FRANK MANKIEWICZ, VICE CHAIRMAN, HILL & KNOWLTON: Well, I said that back in 1972, when I had a serious role in Senator McGovern’s presidential campaign – and Senator McGovern had just been nominated at the convention in Miami, and we had to pick a vice presidential candidate. And my choice was Walter Cronkite, and he was the most trusted man in America, and he was the anchor for everybody. And I was voted down unanimously. Everybody said, ”Don’t be silly. He’d never accept. We’ll look bad if we offer it to him, and he turns it down because everybody will know that. So let’s go to a more mainstream politician,” which we did.

LAMB: Why did you think Walter Cronkite would even take the job?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I thought – I knew he was very much opposed to the Vietnam War because about six months before that he had come back from Vietnam and immediately called me and asked to see Robert Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy. And the two of them met. I was there.

And he began by saying, ”Senator, you’ve got to run for president because this war has got to end,” and went on to say how unwinnable it was. He said we’d win a village in the daytime, and then we’d have to give it back at night. He said the Vietnamese in the south may not like the north but they like us less. So I knew – and – but Kennedy said to him – he said, ”Walter, I’ll run for president if you’ll run for the senate in New York.” And Cronkite laughed and said, ”Well, I can’t because, in the first place, I don’t live in New York, I live in Connecticut. And secondly, I’m not a Democrat; I’m registered as an Independent.”

But I knew he had those feelings about the war, and so I thought, ”Well, maybe he might accept it.” He would take it seriously, I thought.

LAMB: And that was …

MANKIEWICZ: And he certainly could outrun, outvote anybody else I could think of.

LAMB: That was 1968.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: Where was the meeting?

MANKIEWICZ: No, that was 1972.

LAMB: I mean 1972. Where was that meeting held?

MANKIEWICZ: Which? With Kennedy?

LAMB: With Mr. Cronkite and Senator Kennedy.

MANKIEWICZ: In Senator Kennedy’s office.

LAMB: On Capitol Hill.

MANKIEWICZ: On Capitol Hill.

LAMB: And what was your job at the time?

MANKIEWICZ: I was Senator Kennedy’s press secretary.

LAMB: How had you come to know Senator Kennedy in the first place?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I came to know him because he called me up one day when I was still an official of the Peace Corps. I had been very active in the Peace Corps. I was a director in Peru, and then I was the regional director for Latin America.

And he called me up when he had just been elected and was going to Latin America as his first sort of trip. Because he knew I’d been there – some friends of his had told him I’d lived in Peru for two years in the Peace Corps, and he wanted to check the Peru schedule that the State Department had given him with me. It was a terrible schedule. It called for the a visit to the American school in the morning and lunch with the American-Peru Chamber of Commerce and – a lunch, and then a visit to some USAID projects in the afternoon, and then dinner at the Embassy.

And I said to him, ”Senator, why are you going to Lima to do all that? You could do it right here.” And he kind of laughed and said, ”Yes, I know.” He said, ”That’s why I wanted to talk to you.” So I gave him an alternate schedule, and then we talked when he was on his way to Peru. I happened to be in Panama when his airplane stopped there for refueling.

LAMB: Had you known him before?

MANKIEWICZ: Never known him. No, no.

LAMB: So that’s the first time you ever …

MANKIEWICZ: The first time we ever talked.

LAMB: You ever …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: For those – you know, it’s hard. You ask questions for people that were around during the time all this happened and those that have never heard any of this …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: … and I might’ve misled folks, but you were – in ’72, you were in Senator McGovern’s office.

MANKIEWICZ: In ’72 – well, I’d been in Senator Kennedy’s office as press secretary for three years. And then when he was killed, I was a journalist for a while, and then Senator McGovern asked me to join his campaign for president three years later, in ’71, and then I was still there in ’72. Essentially, Gary Hart, Senator Gary Hart and I ran that campaign.

LAMB: Let’s step back again. How did you get into the Peace Corps? What was your motive there? Where did you come from?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I was a lawyer in California. I was active in politics in California. I had run for the legislature when I was a very young man, active in politics, very active in the campaign of President Kennedy’s in California. And when he won, I just thought being a lawyer for some movie people was not how I wanted to spend my life.

So I wrote to friends of mine who were in Washington saying, ”Here I am. Use me somehow.” And I came back here eventually and did some interviews. I talked to an old friend named Adam Yarmolinsky who was then at the Defense Department. And I wound up talking to – going over to the Peace Corps because an old friend of mine from California named Franklin Williams, who had been a Deputy Attorney General in California was now Shriver’s, Sargent Shriver’s, man for Africa in the Peace Corps, and he said, ”You’ve got to come here.”

So I went over and did some interviews, and I was enchanted with the Peace Corps. I thought it was just a terrific idea. It was just getting started. I spoke Spanish, and so he said to me, ”Well, pick a country.” So I said, ”All right. I’ll run the country in Peru.” And they said, ”That’s fine. You’re going to have to talk to Mr. Shriver when he gets back,” but we worked that out.

LAMB: So when did you first meet Walter Cronkite?

MANKIEWICZ: I suppose when I was Senator Kennedy’s press secretary, just maybe in the normal course of being a press secretary. I probably talked to him a few times about a story, about something that had happened. Things were fairly relaxed in those days. You could talk to almost anybody.

LAMB: And of all the people you’ve been around, who were you the closest to personally?

