1 THE KALB REPORT
2
3
4
5 ------------------------------------------------X
6 A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS FRIEDMAN: :
7 SOURCES, LEAKS, AND THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM :
8 ------------------------------------------------X
9
10 Main Ballroom, 13th Floor
11 National Press Club
12 14th and F Streets, N.W.
13 Washington, D.C.
14 Monday, December 12, 2005
15
16 The program commenced at 7:47 p.m.
17
18 MODERATOR: MARVIN KALB
19 INTERVIEWEE: THOMAS FRIEDMAN
20
21
22
23
24
25
0002
1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 Welcome to the National Press Club. A big crowd
3 tonight. Good lord, Marvin, you pack them in better every time.
4 Welcome to the National Press Club. My name is Gil
5 Klein. I'm a national correspondent with Media General
6 Newspapers and I was president of the club when we created The
7 Kalb Report as a joint project of the George Washington
8 University and the National Press Club back in 1994. That's
9 getting to be a long time ago.
10 But we've had 49 shows now. This is the 49th show,
11 and we're pleased to now be sponsored by the George Washington
12 University and the Joan Shorenstein Center for Press for Press,
13 Politics, and Public Policy. We are also underwrited by the
14 Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation out of Oklahoma.
15 Tonight we will be going out live on WMAL Radio. We
16 will have -- at 9:00 o'clock we'll be going out on XM Radio
17 across the country. So if you finish up here, you can run out
18 to your car and turn on and listen to it right away -- instant
19 replay. We're also being taped for Bloomberg Television, for
20 New England Cable News -- that's the first time I've heard that
21 one -- and for several public television stations, including
22 WHUT here in town.
23 Now, there will be a reception afterwards in the
24 back, so when you finish we can continue the discussion back at
25 the bar there in the back, right outside these doors. I hope
0003
1 you'll join us there.
2 Now, since we are going live and all this, please
3 turn off all cell phones, like that one that just went
4 "brr-ring" just a minute ago. Please turn off all cell phones
5 or turn them to vibrate. It's a lot more fun that way anyway.
6 Again, please, once the show starts please don't get up and
7 leave. If you've got to go, go now.
8 Now it is -- we've got five minutes. We've got a
9 lot more time to kill, Mike. Now that I've come to the end of
10 my part, I'd like to turn this over to the man who really does
11 all the work to get this show running every week, Mr. Mike
12 Freedman, Vice President of the George Washington University.
13 MR. FREEDMAN: Thank you, Gil.
14 [Applause.]
15 Everybody, thanks for coming out tonight. Let me
16 mention a few logistics first of all. As Gil mentioned, we are
17 going to be live on the air straight up at 8:00 o'clock, and
18 then this quick turn-around for XM, which will be airing the
19 program nationally starting at 9:00 o'clock. While we're
20 actually still in the Q and A, they'll be starting the program
21 from the top of the program. Don't ask how, but they're going
22 to be doing that.
23 With all these tapings, you will hear some cues
24 leading up to the start of the program. Matt Lindsay says we
25 have what, about four minutes until the start of the program?
0004
1 At 58 minutes and 30 seconds, Marvin will offer a cut-away,
2 which will allow the live programming to end. Don't leave,
3 though, at that point because we'll continue taping and move to
4 your questions for the next 15 minutes or so.
5 There are two microphones, so at the cut-away point
6 if you want to begin moving to the microphones if you have
7 questions for Tom Friedman or Marvin Kalb, please do so at that
8 time.
9 This series began, as Gil mentioned, in 1994 when
10 Marvin Kalb, at the invitation of GW President Steve
11 Trachtenberg became a visiting professor at the university. The
12 President asked us to come up with a series that would benefit
13 the students and the public, and that charge led to the
14 creation of The Kalb Report. Tonight we're very pleased to have
15 President and Mrs. Trachtenberg in the audience with us and I'd
16 like to acknowledge their presence and say thank you for getting
17 this started.
18 [Applause.]
19 MR. FREEDMAN: Could I ask for a show of hands: How
20 many students do we have here tonight?
21 [A show of hands.]
22 That's terrific, that's terrific. This series is
23 for students as well as the working press, other members of the
24 National Press Club, and our local and national audiences on
25 radio and television. But what a wonderful opportunity it is to
0005
1 present guests like Tom Friedman to hundreds of students like
2 you who've turned out tonight.
3 Again, let's thank our partners in this series, the
4 George Washington University, the National Press Club, the
5 Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School. We'd like to
6 thank our television production unit from Metro Teleproductions.
7 We'd like to thank Matt Lindsay and his terrific crew from GW
8 who do a lot of the behind the scenes work, our granting entity,
9 Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. A particular
10 thank-you to our guest tonight, Tom Friedman. Tom, thank you
11 for taking time out of a very busy schedule to be with us this
12 evening. Of course, a wonderful thank-you to my friend and
13 partner in this series for 49 forums, Marvin Kalb.
14 MR. KALB: I thought he was going to say 49 years.
15 MR. FREEDMAN: Hopefully it will go for 49 years. I
16 hope so.
17 We'll have about a minute and a half of silence as
18 we lead up to the cue for the 8:00 o'clock start. I want to
19 thank you all for joining us tonight. I'd like to take this
20 opportunity on behalf of President Trachtenberg and all of us at
21 GW to say happy holidays to you, a safe, peaceful, and
22 successful New Year, and we will see you after this evening in
23 2006.
24 So thank you for joining us and we'll go in about 45
25 seconds. Thanks.
0006
1 [Pause.]
2 MR. KALB: Shhh. Be very quiet. Don't say a word.
3 MR. LINDSAY: 30 seconds.
4 MR. KALB: Hello and welcome to the National Press
5 Club and to another edition of The Kalb Report, a public policy
6 forum that is co-sponsored by the George Washington University,
7 the National Press Club, and the Shorenstein Center on Press,
8 Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of
9 Government.
10 I'm Marvin Kalb, a Senior Fellow at the Shorenstein
11 Center, and our guest tonight is Thomas Friedman, the foreign
12 affairs columnist for the New York Times. Our conversation
13 about journalism, leaks, government sources, Iraq, and probably
14 a lot more is being carried live by WMAL Radio here in
15 Washington and then taped for later use by Bloomberg News, XM
16 Satellite Radio, New England Cable News, and PBS, starting with
17 Channel 32 here in Washington, D.C. We are funded in part by
18 the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.
19 In this current series of Kalb Report programs, we
20 have been discussing two interrelated and deceptively simple
21 questions: What is journalism and who is a journalist? One
22 question is very easily answered. Our guest is a journalist,
23 one of the very best in the business.
24 He has already won the Pulitzer Prize three times.
25 Most journalists would die to win it once. After working in
0007
1 Beirut, Lebanon, in the late 1970s and 1980s for United Press
2 International, Friedman joined the New York Times in 1981,
3 serving first as a financial reporter covering oil and OPEC,
4 then in rather quick succession as the newspaper's chief
5 diplomatic correspondent, chief White House correspondent,
6 international economics correspondent, and finally as the
7 foreign affairs correspondent.
8 He appears twice a week on the op-ed page of The
9 Times and his column appears in roughly 700 other newspapers
10 around the world. He is also a best selling author. His newest
11 book is called "The World Is Flat" and it's been on the New York
12 Times best seller list for the past 35 weeks. Now, that's a
13 wow. His other books have also been best sellers, have also won
14 other awards: "From Beirut to Jerusalem," published in 1989,
15 one of the best books I've read on the Middle East; "The Lexus
16 and the Olive Tree," published in 1999; and "Longitudes and
17 Attitudes, Exploring the World After September 11th," published
18 in 2002.
19 He also appears regularly on television. He is
20 really an industry unto himself, and we are delighted, indeed
21 honored, that he's been able to fit us into his busy schedule.
22 So, welcome, Tom, to The Kalb Report.
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: It's great to be here, Marvin.
24 MR. KALB: Thank you.
25 Let's talk first about you and journalism. How did
0008
1 you get into this racket?
2 MR. FRIEDMAN: You know, your story about winning
3 three Pulitzers and people would die for that. I'm now on the
4 Pulitzer board and Don Graham, the publisher of the Washington
5 Post, was head of the nominating committee and he called me to
6 ask me if I would join the board. He called me up one day, he
7 said: "Tom, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is
8 you're going to be on the Pulitzer board. The bad news is
9 you're not going to win any more Pulitzer Prizes."
10 How did I get started? Well --
11 MR. KALB: Even a question before that one. What
12 brought you to journalism? I mean, you could have been a good
13 dentist. What brought you to journalism?
14 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, I grew up in a small suburb of
15 Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, and we had a tremendous journalism
16 teacher at our school, at our high school, Hattie Steinberg, and
17 my sister, older sister, was on the yearbook. My second oldest
18 sister was the managing editor of the paper. So when I came to
19 high school it was sort of a natural that I would take
20 journalism in tenth grade in room 313, and Hattie Steinberg had
21 a huge impact on my life. The only journalism class I've ever
22 taken is her class, in tenth grade in room 313.
