[Jeff Greenfield:] Tonight, a Taliban American is heading for the courtroom. And then, Enron's melted down and probably so has the value of your stock holdings. Now that most of us are giving up the dream of easy money, will we start hating the rich? Tonight on GREENFIELD AT LARGE. We're going to spend most of our program talking about whether the rich are about to become an endangered species, politically speaking. But first, late this afternoon, Attorney General John Ashcroft filed federal criminal charges against John Walker, that could result in life imprisonment.
[John Ashcroft, Attorney General:] The complaint alleges Walker knowingly and purposely allied himself with certain terrorist organizations with terror, that he chose to embrace fanatics. And his allegiance to those fanatics and terrorists never faltered, not even with the knowledge that they had murdered thousands of his countrymen.
[Greenfield:] Joining me now to talk about the legal hurdles that John Walker, and for that matter, the government may face, Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University Law School who has defended clients in national security and espionage cases. Speaking of which, Professor Turley, suppose your phone rings tonight. And it's someone from the Walker family. And they say OK, you're going to rep our client if you so choose. You've read the complaint, where are the vulnerabilities?
[Jonathan Turley, George Washington Law School:] Well, there are vulnerabilities, Jeff, is that these charges are based in large part on his statements. Now the Attorney General calls those voluntary statements. The defense attorney's likely to argue that they were not voluntary. The question is whether, when he gave these statements, he had lawfully and willfully waived his rights, his Miranda rights. He waived his right to speak to an attorney. Many people criticized the government for not allowing the attorney retained by the family to speak to Mr. Walker, that's going to be a very early fight. And the outcome of that fight could determine the outcome of these charges.
[Greenfield:] Well, some of the evidence in the complaint comes from, in fact, a CNN tape, an interview with Walker, when at first he said, "Don't tape me." Now the CNN tape isn't a police interrogation. Is that inadmissible? Could that be challenged?
[Turley:] Well, it can be challenged, but it is not challenged on the same grounds. You're absolutely right. When CNN interviews someone, they don't have to give Miranda. And so, when you make a statement to CNN, it can be very much admissible. It's usually admitted, not directly as evidence, but to rebut the testimony of someone. One of the greatest problems for Mr. Walker is that even if he gets this stuff kept out, even if he gets his statements kept out, the CNN tape kept out, it's still means he can't take the stand. Because when you make statements like that, the government just waits for you to get on the stand, asks you a question, you answer it, and they say: Your honor, I now want to introduce the CNN tape, to show this guy is lying. Yet, you're not introducing it for the evidence. You're interested to show that he's lying.
[Greenfield:] Now on a much more fundamental level, Jonathan, this guy was captured fighting with the guys, fighting against us. Now it seems to me that that's a pretty even a fine lawyer such as yourself might find that a pretty large hurdle to leap?
[Turley:] Yes. No, this is not exactly the world's best defense case. You know, Mr. Walker has some serious problems, including the company that he kept. And there's no question that he is going to face serious questions about giving material support to a terrorist organization, possible transaction violations. Those type of charges are usually what are called "safety net" charges. And if the jury is a little bit worried about the conspiracy to kill Americans, it gives them two very easy fall back charges that they could go to. I think it's very likely he will be convicted of one of these. They also pick a very conservative court, the eastern district of Virginia. And that is the prosecutor's favorite court.
[Greenfield:] Right.
[Turley:] And you know, if he's going to be convicted anywhere, it'll be in the eastern district.
[Greenfield:] Why no treason charge?
[Turley:] That is a very interesting question. Now according to Attorney General Ashcroft, it's because the Constitution requires two witnesses. I find that a little bit hard to believe, quite frankly. I would think that Afghanistan right now is something of a buyer's market for witnesses. But I think the main problem is that treason charges, to prove them, require certain element of clarity, not just legally, but factually. And there's a lack of clarity here. You know, we were trying to get the Taliban to join us. Many Taliban units ultimately did switch sides. And it's that problem of clarity that could make a treason charge very difficult. And it could also really focus attention at the fact that we have never had a formal declaration of war.