MANKIEWICZ: I’d say maybe Robert Kennedy or George McGovern or …

LAMB: Why were you interested in working in the George McGovern campaign?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, because I had come to know Senator McGovern when I was working with Senator Kennedy, and I knew of his real passion about the war in Vietnam, which I shared. And he seemed to me as, when the 1972 campaign began to develop, almost the only candidate who was truly against that war. And then he called me up and wanted to know if I wanted to join his campaign, and I said, ”Yes, I did.”

LAMB: We’ve got some audiotape. It’s kind of long. It’s over three minutes of a Lyndon Johnson conversation from the Oval Office with – Bobby Kennedy at the time was Attorney General. This is in May of 1964.

MANKIEWICZ: He must’ve been just ending his term as Attorney General.

LAMB: Now explain what was going on in the world in 1964.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, there was some talk that he might be the vice presidential candidate for Lyndon Johnson when he ran for reelection and – because he didn’t have a vice president. In those days, if a president succeeded on the death of – if a vice president succeeded on the death of a president, he served the rest of the term but without a vice president. So that was Johnson’s situation.

But it was also clear that he and Robert Kennedy were not friends at all, politically. And Johnson made an announcement at one point that nobody serving in his cabinet could be on the ticket with him as vice president. And Robert Kennedy said he was sorry to have taken all the other fellows over the side with him. And then he later decided he was going to run for the Senate in New York. And I think he left the Department of Justice probably May or June of ’64.

LAMB: So in ’64, how hot was the Vietnam War?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, it was rolling right along. Oh, yes. We were very close allied, I thought, with some very dubious leaders of the country in Saigon, and it didn’t seem popular at all. In ’64, it was a serious war, and we didn’t seem to be gaining very much.

LAMB: Let’s listen to this tape of …

MANKIEWICZ: Sure.

LAMB: … Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. It’s about three-and-a-half minutes.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, (D-NY), FORMER US SENATOR: Bob McNamara about six days ago had a talk with me and asked me to come over, and I went through it. I think there’s a lot of – and it’s the same feeling, you know, with President Kennedy. I think there’s a lot of people around, such as Douglas Dillon and some others who – whether they are involved in making the decisions or not, they frequently, yet based on experience and some judgment, have some good ideas in some of these matters. I think that was the advantage of dealing with the – you know, the problem with the missile crisis and also some of the other difficulties over the period of the last three years.

And I think I’d maybe make the suggestion to utilize some of those brains and talents to the maximum is helpful. And again, having watched it a little bit apart over the last three years, I think that you could have those people involved and make sure that there is a full discussion about some of these things. I – again being quite frank about it, I – based on my two meetings at the National Security Council Meeting, I thought that there was too much projected to Bob McNamara, that there was too much emphasis really on the military aspects of it. But then, I would think that that war will never be won militarily, but where it’s going to be won really is the political war. And the best talent, of course, is over at the Pentagon because you have Bob McNamara. But that same kind of talent really has to be applied to doing what needs to be done politically in that country.

And whether it’s setting up an organization for each one of those counties, politically, and what needs – and what steps have to be taken, that may be dropping the bomb someplace or sending more planes there. The people themselves aren’t interested, as you point out frequently, but – which I’m not sure that they’re – they concentrate on that sufficiently. I think that a real major effort on the – in the political field as you made in the military field because the military action obviously will have to be taken, but unless the political action is taken concurrently, in my judgment, I just don’t think it can be successful.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON, 36th PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES: I think that that’s good thinking and that’s not any different from the way I have thought about it. What, we spent the whole afternoon yesterday with (Walter) Lippmann . I assume you saw his column this morning …

KENNEDY: Yes, I did.

JOHNSON: … about McNamara and George Ball and Bundy and different ones. The – I agree with you on Dillon and the Council, too. The problem we’ve had there is very much what you referred to on the first days I was in here that you don’t get too much when the president is present …

KENNEDY: No.

JOHNSON: … in the way of frankness and real adventure and imagination. And people are somewhat hesitant, as you said …

KENNEDY: Yes.

JOHNSON: … to give their ideas. So I have been trying to stimulate and encourage political thinking and try to incite in them some adventure and some …

KENNEDY: Right.

JOHNSON: … diplomatic adventure in some political programs.

(END ADIO CLIP)

LAMB: This is about as close as you could get to two human beings inside an administration.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: Now, LBJ knew – he pushed the button, so he knew that the tapes were running. I assume Bobby Kennedy did not know. But what did you hear there that you would – that you were thinking as you were listening to that?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I thought what I was hearing was an evolving position of Senator Kennedy’s. After all, he’d been certainly a strong supporter of President Kennedy’s, and President Kennedy had been a strong supporter of the war. But he was moving away clearly and thinking that there were other ways to achieve whatever we wanted in Vietnam, and the bombing and the straight wartime military tactics were not working and were not going to do the job.

LAMB: Well, from your own experience, when did Senator Kennedy – eventually Senator Kennedy become very antiwar?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I would say probably by 1966, ’67 maybe, but he was always moving that way. I mean, if he had to come down yes or no, I think he’d have come down no fairly soon after this conversation with Johnson because Johnson, President Johnson, is saying, ”Well, we need to do political things. We need to do non-military things,” but clearly his heart was not in that because he never did.

LAMB: Well, put Bob McNamara in perspective. He was appointed originally Defense Secretary by John Kennedy …

MANKIEWICZ: Right.