23 Two things kind of happened that year that really
24 shaped my life. One is I took journalism and over Christmas
25 break that year my mom and dad took me to visit my oldest
0009
1 sister, who was then doing her junior year abroad at Tel Aviv
2 University. It was the first time I had been out of the state
3 of Minnesota. I was 15 -- except for brief forays into
4 Wisconsin. It was the first time I had ever been on an
5 airplane, and I went from Minneapolis to Jerusalem.
6 I just completely -- I don't know, maybe if I had
7 gone from Minneapolis to Beijing I'd be a sinologist today. I
8 don't know. But I was completely wowed and taken by it. That
9 was the time, just post-'67, Israel was in its most heroic
10 phase.
11 Those two things kind of came together. So I spent
12 actually all three summers of high school then living on a
13 kibbutz in Israel. I became completely absorbed in the Middle
14 East. I was known in my high school as "Mr. Israel." I was
15 just completely focused on that.
16 MR. KALB: Did you learn Hebrew at that time?
17 MR. FRIEDMAN: I had gone to Hebrew school in
18 Minneapolis.
19 So when I started college, which was at the
20 University of Minnesota, I started taking Arabic as a freshman.
21 It was -- you know, there were a lot of people that were
22 studying Norwegian and Swedish, not a lot of people studying
23 Arabic, you know. But they have a very good program. Then I
24 did my sophomore year abroad at the Hebrew University and I did
25 a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo. I
0010
1 eventually transferred to Brandeis and graduated from Brandeis.
2 But I really got my start, Marvin, in journalism big
3 time when -- I had a Marshall scholarship to go to school in
4 England after college, after my four-year degree, and I spent
5 the first year at the School of Oriental and African Studies in
6 London. I met a young woman there from Des Moines, Iowa, who
7 was then my girlfriend, now my wife. In 1976 -- this was we
8 were still in London -- we were walking down the street in
9 London one day, and it was the time that Jimmy Carter was
10 running against Gerald Ford for President.
11 You know the Evening Standard in London, they have
12 those blaring headlines they give you on the newstand, and this
13 headline said: "Carter to Jews: If Elected, I Promise to Fire
14 Dr. K." This was about Jimmy Carter was running for President
15 and he was promising, in order to win Jewish votes, to fire the
16 first ever Jewish Secretary of State.
17 I thought: That's really odd. You don't see that
18 very often. So I thought about that headline, and I have no
19 idea what possessed me, but I went back to my dorm room and I
20 wrote a column.
21 MR. KALB: For whom?
22 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, that's a good question. I
23 didn't quite know for whom, but I wrote a column. I wrote an
24 op-ed piece, and my then-girlfriend, now wife, happened to be a
25 family friend of Gil Cranberg, who was the editorial page editor
0011
1 of the Des Moines Register, and she took my column home with her
2 on spring break and she gave it to Gil Cranberg, and he liked it
3 and he published it as a sort of half-page piece in the Des
4 Moines Register with Auth's cartoon, and they paid me $50.
5 MR. KALB: Attaboy.
6 MR. FRIEDMAN: And I thought that was the coolest
7 thing in the whole world. I had been walking down the street, I
8 saw something, I had an opinion, I wrote it up, they paid me
9 $50. And basically I was hooked ever after.
10 So during my time as an undergrad -- I mean, as a
11 graduate student in England, I wrote eventually another ten I
12 think op-ed pieces for the Des Moines Register and for the
13 Minneapolis Star and Tribune, my home town paper, where I also,
14 I knew the managing editor. He was a family friend, Harold
15 Chalker, a wonderful man.
16 So I eventually went up to Oxford. I got my
17 master's degree in Arabic and Middle East History from Oxford,
18 and I after college applied at AP and UPI -- I really didn't
19 know what I was doing, frankly -- in London. AP said: Forget
20 it, kid; you haven't even covered a fire; you've never covered a
21 city hall meeting; you've got these op-ed pieces, whatever,
22 because that's all I had to show for myself. I had never
23 covered a fire and I hadn't taken journalism since room 313.
24 But a wonderful, grizzled, really, really fine
25 newsman named Leon Daniel, who was the bureau chief for UPI in
0012
1 London -- someone had just been moved from London, they didn't
2 want to pay to bring someone from the States, and he said: I'm
3 going to take a chance on this kid. So Leon Daniel hired me and
4 I learned how to be a journalist.
5 MR. KALB: Were you working then in London?
6 MR. FRIEDMAN: I worked in the London bureau of UPI.
7 I worked the overnight shift from 11:00 to 7:00 every three
8 weeks, then you worked during the day. I was actually there
9 when -- you remember the popes died in succession? I was
10 actually on duty the night that the second pope passed away.
11 MR. KALB: John Paul the First.
12 MR. FRIEDMAN: Right. There was -- I'll never
13 forget. Leon Daniel came in the next morning and there was a
14 UPI news wire that said: "Hard to believe, for the second time
15 in a month the pope is dead." Leon looked at that and he said:
16 "That is hard to believe." So I was there then.
17 I was there for about 11 months. My first story I
18 think was a taxi strike in London, but eventually they got me --
19 the Iranian revolution was happening, so they kind of made me
20 the oil reporter because I had studied Arabic, so somehow there
21 was a connection.
22 11 months after I was there, the number two man in
23 the Beirut bureau of UPI got hit in the ear by a piece of
24 shrapnel from a man robbing a jewelry store on Hamra Street in
25 Beirut, and he said: I'm want to leave, I do not want to pass
0013
1 go, I do not want to collect $200, I want out of here. They
2 came to me and said: This is your chance, kid. So I looked at
3 my little wife from Des Moines, Iowa, and said: This is our
4 chance. So it was 19 --
5 MR. KALB: What did she say?
6 MR. FRIEDMAN: She knew that this is what she had
7 signed up for.
8 So it was 1979 at that point, so I was 25, and they
9 sent me to Beirut as their number two man. It was the middle of
10 the civil war. So that's how it all started.
11 MR. KALB: Tom, there's a wonderful story about how
12 you got your job at the New York Times and I want to run it past
13 you and you tell me whether it's true.
14 MR. FRIEDMAN: Sure.
15 MR. KALB: I'm told that the New York Times called
16 you and that you were in, either in Beirut then -- and they
17 said: Young man, we would like you to come to New York and meet
18 with Abe Rosenthal, who's the editor of the paper. And what you
19 did was arrive in New York, but you were late for the meeting
20 and you weren't even sure that you'd go to the meeting, is the
21 way the story is told.
22 MR. FRIEDMAN: Let me stop you there -- go ahead.
23 MR. KALB: But that you were late for the meeting.
24 Now, I can't imagine a young reporter seeking a job at the New
25 York Times being late for a meeting with A.M. Rosenthal. What
0014
1 happened?
2 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, I'm afraid that's an apocryphal
3 story.
4 MR. KALB: It is?
5 MR. FRIEDMAN: Actually, I wasn't the one who was
6 late.
7 MR. KALB: Was Abe late?
8 MR. FRIEDMAN: No. It didn't quite work that way
9 back then. They did invite me for an interview, but the
10 interview was with Bob Semple, who was then the foreign editor.
11 So I flew all the way from Beirut to have this interview. I
12 remember I got a new raincoat, and I was early, so I walked
13 around Time Square, and it was really cold and I didn't have
14 gloves.
15 Anyway, as the time came, 12:30, go to the lobby of
16 the New York Times, call up to Mr. Semple's desk: "Mr. Semple,
17 this is Tom Friedman from UPI; I'm here for the interview." And
18 suddenly I hear on the other end of the phone: "Oh, jeez. I
19 made a squash date. Can you come back, uh -- can you come back
20 another day?"
21 I said: "Well, I actually came all the way from
22 Beirut." And he said: "No, no, no, I don't want you to come
23 back." He said: "Come back after lunch."
24 So I walked around Time Square some more without my
25 gloves, came up after lunch and met Bob and Craig Whitten, who
0015
1 was then the deputy foreign editor. They had lost my clips, but
2 I fortunately brought an extra set. Remember that: They'll
3 often lose your clips; always bring an extra set.
4 But we had a very nice chat and they eventually
5 offered me -- well, they couldn't offer me a job because the
6 foreign desk had no job. So John Lee, the business editor,
7 stepped in and said: "I'll take him. He covered oil in
8 Beirut." Yussef Ibrahim, who was then our oil correspondent,
9 had just been wooed away by the Wall Street Journal, and so
10 there was an opening in the oil area. So I was very lucky, so
11 John Lee took me.
12 I was there for nine months and then they sent me
13 back to Beirut as their bureau chief in April of 1982.
14 MR. KALB: So there's nothing to this business about
15 being late to meet Rosenthal?
