From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Welcome to the program. Tonight, we close the year by remembering some of the people we lost in 2014. These men and women led lives of purpose and consequence. They enriched our culture through their inventions, their art, and their enterprise. They have appeared on this program in the past 24 years and passed away this year. Every israeli, every jew, wants peace. Generals are suspected to like wars. Myself, i was branded that generals are always looking for wars. Something personal ive been participating in all wars of the state of israel and i went through the ranks. I started as a private first class and i saw all the battles, all the horrors of the battles. I felt all the fears of the battles. We lost our myself, i lost most of my friends. I was very seriously wounded twice and i felt being in terrible pain being in the hospital. I hate to take decisions of life and death of myself and of others. Believe me, i understand the import of peace better than those politicians that speak about peace and never had this experience. Im interested when i direct a movie always to make a step forward. All the films i directed have not been a good family story or something. I always try to invent something new like in the pedestrian or first love. Or tales from the vienna woods, i think it should be something new. To discover this new aspect in a play or movie, that is what interests me. Acting is a weird thing because acting is a daytoday thing. That is why doing theater is so important to me because youre only as good as what you are doing right then and i truly believe it. Acting is not something that is put on a canvas that you can put on the wall and people can see it. It is really what you do in that day is when i am satisfied. Im as good as what i am showing you right now because in the theater, it is something that will humble you in a second because you will be as bad as you can be at certain times in the theater. Where did the gibberish start from . It started when i was a kid. My father had a restaurant in yonkers. I used to pick up dishes at lunchtime. I would help my father out. Each table had a different ethnic group. There were frenchmen over here bunch of germans over here bunch of italians over here, a bunch of greeks. [laughter] i used to walk over and theyd talk to me. Theyd say [speaking french]. Id say [speaking gibberish]. Then, id go the italian table and go [speaking gibberish]. It means nothing. [laughter] they would go [speaking italian]. You want two eggs, too . Then, i go to the german table. [laughter] you always wanted to go overseas . I did. Isnt it strange . I had brothers, older and younger, that both wanted to go into the academic world involved with international affairs. I went over and it stuck. I knew from when was it . I guess my freshman year in college i wanted to be on television a foreign correspondent. When you were there at the beginning, was it hard to get on the air because you have to get the footage from vietnam . You couldnt get it transmitted by satellite so you had to fly it back. When the halfhour shows came on in september of 1963. It was cronkite on cbs and Huntley Brinkley on nbc. Abc was not yet a competitor. There were no satellites and very few correspondents who really knew how to do the work how to go out and package a story as well as report a story. Work with the camera team, write the script, put it on a pan am flight and send it back across the pacific. You are left totally to your own devices. There was no producers shadow looming over you in the mekong delta. You were given a free hand and those were heady days. There are a lot of theories that have been written about the comic spirit in people. There are freudian explanations of it. They say that funny people perceive their mothers as being troubled and they spent their early childhoods trying to amuse their mothers. Is that what they say . Yeah. Do you buy that . I think thats your first audience. Its your mom in the kitchen. Doing something goofy and making your mom laugh. You are trying to make her happy and laugh. Yeah. Or make her love you. One or the other. Thats probably all rolled together. Other people talk about the absurd child syndrome. That children perceive insanity in the world. We are told things as children that are clearly not true. As soon as you open your eyes and look at the newspaper we are told policemen are good. Were told that bad people go to jail. Kids, they are not blind and deaf. They see not all policemen are good, they are indicting all these policemen or innocent people are being executed in jail. So, the child has two choices this is a small child either im crazy or the world is crazy. The kid who decides the world is crazy he now has two choices. He can be crushed by that or he can find the comedy in it. He sees it either as tragedy or comedy. Once you decide it is comedy you are an absurd child. [laughter] no, i think the greatest thing i have done in my life charlie, is to take care of sick people. To my great regret, when i die the obituary is going to be headlined something about the writing. It is not going to talk about all of those people whom one on one i had the opportunity to care for. When i say care for, i mean not just in the medical sense because that is what being a doctor is really all about. The satisfaction of making a difference in somebodys life . The satisfaction of making a difference in someones life but you know, each time it makes a difference in your own life, too. The sense of healing which covers so many things is actually something that benefits the healer just as much as it does the person healed. What i wouldnt like is that opera is considered something of the past. I always try to show that even a piece is something very much about our time. You must display them not necessarily in modern costumes but played that way in which people are moved by it. I always think when people go to the opera and they dont come out with eyes a little bit wet because they have laughed a lot or cried, the opera didnt work. Im very afraid that opera can lose its impact on the modern public if you dont make an opera feeling as something of our time and not something of the past. Thats difficult nowadays. I come to care about people