LAMB: … John F. Kennedy, the President. And what was Bobby Kennedy’s relationship with him because we have learned later …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: … that Robert McNamara didn’t think we could win the war, but we went on and fought it anyway.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. Well, Kennedy and Senator – Secretary McNamara were quite close, personally, talked a lot. And I think maybe as Bob Kennedy’s positioned was changing maybe so was McNamara’s because he stayed with it a long time. But as McNamara said in his documentary he did a couple of years ago, ”The Fog of War” …

LAMB: ”The Fog of War.”

MANKIEWICZ: Yes. He clearly regretted having stayed with the war as long as he did in a purely military posture. And I think Kennedy came to agree with that.

LAMB: What is your reaction to the President saying people do not tell him to his face …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: … what he should hear.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I thought that’s a remarkable insight, and I think every president maybe feels that, perhaps, but doesn’t do much about it. I know some people, George Reedy I think particularly, who had been one of Johnson’s press secretaries, said the problem with the Johnson Administration and he thought with every administration is there’s nobody in the White House who will say, ”Mr. President, that’s the dumbest idea I ever heard of. You’ve got to stop that. You can’t do that,” whatever it is. And presidents I think are really in a bubble inside the White House where no one will dare say, ”You’re wrong, Mr. President. I think you should take a different position or appoint a different person or change it to a different policy.” And …

LAMB: How did you …

MANKIEWICZ: … Johnson was beginning to think like that, I guess.

LAMB: How did you personally, then, relate to Senator Kennedy? I mean, you’re age – he was – I figure he was about 38 when he was talking to Lyndon Johnson, and Lyndon Johnson was about 55.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: So there’s a big difference in their ages.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, Robert Kennedy and I were almost the same age. And in fact, when I was appointed press secretary, the leading political writer for the New York Times, Johnny Apple, said Senator Kennedy has found a playmate his own age.

LAMB: Did you ever talk back to him or talk up to him or …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, well we were fairly close, yes. We spent a lot of time together in which there were just the two of us, particularly travel.

LAMB: And you were on his Senate office for three-and-a-half years.

MANKIEWICZ: Three.

LAMB: Three years. And what changed your mind on the war, or were you ever in favor of the war?

MANKIEWICZ: I was really never in favor of it. What changed my mind was observing, not just in Vietnam but elsewhere, particularly in a skirmish we had in the Dominican Republic that the government was actually misleading the public about the war. And I thought, ”Well, if they’re doing that in South America, they’re maybe doing it in Southeast Asia.” I was really against the war from I guess 1964 on when I first really became aware of what was going on.

See, I was overseas. I was with the Peace Corps in Peru from 1961 until ’64, ’65.

LAMB: And then how did you work in the campaign, the Kennedy for President Campaign? How’d you get into that, and what were the circumstances around when that decision was made?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, in ’68 – early in ’68, he decided he was going to run. I think the results of a primary election in New Hampshire where President Johnson narrowly defeated Senator Gene McCarthy – I think that persuaded Robert Kennedy that the Democratic Party was hopelessly split and that the good of the party no longer required him to go along. So he decided to run, and that was in March of ’68. That was pretty late. Presidential campaigns now begin, what, eight, nine years before the election, but this was early.

LAMB: The date I have on that is that he actually announced March the 16th.

MANKIEWICZ: That’s right.

LAMB: And what I want to run …

MANKIEWICZ: The day before St. Patrick’s Day when he went up to New York and marched in the parade.

LAMB: But just two weeks earlier than that, Walter Cronkite had made his statement on Vietnam on his newscast. That would’ve been February the 27th, 1968. And this is only about 30 seconds. It was longer than that, but let’s just listen to a little bit of that.

MANKIEWICZ: Sure.

(VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER CRONKITE, AMERICAN BROADCAST JOURNALIST: It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation. And for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the north, the use of nuclear weapons or the mere commitment of 100 or 200 or 300,000 more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MANKIEWICZ: Hmm.

LAMB: It was longer. He went on to say, ”To say that we were closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” and it goes on.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: But my question is – he came back – when did he meet with Senator Kennedy? Was it between that moment and that moment that he announced?

MANKIEWICZ: No, I think it was before that, before …

LAMB: Before he had gone to Vietnam?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I think he had another trip to Vietnam. I think he’d been there before.

LAMB: And when you were sitting there listening to him suggest to Senator Kennedy he had to run for president to stop the war …

MANKIEWICZ: Right.

LAMB: … what was going through your mind?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I welcomed him as an ally. A lot of them on the Senator’s staff wanted him to run. Some did not. And here I thought was a pretty important fellow in America saying, ”Yes, you should run.” It may have helped him make up his mind.

LAMB: But in a bigger way or discussion, what about an anchorman for a major network getting involved in politics and the public didn’t know it?

MANKIEWICZ: Not very – it didn’t happen very often, if at all. That’s right. I was very – well, that’s one reason I favored Walter Cronkite to be the vice presidential nominee four years later with Senator McGovern. And as it turns out, as I wrote in the Washington Post, a year or two ago, Senator – Walter Cronkite told Senator McGovern that if he had only asked him he would’ve accepted. So if the ticket, in ’72, would’ve been McGovern and Cronkite, I think it would’ve been a different election.

LAMB: You wrote in this column after Walter Cronkite had died, ”’You must announce your intention to run against Johnson,’ Cronkite urged, ’to show people there will be a way out of this terrible war.’ Kennedy listened intently and asked Cronkite his opinion of the battlefields he had seen. ’The war can’t be won,’ Cronkite told him. ’What we gain on the battlefields and in the body count during the daytime,’ he said, ’we lose to the villagers at night.’”

