CNN Moderator: Good evening, we'll begin our Cold War interactive chat with Daniel Schorr now. We'll start with our first question from our guests.

Chat Participant: Since the end of the Cold War, we have seen so many civil "unrests" and "national" conflicts arise in many countries. This seems to be a trend that is growing. What do we have to look forward to in this area in the future?

Daniel Schorr: I am afraid so, because the Cold War, however bad it was in many respects, had one quality, and that is there were two great superpowers, and each of those superpowers was able to keep control of a vast part of the world. With the end of the Cold War and the death of the whole communist system, what has happened in Europe at least is that countries that were under the control of the Soviet Union are now going back to fighting their national, ethnic and religious wars, and that is what we are seeing today in the Balkans, and we are likely to see more of it.

Chat Participant: Based upon Mr. Schorr's experience, are there any other Cold War events which he feels are comparable to the present Serbian situation?

Daniel Schorr: Well, no, what we have here is a situation that is totally a part of the new world that we now live in. We can compare it in some ways to the revolt of people of Chechnya, which is a part of Russia, fighting for its own identity in much the same way as the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Chat Participant: I would like to know if the Cold War was good or bad for the U.S. economy. I believe that war is the backbone of the American economy, and thus the need for conflicts ongoing to keep that economy going. Would you like to comment on this?

Daniel Schorr: I don't think that the Cold War was a deliberately staged thing in order to help the economy. During the Cold War we managed to have a couple of severe recessions. It is true that certain parts of our economy, aviation and defense industry in general, benefited a great deal from the Cold War but often at the expense of other American interests.

Chat Participant: Why do you think the Soviet military allowed Mr. Gorbachev to carry through with his reforms?

Daniel Schorr: By the time that Gorbachev began to carry out its reforms, the Soviet military no longer had either the leadership or the resources to stand up to Gorbachev. And the fact that Germany reunified itself left a large part of the Soviet army stranded in East Germany. In the end West Germany had to pay to get them home to the Soviet Union and even paid for housing for them. An army in such shape could not stand up to a political leader like Gorbachev.

Chat Participant: Do you think communism was worth fighting as American citizens during the Cold War? After all, unlike Nazism, which happened once in history and was contained, communism spread from country to country. And do you think the Academy Awards guests were right to ignore honoring the man who turned communists in back in the '50s?

Daniel Schorr: I'll answer in two part. Yes, the Cold War was worth fighting. Had it not been fought, the Soviet Union would have marched westward into countries like Italy, Germany and even France, which had a strong communist movement backed by the Soviets. It was not possible for the U.S. and its allies to do anything other than stand up to the threat of the spread of communism. As to your second question, I lived in those times in the 1930s and 1940s and it is very easy today to condemn someone who in those days named communists. I only want to say that I knew a couple of people who did the same thing, and it was a very, very complicated matter.

Chat Participant: Is the world more or less stable following the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Daniel Schorr: In some ways, the world is less stable than it was before. As somebody said to me in Moscow when I was stationed there, "One thing about a police state, it's well policed." We had hope that with the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism that all of Eastern Europe and eventually China would simply embrace democracy and the free market. We failed to realize that it doesn't happen overnight. And the journey to get there can be very, very painful.

CNN Moderator: What do you think is the future of the remaining self-described communist nations, such as China, North Korea and Cuba?

Daniel Schorr: Let me start at the Cuba end. The regime in Cuba is self-limited by the age of Castro. I don't think that Castroism can survive in Cuba without Castro. I think we express much too much alarm about a little island which is of no earthly threat to us. China is to me a great unknown. China is trying, the Chinese regime is trying, to make a leap into the free market without making a leap into political democracy. That has never been tried before and I'm not sure it will work.

Chat Participant: Could the current events in Yugoslavia result in a change in the Russian leadership that would restart the Cold War?