i get involved with. I come to care, im genuinely curious about what happens inside the heads and hearts of other people. I think the people who im dealing with as a writer can sense that this is not an act, this is not something im faking. I really do become curious and concerned about whats going on in their lives. Whats the hardest part . Writing. The writing of it . Yeah. Getting the story is easy compared to writing it and putting it together and telling the story in a way because frequently youre dealing with stories in which you already know the end. Thats true. This is not a highprofile case. Its not a famous story. The Mcdonald Book was more well known, people knew the end. But, the writing for me is much harder. Thats not to say the research is fun. That last time i had fun doing research was my book on alaska. These last 14 years of research hasnt been fun. I love the thing that jim wright supposedly said. I dont know who the next president is going to be, but i know who his best friends going to be. Yes. Its bob strauss. He said that not about jimmy carter, but about somebody else. What is it about you that these powerful men are attracted to . Well, i dont have any desire to run for public office. I was nonthreatening and i had a reputation of being very, very loyal. And, i had a reputation of having pretty good judgment. Judgment is what its about. Thats what its thats the main thing. Somebody you can trust. And somebody that has good judgment. Not in business just for himself, but in business for the countrys good and the president s good. I think they have understood at the end of the day the double standard world in which the United States and eight other powers have Nuclear Weapons and give lectures and try to put pressure on the rest of the world not to have those is an unworkable thing. It is a selfdefeating policy. It is not going to stop proliferation. It really cant be until the nuclear powers, they are saying and im warmly agreeing with them it is odd company for me to be in, but here i am. Schell and kissinger together at last. Yes, at last. What they are really saying is or what i am saying is if you bring your own arsenals to the negotiating table that is america and russia and so on that is the biggest bargaining chip anybody has put on a diplomatic table. You say we are willing to go down to zero. We are willing to live in such a world so you proliferators better not get in that business. People say why does he write fiction, but i think fiction is the heart of my work. You would think you will be remembered in time for your fiction . I do. Maybe im whistling in the dark, but i dont think so. First, i began as a short story writer. I wrote about 30 short stories before i wrote any nonfiction. My first three of my four books were novels. Not very good, but nonetheless the stories were being published. It was really a financial decision. I was a commercial fisherman. I had a new wife and young kids and i really had to make some money. I went over to writing nonfiction about what i knew about boats and wildlife. You would fish during the summer and write in the winter. Yeah. Then, i got mr. Shawn to agree to send me around the world to all the wild places. I said everybody is writing about europe but who is writing about these wonderful wildernesses that are going down the tube . He agreed and i rushed to south america before he could change his mind. That was really the beginning. That produced a fiction book and a nonfiction book. The real issue is adaptation. The world is changing so fast. Adapting to what . Adapting to what it is that students ought to be prepared for as the world changes. I read an article a couple of weeks ago that said this is all a con game. You used to say if you went to college and got out, you got a better job and a higher salary. What is happening now . People are coming out and they are prepared, but not for the jobs. Thats interesting because colleges sent ourselves down that road. We tried to tell parents and everybody else if you come to universities, you will make a lot of money. Listen, you will have a good life and learn a good deal. Who says a plumber cant read moby dick . Who says a plumber cant be interested in shakespeare . We need to widen the sense of where College People are going to go. Many of the great editors on the times went abroad to be war correspondents. Many of them went to washington, national bureaus. I stayed in that one place. Once i became a cultural reporter, i loved doing what i was doing. Many of my friends who have become foreign correspondents, including abe rosenthal, they felt that they were surprised that i wanted to go into what was regarded as a sissified occupation. Cultural critic. Sissified occupation . [laughter] yes the real men were covering wars and you were there covering theater and opera and museums. It was a male world, in those days, journalism. You had get out and do some real tough reporting. I was about to go overseas but Brooks Atkinson persuaded me he said, you can always go overseas. Why dont you try it . You are doing a lot of articles on a freelance basis for the sunday drama section. He said try it out for a year. You might become a critic someday. You will enjoy doing that. You think that poetry is music for the voice. Thats right. It is all music. I go back to Edgar Allen PoeNikki Giovanni all poetry is music written for the human voice. It only comes into its own when it is spoken. It is wonderful to see professors of literature and the Ivy League Universities and colleges looking at what is called concrete poetry. That is poetry which is to be seen. How it is shaped is so important to the poetry. That is fine. But for me, until the human voice gives it elevation, it does not really sing. It doesnt come into its own. It doesnt lift the heart and make the blood race. Of all the talents you have what one of them resonates most with you . What is the clearest expression of who you are and what you are . Im a writer. Thats what i am. Thats who i am. That is how i describe myself to myself and to god in prayer. When i say, lord, do you remember me . Maya angelou, six foot tall black female. I write lord, remember. When i feel i really have to describe myself to the lord i always include what i do i write. Thats what i do. I thank