Booknotes

ROBERT CHRISTOPHER: Well actually the book is more about non WASPs, but I think the reason to write about them is fairly simple. It's the national mythology is that they run the country. Or it's a myth that's held by a large part of the country.

CHRISTOPHER: A WASP is actually any person who is generally perceived by the rest of the populous to be a WASP. There are certain limitations. You have to be white and you have to have a reasonable degree of education or professional success or money or some combination there of. But ethnicity really in terms of what your ancestry is not central.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, technically it refers to people of Great -- well not even Great Britain of England really. And many WASPs probably the majority of WASPs in this country are not of purely or even totally or even in any degree of English ancestry.

CHRISTOPHER: Because I think -- oh, you mean where did it originate.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, it originated in an article written by a sociologist back in the '30s as I recall late '30s or early '40's in which he very carefully said I will refer to this group henceforth as WASPs which stands for white anglo saxon protestant. A lot of people think that it was originated by a guy named E. Digby Valtsell who is regarded as the paramount historian of WASPs but he himself concedes that that's not the case.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. I am first of all perceived as a WASP which dafacto makes me one. And I am I suppose in part I'm in part of English ancestry. But I think that's not really the central point as I've said.

CHRISTOPHER: With difficulty. The research was really quite challenging because one of the things I discovered was that you cannot any longer make any assumption about the ethnic background of an American simply by going by his or her name. That in every case if you want to make an assertion about somebody's ethnicity regardless of their surname you have to check it out.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh sure. One fascinating case that I mentioned in the book there is a gentleman named Nathan Hale Shapiro who in fact is a direct descendent collateral descendant of one of Nathan Hale's brothers. But with the surname Shapiro he obviously is unlikely to be perceived as a WASP. There are people with names like Bingham and Lodge who are half jewish but who because of their surnames are generally tend to be perceived as WASPs.

CHRISTOPHER: I live in Old Lawn, Connecticut.

CHRISTOPHER: Heavy WASP country in the sense that the prevailing behavior patterns are WASP. In strictly ethnic terms, many of the WASPist people in town in fact have no English blood.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, I would say a WASP might well be -- let's say a president of a local bank who went to Princeton or Dartmouth whatever is obviously prosperous, belongs to the country club, does all the proper charities and so forth and may well be of -- I don't know, say, primarily Irish ancestry. Primarily may well be half Italian and half Scottish could be a lot of things but he'll be a WASP because he is perceived as a WASP.

CHRISTOPHER: No. Not at all. No. They come in male and female.

CHRISTOPHER: A certain number of the old line WASPs care very much. There are some of them who feel that there really is a a kind of superiority and they founded the country which is not totally true and that it matters very much being a WASP. Then I think there are a lot of people who care because WASPs serve as a very convenient lightening rod. If you don't like the way things are going the way the country's being run you can blame it on the WASPs.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, yeah. No question. And he's a WASP in every sense. I don't know about his ancestry in detail but I presume it's predominately English. So that he's a WASP even in the most literal sense. But he's certainly a WASP in behavior patterns, upbringing and so forth.

CHRISTOPHER: Related to but that's one of those things that if you go back far enough everybody's related to everybody. I mean I think the relationship is -- probably, for all I know, I may be as closely related to the Queen as he is.

CHRISTOPHER: Because I really did think that in a way the Dukakis nomination and the speech he delivered in Atlanta symbolized what I was talking about which was the fact that the highest echelons of American society aren't now inhabited by a multi ethnic elite. They're no longer dominated or monopolized by the WASPs.

CHRISTOPHER: I can understand that some people may find it uncomfortable to talk about. I think it's worth talking about and important to talk about though because what has happened particularly in the last 20 years in terms of the ethnic makeup of the American elite is enormously encouraging. That it's grounds for great optimism about the future of the country and for that reason I think it's false squeamishness to not to talk about.

CHRISTOPHER: Awfully hard to say. In a concentrated way probably about a bit under two years but since I didn't work on it full time I wasn't able to it actually took me about three years from the time I started till the time it went to the publisher.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes I can. Actually I was working on another book entirely. I had contracted with my publisher to do a book about great WASP families. The kind of book that Stephen Birmingham later did -- "Invisible Aristocracy" or whatever he called it. And as I began to work on that book I discovered that first of all, I wasn't all that fascinated by the "Invisible Aristocracy." and secondly that more and more it became clear to me that the power really didn't lie any longer in those hands. And at a certain point I went to my editor and said you know I don't want to do that book. I want to do a book about the change in the ethnic makeup of the American elite.