Why did you wait until he had died to write that?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, maybe I overextended the sense of what would be the ethical thing to do. If he had not talked about it, I wasn’t quite sure it would be appropriate for me to do so.

LAMB: And what – is there more to the story than that? How long was the meeting that they had when they met?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I pretty well described it. It didn’t take very long. They talked about New York politics, and they talked about Vietnam. He would ask Walter Cronkite what happened here and, ”What did he think of this,” and, ”What did he think of that?” And Cronkite was very candid with his assessment, essentially what he said in that clip we just saw that the war can’t be won. If it can’t be won, then why pursue it? He didn’t think we’d lose in any sense, but we’re not going to be able to accomplish our objective.

LAMB: Did you see what Larry Sabato wrote about this, from the University of Virginia?

MANKIEWICZ: No. About what I wrote?

LAMB: Yes.

MANKIEWICZ: No, I never have.

LAMB: He said, ”Decades later, everyone knows that Cronkite was a Democrat. After his retirement, he gradually made no secret of his party affiliation and philosophy. But at the time, CBS went to great pains to present him as nonpartisan, and most Americans accepted that this was true. (The other networks played the same game with their anchors, whatever their underlying political philosophy and not all were Democrats by the way.) Now we learn that Cronkite was prepared to run for vice president on the 1972 Democratic ticket had he been asked.” A little bit more – ”But it is the 1967 Cronkite meeting with Robert Kennedy that stuns. Cronkite willingly became an active player in national politics, choosing a personal favorite for president and directly attempting to induce and prominent politician to run for the White House. We do believe that Cronkite’s private importuning had no effect on his reporting.”

There’s a lot more to this but …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, yes. Well, I don’t know. I’d have to think about that. I don’t think it had any effect on his reporting. I think Cronkite was very careful to keep his personal opinions out of his reporting. Although in this clip that we saw – but, on the other hand, he made it clear that was not part of his news broadcast.

LAMB: So when you remember the ’68 – Lyndon Johnson pulling out and not running for president that year and the quotes that came out of LBJ saying that now that Walter Cronkite is – ”We’ve lost him, we’ve lost the rest of America.” Did he really have that much impact on it, do you think?

MANKIEWICZ: I think what President Johnson said was, ”If I lose Cronkite, I lose America.” I’m not sure he ever thought – was quite convinced that he had lost him, although, in fact, of course, he had. No, I don’t think it had that much effect. I think there was – I mean, the fight over Vietnam in America was very widespread, and I don’t think that the opinion of even Walter Cronkite would’ve turned it one way or the other.

LAMB: This next clip I’m going to show you’ve seen many times, and it’s been talked about many times. But for I guess either nostalgia reasons – I’m not sure you’d call this nostalgia – or the younger folks who may not have ever seen it, it’s the clip from your announcement that Robert Kennedy was dead.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: Before we show a little bit of this, give us the circumstances. Where was this, and when was it?

MANKIEWICZ: It was in Los Angeles, 1968, June 6th. It was the California primary, the key primary, which he had won that night. And in the hotel, on his way to another press conference, Robert Kennedy was shot and spent about 36 hours in the hospital and never recovered from the gunshot wound to the head and died in June of ’68 just after the California primary.

LAMB: And where were you that night?

MANKIEWICZ: I was with him of course all the way.

LAMB: He was – were you next to him when he was shot?

MANKIEWICZ: No, I wasn’t. I was maybe ten, 15 yards behind because I had – as we were leaving the platform that he was on to go to the next meeting – normally I would’ve been at his side. I was only the security he had beside Bill Barry, who was a former FBI guy and who was sort of a security man for him. And we both stayed behind to help Ethel Kennedy down from the platform. She needed help to jump maybe two or three feet down. And what some of us knew but not the public yet was that she was pregnant a couple of months, three or four months I think. So we stayed behind and helped her down and then turned to go catch up with Senator Kennedy, and that’s when we heard the shots, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.

LAMB: In Los Angeles.

MANKIEWICZ: In Los Angeles.

LAMB: And that – it was located over on Wilshire Boulevard.

MANKIEWICZ: That’s right.

LAMB: His brother had been killed. And what was your sense at that time about security? I mean, how tight was the security around him when he was running?

MANKIEWICZ: We had no security at all, provided our own. As I say, it was me and Bill Barry, and we’d sort of stand beside him and try to keep the crowds away.

LAMB: But I mean, in your heads, though, were you worried – I mean, back then – I mean, today there is so much security.

MANKIEWICZ: I know.

LAMB: Even lesser members of the Congress have people with them.

MANKIEWICZ: I know, I know. I never thought about that, really very little. Only we had police protection, of course, when he drove around the city, although not in Los Angeles because the mayor was very much anti-Kennedy.

LAMB: Mayor Yorty.

MANKIEWICZ: Mayor Sam Yorty. He had been himself a candidate for president earlier, although not taken very seriously.

LAMB: And where was he specifically and how did Sirhan Sirhan find him at that point?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I don’t know. Sirhan was sort of loitering in the kitchen. And normally, we would’ve walked through the public parts of the hotel, through the lobbies to this other meeting room in the hotel where the press was waiting or, as we’d say now, the media. And – but he was very tired, Senator Kennedy was, and didn’t like the idea I guess of once more pressing through this enormous and adoring crowd. They would pluck his clothes and try to force in. So the maitre d’ of the hotel said, ”Well, we can get to that room where the press was going to be by going through the kitchen, shortcut.” And Senator Kennedy said, ”Fine, let’s do that.”

