingrained attitudes of white Americans toward black Americans. And so, to each of these amendments, Congress attached language giving itself the power to pass laws to enforce their guarantees and prohibitions.

It was necessary almost immediately for Congress to exercise that enforcement power. Resistance to the efforts of

black men to assert their newly throughout the southern states.

Congress passed five civil rights the country's promise of fair nation's black citizens.

won rights quickly developed In the post-civil war decade, laws, each intended to enforce and equal treatment for the

One of the most appalling developments in the post-civil war South was the organization of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a secret society of white men whose goal was to keep blacks as powerless as they had been before the war. The KKK engaged ,in terrorism against blacks and anyone who supported black efforts to achieve equality.

Horrified by reports of crimes committed by the Klan and unpunished by state officials, Congress enacted the 1871 rights law. The first section of the act allowed individuals to sue for redress in federal court when their rights were denied by a person or persons acting "under color of," that is, under the authority of, state law. The victim could demand payment of damages from his oppressor, or he could ask a judge to issue an order requiring that the offensive actions be halted.

The law reads: Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory, subjects, or causes to be subjected any citizen of the United States or other person wilhin the jurisdiction then;of secured by the to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.

The allowed persons if in no

most significant aspect of the 1871 law was that it those who felt that their rights had been violated by whose actions the state seemed to sanction, by inaction other way, to call the alleged violators to account in federal court. Until well into the 20th century, most matters involving the rights of individuals were resolved in state courts.

But the 1871 law recognized that an individual's federally granted rights should be protected by federal courts, particularly if state courts refused to act.

This began the conversion of the federal court system into the important forum it is today for the protection and definition of the rights of the individual.

Despite these vigorous congressional efforts, the promise of the new constitutional provisions was frustrated for decades.

And the U.S. Supreme Court was one of the major factors in this frustration.

On the one hand, the Supreme Court gave the key phrases of the new amendments the narrowest possible meaning, providing far less protection for the individual than Congress had intended. And on the other hand the Court strictly limited the power of Congress to interfere in state matters to enforce these new guarantees.

If the reasons for this judicial attitude were unclear, the results were not. The Court's rulings left the states free to adopt a variety of discriminatory requirements and practices, among them voting laws effectively denying all blacks the right to vote, and laws mandating racial segregation in schools, parks and other public places. As a result of the Court's attitude, the 1871 Act lay little used. Between 1871 and 1920 only 21 cases based on it were brought in federal court.

In the 1920s, however, the 1871 Act began to be cited more frequently as the basis for civil rights lawsuits, with the Supreme Court approving its use.

In 1927 the Court upheld the use of the law to penalize Texas election officials for enforcing a state law that effectively denied blacks the right to vote in primary elections.

Twelve years later, in 1939, the Court made it clear that the 1871 Act could be invoked in cases beyond racial discrimination. In a decision announced that year, the justices endorsed a suit under this law brought by labor organizers working in Jersey City, New Jersey. The labor officials sought a federal court order stopping city officials from enforcing ~ city ordinance in such a way as to deny them their right to hold lawful meetings to discuss labor unions.

As the law was applied increasingly, cour~s began to

he "rediscovery" of the old act set off explosion in civil rights lawsuits: By 1972, 100 years after its passage, the act was being cited in up to 8,000 cases a year. scrutImze its wording, particularly the rather vague phrase which allowed suits against persons for their actions "under color of" law. What, in fact, did "under color of" mean?

Until the mid-20th century, it was assumed that actions under color of law meant actions authorized by law. Seen from that view, the 1871 Act permitted lawsuits only against persons whose offending actions were a regular part of their official duties, in line with state law. Misconduct or abuse 9f power by officials was not action "under color of" law, so such misconduct was not reachable under the law of 1871.

In 1941, however, the Supreme Court began to revise its view of this key phrase, expanding it to include misbehavior on the part of persons in power. This expansion began with two rulings-neither of which directly involved the 1871 Civil Rights Act. Both concerned the meaning of the "under color of" phrase.

In the first of these cases, state elections officials had fraudulently miscounted ballots cast by black voters. This was clearly not authorized by state law. But the Court nevertheless held that such vote fraud was action "under color of" state law because state law gave the officials the authority they so misused.

The second case involved the fatal beating of a black prisoner by a sheriff. The Court found that this clearly illegal action was also action "under color of" law because the sheriff held his office under state law.

However, almost 20 years were to pass before this broader reading of the key phrase was applied to the 1871 Act. Before dawn on an October morning in 1958, 13 members of the Chicago police force broke into the apartment of James Monroe, his wife and six children. The police taunted the family, roughed them up, and ransacked their apartment in a fruitless search. They forced Monroe to accompany them to the police station where he was held incommunicado for most of the day and questioned about a recent murder, but was charged with no crime. Eventually he was released. The story of James Monroe could have ended there.

But Monroe took advantage of the 1871 Act, and went into federal court to sue the city of Chicago and the 13 Chicago policemen for violating his constitutional right to be secure in his home from unreasonable search.

In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Monroe was using the old civil rights law in just the way Congress had meant for it to be employed. The Court at last applied to this law the broader reading of the "under color of" law requirement, holding that this sort of suit could properly be brought against the Chicago police even though they were clearly breaking-the law, rather than enforcing it, when they broke into Monroe's apartment.

Although the Court allowed Monroe's suit against the policemen to proceed, it found that the city of Chicago itself was immune from such a suit. The justices based that conclusion upon their reading of the congressional debates before passage of the 1871 law.

Notwithstanding this exception, the Court's decision set off an explosion in civil rights lawsuits, particularly in suits using this rediscovered old law. By 1972 up to 8,000 suits were being tiled each year under the 1871 law, as citizen after citizen found the law well suited to his needs in seeking recompense for violation of his rights by officials.