CHRISTOPHER: Broke it up in terms of areas of activity -- politics, business, the arts, sports, entertainment, the military. I tried to take the major areas of activity in american life and devote a large chunk to each of them.

CHRISTOPHER: Well that's hard to say. I found all of them honestly fascinating. I guess possibly one of the one's that I found most interesting was sports simply because I came away with a very different feeling about sports than I had had started out with. That it really is a vehicle of mobility, but more than that, social mobility. That it's a way that people can move into the elite. But more than that, it's changed in nature quite a lot since television. And that sports has really became entertainment and with the result of sporting figures have a lot more impact on peoples thinking and on social attitudes now than they used to. And as a result of that, and as a result of the fact that as entertainers they are paid much more than sports figures used to be, there is an interesting change going on. Traditionally people who could do anything else didn't make their living playing games. That was left to the lower orders who couldn't get better jobs. Now with the high salaries in sports you find people from middle class backgrounds and considerable education going into professional sports.

CHRISTOPHER: No. Not that I can think of off hand. There are some that used to be until fairly recently, but I don't think ... Tennis for example was a WASP sport at one time. It sure isn't any more. Polo maybe. Although no there you go Argentineans and people like that are big. I can't think of one off hand that I would qualify as a WASP sport no.

CHRISTOPHER: Varies from area to area. Yeah sure. I mean, for example in basketball, clearly blacks make up the majority of the players now, the majority of these big time players. In hockey it's still very heavily Canadian. Boxing ... there's been a curious ethnic history in boxing. That's the last sport I think where in perhaps you don't get very much middle class participation, which is left pretty much to people in underprivileged backgrounds. You see a lot of Hispanics coming into that now particularly in the lighter weight classes.

CHRISTOPHER: I think this is simplifying a very complicated subject but I think that what basically happened was that the fruits of the G.I. Bill of Rights after World War II really kind of matured them. Because of the G.I. Bill, all sorts of people who prior to World War II did not traditionally get college educations got it. And those people and or their children began to move into positions of real authority. I think of the late '60s and the early '70s.

CHRISTOPHER: I think it did. I think it made an enormous difference. I don't think it was a result that anybody intended. I mean I don't think it was designed as a way of promoting ethnic equality, but that's the effect it had.

CHRISTOPHER: Well it was started at the end of World War II and basically what it did was to enable veterans to go to college largely at government expense. Your tuition and a certain amount of living expense was paid by the government. And that continued with Korean War veterans. I don't think Vietnam veterans got the same kind of lavish treatment that the World War II vet and Korean vets did. What it accomplished was to make it possible for people who otherwise would not have gone to college to go to college. And this had particular importance for some groups of the population. And these were mostly groups of fairly recent immigrant origin. I grew up in a very heavily Italian American community. And when I was a kid the great majority of Italian American youngsters in my hometown did not go to college. By the time the war was over and the G.I. Bill came along they began to. Their children all go to college and the result is that prior to World War II an Italian-American was only a quarter as likely to go through a four college as a WASP. Today the college in the two groups are absolutely identical.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, certainly the Civil Rights Movement -- not only in the obvious way of making some improvement in the opportunities for blacks, but also in an indirect way it created a certain ... I think it inspired Hispanics to be perhaps a bit more aggressive. It also created a certain amount of backlash amongst white ethnics, so called. And that was an unfortunate impact. Another thing that I am persuaded that had impact was the Vietnam war, which I think consciously or unconsciously brought the WASP establishment into greater disesteem [and] made people more suspicious of it than they had been before.

CHRISTOPHER: Most of what I've seen -- and I haven't seen all of them yet because it hasn't been out that long -- a couple of them are very good. One accused me of being too loose in my definition of WASPs. So far the reaction with the exception of that one review seems to be broadly favorable.