16 MR. FRIEDMAN: No. No. I did eventually -- in
17 those days, only Abe hired people, and so I went back to Beirut
18 and then had to go back again for the interview with him.
19 MR. KALB: And you were on time?
20 MR. FRIEDMAN: I was very much on time. And his
21 only question was: How am I going to send a Jew to Beirut? And
22 I said: Well, I've been there for two and a half years.
23 Because the New York Times then had never sent a Jewish
24 correspondent to Israel.
25 MR. KALB: That's right.
0016
1 MR. FRIEDMAN: Let alone to Beirut. It was a
2 different time then, you know. So that was a very big hurdle
3 for them to get over psychologically and what kind of
4 implications that would have.
5 MR. KALB: Tom, it is often said now in the world of
6 journalism that we're all in trouble, that there are serious
7 problems going on. One, do you agree? And what do you think
8 the problems are?
9 MR. FRIEDMAN: In the journalism business?
10 MR. KALB: Yes.
11 MR. FRIEDMAN: Oh, I don't want to dodge that,
12 Marvin, but it's hard for me to summarize the whole industry, as
13 it were.
14 MR. KALB: I could be specific about The Times if
15 you want.
16 MR. FRIEDMAN: No, let's go back to the whole
17 industry, actually.
18 [Laughter.]
19 MR. FRIEDMAN: We're in a real transition. We're in
20 a transition between one platform to another. We're in a
21 transition from the New York Times, a newspaper published
22 primarily on dead trees, and one published on bits and bytes.
23 The transition between those two platforms isn't just an
24 economic transition, isn't just a physical one, but it's also a
25 very -- it's psychological. It's bringing in a whole group of
0017
1 new players. It's changing the environment for journalism.
2 So there's a lot of transitions going on. We're
3 going through this Times Select thing. Everyone's trying to
4 figure, is it the right thing to do, is it the wrong thing to
5 do? People feel like we've got to try it. I certainly, I'm not
6 averse to trying things because what knows what is going to be
7 the right model. But I feel like we're in this silo -- it's a
8 little bit what my book is about -- and we're in this silo and
9 everything was very clear. We were like IBM. IBM sold hardware
10 and they sold software. You could pick your place in the stack
11 and it was very clear. Then suddenly, boom, the world opened
12 up, it flattened out, and exactly how you find your footing is
13 more of a problem --
14 MR. KALB: For example, one of the things that you
15 wrote in "The World Is Flat" is that with the explosion of the
16 Internet and with information just bouncing around all over us,
17 you get up in the morning and the first thing you do, you turn
18 on the Internet and suddenly you're in this vast world.
19 MR. FRIEDMAN: Right.
20 MR. KALB: And in that kind of a world it's not
21 clear, or the message I got is that it's not clear, that you
22 need a professional columnist like Tom Friedman any longer,
23 because anybody who has a blog and who chooses to be a
24 journalist, a columnist, an opinionmaker, can be that. But is
25 that good?
0018
1 MR. FRIEDMAN: Anyone can be an opinionmaker now,
2 there's no question. But anyone can't have an audience.
3 There's a big difference. There's a big difference that anyone
4 can what I call upload, okay, but that doesn't guarantee you're
5 going to have an audience and the credibility that comes with
6 that. That you have to earn.
7 MR. KALB: Do you think that we'll be able or people
8 will be able to earn that in the blogosphere in the way that you
9 have earned it at The Times?
10 MR. FRIEDMAN: Absolutely. You look at the best
11 bloggers today and to me there aren't that many in the broadest
12 range. There are in different niches, good bloggers in a lot of
13 different areas. But if you look at the political sort of
14 space, there's probably 20, 25 really good people who you want
15 to go to regularly over and over, who you develop a trust for
16 and a respect for. Do they correct themselves? Do they have an
17 original point of view?
18 It's one thing to get up in the morning in your
19 pajamas and just upload anything, but that doesn't mean you're
20 really going to have a following. So to me the best blogs are
21 people like Andrew Sullivan, for instance. Andrew could be and
22 is, he's a columnist for Time Magazine, for the London Times, he
23 does a blog. We're really moving to blended models. I don't
24 think you're going to be either this or that.
25 But all I'm saying is the basic skills you need -- I
0019
1 don't think -- just because you can do it doesn't make you that
2 person.
3 MR. KALB: When I started before, Tom, I asked those
4 questions about what's journalism and who's a journalist. Now,
5 I've been around in this sense in journalism a little longer
6 than you and I can tell you that 20, 30 years ago I would never
7 have asked that question. It would have been ridiculous. You
8 know who the journalist is.
9 But today the question is valid because we are not
10 sure who the journalist is, but we know that a lot of people
11 pose as journalists. I play one on television, thank you.
12 What is the danger that may be inherent in that kind
13 of world of loose definitioned journalism?
14 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, I think the danger is that,
15 what is the New York Times or the BBC? What do I do when I go
16 online? Well, I read the New York Times, I read the Washington
17 Post, I read the Beirut Daily Star. I like to read the Straits
18 Times from Singapore. Why do I go to those? The bbc.com. Why
19 do I go to them? Because I trust them. I trust that there is
20 some filter there and I trust that some standards have been
21 applied --
22 MR. KALB: Right.
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: -- to what they are bringing forth.
24 So that's why I go to them. I'm looking for more than just
25 opinion. I'm looking for more than just attitude.
0020
1 I happen to believe that when the world is flat one
2 of the biggest growth industries is going to be what I call the
3 explainer. Great explainers are really in short supply, whether
4 their journalists, whether they're teachers, whether they're
5 managers, because we are entering such an age of complexity. If
6 you can just explain things to people so they can manage
7 themselves, that's going to be a huge growth industry.
8 So I don't think journalism's going -- I don't think
9 good journalism -- I know what it is and it's not going away.
10 It's what the BBC practices, the New York Times, Washington
11 Post. I want that filter. I don't want my news from someone
12 who just got up in their pajamas. I'm interested sometimes in
13 their opinions if they seem to be based on good sound reporting.
14 You know, the best columnists in my view are also
15 great reporters. I always remember growing up in journalism
16 that you'd hear people say: You know, I don't do reporting any
17 more; I just do analysis. And I'd always think to myself:
18 Well, your analysis must not be very good, because all my
19 analysis actually comes out of reporting. You know, you report
20 a story six days in a row and then suddenly you start to see
21 threads and patterns that if you were just an "analyst" you
22 would not see.
23 People often ask me how I wrote my books. I say how
24 I write my books is by writing my books, which is to say I go
25 out, I report, I write, I write some more, I go out, I report.
0021
1 It's a totally interactive process. Whenever I run into people
2 who say, I'm in my research phase, it's like I don't know what
3 that is, because I can't imagine just researching, just sort of
4 piling stuff up, because I'm researching, I'm writing, I'm
5 researching, I'm writing, all the time. That's how I write my
6 columns, the same way.
7 MR. KALB: You're leading right into my next
8 question and I thank you for the transition. Ever since I've
9 been reading Tom Friedman the columnist I have noticed one thing
10 and I've meant to ask you this for a long time. You use the
11 personal pronoun more than any other columnist I have ever read,
12 have ever read. I mean, for example, James Reston, who ran the
13 Washington bureau of the New York Times with great distinction
14 for many, many years, would never have used the personal
15 pronoun. Flora Lewis, who had your job 20, 30 years ago, she
16 would never have used that.
17 But you use it in the first sentence and if it's not
18 by the third sentence of your column something's wrong with Tom
19 that day. Why the first sentence? Why have you turned your
20 column in a sense into the adventures of Tom Friedman and here I
21 am?
22 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, it's probably a legitimate
23 question, but I in fairness think it's actually vastly
24 overstated. If you actually were to read my columns, I don't
25 think I use the personal pronoun quite that much.
0022
1 MR. KALB: Do you really want me to go through them?
2 MR. FRIEDMAN: Yes, you could, seriously. I think
3 it's actually overstated, frankly. But nevertheless, it's
4 certainly nothing I'm embarrassed of. I think that a column to
5 be successful involves a personal relationship between you and
6 your readers, and you open yourself up to people, to your
7 readers. They get to know you. They feel like they are part
8 somehow of your community, of your world, and they forge a
9 personal bond.
10 So I don't -- I'm very unconscious about it. I
11 don't sit down and say, what did I feel, what do I want to tell
12 you today. I'm just kind of talking to you. I'm having a
13 conversation and my column is conversational.
14 People ask me what I do for a living, I tell them
15 I'm a translator from English to English. I take really complex
16 themes and subjects and I break them down in ways that I can
17 understand. Then once I can understand them, I figure my mom
18 can understand them, and between me and my mom we've probably
19 got 95 percent of Americans covered.
20 So I'm not into high-faluting. I'm not into big
21 words or that you're not going to understand what I'm saying.
22 You can accuse me of many things, but writing in a clear way --
23 not writing in a clear way is not one of the things you can
24 accuse me of.
