Two years earlier New York City had declared bankruptcy (remember the New York Daily News headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead"), and WFB and his guests engage in an instructive discussion of who was at fault, when action should have been taken, and why it wasn't. JN: "When this crisis began, I didn't know the difference between a debenture and a debutante-and that was true of a lot of writers covering New York's crisis." ... RS: "The last thing we wanted to be told was that we couldn't spend this money because we didn't have it.... The press of this city were not only blind, but willfully blind."