Background
Nelson, welcome to our program.
Thanks.
Where you born and raised?
Norwich, Connecticut, which is the eastern, agricultural part of the state.
You were raised there?
I suppose.
And looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your character?
I haven't the slightest idea. That's beyond me. My dad was always interested in public affairs, but that
doesn't count as character. That's just intellectual interest.
Is it from him that you get this fascination with politics?
Probably. And he had a wonderful sense of humor, which my brothers and I, I think, inherited.
Humor is a tool that you use a lot in your work, isn't it?
Well, yes, it's sort of like a can opener. It gets you where you want to be.
Was there a lot of discussion about politics around the dinner table,
among relatives?
I think some. It's a little hard to say. My dad died when I was 12 years old. So certainly not as an adult.
What about school? Any teachers when you were young, before you went to
college, that were influential in getting you interested in the kind of
things that later ...
No, I would say, I was already interested by the time I went to high school.
Was it from reading newspapers?
Yes, I read the newspapers and listened to the radio. World War II was on when I was a kid. I listened to
CBS News and stuff like that.
So very early, you became a news junkie?
Yeah, yeah, I'd say so.
So tell us a little about your education. You went to Johns Hopkins?
The usual stuff.
I see.
B.A., Johns Hopkins, which was and is a very interesting little school, mostly for pre-meds and engineers.
But they had a very good, small group of social scientists there, who were quite accessible to undergraduate
students. They didn't, however, have a Sociology Department, and I thought sociology monopolizes all the
good subjects. So I took a year and studied sociology at Brown, which had a good demography group and
some other things. And then went to Yale for a Ph.D.
Throughout your work, it's very clear that there's an intellectual
curiosity, a capacity to figure out these problems. Any sources of
that, other than in your genes, or was it teachers who brought you to
that level?
I've always been pretty much a self-starter, I would say. I've had good teachers along the way, but I
wouldn't say that they were the source of my curiosity about things. The source of my curiosity was seeing
things going on in the world and wondering "how come?"
When I was away at boarding school, my family moved to Washington,
and there was a lot of Washington talk when I would go home for
vacations. A lot of people would make, as they do in Washington,
comments about what was causing what and the rest. In particular, I'd
have to say one of the main intellectual influences in my life was Joe
McCarthy, because Joe McCarthy was running rampant through
Washington. People were making all kinds of wild statements about Joe
McCarthy. And I thought to myself, "Gee, I wonder if it's true?" In due
course, at Johns Hopkins, for an honors thesis, I started digging in to get a
feel for why Joe McCarthy was as effective as he seemed to be in scaring
the daylights out of people in the Washington community.
One of the things that you found was that he and
his entourage were getting more credit than they
deserved.
Oh, absolutely. He'd been overrated. I began to see an interesting contrast
between what people thought in the Washington community and what
could be established by digging around in public opinion materials and
electoral materials, and things like that. For example, it happened to be the case that Joe McCarthy was
always the least popular guy on the ticket in Wisconsin -- the least popular winner, I should say. He wasn't
anywhere near as powerful at the grassroots as people in Washington made him out to be. That was
interesting. I [realized that] it's possible, by application of common sense and finding out about some things
that were actually in their beginning stages -- focused public opinion work, electoral analysis, things like
that -- to dope out what was true and what was false about the claims that were being made in the public
arena. That struck me as a lot of fun and, I suppose, was one of the reasons why I persisted and went on
into graduate school, because I [liked] the idea that there was actually a profession out there in which
people paid you American money to study this stuff. And I thought, "Well, let's give it a try."
While we're on McCarthy, there's one other interesting thing here which
is that not only was McCarthy given credit for having helped defeat
more senators than he had defeated, but in the end there was a lot of
confusion about why he gained the power that he got. You were one of
the first ones to point out the reasons there -- that the Republican
Party supported him.