25 MR. KALB: Absolutely right.
0023
1 MR. FRIEDMAN: I really try to make things clear and
2 make the column one that is really inviting. And if using the
3 personal pronoun is part of it, mea culpa, no problemo.
4 MR. KALB: The other side of it is that your column
5 --
6 MR. FRIEDMAN: I'll say one thing in the reverse.
7 You put my columns with James Reston, who I have inherited his
8 office. This is one of the great icons. Here's another thing
9 you'll rarely find in my column. For as many times as you'll
10 find "I", here's what you won't find: "Sources say."
11 MR. KALB: I was just about to say that. One of the
12 other side is that you don't depend on the unnamed sources and
13 "the senior official with whom I just had dinner" and all of
14 that stuff. You don't do that at all, as a matter of fact. You
15 have leveled with your reader. You tell them with whom you've
16 had dinner or whatever.
17 MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, whoever it is is talking.
18 MR. KALB: And that wherever you are in the world,
19 you do this. So I do go back to, you've personalized the
20 experience of analyzing and reporting on foreign affairs, which
21 is I think quite interesting.
22 MR. FRIEDMAN: We tried to bring that, if you've
23 seen the documentaries we've done for the Discovery Channel --
24 MR. KALB: Yes.
25 MR. FRIEDMAN: -- we've tried to bring the same,
0024
1 which is literally you see I'm typing. I'm actually working on
2 my column. The camera is kind of -- because we want you to come
3 along. I want you to come along. Like I go places and I see
4 things and really I'm just so excited to tell you, Marvin, what
5 I saw, you my reader. I want you along with me.
6 But I'm not writing some high -- another thing, I'm
7 often accused of being, oh, hangs around with world leaders.
8 How many world leaders have I ever interviewed in my column?
9 Virtually none. I mean, there's --
10 MR. KALB: Occasionally.
11 MR. FRIEDMAN: Very occasionally, because, very
12 simple, it's my column. I'm not giving it to you. Buy an ad,
13 but I'm not -- so I don't go around meeting -- or I may meet
14 kings and queens, but they don't get my column. So I'm very
15 conscious of that.
16 MR. KALB: I think it's very interesting and I think
17 very important. One of the other qualities I think of your
18 column is that as a foreign affairs column you spend a great
19 deal of time on economic issues, which probably led you then
20 into this globalization --
21 MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, absolutely.
22 MR. KALB: -- specialization that you have. I was
23 wondering if that is indeed accurate and that your training
24 early on for the New York Times in oil, OPEC, being an economic
25 correspondent, that that sort of steered you in this direction
0025
1 and that you think, as you look back upon it now, it was a very
2 worthwhile thing to do?
3 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, one thing kind of led
4 to the next. So I'm in Beirut and I did that for almost five
5 years total between UPI and the New York Times. Then Abe said:
6 Why don't you go to Jerusalem? They thought they had broken the
7 taboo of sending a Jewish reporter to Jerusalem by sending David
8 Shipler, but he just looked Jewish. He's actually quite
9 Protestant. So they didn't take any chances and they sent me.
10 So I did that for almost five years, and both our
11 girls were born there. Then they gave me a year off to write
12 "Beirut to Jerusalem." Then I did -- they said, you're going to
13 get a year off to write "Beirut to Jerusalem" and then when you
14 come back you're going to be The Times' chief diplomatic
15 correspondent, replacing Bernie Gordsman -- David Shipler was in
16 between us for a brief period of time --
17 MR. KALB: Right.
18 MR. FRIEDMAN: -- for whoever wins. Well, George
19 Bush Senior won and so I spent the next four years, as you know,
20 traveling, as you did with Henry Kissinger, with Jim Baker. Of
21 course, that -- so much of journalism, as you and Bernie know,
22 is being in the right place at the right time. So I show up as
23 the diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, in what
24 year? 1989.
25 MR. KALB: Not bad.
0026
1 MR. FRIEDMAN: A few things happened in 1989. Got
2 off to a little slow start, but there was this wall that came
3 down in Berlin and then there was this incident in Tiananmen
4 Square, and then there was this peace conference. It was for
5 me, because, see, I had spent the first 35 -- I'm 35 now and so
6 I had spent the first 35 years of my life, 36 at that point I
7 guess, focused on one thing, the Middle East. And I came back
8 to Washington, I didn't know anything. I didn't know -- to me,
9 I didn't know contras, I didn't know START, I didn't know stop.
10 I'll tell you, the first day, my first day back on
11 the job, I've been off for a year totally absorbed in the Middle
12 East writing this book. My first day on the job was Jim Baker's
13 confirmation hearing, which went from START to stop to the
14 contras, to this and that. I got back to the office, I had no
15 idea what the lead was. It was Greek to me. Thank God, Michael
16 Gordon came over and said: Hey, kid, the lead is this. But
17 everyone in the office is saying: Pulitzer Prize, he doesn't
18 know what the lead is.
19 But what I got in those four years of traveling with
20 Jim Baker was a master's degree in international relations,
21 because we had a front row seat to some of the most incredible
22 dramas.
23 MR. KALB: Is it possible --
24 MR. FRIEDMAN: Let me just finish this point,
25 Marvin.
0027
1 I did that for four years. Then I covered Clinton
2 for the first year of the Clinton White House, and that was Mr.
3 Toad's wild ride, okay, because Travelgate, gays in the
4 military. Just that first year of Clinton was absolutely -- so
5 I was a White House correspondent. I hated that. None dare
6 call that journalism, as Hall used to say.
7 But I did that for a year, and then it was sort of
8 an idea that Max Frankel and Joe Ellyvelt came up with with me
9 that, why don't you -- something seemed to be going on around
10 foreign policy and economics. Somebody used this word
11 "globalization" and they said: Why don't you invent a beat at
12 the intersection of finance and foreign policy, because it seems
13 like now, you know, General Motors and General Powell, there's a
14 really kind of interesting intersection going on between the two
15 of them.
16 So that's what we did. So I did that for three
17 years. So when I started as a columnist when Arthur gave me the
18 column in 1995, I was coming off three years of this. So I
19 immediately brought that to the column. That was quite jarring
20 compared to my four predecessors.
21 MR. KALB: Yes.
22 MR. FRIEDMAN: And a lot of people didn't like it.
23 What, are you writing an investing column, kid? This is foreign
24 policy. I got a lot of flak for that. But I sort of persisted,
25 and then I eventually wrote "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" as a
0028
1 way of basically saying, look, don't criticize me for the
2 column. Understand, this is the framework that I'm writing out
3 of. So if you want to criticize me, criticize me for this, but
4 give me your counter-view. But I'm not just throwing darts
5 here. There was a point of view that I was trying to get
6 across.
7 So that then brought me to that real interest in
8 globalization.
9 MR. KALB: And yet, at the very time that you were
10 writing about globalization and many people were talking about
11 it, we had an explosion also of small, tribal, ethnic, religious
12 violence, nations in Europe and in other parts of the world that
13 we thought were nations began to feel as if they're splitting
14 apart. We see that continuing right now.
15 So is there not -- in your quest to see things
16 through the prism of globalization, are you not also looking at
17 a world that seems to be going in the other direction?
18 MR. FRIEDMAN: That's why I called the book "The
19 Lexus and the Olive Tree."
20 MR. KALB: "And the Olive Tree."
21 MR. FRIEDMAN: And the argument I was simply making
22 was that if you want to understand international relations today
23 you have to understand it's the intersection between our olive
24 tree urges, our pursuit of and aspirations revolving around
25 ethnic identity, religious identity, national aspiration, it's
0029
1 all of those urges that are as old as man, emerging in a world
2 and bumping into this globalization platform.
3 All I was trying to say in that book was, if you
4 want to understand international relations today you can't just
5 look at this and you can't just look at this [indicating].
6 You've got to understand, it's about the intersection of these
7 forces.
8 MR. KALB: Which one's winning, if there's such a
9 thing?
10 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, you really can't, because each
11 one is playing off the other to some degree. So it was in "The
12 Lexus and the Olive Tree" that I coined the term "the
13 super-empowered angry man." What was my model for that? A guy
14 named Osama bin Laden. Who was my other model for it? A guy
15 named Ramsi Yussef, the guy who blew up, tried to blow up, the
16 World Trade Center the first time. So I was always very alive
17 to these other forces and how actually this [indicating] was
18 helping to empower or, better, super-empower this.
19 MR. KALB: Very interesting.
20 MR. FRIEDMAN: So that's what I was -- and you get
21 caricatured. People say, Friedman, Friedman. What drives me --
22 there's one review of this book, it's a "Trend" review if you
23 get it, that really drives me nuts. It drives me nuts because
24 it is so stupid and it masquerades as a kind of effete
25 intelligence. It's that: Oh, Friedman doesn't, he's forgotten
0030
1 about politics, he doesn't know there's politics in the world;
2 he's made the CEO's and CTO's the lead actors in the global
3 drama.