For a decade and a half after the Court's decision in Monroe's case, persons who brought damage suits under the 1871 Act were successful in obtaining such compensation only from individual officials or public employees. State governments managed to avoid such penalties by citing a constitutional amendment and the doctrine of sovereign immunity that protected them from being sued without their consent. And city governments cited the exemption that the Court had granted the city of Chicago in the Monroe ruling.

Jane Monell, a young woman who worked for the city of New York in a shelter for neglected children, was seven months pregnant when city officials insisted she take unpaid leave for the duration of her pregnancy.

Unhappy with this preemptory order, Monell discovered that other women had had similar experiences. As a group, they sued the city agencies which had insisted upon such mandatory maternity leave. The women asked a federal court to order their former employers to pay them the earnings they would

have received had they been allowed to continue working during their pregnancy.

In the early rounds of the lawsuit, Monell and the other women lost their case. Lower courts pointed out to them that any such back-pay award from a city agency would ultimately come from the cIty's treasury, in violation of the Court's holding in the Monroe case that city governments were exempt from such lawsuits.

Undeterred, Monell and her fellow plaintiffs went to the Supreme Court of the United States, arguing that cities should not enjoy this sort of immunity. The Court-declaring that its earlier decision granting that immunity was mistaken-overturned that part of its Monroe ruling.

City governments could be sued under the 1871 law, the Court held in 1978. Under that law, wrote Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., cities were subject to the same penalties as individual officials-subject to an order that they halt their offending actions, an order declaring those actions unconstitutional, or an order requiring the city to pay money damages to its victims.

Ultimately, the city of New York agreed to pay up to $1,000 each to Monell and women similarly forced to take leave during pregnancy.

The Monroe and Monell decisions together seemed to have done a thorough job of resurrecting the 1871 Act, but in mid-1980 the Supreme Court again extended the reach of that law and the lawsuits it authorized.

Joline and Lionel Thiboutot were certain that Maine officials had improperly refused to pay several of their children the full Social Security benefits to which the children were entitled. Protesting this deprivation, the Thiboutots sued the state, basing their case on the 1871 Act. The plain language of the act authorizes persons to sue those who deprive them of rights secured "by the Constitution and laws .... " Yet despite that language, until 1980 the law was seen as properly invoked only by persons whose con3titutional rights had been violated ..Denial of a right granted only under federal law could not successfully be challenged under the 1871 Act. Nevertheless, the Thiboutots sued Maine under the old law for denying their children the full benefits they were due under the federal Social Se~urity Act (some federal Social Security programs are administered by state governments).

And in 1980 the Supreme Court found this a proper use of the law. This decision vastly expanded the reach of such lawsuits-and the liability of state and local governments.

The Court added sting to its decision by ruling that when such a suit was successful, the judge presiding over it could order the state to pay the fees of the lawyers represt:<ntingthe victims.

It was apparent that individuals could now sue state and local governments for failing to carry out properly abroad range of programs authorized by Congress. The century-old law had moved with the times and is as potent today as it was meant to be more than 100 years ago.

0 About the Author: Elder Witt is a Washington-based writer associated with Editorial Research Reports, a weekly publication.

Norman

Mailer

AN rnTERVlEW

BY HILARY

MlLU

The man and his style Norman Mailer is one of the most prolific, varied, and perplexing serious writers of this generation. He began his literary career in 1948 when, at the age of 25, he published his now-classic novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead. Since then, Mailer has written a total of 22 books, including five more novels, several collections of eclectic and brilliant essays, profiles of such personalities a_sMarilyn Monroe and Mohammad Ali, and nonfiction.

In addition to this prodigious output, Mailer has made three movies, rununsuccessfully-for mayor of New York in 1969, married six times and has had eight children. He now lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York, with his sixth wife, Norris Church, a former Arkansas schoolteacher.

Mailer's book about the 1967 antiVietnam war march to the Pentagon, Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1969 as well as The National Book Award. His book about the execution of Gary Gilmore [a convicted murderer shot to death by a firing squad in January 1977; the first person to face the death penalty in the United States since 1967], The Executioner's Song, won the Pulitzer Prize for literature last year.

Mailer's newest book, published in December 1980, is a large-format collaboration with photographer Milton H. Greene entitled Of Women and Their Elegance.

Q

You've used a lot of different literary forms over the past 33 years, yet it's always seemed as if you have the most respect for the form of the novel.

Well, perhaps it's the professional respect I feel for the novel. I think it's the most difficult of all the forms I've tried.

I've always been fond of journalism, but I don't respect it in the same way because I think it's easier. Artists always have a kind of regard for virtuosity, and

although the fact that something is easier doesn't therefore mean it's a lesser form, deep down I think most artists feel that if it's hard you respect it more.

Q Looking

back on your career, it seems as if your novel The Deer Park was a kind of watershed. It was after that book came out in 1955 that¡ you gradually moved away from the novel and into journalism.

What happened at that point in your career?

I really think the watershed book was Advertisements for Myself because that was the first book, oddly enough, that I'd say was written in what became my style.

I never felt as if I had a style until that book, and once I developed that stylefor better or for worse-a lot of other forms opened to it. It's an adaptable style, and of course when I finally discovered in Armies of the Night that I could put myself into a book and thereby paint all sorts of splendid effects, I began to enjoy going in many directions.

Between Advertisements for Myself which came out in 1959 and Armies of the Night which was written in 1967, I was going in a good many different directions but I wasn't enjoying it. I didn't know quite how to do it. I was having a terrible time with my journalistic pieces, but of course I was having a terrible time with everything I was writing. Writing was very difficult for me during that period and so much of it was tied up with my personal life.

Q You've

mentioned previously that you were smoking a lot of marijuana around this time; do you think this had anything to do with the difficulties you were encountering in your work?

