David Andelman, "A Shattered Peace" author, Forbes.com executive editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

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BOB ANDELMAN/MR. MEDIA: Could a different result in Versailles have really changed the world’s make-up today for the better?

DAVID ANDELMAN: I think it could have. I think definitely. There’s no question. I think it’s very unlikely that if Saddam would’ve come to power in Iraq, if things had been done differently then, I think that…

MR. MEDIA: No Hitler?

D. ANDELMAN: Oh no. I think if they hadn’t tried to destroy Germany, Hitler might never have come to power. I think that’s entirely possible. There were people like John Maynard Keynes, a very young economist in those days. He had a solution that would’ve worked in terms of reparations, in terms of the kind of payments that Germany was going to have to make and so on. He wrote a book called The Economic Consequences of the Peace after he walked out in disgust from the deliberations in Paris in 1919. If his concepts and if the concepts of others like him who wanted to see a strong but free Germany in the middle of Europe, as an anchor in the middle of Europe, if that had been paid attention to, we might never have had World War II. That’s entirely possible.

MR. MEDIA: I have to say, this seems like one of those Star Trek time paradigms. “If this, then that. If that, then this…”

D. ANDELMAN: Sure. The path not taken. Here we have all of these paths before us after this war. We choose this one. It’s very hard to fight your way back up to start over at square one and go down another path, and that’s what happened.


MR. MEDIA: You’ve written these other two books, The Peacemakers and The Fourth World War. After those books, have you seen that they have had an impact on the debate, on the discussion, and what do you think will happen following A Shattered Peace?

D. ANDELMAN: Well, let’s take The Fourth World War, particularly. It was interesting because that was done in the early 1990s, and terrorism was only just vaguely coming into vogue. The subtitle of the book was “Diplomacy, Espionage, and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism,” and my co-author was a gentleman named the Count de Marenches, who was the long-time head of French intelligence. Our theory was that terrorism was going to be the next major war. It was going to be a North-South conflict. We suggested that the world had to take a number of actions, which they never did, of course, if this was going to be prevented. But the world that we painted as a consequence, it was so frighteningly similar to this world, that I’m kind of hoping that people will see this book as a roadmap as well and do something about it. They didn’t particularly, in the last book, partly because Marenches was a Frenchman, and you know what Americans think of the French!

MR. MEDIA: Oui, oui.

Even more than the thesis of the book, one of the most compelling elements of A Shattered Peace is the colorful details and the anecdotes that you bring to bear on the storytelling. In one place, you quote an aide to then-President Woodrow Wilson, Colonel Edward House, describing the post-war situation of Hungary and suggest -- to the reader -- replacing Hungary in the reading of it with Iraq and Bolshevism with Al Qaeda. Is it really that similar? Again, we’re drawing that parallel.

D. ANDELMAN: Oh sure. Remember, the fears at the time were colossal in having to do with Bolshevism. Lenin and his people were predicting revolutions in the streets momentarily in London and Liverpool and across France and across Germany. The Communist parties were suddenly rising. There were actually Communist cells in various cities in Germany and even in France. People were desperately afraid in those days that Bolshevism really was the new terrorism in so many ways. It was the root of terrorism. And Lenin was quite definitive that he was going to be there to destroy the Capitalist system and have the Soviets take over across the West. There was a desperate fear. The result was it motivated them into failing to deal with Russia the way they should have and trying to draw them into the international system. That’s my fear now, that we need, in some fashion, to draw the Muslims into the international system more effectively so they feel they have a voice just like Bolshevism might have had a voice in those days.




MR. MEDIA: We always seem to demonize a group whether it’s the Muslims or the North Koreans, the Communists. We have to have someone…There was that whole issue even on…I hate to bring television into this, but the show “24” had that issue over a couple years. It’s like, “Who are we fighting against anymore?” Now, okay, it’s a little more clear, but maybe we’re just demonizing people. Maybe they’re not really…

D. ANDELMAN: Exactly. There certainly are people out there who are suicide bombers and blowing things up and blowing people up. 9/11 was a reality. It was a fact of life. And these are suicide bombers, and these were Muslims. But we can’t demonize all Muslims just like we couldn’t demonize all Russians or even all Bolsheviks. Not all of them wanted to see revolutions and blood running in the streets in the West. We have to find the right people to talk to and then bring them into the system and make sure we understand them.