Sure. That earned me a certain amount of disdain from some of the people senior to me, who had other
ideas, and less good ideas, on the subject, and who were, in general, quite wonderful social scientists, like
Dan Bell and Richard Hofstader. It irked them that the party explanation just never occurred to them, and it
occurred to me. I think it annoyed them quite a lot, but that's the way it goes.
Being a Political Scientist
In a speech you gave at the
"Where do Ideas Come From,"
to firm up or discredit the
political actions are based
University of Chicago on the topic of
you said, "The general activity of seeking
factual premises on which social and
seemed to be a socially worthwhile action."
Well, that's gorgeously put.
That's why I wanted to read it.
I wouldn't dream of improving upon that.
And you went on to say that "This is a job of fundamental importance,
because facts rarely speak for themselves. There are usually too many
facts and not infrequently too many different versions of the facts.
Rather than speaking for themselves, various facts have what we have
come to refer to as spokespersons."
What an eloquent fellow.
That's right.
What year did I say that?
I forgot to look, but it was at your talk at the University of Chicago.
I guess it was in the nineties.
Right around the 100th anniversary of the University of Chicago. Well, we are all older now.
That's right. But you see, I like to go back and read this stuff so I
can hold you to your words. You opened up a place that I want to go,
which is what a political scientist does
That's what we do.
And why he does it -- and you've just explained it. In other words,
bursting the myth of, for example, McCarthy.
It isn't a matter of necessarily being a contrarian, although some do make a good living at that. But, simply,
attempting to put empirical foundations under what we think we know.
In going back and looking at a small portion of your work, I have a
sense of two intellectual tracks you're on -- one, we have just
discussed, that is, bursting the balloons or the false premises by
looking at the facts; but you go on to call yourself a "quasi-
anthropologist." Explain to us what you mean by that. It seems that
that involves a different attitude toward your subjects.
There is a very large array of possible ways of going about social science. My particular way of doing it is
to talk to people, listen to people, watch people, and then write down what I've learned. It's quasianthropological in the sense that I am not, in fact, an anthropologist, but I do have a good deal of regard for
the people who are doing the acting. I attempt to find out, as best I can, what their perspective is on things,
because then it helps you, quite frequently, to understand what they're going to do next.
I don't think that's different from whatever it is you thought my other track was. The idea is to find out
what's going on, and attempt to talk about it in some way that is easily storable and compact, and
understandable and communicable to other people.
One of the many subjects that you've covered is the Congress, and we're
going to talk about your new work in a minute. But I would like to go
into the origins. It's quite fascinating how you wound up getting
interested in Congress. It was really about a course that you were
asked to teach, right?
Yes. When I was a teenager and my family moved to Washington, I used to get out and hang around
Congress. In those days, no guards, no nothing, and you could just hang out and see what they were doing,
which I thought was quite a lot of fun. Sometimes I'd talk to people, but mostly I'd just watch. I, however,
did not write about a Washington-centric topic for my doctoral dissertation. And my first teaching job was
at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was a temporary job created because two people senior to me,
a good deal senior to me, went on leave, one of whom was, I suppose, the greatest congressional scholar of
his generation, Ralph Hewitt.
Anyway, they thought, when they hired me, that I would teach the other
guy's course, Harry Scoble's course on community power. But nobody
much took the community power course, and people were taking Ralph's
course on Congress. So the chairman of my department, Leon Epstein,
who still remains a dear friend -- this is a long time ago now, this is 1960
or '61 -- Leon calls me and he says, "Why don't you teach Ralph Hewitt's
course on Congress?" I said, "Well, I've never taken a course in Congress.
I do know something about the Senate because I was a snooper when I
was a teenage political junkie. But I don't know anything about the House
of Representatives, really, very little, anyhow." "Oh," he says, "You'll
make out all right. You're a smart fellow."
So I taught this course and scrounged around and found a few things, and
brought in the member of Congress from Madison, who retired only a few
years ago and still lives in Washington, Bob Kastenmeier -- nice fellow.
And at the end of the course, I said, "Well, that was sort of interesting.