No. All it did was consume large tracts of my brain ... .I think parts of my head have been permanently sluggish ever since. But I don't think the damage to my head was what was giving me difficulty in writing. It was more timidity. I was a little

aghast at what I was trying to do because no one had ever done it before. These days everybody is laying claim to having started the New Journalism .... But I think if I started any aspect of that New Journalism-and I did-it was an enormously personalized journalism where the character of the narrator was one of the elements not only in telling the story but in the way the reader would assess the experience.

I had some dim instinctive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism was that the reporter pretended to be objective and that was one of the great lies of all time. What this really was was an all-out assault on New Yorker writing, and at the same time I had-as all of us did-a vast respect for the New'Y orker. So I was a little scared at what I w'as doing. I thought I was either all right or all wrong.

The stakes were high, but by now it's more comfortable to write that way.

Q You also pointed

out in Cannibals and Christians that after the war American society was changing so rapidly that "the novel gave up any desire to be a creation equal to the phenomenon of the country."

Did this have anything to do with your move away from the novel form and into journalism?

Well, I wasn't taking journalism that seriously. I never felt that I was doing something more important than the novel. ... The thing that makes the novel so hellishly difficult is that you. have to elucidate a story from the material. If you make a mistake, then you may not discover it until the book is done and you're looking back on it Ie years later.

It's very much like chess in a funny way.

Good chess players always speak of the best line of continuation. They can analyze a game afterward and really replay the points of no return and see whether a knight should have been moved to another box. In the novel, you're left wondering.

Q

You've talked a lot about your economic problems in the past. If economic necessity hadn't been a factor in your life, would you have written as much as you have?

If I had no economic necessity I would have written about one and a half as many pages as William Styron and that's because I'm about one and a half times more energetic than old Bill....

No. I would have written books that are more like Styron's too, in the sense that they would have been more literary and more well-rubbed, and I would have spent more time on them and I would have polished them and I would have lived with them and would have sighed over them and I probably would have taken them more seriously than I take my books, although I do take them very seriously. But I mean I would have been truly solemn about them ....

Q

How would you say your early success affected you and your work?

It changed my life. For a long time after the success of The Naked and the Dead, for seven or eight years, I kept walking around saying nobody treats me as if I'm real, nobody wants me for myself, for my five feet eight inches, everybody wants me for my celebrity.

Therefore my experience wasn't real. All the habits I'd formed up to that point of being an observer on the sidelines were shattered. Suddenly, if I went into a room I was the center of the room, and so regardless of how I carried myself, everything I did was taken seriously and critically. I complained bitterly to myself about the unfairness of it until the day I realized that it was fair, that that was my experience. It's the simplest remark to make to yourself, but it took me 10 years to get to that point.

Then I began to realize the kind of writing I was going to do would be altogether different from the kind of writing I thought I would do. After The Naked and the Dead I thought I would write huge collective novels about American life, but I knew I had to go out and get experience and my celebrity made it impossible. I then began to realize that there was something else that I was going to get which hopefully would be equally valuable, and that was that I was having a form of 20th-century experience which would become more and more prevalent: I was utterly separated from my roots. I was successful and alienated and that was a 20th-century condition. This went into ,all my work after that in one way or 'another and will go on forever because by

now I suppose I can say that th~t kind of personality interests me more than someone who is rooted.

Q Do

you ever think of an audience when you write?

No. I used to have a much clearer idea of who I was writing for-certain friends, certain intellectuals, certain critics, a certain sense of the kind of audience I wanted -out there and who they might be.

That was in the Sixties, but in the Seventies there was a stretch where I really didn't know who I was writing for.

You go in and out of fashion as a writer, that's one of the periodicities in your life, and another is that your sense of who you're writing for goes in and out of phase or focus. I've gone through a period of about four or five years where I really didn't know who I was writing for any more, and I must say with the novel on Egypt I'm working on I've gotten to the point where I don't care who I'm writing for. It's either going to be good or it isn't going to be good, but I wouldn't have a clue who's going to like it and who is not going to like it. You get old enough and realize there are gods in the cosmos but there are no literary gods left. That's not bad; there's something demeaning about being in awe of a critic.

morning. I'll work quietly on it, but the one invariable is if I tell myself the night before that I'm going to work, I go to work and it doesn't matter what kind of mood I'm in. When I was younger I used to shatter work all the time and could not finish things because I'd do some good writing, then go out and celebrate and then unconsciously I'd be working on the continuation of what I'd been writing while I was celebrating. I was shattering my brain and I'd wake up the next morning and have to reconstruct it. Eventually the brain just rebels. I found I began to have blocks and the best way to

"I discovered that 1 could put myself into a book and thereby paint all sorts of splendid effects." get around a block is to tell yourself you're going to write. If you obey that promise you made to yourself-even if it takes 45 days-the unconscious will trust you again and begin to deliver the material.

Q

What time of day do you write? concentration different when Usually in the morning, sometimes in you work on a novel from when you work the afternoon. I start around 10 and work on journalism? till one, break for lunch, and then someThe novel is much more demanding times start again in the afternoon and physically. I've found that I almost can't sometimes not. I don't like to write twice do serious writing without getting into a in th~ day .... depression. The depression is almost a Do you type or write in longhand? vital part of the process because, to begin Longhand. . with, it's dangerous beyond measure to fall in love with what you're doing while you're doing it. You lose your judgment Are you one of those writers who build and you lose it for the simplest reasona book painstakingly from page one or do you like to get the material down and go that the words, as you're reading them, are stirring you too much. The odds are, back and revise? if they're stirring you too much, they are I'm not happy if I feel that what's going to stir no one else. behind me is wrong or needs work. The reason for that is I tend to build my books You also get depressed for reasons that are impossible to explain. I think we on the basis of what I have already. I sometimes get depressed when we're . never have a master plan for the entire writing because we're destroying other book. Every time I have-and when I possibilities. The deeper your theme, the was younger I used to sit down and write more you're making it impossible for out a complete plan for a book-I never wrote the book. Even with The Execuyourself to approach other themes that are collateral to it. So there's the gloom tioner's Song where, after all, I knew the that certain things are probably not going story in great detail, I was very careful to get written about. not to be versed in too many details of the story way ahead. In other words, I tended Once you commit yourself to a work to do my research no more than 100 do you write consistently every day? pages ahead of where I was because I wanted to keep the feeling that I didn't I've been working on the Egyptian noveJ on and off for 10 years so I hardly know'how it was all going to turn out. I feel'desperate when I get in in the wanted to have the illusion that I was

Q Is your

Q

Q

Q

inventing each little detail as if I were writing a conventional novel.

