Bye-bye, Bill Clinton. The index of the legacy, in alphabetical order, will cover Arkansas, bimbo eruptions, boxers or briefs, bridge to the 21st century, the contract with America, Dick Morris, don’t ask don’t tell, ending welfare as we know it, the era of big government is over, filegate, free trade, George Stephanopolous, Haiti, Hillary’s health care, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, impeachment, it takes a village, Janet Reno, Ken Star, Kosovo, the Lincoln bedroom…

Linda Tripp, the man from hope, monicagate, NAFTA, NASDAQ, national dialogue on race, new economy, northern Ireland, oral sex is not sex, the president is not irrelevant, Rwanda, socks, trade with China, travelgate, triangulation, vast right-wing conspiracy, Vince Foster, Whitewater, who lost Russia, and Zoe Baird. Bill Clinton is history, depending on what the meaning of “is” is.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jack Beatty, senior editor, Atlantic Monthly

Randall Kennedy, Professor of Law at Harvard University

Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Boston University

James Fallows, senior political correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly

and Tish Durkin, political writer for the New York Observer.

The Ken Burns jazz series for PBS is the biggest promotion that America’s native music has ever had. And still the knock from musicians is that it doesn’t swing. Burns has taken the nightlife music of New Orleans 100 years ago and set it in a video museum-as if to say: (a) it’s great and (b) it’s over-or as if the spirit of improvisation and rebellion in the music could have died around 1960. Nobody knocks the musical giants, especially Armstrong and Ellington, that Ken Burns lionizes all over again. And nobody knocks Burns way of putting still pictures and narration together.

Yet lots of players and fans want to contend with the eminence behind Ken Burns, the trumpet star and cocky voluble commentator Wynton Marsalis. It’s Wynton’s ax that this series is grinding: the idea that America’s classical music is now a virtually closed, canonical art form from our past. We’re arguing with Ken Burns’ Jazz.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Gary Burton, President Berklee College of Music and vibraphone star since he played with Miles Davis in the 50’s and Billy Pierce, tenor saxophone player from the Berklee College of Music.

George W Bush’s polarizing pick for Attorney General takes the hot seat today at Senate confirmation hearings that could stretch beyond this weekend’s inauguration. It promises to be a particularly excruciating version of “This is Your Life”, replete with witnesses from Ashcroft’s political past and a chorus of concerned citizens on the streets. John Ashcroft’s 25-year career includes two terms as Missouri’s Attorney General, two terms as Governor, and one term as Senator before he lost the seat to the deceased Democrat Mel Carnahan last fall.

There is little that is not known about Ashcroft’s staunchly conservative stands on issues like abortion and the death penalty, or his Senate reputation for sabotaging Clinton appointees. But did you know that he composes and performs gospel tunes in his spare time? Or that his wife teaches law at the all-black Howard University? Being John Ashcroft is here.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jon Sawyer, Washington Bureau Chief for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Harriet Woods, former Lieutenant Governor from Missouri, Rich McLure, was Governor Ashcroft’s chief of staff 1985-1992

Saul Bellow is on every critic’s top ten list. John Updike has called him our best portraitist, he is a mentor to the British writer, Martin Amis, and his Chicago has become as familiar as Joyce’s Dublin. He has received three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1976, the Nobel Prize for Literature. You could read Bellow’s new novel “Ravelstein” for clues about his real life friendship with Allan Bloom, the controversial and flamboyant author of the 1992 bestseller, “The Closing of the American Mind.”

You could also read it as a Saul Bellow meditation on friendship, writing and dying. Abe Ravelstein is a larger than life philosopher at the University of Chicago, who chain smokes, lives extravagantly, and is as much of a gossip as he is an intellectual. Before Abe dies, he asks his friend, Chick, to write his biography. Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein,” on this Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Saul Bellow

What’s indisputably great about this new economy is that so many of us can buy into speed, comfort, opportunity and deals that we hadn’t imagined ten years ago. What’s not so great, as Robert Reich observes, is that we’re not just consumers and investors. We’re also workers-that is, producers, at tremendous risk from competition; and we’re family, friends and neighbors whose connected private time seems to have disappeared.