Maybe I ought to pursue my method," which was go to Washington and
hang around the House of Representatives a while and see what I could
make out of that, because there was practically no literature on the subject. Literature, as you know, is a
word that scholars use. It means "written stuff which other scholars write and which scholars regard as
respectable and, more or less, codifying what we know." That's the literature; there wasn't much.
So the summer after I taught in Madison, we moved to Washington. A member of Congress had agreed to
let me hang around him for a week -- sit in his office, and every once in a while I'd interview him a little
bit, but mostly just see what the flow is like, what his calendar was like, what came up, who talked to him
and what he said to them. This was a lovely gent by the name of Charles Mosher from, I believe, is the 13th
District of Ohio, Oberlin. I spent a week with him and then I went with Kastenmeier, who said I could
follow him around. I was moving, at that point, from Wisconsin to Wesleyan, so I asked the two Wesleyan
alumni who were in Congress if I could do the same thing with them. One was a Republican, one was a
Democrat -- Abner Sibal and Emilio Daddario. I did the same thing with them, started mooching around,
interviewing, but, in other words, learning the territory. And that's how I got interested in Congress. I did a
lot of work on Congress then.
Would it be fair to say that somebody who wants to do political
science, in a way, has to embed himself in the environment and, at one
level, be respectful of what is going on and understand the complexity?
No. If you want to do it my way, that's what you've got to do. But there are, in fact, lots of different ways of
doing it. Lots of different ways. That just happens to be responsive to the way I assimilate information and
learn about things.
To prepare to be a political scientist, what skills do students have to
acquire and what traits should they come with?
I think they have to be interested in politics, that's the main thing.
What makes politics interesting?
Well, I don't know; people win, people lose. It's important. A lot of the outcomes in politics are important
to human existence in various ways. Sometimes, of course, you have to know a bit in order to be able to
work the system, or get the system to do what you want. There are lots of different reasons why it might be
fun to know about politics. If you get really, really interested in politics, then the next step, it seems to me,
is to assess how you learn best.
You mean personally?
Yes, what sort of person you are. Unfortunately, my way is an expensive way to do it.
That is, going and hanging out.
The going and hanging out, which is a very expensive thing. It's time consuming. Other people, for
example, who have a taste for numbers, can get what they need by reading tables and by looking up
statistics, and making arguments based on that. Other people are bookworms and like to read great books
and dope out what great people have said about great topics.
So you are suggesting that it's (a) being interested in the sets of
problems, but then (b) respecting your own integrity about what you
like to do and what you do well, in terms of defining the style by
which you approach the subject.
Integrity is kind of an edgy word that implies that there's something assaulting your integrity.
All right, give me a better word.
No, just try and figure out what you're good at. My belief is that there are multiple forms of intelligence,
and different people are good at different things. What they ought to be doing is finding out what they're
good at and doing that, and having fun at it, too.
Now, in addition to hanging out, which you said you do, and in addition
to being a voracious reader, going and finding polls that have been
taken by others and so on, I get the sense that it's important to be a
part of a community of scholars. When one looks at your forthcoming
book, which we will talk about in a minute, there's a sense in which
you felt a responsibility to navigate what has been written and
identify the better works, but also respond to the others.
Well, you've opened up a number of topics. Scholarly communities: these are communities which, in effect,
certify knowledge as knowledge, tell you what the problems are, tell you what we already know, and
they're an audience. If you haven't got an audience of scholars -- journalists, for example, don't have
scholarly audiences on the whole; they broadcast to the millions. But their work, therefore, has a short life.
If you, in effect, take seriously what a scholarly community can do for you, then you can, in effect, hook on
to the problems that seem to exist in the environment, and contribute. That's what it means to make a
contribution, it's to get your work accepted by such a community. But it's not compulsory that you do so.
You can write for popular audiences, but the trouble is what you find out isn't conserved as efficiently as
when you write for a scholarly community.
So there's an element of immortality. That your work will transcend the
present, is that what you are suggesting?
Well, if you mean between now and next week?
But maybe two weeks for academics; one week for journalists.
