President Gerhard
Casper’s letter to Ted Koppel
The
following was a private letter President Casper sent on
April 8 to Ted Koppel as a part of his invitation to
Koppel to deliver the June 14 Commencement address.
Because Koppel’s address was, in large part, a response
to this letter, Koppel suggested, and the president
consented, that letter be made public, which we do here.
8 April 1998
Mr. Ted Koppel
Nightline
ABC News
1717 DeSales Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Dear Ted,
Since you asked for my
thoughts, here they are.
For many years, I have
been concerned about developments that the
Lewinsky-Affair has exaggerated. My reactions are not
particularly original to be sure, but they are also not
of the kneejerkish kind. Let me single out two. The first
goes to the distinction between public and private, the
second to the overreach of law enforcement.
(1) I say "the
distinction between public and private": my emphasis
is not on "privacy." Privacy is obviously a
related concept but it stresses the individual, his
control over information, his rights. Anybody who runs
for office obviously sacrifices much of his right to
privacy.
My question is somewhat
different. Can a society that essentially obliterates all
distinction between the public and the private realm be a
free and civilized one on the long run? The fact that
there is much sin does not necessarily mean that we can
afford to eradicate all of it without turning society
into something both oppressive and trivial. Government,
media, and ordinary people seem to have lost all sense
that making everything public paradoxically means the
victory of the private realm over the public business
(not the other way around): the public realm will be
eaten up by the private, by gossip, by entertainment.
Ironically, it is the public realm that loses.
Ted Hughes once said
something to the effect that television hates reticence.
Yes, but not only television: in my first year as a
university president, I found it very hard to focus
people on core academic matters. I was reluctant to
answer endless questions about my private life in a
culture that has come to equate reticence with
standoffishness or worse. When Chelsea Clinton entered
Stanford, virtually all reporting was about the gossip
angle. It did not cross any reporter's mind to look at
the academic side of the university that the young woman
had chosen.
Refusal to recognize a
line between the public and the private not only drives
the country literally to distraction but it also makes
the country oppressive.
I had a very close friend,
Charlotte Beradt, who was a Jewish refugee from Berlin
and lived in New York City. In the early days of the
Nazis, she collected dreams with a manifest political
content (published in 1966 as The Third Reich of
Dreams). Here is an excerpt.
In 1934, after having
lived one year under the Third Reich, a forty-five-year
old doctor had the following dream:
"It was about nine
o'clock in the evening. My consultations were over, and I
was just stretching out on the couch to relax with a book
. . . , when suddenly the walls of my room disappeared. I
looked around and discovered to my horror that as far as
the eye could see no apartment had walls any more. Then I
heard a loudspeaker boom, 'According to the decree of the
17th of this month on the Abolition of Walls . . .'"
So disturbed was the
doctor by his dream that he wrote it down of his own
accord the next morning (and subsequently dreamt he was
being accused of writing down dreams).
I am obviously not
suggesting that we are becoming like the Third Reich.
Still, it behooves us to make sure that even segments of
our social and political life do not resemble some
aspects of life under totalitarian rule.
(2) The overreach of law
enforcement is closely connected to the demarcation
between public and private since in a secular society law
enforcement is the main vehicle for getting at sin. Law
enforcement also has become a main source of
entertainment. Overreach includes the blurring of any
distinction between auditing and prosecuting; using
perjury to get at behavior that is not criminal in
itself; limitless depositions as the modern equivalent of
torture for obtaining evidence (I spent 10% of my time
during the first three months of the year on
depositions). There is little that is special about Ken
Starr: many U.S. attorneys behave his way routinely and
private lawyers do so increasingly (after all, Lewinsky
was brought into this by Jones' lawyers if I remember
correctly). There is no or little reluctance to use
evidence that is "fruit of the poisonous tree"
(see the wire taps).
However, instead of
focusing on the well known, let me talk about ordinary
people. The New York Times this last year has
carried stories about New York police brutalizing
ordinary citizens. Some of these have been heartbreaking.
Recently, Bob Herbert told about a black man in the Bronx
by the name of Ellis Elliott who was wrongly
"drug-busted" in a manner that was so appalling
that we would associate it with police states. Tony Lewis
has been running horror stories about the Immigration and
Naturalization Service. What is most dismaying is that
accounts like these do not seem to be seen as
particularly scandalous by anybody except those who write
about them. And, of course, what happens to ordinary
people, in different ways, is experienced by institutions
(for instance, Stanford in the indirect cost controversy)
and, for that matter, politicians.
In my mind, a civil
society is associated with a clear demarcation between
public and private and conscientious decision-making by
those who exercise the authority of government. There are
too many exceptions to what is, thank God, still the rule
(of law?) that I believe we need to worry much more than
we do. If a U.S. attorney tomorrow decided to go after
you, for whatever alleged offense, he can impose
extraordinary expenses on you, and, if you were acquitted
in court, you would still have lost because the
government would not reimburse you for your legal
defense. If I got sued tomorrow in a civil case and I
won, the losing party would be under no obligation to
reimburse my expenses. That is why corporations and
institutions, such as universities, frequently settle law
suits: it is cheaper to pay the plaintiff off than to pay
your own lawyers. And if you have done nothing other than
being in the wrong place at the wrong time (like some of
the White House staff), you still can face extraordinary
legal bills.
Let me conclude with
another dream from Beradt's book. The dream is about how
distorted life becomes if you worry all the time.
"I dreamt I wanted to
call on an acquaintance of mine whose name, shall we say,
was Miss Small, but on my way I discovered I had
forgotten her exact address. I went into a phone booth to
look it up, but I looked up an entirely different name to
be on the safe side . . ."
We are looking forward to
your visit.
Cordially,
Gerhard
Casper
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