Specials: From the Waterfront

Every once in a while, television interviewers have journalistic sense enough to put a good subject in front of a camera and just get out of the way. It worked so successfully last September with Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind that CBS rescheduled the 60-minute show for this week (Tuesday, 10 p.m.). Though Eric Sevareid is the reporter of record, the program is Hoffer, the shirtsleeved philosopher from the San Francisco waterfront, whose aphorisms and world views have sold 700,000 books (The True Believer, The Temper of Our Time) and have produced disciples from the University of California's Clark Kerr to Dwight Eisenhower.

On TV Hoffer, 65, comes on with a muscular humanism that hymns ordinary people and the land that enthroned them. "The only new thing in history," he says, "is America. It's blasphemous to say that, you know, but it's true." And what is America's contribution? "The deproletarianization of the working man. He ceases to be a proletarian. He thinks he's as good as everybody else." Hoffer knows he is. "You can almost close your eyes," he says, "reach over the sidewalk and make a man President, and he'll turn out to be Truman." That, in Hoffer's eyes, is "terrific, breathtaking."

Other salty notions:

> On the U.S. in Viet Nam: "You do not start a world war when a democracy throws its weight around facing a bully. World wars are started when the democracies are too unprepared, too cowardly, too reasonable, too frightened, too tired, or too 'humanitarian.' "

> On the survival ability of modern nations: "If the President had picked me to predict which country [in postwar Europe] would recover first, I would say, 'Bring me the records of maintenance.' The nation with the best maintenance will recover first. Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western. They haven't got it in Russia. If I got in there in the warehouse, let's say, and I saw that the broom had a special nail, I would say, This is the nail of immortality.' "

> On Negro leadership: "The leaders of the Negro revolution have no faith in the Negro masses, no concern for them. When I hear Stokely Carmichael, he's always asking, 'Give me the can opener, so I'll open the cans of power and eat them.' You waste your energies on demonstrations, on riots. They do not produce one atom of pride. You know the chemistry of pride, Mr. Sevareid? Pride. This is what the Negro needs, see. Viet Nam is going to do to the Negro what Israel has done for the Jews. And if I was a Negro leader, I would pitch a tent on the water edge and grab those Negro veterans as they come back. They are the seed of the future. They are the kind of leaders that the Negro needs."

> On hippies: "If it wasn't for the question of drugs, I would be all for the hippies, because it's a healthy reaction against the rat race. And now with automation coming on there, see, we have to know how to enjoy leisure."

> On John Kennedy: "I had no feel for Kennedy at all. Kennedy was a European. All you have to do is tabulate how many times Kennedy crossed the Atlantic and how many times he crossed the Appalachian Mountains and you know where he belonged."