That's the point. I give, as an example -- as it happens, a wonderful example: By many accounts, the best
work of journalism written in the immediate postwar period about United States politics was a book by
John Gunther, a very fine journalist, called Inside USA, which got a rave, front-page review on The New
York Times and then, generally, was a highly regarded book, and still is today; but it's not cited anywhere.
It's not referred to anywhere. And it is roughly contemporaneous with a book of roughly the same size and
heft by V.O. Key, Jr., called Southern Politics in State and Nation, which is still in print and cited
everywhere. And what was the difference? Gunther wrote as a journalist for national circulation, and got it,
and succeeded, and did a fine job. And V.O. Key wrote for a more scholarly audience, more restricted, but
a structured community, which so valued his work that they have kept it alive since 1949.
Leadership
Before we talk about the book on the House, which we'll do in a minute,
in the course of your career you assumed two very important roles. One,
as Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies, where you took
the lead in putting together intellectual communities on issues of
domestic politics and so on. Tell us a little about that. In other
words, what is different from the theoretical notion of academic
communities versus the leadership role in forging communities?
Well, in the first place, it isn't being the quarterback, it's being the blocking-back.
Meaning?
Meaning, if you're lucky enough to be part of a very resourceful, interesting, intellectual community, that is
to say, a lot of smart people around, what you do is, simply, find out who wants to do what and help them.
I see. So whom are you blocking then?
Well, blocking for.
Oh, I see, blocking for, okay.
Blocking for, that's the idea. You make a way for people who are carrying the ball. And that was what I did
and what I liked to do. It's really quite a lot of fun to see people succeed because you've helped them out.
I'll give you a rather large handful of examples. A dreadful fire devastated a part of our town [Berkeley].
One of our senior colleagues was about halfway through his magnum opus and it was destroyed in the fire.
Two days later, or a week later, I called him up and I said -- and I will not use his name, but I did use that, I
said, "-----------, I have a rather substantial sum of money" (which I named) "for you, for your purposes in
going after that book again, and I want it firmly on record that you did not ask for it."
Well, that's very nice. So he was able to finish his work?
Yes, he did. And it's a brilliant, wonderful piece of work. And, obviously, he needed more help than that.
But I was in a position to do that. That, in my opinion, is leadership.
Here's another example. We established a bunch of seminars. I discovered just by chance, in a very odd
way -- I was visiting at Harvard and the man who is currently the Executive Editor of The New York Times
was just being sent to London to be a foreign correspondent. He'd never
been in London before. A pal of mine sent him up to me at Harvard and
said, "Brief him." So I convened a dinner of a bunch of Harvards who
were various ex-Rhodes Scholars, ex-patriates. They had a glorious time.
They'd never actually met in the same room. And when I got back to
Berkeley, I said, "Well, hell, we can do this here." So we established the
U.K. Seminar, which has been going on, a howling success, because
people love to talk about this kind of thing.
The third example. On a daily basis, this is a big, ugly, impersonal
university, as you know. And visiting scholars tend to get lost, as you
know.
Yes, that's right.
At IGS, in my time and since, we do tea at 3 o'clock every afternoon. So
that's leadership, i.e. making things possible, facilitating.
There's another element in one of your works. When you worked on
innovation, you made the argument that innovation often came from
experts. But, also, it was part of an intellectual process of
comparing, and so you brought a European dimension to that effort.
Well, we've always had visiting scholars, in my time, from Europe, from Asia, from around the country.
Sure.
Now, this other leadership role that you've held was as Editor of the
America Political Science Review. And that is a major responsibility of
defining or helping to shape the discourse in the field.
Yeah, I claim not.
Okay, you claim not. You deny that.
That's right. My job was to receive proffered articles ...
I see.
... and to give them an honest reading. That is to say, get other people to read them.
I see, and come to the conclusion about them.
And come to the conclusion about them, and then accept and print the ones that were acceptable to the
referees we sent them to.
Now as part of that task, I know that you used to run a seminar at your
home.
That's right. You were ...
In fact, I was a member, yes.