Q So you don't take many notes on plot or character, development?

A few notes. Usually if it's a powerful enough idea about the continuation of the book I don't need to take a note, If I can't remember that, then what kind of idea could it have been? Once in a great while I'll put together a note on something that should happen 200 pages ahead, just a thought the character might have, and I sort of know the place where it will come in; but I like the idea of a book not being too programmatic, I find some of the best ideas I get I receive because I haven't fixed other ideas in concrete and have to obey them. When you know your end, it's disastrous to get a good idea which takes you away from that end.

Q

Do you show your manuscript to someone while a work is in progress?

Oh sure, I do it the way I box: I pick my sparring partners very carefully.

Usually I'll box with people who are so good that I'm in no danger of being hurt because they consider it obscene to hurt me. Or I'll box with friends where we understand each other and are trying to bring out the best in each other as boxers.

The same thing with an early stage of a manuscript. ...

Q

You've worked on a number of other books while writing your big novel. Do you ever find it hard to get back in sync with the novel after doing these other projects?

I've often said that this Egyptian novel is nicer to me than any of my wives. I leave it for two years and come back and it says, "Oh you look tired, you've been away, here let me wash your feet." I've been able to go back to it without trouble every time so far. But a novel is very much like that mythological creature: a good woman. You can't abuse her forever. So I think I've finally got to finish the Egyptian novel. The time has come.

Q What

is it abo~t?

It takes place in the reign of Ramses IX who was pharaoh in the 20th dynasty. .The period is 1130 B.C. That's just the first novel. I'm two-thirds of the way through, and it's 1,000 pages long so far.

The second novel will take place in the future and a third novel will be contemporary. I've got a very tricky way of tying .them up, but I'm not going to talk about that because I've got to have something to keep me going ....

Q Can

you just say what the original inspiration for the book was?

I thought I'd take a quick trip through Egypt. At one point I wanted the novel to be picaresque and have a chapter on Egypt of antiquity, a chapter on Greece, and a chapter on Rome just to show how marvelously talented I was to be able to do all these things. So I dipped into Egypt and I never got out. I'm kind of sluggish when you get right down to it.

a

It's interesting that when you wrote The Deer Park back in 1955 it was originally supposed to be the first volume of an eight-novel project and now you've circled back to a novelistic scheme of almost equally monumental proportions. Do you feel more ready now?

Well, I feel more ready but I don't feel ready. I mean I don't think you ever do .... What I'm attempting in this book is a good reach or two beyond anything I've done before. I'm not at all confident that I'll be able to do it, but I'm hoping I will.

Q

Your work is totally unique, but do you see yourself as a direct descendent of any particular literary line?

I must say that I have a fragmented soyl when it comes to what I think are my traditions because my taste and my loyalties are all in separate places. My loyalties are to people like Dreiser and Farrell and maybe Steinbeck and Wolfe-and the people who were writing about working-class and lower middle-class people.

They were the ones who first got me excited about writing. On the other hand, my taste quickly inclined toward Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald, and I learned so many things from them that I didn't learn from the other bunch.

Then, in a way, my actual roots and influences are so peculiar. Henry Adams, for instance, obviously had a vast influence on me but I never knew he did until I started to write Armies of the Night.

a

Are you in the habit of socializing a lot with other writers?

Not as much as some writers do. I have a distrust of the literary world ... .I think that the literary world is a very dangerous place to be in if you want to do an awful lot of writing because it's almost necessary to take on airs in order to protect yourself in that world. In a way you can't handle yourself skillfully unless your airs are finely tuned ....

Hemingway committed suicide working on those airs. He took the literary world much too seriously and he's almost

there as a lesson to the rest of us: Don't get involved in that world at too deep a level or it will kill you and kill you for the silliest reasons-for vanity and because feuds are beginning to etch your liver with the acids of frustration.

a.

On the other hand, you've put almost as much creative energy into your public performing self as you have into your work. Do you think that public self has helped or hurt your work?

It's probably helped my mind and hurt my work. I think I've had the kind of experience that made me equipped to deal with certain kinds of problems that a writer who's more serious about keeping to his study and not venturing out too much-or certainly not venturing out on quixotic ventures-would not have had. I think I have an understanding of the complexity of the world that I wouldn't have gotten if I stayed at home. I would have tended to have a much more paranoid vision of how sinister things are.

Things are sinister but not in the way I used to think they were sinister.

Q It's

interesting that in your latest books, The Executioner's Song and Of Women and Their Elegance, Norman Mailer is conspicuously absent as narrator. Is this a conscious attempt on your part to get away from the autobiographical mode?

I think I've just worn out my feeling that that was the style in which to keep writing. Because it was so difficult for me to arrive at my own style-after all I'd been a public writer for 10 to 12 years before I felt I'd come into my own style as such-I didn't start with an identity. I forged an identity through my experiences and through changing. Because of that, I think, in a funny way it was much easier to give up that style when the time came. I didn't feel as if I were giving myself away.

And I've always felt as if the way people react to me is not to me but they react to the latest photograph they've seen of me. So I can change the photograph and have the fun of observing the reactions. Also the devil in me loves the idea of being just that much of a changeling. You can never understand a writer until you find his private little vanity and my private little vanity has always been that I will frustrate expectations. People think they've found a way of dismissing me, like the mad butler-but I'll be back 0 serving the meal.