CHRISTOPHER: What I hope is that people will think about ... I genuinely do think that there is less ethnic prejudice and a greater degree of acceptance amongst privileged people in this country now successful people than there is amongst underprivileged people. I think if we look at these what I call the elites and try to figure why that's so. Why is there less? What's happened? What's created a situation in which people successful people are more open minded ethnically? That we might get some clues about how we should behave in the future.

CHRISTOPHER: I do.

CHRISTOPHER: That's correct.

CHRISTOPHER: Well it's an old program. As a matter of fact, it will be 75 years old in 1991. And every year the Pulitzer Prize Board, of which I am a Secretary, hands out 14 Journalism awards prizes and six so-called Letters prizes for books and plays. They are very highly esteemed, in journalism, particularly, as I am sure you know.

CHRISTOPHER: The original Joseph Pulitzer was an immigrant. A Hungarian, half Jewish. He came here about the time of the Civil War and managed, starting from nowhere, to become one of the most powerful publishers in the country. He owned a paper called the New York World which was very, very famous in its day. And then subsequently started the St. Louis Post Dispatch which still survives of course and which his family still owns or his decedents still own.

CHRISTOPHER: I felt that I had pretty much gotten out of weekly journalism everything I was going to get out of it. And I also found that while I was editing -- which is for the last 15 years or so -- that I simply didn't have any time or any energy to write, which I wanted to do. And I thought correctly as it turned out that even though the Pulitzer thing and the teaching I do at Columbia is full time it does leave me with enough psychic energy and enough time that I can steal away by working weekends and stuff to do my own writing.

CHRISTOPHER: I think so. I think they ... yeah, I would say so. The journalism prizes may in a sense be even more important because the whole kind of newspaper world, if you will, has been pulled into it and feels now a kind of proprietary sense about the Prizes.

CHRISTOPHER: It's complicated. We get in journalism alone about 1,500 entries a year. It's impossible for any one person to read all of that. It's broken down into 14 different classifications, if you will: foreign news, national news, local news, investigative reporting, etc. For each one of those classifications we name each year a jury of five people -- journalists from all around the country. They read everything in their category. Then they choose three of those entries which they recommend to the special attention of the Pulitzer Prize Board which consists of 16 people, mostly although not quite all are very prominent editors and publishers. And the Board reads certainly all three of the entries proposed by each jury and then normally chooses a prize winner from amongst those three.

CHRISTOPHER: It doesn't have to and on occasion it does not.

CHRISTOPHER: Mainly that people still remember it.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh that was ... that was in fact just before I actually became Secretary. It was in 1981.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes ...

CHRISTOPHER: Who was taking crack or non crack in those days ...?

CHRISTOPHER: But heroin, yeah. It was very detailed and very heart rending story. And it turned out to be totally made up.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, actually the editors of the Post discovered this almost within a matter of 48 hours or less after the Prize was announced. And they then withdrew the entry and the Prize was awarded to someone else. The sort of runner up. What it did I think was to ... it obviously did damage. A lot of people said, "How do we know that some of your other entries aren't made up?" I think that damage has been ... since there's been no repetition of it and since it was detected so rapidly. I think the damage has been largely corrected. But there's not question that there's still some fall out.

CHRISTOPHER: I've got a whole chapter about that in the book. The press and the word press, I include television news and weeklies, dailies, the whole thing. The press was very heavily dominated, not only in ownership and the top editorial and business management prior to World War II. That is no longer the case. If you take a roster of top journalists around the country, around 500 to 600 top journalists -- it's a real ethnic mishmash. I do sort of an approximation of that in the book. It's a complete mixup. Two things have happened: It's become to some extent more ethnic and ethnically diverse. More important, I think it's tended to become devoid of ethnic character. In other words you take a company like Gannett which is the biggest American newspaper chain and it's ownership is so diffused that it has no ethnic character.

CHRISTOPHER: That's one of the oldest lines in the book. Henry Ford was convinced of that and so was Henry Adams. It simply isn't true. There are some of the powerful media that are owned by Jewish families. The New York Times and the Newhouse chain. But there are a number of others that are owned by WASPs. The whole Los Angeles Times company -- the controlling family there is WASP. Dow Jones which owns the Wall Street Journal is owned by a WASP family. First of all, you can't honestly state that any particular ethnic group and longer controls the bulk of the nations most important publications. But more importantly you can't demonstrate that there's any real connection between the ethnicity of publishers and the way their papers handle the news. In many cases it's interesting -- Dow Jones is a good case, and Wall Street Journal is an interesting case in point. The owners are WASP. As it happens right now the Chairman of the Board and the Editor of the Journal are both Jewish.