You were a member of the seminar.
So we're telling all these trade secrets -- you ran a seminar at which
I was one of the students. But your idea was to facilitate the training
of the future generation, is that right?
Sure, sure. But look, this was easy. The American Political Science Review gave me some resources to
receive, evaluate, and publish articles from the profession of political science at large. It was based here. So
I interpreted that as a kind of an educational opportunity. We had graduate students around. They're reading
this journal. They were going to have to publish in this journal. Why not get a bunch of graduate students to
come in? We had a monthly meeting, and each graduate student would take responsibility for a single
article and go check the footnotes.
Yes, but also meet with the author.
Yes. And sometimes we had authors or [other] speakers coming through. The idea would be to give
[students] some feel for the profession they were entering. That seemed easy to do, and so we did it.
Congress
Let's talk a little about Congress. Your new book is the culmination of
a forty-year affair with the Congress?
Well, it's been forty years since I've studied Congress and have kept up with it as best I could. Now, here's
an example. Political scientists get their agenda, obviously, from the community in which we work, but
also from life, from current events, from politics. The most important thing, probably, that happened to the
House of Representatives over the last fifty years, say, was that it went from a body dominated by the
conservative coalition of Democrats -- Dixiecrats mostly -- and Republicans, to a condition in which they
were dominated by the majority of the majority party, which was liberal Democrats. In other words, it
liberalized. This is, obviously, before the big change in the mid-nineties, when the Republicans took over.
But over the sweep of time, it was the conservative coalition giving way to a programmatic, liberal majority
of the majority party. And the question is, why did it happen? It's a political science question, "Why did it
happen?" Although, in principle, it could also be a current events question, "Why did it happen?" But in
any event, I took that as the theme for this book that I've just written. My conclusion was, as you know,
"air-conditioning." Okay, now, what happened?
A simple way to make a complex point.
Let me give you the forty-second version. It went this way. In order for the House to liberalize, it was
necessary for the majority of the majority party to find its voice. The majority of the majority party could
not find its voice when the Democratic caucus, the Democrats, were in the majority. The Democratic
caucus was moribund, could not meet and could not act because it had so many Dixiecrats in it.
Conservative Democrats from the South.
From the South. All right, now, what happened? Well, the Dixiecrats disappeared. Why did they disappear?
So then we moved backward. They disappeared because of the rise of the Republican Party in the South.
Sooner or later, conservatives, instead of being Dixiecrats, became Republicans. Now why did they become
Republicans? Well, because a sufficient number of people who were Republicans moved to the South from
the North. And the question is, why did they move South? This Dixiecrat phenomenon is 100 years old.
That is, the phenomenon that put the Dixiecrats in their positions of
power?
Yes, it's 100 years old. From the Civil War and the Reconstruction, onward. So why did that finally break
down? Why do Republicans suddenly appear down there? And the answer is, they migrated down there.
Why did they migrate down there? Well, basically, a fair number of them had spent winters down there, but
with the introduction in the early 1950s of residential air-conditioning, people began to stay down there. It
was interesting to me that the first safe Republican seat in the South, outside of the ones up in the
Appalachian Mountains -- there are only four or five of those -- but the first safe Republican seat under the
new dispensation was St. Petersburg, Florida, which was a winter resort, and it happened in 1954. And then
Dallas, Texas.
That was Bruce Alger's seat.
Bruce Alger. That's right, you're a Texan, so you remember those things. But anyway, that seemed to be it.
Now, how did I verify this? Well, there is some demographic material, which seems to show this, and, also,
of course, I went around and talked to some Southern Republican congressman. They told me some
wonderful stories about how they had become Republican, or their parents had become Republican. And it
was all about Northerners moving down and making it possible.
And an example would be Trent Lott, who originally was a Dixiecrat,
right?
Trent Lott was originally a Democrat. He worked for a congressman from Pascagula, Bill Comer. When
Bill Comer retired in 1972, Trent Lott went home, switched parties, ran for a seat, and won. So that was
short.