4 Well, excuse me, but but if you want
5 to understand actually the platform on which international
6 relations is being played out today, a platform involving the
7 Internet technology that is enormously empowering of
8 individuals, who's going to explain that platform to you?
9 Villagers in rural Brazil? In sub-Saharan Africa? Osama bin
10 Laden? Osama bin Laden is playing off this platform. He's
11 drawing energy from it. He's leveraging it. But he's not
12 driving the platform.
13 People who are going to explain that platform to you
14 are people like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Walmart, the people,
15 the great outsourcing companies of India. They're the ones
16 pushing it forward. If you don't understand the power of that
17 platform, you are never ever going to understand international
18 relations today.
19 MR. KALB: What does Walmart know about Osama?
20 MR. FRIEDMAN: What does Walmart know about Osama?
21 I would say the person -- Walmart doesn't like it when I say
22 this, but I'll say it anyways. The person who understood global
23 supply chains almost as well as Sam Walton is Osama bin Laden.
24 MR. KALB: Really?
25 MR. FRIEDMAN: Because to me al-Qaeda today is
0031
1 nothing more than an open source global supply chain, only it
2 delivers suicide bombers as opposed to tennis shoes, sneakers,
3 and low-priced goods. It operates exactly like a global supply
4 chain.
5 MR. KALB: Tom --
6 MR. FRIEDMAN: It's a completely horizontal enemy.
7 MR. KALB: You've covered the Middle East, lived in
8 the Middle East now for a good part of the last 30 years or so,
9 more than 30 years now. What has been the role of the media?
10 And I'm thinking really about al-Jazeera, which gets a lot of
11 play. There was a study that was put out today by Chevley
12 Talhami of the University of Maryland --
13 MR. FRIEDMAN: Good man.
14 MR. KALB: -- in which he says that 45 percent of
15 the Arab-speaking world get their news from al-Jazeera, and if
16 you ask them, what's your second source, they'll say one of a
17 number of other Arab-speaking. But then if you put -- if you
18 ask the question the first and second source, 68 percent of the
19 people in the Arab world get their information from al-Jazeera
20 or a second source like it.
21 Is it possible, possible, that a lot of the
22 misunderstanding in the Middle East, perhaps about what it is
23 that they themselves are doing, perhaps what it is that we are
24 trying to do in the Middle East, comes from a misunderstanding
25 conveyed by al-Jazeera, of bad reporting by al-Jazeera, to
0032
1 emotional reporting by al-Jazeera? What role do you think it
2 plays?
3 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, I think al-Jazeera, in
4 fairness, is a work in progress. It is really the first
5 reasonably free television emerging from the heart of the Arab
6 world, based in Qatar.
7 MR. KALB: Yes.
8 MR. FRIEDMAN: I say it's a work in progress in the
9 sense -- I'm on al-Jazeera a lot. I can say whatever I want.
10 MR. KALB: They invite you on?
11 MR. FRIEDMAN: They invite me regularly. When "The
12 World is Flat" came out, they did a book show about it.
13 MR. KALB: Oh, really?
14 MR. FRIEDMAN: And they're tough. They'll come with
15 very aggressive questions. I've been on -- they used to have a
16 kind of Crossfire show I've been on. I've done a lot of
17 al-Jazeera over the years. So who I am therefore to say, well,
18 it's just one point of view? Wait a minute. You've been on
19 their air and you've been able to say what you want.
20 MR. KALB: And they cover all of the President's
21 news conferences.
22 MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, yes.
23 MR. KALB: Rumsfeld's news conferences.
24 MR. FRIEDMAN: And at the same time, I would say
25 they're a lot closer to Fox than they are to CBS, in the sense
0033
1 that they're fair and balanced from a certain point of view. So
2 that's the tension that I think you really get with al-Jazeera.
3 On the one hand, they really have opened up the dialogue in the
4 Arab world and you have to give them credit for that. At the
5 same time, there is still -- there is still a Nasserite tinge
6 that goes back to the founding of al-Jazeera and the people who
7 founded it, who came out of the BBC Arabic service, and they
8 definitely have their own Nasserite fair and balanced view.
9 MR. KALB: Iraq. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has
10 been saying quite a few times in the last few weeks that one of
11 the great problems that we have is that the American media
12 conveys a negative portrayal of events in Iraq and that if it
13 would shape up it would present a more positive vision of what
14 it is that is going on in Iraq.
15 Number one -- no, I'll try to be polite. Why do you
16 think he does that? Is he seeking simply to take advantage of
17 the fact that the media is not held in very high esteem in the
18 United States and he wants to put us there with the Congress and
19 root canal specialists? What is his angle on focusing on the
20 media so much?
21 MR. FRIEDMAN: I think Rumsfeld's a really bad guy.
22 MR. KALB: A really bad guy?
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: A really bad guy, because I think he
24 is responsible for more bad decisions in the implementation --
25 let's take the debate about the war away, but in the
0034
1 implementation of this war I think he's done some really bad
2 things. And for him to be lecturing anybody, a man who was told
3 by his own general, you need an overwhelming force in order to
4 secure and stabilize this place, and basically just flicked him
5 off with a flick of his wrist; a man who described looting as a
6 form of freedom, as "stuff happens"; a man who said, "Well, you
7 go to war with the Army you got" when his own soldiers
8 confronted him; a man who tells us every day how important this
9 war is. Well, if it's that important, then why did you
10 prosecute it with just enough troops to lose?
11 So I'm really -- Marvin, you'll pardon me -- not the
12 least bit interested in his opinion.
13 [Applause.]
14 MR. KALB: But don't you think -- don't you think
15 that he represents the opinion of the President of the United
16 States?
17 MR. FRIEDMAN: I really don't know. I really think
18 --
19 MR. KALB: I mean, could he be doing this without
20 the President's knowledge and therefore approval?
21 MR. FRIEDMAN: I'm sure there is some cynical motive
22 behind it. But I just feel that this is a man who has never
23 come to terms with the mistakes he's made. I've written, so
24 this is not saying anything, that he should have been dismissed
25 a long time ago and that I'm just not interested in commenting
0035
1 on anything he has to say. He does not merit that in my book.
2 MR. KALB: You said in a recent column that -- you
3 spoke about George Bush's third term. I'm wondering if in the
4 third term you feel that the Vice President ought to be put out
5 to pasture somewhere?
6 MR. FRIEDMAN: I don't want to get into -- if you
7 want to have an opinion on that, I'd write a serious column
8 about it.
9 MR. KALB: Okay. But we're having a serious
10 conversation.
11 MR. FRIEDMAN: But I don't want to just shoot from
12 the hip.
13 MR. KALB: Okay, then shoot from the hip on Iraq.
14 What's it like -- what is it like to be a journalist in Iraq?
15 Can you go out and cover the news as you would like or are you
16 inhibited by fear, which is what I hear from Iraqi journalists
17 and American journalists based in Baghdad?
18 MR. FRIEDMAN: I've been there five times now since
19 the start of the war. I had never been to Iraq before the war.
20 I was there in 1979 with the Iran-Iraq War, but that didn't
21 really count. I've been there five times, all short visits, and
22 in different sort of contexts, sometimes with American military
23 groups that went over, sometimes on my own. So it was all
24 different things. I was actually in a caravan that was robbed
25 by highway robbers outside of Ramadi, gun to the head kind of
0036
1 stuff. So I've seen it all.
2 Iraq's the most dangerous place I've ever been as a
3 journalist, far more dangerous than Beirut. You know, in Beirut
4 there was a certain -- it was chaotic, but there was a certain
5 order within the chaos and you kind of knew where the threats
6 were. There was always the fear of indiscriminate violence, a
7 car blowing up or whatever, but you knew there was some
8 sanctuary and there was some order.
9 In Iraq I feel and I felt when I was there there's
10 just no -- if you're with the Americans, it's dangerous. You
11 can get shot at being with them. If you're walking down the
12 street, you can be there when some guy decides he's going to
13 blow up a police academy or a mosque.
14 Think about what happened in Iraq in the last month.
15 On the first day of Ramadan a jihadist suicide bomber walked
16 into a mosque -- I believe it was in Hilla -- and blew up a
17 funeral. A Sunni Muslim jihadist went into a Shiite mosque on
18 the first day of Ramadan and blew up a funeral, a memorial
19 service for a restaurant owner who had been blown up in a
20 suicide bombing. That bespeaks a situation where there are no
21 moral boundaries. When you have people who will go into their
22 own house of worship on their own holiest of days and blow up a
23 funeral, then absolutely everything goes. That's what's so
24 frightening about it.
25 MR. KALB: So in your view we have to win this war,
0037
1 right?
2 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, the term I have used
3 consistently, if you Lexis-Nexis my column, is that we have to
4 try to produce a "decent outcome." I've tried to stay away from
5 words like "winning" and "losing." I have my own take on the
6 war, have from the very beginning, and my own reasons for
7 wanting to see it come out right and believing that something
8 really is important at stake.
