Hot Buttons: Talk show topics

DAVID ROCKEFELLER

David Rockefeller, at age 87, has become the first in three generations of Rockefellers to publish an autobiography.

"Memoirs," an account of Rockefeller's life at the busy intersection of global banking, family business and unofficial diplomacy, is published by Random House.

The New York Times says Rockefeller lays out his conflicts with his older brothers, his insecurities as a child, his shortcomings as a father, his battles over art and real estate and his career at Chase Manhattan Bank, now part of J.P. Morgan Chase.

One impulse behind the memoir was Rockefeller's desire to show he had worked for his place in the world and not simply inherited it.

He recounts how he labored to earn his doctorate in economics, spending a winter marooned at the family's opulent Tarrytown estate to work on his dissertation. He writes of being enlisted as a private in the Army in 1942 and surviving the rigors of basic training and how hard he worked making Chase an international bank.

-- Is it a big deal that Rockefeller was cooped up in his mansion writing a dissertation when other graduate students have to sling hash as well?

-- Is too little expected of the rich?

SNIPER CHANGES LIFE

Much in the Washington area resembles a war zone, not as acute as Bosnia streets under sniper fire during the war, but certainly beginning to have the same sense of anxiety, United Press International reports.

For instance, one of the busiest commuter routes from Maryland to Washington, Connecticut Avenue, was held up for hours as heavily armed police searched for a sniper, car by car.

They made people get out of cars under gunpoint, warily checking trunks and backseats after bus driver Conrad Johnson was shot, the 10th person to be killed and 13th shot overall by the so-called serial sniper.

Some experts say blocking traffic and car searches after a shooting are long shots because before police can set them up, the sniper can vanish.

-- Are the gridlock and armed searches adding to the public's feeling of living in a war zone?

-- Could an estimated 400 FBI agents, 200 police detectives and some 1,000 uniformed personnel under the direction of the sniper task force be too much to coordinate?

(Thanks to UPI's Nicholas M. Horrock and Adrianna Borkowski)

ANDY ROONEY ON WOMEN

CBS commentator for "60 Minutes" Andy Rooney caught fire this month for saying to sportscaster Boomer Esaison: "The only thing that really bugs me about television's (football) coverage is those damn women they have down on the sidelines who don't know what the hell they're talking about," The New York Observer reports.

"I mean, I'm not a sexist person, but a woman has no business being down there trying to make some comment about a football game," Rooney says.

Don Hewitt, "60 Minutes" executive producer, suggested Rooney do a piece on it for the show. So he did.

"I think women have found it difficult to find some compensatory attribute to muscle," the 83-year-old says. "I mean, men are stronger, and this is difficult to argue with. Women, broadly speaking, are better human beings.

"I don't think the world would be in as much trouble as it's in if they had been in charge, and I think the reason they have not been, originally, was muscle," Rooney says.

-- Does muscle make the difference in a world of guns and computers?

-- Do you agree the world would be in less trouble if women were in charge?