MR. MEDIA: You mentioned Lenin, and I want to come back to Lenin because, again, this is the storytelling of the book. But a great moment of intrigue in the book is found right up front when future American spymaster Allen Dulles declines to take an urgent call from a Russian revolutionary because he was more interested in keeping a date with a buxom Swiss lass. The caller: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Oops. When and how did you dig up that detail? I love that.

D. ANDELMAN: It’s actually a detail that Dulles loved to tell on himself and on his life. It was actually written in one of his diaries. I found it there. But it’s so emblematic of the kinds of changes in history, these little turning points that could make such enormous differences. A date on a tennis court versus a half-hour conversation at a consulate. It could’ve changed the course of history! And I tried to get across the fact that that is the case very often if we don’t pay enormous attention to detail, it’s the details that can do us in.

MR. MEDIA: Suddenly, I have this flash. I’m thinking of former President Clinton. Maybe if there were a few moments that he had not spent in this little ante room…Well, anyway. I’m getting off-topic. I’m sorry.

D. ANDELMAN: Yeah, my wife and I have discussed that as well.

MR. MEDIA: That’s funny. But I loved that. That was just wonderful color. So I have to ask. Just wrapping up on the Iraq comparisons, do we have any business in Iraq as a government, as a country? And can the adventure there be justified or grounded in history at all?

D. ANDELMAN: We got rid of Saddam Hussein. Now was it up to us to do it, or was it up to the Iraqis themselves to do it? The Iraqis weren’t very successful in doing it so we did it. What would be interesting is to say the first George Bush, did he make a colossal mistake in not finishing things by halting short of Baghdad and saying, “Oh, the Iraqis will take care of it,” or just going in and taking care of it then and then pulling out immediately? We might never have had a second Iraq War if we hadn’t had the first. So I’m not going to say that there weren’t...Huge mistakes were made at every turning point. There’s no question about that. But, again, these are mistakes that we’re now in a position, I think, to rectify in terms of how we deal with this country going forward and what kind of a country we would start to plan for as we withdraw and hope to leave behind. That’s what’s critical, I think.


MR. MEDIA: Up until 2001, I always thought we were the country where we would read books and see movies about how our CIA did these things quietly and behind-the-scenes, and then we would hear about them later. But in the last six or seven years, it seems like the kind of jobs that the CIA did, we’re just out front with them now. We don’t like this dictator. We kill this dictator. We don’t care for this country, Iran. Iran, you’re not doing things we like anymore. We’re no longer the country that talks to or that negotiates. We’re just gonna come along and bomb you. Next! Syria, are you next? It really has changed.

D. ANDELMAN: Well, it has.

MR. MEDIA: It doesn’t seem like there’s been an upswelling of saying, “Hey, we need to start attacking people.” We just started doing it.

D. ANDELMAN: The French have done that. In fact, when I was talking to Marenches, my co-author in the last book, he used to have this thing where there would sometimes be actions, especially in Africa, that he felt it was necessary to be done by the French. It may be a small invasion. It may be assassinating a national leader or whatever. And he’d go in to see the French president. He had an arrangement with every French president. He worked for about four of them. And he would say, “We have to do this and that and this and that,” and he’d say it was a question of raison d’etats. “We have to do this.” And he would then pause, and if the French leader didn’t say anything, he had a go-ahead. But he had to have that 20-second moment when he could say, “No, you can’t do that”. He said it never happened. He was always allowed to do whatever he felt was necessary, often bloody.

MR. MEDIA: Wow. As a writer, I’m always interested in where other writers find details in events that happened in the days before electronic recording and, to some degree, reliable newspaper reporting that we would consider reliable. Can you share a little bit about your research methods and how you decided what was truth and what was fiction from 1919?

D. ANDELMAN: Well, there was a lot written about that at the time, a lot of diaries that were kept. In those days, people didn’t have blogs. They didn’t have emails and whatever. They wrote diaries, and a lot of those diaries were never even published. Some were published in small editions in the early ‘20s up to the early ‘30s, and those I managed to find. Those are pretty easy to find. But a lot of them went into archives, and their papers were deposited in libraries like Columbia or Yale or Princeton or some of the presidential libraries. The Internet was an enormous tool in being able to find these resources and saying to a librarian in some distant archive without having to actually go there, “Listen, I think there’s a diary by William Westerman,” who was the chief advisor to Wilson on the Middle East in the inquiry. And he was a Columbia professor. He kept a very detailed diary. He typed it every night on a little typewriter in his hotel room. And he never published it. It was deposited in the Columbia archives with his papers, and I found that. And it was extraordinarily, extremely detailed. You could cross-reference a lot of these different diaries. People were at the same meeting, different perspectives and so on. And if you did that, you came up with a pretty good portrait of what had actually gone on there.