[Greenfield:] Right.
[Turley:] Something the administration has tried to avoid.
[Greenfield:] The complaint alleges that Walker was part of a group that met with Osama bin Laden, although for five minutes. Is that in I mean, if you were Walker's lawyer, would you challenge that on the question is this too inflammatory?
[Turley:] You would definitely challenge it. I mean, that's right up there with pulling a severed head out of a duffel bag. It's one of those things where regardless of what value it is as evidence, that jury's not going to forget it. And you're going to challenge it. But the problem is there is a nexus here. The government's going to argue, well now come on, the guy's the head of a terrorist organization. And he gives an "atta- boy" to this guy. Now that suggests something of a nexus to a terrorist organization. That's going to be one of those issues they fight about, Jeff. And it's one of those issues the defense is really going to get hurt by, if that statement gets in court.
[Greenfield:] Lastly, you mentioned the district where this case is being brought as a prosecutor's dream. But given the publicity in this case, the "Newsweek" proclaims him American Taliban, where does John Walker go to get a fair trial or an unbiased jury in this country?
[Turley:] Well, you're right. I mean, that's going to be very, difficult. And that's what makes it so important to do voir dire, the selection of jurors. And to really try to get jurors to keep an open mind. But people would be surprised. American jurors really are very fair and taking their jobs very seriously. And I think you can get a fair trial in the eastern district. It's just the defense will have a very steep hill to climb.
[Greenfield:] OK, Professor Turley, thank you very much for joining us. Appreciate it.
[Turley:] Thanks, Jeff.
[Greenfield:] When we come back, is it OK to start hating the rich? Stay with us. Maybe you heard about this story out of Boston, two doctors have come up with a nifty way to give patients the care and attention they want. They'll provide their cell phone numbers, personal
[Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fmr. President Of The United States:] This great nation will endure.
[Greenfield:] In his inaugural address at the depth of the Great Depression in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed that the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization, and promised to apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. Harry Truman, in his 1948 campaign, cheerfully bashed the barons of Wall Street. And during a battle with U.S. Steel, John Kennedy reported snapped: My father told me all businessmen were SOBs, but I never believed him until now. But note, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, were all themselves men of substantial wealth, who nonetheless won the votes of the poor and the middle classes, nor did their political views keep them from enjoying the privileges of the wealthy. Indeed, in part because prosperity in America has been spread across a broad middle class, Americans are as likely to admire the rich, as to scorn them. In fact, when Senator George McGovern proposed a stiff inheritance tax on the wealthy during his 1972 presidential campaign, he found that factory workers in New Hampshire attacked the idea. Maybe because they dreamed that someday, their children might grow rich. And so, our highly successful business people have become folk heroes of the sort. Chrysler's Lee Iacocca was a businessman hero 20 years ago. Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos was "Time" magazine's man of the year in 1999. GE's Jack Welch was all but buried under an avalanche of favorable press clips. And that may help explain why taking on the rich can often be risky political business. While consumer advocate Ralph Nader became a national figure by tangling with General Motors back in the 1960s, his independent presidential campaign in 2000 couldn't draw even five percent of the vote.
[Al Gore, Fmr. Vice President:] It's time to fight for people and not the powerful.
[Greenfield:] And some Democrats argued that Al Gore's populist rhetoric in the 2000 campaign hurt more than it helped.
[Rick Macarthur, Harper's Magazine:] Well, if it's done in private, so to speak, and it doesn't turn into a sort of a mad house of spend thrift conceit, then yeah, my you can get away with it. My grandfather used to say: Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered. And what he was getting at was that if you are successful in business and you want to stay successful and keep your money, you shouldn't get too greedy, as in the case of these Enron types. Although, that doesn't get at the question of what you're intro talked about, which is why the American people don't resent it more when the rich get too greedy. And for that, I think you have to go right to your question of class. The American people have always assumed, generally correctly, that we don't have a class system in this society. We don't have a certainly don't have a hereditary aristocracy.
