the board, wherever Third World interests were concerned he did it.
Renewed relationships with Argentina. There's not a pariah state,
there's not a right-wing government repressive regime in the world that
was not cheered by Reagan's election. So it's not only a question of race. I don't think it's as simple as that. It's a question of his
clear class preference. He is a man who is concerned about the preservation of privilege.
X: I would be interested to bear a little bit more about the kinds of
strategies that you and your organization are pursuing to bring pressure
to bear . .
R: Last night in New York, former ambassador Carl McCall, there was a
reception for us, and Carl said that during the Carter administration
he used to walk in there to see Muskie and Vance. When he asked to see
the Secretary, he would go right up to the seventh floor, and he'd see
the Secretary. Now when he asks to see the Secretary, they point him to a clerk-typist. That's exactly what he gets to see, a secretary, so we
don't have that kind of access any more. But I think it might be there's
a silver lining in this. If I can point up the mistakes that I think that we have made, that blacks have made, it is that sometimes we have
been mesmerized by democratic access. It's what I call the East Room disease, you know. We got invited to the Carter White House more than
by any White House in history. I mean, I was over every other week, and you get mesmerized by it, so that you forget about the work you have to
be doing at the grass roots because you're sitting up there talking to the President. And the President knows that he can ignore you, too, if
you're not doing work at the grass roots. Because every politician thinks
when you sit down with him, "Can you help me, or hurt me?" And if you
have neither capacity, that is a nice discussion you are having, and it's cute, and you're very scholarly and cogent, but it's not worth anything.
That's the kind of fix that the democrats have often left us in. By
leading us to believe they're our friends, getting our votes and disappointing us. Carter did a lot of that in his early term in office, and
later on, particularly in his domestic programs. Now, Reagan is going
to force many of us to concentrate on what we ought to be concentrating
on, and that is building a constituency, building a system of response from the grass roots up that works. Administrations don't make up the government alone. And sometimes apathy can be your friend. See, most
Americans are apathetic. And that can be your friend as long as your group
is not one of those elements. I think that people talk about how much
impact the American Jewish community has had on Middle East policy. And it's true. But they've had that impact because they've been disproportionately industrious, while most Americans don't even know what the West
Bank is. They think it's somewhere that they can put money! They just
don't have any sense about these sorts of things, so it means that politics
is the business of competitive pressures. And most people who vote in
the Fouse of Representatives, most Congressmen, they vote on hundreds
and hundreds of things per session. They don't know what the bell they're
voting on. They go over there and they look for the leadership, they