Daniel Schorr: No, I don't think so. The Russians are playing the Kosovo affair very carefully. That is to say that they express sympathy and rhetorical support for the Serbians, introduced a resolution into the United Nations Security Council which it soundly defeated 12-3 but it enables President Yeltsin to say that he is really doing his best for the Serbs. What he has made clear he will not do is send military support.

CNN Moderator: What do you see happening in post-Yeltsin Russia?

Daniel Schorr: Post-Yeltsin Russia is also a great unknown. At the moment, Russia is going down the drain so rapidly, that I can hardly conceive of something other than total collapse with or without Yeltsin.

Chat Participant: Since the reunification of East and West Germany, East Germany has seemed to be a heavy burden on West Germany's economy. Has that situation improved or does it seem to be worsening?

Daniel Schorr: The situation is improving very slowly, but it is still, as you suggest in your question, very, very bad. The cost of bailing out East Germany is a tremendous strain on the German taxpayers. And Germany is faced itself with something like, I won't say a crisis, but it is faced with a great deal of economic difficulty. The expectation of East Germany simply becoming like West Germany if you put in enough money has not worked out. It takes time.

Chat Participant: How do you think the addition of Eastern European countries such as Hungary and Poland into NATO will affect Russia? Will it increase the feeling of Western pressure and give the hard-right nationalists more ammunition?

Daniel Schorr: Well, it won't give the nationalists much more ammunition since the Russian government has been staunchly against the enlargement of NATO. I think they'll manage to absorb that OK, but if any further countries are included in NATO, especially the Baltic states or Ukraine, then I think there will be real trouble.

Chat Participant: Having experienced many crises firsthand, what is the potential of this one [in Kosovo] to become a world conflict?

Daniel Schorr: It has very little potential of becoming a world conflict. It does have a great deal of potential of becoming a terrible regional conflict, which could perhaps spread as far as Turkey, but I don't think any further.

Chat Participant: Is there a chance that China could be our "Soviet Union" of the 21st century?

Daniel Schorr: No, I don't think so, because history doesn't really quite repeat itself in the same way. China is today far ahead of where the Soviet Union was economically. China can avoid repeating some of the Soviets' mistakes.

CNN Moderator: Does the current political landscape in Eastern Europe surprise you?

Daniel Schorr: What only surprises me about the current political landscape in Eastern Europe is how quickly some of these countries have adapted themselves to a new system. Poland and the Czech Republic are simply amazing.

Chat Participant: How instrumental was free radio in the collapse of the U.S.S.R., and do you think it will help to alter the thoughts of the Serbians?

Daniel Schorr: I think that free radio, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Liberty, played a small but significant role. I think that a much greater role was played by television. I think for example that the collapse of East Germany was directly related to the fact that everybody in East Germany was looking at West Berlin television.

Chat Participant: Why have smaller Soviet satellite nations been able to adapt whereas Russia has not?

Daniel Schorr: You are asking for a long history lesson! Russia leaped basically from feudalism to communism with nothing in between. When communism collapsed they didn't have the know-how to enter into the Western world. The East European countries, most of them had had some pre-communist experience with capitalism and democracy and thus were able to make the transition much faster.

Chat Participant: America's turn to the right followed the end of the Cold War. Do you think Reagan's "victory" over communism has been digested by the American public as a triumph over domestic liberalism?

Daniel Schorr: Well, yes, I think so. It certainly is true that liberalism is pretty well dead in this country trying to revive itself under the progressive and the new center. Reagan did seem to embody a general American sense of opposition to what was happening in the Soviet Union. In that respect, he managed to make himself quite popular.

Chat Participant: Was the end of the Cold War a vindication of free-market capitalism or of democracy?

Daniel Schorr: The end of the Cold War was less a vindication of free-market capitalism than it was a demonstration of a system that was simply corrupt and sick on the inside and couldn't last anyway. It was not that we won, but that they lost.