9 You see, my difference with Rumsfeld and the Bush
10 administration is not that I didn't think it was important. I
11 really think it's important. My difference is that I knew it
12 wouldn't be easy. See, they thought it was going to be
13 important and easy and I thought it was going to be important
14 and really hard. I think in thinking that it was easy they made
15 so many mistakes, and for that there really is no excuse.
16 MR. KALB: I was going through the blogosphere --
17 you'll forgive me --
18 MR. FRIEDMAN: Please.
19 MR. KALB: -- and came upon a really dreadful
20 critique of you written by some guy named Bob Norman of the
21 Broward-Palm Beach New Times, which I don't normally read.
22 MR. FRIEDMAN: You and me both.
23 MR. KALB: But it had -- really, I'm not even sure I
24 want to go through all of this. But it was very, very negative,
25 and the whole point was that you're a big-shot journalist and
0038
1 you supported these people going into Iraq. You thought it was
2 a necessary thing to do.
3 MR. FRIEDMAN: Right.
4 MR. KALB: And you wrote many columns, and I want to
5 brief some of these here. You wrote many columns about this.
6 So you're a no-goodnik and it's quite clear that you are.
7 What is your feeling as you look back over the last
8 couple of years? You said you don't want to, but I would like
9 you to. Do you feel that what you were writing about in 2002
10 has been more or less borne out by the reality of what has
11 happened?
12 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, you have to know, as you know
13 from reading my column, I did not support the war on the grounds
14 of WMD.
15 MR. KALB: Yes.
16 MR. FRIEDMAN: I believed that there was no WMD
17 threat and wrote that at the time, and my argument was that if
18 you're going to Iraq in pursuit of WMD that is not a cause for
19 war, and the column I wrote about that before the war was: "Mr.
20 President, tell the truth." This is not about WMD, don't take
21 the country to war, I wrote, "on the wings of a lie."
22 MR. KALB: That's right.
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: But I thought there was a justified
24 reason for the war. I felt it then and I feel it as strongly
25 today, Bernie, as ever. And whether you're from the Broward
0039
1 paper or anywhere else -- first of all, this war, this was a
2 hard call. This was the hardest call I've ever had as a
3 journalist. I have great respect for people who called it the
4 other way.
5 But I know why I wrote what I wrote. I didn't come
6 to that opinion lightly. Now, I'll give you the 30-second
7 version of it. I believe for 50 years we treated the Arab world
8 as a collection of just big gas stations, just a series of big
9 gas stations, and all we cared about as a country were three
10 things. We cared that the price -- the pump was open, the price
11 was low, and in recent years that they be nice to Israel.
12 We basically told the Arab world for 50 years:
13 Guys, just keep the pump open, the price low, and be nice to the
14 yehudis, and you can do whatever you want out back. You can
15 treat your women however you like. You can write whatever lies
16 in your newspapers you like. You can preach whatever
17 intolerance against Christians, Jews, Hindus, infidels, from
18 your mosque that you like. You can inculcate your kids with
19 whatever hateful ideas in your textbooks you like. Just keep
20 the pump open, the price low, and be nice to the Jews.
21 Well, guess what, Marvin. On 9-11 we got hit with
22 the distilled essence of everything going on out back. That's
23 what bin Laden represented. The threat from that region is not
24 that bin Laden was in league with Saddam Hussein. It is the
25 pathologies of what was going on out back.
0040
1 Now, fool me once, all right, shame on you. But
2 fool me twice, shame on me.
3 I believed we had a strategic interest and a moral
4 obligation to test -- and I always knew it was a test, a long
5 shot -- to see if we could partner with the Iraqis in the very
6 heart of that world to change the context of what was going on
7 out back. So to all those on the left, to all those in Broward
8 County, all right, I don't happen to think that that has
9 changed. I believe -- you can disagree with that, but you have
10 no right not to think seriously about this war and about what
11 was going on out back.
12 I'll tell you what's going on in the Arab world
13 today. It's real simple, okay. We're seeing the biggest
14 population explosion on the planet from Morocco to the border of
15 India. That's what's going on there. That's on one track. On
16 another track we're seeing a huge explosion of windfall profits
17 from oil. Now, in simple terms what's going on is these
18 autocratic regimes are taking these windfall profits and feeding
19 it to this population explosion in the form of government jobs,
20 subsidies, and inefficient, uncompetitive, state-owned
21 industries.
22 As sure as we're sitting here, Marvin, this is what
23 is going to happen. The price of oil will go down, the
24 population explosion will continue, and when those two lines
25 cross you are going to see the biggest bang coming out of that
0041
1 region anywhere on the planet.
2 MR. KALB: Biggest bang?
3 MR. FRIEDMAN: Bang. There is going to be a
4 political and socioeconomic explosion from that part of the
5 world. My hope, my logic, was we need some alternative models
6 in place, a different context, in the heart of that world for
7 when that eventuality hits.
8 Now, it's possible to do a noble and right thing
9 really badly. We've demonstrated that during the last three
10 years. But there is a logic to this. What is the second
11 largest Muslim country in the world, Marvin? No, it's not
12 Indonesia, it's not Saudi Arabia, it's not even Pakistan. It's
13 a country called India. Well, here's an interesting statistic:
14 There are no Indian Muslims we know of in al-Qaeda and there are
15 no Indian Muslims in Guantanamo Bay. Well now, that's an
16 anomaly. The second largest Muslim country in the world and
17 they're not represented there.
18 Why is that? Why is it? Could it be maybe because
19 the President of India is a Muslim? Could it be because there
20 are Indian Muslim women on the Indian Supreme Court? Could it
21 be because the wealthiest man in India today is a Muslim
22 software entrepreneur? Could it be because when I was in New
23 Delhi after we had invaded Afghanistan and there was a debate
24 live on Indian TV between the imam of New Delhi and the
25 country's leading female movie star, who's a Muslim woman, and
0042
1 the imam of New Delhi called on Indian Muslims to rise up and
2 join the jihad, join the jihad in Afghanistan against Americans,
3 and live on Indian TV she told him to shove it, because she
4 lived in a context that empowered and protected her to do so?
5 So guess what, folks. Context really matters. The
6 context within which people live their lives really matters.
7 And if you change the context, give people a context where they
8 can vote, where they can start a business, where they can start
9 a newspaper, where they can achieve their aspirations, where
10 they can sue their neighbor and not have to bribe the judge with
11 a goat, and guess what, guess what, Marvin? They don't want to
12 blow up the world. Maybe they want to be part of it.
13 So you will pardon me if I felt we had a strategic
14 and moral imperative to see if we could find a way to begin to
15 change the context in that part of the world. Oh, I regret
16 many, many things about this war, most notably the number of
17 young Americans who have been killed and wounded, and Iraqis as
18 well. But I knew what I was doing. I had a logic for what I
19 was doing.
20 History and time may show me completely wrong, to be
21 completely quixotic, to be on a fool's errand. That may be
22 true, but I didn't come to this lightly. I didn't come because
23 someone whispered in my ear there was WMD there. And most of
24 all -- and this is where my real contempt for a lot of those
25 people comes from -- I didn't come to my position for or against
0043
1 the war because I loved George Bush or because I hated George
2 Bush. I felt I had a responsibility as a parent, as an
3 American, and as a columnist to think this through as best I
4 could.
5 That's how I thought it through. I don't regret a
6 single thing.
7 MR. KALB: Good for you.
8 [Applause.]
9 MR. KALB: Tom, we don't have that many minutes left
10 and I want to ask you something that concerns the New York
11 Times, concerns Iraq, and you're right in the middle of this in
12 a way. As I told you before, Judy Miller, who was a New York
13 Times reporter, was sitting where you are a month ago. She felt
14 the need to leave the New York Times because, as she said, she
15 had become too much part of story.
16 Do you feel that The Times management, the editors,
17 the boss himself Mr. Sulzberger, were all fair to Judy after she
18 had spent 85 days in prison on a principle of not yielding a
19 name of a source?
20 MR. FRIEDMAN: Marvin, whatever I feel about that
21 issue and my bosses I'll communicate directly to them.
22 MR. KALB: Okay.
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: I'm not going to get into it.
24 MR. KALB: You can send me a carbon if you like.
25 MR. FRIEDMAN: I'm just not going to get into it.
0044
1 MR. KALB: Today in the new issue of the New Yorker
2 Ken Auletta has a piece about Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher,
3 and he describes him as somebody smaller than the other
4 publishers, not quite up to the task. He also says that the New
5 York Times newsroom today appears rudderless, without any
6 genuine leadership.
7 You're going to pass that on to the boss yourself,
8 too?
