A talk with Tutu.

The interview this month with Archbishop Desmond Tutu is dear to me because my political awareness dates back to the movement to end apartheid.

When I was in college, I threw myself into the campus divestiture campaign--an effort to pressure universities to sell their stocks in companies that were doing business with the racist government of South Africa. I spent the better part of my four years attending meetings, writing leaflets, putting up posters, and organizing rallies.

We occasionally invited representatives of the African National Congress (ANC) to speak at our demonstrations. One evening, we asked a man from the ANC to go out to a bar with us. We ordered a pitcher of beer and started to pour him a glass, but he refused it. "I have vowed not to have a drop of liquor until liberation day," he said.

He was thirsty for a long time. That was twenty years ago, and I was young and impatient. It was hard for me to glimpse the long-term view that inspired people like Nelson Mandela and Steven Biko and thousands of other men and women to make huge sacrifices for freedom.

I remember tears welling up in my eyes that day in 1990 when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. I remember rejoicing as he embraced Winnie Mandela. And I remember Desmond Tutu hopping around in a jubilant dance.

Since that day, a lot has changed. Apartheid is over. Nelson Mandela is stepping down as president after successfully serving out his term. Winnie Mandela is now Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and Desmond Tutu is head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In that capacity, he stands in judgment over her for her role in some grotesque human-rights abuses, which allegedly included nine murders.

The Winnie Madikizela-Mandela scandal is an embarrassment not only to the ANC but also to those in this country who idealized her. This hero worship continued even after her 1989 conviction for kidnapping Stompie Seipei, the fourteen-year-old who was murdered by one of her goons. To defend--even exalt--someone after such damning evidence about her comes to light is disturbing, to say the least.

I wasn't impressed with Madikizela-Mandela during her hearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From the reports I read, she basically denied everything and made a mere gesture of apology only after Tutu begged her.

"Happy the age that needs no hero," Bertolt Brecht is reported to have said. That certainly applies in the case of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

We sent Zia Jaffrey, who interviewed Wole Soyinka in our August issue, to South Africa to talk with Tutu. She was there for the entire Madikizela-Mandela hearing, and she caught up with Tutu the day after it ended. I hope you enjoy her interview with him, which begins on page 18.

I had the indistinct pleasure of debating Dinesh D'Souza on WGN radio in December about his latest book, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. D'Souza began his career on William Buckley's farm club, The Dartmouth Review. D'Souza has been a darling of the right ever since, with such books as Illiberal Education and End of Racism. In person, D'Souza was a pleasant enough fellow, but he was deeply in the grip of his own brand of hero worship.

From the posh headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute, he has set upon the task of demonstrating that Reagan, far from being a passive President, was the prime mover behind the major policies of his Administration (with the convenient exception of Iran-contra). And he labors to turn almost every Reagan blemish into a beauty mark, almost every gaffe into a clever gambit.

"He was an actor, and he knew how to play the part of Shakespeare's fool," D'Souza writes. But was Reagan really Shakespeare's fool, or just a plain fool, when he said, "We begin bombing Russia in five minutes"?

D'Souza insisted on the radio that his book is not an exercise in hagiography. But if it's not, I don't know what is.

In 1980, D'Souza writes, "the nation's woes called for nothing less than a man who could turn the tide of history and renew the American spirit. In California, there was such a man." Drum roll, please.

D'Souza minimizes Reagan's attack on the safety net, provides just two sentences on his disregard for the environment, and says that "the Iran-contra scandal may become a footnote that future generations will not even remember."

And in a book of 292 pages, he gives just two paragraphs to El Salvador, where the Reagan Administration trained and financed death squads that raped and murdered American nuns and littered El Salvador's roads with mutilated corpses on a daily basis. D'Souza gives more space to Reagan's jelly-bean habit. In so doing, he follows the first rule of hero worship: Don't look too closely at your idol.