THC: Which people in your book were you most fascinated by?

DH: I think one of the most interesting people, and he’s very easy to underestimate, is John Shalikashvili [former Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]. He’s an uncommon man, a decent man, and he has a certain nobility. He’s surprisingly erudite. I think he was a man not a lot of people paid attention to and never had much of a public relations machinery, but I think he’s a very superior man; I like him. There are a lot of fascinating people there....but when you ask that who’s the surprise, Shali pops to mind.

THC: In terms of U.S. foreign policy, do you think we should play a more interventionist role?

DH: Well, I think we ought to pay attention to the rest of the world. The world has come to us, however involuntarily. When I was a young man, 40 years ago, I was sent to the Congo as a foreign correspondent for the Times, and then to Vietnam. I had to go very, very far away to find the tensions between different cultures and civilizations, between the Third World and the First World. And now, late in my life, it’s coming to our doorstep. Do I think we should be more interventionist right now? I think we’re utterly absorbed with the issue of security and I think that’s how it should be. Because, in effect, if we do not meet this threat, then not only are we vulnerable, but the rest of the world is vulnerable. This is an assault, among other things, on established order.

THC: In terms of the future of journalism, are you pessimistic?

DH: I think it’s a great profession; I’ve had a great run. I think the question is, what is the private sector going to do? In the networks, if they keep having to drive the stock up quarterly and achieve an increase of 10 to 15 percent a year, it’s going to drive all the juice out of it. It’s just going to be terrible. You can see it in the networks, you can see it in a lot of papers that are part of a larger chain. It’s a wonderful profession, and the talent is out there. A lot of bright young people want to be journalists, but the number of places where they do serious reporting has gone down in my lifetime. I think that’s particularly true of the networks, where I think there’s a right to be angry, if you’re a journalist, about how they’ve trivialized their agendas in so many ways.

There’s a real test for what a great editor is. A great editor is someone who balances what people want to know with what they need to know. And I think the top people, particularly the owners, of these networks, the managers at the top, have set up norms of profit that make it damn near impossible to do the kind of thing they should be doing.

THC: What about your time at Harvard?

DH: I was a terrible student. I was an editor at The Crimson. I was good at The Crimson, and it was the one thing I was good at, so I have this fondness for it going back a long time. I was part of a terrific group at The Crimson that went on to be journalists when there was a sort of change. Tony Lukas, who was a close friend, whose death was really very tragic, was on the board with me; Dick Ullman, who’s a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School; and Jack Langguth, who was later a foreign correspondent for the New York Times as well and has written a very good book on Vietnam, was the president. Dick Burgheim later ended up with Time and People. We had a wonderful time, we had a great run.

THC: What’s next for you?

DH: Well, I’ve got a book I’m already working on, on a battle in the Korean War. I’ve been working on that, but whether that’s going to be moved aside by these events, I just don’t know. I’d like to stay with that book, but I just don’t know how I’m going to be feeling in a couple of months, and whether there’s going to be something that jumps up in front of me.