So that’s where we were, and Sirhan was there. I don’t know how he got there. I don’t know if anybody stopped him or asked him for an ID or anything else. He walked around.

LAMB: Where was he from?

MANKIEWICZ: Where?

LAMB: Yes.

MANKIEWICZ: I think Syria. He was a Palestinian, but I don’t know where. He lived in California for quite a while.

LAMB: And where is he today?

MANKIEWICZ: He’s in San Quentin Prison for life.

LAMB: At that time, do you remember how old he was?

MANKIEWICZ: Maybe in his late 20s, early 30s.

LAMB: Let’s run this clip of you making the announcement back in 1968.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MANKIEWICZ: Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife Ethel, his sisters Mrs. Steven Smith and Ms. Patricia Lawford, brother-in-law Mr. Steven Smith, and sister-in-law Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was 42 years old.

(END OF CLIP)

LAMB: I’m going to ask what you remember about that particular moment, the circumstances.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I remember that I left out of that list of people who were with him his brother Senator Edward Kennedy, and I made that correction very shortly thereafter. I don’t remember a lot about my own feelings because there was so much going on that had to be done. I think in a way I was lucky. I had a lot of duties. I had to take care of maybe 100 reporters who were on the scene, get them information, make our travel arrangements and let them be public.

Pierre Salinger, who was working with me at that time, was helping out here and there. We starting making lists of people to be invited to the funeral, how we were going to handle the press at the funeral, where it was going to be. There was a lot to be done. And as I say, I think that was a bit of a blessing, so I didn’t have to think very much about grief.

LAMB: When did it hit you?

MANKIEWICZ: A couple days later, back here in Washington.

LAMB: And is there any way to describe the impact that it’s had on you for the rest of your life?

MANKIEWICZ: Not yet.

LAMB: And when you were rattling off some of the names, it just so happens that in this particularly time period a lot of people are passing on, including Eunice Shriver.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: And her husband has Alzheimer’s Disease since 2003.

MANKIEWICZ: Eunice Shriver, at that time, was with Sarge when he was Ambassador to Paris.

LAMB: Sargent Shriver?

MANKIEWICZ: Sargent Shriver.

LAMB: And let me just stop with that one. I saw a picture of him the other day, can you communicate with him anymore?

MANKIEWICZ: I saw that picture, too. It was very saddening. Sarge was a wonderful, vibrant, vigorous, tough, active guy, well into his 60s, 70s. And now, as you say, he’s afflicted, and that’s well known, with Alzheimer’s Disease. He seems – I don’t know. The picture I saw in the press of him at Eunice Shriver’s funeral he looked very old, much older than he is.

LAMB: And he ran the Peace Corps.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, he did. He started it. Right.

LAMB: Did you know him when you were there?

MANKIEWICZ: Very, very well. Yes.

LAMB: What I’m about to connect, though, is after Senator McGovern choose Tom Eagleton to be his vice presidential candidate, and then because of problems he backed out or he left, then Sargent Shriver was picked, was that your choice?

MANKIEWICZ: Ultimately, sure.

LAMB: Why did you – how did you do that?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, we threw out a lot of names, and people were unwilling to run. And I think it was a real turning point of the campaign. I mean, he might not have won that election but he certainly would’ve come close. We were five, six points behind, and I think we had some ability to – you know, we had Watergate going for us.

LAMB: But you lost by almost 25 …

MANKIEWICZ: Oh, yes, lost a significant amount to the point where Senator McGovern could not have, as I think he would have had he run close, been the candidate four years later.

LAMB: Walter Cronkite died a few weeks ago. And today, when we were taping this, Don Hewitt died.

MANKIEWICZ: I just saw that.

LAMB: Did you know him?

MANKIEWICZ: I knew him as the producer at CBS. In fact, he gave me cause for considerable lighthearted, to be sure, embarrassment in the Kennedy campaign. Don Hewitt called me up I guess early in 1967. Ronald Reagan had just been elected Governor of California. And he said to me, you know – he said, ”CBS has this new thing called a satellite,” he said, ”and we can bring into the same broadcast people from different parts of the world talking to each other.” He said, ”What I want to do,” he said, ”is have a debate between Senator Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, the new Governor of California, and we’ll have students from maybe England or Japan or India talk to these two guys and ask them questions and have a debate. What do you think?” Well, I thought it was a perfect setup for Senator Kennedy. He was, after all, a very experienced politician and this Governor of California is an ex-class-B movie star. There’d be no contest, and I persuaded Senator Kennedy to accept.

So he did, and they had the debate, and it was carnage. I mean, no one’s ever won a debate more decisively than Reagan did that evening. Senator Kennedy looked at the monitor in the room rather than at the interviewer. And the result is that the people watching saw him being kind of shifty-eyed. He went on at great length for his answers trying to be very precise about Vietnam, whereas Ronald Reagan was superb. He hit his marks. He gave wonderful reassuring pro-American answers. And for the years after that, whenever we’d be having a discussion on the Kennedy staff of the Kennedy surroundings, and I would take the position that Senator Kennedy maybe didn’t hold, he would turn to me and say, ”You’re the fellow that got me into the debate with Ronald Reagan, aren’t you?”

LAMB: I first heard …

MANKIEWICZ: It was Don Hewitt’s idea.