Aboutthe Interviewer: Hilary Mills is a newspaper

columnist in Washington.

Conventions and trade shows in the United States are big business and cities vie with one another for the privilege of playing host these grand spectacles.

to

.Putting ona Good Show From high in the box seats of the massive Astrodome in Houston, Texas, the scene below seemed a child's delight: Concrete mixing trucks, road graders, hopper cars and other equipment on display in the arena looked like a collection of brightly painted toys. Even down on the ground level, where the awesome dimensions of the machines were apparent, the flashing lights, games and giveaways made the scene seem more like a carnIval than a serious place of business.

But for the 241 manufacturers of concrete equipment, who were exhibiting their wares at the 1980 International Concrete and Aggregates Show, the exposition was probably the most important business event of the year.

"We can do as much business in four or five days at these shows as we can in a whole year," says Robert Ross, president of the Ross Company of Brownwood, Texas.

Ross' company, which makes concrete mixing plants, had one uf the biggest exhibit spaces in the show. Nearly every visitor to the exhibition strolled past the company's wares and thousands talked with the Ross people to know more about their equipment. "We just can't get that kind of exposure any other way," a company salesman says.

Exposure and people are what trade fairs and conventions are all about. Virtually every fraternal or occupational group in the United

Left, top: Sports fans pack the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, for a football game. Left, center: After the game, workers roll up the artificial turf to ready the stcuJium for the 1980 International Concrete and Aggregates Show. Left and right: Workmen wrestle machinery into position for the fair. .

States has an annual convention.

And there are literally thousands of these groups: farm- and powerequipment dealers, women organizations, singers' associations, legal-aid associations, neurologists, doctors, editors, publishers, farmers, bankers, engineers, business executives-and hundreds more.

Conventions and trade fairs are big business in the United States, pumping more than $15,000 million into the economy each year, and generating a bonanza for their host cities.

The International Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus recently conducted a survey of conventions in 55 American cities which revealed that the average delegate stays 3.8 days in the convention city and spends a total of $254 while there.

While delegates are the most conspicuous convention spenders, behind-the-scenes expenditures are equally big, For example, exhibitors who are selling their products or services spend an average of $1,845 during the 3.8 days that they usually stay at a convention.

The associations that sponsor conventions are themselves a major source of income for host cities.

According to recent figures, in one year each host association surveyed spent an average of $57,265. In addition, contractors hired by these organizations in turn spend $40,000 or more per convention or trade show in contracting local suppliers to provide labor and hauling services.

No wonder, then, that cities in the United States vie with one another to lure prospective convention associations.

More than 100 cities have fulltime professional staffs whose job is to attract conventions to their cities. Promotional gimmicks are often proffered. Houston, for example, sends. potential customers miniature glass oil wells and pack-

ets of a famous Texas barbecue sauce.

Promotional efforts don't stop there. Cities build "the biggest," "the best" hotels, indoor stadiums and other facilities to attract prospective customers. One of Houston's biggest selling points', for example, is the city's Astrodome, which was designed to serve the twin functions of a sports arena as well as a site for conventions and trade shows. The world's first airconditioned stadium, its spectacular circular dome rises 63 meters above the floor and has a span of 196 meters!

Although most conventions have about 1,000 registrants, conventions with more than 30,000 delegates are not a rarity. For these large gatherings, space must often be reserved up to 10 years in advance. Some American associations have booked conventions through the year 2000.

Planning these gatherings has become a precise science; conventions-especially the major oneswork with a clockwork precision.

They often have scripts spelling out minute-bY1minute activities.

Why do¢s the convention business continue to boom in the United States? Many reasons have been cited: Discount air fares make distant meetings more accessible for more people, and companies often reward productive employees with prepaid convention trips.

Conventions provide opportunities to exchange infoqnation, discuss problems and make fresh contacts.

According to anthropologist Lionel Tiger, the convention in this technological age "is an effort, like the fair of old, to generalize one's experience, to make something more meaningful of it."

Whatever experiences each delegate carries home, it seems that the big business of conventions in the United States can do only one 0 thing-keep growing.

Workers give finishing touches to the exhibits-tightening track of earthmoving equipment (right), painting grillwork (below), and polishing a machine part (bottom).

Above: Within a few days, Ithe job of moving displays and concrete machinery into place is complete, cmd a sports arena-,,-the Astrodome (left}-becomes the site for a major trade fair. At right is an aerial view of the 1980 Concrete and Aggregates Show.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE·

"Sorry, Mrs. Martin ... ifwe let you, then everybody would want to do it."

REAPPRAISAL OF SCONTROL

In a recent address to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, the s. Secretary of State (above) said that the United States is committed to "a serious and realistic approach to the problems of arms control," and is not pursuing negotiation "for its own sake, or for the political symbolism of continuing the process."

u.

We are living in an age when man has conceived the means of his own destruction. The supreme interest of the United States has been to avoid the extremes of either nuclear catastrophe or nuclear blackmail. Beginning with the Baruch Plan, * every American President has sought international agreement to control nuclear weapons and to prevent their proliferation. But each Chief Executive has also recognized that our national security and the security of our Allies depended on American nuclear forces as well.

President Ronald Reagan stands on this tradition. He understands the dangers of unchecked nuclear arms. He shares the universal aspiration for a more secure and peaceful world. But he also shares the universal disappointment that the arms control process has delivered less than it has promised.

One of the President's first acts was to order an intense review of arms control policy, the better to learn the lessons of the past in the hope of achieving more lasting progress for the future. Two fundamental conclusions have emerged from this review. â&#x20AC;˘ First, the search for, sound arms control agreements should be an essential elemerit of our program for achieving and maintaining peace. â&#x20AC;˘ Second, such agreements can be reached if negotiations among adversaries about their natiot;lal security interests are not dominated by pious hopes and simplistic solutions. ' The task of arms control is enormously complex. It must be related to the nation's security needs and perspectives.