CHRISTOPHER: Obviously, I was very interested in that and made a very, very careful study and as far as I can determine the answer is no. You can't put your finger on any difference that has occurred or any change in the media. There have been changes in the media but you can't put your finger on any change that you can attribute to ethnicity really. Lou Bocardi of Associated Press, an Italian American -- I discussed this at length with him and he finally said, "Well, maybe it's had the effect ... you have more different sensibilities at work." But even that he was doubtful about. You really can't find a clear cut cause and effect relationship.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. It's not a group that I regard as very important, but in what sometimes is called the old society, not society generally, but the old society, is still I guess predominantly WASP.

CHRISTOPHER: It's people who have been rich for a very long time.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, but they prefer to think of themselves as society.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh yeah. Vanderbilt, Rockefeller maybe, although that's more their just getting there, Roosevelt. I'm trying to think there's some in Philadelphia but they may not be nationally known. But a lot of the nationally known names that are now considered old society were not originally WASP. They are now seen as such. The Mellons for example were originally from Ulster, Northern Ireland which is not big Anglo Saxon country.

CHRISTOPHER: Because I had done my first book for them and they gave me the contract.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, I'm not the only one but I'm one of the last surviving people who writes with a pencil and a yellow pad. I write the first draft in pencil and yellow pad and then I transcribe it on a word processor -- it's a computer alright, but it's a computer made for idiots like me which won't do anything but process copy.

CHRISTOPHER: Hard to say. I guess generally sort of the middle of the day. I'd say from around 10:00 to around 4:00 something like that.

CHRISTOPHER: When I can, yeah. I don't write at home. At various times I've had a little office or a chair in a library or something but I make a point of going somewhere else to write and it's like going to the office. I just find that it works better that way.

CHRISTOPHER: What I normally do is to write a kind of rough draft long hand then I go back and rework that in long hand and then I'll put it through the word processor doing less revising on the word processor. But I try, I'm not the sort of person who does a whole manuscript then goes back and edits it. I really feel more comfortable if I think I've got things right as I go along.

CHRISTOPHER: Basically because I became a Japanese language officer in World War II courtesy of the U.S. Army and I went to Japan a couple of days after the surrender. I was shipped in an became fascinated with the place. And so when I went back to college after the war on the G.I. Bill I majored in Japanese history and I've been interested ever since.

CHRISTOPHER: "Japanese Mind" I wrote -- well it was published in 1983 so I wrote it in 1981-82 and the "Second to None." I wrote in '83-84.

CHRISTOPHER: Is it really true? Have the power elites really been De-WASPed? A lot of people don't think so. And that's partly because in certain areas it's a reasonably recent development. Things like banking and law it's ... law really didn't begin to happen very widely until a decade ago or a little more. Banking -- it's really this decade. So one reason that they wonder if whether it's true or not is that, as I say, it's quite recent. Another is that most people don't look across the whole spectrum of society. They look at their own field and they say but it's probably different elsewhere. So that's the first question. Then the other question is one that we've already talked about which is what is a WASP really. And most people tend to think they know. Then when you ask them to define it they really can't. At least they can't define it in any way that they won't admit is ... doesn't really work when you begin to press them.

CHRISTOPHER: But you see that's where the term WASP is really a misnomer because WASPs -- they are white that much is true so far that may change, but they are not necessarily Anglo Saxon by ancestry at all, nor are they even necessarily Protestant. There are very definite WASPs who are Roman Catholic.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, yeah. I mean sure. I would say that when I was a child in fact, really up till about World War II they ran the country with certain very minor exceptions.

CHRISTOPHER: That was the first place.

CHRISTOPHER: That's the first place it began to happen where the change began. And it still to this day is the place where new ethnic groups generally begin to break through. Well, for example in Boston they began electing Irish Mayors about a century ago. In a lot of other New England communities it came along not too long after that. My own hometown New Haven, Connecticut had been was run by an Irish Political Machine when I was a child and had been for some time. And of course in New York, by the latter part of the last century, Tammany Hall was essentially an Irish American operation.

