(upbeat music) - [Advertiser] In Person is brought to Marylanders through grants by Waverley Press Incorporated, The Williams & Wilkins Company, Merit Gasoline Foundation and the members of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting.

- Hi I'm Rick Breitenfeld, two years ago, we had the privilege of chatting with Dr. Milton Eisenhower on this program, but as you can well imagine we only scratched a bit at the surface of the wisdom and vision of this remarkable American.

We won't come near finishing the job now no doubt, but well the privilege remains undiminished.

In Person Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower.

(soft music) [Rick] Milton Eisenhower has served eight presidents of the United States in a variety of official and unofficial capacities, including eight years as special ambassador to Latin America.

He's been the president of two large state universities and for 12 years total, he was twice head of the Johns Hopkins University for his efforts in education and international affairs, 39 American and foreign universities have conferred honorary doctorates upon him, and six foreign governments have awarded him their highest declarations.

His activities and achievements over most of the 20th century have made our country something significantly more than it otherwise might have been.

And as if that weren't enough in 1962, he was elected Father of the Year.

Dr. Eisenhower when last we spoke, we talked about your acquaintanceship with a number of United States presidents, this time I'd like to talk to you about at least begin talking about higher education in America.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Yes.

- [Rick] In our country is higher education in trouble?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Yes.

Due to the insidious inflation, which is raising costs of university so much that many can't get the increased income.

Other than this I would say no, if it's largely a financial problem.

- [Rick] But enrollments are dropping?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, that's because of the age distribution partly and also partly because of cost.

For example, when I went to college, believe it or not I could stay in college for $50 a month, now to go to Johns Hopkins as one example probably cost a minimum of $9,000 a year.

So, it's a great change.

- [Rick] Of course, people were only making 12 and $13 a week in those days too.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Oh, yes.

Yes.

It's not the same.

- [Rick] But when you went to college, when you were at the Kansas State, I have an idea that the preparation for college was sturdier, that is to say, the student body at a college then, a freshmen student body was it was better prepared than today, today our youngsters come into so many colleges with deficiencies in study skills, reading, and writing, why is that?

- I don't think one should generalize that too much.

Let me say that in the highly selective universities of this country, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and Hopkins, and others like it, we have today, the most academically advanced students who understand domestic and international problems better than ever before and who deeply care about the welfare of this country, and its people.

This is a great change over the time when I was a college student, you can hardly get a student to read a newspaper.

Now, it is true that if you take the problem in mass that the preparation of students out of our secondary schools for college has declined.

I think here are many reasons for this, I'll might just mention a few.

One as an affluent nation which we were for a long time and still are to some extent ah, mother and father had more interests outside the home than in the home, therefore there's been less supervision of the children and in the absence of any supervision the television has become more attractive than the studies.

Um... Further we have introduced into our preparatory schools so many electives for students, which has led to a neglect of the real fundamentals.

And thus, it is that we get so many students in many of our colleges universities, who cannot read and write with logic, clarity, and even style, certainly.

And also their knowledge of mathematics is deficient.

Also, and don't misunderstand this, integration has temporarily reduced quality.

It wouldn't have had we started 50 years ago to bring about integration, but you have brought together two unequal equally trained people, the minorities and the majorities, now we have to look forward to the day when all are equal in their abilities and thus the teachers will raise the level of their instruction.

Um...

So, I look upon it as a transitional diminution in the quality and it will be restored because of course, we have enough students to prove that there's no...

Nothing wrong with the minds of the American young people.

- [Rick] Our standards then we'll go back up you believe?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] In time yes.

- [Ridk] Will the standards be different, do you think?

Or are they different between public universities and private universities?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] There's less difference now than there was originally, um.

Originally when we had the private universities like Harvard and Cornell and so forth, these were thought of as having the best minds in the country and I think it was true.

But today, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the Pennsylvania State University, places like Ohio State University, places like this publicly supported institutions have great distinction in their courses and in their students.

- [Rick] Is there a limit to how big a university can get before it simply loses its effect?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, it is true that the very large universities are said to have only one thing in common and that's a plumbing system.

Now, it isn't quite as bad as it sounds because the large university has some advantages, for example, today in most of the sciences you need very sophisticated and highly expensive equipment.