Above all, arms control policy must be seen in the light of international realities.

As Winston Churchill put it, "You must look at the facts because they look at you." An American arms control policy for this decade must take into account the facts about our security and the lessons 'Under the Baruch Plan. the United States offered in 1946, when it was the only country to possess atomic weapons, to destroy its own atomic weapons if the United Nations would forbid other nations to manufacture atomic weapons. The plan was rejected by the Soviet Union. .

that we have learned about what worksand what does not work-in arms control.

Despite the extraordinary efforts at arms control during the Seventies the world is a less secure place than it was 10 years ago. We began the process with the expectation that it would help to secure the deterrent forces of both the United States and the Soviet Union. But Moscow's strategic buildup has put at risk both our crucial landbased missiles and our bombers. Simultaneously, the Soviets have continued a massive buildup of conventional forces and have used them with increasing boldness. Their armies and those of their surrogates have seized positions that threaten resources and routes critical to Western security.

We cannot blame our approach to arms control alone for our failure to restrain the growth and use of Soviet power. The Soviet Union did not feel compelled to agree to major limitations and adequate verification in part because the United States did not take the steps needed to maintain its own strategic and conventional forces. Nor did we respond vigorously to Soviet use of force. The turmoil of the 1960s, Vietnam, and Watergate contributed to this passivity; as a result, the basis for arms control was undermined. We overestimated the extent to which the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks would help to ease other tensions.

We also underestimated the impact of such tensions on the arms control process itself.

This experience teaches us that arms control can be only one element in a comprehensive structure of defense and foreign policy designed to reduce the risk of war. It cannot be the political centerpiece or the crucial barometer of U.S.Soviet relations, burdening arms control with a crushing political weight. It can hardly address such issues as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Libyan invasion of Chad, or Cuban intervention in Africa and Latin America. Instead, arms control should be

one element in a full range of political, economic and military efforts to promote peace and security.

The lessons of history and the facts of , international life provide the basis for a realistic set of principles to guide a more effective approach to arms control.

All of our principles are derived from a recognition that the paramount aim of arms control must be to reduce the risk of war. We owe it to ourselves and to our posterity to follow principles wedded to that aim.

Our first principle is that our arms control efforts will be an instrument of, not a replacement for, a coherent Allied security policy. Arms control proposals should be designed in the context of the security situations we face, our military needs and our defense strategy. Arms control should complement military programs in meeting these needs. Close consultation with our Allies is an essential part of this process, both to protect their interests and to strengthen the Western position in negotiations with the Soviet Union. If conversely, we make our defense programs dependent on progress in arms control, then we will give the Soviets a veto over our defenses and remove their incentive to negotiate fair arrangements. Should we expect Moscow to respect parity if we demonstrate that we are not prepared to sacrifice to sustain it? Can we expect the Soviets to agree to limitations if they realize that, in the absence of agreement, we shall not match their efforts? In the crucial relationship between arms and arms control-we should not put the cart before the horse.

There is little prospect of agreements with the Soviet Union that will help solve such basic security problems as the vulnerability of our landbased missiles until we demonstrate that we have the will and capacity to solve them without arms control, should that be necessary.

Our second principle is that the United States will seek arms control agreements that truly enhance security. We will work for agreements that make world peace more secure by reinforcing deterrence.

On occasion it has been urged that we accept defective agreements in order "to keep the arms control process alive." But we are seeking much more than agreements for their own sake. We will design our proposals not simply in the interest of a speedy negotiation but so they will result in agreements which genuinely enhance the security of both sides.

Dr. Robert J. Lifton.

Courtesy of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist.

That is the greatest measure of the worth of arms control, not money saved nor the arms eliminated. Indeed valuable agreements can be envisioned that do not save money and do not eliminate arms.

The vital task is to limit and to reduce arms in a way that renders use of the remaining arms less likely.

Just as arms control should not aim simply at reducing numbers, so it should not try simply to restrict the advance of technology. Some technological advances make everyone safer. Reconnaissance satellites, for instance, discourage surprise attacks by increasing warning and make verification of agreements possible.

Submarines and other means of giving mobility to strategic systems enhance their survivability, reduce the advantage of preemptive strikes, and thus help to preserve peace. Our proposals will take account of both the positive and the negative effects of advancing technology.

Whether a particular weapons system,

rms control should be one element in a full range of political, economic and military efforts to promote peace and security."

and therefore a particular agreement, undermines or supports deterrence may change with the development of other weapons systems. At one time fixed ICBMs were a highly stable form of strategic weapons deployment but technical change has altered that. We need to design arms control treaties so that they can adapt flexibly to long-term changes.

A treaty that, for example, has the effect of locking us into fixed ICBM deployments, WQuid actually detract from the objectives of arms control.

Our third principle is that we will seek arms control bearing in mind the whole context of Soviet conduct worldwide.

Escalation of a.crisis produced by Soviet aggression could lead to a nuelear war, particularly if we allowed an imbalance of forces to provide an incentive for a Soviet first strike. American foreign and defense policy, of which arms control is one element, must deter aggression, contain crisis, reduce sources of conflict, and achieve a more stable military balanceall for the purpose of securing peace.

These tasks cannot be undertaken successfully in isolation from each other.

Soviet international conduct directly affects the prospects for success in arms control. Recognition of this reality is essential for a healthy arms control process in the long run. Such "linkage" is not a creation of U.S. policy: it is fact of life.

A policy of pretending that there is no linkage promotes reverse linkage. It ends up by saying that in order .to preserve arms control, we have to tolerate Soviet aggression. The Reagan Administration will never accept such an appalling conelusion.