LAMB: I first heard that story from something you wrote in the March 29, 2006, Washington Post with the headline, ”Nofzinger: A Friend with Whom …”

MANKIEWICZ: Oh, yes.

LAMB: ”… It Was a Pleasure to Disagree.” Lynn Nofziger …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, yes.

LAMB: … And Conservative and former aide to Ronald Reagan …

MANKIEWICZ: Right.

LAMB: You wrote, ”Until his death Monday, Lynn Nofziger and I, unlikely as it may seem, were good friends …”

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: ”… off and on for 50 years.”

MANKIEWICZ: That’s about right, since I was running for the legislature in California.

LAMB: How much of this friendship between Democrats and Republicans, Conservatives and Liberals exists today that we don’t know about?

MANKIEWICZ: I would think much less than it did 30, 40 years ago, or even, in the case of Lynn Nofziger, maybe 50 years ago.

LAMB: How did you – where did you meet Lynn, and what was the …

MANKIEWICZ: I guess, in the political campaign, he was probably involved with somebody on the other side, but I respected him. He first walked – he was one of the rare Conservatives that I have ever known who had a good sense of humor, and so we had a lot of fun together. We put aside our ideological differences and enjoyed some of the fun of politics.

LAMB: I think you …

MANKIEWICZ: There doesn’t seem to be a lot anymore.

LAMB: All right. I think you wrote – I’m not sure you wrote about it, but it’s well known that he used to wear his Mickey Mouse tie when he was …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, he did, all the time, loose.

LAMB: Just never tied it …

MANKIEWICZ: Never tied.

LAMB: … never tied it up. I don’t know. There’s no other way to ask this question than straight on. You’re 85 years old.

MANKIEWICZ: I am.

LAMB: You’re vigorous. You’re up and about. And I understand you go to work every day.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I work every day. I’m technically retired at Hill & Knowlton, but I keep the office and the phone and the computer. And I’m writing a book and doing a little work here and there.

LAMB: What are you writing a book about?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I suppose it’s a memoir.

LAMB: And why have you waited this long?

MANKIEWICZ: Because there’s never been time, but now I have the time to do it.

LAMB: It seemed like you’re almost – when I read your Cronkite column, I wanted to say, ”How many other of these little stories do you have left in you?”

MANKIEWICZ: Oh, I’ve got a few.

LAMB: But you’re 85, and people – Don Hewitt, what, was he 90? No, I think he was 88 or something like that when he died.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, yes.

LAMB: Walter Cronkite’s 92. Eunice Shriver, what was she, 88.

MANKIEWICZ: Eighty-nine I think, yes. Yes.

LAMB: So how do you do it every day at this age? I mean, how do you look at life at this age?

MANKIEWICZ: Pretty much the way I did 20 years ago, or 30. I have things to be done. I have a wonderful wife, and we have a lot to talk about, a lot to remember, a lot of good friends. I’ve written four books, and one of the fellows I wrote one of them with is who’s working with me now on the memoir.

LAMB: Is that Joel Swerdlow?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: And what book did you write together before?

MANKIEWICZ: We wrote a very good book about television called, Remote Control, about how television – and this was in the ’70s – how television was really influencing our lives, not just news but entertainment television.

LAMB: Is it still?

MANKIEWICZ: I think so.

LAMB: In what way?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I think, of course, the difference between television in the ’70s and television now is of course cable, which you know something about. It’s the C in C-SPAN, huh?

LAMB: It is.

MANKIEWICZ: And it’s created constant rotating news cycles, which make a difference in politics and, in a sense, in the way in which we look at our public life. I mean, we used to read the morning newspaper or watch the evening news and that was it. Now there’s things going on every ten minutes that have to be dealt with, answered, talked about, discussed. Truth is always – seems to be drifting further and further out of the discussion.

LAMB: What’s your own …

MANKIEWICZ: I think people are getting angrier and angrier.

LAMB: Are you getting angrier?

MANKIEWICZ: Maybe, but I don’t watch all of the cable stuff during the day I’m sorry to say.

LAMB: What do you watch? What do you – what are your habits every day?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I wake up to a wonderful radio program on National Public Radio, which I was president for a while, seven years in fact. And then, I don’t know, I don’t really take in much entertainment or – I mean, I watch the screen for email and things like that. I mean, I heard about Don Hewitt’s death today because somebody sent me an email telling me about it.

LAMB: When you were running National Public Radio, back in 1980, did you get involved in the Ted Kennedy campaign at all?

MANKIEWICZ: Only in covering it, yes.

LAMB: But did you encourage him to run, or did you have any relationship with him?

MANKIEWICZ: I probably did but only peripherally. I didn’t have any real role in his campaign. I knew a lot of the people who did, and I certainly talked to them and probably gave them advice, which they either took or not.

LAMB: Why did they roast to you in 2004?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, that was – that had to do with a fund that was being raised in my name to set up a scholarship at the Columbia Journalism School. And somebody thought it would be a good idea to get people to come together and pay a few hundred dollars and put it in this scholarship fund, and it’s been quite successful. There’s been a scholar every year since.

LAMB: Well, people will notice you on the stage, but here is Ted Kennedy talking about you back in 2004.

MANKIEWICZ: Oh.

(VIDEO CLIP)

EDWARD MOORE ”TED” KENNEDY, (D-MASS), US SENATOR: I owe Frank a lot. I’d never have run for the White House in 1980 if Frank hadn’t been president of NPR in the 1970s. He kept needling me year after year, ”Ha ha, Ted,” he loved to say, ”I got to be president before you did.” How could I possibly go wrong with all of Frank’s wise advice, great judgment, hands-on experience in politics. He kept saying, ”You can do it, Ted. You can’t miss. Piece of cake. Look at the polls. It’s your year.” So, I took the plunge in 1980, and the rest is history.