9 MR. FRIEDMAN: The only thing I'm going to say about
10 Arthur Sulzberger, Marvin, is that in 1995 he walked up to my
11 desk and said: "I'm going to make you the foreign affairs
12 columnist for the New York Times." That was a big risk,
13 frankly. That was a big gamble on his part. He bet on me, and
14 I will be forever grateful for that.
15 MR. KALB: I thank you for the answer.
16 What about the dangers of -- you mentioned the first
17 time you were covering the State Department and you were running
18 around the world with Secretary of State James Baker. It's
19 extremely different for a New York Times reporter covering the
20 State Department -- and I've met many of them -- not to be
21 sucked into the power, the glory of covering the New York Times,
22 because the Secretary of State needs you to project a certain
23 image to the country and the world.
24 Were you aware that you were being used at the time
25 that you were the State Department reporter?
0045
1 MR. FRIEDMAN: When did I stop beating my wife?
2 I'm sure that there are probably stories I'd look
3 back on that way. All I can tell you is Baker and I had an
4 interesting relationship. We hit each other with hammer and
5 tong every once in a while. But one of the things that I always
6 used to say is that Jim Baker, George Bush Senior, Brent
7 Scowcroft were part of a national security team that brought the
8 Soviet Union in for a soft landing. They brought -- they helped
9 -- they had Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, which is even more
10 important. They brought the Soviet Union in for a soft landing.
11 They re-unified Germany, with the help if Kohl,
12 Margaret Thatcher, and Francois Mitterand. They brought about
13 the first peace talks between Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs
14 at Madrid. They brought the START Treaty to conclusion.
15 Was I supposed to write that was all bad? Really,
16 boss, I know this Soviet Union thing, it looks good, but we
17 could have at least had some fireworks on the way down? That's
18 what I never quite understood. You are the reporter, you are
19 responsible for reflecting and writing the story. Should I have
20 said that was all bad? So I never quite understood --
21 MR. KALB: No, but supposing something was bad. You
22 would have the responsibility for reporting that.
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: Absolutely. You know, and this was a
24 lesson in journalism, too. Jim Baker took 16 trips to the
25 Middle East before he put together the Madrid peace talks. 15
0046
1 of them, my lead said -- began this way: "James A. Baker III
2 failed today," failed again in his pursuit of. It used to drive
3 him nuts.
4 But on number 16 --
5 MR. KALB: He pulled it off.
6 MR. FRIEDMAN: -- he pulled it off. And that's why
7 -- I learn a lot about covering just diplomacy. I don't know
8 how Iraq's going to end. I'm not as smart as people on the
9 left, who are sure it's going to fail, and I'm not as smart as
10 people on the right, who are absolutely certain it's going to be
11 victorious. I'm going to tell you I just don't know.
12 MR. KALB: Tom, I'm going to give you 30 seconds to
13 give journalism students, 30 seconds, a lesson in journalism.
14 What is it that they should think about this profession?
15 MR. FRIEDMAN: There's only one thing you need to
16 know to be a good journalist: You have to like people. There
17 are so many journalists who actually hate people. But the most
18 important skill for a journalist is conveying that you like
19 people, that you like to listen to the crazy things they say and
20 do. You know, if you can't hear the music you'll never be able
21 to play the music, Marvin. But if you can hear the music, if
22 you convey to people how much you enjoy hearing whatever it is
23 -- the most important lesson for a journalist is be a good
24 listener. You'll be amazed, not only what you hear, but
25 listening is a sign of respect. More importantly, it's a sign
0047
1 of respect, and when you show people that respect it's amazing
2 what they'll show you back.
3 MR. KALB: Tom, it's been a pleasure listening to
4 you, and do come back again.
5 MR. FRIEDMAN: Thanks so much.
6 [Applause.]
7 MR. KALB: It's now time for your questions, and you
8 can still continue to listen. I ask you please, please, to pose
9 a question. Make it brief, and I'm going to ask Tom please to
10 give short answers if you can. I'm going to ask you to be
11 polite and no diatribes, no speeches. He can do the diatribes,
12 nobody else.
13 MR. FRIEDMAN: Why should this night be different
14 from any other night?
15 MR. KALB: There are microphones on both sides.
16 Identify yourself, brief questions. Start there, please
17 [indicating].
18 MR. SNIDERMAN: Hi, my name is Eric Sniderman and
19 I'm from the George Washington University, a freshman.
20 I wanted to ask you, do you think the U.S. media is
21 biased and how do you think that affects the way that Americans
22 look at the world and what they do in it?
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: Biased in a particular way, left,
24 right? In a particular area, pro-China, anti-China,
25 Arab-Israeli? I mean, "bias," that's a pretty big question.
0048
1 MR. SNIDERMAN: Do you think that the U.S. media, as
2 opposed to other foreign media sources like the BBC, tries to
3 present a certain point of view to kind of guide the people, as
4 opposed to just presenting the facts?
5 MR. FRIEDMAN: You know, I think that as a whole the
6 U.S. media does a pretty good job of -- I think if you look at
7 the main institutions, I know the New York Times, the Washington
8 Post, the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, I
9 think they're all trying to present the news day in and day out
10 in as fair and objective a way as they can.
11 On any individual story, will some news
12 organization, some reporter, tilt one way or another?
13 Absolutely. I always used to tell people who -- you know, being
14 the New York Times correspondent in Israel, which I was for four
15 and a half years or so, it's like -- people think you're writing
16 for the New York Jewish Week. It's like nothing you do can ever
17 be fair to one side or the other.
18 But I always used to say to people: Look, don't
19 judge me on today's story or yesterday's story. Judge me over
20 one year, two years. If over one year or two years you see a
21 real pattern of bias, as you said, then you present it and we'll
22 really look at that. But don't tell me you didn't like my story
23 this morning or you had -- it ruined your morning. It may have
24 ruined my day writing that story, but I was there and that's how
25 I saw it.
0049
1 So I think generally we do a pretty good job day in
2 and day out, under not always easy conditions.
3 MR. KALB: Okay. Next, please.
4 MR. CAGGIANO: Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Friedman.
5 My name is Gabe Caggiano. I'm a recovering TV reporter. I
6 write for the Montgomery Sentinel now, writing a column where
7 Maureen Dowd and Bob Woodward started.
8 You speak with a great deal of passion about going
9 into Iraq. What about Iran? They are a country that is about
10 to develop a nuclear weapon, will probably provide dirty bomb
11 material to al-Qaeda terrorists. We don't have the same passion
12 and from a strategic or weapons of mass destruction point of
13 view they're a much more dangerous threat long-term. Why is
14 there not the same passion about Iran as there was towards Iraq?
15 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, it's certainly a good and
16 legitimate question. I can't tell you from a policy point of
17 view -- where did he go? Did he leave? Is that you there? Oh,
18 he sat down.
19 Obviously, given the degree to which we're already
20 committed and overcommitted in Iraq, we are not about to invade
21 Iran, although I would argue had we not gone to Iraq we still
22 wouldn't be. Iran is a country of 60, of 70 million people
23 today. It's not Iraq. It's a much bigger, complex, more
24 difficult enemy, and that's a problem.
25 That's why a big part of my whole take on the war
0050
1 before and during and after is that we can't just rely on a
2 military strategy. There needed to be an Arab-Israeli
3 component, I argued, but most importantly there needed to be an
4 energy component. Unless we bring down the price of oil and
5 create a burning platform under these regimes to change, how
6 much do you think the Iranian president takes seriously when the
7 Europeans come and lecture him? He knows with $60 a barrel oil
8 he has got so much money to dangle around in the way of
9 contracts, he can buy off everybody six ways to Sunday.
10 So to me one of the great failures of our Iraq
11 strategy has been the completely lacking component of what call
12 the "patriot tax," a one dollar a gallon gasoline tax that would
13 begin to bring the price of oil down. I've often said I could
14 -- if I had a blackboard here, I'd do a very interesting graph
15 for you, just two lines. One line would be the Iranian reform
16 movement and the other line would be the price of oil.
17 It goes like this, starting in 1979. The Iranian
18 reform movement peaks when? Basically in the late eighties,
19 early nineties. What was going on then? Oil was down to $15 a
20 barrel. So the reform goes that way, that line; the oil line
21 goes that way.
22 Now you see what happens. Oil starts to climb up.
23 The reform movement, because the regime doesn't need to open up
24 any more, doesn't need to be responsive to external pressures or
25 internal pressures, it can just buy them off. The price of --
0051
1 the Iranian reform movement goes down. The price of oil goes
2 up. Those lines have already crossed now and the oil line is
3 going straight up there.
4 So unless you take on the oil issue, you cannot have
5 a sustainable strategy. At this point, in terms of the nuclear
6 question, what do you do about Iran's nuclear arsenal, I don't
7 know. I think that the only thing you can do -- actually, I
8 don't say I know, but did write a column in which I basically
9 said the following: Dear Reader: If you're wondering why I
10 don't write about North Korea or Iran very much, it's very
11 simple, because the solution to both these problems is so
12 obvious. If all the European Union countries got together, came
13 to Iran tomorrow and said, look, pal, we are not buying that
14 carpet any more, unless you open up your nuclear facilities to
15 inspection you are going to face a full and complete economic
16 boycott, Iran tomorrow would open up its nuclear facilities to
17 inspection.