Our fourth principle is that we will seek balanced arms control agreements. Balanced agreements are necessary for a relationship based on reciprocity and essential to maintaining the security of both sides. The Soviet Union must be more willing in the future to accept genuine parity for arms control to move ahead. Each agreement must be balanced in itself and contribute to an overall balance.

Quantitative parity is important, but balance is more than a matter of numbers. One cannot always count different weapons systems as if they were equivalent. What matters is the capacity of either side to make decisive gains through military operations or the threat of military operations. Agreements that do not effectively reduce the incentives to use

force, especially in crisis situations, do nothing to enhance security.

Our fifth principle is that we will seek arms control agreements that include effective means of verification and mechanisms for securing compliance.

Unverifiable agreements only increase uncertainty, tensions, and risks. The critical obstacle in virtually every area of arms control in the 1970s was Soviet unwillingness to accept the verification measures needed for more ambitious limitations. As much as any other single factor, whether the Soviets are forthcoming on this question will determine the degree of progress in arms control in the 1980s.

Failure of the entire arms control process in the long run can be avoided only if compliance issues are clearly resolved. For example, there have been extremely disturbing reports of the use of chemical weapons by the Soviets or their proxies in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. With full Western support the United Nations is now investigating the issue of chemical weapons. Similarly in the spring of 1979, there was an extraordinary outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. Despite continued probing, we still await a serious Soviet explanation as to whether it was linked to activities prohibited under the biological weapons convention.

Our sixth principle is that our strategy must consider the totality of the various arms control processes and various weapons systems, not only those being negotiated. Each U.S. weapons system must be understood not merely in connection with a corresponding Soviet system, but in relation to our whole strategy for deterring the Soviets from exploiting military force. In developing our theater nuclear arms control proposals, for example, we should consider the relationship of theater nuclear forces to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) overall strategy for deterring war in Europe. We cannot overlook the fact that our European strategy has always compensated for shortfalls in conventional capability through a greater reliance on theater and strategic nuclear force's. If we are to rely less on the nuclear elements in the future, the conventional elements will have to be strengthened.

What then are the prospects for arms control in the Eighties? We could achieve quick agreements and an appearance of

will seek arms control agreements that include effective means of verification and mechanisms for security compliance. Unverifiable

agreements increase

uncertainty, tensions, risks." progress if we pursued negotiation for its own sake, or for the political symbolism of continuing the process. But we are committed to serious arms control that truly strengthens international security.

That is why our approach must be prudent, paced, and measured.

With a clear sense of direction and dedication to the serious objectives of arms control, the Reagan Administration will strive to make arms control succeed.

We will put our principles into action.

We will conduct negotiations ,based upon close consultation with our Allies, guided by the understanding that our objective is enhanced security for all of our Allies, not just the United States.

We will work with the U.S, Congress to ensure that our arms control proposals reflect the desires of American people, and that once agreements are negotiated, they will be ratified and their implementation fully supported.

We will comply with agreements we make, and we will demand 'that others comply, too.

By the end of the year, the United States will be embarked upon a new arms control endeavor of fundamental importance, one designed to reduce the Soviet Union's nuclear threat to our European Allies.

The impetus for these negotiations dates back to the mid-1970s, when the Soviets began producing and deploying a whole new generation of nuclear systems designed to threaten not the United States-for their range was too shortbut Qur European Allies. These new weapons, and in particular the nearly

5,OOO-kilometer range SS-20 missile, were not just modernized replacements for older systems. Because of their much greater range, their mobility, and above all the multiplication of warheads of each missile, these new systems presented the Alliance with a threat of a new order of magnitude.

The pace of the Soviet buildup is increasing. Since the beginning of last year, the Soviets have more than doubled their SS-20 force. Already 750 warheads have been deployed on SS-20 launchers.

The Soviet Union has continued to deploy the long-range Backfire bomber and a whole array of new medium- and short-range nuclear missiles and nuclear capable aircraft. This comprehensive Soviet buildup was in no sense a reaction to NATO's defense program. Indeed, NATO did little as this alarming buildup progressed.

In December 1979 the Alliance finally responded in two ways. First, it agreed to deploy 464 new U.S. ground-launched Cruise missiles in Europe, and to replace 108 medium-range Pershing ballistic missiles already located there with modernized versions of greater range.

Second, the Alliance agreed that the United States should pursue negotiated limits on U.S. and Soviet systems in this category ..

This two-track decision represents explicit recognition that arms control cannot succeed unless it is matched by clear determination to take the defense measures necessary to restore a secure balance. On taking office, and as one of its first foreign policy initiatives, the Reagan Administration announced its commitment to both tracks of the Alliance decision-deployments and arms control. Last May, in Rome, we secured unanimous Alliance endorsement of our decision to move ahead on both tracks, and of our plan for doing so.

Since then I have begun discussions in Washington with the Soviet Ambassador on this issue. When I meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko at the United Nations this month, I will seek agreement to start U.S.-Soviet negotiations on these weapons systems by the end of the year. We would like to see U.S. and Soviet negotiators meet to begin formal talks between mid-November and midDecember. We intend to appoint a senior U.S. official with the rank of ambassador as our representative.

Extensive preliminary preparations for

this entirely new area of arms. control are already underway, in Washington, and in consultation with our NATO Allies in Brussels. Senior U.S. and European officials will continue to consult after the beginning of U.S.-Soviet exchanges. We and our Allies recognize that progress can only come through complex, extensive and intensive negotiations.

We approach these negotiations with a clear sense of purpose. We want equal, verifiable limits at the lowest possible level on U.S. and Soviet theater nuclear forces. Such limits would reduce the threat to Allies and bring to Europe the security undermined by the Soviet buildup. We regard the threat to our Allies as a threat to ourselves, and the United States will therefore spare no effort to succeed.

