Interviews With Dukakis, Jackson

Thank you for printing the long interviews with Dukakis and Jackson.

In reading Jackson’s replies to Scheer’s questions about foreign policy, I was reminded of a response attributed to a former secretary of state who asserted that differences among nations could be solved if only the participants would sit down and talk things over “like good Christian gentlemen.”

Jackson exhibits that same simplistic view about dealing with irreconcilable clashes between major actors in the world. He himself is a “good Christian gentleman” (as is Dukakis, too: but with a big difference, Dukakis, for the most part, views the world realistically in its bitter complexities, and not as Utopia in four years).

Jackson has traveled to the Middle East and to other parts of the Third World, and has talked to people in many troubled spots. But he hears only what he sets out to hear, and filters out or ignores discordant noises that do not agree with his own blessed background as someone who has risen to a major national position because of his own efforts.

But, if as the interview with Scheer suggested, Jackson becomes accepted by the Democratic Party as its self-proclaimed “moral leader,” the next Administration may be guided by the same foolish innocence in international politics that contributed to the start of World War II.

THOMAS McENROE

San Clemente