the lord that i am able to do other things. Im grateful, but that is how i describe myself to myself. Is it in your judgment a learned craft or is it everything is learned charlie rose. I dont know how you learn it, but everything is learned. It is said that some people are born great, some achieve it and some have it thrust upon them. I think that is true of all the things you are. You are born that thing, you earn it and some of it is thrust upon you. I believe that to be so. Tell me what it means to you this game having spent seven decades in. I think the book sums it up pretty good a life. Ive never earned a dollar bill outside of baseball. When i tell that to people they say, what did you do . Come from a rich family . I say, no. When i was a young kid and finally signed out of high school with the brooklyn dodgers, went to the minor leagues, i was a pretty decent player at a very young age. I was asked to go to havana, cuba to play in the Winter League in cuba. They wanted bigleague players at that time, but al campanis recommended me at a young age to go to cuba. I played there for two or three years and then when castro came in, that was the end of baseball. I went to puerto rico and played in the wintertime. Played there for two or three years and then they started having instructional leagues in florida. I always wound up as an instructor or something in florida where i lived. Thats why i can say ive never drawn a paycheck outside of baseball. The defining event of my life was being raised in harlem. Really . Shaped by the black cultural experience. Yes, but i was not even thinking about the culture so much as the total Life Experience there and the people i met. My mother, stepmother how that all came to be. I came out of harlem and in that i tried to put into perspective why it has a claim on you, that place. It did then and i suppose it still does. The rhythm of the people and the sounds, the ideas everything was at a crossroads there. Prejudice and discrimination as well as love and freedom and fun. The most meaningful thing has been this relationship with ozzie. Ive learned and we wrote each other a letter in the book. Did you read your letter to him . No, i have not read it since i wrote it. You wrote each other a letter. What did you say . We talked about love and sex and beginnings of things and scratching through to each other. It is like coming out from deep murky waters out to the surface of life where we could both see each other. That has been meaningful. How to how does love flourish . How does love work . That has been i have come to the conclusion that maybe that is why we got put here on earth in the first place. To make love work. Here was a man who never harmed anyone in his life, was totally antiviolent. There were no politics ever involved in our house. The only pictures in our house were religious pictures. The enormous shock of not only myself being arrested and tortured, but then finding that not only was my father arrested but several members of my family as well with evidence that was obviously fabricated. You pointed out this fatherson relationship. It is that you grew to understand, know, appreciate love more deeply your father because of your association in prison. Is that fair . That is totally true because all of my dealings with my father up until that period was on a superficial level. Give me some money or tell me what horse is going to win the next race. It was only when we were together in prison that i got a deeper understanding of the true man and the spirit that was in the man. That deeply affected me. My father gave up the ultimate sacrifice for me. Life. His life. He came to prison and went through the brutal hardships of prison to give me an understanding and a maturity about what life was all about. You were the definer onstage of Tennessee Williams, more than anybody i can think of. He is a great poet and a great writer. I was fortunate enough to do the rose tattoo. That was early in your career. Yes, that was many years ago, in 1950. 48 years ago. The next play i did of his was camino real. The first film i made was written by Tennessee Williams so i feel real rich. You are reminding me of a quote about living. Tennessee as lord byron says in the play lately ive been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single purestringed instrument of my heart. For what is the heart but an instrument that turns noise into order and chaos chaos into order and noise into music. Make voyages, attempt them there is nothing else. I have taken that as my philosophy. [laughter] keep making the voyages even though there may be a leak in the ship. Stay on the journey. Yes. How was he to work with mary . He was wonderful because he was so bossy. He was a captain. He knew what he wanted. Yes, and you didnt get to argue. You could say, well, george i was one of the few people to call him george because id known him for so long. Everyone else said mr. Abbott . Yes, except his daughter. She called him george. But, youd say can we try this and hed say you can try it once and if it doesnt work, thats out. He was completely fair and a pragmatist about everything. He wouldve been so bored with the idea of his dying. Dying was very dull to him. When we were in our orchestrial readthroughs, the musical directors mother died and he had no sympathy for that. One day out, thats enough. He should be back in. Ronald reagan once said, i dont dare call him george because im temporarily between jobs. [laughter] it is said that he liked to work with people who werent stars. Thats absolutely true. We had a very sad story about that because nancy walker and she was thrilled to do it. She heard the score, everything was fine. George had the entire Production Group in the room and said, how many people here want nancy walker in this part . 19 hands went up and he said well, all right, i guess i lose, but im not going to like it. It had nothing to do with nancy. He loved nancy, but he wanted to make stars, not work with them. I treasure every moment of my service in the senate and my service in the white house. The majority leader of the United States senate may be the very best job in the city. You have real power, you can really accomplish things, but you still dont have the trappings of security and the things that