(END OF CLIP)

LAMB: What’s he like?

MANKIEWICZ: Oh, he’s a very likeable engaging man, and I think – publicly, I think he’s the best senator of the 20th Century, and I think with only nine years gone he’s already the best senator of the 21st Century. He’s a man of enormous leadership capability and devotion to really good causes.

LAMB: Have you talked to him during this period of his brain cancer?

MANKIEWICZ: Only very briefly.

LAMB: And you know, with all the – Bob Novak died yesterday …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: … of brain cancer, another figure, 78 years old and all that. This seems to be a period of a big huge enormous group of people passing on.

MANKIEWICZ: Well it does, doesn’t it, all the sort of big name figures of the ’60s and ’70s, some of the ’80s …

LAMB: What’s the legacy from your own perspective of all that era?

MANKIEWICZ: Well it’s hard to say. But you know, part of the legacy I think is – I hate to say terms like good fellowship or compatibility, but it’s true that we all got along a lot better, and maybe things moved a little more easily as a result. Bob Novak and I, I don’t think, ever agreed on anything, but we would talk frequently about all kinds of things, college basketball and some of the more abstruse labor and foreign policy issues but always on the basis of what was interesting and amusing rather than what was right and what was wrong because, when it came to that, we didn’t see eye to eye at all. But then – and that’s a fair thing that went along with a lot of people.

LAMB: Your father was Herman?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: And Herman Mankiewicz did what for a living?

MANKIEWICZ: He was a screenwriter. I would not have known that, but again just from watching I would’ve thought he was a political columnist, but he did – in fact, he was a screenwriter for 30 years.

LAMB: His most famous …

MANKIEWICZ: Movie?

LAMB: Yes.

MANKIEWICZ: ”Citizen Kane,” which many people say is the best movie ever made.

LAMB: And it was the story of what?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, it was a story about a newspaper publisher who was a young, tough crusading radical as a young man and became a kind of crusty Conservative in his old age, and the story of his relationship to other people, his friends, his girlfriend.

LAMB: Where did he – where did your father get the idea?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, people thought that there was a parallel to the life of William Randolph Hearst, and I suppose there was some, sure. He knew Hearst. And you know, he sort of studied his life. You know Hearst was a young radical Democratic Congressman from New York in his youth and became sort of one of the idols of the extreme right as a publisher.

LAMB: Now you have two sons, Ben and Josh.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: Tell us about both of them and what are they doing?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, they’re in the business. They – Josh is a correspondent for an NBC program called ”Dateline” on NBC. He’s been there a number of years. He’s a respected reporter and correspondent. Ben, who’s much younger, has I think maybe the best job in America. He’s the weekend host of ”Turner Classic Movies.” You can’t do much better than that, no downside.

LAMB: And he was – wasn’t he one of ”The Young Turks” on Air America for a while?

MANKIEWICZ: He was, and he may do that again.

LAMB: So where does all this come from in the Mankiewicz family?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I don’t know, maybe some from my father who was a movie journalist. He was, among other things, the first drama critic of the New Yorker magazine. He was a reporter in Europe for a while, worked for the New York World, always known as the Old New York World. I knew all those people, Heywood Broun and Ring Lardner and Alexander Woollcott and that crowd. He was a member of the Algonquin Round Table crowd. So maybe it came from him. Maybe it came from his father who was a professor of German Literature. I don’t know.

LAMB: Here’s a little more from Ted Kennedy at that roast.

MANKIEWICZ: Okay.

(VIDEO CLIP)

KENNEDY: What a great two years they had together. I loved to watch it, a marriage made in heaven. Bobby relied heavily of course on Frank’s excellent advice and extraordinary press skills. But what my brother loved most was Frank’s day-to-day great good company and his brilliant laugh-your-head-off sense of humor.

Once, Bobby brought his newborn son, Dougie, to the Senate office. He was just a tiny baby. Bobby showed him off, introduced him to the whole office. At the time, Frank had just become a father again, too. His son, Ben, had been born a few weeks earlier. So Bobby went over to Frank’s desk, held up the baby and said, ”Frank, say hello to Dougie. He’s just finished reading Camus.” Frank laughed, and without missing a beat he said, ”Senator, that’s fabulous. You and Dougie have to meet Ben. He’s just finished reading the complete works of Shakespeare.” And he continued, ”And next week, he’s going to read it all again right side up.”

(END OF CLIP)

LAMB: You know, it reminds me of – I think in reading this – part of the speech that Bobby Kennedy gave in Indianapolis after the death of Martin Luther King, was it there he quoted Aeschylus?

MANKIEWICZ: He did.

LAMB: Did he really know Aeschylus while …

MANKIEWICZ: He did, he did.

LAMB: I mean, you talked about – at one point, you talked about writing a speech on the way to the place in Indianapolis, but he ended up speaking off the cuff.

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I wasn’t writing a speech, but I was writing some ideas for a speech, but he never – we never got to it because the police in Indianapolis abandoned our motorcade when it got into the less prosperous part of town.

LAMB: Abandoned you? Just left you?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, pulled off.

LAMB: Huh.

MANKIEWICZ: The result is that the press bus where I was got to the speech only after Robert Kennedy had started to speak. That speech in Indianapolis was right off the top of his head with no notes.