Chat Participant: NATO was a regional organization to protect its members from Warsaw Pact aggression. Now it seems to be directed at isolating Russia. With actions such as the bombing of Yugoslavia, isn't it putting Russia in a difficult position to respond?

Daniel Schorr: I think it is not true that NATO is trying to isolate Russia. I think that it is a fear that Russia expresses, but I think that it is unjustified. In fact, if anything, NATO, including the United States, has been reaching out to Russia for partnership.

Chat Participant: Do you believe that Russia is supplying the Serbians in a behind-the-scenes effort?

Daniel Schorr: I think as I said before, that the Russians are grandstanding as friends of the Serbians but without doing anything serious that would cost them American loans and American support.

Chat Participant: Could communism return to its former glory on the world stage, or have nations learned the price of "utopia"?

Daniel Schorr: I think communism is dead forever. I don't know anybody, even communists, alive today who believe that communism could be resurrected. I think a right-wing reaction is much more likely to come than a left-wing reaction.

Chat Participant: Wasn't the collapse of the Soviet Union really an economic failure rather than a change of political and ideological attitudes?

Daniel Schorr: It was fundamentally an economic failure -- and the ideology and politics of it simply followed behind.

Chat Participant: Do you think NATO will quietly replace the U.N. as the world's peacekeeping instrument? Perhaps for all practical purposes replacing the U.N. altogether?

Daniel Schorr: That's an interesting question. Certainly, in the Kosovo affair, NATO has moved without seeking the support of the United Nations Security Council. It is clear that with a Russian and Chinese veto in the Security Council that NATO will more and more have to move bypassing the U.N.

Chat Participant: What in your opinion would the Nixon administration's reaction have been to the situation in Kosovo? Would other presidents have had a different reaction than the Clinton administration?

Daniel Schorr: That is really terribly hard to imagine, to try to put Nixon into this situation. I suspect that Nixon would not be doing much different than President Clinton is doing today. Indeed, and I'm only guessing, this is really so hard, I would not have been surprised for example if Nixon had sent not only airplanes, but ground troops. Nixon was one for doing the job completely all at one time.

Chat Participant: Will worldwide television players such as CNN keep another Cold War from happening?

Daniel Schorr: No, I don't think so. In some ways, the CNN effect helps to bring on troubles, because it doesn't give political leaders time to think before they have to react to what people are seeing on the screen.

Chat Participant: Could the Internet serve as the new tool for international understanding?

Daniel Schorr: I have always believed that improving means of communication does not in itself improve what we communicate. I think that the Internet could be just as good at spreading misunderstanding as spreading understanding.

Chat Participant: Do you think that, particularly after 1960, the foreign policies espoused by the Soviet Union and the United States were morally equivalent?

Daniel Schorr: No, nobody believes that. I lived in the Soviet Union for 2 1/2 years -- and left the Soviet Union with a most profound feeling of how unequivalent our systems were.

CNN Moderator: You had first-hand experience with several Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev. Can you give us an example of what they were like?

Daniel Schorr: Once again, we don't have the time to tell you all I could tell you about my friend Nikita Khrushchev. He was an earthy, funny, coarse, intelligent guy who loved to talked to foreign correspondents and bait them. I'll have to stop there, because otherwise, we'd be another two hours.

Chat Participant: Mr. Schorr: Do you agree that Reagan's politics brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1984, and only the sudden deaths of the Soviet hard-liners (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko) saved us?

Daniel Schorr: No, I believe we were never really at the brink of nuclear war, certainly not in 1984. We were supposed to have been [at the brink] at the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but in retrospect, I don't believe Kennedy or Khrushchev was going to go into nuclear war.

Chat Participant: Is there any similarity between the amazing resurgence of the economies of the defeated countries in the post-World War II world -- Japan, West Germany -- and the resurgence of the economies of the defeated Cold War countries -- Poland, the Czech Republic?