This is one of the dilemmas that Robert Reich lived as a husband and a parent before he quit Bill Clinton’s Cabinet. In his take on “The Future of Success,” this is the crack: to be optimistic about this hyper-productive economy is to be pessimistic about our sanity as stressed-out players in a hyper-competitive society. The downturn to worry about isn’t a recession, Reich would tell you. It’s our weakening confidence in the social value of equality, stability, loyalty. Robert Reich is this hour, on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Reich, author of “The Future of Success”

Tito Puente was the real-life Mambo King when Latin jazzy dance rhythms and the three-and-two pulse of Afro-Cuban music first took over New York. It was the 1950s when Americans went cha-cha-cha crazy, preferably in spiky heels and shiny ducks-ass haircuts, when the Palladium dance hall at 53d Street and Broadway in Manhattan went all-mambo and the young timbale drummer Tito Puente actually had to fight it out for the royal crown against bandleader Perez Prado and his hit-parade singles like “It’s Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom Time.”

Fifty years later, and after his death last May at 77, Tito Puente is remembered not just for his own many hits but for his confident, virtually classical personification of a musical movement called salsa now and still getting stronger: amazingly energetic music that works for dancers and jazz improvisers, pop singers and record companies, too. The life and legacy of Tito Puente are this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Dave Valentin, jazz flutist and former music director for “The Golden Latin Jazz All Stars,” a former group of Tito Puente’s.jazz flutist and former music director for “The Golden Latin Jazz All Stars,” a former group of Tito Puente’s. Jim Payne, percussionist and co-author of “Tito Puente’s Drumming with the Mambo King.”

George W. Bush is the country’s first MBA president. He’s an HBS guy; that’s the Harvard Business School where they say if it weren’t for the H it would be BS. That’s where they teach you that life is a series of case studies, about finance and production and managing for change. Dubya call himself a hands off manager and a delegator. He’s not a details guy which is why he hired Dick Cheney. Just give him the executive summary and schedule short meetings around his daily workout and then his nap.

Along with him will surely come yet another trendy round of leadership theory, modeled on the first CEO. Except it wasn’t so long ago when we were blaming those case study whiz kids for what was wrong with American business. They were too short sighted, too result-oriented, and ultimately wrong about where the country was headed. The George W. Bush case study, of a business school manager, as president is on this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alan Webber and William C. Taylor Founding Editors, FastCompany

Nancy Koehn, from Harvard Business School

Aristotle was the best ad man/wrote the most persuasive copy for living an ethical life. Happiness, he believed, is the driving force in humans and the only way to achieve it is to live a good and virtuous life. Athenians felt they had to be do-gooders to attain that most sought after state of bliss. Freud would say Aristotle overlooked one important fact: humans are always and everywhere causing themselves misery. Traumatized people often keep dreaming about their traumas, severely repressed people are susceptible to all sorts of physical ailments, and we’re all at the mercy of perverse fantasies we’re not even aware of.

It’s not living the ethical life that’ll make us happy, but lying on the couch talking to a shrink. The writer with a foot in both camps, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear, says they’ve both got it wrong. Psychoanalyzing happiness is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jonathan Lear, author of “Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life.”

Kosovo syndrome is the name for illnesses contracted by NATO troops after the 1999 Balkans bombing campaign. Ten tons of uranium-tipped NATO and U.S. weapons litter the landscape in Kosovo and Serbia, leaking radiation that’s being blamed for a growing number of cancer deaths among European peacekeepers. It sounds like Gulf War syndrome, the mysterious affliction American veterans say they picked up during Desert Storm ten years ago.

As in the Gulf War case, the U.S. government denies the link between exposure to weapons in the field and the lingering illnesses that soldiers are reporting now. And the U.S. media have been kissing off the story that’s page one all over Europe. “No body bags” has been the political promise of U.S. high-tech warfare. The score of NATO combat deaths in Kosovo was supposed to have been zero. But war can still be hell, even months after its over. The Kosovo syndrome is on this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Sylvia Poggioli, NPR European correspondent

Scott Peterson, writer

Barry Posen, Professor of Political Science at MIT

Filmmaker Julian Schnabel was a star of the go-go 80’s art world in New York, known for his cracked plates and his mega collage. He’s still seen as a kind of poster boy for the excesses of the 1980’s. He lives in a perfume factory in Manhattan, he casts his glam friends in his films and may just show up for an interview wearing a dress. “People don’t know what it is to be an artist in society,” Schnabel likes to say.

His first film about the celebrity artist Jean Michel Basquiat who died of a heroin overdose at age 27 was a variation on that theme. So is “Before Night Falls,” his new film about the Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas. Arenas was jailed and fled from Cuba because he was homosexual and deemed a subversive writer. Reinaldo Arenas “speaks for many” Julian Schnabel says, “it’s an outrageous voice full of humour that has turned suffering into great beauty.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Julian Schnabel