But he knew the Greek poets. He carried with him Edith Hamilton’s book called The Greek Way. And he really did read a lot of interesting literature. He was one of the few – Robert Kennedy and I think Ted Kennedy as well, among the very few politicians I’ve known who keep on learning. I mean, most of us bank our intellectual capital maybe in our mid 20s, and then we live off the interest for the rest of our life, but the Kennedy’s kept running off on learning. Robert Kennedy …

LAMB: You mean – don’t you keep on learning?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, I try.

LAMB: What technique do you use to keep on learning?

MANKIEWICZ: Reading books. I read newspapers and, in the newspapers, I’ll see references to books, and so I go after them. And I talk to a lot of people. I have a good memory. But I think many of us just take what we have and live off that.

LAMB: As you’re writing this memoir, are you just recalling off the top of your head, or have you kept notes of the years?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I haven’t kept notes, but what I did for the last two years I met regularly with Joel Swerdlow, and he would bring a tape recorder to regular breakfasts we had and ask me questions about different parts of my life and tape it all. And we’d read the transcripts, and I’ve got those, and there’s quite a library to look at now.

LAMB: So do you want to just give us a hint on one story you’re telling in the memoir that we’ll read about next year?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, I’m trying to think of what one might be – some of them are profane and probably not fit for widespread circulation.

LAMB: But you can – you’re going to put them in the book, though?

MANKIEWICZ: Oh, they’ll be in the book, yes.

LAMB: And when’s this book going to be published?

MANKIEWICZ: I have no idea. It’s up to the publishers.

LAMB: Expect it next year?

MANKIEWICZ: Maybe late next year, yes.

LAMB: Back to that – what I was – here’s George McGovern talking about you.

(VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE MCGOVERN, (D-SD), FORMER US SENATOR, FORMER US REPRESENTATIVE: One of the strange things that happened in that campaign of so many years ago is that some members of the press started to venture the opinion that I was just too nice a guy to be President of the United States. How could such a gentle and decent soul hold up in the rough and tumble of presidential politics?

I mentioned this to Frank. I was kind of puzzled by it. And he said, ”Well, why don’t you tell them that you do have a few virtues, but the list of sins is much longer?” So I tried that, and the press said, ”Well, what are some of those sins?” And I said, ”Well, I’d refer you to Frank Mankiewicz who’s been compiling a list.” So Frank said to them, ”Well, what I told you was true. He does have a lot of sins, but that’s classified information until after the judgment day.”

That was Frank’s only mistake in the campaign because the voters who had figured out that I was not bad enough to be president found their answer in Richard Nixon, and …

(END OF CLIP)

LAMB: So in your memoir, are you going to tell us the sins of George McGovern?

MANKIEWICZ: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so, though, I’ll talk a lot about Richard Nixon.

LAMB: What did you think of him?

MANKIEWICZ: Well, you know, I’ll tell you just one story that was observable on the tapes, the White House tapes that Nixon made. When – in this campaign, in the McGovern campaign, in 1972, when George Wallace was shot, middle of May, 1972, in Maryland, and for some reason – well, I guess people captured the assassin – or would-be assassin on the spot. And Nixon had heard from the FBI or from someone where he lived. He had an apartment in maybe Milwaukee. I think that’s right.

In any event, Nixon then called Chuck Colson into his office, and this is on tape, and asked him – told him to hurry up and get out to this guy’s apartment in Milwaukee before the FBI surrounded it and took over and plant McGovern literature. Now that’s the President of the United States. I think that’s all you need to know.

LAMB: You come across as a mild-mannered individual.

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, I am.

LAMB: Do you ever get angry, really angry, though?

MANKIEWICZ: Yes, I do from time to time, yes.

LAMB: What angers you most in politics?

MANKIEWICZ: I’m increasingly angered by the passivity of the media, that they seem so anxious to preserve this notion that they’re concise and they’re contesting always. I mean, television loves controversy, I mean, preferably violent controversy because it brings in audience.

And the result is that you can tell the most outrageous lies, and it will all be treated as ordinary conversation. I mean, in this debate over healthcare reform or global warming, whatever it is, there are some just absolute false statements being made, which the media know are false and yet they’ll recite them as propositions that then have to be answered by the other side. And of course, when people scream and yell at a public meeting, they tend to get on camera, and then somebody says, ”Well, that’s not entirely true,” and a controversy here and there. But the media has yet to say, ”Senator So-and-So lied today when he said X, Y or Z.”

LAMB: Well, going to back to …

MANKIEWICZ: And that gets me angry.

LAMB: … what we started talking about, the Cronkite column that you wrote after he died …

MANKIEWICZ: Yes.

LAMB: … will there ever be anybody as big – and they’re going to have a big memorial in Lincoln Center in New York, and they’re going to have the Marine Band and the President’s going to speak, is that ever going to happen again? Is anybody going to be that big?

MANKIEWICZ: That someone had that stature?

LAMB: Exactly.

MANKIEWICZ: I think not.

LAMB: Should they?

MANKIEWICZ: Maybe not. Maybe not, but the reverse ought not to be true, either, that there be 50 or 100 sharks circling each with its own sound bite. Somewhere, we have to find the medium, and I don’t think – I’m not sure we’re going to.

LAMB: Frank Mankiewicz, we’re out of time. We’ll look forward to your memoir being published soon. Thank you for joining us.

MANKIEWICZ: Thank you, Brian. I enjoyed it.