Well, if you have a large number of students in one group, part of the cost is spread, it is less per student than in a small institution.

Further within these large institutions you form communities within the big community, you develop a social community either in the dormitory, or the fraternity, or sorority, you develop an intellectual community in that area you are specializing.

However, the small universities like Hopkins...

I guess it is the smallest true universities in the country, you do have what we like to talk about is a great community of scholar.

At Hopkins, all the faculty know one another and this is terribly important in modern education because the interdisciplinary studies are becoming as great if not greater value than purely one of specialization in mathematics or so.

- [Rick] But surely there must be a place still for that small liberal arts school with a tiny faculty.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] There is and they are in trouble.

A lot are combining, two of them going together we've seen this happening right here in Baltimore, ah, and that's one way to save the situation.

For example, Loyola and Notre Dame have a common library that saves both of them money but it would be a shame to see the good, private, small intimate colleges and universities go under.

- [Rick] And many of them might.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] They could unless we learn how to stop inflation.

And, this is almost the key problem we have in this country.

- [Rick] The key is not the federal support, you think?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, if federal support increases the federal deficit and increases inflation, you get worse and worse instead of better and better.

- [Rick] Well, we're on that subject again inflation.

Last time we met you talked about the causes for inflation, I think you said there were seven.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Yeah.

- [Rick] Just to give us some common ground now would you rattle off those seven again?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, first of all is what's called cost push inflation.

In other words, wages go up, prices follow, or prices go up, and wages follow, and we've been on a staircase now since 1965.

Ah...second, deficit financing has to be broken into several parts.

One part is that you're printing paper money in order to cover the federal deficit, therefore you are increasing the money supply without increasing production and therefore the unit price of goods going up.

Second, the savings are very light in this country due to inflation people are spending their money fast and industry finds it very difficult at high interest rates to borrow the money, to modernize and to increase productivity actually we have a minus figure in productivity rather than growth.

Third, there's a psychological factor here, people rush to buy fearing that prices are gonna go up and thus their the savings are only 5% a year.

Next is increased government intervention into private affairs making for great inefficiency.

I've been a director of some good railroads for a good many years and I can tell you that the regulations literally would be about, standing about three feet high that a few people have to understand.

Next, we are suffering great imbalances in international payments and this is highly inflationary.

We've been as high in importing as much as 50 billion dollars in goods and services more than we export, oh, that's greatly reduced right now.

The two worst of these situations is OPEC.

That is a great problem for us and we have not taken the steps we should cure that.

And second is our trade with Japan, they have open access to our market, they have technical requirements which make it very difficult for us to ship to them and therefore we have a deficit with that one country of $13,000,000,000 year.

Well, these are among the major causes.

- [Rick] If we were fortunate enough to have another President Eisenhower, and his first name were Milton, would he put strict quotas on imports?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] I would put...

Yes, keep in mind we again are a debtor country, and a debtor country behaves differently from what a creditor does.

Now, I would put quotas on not as a permanent policy, but I would put it on in order to force countries to sit down at the table with us and work out what will be fair to both countries.

There's no reason under the sun why Japan and the United States cannot each make the trade going both the two ways equal.

That would leave us OPEC and there by the proper policies, we could reduce our imports by 50% and thus greatly reduce the funds that are flowing out of our country.

- [Rick] How could we do that?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Rationing.

I lived under all during World War Two, worked very well, I never drove a car alone to my office in Washington, five of us rode in a car and each of us drove once a week.

Ah, what rationing does is diminishes the use of petroleum for pleasure purposes without interfering with it for business purposes, and since we produced half of it at home, and half of it imported, now mathematically we're wasting 50% of all we consume, a share waste.

If you cut the waste by 25%, you reduce the imports by 50%.

And that is perfectly possible without hurting anybody.

- [Rick] Why haven't we put technical requirements on the imports from Japan?

-[Dr. Eisenhower] We're still acting as if we were a creditor and all of our economic truisms are those of a creditor.

And one of these days we'll wake up to the fact that we are in a different and a new ballgame.