18 And if the Chinese said to the North Koreans
19 tomorrow, pals, it's going to be a long winter without our coal
20 and without our oil unless and until you open up your facilities
21 to international inspection again, in which case North Korea
22 would open up its facilities.
23 So it's very clear what the solution is. We have it
24 within our power. We just don't have the will to implement it.
25 MR. KALB: Tom, I'm going to ask you in the next
0052
1 answer to be about one-tenth as long.
2 Yes, please.
3 MR. FRIEDMAN: No -- okay. Yes, next question.
4 MR. TUCHERONI: Thank you for coming. I'm Alex
5 Tucheroni. I'm a sophomore at GW.
6 You commented on the status of the Muslim community
7 in India, how they're relatively peaceful, how there's not a lot
8 of Indian al-Qaeda, and you spoke to their access to the
9 franchise, their economic opportunities, as to a reason why this
10 is. I was just curious as to how you would explain the
11 situation in France last month, in which so many Muslim
12 teenagers and youth were basically rebelling against the French
13 government. They were rioting across the country. It's a
14 country where economically they may not have the opportunities,
15 but they have access to the franchise, they have certain
16 opportunities that you get in an open society.
17 MR. FRIEDMAN: There I think there's a lot of things
18 going on. They don't actually have access to the franchise. I
19 think that's what a lot of it was about. Actually, you have
20 three generations of Muslims who have not been absorbed, who
21 have not been made welcome. There's no Muslim president of
22 France. There are no French Muslim women on the French Supreme
23 Court.
24 So really, yes, both on the surface are free market
25 democracies, but sometimes the more open a place is and the less
0053
1 access you have the more frustrating it can be. Now, why that
2 access isn't there is such a complicated question. It may not
3 all be France's fault. It may also be the fault of the Muslim
4 community in France. But the parallel really doesn't work.
5 MR. KALB: Thank you.
6 You're on.
7 MR. WEINSTEIN: My name is Seth Weinstein from
8 George Washington University.
9 My question deals with the terrible and inefficient
10 Arab governments. How do you respond to the fact that these
11 autocratic Arabs, especially the Saudi Arabians, are using oil
12 profits to buy up real estate and other manufacturing --
13 MR. FRIEDMAN: The rules are only I can insult
14 people here, so keep it brief.
15 MR. WEINSTEIN: I was wondering, how do you respond
16 to that fact?
17 MR. FRIEDMAN: I think I got the message. The Arab
18 world is what the Arab world is. Today it has -- I think it has
19 some interesting success stories in the case of Jordan, Bahrain,
20 two that come to mind. It has obviously enormous still
21 liabilities and forces dragging it back, as we saw in Lebanon
22 today, where a very good friend of mine, Jibran Twaini, one of
23 the great journalists in the Arab world, was killed today by a
24 suicide -- excuse me -- by a car bomb.
25 I think that no one has described those pathologies
0054
1 and those problems better than the Arabs themselves in the UNDP
2 Arab Human Development Report. Anyone who's interested in that
3 I think can find that on line.
4 MR. KALB: Yes, please.
5 MR. MORVILLE: Hi, my name is Ishan Morville and I
6 currently work at the World Bank.
7 I was curious about the psychology of terrorists and
8 how you think we can convince people who are terrorists today to
9 not commit the acts they're doing.
10 MR. FRIEDMAN: It's a good question and it gets back
11 to changing the context. I'm a big believer when it comes to
12 terrorism that it takes a village, that only the village can
13 actually restrain terrorism. It's only when the village, when
14 the community, says this is wrong and illegitimate that it
15 stops.
16 Look at the Israeli-Palestinian context. We were
17 told for three years Palestinians are so desperate they just
18 have to go out and kill themselves, there's just nothing they
19 can do. Then suddenly Israel gets out of Gaza, there's a
20 Palestinian election, Abu Mazen comes in, the village says, no,
21 this is wrong, this is really bad for us, you can't build a
22 healthy modern state on the ruins and graves of suicide bombers,
23 this has got to stop, and it stopped. It stopped except for an
24 extreme force in the village, Islamic Jihad.
25 So I'm a big believer that what we're seeing in the
0055
1 Arab world today, what we're involved in is a war of ideas.
2 We're involved in a war of ideas within Islam. I believe only
3 Islam can cure that. Only Islam can say going into a mosque on
4 Ramadan and blowing up a funeral is so bad and so vile no one
5 must ever do that again. It's only when the village does that.
6 The reason again that I thought was the legitimate
7 reason to support the war was to create a context where that
8 where of ideas could be fought out freely. People have asked
9 me, how will you know when we've won? I don't use those words,
10 but my answer is always very simple. It had nothing to do with
11 WMD. My answer was: When Salman Rushdie can give a lecture in
12 Baghdad.
13 MR. KALB: Beautiful. Thank you, thank you.
14 We've got time, unfortunately, I think for about two
15 more questions. So go ahead, please.
16 MS. OBERT: My name is Gretchen Obert and I'm from
17 Minnesota as well.
18 MR. FRIEDMAN: Bless you.
19 MR. OBERT: I have a lot of respect for you, Mr.
20 Friedman.
21 MR. FRIEDMAN: Thanks so much.
22 MS. OBERT: But I don't always agree with you.
23 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, that's my favorite reader
24 profile, because if you agreed all the time you wouldn't read
25 me. You'd say: I know what he's going to say.
0056
1 MS. OBERT: My comment is going to be -- and I'd
2 like your response -- you mentioned al-Jazeera before and the
3 slant like Fox News. Up to the beginning of the war in Iraq and
4 after, I was watching a lot of commentary. I know you were on
5 Charlie Rose several times. But it was mostly Jewish
6 journalists or whatever. There were no Muslims to explain the
7 religion. There was so much misinformation about Islam during
8 that time. I do know a little bit about the religion and I was
9 just shocked by the misinformation, which is still going on to
10 this day. It hasn't been corrected.
11 So I think with our media we have not done a good
12 job --
13 MR. KALB: Could you please ask your question.
14 MS. OBERT: Yes. Do you believe, have we done a
15 good job, the American media, in explaining the religion,
16 because so many Americans don't understand the religion?
17 MR. KALB: Good question. Thank you.
18 MR. FRIEDMAN: You know, I'd say several things
19 about that. If you looked on amazon.com in the months after
20 9-11, of the top 25 books on amazon.com I think half of them at
21 one time were either the Koran or books on the Arab world and
22 the Middle East.
23 I studied Islam at the University of Minnesota in
24 1971. There's barely a university, a major university, in this
25 country that doesn't teach Arabic or Islam. Do you know how
0057
1 many American studies centers there are in the Arab world? One.
2 MR. KALB: Where is that?
3 MR. FRIEDMAN: One that I know of, at the American
4 University in Cairo, funded by the U.S. government.
5 So when it comes to like understanding or not
6 understanding, I would say that we are not the party that is
7 short of curiosity. They don't teach comparative religion too
8 many places in the Arab world today.
9 MS. OBERT: [inaudible] That's because of freedom --
10 MR. FRIEDMAN: Pardon me?
11 MS. OBERT: That's because of freedom [inaudible]
12 access to the technologies [inaudible].
13 MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, as I say, I certainly think
14 it's good to give as many voices, and I'm all for bringing Arab
15 and Muslim voices out there. I think there have been more,
16 frankly, than you may have noticed. But when it comes to
17 understanding, I think that we all could do a lot better.
18 MR. KALB: Last question, please.
19 MR. WINO: Good evening, I'm Mark Wino. I'm an alum
20 of GW and also a member of the Press Club. Thank you very much
21 for coming tonight.
22 I have a question with regard to information
23 technology and nations of the world or regions of the world.
24 You talk a lot about the Middle East and also India and China,
25 certainly areas of growing information technology resources,
0058
1 certainly from the people's standpoint. What are your thoughts
2 about Latin America as far as that? Is there a revolution going
3 on as far as human capabilities growing and their IT
4 infrastructures?
5 MR. FRIEDMAN: Unfortunately, I don't know enough
6 about what's going on there in any current way to give you an
7 intelligent answer. So I really can't.
8 MR. KALB: I love that kind of answer. I absolutely
9 love that.
10 Anyhow, our time's up. Ladies and gentlemen, I want
11 to thank our audience. That's all of you. I want to thank our
12 co-sponsors, the George Washington University, the National
13 Press Club, and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics,
14 and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I
15 want to thank the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism
16 Foundation. I want to thank Bloomberg News, New England Cable
17 News, XM Satellite Radio, WMAL Radio, and PBS, starting with
18 Channel 32.
19 Most of all, I want to thank the incomparable Tom
20 Friedman for being our guest.
21 MR. FRIEDMAN: Thank you.
22 MR. KALB: I'm Marvin Kalb. Good night and good
23 luck.
24 [Applause and, at 9:14 p.m., end of program.]
25