Although Mr. Kissinger said it ever so carefully in his famous interview, Mr. Buckley begins, "his words were, 'I am not saying that there's no circumstance where we would not use force, but it is one thing to use it in the case of a dispute over price; it's another where there's some actual strangulation of the industrialized world.'

In a show taped just a few weeks after Squeaky Fromme's attempt on Gerald Ford's life, WFB engages his guest--who had prosecuted Charles Manson and his "family" for the murders of Sharon Tate et al. six years earlier--in an absorbing exploration of the Manson phenomenon: to what extent it grew out of the Sixties culture; whether executing Manson might have put an end to his cult; how Manson resembles and differs from Hitler.

Mr. Schlesinger had served in a variety of positions in the Nixon Administration, remaining in the last of those after Mr. Nixon succumbed to Watergate. The discussion here begins with South Vietnam, which had just fallen to the Communists, and moves through the Persian Gulf and Soviet power generally, to broader questions such as the difficulties of foreign policy in a democracy.

The author of A Ford, Not a Lincoln is in a state of cheerful despair about the future of democracy in America. A wide-ranging discussion of the way our candidates are chosen nowadays and of the press's failure to hold them accountable.