Daniel Schorr: I hadn't given that a lot of thought. Let me think. There may very well be some similarities in the sense that in Western Europe all they needed was somebody to prime the pump as we did with the Marshall Plan, and they simply went back to being what they were before the war. In these countries you mention now, especially on the Pacific Rim, it is less a reversion to what they were before the war, than in many cases a totally new phenomenon.

Chat Participant: Looking back in time, how would you now characterize your role in the Watergate situation?

Daniel Schorr: I'd like to claim a large role, but I can't. There were reporters like Woodward and Bernstein who did a much better job than I did of covering Watergate. What I could contribute or CBS could contribute was to turn a newspaper story into a television story which meant that millions more people learned about it.

Chat Participant: How did being on Nixon's "enemies list" change your life (if at all)?

Daniel Schorr: It changed my life a great deal. It increased my lecture fee, got me invited to lots of very nice dinners. It was so wonderful that one of my colleagues that I will not mention, but a very important man at CBS, said, "Why you, Schorr? Why couldn't it have been me on the enemy's list?"

Chat Participant: Having covered and confronted a large spectrum of events, what do you consider to be the most significant?

Daniel Schorr: There were two. One foreign, one domestic. One was covering Moscow at a time when the country was coming out from under the blanket of Stalinism and my arranging a first-ever television interview with Nikita Khrushchev. And domestically it would have been Watergate plus the investigation of the CIA that I like to call the son of Watergate.

Chat Participant: Given the current state of our seemingly more corporately controlled media, could a story on the scale of Watergate manage to break today?

Daniel Schorr: Only if it had a sex angle to it.

Chat Participant: How will President Clinton be remembered for his handling of international affairs?

Daniel Schorr: I tell you, I hate trying to look forward and then look back from a position I never will be 50 years from now. It's very difficult to put yourself that far ahead. I think that he will get sort of a barely passing grade. A president, where he realized what he had to do, did it, but was never fully engaged in foreign policy.

Chat Participant: Seeing that the catalyst for World War I was the play of alliances, with Russia coming to the aid of the Balkan states, what is the possibility that the current situation in Yugoslavia could escalate with the Russians again aiding there neighbors in the Balkans?

Daniel Schorr: That's not the way I remember the war. The first World War was when Germany and Austria plunged into war. It is too easy to say the trigger event of World War I was the assassination of the arch duke in Sarajevo. The first World War was going to happen anyway, and there would have been some trigger, if not Sarajevo, it would have been something else. World War II started with the German invasion of Poland.

Chat Participant: Looking back over history are we better off now than during the Cold War?

Daniel Schorr: Kind of depends who "we" is. We are as well off as we were, but certainly the Soviets are a lot better off than they were.

Chat Participant: Which country/world leader, in your opinion, has had the greatest influence on history during the last half of the 20th century? Why?

Daniel Schorr: Obviously, the United States, and especially now, as the only superpower left. The country that Secretary Albright calls the indispensable nation. And if I had to pick one leader, I would pick Franklin Roosevelt, who had to lead the people, take the U.S. into a war, after a terrible depression.

Chat Participant: Might China possibly attempt to take Taiwan or make other attempts to take Western interests?

Daniel Schorr: I think that China at the moment will not try to take Taiwan by force. However they have made it very clear that if anything is done to change the status of Taiwan that they might use force. As long as we can keep the situation frozen as it is now, I don't think there will be any possible effort to take Taiwan.

CNN Moderator: We have time for one more question.

Chat Participant: Can and should the U.S. serve as world police?

Daniel Schorr: Can, maybe. Should? There is no other way. A friend of mine in the Brookings Institution, Richard Haass, wrote a book titled "The Reluctant Sheriff." I thought that was a pretty good description of our situation. We would rather not be, but conditions force us to be the world's sheriff.

CNN Moderator: Do you have any final remarks for us?

Daniel Schorr: No, I'm talked out, but thanks for having me. Great pleasure. You certainly managed to slow me down!