[Greenfield:] If I may, Michael Kelly, it seems to me one of the reasons why wealthy people often do very well in politics, I mean you've got the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Bushes, the Roosevelts, is that people also believe if you're wealthy enough, you're not going to steal.
[Michael Kelly, Editor, The Atlantic Monthly:] I think that's part of it. And I think that Rick's point is a very large part of it. This from this country's inception, it was in this way obviously different from England from France. They're isn't hundreds of years of rigidly enforced, entrenched hereditary class. So that there is this thing from the beginning, this ambivalence towards the rich. On the one hand, we've always there's never been a time when it's not been fashionable to hate them, to whack the rich. But on the other hand, there's always been a kind of sense of, compared to Europe at least, of make believe or theater about it. There's a kind of lovely symbiotic relationship. We get to whack the rich, and the rich get to be rich. It sort of works out for everybody.
[Greenfield:] Then, James Glassman, one of the things that struck me was, in that example I gave at the outset, that when George McGovern proposed a stiff inheritance tax above, I think, a couple of million dollars, it was blue collar people who said, "Wait a second. You know, it's going to deprive my kids of their opportunity." And yet, I believe, it was Andrew Carnegie, not exactly at the end of his life a person of modest means, who proposed at some level 100 percent inheritance tax. His view was you can live as well as you want during your lifetime, but at the end of your life, everybody should get to the same starting line again. There's never been much appetite for that in this country, has there?
[James Glassman, Syndicated Columnist:] No. But we see this all the time. Remember during the proposed Bush tax reforms, there was a group of very rich Americans who stood up and said, "No, no, no, we have to keep the inheritance tax." Whereas 71 percent of Americans want to get rid of the estate tax. Frequently you find the rich, who may well be feel guilty about the money that they make, in the forefront of these kinds of, sort of, socialistic kinds of ideas, these leveling sorts of ideas. Well, whereas most Americans feel that in fact, they can become rich themselves, because we live in an open society.
[Greenfield:] Go ahead.
[Macarthur:] You have to be careful when you say most Americans, because most Americans is a little vague. I mean, most Americans don't know how they get conned by the stock touts and the Enron types, who take their money and run.
[Glassman:] I think that your view is
[Macarthur:] Most Americans are unaware of you know, you look, the American dream is to get rich quick. I think we'll all agree on that. That's one of the American dreams anyway.
[Glassman:] I wouldn't agree with that.
[Macarthur:] For many Americans, it's getting rich quick is and taking short cuts is an admired path to success. But if you look at a guy like Henry Blodgett, for example, who started out his career as a not very good proofreader at Harper's Magazine and went on to tout worthless Internet stocks at Merrill Lynch, you have to ask yourself, how do these people become created? How do they make a fortune? And really, do most Americans, as you say, really know that Henry Blodgett doesn't know anything about stocks or business or anything until after they've lost their money?
[Glassman:] Well
[Greenfield:] James, let me just zero in on this question. You know, it seems to me, whenever I look at the lines at the lottery sales, when the lottery gets to about $20 million, you have to certainly acknowledge that the idea of putting away money for 20 years is a way of getting rich has certainly been supplanted by a kind of, if not a lottery scheme, then the whole idea that you could get a lot of money accumulated in a bull market very quickly. The question is, is this real? Is it realistic to believe that people can aspire to the dream of great wealth on a mass basis?
[Glassman:] It is absolutely realistic to believe that people can aspire to great wealth on a mass basis. And it is not realistic to believe that most Americans think, or even a small minority, or a large minority of Americans believe that the road to riches is buying a lottery ticket that pays off. Look, half of Americans today are in the stock market. 40 percent of them have 401 [k] plans, which require them to accumulate wealth. And they can't even take it out until they're 59.5.
[Greenfield:] All right, now
[Glassman:] The idea really for America is not Henry Blodgett, it is Robert Johnson, the head of BET, Black Entertainment Television, one of 10 kids, the only one who went to college, put up $15,000 in 1979 and became a billionaire.
[Greenfield:] Now Michael
[Glassman:] People know that story. That's an American story.
