The terrorists are going to believe the worst about America. They think we spy on everything. They think we kill everyone. They think - they don't believe that we believe in democracy, right? They don't believe we have limits on our government.

Eisenhower was a pretty peace-oriented president. Truman was a pretty hawkish. I would argue, if we had more time, I would argue Truman had a lot to do with getting the Cold War going.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

It had run as a column - I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.

George W. Bush is a person who is totally disinterested in the world, uneducated. I'm not saying he's stupid. I don't think he's stupid. He's crafty as hell, but he projects well on television. And that's the real big problem. He is the perfect "what, me worry?" president.

Eisenhower provided the first break in the Cold War, by bringing Khrushchev to the United States, in humanizing the Soviets; and then Nixon, by making the opening to China; and then Reagan, even meeting in Reykjavik with Gorbachev and acknowledging that nuclear weapons are a horror. So I won't accept that Republicans just escalate. Republicans, at least when they were more moderate, they were maybe even more isolationist, they sometimes brought sanity to the debate. We don't have that now. We have - all these Republicans have gone off the neoconservative deep end.

The terrorists are going to believe the worst about America. They think we spy on everything. They think we kill everyone. They think - they don't believe that we believe in democracy, right? They don't believe we have limits on our government.