CHRISTOPHER: I would say so. There were a lot of places -- in the south for example you certainly wouldn't have stood much chance if you weren't a WASP. Many parts of New England that was true.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, sure, you get black elected officials in the south now. I would say that generally in the eastern half of the country there was a time when if you weren't a WASP your political prospects were very dim indeed.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, it was fun. I was talking there about a mythical army platoon which during sort of World War II times ... Hollywood used to love to create these fake army -- mythical army platoons in which people were of vastly different ethnic origin all working and fighting together to save democracy. The point of that list is that I said that could be the list of one of these multi-ethnic World War II platoons. But in fact what it is a list of members of the United States Senate as of 1987 with that enormous ethnic diversity.

CHRISTOPHER: Maybe a little bit, but not radically. I think there are probably policy areas where, out of deference to one or another ethnic group, let me start again. The political structure tends to differ to the ethnic group whose interests are most directly involved in certain foreign policy issues. Greece on the Cyprus issue, Israel on the Israeli-Arab issue and there are others. But I don't think it really overall determines, and I'm not sure that we wind up doing things as a nation that we wouldn't do anyway.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, I suppose it's a generational thing. I was a great fan of John Kennedy's and I thought it was an enormously healthy thing when he was elected President to finally break the tradition that the President had to be a Protestant. He did that simply, I think, by taking advantage of a change in the national mood. And he was obviously -- you know he was every bit as much as of an aristocrat and a preppie as George Bush. The only difference was that he was an Irish American aristocrat. And that I think that probably helped in certain places in the country to make it easier for people to swallow the fact that he was Catholic --the fact that he was so visibly WASPy in manner if you will. So that was an important one.

But one of the ones I take very seriously, I think is enormously important is the rise of Senator Daniel Inoway in the Senate. Because when he first came into the United States, he was first elected to Congress, the notion that a Japanese American could possibly exercise a leadership role in the Congress was out of the question. Inouye is now one of the real Senate insiders so much so that he was considered at one time for Majority Leader very seriously. And that seems to me to symbolize a very important change in American life.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes.

CHRISTOPHER: I think that's true. When you look at both his personal friends and the people he appointed to office you can't really argue that he was. Frank Carluci -- he's an Italian American clearly. Justice Scalia an Italian American. I could go on and on. His chief of protocol at one time was a lady named Lucky Roosevelt which sounds very WASPy but in fact she's a Roosevelt by marriage and she's a Lebanese druse by birth. I don't know I don't think that ethnicity was ...

CHRISTOPHER: That's an interesting point. In may cases I didn't have to because whereas lets say 30, 40 years ago successful people who weren't WASP tended to if not try to conceal it they certainly didn't emphasize it. Now a days people do. I mean nobody any longer worries in the upper ranks of American society American establishment worries about being non WASP and people are very open about what they are.

CHRISTOPHER: All over. It's you know I don't know where to start because often the name changes go way back. I mean people began changing their names in this country in the 18th century. Awful lot of Germans who came here wound up -- their people you know who were named Taylor who were originally Schneider and Blacks who originally Schwartz's. If you take famous people, well the Hoovers were originally Whaler. General Pershing's family was originally named Thershing. General Custer's family was originally names Clisder.

CHRISTOPHER: You know I can't flatly say no.

CHRISTOPHER: Hollywood they don't. That's been an enormous change because up until I would say probably the '60s it was absolutely de rigeur unless you had a WASP name or an ethnically neutral name -- the people who ran the studios made you change it. That's no longer true at all. Nobody bothers to ... People do sometimes their name now for reasons of convenience. By that I mean if you've got a name that's very difficult for people to pronounce or spell people will change for that reason. Or they will change ... actors will change just because they think another name is somehow more appealing or will grab the public, impress the public more favorably. People don't change them for ethnic reasons anymore.

CHRISTOPHER: Well ...