You're being humorous. I mean, obviously, air-conditioning is key, but
you're really talking about the modernization of the South, the
movement of people to the cities and that whole complex of
technological change.
Sure, that's right. Well, all right, if you want me to begin with the tractor. You begin with pesticides. You
begin with machinery for picking cotton, driving people off the land.
And not just technology, but also changes with the Voting Rights Bill
and so on.
The Voting Rights Bill strengthened the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and encouraged conservative
Democrats to move to the Republicans.
Now, it's interesting, because taking this longterm perspective as you analyze reform, in a way
you're offering an answer to people of my
generation in the sixties who argued for change,
but couldn't get it right away, because you
couldn't get the legislation through the Congress
as long as the Dixiecrats were in place. So what
you're suggesting is there is a long-term change
and an evolution that allows the liberal agenda
to be implemented.
Well, it happened that way.
Hence the need to explain this process over time?
Well, yes. I do think it's important, because you're speaking now from the
standpoint of somebody who wants to manipulate the system, or to succeed in the system. And that, in my
opinion, requires knowledge. This is my attempt to convince people that this is what you needed to know in
order to get what you want.
Let's talk a little more about the Congress. Who are examples of people
you see in the Congress whom you've known or written about or studied,
who emerged as formidable leaders in the system?
Well, you've already learned that I have a very individual view of what leadership is.
Tell us what that is.
All right. For a legislative body, leaders are not necessarily the people who have the best press releases and
who make the most ringing speeches. My view is that the most significant leaders of Congress are
generally those people who are trusted by their colleagues to frame issues for them. I've known a number of
people who are that way. Tom Foley was very much that way when he was there. And my good friend Carl
Elliott, who was a Congressman from Alabama and was deeply trusted by his colleagues, including by
people who didn't agree with him about things. He was, of course, a liberal, and, although he didn't show it
on Civil Rights -- couldn't show it on Civil Rights, given the situation in Alabama -- nevertheless, when
Carl Elliott told people something, they were able to put it in the bank and they were able to act on it. So
my view is that people who are, certainly, most interesting to me are the people who operate within the
group structure in such a way as to give an orientation and information to their colleagues, which leads
them to decide the way they do.
But are these people, in addition, visionaries in a sense that they
point to a future route that may not be possible at this point?
I think some are and some aren't. I'm not terribly impressed by people who take the long future as a
benchmark. Bob Dole used to say his vision was, "Let's survive until lunch." Of course, the newspaper
people demanded that he have a "vision thing," and it wasn't him. But some of these people certainly had
quite a lot of idealism ... Carl Elliott was deeply convinced of the need for education, all up and down the
system -- vocational education, language education, and higher education -- all kinds of education. In that
sense, I suppose, he was a visionary, but I only say it because it's a compliment to him.
So you would place more emphasis on doing the job well?
The question is, what is the job? The job is seeing the relationship between what you're doing today and
what can happen tomorrow.
What skills are involved in being able to do that successfully?
Patience, goodwill. It really helps to be a decent person in a legislative body, because people remember
when you're not. But, you know, it takes all kinds. A place like the House of Representatives -- 435 people
-- all kinds of people there and all kinds of people doing constructive work. And I must say, some of the
nicest people there were not doing constructive work at all, because they didn't believe in it. So it's a very
complicated story.
How important are principles for these actors? That is, commitment to a
broader set of values?
It doesn't hurt.
It doesn't hurt. But it doesn't necessarily lead to success or failure,
then?
Well, success is when you've got enough votes. I mean, in a legislative body, mind you.
We're in an era now, after 9/11, where foreign policy is very important
again and very much on Congress's agenda. How well has Congress done
this kind of work? Is it so different from what they normally do that
it's harder, or can they adapt to these new challenges?
They certainly can adapt. The Senate has, of course, confirmation powers, treaty powers, those kinds of
things. But the House of Representatives has mostly the power of the purse, appropriations powers. And so
it's in the details. They can also do some other things, which include running timely investigations; so there
are some things that they can do. But it isn't easy for Congress as a collectivity to have as big an impact on
foreign policies they have on other forms of public policy.