- [Rick] Might it be too late?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] I hope to goodness not, you have to hope that we're going to come to our senses and do all the hard things that we have to do.

Some of which are deemed to be very unpopular.

But we've been years in getting into this trouble, it's going to take us some time to get out.

- [Rick] There's a word you hear a lot about these days, the word is productivity and the bad news seems to be that America's productivity is going down.

-[Dr. Eisenhower] Yes.

- [Rick] Is that as complex as inflation to turn around?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, in fact the two are related.

Um, productivity is largely dependent not so much upon the individual worker as a human being, but upon the machinery that he has to work with to increase production.

Now with inflation and the high interest rates business has not been able to keep its plant, so that it's the most productive in the world.

Now, the attitude of workers obviously has something to do with the problem, but mechanization and efficient mechanization in all forms of production, is the key to productivity.

- [Rick] That word attitude though rings a bell because I read that in Japan, they treat their workers in factories completely differently from the way we do, they have incentives, they have part ownership, they work for the same company for a lifetime as a matter of national policy.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Of course, we have some of this in this country in which workers become major stockholders in the company and I think that's a good thing.

They have some very interesting practices in Japan, for example when they sell a car, they put on a high sales tax at the request of the industry.

The income from that tax goes not to the government but is transmitted by the government back to the industry, to keep on increasing the efficiency of production so things sell more and more.

Now this means really that they're selling their cars and electronics and other things to their own people at higher prices than they're selling to us even considering the enormous cost of transportation to get it here.

Ah...in a way, one can consider this dumping which is illegal internationally.

Ah, then when we go to ship to them, we run into these awful technical karmas, I have a friend in the state department who's been over there twice trying to get them.

They don't produce their own tobacco, but they make it very difficult for us to even ship tobacco into Japan because of technical requirements.

- [Rick] Well, our current administration is making what everyone will admit is an honest and bold attempt to help turn around our economy, are you optimistic about so-called Reaganomics?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, let me say that I'm optimistic about parts and not about others.

Um...

Certainly his effort to reduce costs is absolutely imperative, and reduce the deficit hence therefore the inflationary influences that flow from a deficit financing.

Um, but he also wishes to increase greatly, ah, defense expenditures which might eliminate some of that gain by cutting other things.

Now, I want the United States to be a secure nation just same as anybody else but let me say that our security depends on a lot more than mere military hardware and men to operate that hardware.

- [Rick] What else?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] It depends upon the economic strength of our nation, it depends upon the unity of purpose of the American people, it depends upon better relations among our allies because if you look at the total power of the Western world it's as great as the power of the communist world, but unfortunately, we've got in the habit of making decisions ourselves and then going and asking for cooperation.

What we need to do, is to work out the policies and the programs and dealing with the problems of the world with our allies, so that we, we all move together.

Now those actions are just as important as producing new planes and new submarines, and the like.

I personally, if I were president of United States today, which I needed to, I don't think I will be.

Ah, I would postpone for about three years the increase in the defense expenditures in order for the reduction in other federal costs to take hold and have a beneficial effect.

Further, I'm very afraid that a reduction of 10% in taxes per year for three years will not have the result that is desired.

Ah, the hope is of course, that, that money will go into savings and thus increase the money market funds so that industry can borrow and modernize and hire more people at the like, and that would be very desirable, but there's no guarantee that, that money won't be spent in buying consumer goods and the like.

I have suggested to some of my friends in the Senate that instead of having a tax reduction as such, that we permit a deduction from income and making our taxes if we put money into savings.

- [Rick] Making it therefore available to the industry.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] I mean, I say, I've had some very favorable responses from senators, I don't know whether the ad is going to catch on it or not.

- [Rick] One of the areas in which we've made some cuts has been in so-called social programs.

As these cuts affect not the fat or the cheaters, but actually those in need, do we stimulate a kind of social revolution?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Unfortunately...I hope not.

You see you have to weigh one evil against another.

If we didn't make these cuts, inflation would keep on going and inflation has already put hundreds of thousands if not millions of families that previously were proudly self-supporting onto the relief roles of this country increasing the cost and humiliating those people who were once very proud.

Now, there's no way of getting out of the trouble that we've built ourselves into over a period of time, except by cutting good things, as well as bad things.