We are proceeding with these negotiations to limit the theater threat within the framework of SALT-the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks designed to limit the nuclear threat to the United States and the Soviet Union. In this area, too, the U.S. has initiated intense preparations. These preparations must take into account the decisions we will make shortly on modernizing our intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers.

In the course of 10 years of SALT negotiations, conceptual questions have arisen which must be addressed. For instance, how have improvements in monitoring capabilities, on the one hand, and new possibilities for deception and concealment, on the other, affected our ability to verify agreements and to improve verification? Which systems are to be included in a SALT negotiation, and which should be discussed in other forums? How can we compare and limit the diverse U.S. and Soviet military arsenals in the light of new systems and technologies¡ emerging on both sides?

In each of these areas there are serious and pressing questions which must be answered to insure the progress of SALT in the 1980s and beyond. Only in this way can SALT become again a dynamic process that will promote greater security in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. We are determined to solve these problems and to do everything necessary to arrive at balanced reductions in the strategic arsenals of both sides.

We should be prepared to pursue innovative arms control ideas. For example, negotiated confidence-building mea-

he paramount aim of arms control must be to reduce the risk of war.

We owe it to ourselves and to posterity to follow principles wedded to that aim." sures in Europe could provide a valuable means to reduce uncertainty about the character and purpose of the other side's military activities. While measures of this sort will not lessen the imperative of maintaining a military balance in Europe, they can reduce the dangers of miscalculation and surprise, Weare eager to pursue such steps in the framework of a European disarmament conference based on an important French proposal now being considered at the Madrid meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. We call upon the Soviets to accept this proposal, which would cover Soviet territory to the Urals. As we proceed in Madrid, we will do so on the basis of firm Alliance solidarity, which is the key to bringing the Soviets to accept serious and effective arms control measures.

Our efforts to control existing nuclear arsenals will be accompanied by new attempts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The Reagan Administration is developing more vigorous policies for inhibiting nuclear proliferation. We expect the help of others in this undertaking and we intend to be a more forthcoming partner to those who share responsible nonproliferation practices. Proliferation complicates the task of arms control: It increases the risk of preemptive and accidental war, it detracts from the maintenance of a stable balance of conventional forces, and it brings weapons of unparalleled destructiveness to volatile and developing regions. No short-term gain in export revenue or regional pres-

tige can be worth such risks.

It may be argued that the "genie is out of the bottle," that technology is already out of control. But technology can also be tapped for answers. Our policies can diminish the insecurities that motivate proliferation. Responsible export practices can reduce dangers. And international norms can increase the cost of nuclear violations. With effort we can help to assure that nuclear plowshares are not transformed into nuclear swords.

In sum, the United States has a broad agenda of specific arms control efforts and negotiations already underway or about to be launched. The cha'rge that we are not interested in arms control or that we have cut off communications with the Soviets on these issues is simply not true.

The approach I have discussed here stands in a long and distinguished American tradition. We are confident that it is a serious and realistic approach to the enduring problems of arms control. The United States wants a more secure and peaceful world. And we know that balanced, verifiable arms control can contribute to this objective. â&#x20AC;˘ Weare also confident that the Soviet leaders will realize the seriousness of our intent. They should soon tire of the proposals that seek to freeze NATO's modernization of theater nuclear weapons before it has even begun, while reserving for themselves the advantages of hundreds of SS-20s already deployed.

They should see that the propaganda campaign intended to intimidate our Allies and frustrate NATO's modernization program cannot succeed. Arms control requires confidence but it also demands patience.

Americans dream of a peaceful world and we are willing to work long and hard to create it. The Reagan Administration is confident that its stance of patient optimism on arms control expre~ses the deepest hopes and the clearest thoughts of the American people.

It is one of the paradoxes of our time that the prospects for arms control depend upon the achievement of a balance of arms. We seek to negotiate a balance of less dangerous levels but meanwhile we must maintain our strength. Let us take to heart John F. Kennedy's reminder that negotiations "are not a substitute for strength-they are an instrument for the translation of strength 0 into survival and peace."

The Body Electric Scientists have discovered a way to transmit messages into the body in a language-electrical signalsthat cells understand. Through this technique, they hope to direct cells to re-form a lost limb-and perhaps to convert a cancerous tumor back into normal tissue.

A Long Way From Broadway Regional theaters are supplying new vitality to the American stage. One of the most innovative of these is the Trinity Square Repertory Company, which tours India this October. The article describes the work of this and other American regional theater groups.

Folk Art-American

and Indian

A colorful portfolio of American folk art displays the works of contemporary artists whose mediums range from wood to wool. Noted expert Pupul Jayakar presents a sampling of Indian rural art - an integration of ritual, myth, magic, technology.

Caring A story about seven American citizens who through voluntary service are making extraordinary contributions to their. communities. What they share is a conviction that one person can make a difference.

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SEASIDE SAN DIEGO Nature has been kind to San Diego: sunshine nearly every day of the year, benign climate, a natural deepwater harbor, a technicolor blue ocean, spectacular scenery. San Diego epitomizes, like few other Californian cities, the perfect holiday. The city, once fast decaying, is now alive with parks that are veritable wonderlands; vast public beaches; picnic areas; resorts; sports facilities and--":'thanks to spectacularly successful environmental efforts-the bay that was once called a municipal cesspool has now been declared the cleanest urban estuary in the United States. Not surprisingly, tourism supplies one of San Diego's biggest payrolls. The city is also famous for its oceanographic research; the Salk Institute, started by Jonas Salk himself; the Navy presence-it is the U.S. Navy's main Pacific portand its aerospa..ceindustry.

Left: Sand sculptors create a grand castle on the beach at Mission Bay Aquatic Park, a 1,860-hectare resort playground. Below, left: A family explores marine life in a tidepool.

Below: A hang glider flies along the 90-meter cliffs on the Pacific shoreline. Bottom: The Paradise Hills and San Diego Bay frame the lush California city.