Q 13

PLAYBOY: If you get a dud audience for your show, what do you do to get it going?

David Horowitz: I have dud audiences all the time. People come to my show after they've waited on line in 95-degree heat to see The Tonight Show. They've been wrung out. Sometimes, you know, Johnny has a fantastic show. They laugh themselves sick, and when they come to my show at eight o'clock at night, they're wiped out. I have people who love my show and still sit there sound asleep. So my producer, Lloyd Thaxton, and I warm the audience up with our Las Vegas lounge act based on consumerism. I mean, we tell jokes. We comment on the day's consumer news. I ask the audience for questions. They ask, "Why do you look different made up from the way you look normally? You look so much better without make-up on." And I say, "Well, the reason for that is our make-up guy," and I bring him out and introduce him. "Our make-up guy works on this show only on Thursday nights." "Where is he the rest of the week?" "Over at Forest Lawn."

Q 14

PLAYBOY: What recent product would make your all-time joke list?

David Horowitz: The diaper bell that detects wetness in a baby's diaper. Can you imagine a kid growing up with this? This is Pavlov again. Every time the kid pees as an infant, the alarm goes off. So now he grows up and doesn't hear the alarm. He absolutely freaks out; he thinks there's something wrong with him. He has to have a bell in his pants in order to go to the john. I mean, it's ridiculous. And yet people buy this crap. Stuff like this is sent to me all the time.

Q 15

PLAYBOY: What would you like to have told P. T. Barnum?

David Horowitz: That he was underestimating mankind when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute." You can break the minute down into infinitesimal measurements, and in each little measurement there's a sucker born. People who get ripped off have given a little of their self-respect away. It's almost like losing at dice or roulette. When you lose, you feel like a sucker. The real basis of consumer reporting is trying to keep people's self-respect intact. The reasons viewers like to watch shows such as 60 Minutes or 20/20 or Nightline is that they love to see how people get taken and how much of their self-respect is lost--and they like to see the heroes, the reporters, come back and restore it and punish the guilty.

Q 16

PLAYBOY: Tell us about a memorable sales tactic that really drove you up the wall.

David Horowitz: We tested a floor detergent, and it flunked. So, the guy from the manufacturing company got on the phone to me, and he was really pissed. I mean, he was pissed! He said, "You so-and-so, want to know something? You didn't use the right formula for dirt." And I said, "You're putting me on. The right formula for dirt? What is dirt?" He said, "Our formula for dirt is what you would find behind a refrigerator that hasn't been moved for five years. You know, we use a little salad oil, some hair, some dust. That's our formula for dirt." So I said to the guy, "You mean to say that America should have a formula for dirt? That your product will work if everyone has the same formula for dirt?" Well, the guy got huffy, hung up the phone, didn't talk to me for five years and went around bad-mouthing me in the advertising industry.

Q 17

PLAYBOY: Do you ever fear for your safety?

David Horowitz: Not really. I don't draw kooks or nuts, though some corporation may say, "Hey, let's take care of this guy; let's set him up." When we did an exposé a while back, one of the insiders in that company, who was our Deep Throat, called our office and said that the head of his company was going to get two private detectives "to shadow you to try to dig up some dirt on you." I said, "What kind of dirt do they want to dig up?" "Well, to find out whether you're a homosexual." I said, "Oh, well, there are a lot of homosexuals out there. That doesn't make it bad." "Or to find out whether you're screwing around with another woman, cheating on your wife. Or to find out if you're into drugs or if you steal or if you're on the take--to discredit you." I said, "Hey, go to it. I'll even give them my tax returns, which are audited every year. You can have anything you want." That was it.

Q 18

PLAYBOY: Do you have any advice for Ralph Nader?

David Horowitz: Aside from getting a different colored suit and tie? I respect Nader. He was my hero when he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed. Some of his groups now, such as Public Citizen, and his health-research group in Washington, are doing a fantastic job, But Nader has been undercut by all those Washington political animals. Now he's a consumer advocate in search of a cause. And I wish he would loosen up a little bit and go back to being the Ralph Nader and do the kind of stuff that he did as a muckraker 15 years ago. He's become like a grasshopper, jumping from issue to issue to issue rather than really getting into something and fighting for it.

Q 19

PLAYBOY: You were a Vietnam correspondent. Did we get ripped off in Vietnam?

David Horowitz: Yes. I went over to Vietnam at the age of 26, wanting to see what war was like. I was a student of history and of all the great reporters who came out of war scenes. I went over there as a hawk and came back as the quintessential dove, because I saw the lies. I saw us violating the 1954 Geneva Accords. I saw military advisors actually fighting. I arrived there shortly after Diem was assassinated, and I saw the beginning of the end. I saw a country that really needed a military dictatorship in order to survive; that needed what the North Vietnamese were doing in North Vietnam. After Diem was assassinated, it was kind of like Sodom and Gomorrah. There was nothing on which to center the culture. There was no government, there was no morality, just a hodgepodge of people all trying to survive. And Saigon was an isolated island compared with the rest of Vietnam. I'm not saying this on the side of the Viet Cong, because the Viet Cong were not fun people to deal with. That was the other side of it. But what I saw over there was a part of history that we should not have been involved in.

Q 20

PLAYBOY: If you could be a Disney character for a day, which one would you be?

David Horowitz: I really like Donald Duck. Donald has a personality. I mean, he gets emotional [quacks a little], he gets upset. Donald Duck is basically a real honest guy, a sweet guy, a very trusting guy who falls into all these problems because he's trying to do something positive. Some of the other Disney characters, such as Pluto, have the personality of a schlub. But Donald's a mensch.