Do you have any thoughts about how 9/11 and the response will affect
the Congress and -No.
-- other institutions of American government?
No, not really. Over the short run, it helped the presidency a lot. As it always the case, when we have a
crisis associated with foreign affairs, we have what is called in our business the "rallying around the flag."
And we got one, and that helps the president. Whether he can do much with it, other than attempt to ... For
example, the creation of a Homeland Security operation, that strikes me as completely misguided. But
they're going to get it, because it would be vaguely unpatriotic to oppose it on the grounds that it would be
ineffective. Somewhere in one of my voluminous works, I define what a crisis is in public affairs. A crisis
is a period where everybody believes that something must be done. That's a crisis. Obviously, 9/11
produced one. But it's much harder to claim ... it's certainly not a war in the sense that World War II was a
war. They're claiming it's a war, but there's no particular nation state. We maybe creating one out of Iraq at
this point, but it's hard to see how this will all play out. A "war against terrorism" is rather like the war
against cancer. That is, there's no doubt about it that it's something we'd like to eradicate, but it's terribly
difficult to figure out how to do it.
So it would be different than the crises that you discuss in your book,
where, for example, in the Depression, World War II, the response to
the Kennedy assassination, there was a more focused agenda about what
the Congress could do in terms of legislation?
Well, they did a whole bunch of things, some of them related to the crises and some of them not. It was a
mixed bag.
But in this case, we are dealing in a world of amorphous adversaries,
and one gets the sense in the Homeland Security that it's sort of
changing the signs on the doors and calling that a reorganization.
Well, if those were the only transaction costs, that would be swell, but I have a feeling those are not the
only transaction costs.
Lessons Learned
There are two things that I want to talk about
related to your work, as we near the conclusion
of the interview. One is writing. You write
extremely well and very lucidly, with great
clarity and simplicity. Did you learn that?
Yes, I learned it.
But did it come naturally?
Yes. I used to read a fair bit, and there are writers I admire quite a lot,
because they write clearly. I found myself imitating E.B. White, Mark
Twain, people like that. So I suppose I write imitatively. The rule about
clarity is perfectly straightforward: If I write a sentence and then I say to
myself, "What did I mean by that?" it means it wasn't clear and I have to
do something about it. My goal is to be able to understand the next day
what it was I meant.
Is that hard work or does it come easier every time?
It depends entirely ... sometimes it's hard work; sometimes it's easy. It just varies. Sometimes I've gritted
my teeth and away I go and other times, it's just like breaking rocks. It just depends.
It's rumored that you have a sense of humor, and I want you to talk a
little that. What role does humor play in discourse?
Well, somebody with a sense of humor normally doesn't explain when they're being facetious.
Oh, I see, I see. But could you tell us about that strength and the
role it plays in discourse?
It's not a strength. As a matter of fact, it's risky.
It's risky?
Yeah, yeah. Frequently, I've said things that were meant to be silly and were taken quite seriously. I knew
they were silly, but other people just thought they showed that I was an unsound person.
So it's not something that you would recommend to others?
Well, certainly not to someone who runs for public office.
I see, I see.
But I can get away with it, because I've got tenure.
I see. Okay, so let's conclude now and let me ask you, if you were
advising students, if students were to sit through this interview, any
recommendations for how they should prepare for the future if they want
to pursue political science?
Well, the main thing is to enjoy it, find their own voice. The most important thing in the world is to have a
mind of your own. I have to say, the graduate education around here at Berkeley and, to a certain extent
also, even an undergraduate education around here ... we attempt to help people find their voice and find
what they're good at. And there are, obviously, skills associated with it, and we're certainly as prepared as
many universities are to bring them up to speed with respect to those skills. But the main thing is to find a
mind of their own and pursue what interests them.
Nelson, I want to thank you for this opportunity.
My pleasure.
And thank you very much for joining us with this Conversation with
History.
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