CHRISTOPHER: I think we're beginning to get a little bit of dialing back, maybe from the consequences of Watergate. By that I mean that following Watergate, the press -- and I'm not saying this in a hostile way or critical way -- but the press essentially took up an adversarial role toward the government. They regarded the government with enormous suspicion and distrust and were persuaded that you couldn't put much faith in any public official [or] what any public official said. Investigative journalism got carried to -- I think in some cases -- to rather inordinate extremes and I think in a way that all culminated in the Gary Hart episode. When all of a sudden it turned out that even peoples personal lives were granted any immunity from public scrutiny. I have a sense that there's beginning to be a little bit of hesitation about that. Not that the press is going to be less assiduous in trying to find corruption and evil doing. But that maybe there's a little bit greater that you've got to check out your information a little more carefully.

CHRISTOPHER: No. I mean not particularly, and certainly they aren't turned on by investigative stuff that they feel has been acquired by dubious means. The notion of undercover reporting, of pretending you're not a journalist in order to get a story is not popular with them. I think basically what they are most turned by now a-days is a sort of depth in a story -- a sense that the story has been not only fully reported but that it's been presented to the public in a way that the public can understand, so that it has some context and some meaning. They are very interested in what ... There's actually a category now called explanatory journalism. By which they mean simply taking a subject which is basically pretty complex, sometimes pretty esoteric, and dealing with it in such a way as to make it accessible to the ordinary reader.

CHRISTOPHER: Well let's see ...

CHRISTOPHER: Well there's Russell Baker. He's a columnist for the New York Times. There's Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of the Washington Post. There's David Laventhall, who's president of the Los Angeles Times Company. Claude Sitton who's head of the Raleigh News and Observer. There is Bob Maynard who is the editor of the Oakland Paper, editor and owner, and I think he's the only black owner of a paper outside the black press in the country at this point. There's Charlotte Cychowski who is the Washington bureau, or was, until recently, Washington bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, they've always been, at least in my time there, the Board's always been very, very keen on standards -- standards of excellence and standards of property if you will. I think they've probably grown a bit more demanding in terms of the quality of the of the writing and that's true in all of journalism these days. I think that newspaper writing is getting more attention that it used to. It used to be just slam it out as long as it was intelligible, don't worry about style. I think there's more attention to style in newspaper writing now.

CHRISTOPHER: Oh no question it's had ... I mean, mostly I think on graphics on illustration.

CHRISTOPHER: We've had a proposal that one be established. Whether it will be or not, I can't say. I think the other influence that USA Today has had though is that it's tended to make a lot of other papers reconsider the length of the stories they publish. And that is not, in my judgment, a bad thing at all because there was a tendency in a lot of papers to let the stories run on and on and on and it was a growing tendency.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes.

CHRISTOPHER: No.

CHRISTOPHER: I really can't tell you.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. One of the things that makes my life bearable is that I don't have a vote. So that I'm the spokesman and sort of the administrative chief but I don't have a vote so that nobody can beat on me because they didn't win.

CHRISTOPHER: The reason that I'm hesitating is that nobody ever believes this and I didn't believe it. Before I went there I'd heard wild stories about how much politics there was and log rolling and so forth. And indeed there may well have been in the old days, but by the time I got there was none and I don't, I haven't you know ... and I've watched manfully and there is no log rolling that I'm aware of.

CHRISTOPHER: I think the toughest part of the job is really mediating, if you will, between the juries -- which are the journalists who have brought in for a brief period to do the initial -- and the board, because the board has the final say. It makes the choices and it is under no obligation to honor the juries choices or the juries recommendations. On the other hand the juries work very hard and perform a essential function without which the process really wouldn't work very well. And the juries feel that when they -- understandably when their recommendations are total disregarded, they get upset.

CHRISTOPHER: Juries normally meet at the end of February beginning of March. The board meets at the end of March and prizes are announced then.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah. There will be ...

CHRISTOPHER: Well, in journalism they mostly come flooding in at the very end of the year. Everybody waits till the last possible moment. In books -- we're trying to get them to get the books in earlier because it takes so much time to read them.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes.

CHRISTOPHER: Well, I'm returning to Japan. I think my publisher would probably slit my throat if I said specifically how, but it will be a book that deals with Japanese- American relations.

CHRISTOPHER: About three and one-half years from now because it's going to involve a lot of research, a lot of travel to Japan.

CHRISTOPHER: It was a lot of fun. Thank you.