[Greenfield:] Michael, if I may, Michael Kelly
[Kelly:] Yes?
[Greenfield:] I want to bring you in as a political with your political columnist hat. If in the 1990s, I can certainly understand how people could believe, you know, that everybody was going to get richer. Is it your sense, whether you think it's right or not, that in a time when people are watching their 401 [k] s plummet in value, and seen stories like Enron, and other companies, where workers are really, you know, on the short end of the stick, do you think that is going to feed the idea that maybe there's something that this is like a crooked roulette wheel, rather than a system in which everyone can prosper?
[Kelly:] I don't think so. I think that you look at something like Enron. And I think most people, and Rick Macarthur is right, that most people is a tricky phrase to toss around. But with the evidence as they are now, we'll probably look at that and say, "Well, it certainly seems like scandalous behavior on the part of some people in that country. And let's hang him high." You know, let's whack him, let's get him, let's put some people in jail. I don't know that there's any direct translation at all to the political process at large. I do think there has been a long change in sort of the ethos of being rich, a kind of disappearance of the magnificent ambros in model of which that Rick was talking about the patriarchal rich, who had a certain sense of aristocratic responsibility. We're not going to flaunt it too much, get too rich. We haven't seen anything like that in the last 20 years. It's been fabulous ostentation. So I'm and there hasn't been any resentment of it at all, that I can see on any mass level. Certainly Pat Buchanan couldn't find it. Ross Perot couldn't find it. Jesse Jackson couldn't find it. I don't know that anybody will find it right away.
[Greenfield:] All right, I need to take a break here. We're going to have more of our conversation after this. We're back. And we're talking about whether the rich are or should be becoming targets of opportunity, political and otherwise. With columnist and "Atlantic" magazine editor, Michael Kelly. With journalist and author John Rick Macarthur, publisher of "Harper's" magazine. And with business columnist and author James Glassman. Rick Macarthur, here's a question that I often struggle with. OK, if you're rich, we know you're going to have some things that most people can't. You're going to be able to buy $100,000 car if you're that rich, live in a fancy house, buy nice clothes. But at what point does was what you get for being rich bother your sense of justice? Better health care, better schools? You can charter an airplane. Nobody particularly may mind that, but do you get to charter the airplane if it keeps a whole of bunch of commercial flights, in which regular people are flying in, delayed on the ground? How do you draw a line like that?
[Macarthur:] I think the only place the line gets drawn in this country is when it starts to cost other people money on a grand scale. I think the American people are remarkably tolerant of private planes. Because as we said, we said, we're repeating ourselves now. They would love to have a private plane themselves. And they think, well, if the guy worked hard enough and could afford to buy a private plane, that's fine, even if they didn't work very hard. Even if they inherited the money or they got it on insider stock information. They made their money that way, which happens all the time and doesn't get talked about. Where it really starts to upset people, and where it is a political issue and could be exploited by politicians is when it really starts to cost people money. You know, I talked to somebody today, works for the University of California, the new pension manager at University at Berkeley, decided to buy Enron stock two years ago. That was worth $68 million. Now it's worth $300,000. People's livelihoods and retirements are at stake here. And it is a politically explosive issue. But as far as ostentation goes that we were talking about, in fact, I think people get a vicarious thrill from it. We celebrate money in this country. We celebrate the rich. We idealized them. And we ascribe wisdom to them that they don't possess, simply be because they're rich.
[Greenfield:] Mr. Glassman, focus in on this question because one of the favorite phrases of a lot of conservatives is the warning against class warfare. But is it ever appropriate to go to war, or at least to combat let's say class terrorism. That is, is there a point at which what people do with a great deal of money begins in Rick's notion, to directly hurt other people?
[Glassman:] Well, I think it certainly can. And I don't think there's any group of people in the world more conscious of that, than Americans. I mean, part of the American ethic is not just that you can get rich starting off poor, but that when you do get rich, you have a lot of obligations to the rest of society. And you know, we have, traditional in this country, like no other country in the world of philanthropy. So I do think there is a it's hard to say where to draw the line. But I think that there is a line and it is generally, in fact, drawn. And the amount of money that's given away in this country is quite remarkable.