MR. MEDIA: Let me change gears a little bit, and then we’ll wrap up in a moment or two. You worked for CBS News, I believe, during the Dan Rather era.

D. ANDELMAN: I did.

MR. MEDIA: Part of that. Do you have any good Dan Rather stories to share? This is Mr. Media, after all.

D. ANDELMAN: I’ll never forget the first time when I was going overseas for CBS. I’d been hired from The New York Times. I’d never really done television or radio very much. I kind of learned it at CBS. So I spent about two or three months in New York before I went overseas. And the week I was leaving, I went in to see Dan, personally, cause I would be on his show a lot. And I said, “Do you have any words of advice?” Sitting there in his inner sanctum with his fish tank behind him and whatever, and he said well, he said let me think. I thought I was going to hear some grand thing about the nature of reporting or the kinds of stories he guesses I was looking for. And he said, “The one thing you should always keep in mind,” he says, “when you’re doing your sign-off, take a little beat pause between the end of what you say and your name. So if you say something and then it’s beat, pause, David Andelman, CBS News, Paris, they’ll remember your name better that way.” That’s my favorite Dan Rather story.

MR. MEDIA: That’s so off where I thought it was gonna go. Wow. Alright. And then let’s talk about Forbes before we run out of time here.

D. ANDELMAN: Okay.

MR. MEDIA: I think this is your first online…

D. ANDELMAN: Yes. I worked briefly for a company called SmallCapCenter.com. I was editor-in-chief during the height of the dotcom boom in 2000, and I saw us balloon up to about 30 editorial people and back down to two, me and another person. And that was a very rapid trajectory, but this is my first real online experience.

MR. MEDIA: How does it differ from your experience at print and broadcast outlets?

D. ANDELMAN: Not that much, believe it or not. I think if you’re a good journalist, a good communicator, you understand what makes a news story, and you can tell a good tale and tell it objectively and quickly and rapidly. If you can write well and really understand what will be interesting to people, I think you can learn to do it in almost any medium. I guess the most difficult transition is print to broadcast or broadcast to print. But the Internet really combines all of those, which is great. We have a video network. We have print and so and so. My experience in that has been perfect for along the entire spectrum. If you’re a good journalist, can tell a good story, know how to ask the right kinds of questions, and then structure it into something that’s understandable and compelling, you can do it in any medium.



MR. MEDIA: During your panel discussion earlier today, you discussed your lack of political affiliation. Why are you not registered with one party or another, and how do you square that with working at Forbes, which is pretty blatantly political in the same way that The Wall Street Journal is political?

D. ANDELMAN: Well, there are parts of Forbes that are. Certainly, Steve’s column is. And Forbes’ title is, the magazine’s title, is the capitalist tool. But one of the things I run is our opinion and op-ed section. And I like to pride ourselves on having really the entire spectrum of opinion on that site. And they’ve been very understanding in doing that. They understand that we are a global website. We are the largest business financial site in the world. We’re in virtually every country. We have a huge readership in India and China and overseas. And we need to really present the news factually and a broad spectrum of opinion, or we’ll never have that kind of a readership. We have 16.5 million readers in an average month. You can’t do that if you become a niche-player. We’re many times, many-fold larger than The Wall Street Journal and WSJ.com, who are our competitors. I don’t usually like to talk about them, and they’re fine. They do a good job, and they’re very objective, for the most part, in their news coverage. They do have an opinion site also which is not so much. It’s more geared toward the right. But we really have prided ourselves on maintaining our objectivity across the whole spectrum.

MR. MEDIA: Finally, what changes and improvements lie ahead for Forbes.com? Will you hire more reporters? Will you break more stories ahead of your print cousin? What’s the future there?

D. ANDELMAN: It’s a great relationship that we have with our print cousin. Recently, a substantial chunk of our equity was bought by Elevation Partners, which includes Bono, the rock singer. What they really want to do is they want to expand us in so many different kinds of ways. They want us to, and they’re starting to buy different kinds of…We just bought Investopedia, for instance, different kinds of websites and so on to sort of bulk up on all that. A lot of our expansion is going to be overseas. We have a Forbes.pl in Polish right now. That was our first beta site overseas. Eventually, we’re going to have Forbes China, Forbes Russia, Forbes Arabia, Forbes Israel, and all the countries with our magazines, there will be websites in that language. And that’s going to be a big part of our growth.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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