Sun, Feb 23, 1969
In this 1969 episode, Harvard alumni J. Lee Auspitz and Thomas Petri debate the future of the Republican Party with interviewer William F. Buckley. Auspitz and Petri represent the Ripon Society, an American centrist Republican public policy organization. As moderate Republicans, Auspitz and Petri insist Richard Nixon's Republican Party must ideologically drift leftward to become a broader coalition and to win more electoral votes. Buckley counters that Nixon should veer rightwards in order to win over disaffected Southern voters in the near future. Auspitz adamantly disputes this possibility. He insists that Nixon cannot win the Deep South to the Republican cause so long as (1) Governor George Wallace remains a thirty-party option and (2) Senator Ted Kennedy looms as a future Democratic candidate for president. By 1972, of course, these two factors were removed and many Southern voters supported Nixon's Republican Party.
Top-rated
Wed, Apr 2, 1969
Noam Chomsky defends his criticism of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia and contextualizes several arguments put forth in his work "American Power and the New Mandarins." Buckley ascribes a self-righteous tenor to Chomsky's views and chides him for omitting Vietcong terror in his book. They debate whether a state can behave disinterestedly in the international arena and whether the United States is an imperialist power.