[Macarthur:] Given away to what? You got to be more specific.
[Glassman:] Given away well, I can be very specific. Well, I don't know about, you know, you do with your money that you inherited, but you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's done a tremendous job in Africa and in other countries, fighting disease. Certainly there are good things that are done with the money and there are bad things that are done with the money. But the notion that we started with it, Americans for some reason, now hate the rich, I think is absurd.
[Greenfield:] No, it was a question rather than a statement. Jim, it was a question, not a statement.
[Glassman:] OK, well, my answer is that they don't.
[Greenfield:] I got you. If I could bring in I need to bring in Michael Kelly for...
[Michael Kelly:] There's a I wanted to pick up on this thought. The whole idea, I think of hating the rich or hating the upper class or the top class. The problem with it, in this country, is that there isn't a homogeneous rich that you could hate or homogeneous upper class that you can hate. In England, raised in England. You could say well, "there is a land owning hereditary class that makes it it's business, though government, through law, to keep everybody else in their proper places. You can define that class. You can define what they do. And there's a target there that is clear. Here, what is the rich? What is the upper class. Katie Couric, is in it? Sean Puff Daddy Combs is in it. And the chairman of Enron is in it. And so are, you know, 10,000 people, you don't know their names, who live in mega mansions all over the country.
[Unidentified Male:] Or who
[Kelly:] It's not group or who don't.
[Glassman:] You know, there's a rat book on this. "The Millionaire next door, where they actually surveyed millions. And what they found was millionaires basically are people who started small businesses, most of them incredibly boring. 80 percent of them had no inherited wealth. They're just basically hard working people.
[Kelly:] And I think Americans will get very historically, have got very angry at rich people or mega rich people that they think are doing the rest of the country dirty.
[Greenfield:] OK.
[Kelly:] But that's not a class.
[Greenfield:] Rick, this, it seems to me, a rather important point, that the combination of upward mobility in this country, where you can be rich if you'd be perfect. You'd be poor if you were rich.
[Macarthur:] Right.
[Greenfield:] That has a lot to do with maybe why they're isn't as class-based politics here as in other places.
[Macarthur:] Right, and there are spectacular examples. As everyone knows, I profile one in my book. A Jack Linsky, who invite the Swing line stapler fortune. He came as a poor immigrant from Russia and ended up owning Lewis 14th chairs and so on in his apartment on Fifth Avenue. We all know these stories. But what we're not talking about here is the public relations gloss that gets added to the rich, once they become rich. They, as I said earlier, are given powers, way beyond. Powers of philanthropy, as you suggested or goodness that just doesn't exist. A lot of philanthropy is just public relations. John D. Rockefeller started it when Ivy Lee, his public relations agent, told them to start going around handing out dimes.
[Greenfield:] Can I ask you, since we're down to our last 20 seconds, do you think it'll be a good idea to adopt some version of Andrew Carnegie's notion and tax back the great bulk of wealth
[Unidentified Male:] Oh, yes. I'm all for a very steeply graduated inheritance tax that hits everybody the same.
[Greenfield:] I've got about 30 seconds.
[Glassman:] Sure.
[Greenfield:] I take it this is not on an idea, an appeals to you?
[Glassman:] Not that much, but I got to say on the top of my list for tax cuts is cutting tax rates. It's not getting rid of the inheritance tax. All I'm saying is three-quarters of Americans want to get rid of the inheritance tax. There's a social reason for that.
[Greenfield:] All right, Michael Kelly, you've got a 10-second response to this idea?
[Mccann:] Well, I think I'm like most Americans. So it depends how much I make it before I die.
[Greenfield:] Theogenes you can stop. We found a genuinely honest man. James Glassman, Michael Kelly, Rick Macarthur. Thank you very much for joining us. I appreciate it. A rich conversation. I'm Jeff Greenfield. Thanks for watching.