And one hopes that the day will come when we have overcome this insidious force that we have in our society, and therefore can resume all the human services that we ought to have.

Now mind you, this may startle you when I say this, if we could do away with all of the extravagance and the cheating in federal expenditures, we would almost have enough money to balance the budget.

There's no way a nation of our size, can spend three quarters of $1,000,000,000,000 a year and not have uncontrolled extravagance and some cheating as has been shown by the cases of general, not general accounting office, the one that manages all the physical properties of the federal government, and quite a bit in relief bills and relief programs too.

- [Rick] How do you get at it?

I mean, trying to fight that cheating is it possible?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Yes, yes.

- [Rick] Without all kinds of inspectors general?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, the supervising personnel simply has to do its very best to find where the cheating is and eliminate it.

I must say, I have not been a great supporter of President Reagan, God knows I wish him well and hope he succeeds.

I supported Mr. Anderson from the very, very beginning, I say this because I think, he did do a good job in California and show that it's possible to take a lot of the cheaters off the role and even increase the payments to those who deserve it.

- [Rick] In 1968, I believe you were appointed by President Johnson, by the time you made your report, it was 1969 and you were talking to President Nixon, but the report had to do with the causes of violence.

So therefore, Dr. Eisenhower as an expert in 1968-9 on American violence, can you compare what you found out then with what you see on the streets and in America now?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] The same causes that we analyzed exists today and the difference is they are now twice as much crime, violent crimes as there was at the time we made that 18 month study with the help of 200 of the great scholars of the United States.

Let me just very candidly say, I don't know how much worse the crime thing has to be before we begin to do something about it, but let me point out that there are 55,000,000 concealable handguns in the hands of the American people and those guns have no purpose but to kill, and we're adding 3,000,000 per year to the inventory of these concealable handguns, they're not target pistols, they have no sporting value whatsoever.

Now, a lot of householders have guns thinking it's for their protection, but the figures show that in less than 1% of all the intrusions of burglars and others into the home is the home gun ever used to chasing from the house or to wounding.

And yet, they are the very guns responsible for around 70 to 80% of all the murders in the United States.

- [Rick] Would hand gun control alone.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] A hand gun control alone would not obviously stop all crime because there are other weapons, the switchblade knife and heavy things.

- [Rick] Sticks.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Yes, they are.

Yes, but it would make a great debt in the problems because the handgun makes the smallest weakest man or woman in the United States, the size of a giant.

Just with that one little instrument it'll kill.

- [Rick] Why has this violence increased?

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Partly, I think because of the increased guns, also because of social reasons for example, the greatest crime in our country is centered in the ghettos of the great cities.

First of all the city rate is 11 times the country rate of crime and within the city, the greatest crime is concentrated to ghettos.

Now, let me hasten to say, that Blacks are no more criminigenic than Whites or anybody else.

But they live in social conditions, barren homes, usually only one parent if any, that one parent working to supplement the aid that they're getting.

Children without supervision roaming the streets, then has come in within the last 20, 25 years what's called a subculture of dope.

This was completely unknown when I was a student and I'm sure when you were a student because it's a fairly recent thing, and this is a brutal, harmful, and permanently harmful influence.

- [Rick] I wanna turn you around because we only have 60 seconds.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] All right.

- [Rick] And I know the Eisenhower smile, I grew up with it and I've known what you've done for young people.

Tell us about why America should be optimistic.

- [Dr. Eisenhower] Well, basically the American people are decent, hardworking, but they need leadership.

They need leadership that will cause them to lift their eyes above their individual selfish interests, put their view on great purposes for the nation, all work together to achieve those purposes and if we do all of us will be better off.

I mean, I say this was the technique of Franklin Roosevelt.

- [Rick] I have to interrupt.

I'm terribly sorry, this is an American optimist and American achiever and a member of an American family that everybody knows about, it's a pleasure and a privilege to meet Dr. Milton Eisenhower again.

Why don't you be here next week In Person?

(soft music) - [Advertiser] In Person is brought to Marylanders through grants by Waverley Press Incorporated, The Williams & Wilkins Company, Merit Gasoline Foundation, and the members of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting.