Interview with Dr. William O'Neill

O'Neill, William L. ; McKiernan, Stephen

Dr. William O'Neill (1935-2016) was a historian, scholar, author, and professor of history emeritus at Rutgers University. Dr. O'Neill was the author of more than a dozen books on subjects related to the twentieth century of American social and political history. He has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and earned his Master's and Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley.

2010-03-18

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

199:22

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: William O’Neill
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 18 March 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:03):
Testing one, two. Here we go. Again, speak up. I remember I said that a couple of times and, oh, all right, here we go. What was America like from 1946 to (19)60 in the following areas, just your perceptions? I know when you wrote American High, you talked about that you looked at it more from a functional perspective as opposed to an idealistic perspective than a lot of the boomers may have thought. Because they were fairly critical, but when you think of the 19 from this (19)46 to 1960, I have got five categories here that I like. Just your thoughts on what was it like to be an African American during that timeframe? A female. What was family life like? Religion? Because I know people went to church a lot. My grandfather was a minister. The leaders that you thought were the most inspirational during that timeframe, there is a lot here, but these particular groups, because this is when boomers were born and right up to the time they went to junior high school.

WO (00:01:27):
Well, of course, I do not know much about what it was like to be an African American. Segregation was of course, universal in the north too, as well as the south. In the south, it was a matter of law, and they had savage punishments if you violated it, they were still lynching people. In the north was intensely segregated too, but in a non-violent way. It was not a matter of law, it was a matter of custom. Realtors would not sell or rent to Black people except in Black neighborhoods. Of course, their income compared to whites was extremely low. Their opportunities were very limited compared to what they later became. The big compensation, I think, for them, was that their family life was so much better than it is now. The divorce rate was slow, the illegitimate rate was low. This was an era of two parent Black families who generally stayed together for life and raised their children and under very difficult circumstances, but what has happened since that is the opportunities for blacks who have improved and enormously, but the Black family has disintegrated. Over 70 percent of Black children are born out of wedlock now. Most Black children do not have fathers. Well, they have them, but they do not know where they are kind of thing. I never know what if I were Black, how I would look at that because ...

SM (00:03:02):
Do you blame-

WO (00:03:04):
... Have been great, but the losses have been big too.

SM (00:03:06):
Do you blame Lyndon Johnson for part of that? Because a lot of people criticize him for the welfare state, and even though the Great Society was, is praised over what he did in Vietnam, a lot of people are critical that really hurt the African American family, because that is the 1960s, '63 after Kennedy died, right, till (19)68.

WO (00:03:34):
Well, what enabled Black women to raise all these illegitimate children was welfare or aid to families with dependent children. That was the actual title aid to families with dependent children. That was eliminated under Bill Clinton in I think 1965 or 1995 or (19)96, so that program does not exist anymore. Women, again, in most states, three to five years of that kind of support, and then it is over. If welfare had been the cause of the Black families' disintegration, then it should be recreated by now, but of course it has not been. It clearly could not have been the principal factor.

SM (00:04:21):
Mm-hmm. How about women? What was it like? You have written about it to be a female in (19)46 to (19)60 in the (19)50s and late (19)40s.

WO (00:04:32):
Well, it was a tradeoff. Women were discriminated against but of course, until Betty Friedan came along with the Feminine Mystique, there was not a strong perception of that among anybody, including, I mean, I knew lots of women. I married one and they did not feel oppressed or discriminated against, although in fact they were not necessarily oppressed, but they were certainly discriminated against. It was difficult for, for example, when I was a student at the University of Michigan, and we all took this for granted in the 1950s, the ratio of men to women was two to one. That was not because the women had inferior qualifications. It was because the admission system was rigged so that a woman had to have superior qualifications to the average male who was admitted in order to get in. Of course, when it came to graduate school, medical school, law school, the discrimination's far worse there. When I- something I have never forgotten, when I entered graduate school at the University of California in Berkeley in 1957, they had an orientation meeting and there were maybe, I do not know, 100 students who had just been admitted. One of the senior faculty, a full professor addressed us and he said, this is a literal quote. He said, "If you are married or female, get out of this program. We only have room for serious scholars." If you were married or a woman, by definition, you could not be a serious scholar. There were women who got PhDs then and they had a terrifically difficult time finding jobs. Now, the plus side is, in those days, men earned, including working class men, but particularly working-class men and middle-class men, they earned enough money to support a family by themselves. A male's wages or salary were sufficient for him to support a wife and three children, I guess was the average at the time. The divorce rate was quite low compared to what it is now, about half what it is today. The tradeoff was yes, women were discriminated against, but more than we were all conscious of. In retrospect, you can see this much more clearly. I did not see it at all at the time and not [inaudible] and then when I started thinking about these things, I am sure it was an eye opener for lots of people, but the plus side was that although women were discriminated against, for the most part, for most of them, they were able to marry, have children, be supported by their husband and stay married to their husband. It was a lifelong deal, and many of them did not think it was that bad a deal.

SM (00:07:48):
Some of the feminists, and I have interviewed a couple of them, one in particular actually is Dr. Lash, she mentioned that she fell, women were never asked how they felt in the 1950s. In reality, if you were to talk to them as they got older, they stayed together for the kids, but they really did not want to get divorced. Secondly, and then unhappy marriages and whatever that effect that had on the children, but they also, if she felt that if you asked a lot of the women of that period, they would say, "Yes, I was totally unfulfilled," because a lot of them had secretarial training and so forth, and they met their husband. They married young, had kids, but they were not able to use their skills until later on. Some others had exceptions of the rule. There were women that were working, but overall, they were housewives. Your thoughts of that kind of, that is-

WO (00:08:49):
That anecdotal evidence is really hard to deal with. Most of the women I know my age, more or less my age, have been happy with their lives. My wife, for example, this is just an anecdote, does not mean anything necessarily, but when we got married, I was still in graduate school and she got a job teaching at a public school in Berkeley, and she taught there for three years. She hated every minute of it. It was there, she was the new girl in school, and so she got the worst classes. She threw up every morning before she went to school for about six months, I think. She never got to like it. I mean, it was always rough. The minute I got my PhD at a full-time job, she quit and was thrilled to quit. She then spent several years because I was always at universities, taking courses in areas of interest in her and developing. She is in fact an artist. She was never able to make a living at it, but art is her biggest interest. She was able to take art classes and produce work, and then she was very highly motivated to have children. After a couple of years of taking courses, she then had two children. Are you a father?

SM (00:10:19):
No, I am lucky. I have been married to my job my whole life.

WO (00:10:22):
Okay.

SM (00:10:23):
My career. Thousands of students.

WO (00:10:24):
Well, it changes your life and it is not always an unmixed blessing, but she had never regretted that she was very highly motivated. She really wanted to be a mother. I have never asked her if she felt that she had a fulfilling life, but it seemed to me that she has had the tradeoffs that she had to make were ones that she made consciously and was not forced into. In fact, I did not want to have children. I was married to my work in those days, a young man and just getting started and had no money. Well, I had a salary, but it just barely covered our requirements. When she had wanted to have a ... And she just [inaudible]. She was very highly motivated. She was determined to have children. I went along with it. It is not like men do not make sacrifices too or did not. It is still true. We all do whatever the balance of power or whatever it is, men have to make compromises and sacrifices too. I went along with it. Our first child was so horrible. She grew up to be a very fine woman, but as an infant, she was just awful. Even she was defiant and a runaway by the age of two.

SM (00:11:56):
Oh my God.

WO (00:11:56):
It just made our lives so difficult. And then my wife said, "Well, it is time to have another child," and I said, "Are you insane? We could barely cope with the one we have." Well, we did it. We went and had Kate.

SM (00:12:10):
Right. You talked a little bit about the family life of the boomer family life. I am trying to make sure that when I talk about boomers, people had mentioned that they thought boomers were white men or white women, but I want to make sure boomers are everybody that lived from all ethnic backgrounds, gender orientation, you name it. Just your thoughts on what it was like to grow up as a kid in the 1950s, because I have not had too many people that I have interviewed that really have concentrated on that period. They like to talk about the (19)60s and the (19)70s, but they do not like to talk about the (19)50s. I need more information because I felt religion was very important in the (19)50s. My grandfather was a minister at the Peekskill Church in New York for, he died in (19)56, I was a little boy, but we went to church, and I know that his church was packed. My dad would come back in the late (19)50s when [inaudible] took his place and it was packed. Something happened in the (19)60s, attendance went down, but just the concept of what it was like to be a family life was like and religion in the 1950s.

WO (00:13:22):
Well, Chris, again, you have to remember that America was overwhelmingly white in that period. The Hispanic minority, practically non-existent. Immigration from Asia and Africa and South America was just impossible. The only immigrants who got in were whites from Europe. The country was about 89 percent white, something like that. Within that context, a lot of class and regional and income differences. What is striking about the family life in that period, first of all, is this is the era of the baby boom. Birth rates had been falling for as long as there had been censuses, and particularly since 1860 when the census really got professional and good. Every generation had fewer children than the one before it. The parents of the baby boomers were, of course, children of depression and war. They have been through a lot and made many sacrifices. With the case of the war generation, they have been separated for long periods of time and they were determined to make up for lost time. Veterans served in military on the average of three years at the time. They all regarded this as three lost years. I mean, not that they rejected the call to service. There were very few conscientious objectors in World War II. They accepted their duty. It was their responsibility to defend the country, but nonetheless, they hated the military, almost all of them, and regarded this is three lost years when they could have finished school and gotten married and had children. When they got out, they decided to do everything at once. It just baffled older people, social critics and the like. Here is a generation they know sooner get out of the army then they get married, have children go to college, all at the same time. You are supposed to do those in sequence, decent intervals between them and so on. It led to this very false school of social criticism about the lonely crowd and the corporation ...

SM (00:15:37):
David Riesman.

WO (00:15:38):
... And all that. I am about 10 years older than the war generation, so I did not participate in their experience. Initially, when all this social criticism came about, again, the lonely crowd, the conformity and mindlessness and tacky houses in the suburbs and all that stuff, and without giving much thought to it, I went along with it. In later years, when I went back to study this, this period from many different demographic standpoints looked better and better, that the birth rate was high, higher than it had been in several generations, and higher than it would ever be again, at least up until this point. The marriage rate was higher too. The divorce rate was lowered. Family incomes grew steadily. The houses in the suburbs were, what is the alternative to a nice house in a suburb like Levittown? Well, a tenement, some crappy apartment in New York that you are paying. For most veterans who bought houses in Levittown, their housing costs fell. They were paying more in rent for overcrowded, under ventilated apartments in New York than for a nice two-bedroom expandable cape, with grass and a driveway and this kind thing. They were family-oriented to a degree unprecedented in American history before that time. The wives too, of course, were similarly motivated because they had had the same deprivation. They had been separated from their boyfriends, their husbands, their future husbands, whatever, and had worked in difficult conditions in war plants and things like that. They felt they had lost three years of their life too. As I look back on them now, I mean, I think they were a wonderful generation and we call them today, they never used that phrase at the time, and you talk about all the complaints that were made about the generation, now, we call them the greatest generation. They were great at peace time too.

SM (00:18:05):
Yeah. It is interesting because I want to get into the leaders here, but you say in your book in American High that when Eisenhower came to power, the country was infused with confidence. It is created expectations, and there was unity. Isn't that what happened when Kennedy came in too, that many of the critics of the (19)50s looked at Kennedy and said, "Whew, what a breath of fresh air, new ideas, somebody who's young," some fairly critical of the (19)50s overall, and as it says here, very complacent, as you said in your book, complacent, unremarkable, marked by intolerance, conformed to materialism. Of course, African Americans were treated poorly. You talked about lynching. Dr. King became nationally known. There were some really bad things happening, but it was kind of hidden. We knew about the Cold War, we knew about the threat of the nuclear bomb, but what was happening in America within our own borders was kind of hidden from boomer children, so to speak. That is why I think a lot of people are critical of the (19)50s because not only were these things happening, but we allowed them to happen and we did not make any effort to change. You talk about the fact also, in your book that after World War II, it was a kind of reconstruction period. It was everybody had been deprived. I know my mom, I know the stories my mom told me about they did not have any butter. I mean, there was no rubber. I mean, they could not drive very far in cars. There was all kinds of restrictions, but the social critics do not look at that. They look at the bad things and the status quo and the lack of being individual thought and your thoughts again.

WO (00:20:08):
The period looks ... Now, of course, the (19)50s did suffer from racism, sexism, and homophobia. Every previous era in American history had suffered from these things too. The (19)50s is not unique in that way. What makes the (19)50s unique is the progress that was made. This was the beginning of the period of the fight against racism. Now, that with around supportive education and then Montgomery Bus Boycott, and in the (19)60s, it would lead to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, so race ... The greatest scandal of American life, which had been a scandal before there was a United States of America, that is the (19)50s is the era when the fight against it really takes off. The worst thing in American life is being seriously addressed for the first time. Well, since the Civil War, I mean, that was many, many hundreds of thousands of union men died to destroy slavery, but then that was it, and discrimination and lynching and all these other things just went unaddressed until really the 1950s. In that area, you get the start really important social progress. In other areas, I have become, I think more I have come to admire Eisenhower more than I did. For one thing, I was as a lifelong Democrat, I voted for Adlai Stevenson, but I have come to appreciate Eisenhower, despite his style, which in public, he was this homuncular, grandfather-like figure. Spoke in long, boring sentences and never seemed to say anything. Of course, we now know that was an act, that he really was not like that at all, but that was the public persona that he represented, which could hardly have been more tedious or bland. While he was putting out this facade of mediocrity, he was ending the Korean War, cutting back the military, drastically paying down the national debt, starting the interstate highway system. I know lots of people think this country pays too much attention to cars, that we are too car-centered and we should have more railroads and stuff. I think that is true also, but the interstate highway system was a tremendous stimulus to the American economy, not only in the jobs that were created in building it, but in the time that was cut from transporting goods from place to place. It was the greatest public works project in the history of the world. One of the big reasons why the American economy grew so rapidly during the (19)50s and (19)60s when it was of course, still rebuilding, built the St. Lawrence Seaway ...

SM (00:23:04):
Yeah, the [inaudible].

WO (00:23:06):
... He kept income tax up. The Republicans, even in the 1950s were gung-ho on tax cuts. He refused to do it, because his feeling was, and he said this publicly, that a strong economy is more important than a strong military because you can always build up a military, but if your economy is shot, you are screwed. Well, he did not put it in that way, of course, but that was his argument, and he said that repeatedly. He refused to cut taxes in order, to pay for the interstate highway system to pay down the national debt, to pay for the St. Lawrence Seaway. This is also a period, he was the first to provide federal funding to schools, public schools, and higher education. The country, during this period, the college population expanded between 1955 and 1960 by about 150 percent. Never been anything like it in the history of this country. Thanks to the fact that the economy is blooming, and the states are doing well, and the federal government is supplying some kind of money, this huge increase in enrollment was met by building new colleges and universities and expanding the old ones and hiring full-time faculty members with PhDs. That is almost all the hiring was done during this period. Now, when I look at us today, of course, this is parochial of me Because I have spent my life in higher education, but higher education has been decaying for such a long time now. So much of the teaching is done by exploited graduate students. The full-time, tenured PhD faculty keep shrinking everywhere, not just at Rutgers. That is happening everywhere. The university's trying to make up the difference by admitting unqualified students and charging a lot of money in tuition. In the 1950s and (19)60s, tuition was essentially free. I mean, there was a tuition, but it would be like $100 a semester or something of that sort. Today at state universities like Rutgers, it is $12,000 a year. That the whole concept that public higher education should be free is just gone. Nobody seems to care. Increasingly what you could get the education [inaudible]. That was not how we did it in the (19)50s and (19)60s or even before that.

SM (00:25:28):
I know Eisenhower, even you criticize him for not being very good in the area of civil rights, although he ...

WO (00:25:35):
He was very blunt.

SM (00:25:36):
... Yeah, although we know what happened at Little Rock, but what is interesting is oftentimes pressure has to be put on leaders to get things done. Harry Truman, of course, integrated the military in the late forties, and I can remember the story of A. Philip Randolph threatening a march on Washington and ...

WO (00:25:55):
During the war.

SM (00:25:56):
... Yeah, during the war, and Truman did not want that. He eventually integrated the army, which meant that I think (19)57 was when King was there for, I think, at the Lincoln Memorial.

WO (00:26:14):
Truman integrated the army in theory in 1948, but it took quite a long time to ... The services really dragged their feet that when they ended formal segregation, oh, in five to 10 years, something like that. Even into the (19)60s, although segregation had officially been ended, you barely saw a black officer. Black soldiers were mostly in construction battalions and riflemen. In fact, in the (19)60s, one of the problems of the Vietnam War is that in (19)65, (19)66 when the fighting really became intensive, Black casualties in relation to the number of blacks in the military were extremely high. Well, the reason was that they were all in the combat arms. Everybody who scored high on Army qualification tests, who would normally be white, got into intelligence and signals and things like that, and Blacks all got to be gunners and rifleman.

SM (00:27:26):
Yeah, McCarthy was an important figure. I can remember as a very young boy sitting on the floor in my home in Courtland before I went to school and seeing this man on television yelling to answer questions. I remember Roy Cohen, I remember that young lawyer to his left, but I remember he was scary to me as a little boy within that black and white TV. I was [inaudible] and even as a four-year-old that this is a guy that even a four-year-old was afraid of. David Kaiser's written in his book, 1968, that he sees Kennedy and McCarthy linked all over the place when you talk about the boom generation. He links three things that really affected the Vietnam War, and he thinks McCarthy, Kennedy and an attitude of appeasement, kind of like what happened in Munich that happened. When he talks about McCarthy, he is talking about all the links with the Kennedy’s, and they were friends and McCarthy-

WO (00:28:33):
Joan Kennedy in particular ...

SM (00:28:35):
McCarthy was challenged them-

WO (00:28:37):
... [inaudible] supporter of McCarthy.

SM (00:28:41):
Right. Well, and of course you talk about in your book about the Hollywood ten. To me that was a precursor of the enemy's list that Nixon did and the COINTELPRO program. I know that M. Stanton Evans has written a book recently kind of saying some good things about Senator McCarthy, but yet-

WO (00:29:06):
Gee, what good is this?

SM (00:29:08):
Yeah. It is actually a revisionist look at the man. You have to get the book. M. Stanton Evans, he is a conservative, but your thoughts on McCarthy and how important he was during that timeframe in terms of shaping about fearing about speaking up. David Kaiser also talks about the fact that many white men in that period looked up to African Americans like Dr. King because they were not threatened by McCarthy. They spoke up against injustice, Dr. King in (19)57, Montgomery Bus Boycott, and they did not worry about him, but many white men who may have spoken up did not because of what was going on in America, soft on communism type of a mentality.

WO (00:30:00):
I am missing your question.

SM (00:30:01):
The question is, McCarthy, how important was he?

WO (00:30:05):
Well, of course he was about five years, he was tremendously important, but he was important primarily as a weapon used by the Republicans to get back in power into the meeting. Well, he had a sort of primitive shrewdness about him, but the man was completely incompetent, and so was his staff except for Roy Cole. Roy Cole was smart, but otherwise, he had a terrible staff. He would go around saying, "There are 185 communists in the State Department," and he would wave papers that presumably prove this. The next time he would ask, "Well, there is 65 communists in the State Department," and he would be president. Finally, he got down to Owen Lattimore, who was not even in the State Department. He was an East Asian scholar who had been serving as a consultant to McCarthy. Well, so where is the fire there? There was not. It was a damp squid. Owen Lattimore was a fellow traveler, but he was not in the State Department and had no influence on public policy and did not matter at all in terms of the life of the country. McCarthy's success was owning to the fact that the Republicans supported him strongly, including even Robert Taft, who was widely admired for his integrity, but did not hesitate to urge McCarthy to get down in the gutter and throw mud at everyone else and did some mud throwing in of itself. The proof of that is that when Eisenhower became president in 1953, McCarthy's days were numbered because he did not realize that he was just a tool, was a means by which the Republicans were going to get back into power. Now that they were in power, there could not be a 21st year of treason and all these other ridiculous charges that he made, and he did not get it. Part of it, I think, was because he was so alcoholic. When you look at the films that have been made of him, the documentaries like Point of Order, which is surely the best known one, you can see that he is visibly drunk when he is speaking. He slurs his words, and he gets things wrong. Here is this drunken fool who becomes a national figure and a real threat to civil liberties, solely as a mechanism by which the Republicans came back into power. Once they are back into power in 1954, they cut him off [inaudible].

SM (00:32:40):
Do you think Nixon learned from McCarthy? He was not like McCarthy, but he saw-

WO (00:32:48):
No, he was so much smarter than McCarthy.

SM (00:32:48):
But he saw that he could threaten people with his enemies list and the COINTELPRO Program.

WO (00:32:54):
Yes, he did not hesitate to use McCarthy methods, but he was so much smarter than McCarthy and so much really more careful about who he went after and how he phrased it. He would usually leave himself an out some sort, so he could red bait and get away with it, but McCarthy was just so crude, and as I say, incompetent. He destroyed himself.

SM (00:33:23):
When you look at your three books that I brought with me today, could you describe what it means to what American High means, what coming apart means and what a bubble in time means?

WO (00:33:40):
Mm-hmm. Well, I have a general theory about modern American history, which these books fit into. I have been trying to think of a way to possibly write another book that would integrate this thing, but it seems to be the arc that the United States has followed, is in the 1930s ... As follow is in the 1930s, of course, it was the Great Depression and a good deal of national despair, which fortunately Franklin Roosevelt came along. And after that, people did not despair so much, but there was a long period of hardships experienced by a large part of the public. And then there was this awful era of appeasement. On the part of France and Britain, which the United States fully supported. Roosevelt was always sending encouraging messages, keep up the good work of surrendering handler, not with so many words, of course. And then when France fell, and Britain was all alone, the last beacon of democracy in a continent that had been completely taken over by the Nazis, the American people, as unfortunately polls pretty reliable by this time. But also, the American still did not want to get into the war. They wanted to wait until New Jersey was invaded and that would be the right point at which to start defending ourselves. And Roosevelt kept trying to explain it would be better to start defending ourselves using Great Britain while it was still independent as a phase. So that was kind of the nature of American life in the 20th century, I think. But once forced into the war, against the will, of course, the American people made a fabulous effort. And in saving much of the free world, they also rejuvenated the United States. And the self-confidence and the economy blossomed. And in the post-war period, we got this long run of success with the economy. The economy. Average incomes between 1947 and 1973 doubled. That is in real terms, that is adjusted for inflation. That is real terms. Since 1973, family incomes have only gone up by about 10 percent. And that is mostly because everybody is working more. Husbands are moonlighting, wives who never would have worked previously are now working part-time when men who worked part-time previously are now working full-time. We put in more hours. American families put in more hours of work than anybody else in the developed world. And that, plus borrowing, is the only reason why family standards of living have improved, or did improve up until what, 2000. But before that, in the year that ended in 1973, the American standard of living doubled because incomes doubled. Real incomes doubled. And as I said before, it is a period of tremendous reconstruction. In 1945, there is a huge housing shortage. In 1950, the housing shortage is over. And then you get the highway and all the other things, the huge expansion of education. It was gigantic on all levels because the baby boomers are here, this huge generation, bigger than the country had ever seen before. Which we did not have an infrastructure to support at the time they started coming. The infrastructure was created, the schools, the churches, which also boomed during this period. So, it is America. The racism, the worst feature of American life, is seriously attacked for the first time since the Civil War in the 1950s. So, this is a period of enormous national self-confidence, which is fully justified by the results. Then as you get into the 1960s, of course the picture becomes somewhat more ambiguous. The growth continues. It goes right on; the economic growth goes right on into the 1970s. Well, as you know, I am not a big admirer of President Kennedy, and he was a cold warrior from the beginning. He was determined to escalate the arms race. He campaigned on nonexistent missile gap between the United States and the Soviets. There was a missile gap, but it was in our favor by a big margin. The first generation of Soviet ICBMs had failed. And Eisenhower, Nixon could not say that because the information was derived from these illegal sky flights over the Soviet Union. And so, Nixon could not say, well, in fact, we were way ahead of the Soviets in ICBMs because owing to our secret and illegal overflights...

SM (00:38:50):
Gary Powers.

WO (00:38:52):
But I am not a big sympathizer with Nixon, but there is a certain irony in his hands being tied in this way. And then when Kennedy became president and Secretary McNamara finally gets the figures and he announces, well, there is no missile gap actually, we are way ahead. And Kennedy made him take that back and insisted on greatly increasing expenditure on missiles despite the fact that we already had this huge lead. The Soviets, of course, then had no choice but to reply in kind. And so, we ended up with something like 40, 000 thermal nuclear warheads on each side, enough to destroy the world many times over. And that all starts with Kennedy. It could have been avoided, it seems to me, with better leadership. He was extremely capable of certain ways, but he was such a hawk where the Cold War was concerned. He never thought about the long-term consequences of what he did. And then we get Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, which is the biggest outburst of progressive social legislation since the New Deal and has never been matched since. Remotely. Nobody remotely has come close to the Great Society. And then he also gives us the Vietnam War. And that enables the war, is unwinnable and unpopular. And it gives us Richard Nixon as a president. And it also is the beginning of the inflation that become so marked in the 1970s, because since the war was so unpopular, Johnson did not want to pay for it. Or that was he wanted to borrow rather than the tax to pay for it. The country was rich at the time; you could afford it to raise taxes. If people were saying in polls, which they did up until 1968, that they favored the war, well want them to pay for it. But Johnson was afraid to push it because the polls showed there was a majority of Americans supported it. But he believed, I think correctly, that the support was rather thin and would not stand up. And if serious sacrifices were required, that support would wither away. So he avoided the tax increases that might have forced all the, I am not an economist, but all the economic histories that I have seen see the beginning of inflation in his trying to fight the war around borrowing money, at a time when we could afford to actually tax. But he was right about the support being thin because once the huge casualties started to come in and the Tet Offensive proved that all these optimistic projections are wrong, support really eroded very rapidly. And so, Nixon was able to come in and that is the end, actually, it was not the end of reform. Nixon was surprisingly open-minded. Currently there's a lot of discussion about the fact that Ted Kennedy, before his death said the worst thing, he ever did was to refuse Nixon's offer of universal health insurance in 1970. Nixon offered a more generous plan than Obama's trying to get now. And in his memoir, Kennedy says, that is the great mistake of his life. Because he thought he could get a better one.

SM (00:42:23):
Yeah, I read that memoir, I thought it was pretty good. Pretty good memoir.

WO (00:42:32):
So then, the economy is kind of shaky because the war's expenses are vaulting high, and the tax increases are not paying for it. In the end, Johnson did put through some tax increases, but they were not enough. So, when Nixon becomes president, inflation is starting to creep up. It is not a monster yet, but it is starting to creep up. And although Nixon, as I say, turned out to be surprisingly open-minded on a lot of social issues, he signed on to the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and expanded funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities and a variety of other things. Not because he was a great hearted liberal or anything, because he was a smart politician dealing with a Democratic Congress. But the one thing that nobody was willing to do was to address the inflation issue. And then in 1973, you get the first oil shock. The young people are at war and the Arab oil boycott, which did not actually deprive the country of all that much oil, but it created hysteria and energy prices started to shoot through the roof. And Nixon did not deal with that, and Ford did not deal with it, and Carter did not deal with it either, although he wanted to, I think. And he did give speeches about energy conservation, all of that. But the inflation just kept getting worse and worse and worse.

SM (00:44:13):
Let me change this.

WO (00:44:13):
So, by the time Paul Volker, who bless his heart Has reemerged-

SM (00:44:29):
Oh yeah, he is always behind the presidents here.

WO (00:44:32):
Paul Volker, whom Carter had appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve, finally decided to end the inflation because Congress would not do it. There are a number of tools for dealing with inflation, but what they basically involve is some combination of cutting government expenditures and raising taxes. But you got there is too much money, you have got to break the money supply down. And neither Carter nor Congressman would take any of these steps because they are unpopular. Nobody wants their taxes to go up and nobody wants their government services to be decline. And so that left only Paul Volker and he broke the back of inflation, as you I am sure remember, by jacking up interest rates. Labor at its prime was at 21 percent at one point, precipitating, of course, a recession, a big one. But with the Congress and the President having failed to act responsibly, he did not have any choice of the matter. In fact, Carter campaigned against him in 1980. His own appointee. Blamed him for the hard times that were coming. Well, my theory is, and it is not just mine, a lot of economists think this too, the economy never recovered from this experience. The rate of economic growth not only declined somewhat afterwards, but the whole way in which income was distributed changed as well. So that while there has been economic growth since 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president, the increase in growth has been funneled almost entirely to rich people. That was not true earlier. In the 1950s and (19)60s, if the economy grew by 3 percent the workers would get a 3 percent raise and the president of the corporation would get a 3 percent raise. And of course, he was making a lot more money than the workers. So, his 3 percent would be a lot more than theirs. But still, the ratio between what the CEO got and the workers got would be 50 to one, something of that sort. Since that time, and Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with this, but he was also the expression of a kind of national impulse in a way was to cut taxes. And people really wanted to have their taxes put out because of course, owing to the inflation of the 1970s, most people's income had fallen. If you were on a salary, as I was, we got raises, but they were never equal to the rate of inflation. And so, the real worth of my salary fell by a third, something like that, during this period. So, one of the easiest ways to deal with that from politicians’ point of view was to cut taxes, which Reagan did. But of course, he cut them particularly for the rich. Then he got the lion share of the taxes. But that began the era in which people came to see that the solution in every problem was tax cuts. And he restored some of them. It was a curious kind of dance. By the end of his presidency about half the tax reduction had been restored. But that still left tax cuts as the mantra on the table that the Republicans rallied both ceaselessly and as a solution for every problem. And with incomes failing to rise as they had done before, older Americans were had gotten used to having their real income go up 5 percent every year or two. And now suddenly it is not going up at all. Or by tiny infinitesimal amounts.

SM (00:48:34):
And pensions are not going up either.

WO (00:48:36):
And pensions are not going up. And if you get a tax cut, well that puts a few dollars in your pocket and it is only a few dollars, but it is better than nothing. And so, we got into the cycle, which we are still pursuing today. President Clinton was never really strong enough to be able to deal with this. He helped around the edges. He did increase taxes a bit on rich people. Did not restore the things to what they had been, but he did increase them a little. And we had the short period of budget surpluses. But that was due to the stalemate between the Republican Congress and the Democratic president. Clinton wanted to spend more, Congress wanted to cut taxes more, and they canceled each other out. So, of course, as soon as George Bush got into office, the Republicans fell on that tax surplus like the old son, the proverbial fold and what had been surpluses became huge deficits. So, anyway, so this is the arc of modern American history. We start from a low point in the 1930s in World War II. The country really redeems its failings and its slowness in recognizing the danger. Well, it never did recognize the danger. The danger was forced upon us. And at that point you could not deny reality anymore. But nonetheless, tremendous effort on the part of the whole population something. Everybody contributed to it one way or another. Victory over the forces of fascism and Japanese imperialism. And then this long, wonderful surge of growth, which benefited everybody, not just rich people. It benefited everybody. And this huge expansion of our infrastructure, and housing, and education, and just everything got better. Since 1973, most things have been getting worse. And the infrastructure is deteriorating. The free college concept, it is just gone. College is expensive now. Even public colleges are expensive. So, it seems to be that in most areas, the Civil Rights movement really matured. That progress did not stop. And of course, women relative to men are in a much stronger position than they used to be. The horrible immigration laws that kept everyone except white people from immigrating to the country, they are gone too. And I think as a nation, we are much better off now that we get immigrants from all over the world, and it is really a national asset. So, there are some pluses. But on the whole, it seems to me that in so many important areas of life, standard of living, quality of education, the state of the infrastructure. Country has been going downhill since the (19)70s. And I am hoping Obama can, I think expanding healthcare will help. That will certainly improve the standard of living, not just, I think of the people who are going to be added, the 30 million or so uninsured. But if the bill will go through with something like their present form, it's going to help everybody by slowing the growth of costs in health insurance, by preventing insurance companies from canceling people because they're too sick. And from denying coverage to people because they are already sick, that is going to help a very large part of the population. And one of the things that keeps this country from achieving its potential, I think, is that healthcare costs have been escalating at a rate towards sucking up everything else. And in the past 10 years, the cost of health insurance has doubled to the point where healthcare now takes up 1/6th of the gross domestic product. If this continues in 10 years, it will take up 1/3rd of the gross domestic product. We will be doing nothing but supporting healthcare. All this has just got to change. And if it does change, then I think there is some hope for the future. But I do not think the last 30 years has gone at all well.

SM (00:53:00):
Phyllis Schlafly, who I interviewed along with David Horowitz, say that the troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running the universities and teaching within the universities. Is that going overboard?

WO (00:53:15):
Not a lot. Not a lot. One of the peculiar features of universities is, whereas the left failed everywhere in American life, except universities. They had, the last was pretty successful in universities. And a lot of the faculty and many administrators are either former leftist who finally got a chance to put their abstract ideas into abstract practice, because it does not affect anything outside the university. It is inside our little world. Yeah, I would say that. And also, another curious thing is that the new left outside of the university has no heirs, but in the university, new left professors trained graduate students and imbued them with their views. Undergraduates are really hard to brainwash on. Conservative used to say, well, students are being brainwashed. It is very hard to brainwash students. I do not know why that is, but it is very difficult. And my efforts at this have been very largely failure. But graduate students, whom you work with much more closely and over a long period of time, are more susceptible to influence. And to fashion. Academic disciplines have fashions, it is just like everything else. And the undergrads do not recognize them because they cannot tell what is new from what is old. But graduate students like to be on the cutting edge, as they say, and latest fashions. And so, the only place in the country where the left has any real influence is in universities.

SM (00:55:02):
Yeah. Harry Eders, even in his books of Black students that he wrote around 1970, (19)71, where he defined the difference between revolutionaries, militants, activists, and anomic activists, talked about the fact that militants were the graduate students who were the leaders of the anti-war movement on college campuses. And many of them were the pre-Boomers that were born between (19)41 and say (19)46. Some of them. And because people like Tom Hayden and that particular group. What are your thoughts on the various academic studies programs that are an offshoot of the (19)60s and early (19)70s? Particularly talking about, I know you bring up in your new book, but about the women's studies programs, Asian studies, gay and lesbian studies, Native American studies, popular out west. Chicano studies on the West Coast, Black studies, and now even environmental studies. So, you have got all these different studies. Your thoughts on these are all the movements, the people of the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, these were all movements that looked to the Civil Rights movement as their role model and their teacher. Just your thoughts on all these various studies programs in university campuses.

WO (00:56:26):
Up to a point, I do not have any objection. In fact, I wrote the first critical history of the old feminist movement ever to be done by a professional historian. And I did that because I felt that women's history, which we did not even call women's history then, the book came out in 1969 and women's studies and women's history were not really defined at that point. They were a few years later. So, I was writing women's history in a sense without even knowing that I was writing women's history. But it was clear that women were clearly being underserved by historians, because here was this rich history and all these fascinating people involved in it who never got into the textbooks except a brief obligatory mention on note 27 or something. And so, I was really pleased to see student women's liberation of course, that movement really galvanized women in graduate schools. And young women, faculty members who could transition pretty easily from... One of the first women to teach women's history at Rutgers, for example, was a French historian. She got her PhD in French history. But having all that scholarly training, it was easy for her to switch from, I do not know what her dissertation, some conventional 18th century French stuff. She was able to transition very easily to women's history. And others did that as well. One of the ironies of the situation for me is that I regarded myself as a founding father of women's history, but all the men got frozen out. There were in, the 1960s, there were 10 or 12 historians who were writing on women's subjects, about half men and half women. Almost all the women went on to become presidents of the OAHA and the American Historical Association in the organization of American historians, things like that. The men all got forced out. Oh, I got insulted in meetings and it just, I never got invited to anything. So, we were all ostracized in that way and it kind of hurt my feelings a little bit on the end, until we're playing by things to write about. Anyway, a long way around by saying that in the case of women's history, I really did welcome it and I think it is a real field and I am glad to see it. I think some of the others too, some of these seem so small or have so little in the way of historical material to work with that I really wonder about them. But some of the Hispanic studies, Haitian studies, things like these are perfectly legitimate fields. They were taught in the past, not on a scale or the orientation that they are now. But what I think is wrong with the current education is that all this has been done at the expense of the basics. We get students, I get students, whose reading and writing skills are so primitive, they can barely write, they cannot write a grammatical paragraph, many of them. Their knowledge of almost anything is nonexistent. They do not know anything about the past. They do not know anything about the rest of the world. So, it seems to me that yes, it's good to have academic life open up in this way and to place emphasis on previously neglected areas, but at the same time it would still be good if students had the basic skills they did 30 years ago. 30 years ago, students were so much better qualified than they are now. They all could read and write. They had high levels, they had some knowledge of history, and they had good work ethics. Almost all of them. I did not know it was a golden age, but it was a golden age of teaching. I did not have to discipline them, or force them to come to class, or bludgeon them into reading the assigned books. They just did all these things. That was accepted.

SM (01:01:00):
Do you think there is any link between, again, I can remember back at Binghamton University students to get out of the draft went in teaching, but they had no interest in being teachers. They did it to get out of the draft and they planned to quit as soon as the war was over. Of course, we are talking 1970 now. And so, they would be influencing students in the mid (19)70s and then beyond, in high school. Do you see any link there between the poor-quality education, that these people were not committed to teaching?

WO (01:01:36):
I do not know enough about the secondary school system in this country. The one I went through was completely different than what exists today. All I know is that, again, 30 years ago, the students I got were just much better prepared for college work than they are now. Lot of them are just not prepared. And what the universities have done is dumbed down the courses. In order to meet their lowered abilities, we have lowered expectations at great inflation. And you can get away with a lot if you give students As and Bs, even if you are not teaching anything. And even if they are not learning anything.

SM (01:02:18):
That is so different, when I was at Binghamton, because Dr. Donnelley hardly gave one A in each of his classes, he taught Russian history. You really had to earn it. One A, and we are talking great students here. And I took three courses from him, and I got an A once, and I got a B once, and I got a C once. I was furious that I got a C. But in that day, you knew you were in a great professor, you knew he made you study. You had to work hard for everything, and you did not go off and, as I have seen today, students go into their advisors and say, I am a straight A student and this is wrong that you are giving me that thing. So, I think you, you are onto something here. One of the things you bring up in your new book too, because I have been perusing through, I got to read it full force like the other two. But I picked and choose some of the things that I read. About when George Bush was president in particular, George Bush Senior. I want to ask you; do you believe in political correctness? What did the universities learn in the (19)60s with respect to student activism? Our universities, as Clark Kerr said, beholden to the corporations, businesses, and applied research. And even Ohio State University now, if you look on their website, their biggest thing is they talk about their research. It is a research university. The question I am really asking here is, I interviewed Arthur Chicory, the great educator, about a week ago, and he's written a 20-page piece and it is going to come out in a major magazine, basically very upset with the universities today. He says the corporations are again running the universities. And then that, and he was referring back to the (19)60s and the Clark Kerrs and the uses of the multiversity kind of an idea. Are you seeing again that universities are beholden to the corporations?

WO (01:04:27):
Well, yeah, but I think in a different way. When Clark Kerr wrote his book, he saw the university service role in a very broad way. He was not just helping corporations make money, it was just strengthening society as a whole and provide it with this sealed, well-trained, well-educated people that are needed in various walks of life. But it did include corporations as among those who would benefit and took the perhaps naive view that benefiting corporations, which employ some millions of people, would benefit a large part of the population as well. Today it is a much more crass kind of arrangement in which universities support health, science, and engineering departments. I do not think humanities get any money from corporations. They support them to encourage the kind of research that will benefit their own company and complement their own research efforts. And often I think it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. So yes. And the reason for that is because universities are in big financial trouble. Have been increasing for quite a long time, but over the past 10 years, it has gotten awful. And so, the departments like the humanities department said they cannot do that. I do not know who would sell out to corporations. They do not walk for bias. So, we never have the opportunity to discover the extent of our... But when the state keeps cutting your funding all the time, and it's not just New Jersey, of course, it is every state has this. Universities like Michigan, California gets less than 10 percent of their operating budget from their states. They are almost entirely self-supporting. And you cannot do it on tuition, and you cannot do it on federal grants. You have got to have more money. And corporations, if it serves their purposes, will supply it. So, I do not see if there is any choice in this area. Yeah, corporations' influence is considerably greater than it used to be. I do not think it is because anybody likes it, but it is because universities are increasingly desperate.

SM (01:06:39):
Yeah, you have probably hit it right on the button here because the university I just came from, everything is linked to some sort of raising some sort of scholarship or fundraising. We had a basketball coach that refused to go out and do fundraising. He was a great basketball coach. He said, I am not here to be a fundraiser. I am here to be a coach. And he quit. And he was a historic basketball coach. He just said, I am not here for that. And they give a lot of scholarships out. And now it is almost like every program you do has got to be linked to, has a value to raising some sort of funds. George Bush, you really bring this out in a bubble in time. I think this particular section of your book needs to be read by everyone. In fact, I am emailing several people that I have interviewed to get your book and to read this section on George Bush. This is the section where the serious text on freedom of speech, President Bush's speech at Michigan, where he talks about the spirit, the speech, and the enterprise. And Marine Dow responded by saying that political correctness is a broad range of generally liberal attitudes, especially in support of the rights of women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, or conservatives and traditionalists. Look at people who espouse these views to the exclusion of others' rights... These views to the exclusion of others' rights and free speech. Conservatives and traditionalists were the ones that are basically making these attacks. I find it interesting because the free speech movement in 1964, and I remember Sam Brown who was in the Carter administration. When he first got involved in activism, he was talking about that he could not bring a communist in to speak. So, what is the difference between what happened in Berkeley in 1964, where they were not allowed to hand out literature and thus it became a free speech issue, and Sam Brown's experience, I forget what college went to where they could not bring in communists to speak? And what is happening here about political correctness? Just your thoughts. Free speech, basically.

WO (01:08:56):
There is a big difference between political correctness and McCarthyism. McCarthyism was presented by most of the faculty. It was to the degree that university professors did not lose their trials. Three at Rutgers. You never stopped hearing about that here. Three professors in the 1950s lost their jobs for taking the Fifth Amendment before some investigating. But the great hope of the American faculty even developed from the conservative professors who were opposed to McCarthyism, were opposed to loyalty tests on the part of the faculty. Political correctness, on the other hand, has a very broad base of support among the faculty. Lots of it, which is why you could get those things through. Why you could get speech codes and these absurd regulations about what could be said and not said, and what kind of posters you could put up and this kind of thing. Political correctness is... McCarthyism was external. It was forced on colleges and universities. Political correctness is internal. It is the faculty that has come to believe that. There is a real irony in the reversal here obviously because in the (19)50s, faculty were always demanding free speech as an essential, universal freedom of course, particularly freedom among academics. How can you teach if you are not free to say what you believe is true? Now, you get faculty members who say, "No, you cannot say what you believe is true if it is going to offend women, Blacks, gays, transgenders, you name it."

SM (01:10:43):
You say that is a real negative on the boomers? The boomers have laid this on society, and because they are the teachers and the administrators, that is a very negative thing. I want to ask you about you, your personal background. Because I know you went to Berkeley. I believe you got your undergraduate degree, was it at Michigan?

WO (01:11:09):
Michigan, yeah.

SM (01:11:10):
Michigan. Tell me a little bit about yourself. In other words, when you were young in high school growing up, who were the people that you looked up to? Whether it be family members, people in your local community, people that you read about in history books, or people you saw on television or heard on the radio. Who were the people that really inspired you when you were young, and what did they have that you liked about them?

WO (01:11:38):
Well, I grew up in a small town in western Michigan, about 5,000 people. It was then this, well still is, it is the economy seat. It was basically a rural agricultural area, so it served farmers. A little bit of manufacturing. Tiny Paris Institute today at a quite large state college, but then just little tiny private institution. There was no real intellectual stimulation there. My family are Irish Catholic Democrats in a Protestant Republican town. 90 percent of the people were Protestant Republicans, so we were very much an isolated minority. I was bookish even as a child. That is not unusual among academic people. So, apart from Franklin Roosevelt, who was second only, or possibly even superior to the pope as a revered figure. He was superior, actually. The Pope [inaudible]. And Winston Churchill. My father, for some reason, although as I say as an Irish Catholic family, my father just adored Winston Churchill and did not chair the... Many Irishmen were still sore about British oppression and things like that, but my family then, even though they were poorly educated and had been in this country a long time, the founding O'Neill came over during the famine in the 1830s. By the time I was born, my family only been here for 100 years. So, the anti-British sentiment had faded over that time. Anyway, so it became a host of the big inspirational figures in my family. And there were some people I had, some teachers that I liked and thought were good.

SM (01:13:52):
Who were they?

WO (01:13:52):
I had an English teacher in high school, who was awfully good at... In many ways, I appreciated her more after I left than when I was there because she was one of those who made you learn and diagram sentences, and do stuff that seemed beneath you. Because you do that in grammar school and you should not have to do it in high school again. But she was absolutely right. She made us do it in our senior year and she said, "You are going to go to college now. The work is going to be a lot harder," which in those days it was. "It is going to be a lot harder than what you have here, so you really need to brush up on your basics." We were therefore learning the parts of speech and diagram sentences. We all felt this was kind of demeaning because here we were seniors and all that. But of course, it was the best thing she could have done for us. I really did appreciate it when I got to school. I did not have any idols, people that I looked up to. I read a great deal of history of biographies. And of course, being a young boy, I was not reading about Aristotle. I was reading about Napoleon, Caesar and figures like that. It was very much a part of the great man period history. It really appealed to me.

SM (01:15:10):
Your college years as an undergraduate and graduate student, were there any speakers that you saw when you were a graduate student, programs you went to in the out of classroom experience that influenced you?

WO (01:15:21):
Yes. Nobody in my family on either side had ever graduated from college or even really gone to college. My mother had what was called business school, but it was typing and that kind of stuff. So, there was nobody in my family with any experience at all in this. But being Catholics, of course, they adored Notre Dame and thought it was just the greatest university in the world. Since I had knew nothing and had no idea what I wanted to do, so I agreed to go to Notre Dame and I spent my first year there. It was really unpleasant. It was a boys' school at the time and I never had a date the whole year, and neither did anybody I knew. There was a small girls' college, St. Mary's, adjoining the campus, but you had to be an athlete in order to date a girl at St. Mary's, so that was really out. Otherwise, the campus was so stark. They did not have any of the things campuses listen to today. There was no student center, no athletic facilities except for athletes. They turned off the power in the dorms at 10 o'clock so you would not be studying.

SM (01:16:42):
Oh my God.

WO (01:16:44):
And then a priest would come around with flashlights to see if you were masturbating or studying. Either one would be [inaudible]. And you did, you had to check in for mass three days a week. You did not have to actually go to mass, but you had to get fully dressed to go down to the chapel and sign in, at which point you might as well go in. So, I told my parents that I just was not going to go back. They were paying my way and I said, "If you do not want pay my way, I will join the Army or something. I will find some way, but I am not going back." That was bad. So, I transferred to the University of Michigan, and I was short some credits because I had taken courses in theology or religion at Notre Dame. Did not transfer. So, I went to summer school and took Western Civ. I cannot remember the name of the professor. He was a senior faculty member at Michigan in those days. The senior faculty taught the introductory courses. That guy was a wizard. For one thing, the education of Notre Dame was very poor, but I did not know that because I did not have anything to measure it by. I would gone to a mediocre high school with a couple of good teachers, but no real [inaudible]. I took this Western Civ course, it was like the heavens had opened. A world I never dreamed of, even though I would read a lot of history and biography on my own. Focusing on military history and having no context, really. I was kind of an autodidact in that way. Then suddenly, here is this guy who is going over the whole sweep of western civilization to about 1000. I think that was the first half of the course, up to the year 1000 in a sweep of civilizations and incredible concepts.

SM (01:18:42):
Mesopotamia.

WO (01:18:45):
It transformed my life. It was just such a revelation. I never knew that anything like this existed. So, of course, I then majored in history. And he was not the only one. Almost every instructor that I had there, I can only think of one I did not like. Almost every instructor I had taught at such a high level. You really had to work your ass off of course because they were... Unlike today, where I assume my students knew nothing, they assumed we knew a lot. What they were providing us was material in addition to the vast body of knowledge we hope you possess.

SM (01:19:27):
I think Phil Donahue was at Notre Dame around the time that you were there.

WO (01:19:32):
I think he was, yeah. [inaudible].

SM (01:19:33):
And I know Regis Philbin was the group before Phil Donahue, because he is another graduate of Notre Dame. He talks about that a little bit.

WO (01:19:40):
I can assure you, although I know Regis Philbin still loves Notre Dame, but he probably loves it for the football comradery. The university just sucked. It was terrible. I was going to say, going to mission was like ascending in heaven. So, bad. Wow. Eventually, of course, my father wanted me to go to law school. He had this belief that he would have been more successful in business if he had been a lawyer. I think he was quite mistaken. He did not have any of the qualities it takes to be successful in business, and he was one of these people who could not work for anybody else because he had such a bad temper. But he was such poor manager, he could not work for himself successfully. He was doing all right. He did [inaudible] away through school because he was doing all right then. But he eventually went pro. He had this false idea that a lawyer would have been more successful, and having no notion. But of course, once I entered into academic heaven here, I was getting these magnificent courses. Well, then I wanted to be a historian, too. And I would already been accepted in law school because I was programmed to do that. But in my senior year, Michigan offered an honors program. We offer much like the one that we offer here. It was very common. The payoff in that senior honors course was to write a very long research paper, 9800 pages, which I did. Then, I realized that if I could do that, I could probably write a dissertation, which meant that I could be any historian and I would never have to leave this life. I could dwell in the realm of ideas and narrative in a great box.

SM (01:21:32):
I think it is great that a teacher inspired you, though. That is the same thing with me. Probably that teacher had faith in you, too, did not he?

WO (01:21:42):
It was a real big course.

SM (01:21:44):
Yeah, but there had to be someone along the line that said, hey, you are not only a good student, but I have an interest in you in terms of your future. So, that was important sometimes, the faculty-

WO (01:21:55):
I do not think I really talked to a faculty member about that until I took this senior honors course. When there were two faculty members to like 18 students. Michigan, even then, was a very large university and most of the courses I took were very larger courses. It was not until that point that I actually talked to faculty members about this. Yes, I was encouraged. They told me, yeah, you could do it.

SM (01:22:17):
I have just some general questions and then we will finish up here. This might go a little bit over. One of the criticisms of the boomer generation is, and actually I do not think it's a criticism, but where they say that 15 percent were activists. That could be conservative or liberal. People that were activists for various causes in the (19)60s and (19)70s.

WO (01:22:38):
[inaudible].

SM (01:22:39):
Some people say five to 15.

WO (01:22:40):
Or these activists as being difficult, very loosely.

SM (01:22:40):
People involved in-

WO (01:22:44):
I knew some student activists in the history department. The graduate students in history of this class had a very high percentage of activism. It was remarkable. But among the undergraduates, they might show up for a rally or a riot once in a while, but I would not call them activists.

SM (01:23:01):
Well, the question I am trying to get at here is that the people that criticize the boomer generation oftentimes say that only 15 percent were ever involved, whether it be five or 15.

WO (01:23:16):
That is fine, that is fine.

SM (01:23:18):
But my question is, can you agree that the larger portion, which is 85 to 95, was subconsciously still affected by this period? Because if you believe in student development theory, because that is what I am. I am a student of Arthur Chickering, Alexander Aston, Eric Erickson, Rogers. When you talk about you cannot pinpoint the effect that some experience is going to have on a student right away. It could be five, 10 years down the road. So, maybe there were fewer at that time, but then others stood up and spoke up, and later on in life, late 20s, 30s. Do you believe that this whole generation of 78 million was subconsciously affected by what happened in the (19)60s and (19)70s, and it is really affected their lives in some way?

WO (01:24:10):
Yes, I do. Yes, I do believe that. Well, the increase in divorce shot up. The divorce rate doubled in the years after the 1960s, is a reflection of the self-indulgence and self-absorption of the activists, the doing your own thing. Taking drugs and free love, live for the moment and suspect authority and do not trust anyone over 30. And of course, eventually became over 30 themselves. But the whole emphasis on the boomer generation, not everybody, I do not want to stigmatize them all, but the boomer generation to a degree unprecedented previously is self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and materialistic. Not anti-social exactly, but has a lessened sense of social obligation and responsibility. I think it all comes out of the (19)60s. Not the create a socialist revolution, which actually almost nobody believed. The SDFs and a few others were doing that, but the real message of that was personal freedom and self-indulgence. That really sold.

SM (01:25:31):
Yeah, it is interesting you say that because C. Wright Mills, who wrote white collar and we all read about him when I was in sociology class, Dr. Lehman, who actually was fired from Bingham for leading a protest in downtown. She was only there a year. But C. Wright Mills said that the goal of the university education is not to need the university. The individualism and think on their own, the concept of in loco parentis kind of ended during this timeframe. That the universities were not supposed to be parents and were not activists doing this in the (19)60s and (19)70s. So, the question I am asking here is that there is the individual right there. Some of the things that students are reading and being educated about, some of the writers we have looked up to, says that the individual is important. Carl Davidson has written a great book on the multiversity in a series on the 60s, and he brings this up about the importance of the individual. Because if the individual is not there, then you do not have freedom. And if you do not have freedom, you do not have power. And students wanted power. Or at least to be looked upon for their thoughts. Is what I am saying really true, what C. Wright Mills said? When you talk about that this is one of the goals of the boomers was to really be an individual as opposed to be a part of a collaborative group?

WO (01:27:07):
Well, I do not know how. They were just as conformist as young people always are. Young people are pretty much by definition, is-

SM (01:27:14):
Let me change...

(01:27:14):
Okay.

WO (01:27:24):
My impression of students in the (19)60s, and of course I was, which is derived largely from Wisconsin where I was a faculty member. It was not my self-esteem anymore. But my impression was that the students in the (19)60s were just as anxious and concerned about their identity and wanting to be a part of the group, and to conform to group norms and all that. Very few students want to be fearless individuals and completely unlike everybody else. They want to be popular and well- liked, and succeed in the areas that students think are important. But what developed among students was a feeling that this generation of students was too well-educated and sophisticated to be treated like previous generation of students, who had had all these regulations governing personal conduct. The girls had to live in, and boys had to live in segregated dormitories and there had to be hours. Well, they did not have lights out except at Notre Dame. At Michigan, for example, the girls had to be in their dorms at 10 o'clock at night on a school night. They could stay up until 12 on weekends. Well, with the beginnings of the sexual revolution and all that, students rebelled against these restrictions, against in loco parentis. But it was sort of collectively. It was not fearless assertions of individualism. It was they believed as a class that they deserved rights that their predecessors had been denied. The universities of course fell all over themselves in branding them, because you're also now getting the protests over civil rights and segregation in the south, and the war in Vietnam. Universities could not do anything about the treatment of Blacks in the south or the war in Vietnam, but they could integrate the dormitories and eliminate the in loco parentis restrictions. That was easy to do. They also did other things, too. The students in Wisconsin and other universities, students went beyond that to an end to the language requirement. Students had always hated the language requirement, but they have never been sufficiently impressive as a pressure group to be able to get university administrations to listen to them. Again, in the (19)50s, students had tried to organize a protest and said do away with the foreign language requirement. They probably would have been expelled, right? No, the university took a very hard line. The dean of women at Michigan was an ex-WAG colonel and the girls were terrified of her. So, the universities really started caving in. In loco parentis, sure that had to go. In the age of sexual revolution and self-expression and doing your own thing, you could not hold the line on that stuff and what was even the point? But when they gave away the language requirement, some of these other things, boy, that is when I think the downhill slide began through universities. Because now you are in the business of pleasing the customers, and that had never been the attitude before. Michigan took the view you were damn lucky to be here, and most of you will not graduate anyway. Michigan was one of those schools where it was terribly difficult to get in, but the senior graduating class was about one-third the size of the freshman class. And they bragged about it. They did not succeed, this is bootcamp. It is not bootcamp, but this is a task. It is going to be very difficult. Most of you are not going to make it. And they would see that right off.

SM (01:31:20):
Yeah, you probably looked to your left, looked to your right.

WO (01:31:22):
Yeah. Yep.

SM (01:31:22):
Yeah, they did that at Binghamton, and just everybody stayed.

WO (01:31:24):
Yeah, they did that at the university. Rutgers operated somewhat differently. Their admission standards were more stringent so that you did not have to fail. In fact, in my early years here, I hardly failed anyone. But they were actually students very well-prepared, hardworking. Even the kids got Cs, those were good, solid Cs. They made an effort to get there. Now, you get a C in many courses just for signing up.

SM (01:31:51):
I thought boomers many times, especially those that were activists, said I want to be around people who think like me, who have the same interests that I do. In other words, I want to be around people who are against the war in Vietnam. I want to be around people who went down south for civil rights issues. I want to be around any of these movements. People who think like I do. Well, isn't the goal of a university is to bring people together who do not agree? I have been thinking about this because that seems if you are just an individual and you are not part of a group where you listen to opposing points of view, that is not a university either. It is a lot of things that come up here, the contradictions of this whole era seem to really make you think. What do you feel led to the AIDS crisis? I have had many people, because when we talk about the (19)80s, and we think of Ronald Reagan. Of course, he said, "We are back," because he's going to bring the military back. During the (19)60s, all the society had gone downhill. But the AIDS crisis is something that he did not really deal with. He could not even say gay and lesbian, as a person. I have had scholars who were gay and lesbian scholars that I have interviewed said that they almost come to tears when they talk about Ronald Reagan. And then, of course, the AIDS crisis is one of the biggest crises of the time. For gay lesbian boomers, it wiped out maybe one out of every two men, who were living within the inner cities. A lot of them were scholars, a lot of them were great writers. The loss of talent.

WO (01:33:37):
I had a friend I remember in the history department, who died of AIDS. I liked him very well. He was gay, but he was... I do not want to make a pun here. He was just a great company. I loved him very much. But he was in the first generation who died. He was extremely promiscuous. They did not take any precautions.

SM (01:34:04):
You think that part of what the (19)70s was about, because a lot of people when they talk about the sexual revolution, they really talk the (19)70s, not the (19)60s. We still had-

WO (01:34:15):
I think it was more pronouncements.

SM (01:34:16):
Yeah, but that kind of led to the AIDS crisis, and then it is what happened after it was found out that people were dying from this, where Ronald Reagan is really dislike by many people, even bringing them to tears.

WO (01:34:33):
I do not know enough about it.

SM (01:34:37):
Right. Of all the presidents from 1946 to 2010, which is the time the boomers have lived, we have made a reference just about all of them in our conversation here. Is there anyone that you think had the greatest impact on the boomer generation, from Truman to Obama?

WO (01:35:03):
No. Not being a boomer, it is hard for me to say. I guess it would be John Kennedy, but not the actual John Kennedy. The myth of Kennedy was. Even today when people are polled and say, who was the greatest president? Well, they normally cannot think beyond the presidents they knew of their lifetime, the ones that they saw on TV or whatever. But Kennedy still comes up a great deal, and on the part of people who cannot possibly have remembered him. My gosh, he was elected 50 years ago. So, you go any younger than that, oh, you would have to be 60 at least to have any faintest personal recollection of his presidency. So, it is the myth of the candidate. The falsehoods, essentially. They have had a great effect.

SM (01:36:01):
What do you think if you were to, you are writing a book and you are writing two chapters, and chapter one is you are writing on one specific quality, that this was the best of the boomer generation and I am going to write about this and break it down? And what's the worst about the... What were the single worst and the single best, and how would you illuminate within the chapter?

WO (01:36:30):
Well, again, up until Bill Clinton, there were no boomer presidents. He was the first one. So, there have only been two.

SM (01:36:41):
Two. Yeah.

WO (01:36:41):
And I was too young. So, there is not a lot of choice there.

SM (01:36:49):
Right. In terms of maybe influencing their lives, some people will say that Lyndon Johnson, what a great person in the area of social issues, the domestic policy. But he was a dismal failure in Vietnam and some did not like his personality, and others did. You still get back to those two that are the boomers? Yeah.

WO (01:37:18):
And as different as Clinton and Bush were, they did share the negative stereotypes that people associate with the boomer generation. They were self-indulgent. Clinton of course, in gross and obvious ways, but Bush was, too. You had this dissipated youth that went on and on. Which typical boomers, not that they are always dissipated, but they hang on to their youth. They are more afraid of maturity and more reluctant to enter into it. I think those are real fair characterizations. Then once he became president, God, he vacationed more than any other president. More than Reagan, more than Eisenhower. Nobody spent as much time vacationing as Bush did, and as little time governing, and as much time working out. That is another boomer thing, working out. Previous presidents did not. Well, Theodore Roosevelt did. It is hard to think of previous president who were focused on exercise.

SM (01:38:22):
Harry did. Harry Truman, he liked to walk.

WO (01:38:24):
He took his walks. Yes, yes.

SM (01:38:26):
Yes, and I think that kept him alive a lot longer than most people because of all the tensions he went through.

WO (01:38:32):
It is a very good health habit.

SM (01:38:35):
Just a couple more things here. I know we talked a little bit about this, but I am not going to talk about very much of these things. You say that in some of your writings here, that the new left or the activist group within the boomer generation, really it was a short period in the end because they burned out. The draft ended, which was the main cause that united them.

WO (01:39:09):
Yes, I think by the end of the draft, collapsed.

SM (01:39:11):
The violence of groups getting frustrated that they had to go, whether it be the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers or Weathermen, all three of them, they went to violence. Even the environmental groups today are dealing with this particular issue, which is really hurting their cause. That they get frustrated and they go the violent way. Is that the reason why? When people talk about the (19)60s, they talk about all these groups and all these people and Woodstock and the counterculture and the activism and protests on college campuses. You got the split between the white students and the Black students in the late (19)70s because one was protesting against the Vietnam War, the other was against working the area of civil rights.

WO (01:40:10):
I may say that I am happy that the left has collapsed, and I am sorry that it still lingers on in the university. Although, I have to say it never did me any harm, I do not think. I just did not like it. Was that they never developed an adult pace and they were overly dependent on the draft. Once the draft had Nixon, Nixon believed that he could get rid of the draft, that would be end of the student movement because he thought it was basically self-centered. And to a large extent, I think he was right. Take the draft away. The war in Vietnam is an on-campus issue as long as you have a draft. When the draft is gone, the issue is gone, too.

SM (01:40:56):
Do you see a link right now between what is happening on college campuses in California and across the country, that students are seeing the issue of their pocketbook and they are not going to take it anymore? Just like people said, I am not going to take the draft anymore? Because it is their self-interest. The middle class may not be able to go on to college because tuition is going up 17 percent. I know in Pennsylvania, they are talking about raising it $1500.

WO (01:41:25):
Students at Rutgers paid 12,000 a year in tuition and fees, but that is absolutely outrageous. It should be essentially free. It used to be essentially free. We're talking about 20, 25 years ago.

SM (01:41:40):
Do you think this issue could be something that unites the students around the country? And again-

WO (01:41:44):
Well, it is certainly something they all have in common.

SM (01:41:46):
Graduate students are taking a lead at Berkeley on this. And actually, I never thought I would-

WO (01:41:52):
Of course, they do not pay tuition in the world.

SM (01:41:53):
Yeah, but what is interesting is that these students are saying for the first time, I do not care if my career is threatened by this. It is wrong and I am out here and I am going to speak my mind. They are threatened by this. It is wrong, and I am out here, and I am going to speak my mind. That is what has been critical of the students of the (19)80s and the (19)90s and even the (19)10s. Is they fear, oftentimes, that by speaking up, they will lose a job, their career could be hurt. A lot of students in the (19)60s never thought that. Just your thoughts on-

WO (01:42:22):
No, they did not.

SM (01:42:24):
Just your thoughts on that, that this could be something that universities are very concerned about.

WO (01:42:30):
Well, they ought to be. Now, I completely understand why universities are doing this. When your state aid collapses, what are you supposed to... You have only got a few options here. And raising tuition, and many more students, which Rutgers does too, crank up the tuition and admit more students, and shrink the faculty.

SM (01:42:49):
Mm-hmm.

WO (01:42:50):
So, your student-generated income goes larger. There is a fewer faculty members you have to spread around, but Jesus, there is got to be a limit to that, and it seems to be a backlash too.

SM (01:43:02):
Yeah. And of course, faculty oftentimes say administrators need to be cut back, because after all-

WO (01:43:08):
They have actually expanded a lot. I mean, the percentage of employees who are administrators has gone up a lot over the last 20 years, and at a time when faculties generally shrunk.

SM (01:43:23):
My last little section here deals back again with political correctness. I want to get your thoughts on the quotes that you put in your book, which I am going to encourage my friends to read, because I think it is great. You have the quote from Barbara Ehrenreich, who I would met twice, that, "Political correctness is the enforcement arm of multiculturalism or feminism." Then you have got Leon Botstein, who I have brought to campus, who really challenged our secondary ed teachers. Oh, they are not were prepared for this. Because he is an advocate that he does not believe we need a senior year in high school. He thinks the senior year is a waste. But the quote here is, "In practice, the call for diversity now prevented any real exchange of opinions on campus." And then Dr. Asante, who responds, "Racists are hiding behind the First Amendment." This is an interesting thing on college campuses. First of all, I am surprised Dr. Botstein had said that, because he's very liberal, but this is oftentimes what people are afraid to say, and what they believe, for fear that they're going to be hurt, that their careers could be threatened. A faculty member may believe this, but I cannot do it because my department chairs, it could have an effect on me. And then students... Just your thoughts on Ehrenreich, Botstein, and Asante's commentary on the dialogue of today, and whether all that took place from the Free Speech Movement of (19)64, and all that happened in the (19)60s, through the mid (19)70s, about freedom of speech on college campuses. Different points of view. Everybody's equal. The concept that all voices count. And then you have these discussions here, where people are afraid to speak their mind again. This happened throughout the (19)90s, and obviously today, and you have seen it on a college campus throughout your career.

WO (01:45:27):
Yeah. I love that by Barbara Ehrenreich. I think, of course, it is actually true. The academic leftist, of course, have backed off considerably. The early (19)90s was the flood tide of these speech codes, and prosecutions of faculty members for making somebody feel uncomfortable. That was a serious charge, "So-and-so feels uncomfortable in your class." I guess your job as a teacher is to raise the comfort zone of everyone. I never thought that was my job. So, they had backed off, because the publicity was so terrible, and justly so. I mean, you claim on the one hand academic freedom, and then you are denying it to your colleagues over silly stuff. You're like that poor man of New Hampshire, with the Jell-O and the vibrator.

SM (01:46:17):
Mm-hmm.

WO (01:46:17):
And those things clearly well-meaning, and not attempting to be salacious. So, they have backed off from the deal. You do not see that stuff in the public area as much as you used to. Otherwise, where did you want to go from here?

SM (01:46:37):
Who is more correct? Is Ehrenreich correct? Is Botstein correct? I find Botstein is commentary something that should be put into a book. I know that [inaudible] wrote a liberal education. We all read that. I have seen him debate a couple times, he is very good at what he does. He debates the other person, that other person is very good too. It is a pretty civil debate. But to hear this from Leon Botstein, this young, I think of him from the (19)60s, because I think he was the youngest college president ever at Bard College, and he was a liberal, and I think he was 27 years old. And for him to say this, to me, sends a clear message that we need to be doing a better job within the university environment, and that tolerance, and beyond tolerance. We went through those phases of tolerance and beyond tolerance. Are we back to tolerance again?

WO (01:47:39):
It is hard to say. One of the annoying things is the, which I do talk about some of the book, is the tremendous overemphasis on identity, on sexual identity, particularly racial and sub-racial identities. Ruckers, for example, the current president is terrifically proud of the fact that the student body contains more racial minorities than it does whites. Well, this is a white majority state still, which means the whites are being discriminated against in order to achieve higher numbers of people in other racial groups. And such as the climate of opinion and politically correct universities is this is seen as a good thing; discriminate against whites, and usually Asians too. He never says that.

SM (01:48:34):
Well, my alma mater, they have gone through a terrible situation with the basketball team, which you have probably have heard. They won the division last year, because Dr. DeFleur, the chancellor, wanted to bring in strong athletic programs, and linkage with our strong academics there. She is a great president, I am not going to question her, but she has been under their heat because they had to fire the coach. They actually paid him, and because of the fact that they brought in mostly African American basketball players from New York City and elsewhere, and they were unbelievably players. And that put a lot of pressure on the other state universities, that they not only have to bring in quality athletes in linkage with the academics, but they found out now, through the last year, that there was agreements made between the admissions office. The admissions' person never would have admitted these people, but was pressured to do so. The coach was in direct linkage with this, who they hired. This is some coach in Georgetown.

WO (01:49:36):
I did read that.

SM (01:49:37):
And it has become such a serious issue. Dr. DeFleur is retiring, but I think she's retiring because I think there is a lot of pressure going on there. And there is a plan that has to go into places so this will not happen again, and sends all the wrong messages. And alumni are furious. Alumni are furious, and they want the administration all gone. And Dr. DeFleur has committed 19 years of her life to making that a great institution. But unfortunately, in this one instance, it is marring her, and it goes right back to this thing here. This is an issue that universities have to face. In conclusion, the violence that took place within the time that boomers were young and growing up, I mean obviously there has been violence. The holocaust happened for the World War II generation. Violence has always been part of what it is like to be a human being. I am very lucky that in July I am going to have two hours of the Robert Jay Lifton, and I am going to Boston, and we are going to talk about the psychology of the Vietnam veteran, but I have asked him to talk about the psychology of the anti-war protestor. And from his perspective, in terms of with veterans, it is post-traumatic stress disorder. But I want to get a better grasp of people that were on the other side, and he has agreed to do so. But the violence, it had to have shaped boomers, because they grew up with being in maybe 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade, with respect to the assassination of John Kennedy. (19)68 saw a United States senator and candidate murdered along with the greatest civil rights leader of all time. The unbelievable violence that took place, not only in Chicago, but the riots that took all... You know. The deaths in many major cities throughout the '60s. Then, obviously, you had the violence and the killings at Kent State University and Jackson State. And actually, I did not know this, but if you study it, there was a student killed at Berkeley, in 1969, at the People's Park incident. And we do not ever talk about him, and he has lost in history, and he should be discussed because he had nothing to do with the protest. He was just standing at the top of a building, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Do you think this did to the psyche? Forget the fact that they are the new left. They were part of the violence too. What happened in Chicago, with the Black Panthers that were killed, and the COINTELPRO, and all the bad things that happened. But the violence, I am talking about the violence. What did this do to the psyche of this 78 million, as they moved into the (19)80s, and (19)90s, and beyond? Any thoughts?

WO (01:52:40):
Well, it certainly upset me. The (19)60s were terrible. The (19)60s were terrible in that way. This is a violent country, since World War II, at any rate. Compared to most other developed countries, we have had far more violence than almost any of the Britain has. Its soccer hooligans, I guess. That is a highly specialized subgroup. But this is just normally a violent country. We have got a big homicide rate. We had lynchings, well, if you could count the murders of civil rights workers, right into the 1960s, were far more heavily armed than anybody in the first world. And getting more so by the day. So, we have a certain amount of background violence, that just, we hardly notice it all. It's there all the time. But the race riots, and the violent demonstrations of the (19)60s, went beyond anything that we have seen in peace time. As you consider a little bit the Vietnam War, it's hard to know what peacetime is. We always seem to be engaged, and we are shooting somewhere.

SM (01:54:07):
I-

WO (01:54:09):
I do not know. I really do not know. And certainly, was extremely upsetting to me. How could it not have been upsetting to him?

SM (01:54:19):
See, I know that there was a book that came out around mid (19)70s, by Oba Demery. I do not know, I think that is how you pronounce his name. It's called Violence in America. And of course, this is talking about what happened in the (19)60s, but it goes way back to the wild, wild west, and how we have been killing, God knows... Native American's wounded knee. So, it is part of what we are as a country, and as a race. As he said, we have been always been a violent nation. And with Howard Zinn passing away recently, whether he like his politics or not, he made a commentary when his last speech. They had it on YouTube. And in that speech, it was pretty powerful. He said, "I was a World War II pilot, and I came back, and I thought when the war ended we had ended war as we knew it. We were not going to have war anymore, because we just defeated the Japanese and the Germans." And he said, "You know, since I came back, and used the GI Bill to get my PhD, he says, we have had nothing but war. War, after war, after war." And as you bring up, the only time we had the break in here was the Clinton period for four years, but even he got involved and skirmishes, Blackhawk down, and those kinds of things.

WO (01:55:40):
It required other statements of other decades. There was really nothing.

SM (01:55:45):
Yeah. So anyways, I am done. Are there any questions that you thought I was going to ask that I did not? Any final thoughts on the boomer generation, that you would like to mention?

WO (01:56:04):
Well, I personally like many of them. But it is true that I am somewhat against them as a group. I am somewhat prejudiced. And what I think one of the paradoxes, that I have never been able to resolve, is that the war generation, which is now officially the Greatest Generation, produces the boomers, who are the most in self-indulgent generation. And maybe they were over-shielded by their parents.

SM (01:56:34):
But you see, the boomers also attacked the consumption, the materialism, yet you are right-

WO (01:56:40):
Very few. Oh, very few.

SM (01:56:42):
Well, they did not, and that is what the multi diversity, the students in the universities attacked them. That was the generation gap. That was a lot of the issues that were happening within that definition.

WO (01:56:54):
That was just this tiny group of leftists, who were not all representative, the students as the whole. Even in the (19)60s, students consumed as much as they could, and they were more affluent. The parents were more affluent than previous generations had been, so they consumed more. And of course, now it is unbelievable. It seems like every other student has a car. And of course, they have all got cell phones, and laptops, and every electronic device known to man.

SM (01:57:28):
I know that the 40th anniversary of Kent State is coming up in about six weeks. I am going. Been there three of the last four years. And Mark Rudd's going to be there, former SDS. They are having an SDS reunion there, because Kent State had one of the strongest SDS chapters in the country. And well, Allen [inaudible] and the group, they were some of the ones that were actually killed. Allison Krause and Jeff Miller were SDSers. The other two were innocent. But they got Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn is coming back from, she was the Weathermen, but she was SDS. So, they are having a [inaudible]. They were having a revival of the SDS group. I was not SDS. But then they're going to have a lot of speakers. And of course, the representative from Jackson State is always there too, because two were killed.

WO (01:58:19):
I read lot ago that Mark Rudd had in effect apologized for the Columbia takeover.

SM (01:58:25):
I interviewed him for my book. And he wrote his, it is a very good book. It is called Underground. And he admits that they were... I mean, it was totally wrong, going into violence, and he says it is the greatest mistake he ever made. They were involved in a group of people that were, even if you did not like them, they were committed. They were generally committed to ending the war, and they had no violence in their aspects. It was all protest, non-violent protests. You could be arrested, you can take over, and you can disrupt. But I have interviewed a couple Columbia University students, who were there at the time, and when they went the violent direction, that ended SDS.

WO (01:59:06):
But others like, Bernardine Dohrn, specifically, are unrepentant, who claim everything they did was already justified. How were they going to get along to you out here?

SM (01:59:16):
Well, I wanted to interview her too. I did not want to interview her husband. But she did not respond. She is at the University of Chicago Law. She did professor there. She did not respond. Mark did. I really enjoyed my conversation with him. You really understand. He opens it all up. He tells the whole story. And if you know the whole history at the very end, Mark Rudd and Vernon Dorn did not like each other. And there was some friction within the... And then Mark went off in his own direction. He is now a grandfather. And the day I interviewed him, he was at the beach in California with his grandson. And he is proud of what he did within the SDS, but he is not proud at all about the violence. He is just-

WO (02:00:04):
So what profession did he go into?

SM (02:00:07):
Well, he is a teacher now. He has been teaching in a community college for quite a few years. He is really a mathematician. He is very strong in math. He has always been good in math. Of course, he was hidden. He was underground for a long time. And what is interesting... I got this still on. But what is interesting is that they all lived out in the Sausalito area in California. When they were hidden, it was the boats.

WO (02:00:29):
What a great place to hide out.

SM (02:00:32):
Yeah. And actually, my sister is going out to visit friends, who has a boat right there in Sausalito. And no one knew them, because there were a lot of hippies, and that whole group there. And so no, that is why they were stay underground for so long. But then he finally let himself- Loud if you can. Are you ready?

WO (02:00:59):
Yes.

SM (02:01:00):
Okay. When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion? And why did it begin, and what was the watershed moment?

WO (02:01:16):
Well, I would say the (19)60s began in 1964. That was the year of the free movement at Berkeley.

SM (02:01:25):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:01:26):
It was the year of the Civil Rights Act. Well, first Birmingham, then the Civil Rights Act. So, it was really, and of course [inaudible]. But there were a series of big events, and really things...

SM (02:01:44):
Mm-hmm. When you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what comes to your mind? Was there a specific event, or a series of events, that continued to shape the boomers, not only in when they were young, but also in their adult years?

WO (02:02:00):
The (19)60s really did not last very long. I mean, it could take (19)64 as the starting point, which for purposes of my book I had, you have to do these things by decades. So, I started in my book in 1960, but in fact, the events that things lost started in 1964. And by 1971, they were essentially over. So, a very lot happened in a very short period too.

SM (02:02:35):
But when you look at the term rebellious incident, well that is an adjective that is often used to define boomers when they were young. And we're talking about a generation of probably 70 to 75 million. Some people have written that a lot of them were rebellious because we had the draft at that time, and maybe they would not have been as rebellious otherwise. What is your response to that?

WO (02:03:00):
Oh, I certainly agree. The political activity had everything to do with the draft. And once Richard Nixon essentially eliminated the risk, even before... Nixon believed that- I hate to agree with Nixon. Nixon believed this was true. And so, he reshaped the draft to eliminate the risk to almost everybody. And the first thing he did was, you were only liable at the age of 19. So, if you were over 19, you did not have to worry about it. And if you were 19, there was a lottery that told you, to win, how high your risk of being drafted was. And he was reducing the brute strength in Vietnam very rapidly. Very few people were at risk. And so again, by 1971 chances of being drafted were negligible.

SM (02:04:02):
But when you look at all the different types of movements that came about in that era, which not only included the anti-war movement, and the civil rights movement was ongoing. And then you had the development of all the other movements; the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, Native American movement, Chicano movement, Earth Day, the environmental movement. There was a spirit happening out there, that they were tired of the status quo, that many of these young people were tired of that status quo. And of course, the question that ultimately asked is there truth to that? And secondly, have they carried these ideas into their adulthood?

WO (02:04:43):
Well, of course the environmental movement, it is still moving.

SM (02:04:49):
Dr. Neil, could you speak a little louder too?

WO (02:04:53):
I guess. I do not think I can turn up the volume here.

SM (02:04:57):
Okay, that is all right.

WO (02:05:00):
Well, the environmental movement became permanent, and it was not just a matter of young people. The [inaudible] came out at the beginning of the decade, and there were a number of others as well, so it was never... A new leftist was a young people's wisdom. Environmentalism was not, feminism was not either. That started relatively early, with Betty Friedan.

SM (02:05:28):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:05:30):
And that is become, essentially, it is not the picturesque phase of feminist, the women's liberation movement, and that sort of thing. That died out in the (19)70s, but the more permanent of termination, to secure equal rights, never did die out. What are the others? We do not hear much about Chicano rights. A right for [inaudible]-

SM (02:06:00):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:06:01):
Who is very much alive. But again, with the kickoff with the riots, at the bar in New York City, name that I cannot remember, that was relatively young people, but it became institutionalized.

SM (02:06:20):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:06:20):
And you noticed, when you see today, for gay married and the like, it is remarkable. Many of them are middle-aged people.

SM (02:06:31):
Is there, when you look at that whole era of boomers, that are defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, some people have had a hard time looking at generations that are confined to years. And I have had that in my interviews. But is there one specific event that you feel had the greatest impact, an event, a happening, that affected this generation?

WO (02:07:02):
No, I do agree that it is a very specific generation. I mean, I do not even think it is a matter of opinion, really. The demographic had a population explosion in the (19)50s, and by 1964 or so, that explosion was over in the first [inaudible]. So, I mean, I do not see how you can deny the boomers are an actual generation has seen, still, the largest single movement in American history. But I do not see it as defined by a single event. For example, the things that are most common in my book, and in most books about the (19)60s, we are talking about the sort of tip of the iceberg. But the movement, like the work we have discussed, and famous individuals, when you are talking about 75 million people, a very small fraction of that total was involved in the things that we talk about.

SM (02:08:06):
Right.

WO (02:08:06):
The real change, the thing that distinguished the boomers, I think, from previous generations at any rate, more than anything else, the self-indulgence, and the pleasure consumed. [inaudible] rate goes way up.

SM (02:08:22):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:08:22):
Drug use goes way up. The rebellion is not so much a form of political one as it is throwing off traditional American values. And that-

SM (02:08:33):
Yeah, that goes right into my next question. Please list some positive characteristics of this generation, and some negative ones.

WO (02:08:53):
I mean, at the time, in the (19)60s, and when I was writing my book, I had been impressed by the Civil Rights Movement, which was fabulous. And for a time, by the new left, but those movements burned out so quickly. I mean, civil rights reaches its peak, probably in 1965, with the voting right back, and the events [inaudible]. And then, by the end of the decade, we have got Black Power, which absolutely destroyed the integrated Civil Rights Movement. And you still have civil rights advocate today, but it is a kind of lobby, not a movement.

SM (02:09:38):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:09:40):
So, the movement period did not last very long. And most of the things, the boomers, the public once again, to politicize the ones you read about at the time, most of them did not last very long. They burned out pretty quickly. And it is hard for me to think of the long-term positive attributes. And I think quite a lot of negative ones, again, in terms of self-indulgence, and the drugs, and the enormous increase in divorce rates, and the like. My favorite-

SM (02:10:24):
You bring up what George Will and Newt Gingrich have said, "Oh, for a long time, whenever they get a chance to take a shot at the (19)60s generation, or the Boomers, is that all the reasons for the breakdown of American society falls into that particular group." And George Will has actually written on it in his books. And when Newt Gingrich came to power in 1994, there were often times when he would say it, even though he was a boomer. And the divisions in our society, the breakdown of American society, the drugs, the families, the lack of trust in positions of leadership... Are George Will and Newt Gingrich right?

WO (02:11:07):
Well, they are half right. I mean, I do agree with them, with what Trooper said-

SM (02:11:12):
What is that?

WO (02:11:14):
But what they never said, that the other half of what's been damaging to America in the last 40 years or so, has been the rise of right-wing extremists, and the Evangelical Christians, and the politicalization of schools, the effort to prevent abortion, and to stop speaking of evolution in the schools, and the denial of gay rights. I mean, the right-wing has a great deal of influence, and they never mentioned that the problem with this country isn't the notion of mere self-indulges.

SM (02:11:46):
Right.

WO (02:11:47):
It is the calculated exploitation of people's fears, right when you are [inaudible].

SM (02:11:53):
One of the interesting points, too, on the criticisms of the boomer generation, is they will always point out that only 15 percent of 70 to 75 million were involved in any sort of activism. And they use it as a negative, but that is still a pretty large number, isn't it? When you consider 70 million people.

WO (02:12:13):
I mean, the movement, can you think of that kind of participation?

SM (02:12:20):
That is a lot. Could you comment on how important the boomer youth were, in college students in particular, in ending the war in to Vietnam?

WO (02:12:36):
I think they were most influential in since of their parents. A lot of people in Congress, and in important... I am reading right now the new biography of Paul Nitze.

SM (02:12:52):
Oh, yes.

WO (02:12:54):
And-

SM (02:12:54):
Yes, I have it.

WO (02:12:56):
Nitze's children were part of the movement. They were opposed to the Vietnam War. So, there he was in the Pentagon, [inaudible]. He was trying to defend it. No, I think they had a lot of influence to their parents, and I think that was more important than marching on the Pentagon, or think. Huh.

SM (02:13:18):
One of the things, and this is getting into modern day universities, is I have had a sense for several years, and you as a professor, probably unlike your comments on this, that people in positions of leadership and universities today, i.e. administrators, are afraid of the term activism, for the main reason is that it brings back all the memories of what happened in the (19)60s and (19)70s. And to them, it means the disruption of classes, the break... there is a real worry that volunteerism is popular, but activism is not, they do not like the term, am I right in assuming this?

WO (02:13:59):
That is my impression. One positive thing I wanted, I omitted, but I think the boomers began, and that was the tradition of local activists. Not great sweeping, let us say the end of the world or whatever, but the fact that ordinary people in neighborhoods started mobilizing the developed freeway from going through the middle town, or waste plant being built in their neighborhood, or whatever. I mean, on this local level, which is an ideological. It is really based on trying to preserve their immediate environment. There is a tremendous amount of this grant activism that is not political, but that the date from, and certainly was inspired by the exit of the (19)60s, that is become a permanent piece of American legacy.

SM (02:14:50):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:14:54):
But then, what you were saying about administrators, the access of the (19)60s began the process undermining the university. I am absolutely convinced for that. It started with [inaudible] credits.

SM (02:15:06):
Yes.

WO (02:15:07):
And I thought that was typically reasonable. I mean, by the 1960's in the effort, they usually did it through the female student. The dormitory in Michigan, where I was an undergrad student, women had to be in their dorms by 10 o'clock on weeknights, and 12 o'clock on weekends. And theory believes that boys were very little opportunities for mischief. I mean, that was such an outmoded thing. So, I thought the getting rid of the local [inaudible] was perfectly fine. Then we started educating against requirements like foreign language, with very considerable success. Most universities came in on that one. And so, we have not had required foreign language, but in a great many universities for a very long time. And then they went after other aspects of the curriculum... memory. Then they went after other aspects of the curriculum that they did not like? Like science requirements-

SM (02:16:05):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:16:06):
... and that sort of thing. And, it is very true Rutgers is where been I have spent most of my career and I know it is good, do not [inaudible] prestige as well, but there was a cutting of the curriculum and newspapers were putting in the word "Vietnam" or "abolish racism". They would get rid of the foreign language requirements, and things like that. And the curriculum, it never recovered from that.

SM (02:16:32):
Well, what's interesting is that the people that run the universities today are the Boomers that were on campus and they witnessed what was happening at that particular period. And I do not know if the people that are running universities are those that were more conservative as opposed to the more liberal students that were doing the anti-war movement and other movements.

WO (02:16:53):
Basically, I think it was the more liberal students because the administrators that I am familiar with fell all over themselves to introduce Black studies, race studies, and Ebonics studies. And I do not mean that these things should not be introduced, but they were done for political reasons not for academic reasons at a time when there was so few experts. I was in Wisconsin, I thought it was dumb when the Black studies program was introduced because some students were marching into classes and disrupting them and taking the microphone away from a person. And it would usually be like 50 white students and one black, and they were demanding a Black studies program along with honestly cobbled ones together, which included a nurse, a geographer. I mean, there were not any experts at the time. It was just placating the students. It was always, administrators [inaudible]. And it makes it relatively easy to blackmail them.

SM (02:17:54):
Well, what was interesting as you well know then, and of course I was a student at that time, is that you give into my demands and we will just demand more demands.

WO (02:18:04):
Right.

SM (02:18:05):
That happened an awful lot. A lot of the Boomers, at least when I was... I went to Binghamton University and I know there was sense there, as well as when I went to grad school in Ohio State, that we are the most unique generation in American history.

WO (02:18:20):
Oh, absolutely, [inaudible].

SM (02:18:21):
Yeah, and I know a lot of people still believe that, that are in their early (19)60s, now. Your thoughts on that kind of an attitude?

WO (02:18:31):
Oh, they were very full of themselves. I have an anecdote, today, [inaudible] word. They will probably block that out, but it was really illuminating to me. One of the things... again, I thought it was constant from (19)66 to (19)71 and those were absolutely the worst years of student activism. And one of the things those graduate students demanded, the graduate students at the University of Wisconsin lead the whole campus-wide to left. And they demanded that the [inaudible] department meetings be open to all students who wanted to come. And so, the department caved in on that. There was a lot of caving going on at the time. And so, the radical graduate students started coming and the result was that regular faculty would not say anything. So, the meetings became meaningless because nobody would have an opinion that might inflame the graduate students or whoever. Oh, after about six months of this, everything had to be done by committees and behind closed doors not at the actual meetings. The department finally decided to rescind that rule and during the (19)60s everything controversial was all an elaborate parliamentary of protocols. [inaudible] school's order was dragged out at every occasion. So, before we got the vote to ban these sorts of departmental meetings, there were a series of preliminary votes and it finally got to the penultimate vote, which was if you voted "yes" on this it meant that you were going to vote yes with students because they were with the radical students sitting right next to me in school, but I put my hand up that I was going to vote. One of these students, he turned to me and he said, " O'Neil, you prick, we will get you for this."

SM (02:20:34):
Oh, my gosh.

WO (02:20:34):
I actually laughed because it was such an inflated opinion on their influence. I knew they were not going to get me.

SM (02:20:43):
My gosh. Yeah, this brings up a question of you personally. When you were a professor in the (19)60s and (19)70s, how did these students differ from other students from other generations? Say the Generation Xers, and the current Millennials. How did these students different? Were they more inquisitive? Were they more well-read? Did they have a better knowledge of history? Just your thoughts.

WO (02:21:14):
The actual (19)60s students and I was [inaudible] over the decade, essentially. On the one hand they were still extremely well-prepared for college work, the deterioration of the general educational system had not set in yet. So, they were extremely well-prepared. They were capable of doing high level academic work and because they had been so politicized by the war and race movement and things like that, that they asked... this is all apart from the demonstration movement... any regular classroom work, you had to be prepared and I always tried to anticipate before I gave a lecture, but, it might be interrupted as imperialistic. And if a student accused me of that, how would I respond to it? And it would not be just a matter of name-calling, they do not, for instance, they will say, "well, how can you defend the policy that entailed using the Philippines, whatever the issue." So, they were smart and well-prepared and well-read in subjects they were interested. It was the most exciting teaching I have ever had. I had not really signed up for exciting teaching but it turned out to be a more of a challenge than I had anticipated. All though, in later years I came to miss some of the manners of them and the one thing they all agreed on was it was important and you needed to get it right. Starting in the (19)70s, things started to go downhill and by the (19)80s it was very marked. Oh, they were poorly prepared, they were not interested... great inflation-

SM (02:22:55):
Yep.

WO (02:22:56):
... a lot of students just were for teaching. So, teaching today is not remotely as much fun as it used to be.

SM (02:23:07):
Wow. I know when we had Tom Hadden on our campus and he met with, several years back, some of our students, student government leaders, they talked about the power that they had to be able to deal with budgets and everything. And Tom shook his head and he said, "I am talking about, do you have real empowerment, not power?" And they did not even understand the term empowerment. And I think that is another term that is referred back to that period of the '60s because of their desire to be involved in all committees and know how the money is being spent. Today's students do not seem to even care how the money is being spent.

WO (02:23:43):
No, they do not.

SM (02:23:46):
So, do you think that the students of that era, the Boomers, really understood empowerment, whereas today students cannot even define the word?

WO (02:23:58):
Well, we were all winging it, including them. It was not like they had a master plan. They tended to be moved by events. And then the faculty and the administration would respond to their reaction to the events, or they would raise up the bans periodically, usually [inaudible] watering down the curriculum or something of that sort. So, it was all very ad hoc. No, I do not know if they [inaudible].

SM (02:24:36):
Could you describe a little bit about the generation gap? The differences that the Boomers had with their parents and... because today, college students and millennials seem to be closer to their parents then at any other time. Their parents are so involved in everything and there does not seem to be any generation gap. And the 2nd part of this question is, why did the generation Xers that followed the Boomers dislike Boomers so much? We actually have programs in this at the university in the early (19)90s and a lot of them just looked at Boomers and said, "you are too tight, we're sick of hearing about your youth, we are sick of hearing about the time that you were young." And they just had problems with it all together. Just your thoughts.

WO (02:25:30):
Well, the Boomers' parents, remember, were the war generation. Both of their parents born through at least part of the depression, and pretty much all of the war. They had endured hardship and [inaudible]. During World War 2, all eligible men went into the services and most men served for years. That was the average, the armed service, most of them received as a rule. So, their generation had gone through hardship and the women had worked in defense plants or they were single mothers and children were raised even by themselves. And then after the war, they became... they were even criticized for this, but they became really eager to make up for lost time and so they got married and everyone had children, all at the same time in a sequence. And they did this by working hard, by self-discipline, by practicing all these traditional virtues. And apparently, they spoiled their children in the process, because they had had it hard, they wanted their children to have it easier and the result was the overconfident, over privileged, self-indulgent Boomers.

SM (02:27:00):
The generations that followed, I want to clarify that, I think I said it wrong. They disliked them or liked them for two reasons: number one, those that disliked them were tired of hearing about the nostalgia of that particular era; and those that liked them were those that wished they had the same issues and causes that would unite their generation that they had. Your thoughts on just this complexity of responses to following generations toward this group.

WO (02:27:32):
I think that was true of college students. I do not know how it was in the general population because they are grad students, majority of people in any generation are not college graduates. And they are preoccupied with making enough money to live on and paying the mortgage and getting the kids through school and maybe they do not have time for that. I think it's strictly a phenomenon of some of the college... but it is true, I noticed that.

SM (02:28:08):
Okay, I want to read this and get your response to this: "do you feel that the boomer generation, or Boomers, are still having problems with healing due to the extreme divisions that tore the nation apart in their youth? And this could be linked to division between black and white. Between those who supported authority and those criticized it. Between those who supported the troops and those who were against it. And also, the Vietnam memorial has tried to play a part in the healing within the veterans’ generation and I do not know if it is done much to the general population. Do you feel the boomer generation will go to it is grave like the civil war generation, not truly healed? Am I wrong in thinking this way or has 35 to 40 years made the following statement true: time heals all wounds?" Is there truth to this statement?

WO (02:29:11):
[inaudible]. Look, as an academic I have a limited perspective. I deal with students and faculty, who are not necessarily representative of any generation in particular. But, my sense of the Boomers is that they are not wracked with post-traumatic stress disorders, anything of that... [inaudible] season in the (19)60s. They seemed to me to have remained so.

SM (02:29:48):
Hmm. How about the healing, do you think that is an issue? And I want to follow this up with something, I took students to see Senator Edmond Muskie before he died several years back and we asked that very same question to him, in a room with 14 students, and I had this actually videotaped. And he did not respond right away because we were trying to get at what happened in 1968 and the tremendous divisions of the Democratic Convention and the lack of healing. And his response said, "we have not healed since the civil war." And then he went on to talk for 10 minutes on the Ken Burns series that he had just witnessed while he was in the hospital and so, his answer to, we had any healing since the (19)60s, he said, "we have not had any healing since the civil war." Just your thoughts on that.

WO (02:30:44):
Well, I think that is true of the south. I think it is striking. The south has been forced to improve course through the voting rights act and the enforcement of it, and these things. But it is utterly remarkable to me how the south has [inaudible] very worst attributes. I saw the other day, just for example, in the last election only 15 percent of white males in Louisiana, compared to a number of other states, voted for Obama. These people they still have slavery because-

SM (02:31:21):
Oh my gosh.

WO (02:31:23):
So, I think where the south is concerned then that is certainly true. But the rest of the nation, though more in the North and [inaudible].

SM (02:31:33):
So, you think the divisions are still here and that is just part of our history and we have no shot at healing, like many in the civil war when they went to their graves they still had not healed?

WO (02:31:50):
Maybe in another hundred years the South will fully [inaudible]. But I really feel this is outside of the national framework, pretty much for the rest of the country.

SM (02:32:02):
How about the Vietnam memorial? Obviously, you have been there and when I first moved back from California in 1983, the first thing I had to do was get down to the Vietnam memorial, and I go down there quite a few times every year. What kind of a job has that done with respect to trying to heal the nation, even beyond the veterans?

WO (02:32:27):
Well, at the very core of the memorial park, it means to heal. But then I still read about members of congress who are still blaming the democrats for losing the Vietnam War and the Boomers for being responsible for that wound that we just cannot let go. And there are the Vietnam veterans themselves who are still tormented by their experiences which should not be surprising because it was full of World War Two veterans. 50 years after the fact. I know World War Two veterans 50 years after the fact who still has nightmares, that kind of thing. The war is quite different-

SM (02:33:18):
Right. What do you think the lasting legacy will be of the boomer generation once the best history books are written? Obviously, you have already written best history books, but a lot of people think the best history books are often written 25 to 50 years after a specific era or time. What do you think will be the overall analysis?

WO (02:33:45):
And when I wrote my book, I was trying to represent what I felt was... what I thought was maybe some kind of ultimate verdict. You cannot make an ultimate verdict. The book came out in 1971-

SM (02:34:00):
Right.

WO (02:34:00):
... so, giving the ultimate verdict. But, yeah, it is often true. Some of the best civil war writing history has been done in the last 20 years.

SM (02:34:12):
Do you think there will be more criticism or more praise? Or is it just impossible to say?

WO (02:34:27):
People even in the (19)60s, there was a cycle of opinion among educated and successful professional Americans, in which the first sentencing was mired, the Boomers because of their participation in the civil rights movement and the movement in particular. By the end of the decade, many of those same people who turned against because of the rise of violence and seeing the Black Power and the weather movement, those sorts of things. Well, the reputation of the Boomers in the (19)60s rose like a rocket and fell just [inaudible]. Have not changed my mind, yet.

SM (02:35:24):
Do you think the Boomers as parents and now as grandparents have really taught their kids about activism or have shared it or have been quiet or? Sometimes I make an analogy, I have talked to so many people, that it is like people come back from war and they do not like to talk about it-

WO (02:35:47):
Yep.

SM (02:35:48):
... and the question is: do Boomer parents and grandparents talk about it to their kids? Do they share? Do they just go on and live their lives? I do not know if you can answer that but.

WO (02:36:01):
Now, seeing it in academia twice, I know a lot of former new-leftists, they are just rampant, still. And my impression is that all though they still cherish their youth philosophies, and indeed, we all hear stories about and still have the same values to the extent that they are compatible with professional success. But in the abstract. So, it is again, getting tenure and getting promoted and-

SM (02:36:37):
Right.

WO (02:36:37):
... pulling your [inaudible]. But in the abstract, they are still in favor of [inaudible], usually [inaudible] and all that.

SM (02:36:53):
Quick-

WO (02:36:53):
There is so many impressions of their children but it's only getting passed on.

SM (02:36:54):
Yeah, but what is interesting is that people will look at Boomer leadership and they look to Clinton and Bush.

WO (02:37:01):
Yeah.

SM (02:37:02):
Because they actually are the Boomers and some will say they both have characteristics within them that really define them as Boomers, both of them. And actually, President Obama is a Boomer, too, he is a very late-stage Boomer at 48, now. But-

WO (02:37:22):
I really do not-

SM (02:37:23):
Yeah, he is a late-stage Boomer himself so he still has that little-

WO (02:37:26):
Oh, wait, does he?

SM (02:37:28):
He has a little bit of an influence.

WO (02:37:35):
Well, I do not see an influence. [inaudible], I feel like. I do see it in Bush. What is it about Bush?

SM (02:37:40):
Well, I do not know, people were all commenting based on qualities, "doing it my way or the highway" kind of an attitude or something like that.

WO (02:37:52):
I still see him as an old-fashioned reactionary.

SM (02:37:57):
Do you think this Peter Max slogan from one of his posters really defines the Boomers? Here is a quote: "you do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we come together it will be beautiful." Now that was a very important statement on Peter Max posters in 1972 when I at Ohio State because I had it hanging in my room. And I wish I kept it because that poster's probably worth money now. Does that really define them?

WO (02:38:26):
No, I do not agree with that at all.

SM (02:38:28):
Okay.

WO (02:38:28):
Many leftists that I knew, and at Wisconsin I knew a lot, because the graduate students were radicalized. No, they were completely intolerant. They did not have room for anybody else's opinion. You were either radical or a fascist, in [inaudible].

SM (02:38:47):
Could you talk a little about the music of the era and how important it was in the lives of Boomers. Secondly, who were the artists you feel shaped the generation more than others? And maybe some of the songs.

WO (02:39:01):
That buffoon [inaudible] to me, I grew up in the big band era, my eras were the one by [inaudible] Frank Sinatra. That was my youth. When rock and all that came along as part of a culling.

SM (02:39:22):
Do you feel that part of the activism that was part of this generation, music played in important part?

WO (02:39:41):
I do not know, it was kind of like their sacramental music. others incited fervor. There was a boom but... yeah, to the degree that you were inspiring sort of religious type emotion and the sacramental music would enhance that.

SM (02:39:53):
I am going to seize a couple more questions here and then I have a section where I just mention some names. You have already mentioned, what does the- I am going to repeat myself- what does the wall... just say a few sentences here, what does the wall mean to you?

WO (02:40:10):
The Berlin wall?

SM (02:40:10):
Yeah, no, the-the Vietnam memorial.

WO (02:40:13):
Oh, well, it just think it is beautiful and moving.

SM (02:40:20):
What does Ken State and Jackson State mean to you?

WO (02:40:22):
Oh, well, those were bloodbaths. 196-[inaudible]

SM (02:40:37):
That was 1970.

WO (02:40:39):
Right.

SM (02:40:40):
Where were you when 1970 when you heard about that?

WO (02:40:44):
I was a visiting professor at New York from Pennsylvania and the semester had just ended. It ended several [inaudible] early. And so, the students who were at campus by the time that happened, there were not any real reactions.

SM (02:40:57):
Wow.

WO (02:40:58):
So, unlike at other universities where they had to [inaudible].

SM (02:41:02):
Yep. What does Watergate mean to you?

WO (02:41:09):
Oh, the greatest [inaudible] reveled in Watergate. And I never thought the public really knew about all the scandalous parts within the institution and all of the fall-out all over the nation. No, I thought it was Nixon [inaudible] for weeks, then he got [inaudible]. He was just delightful. I wish I known now longer what I realized then, he would get acquitted at some point.

SM (02:41:41):
Do you think that had an effect on the Boomer generation?

WO (02:41:49):
No. That is in 1975, it is pretty well-formed at that point. (19)74, (19)70.

SM (02:42:02):
Okay, what does Woodstock mean to you?

WO (02:42:05):
Oh, it did not mean anything to me, I thought, as I said-

SM (02:42:09):
At least to the generation?

WO (02:42:13):
Well, I guess those at Woodstock had a great time, I know, I had some younger friends who went there but I do not see it as a great seminal world-changing event.

SM (02:42:26):
How about the term "counter-culture"?

WO (02:42:30):
Oh, that was a definite [inaudible] piece that took place in propaganda in the (19)60s. A lot of it has become cliched, 30 years later it is pretty difficult recap the origin. But at the time, I thought it was dangerous and quite remarkable.

SM (02:42:57):
I am going to change my tape here, hold on a second. Okay, and if you just speak at just a little bit louder, I know we cannot put the volume up, but. Okay, another one: the hippies and the yippies? Just your thoughts on them.

WO (02:43:21):
Well, the hippies started out at least as being pretty charming. I remember the first time I saw one [inaudible] was in Washington, D.C. I was working at the Library of Congress. And I was walking, got off the bus, and I was crossing DuPont Circle, and a guy with long hair came up and gave me a flower. That was, I think, the first hippie I ever saw. It must have been about (19)63 or (196)4, something like that. So, they were charming at first, but as you know they descended into gross and vanity. And there have been many similar children of hippies who were really kind of abused, mostly from neglect more than. But, [inaudible]. I got a big bang out of the yippies. I thought a lot of the stuff they did, the throwing dollars in the New York Stock Exchange and big demonstration... democratic demonstration, [inaudible] it was really about, this is Eddie Hoffman and some of the others, were really kind of geniuses when it came to turning the establishment on its head and creating a no-win situation but Chicago was [inaudible]. If the authorities had allowed the yippies to go ahead with their demonstration it would have been embarrassing to the democratic party and-

SM (02:45:03):
Right.

WO (02:45:04):
... in the city of Chicago, to no end. But, in attempting to suppress them, they embarrassed themselves even more, so. But like all these things, the yippies ran out of steam. Eddie Hoffman [inaudible] in the later years [inaudible] caricature of themselves.

SM (02:45:21):
How about the Students for Democratic Society and certainly the Vietnam Veterans Against the War?

WO (02:45:28):
Well, SDC is a big different [inaudible] to me. I taught at University of Colorado before I went, and I was asked to be a student for faculty advice... and they had to have a faculty advisor in order to have a [inaudible]. So, I was the faculty advisor to SDS for a couple of years and this was still the era of non-violent activism. They were very much inspired by Martin Luther and so they would have non-violent demonstrations. But I liked them a lot, they were wonderful people. Well, I got to Wisconsin and the tide was already changing and the SDS, I dealt with there had abandoned non-violence and they were having street fights with the police.

SM (02:46:20):
It is the weathermen, yeah.

WO (02:46:23):
These were not actually weathermen, they were just regular SDC [inaudible].

SM (02:46:25):
Right.

WO (02:46:27):
But they were having [inaudible] war from the history department windows pitched down on between the SDC and [inaudible] police. The police teargassed them... and the police would throw the tear gas back at them and then they would have [inaudible]. So, that was a healthy disillusioning.

SM (02:46:51):
How about Vietnam Veterans Against the War?

WO (02:46:52):
Well, the ones that I knew I admired very much and I think some their [inaudible] is really, well, in a better position he really represented some of the fears of the war. They were very thoughtful and well-informed. Very just kind of people.

SM (02:47:15):
How about the Young Americans for Freedom?

WO (02:47:23):
Oh, over-privileged Nazis.

SM (02:47:23):
How about the Black Panthers and Black Power?

WO (02:47:26):
Oh, I thought they were a terrible movement. Again, they destroyed the old civil rights movement, the non-violent civil rights movement which had accomplished everything we got in the civil rights act and the voting rights act and everything of value. And then these nincompoops came along and that old "power comes from the barrel of a gun" and other bullish cliches. And they ruined the civil rights movement, it was just appalling. The Black Panthers, I did not know this at the time, but there has been a lot of work done on them, were more of a criminal organization than anything else.

SM (02:48:00):
Because Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver. Remember, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Hutton, they were all part of that group.

WO (02:48:12):
Oh, it was founded by ex-convicts. That should have been a clue.

SM (02:48:18):
Yeah, Huey Newton had that poster that was on a lot of campuses. Also, the term that Nixon used, "the enemies list", when you hear that what did that... how did you respond?

WO (02:48:32):
I thought it was hysterical because it included the president from Harvard and other universities. [inaudible], some football stars. It was virtually a mark of honor to be on the list. We used to go around lying about it, saying that they were on the enemies list.

SM (02:48:55):
Mỹ Lai?

WO (02:48:56):
Oh, that was horrible, that was terrible. And kind of summed up sort of "everyone's about the Vietnam war, actually."

SM (02:49:07):
1968. The year.

WO (02:49:09):
Oh, well, that was the year that was... a lot books, I think, focus on that one year.

SM (02:49:14):
Yes. Wow.

WO (02:49:17):
Well, I thought the war was going to start... well, I saw fighting outside of my door.

SM (02:49:24):
Do you buy what some people said, that we were close to a second civil war?

WO (02:49:29):
No. That is the kind of overreaction you get when you are in the middle of things.

SM (02:49:29):
Okay.

WO (02:49:43):
I knew in the abstract that we would get [inaudible]. At the time I was writing my book but I did not still see myself sort of [inaudible].

SM (02:49:44):
Right, and tech?

WO (02:49:44):
Well, that was what changed the world of war, that was the point... and it probably... over the world. And at this point, the public opinion polls supported [inaudible] up until then. And Ian [inaudible], and those other liars, they write [inaudible], blah, blah, blah. And they were all really [inaudible]. And it convinced Richard Nixon, I am sure of it, convinced Richard Nixon that could not facilitate policy [inaudible] to get reelected.

SM (02:50:34):
This is another question I would like to read. This deals with the issue of trust. And that is, the boomers experienced many leaders who lied to them and were dishonest in many ways. The result is that many, if not most, did not trust any leaders, no matter their role in society, whether they be a president, a congressman, a senator, corporate leader or religious leader, or leader in any role. What effect did this have on their trust both then and now? If boomers distrust do their children distrust? Psychologists often say that if you cannot trust someone then life has little meaning. Your thought on the issue of trust within the boomer generation.

WO (02:51:16):
Oh, I think they got over it. I mean, the public. One of the slogans at the time was do not trust anyone over 30.

SM (02:51:24):
Yep.

WO (02:51:31):
Well, they all [inaudible] over 30. The ones that I know retain a certain residual distrust of the federal government. But that does not [inaudible] seems to be [inaudible] the other institution is equally evolved.

SM (02:51:56):
All right. Why did the Vietnam War end?

WO (02:52:00):
Because Richard Nixon recognized that it was an absolute no-win situation politically, and that he had to wrap it up, one way or another. And of course, the way he chose was not [inaudible] by any means. And I do not know how else he could have done it.

SM (02:52:18):
When did the (19)60s end?

WO (02:52:21):
Well, I am thinking (19)71, thereabouts.

SM (02:52:29):
Is there a specific event that you knew, and when you saw it, it is over?

WO (02:52:36):
Well, the election of Richard Nixon. And then within, I do not know, six or eight months of taking office, he started pulling troops out of Vietnam. Very, very, soon and very rapid. The draw down was crazy. It was [inaudible] over bombing raids, but that was deliberate on his part, because he wanted the right wing [inaudible] that he was [inaudible] along, but in fact, he [inaudible] rapid rate that by the end of 1971 the offensive action [inaudible] Vietnam. The draft was over basically by then. And that was end of the (19)60s.

SM (02:53:21):
Mm-hmm. Please describe how important race, economics, and culture is in understanding the boomer generation and era they lived.

WO (02:53:33):
Well, race alone for [inaudible] was the first great cause. There were chapters, particularly on campus, the creation of [inaudible] and students and my own coordinating studies in 1960. That sit-in movement spawned a support group, I guess, in major universities all over the country. It was the first movement that the boomers [inaudible]. And in most cases, it was lifelong. I mean, even after white people got kicked out of the [inaudible] the Congress of Racial Equality and organizations like that, it did not change their views. Oh, I think that was terrific.

SM (02:54:26):
And I know Kennedy was very... President Kennedy and actually Teddy Kennedy, in his new book talks it about it too, about Michael Harrington talking about poverty and economics, and certainly that played a part too. It is not just about race, it's about how much money people make and poverty and so forth. That is certainly a part of this generation.

WO (02:54:50):
[inaudible] very interested in the problems of poor white people.

SM (02:54:54):
Right. Right. Couple more, then I am going to ask you some individual names, and then we will be done. What were the most important books that you felt were written at the time that may have influenced boomers when they were young? Authors. Books.

WO (02:55:19):
Boy, that is hard to say. I mean, I know the books that influenced me.

SM (02:55:21):
What books influenced you?

WO (02:55:27):
Well, Michael Harrington's book was a tremendous eye-opener.

SM (02:55:32):
Mm-hmm.

WO (02:55:32):
And Rachel Carson's book too. Of course, those were books that had tremendous impact. My views on Vietnam were shaped by Bernard Fall, who was [inaudible]. Did you read any of his?

SM (02:55:52):
What is his last name?

WO (02:55:52):
Bernard Fall.

SM (02:55:53):
Oh yeah, Bernie Fall. Yes.

WO (02:55:57):
One of my few successful prophecies was when I knew the Vietnam War was going to turn out badly, because I would read Fall. And the United States was making [inaudible]. So [inaudible].

SM (02:56:12):
Yep. How about your personal story? How did you personally decide to become a history teacher?

WO (02:56:25):
Well, I was in a program when my father, who was not at college. In fact, he only went [inaudible]. And so, he ended up in the oil business, as a wildcatter of all things. And he felt that he was politically handicapped by not being a lawyer. He was always [inaudible] other people. [inaudible] career and I took it for granted too. I was the first person in my family to go to college, so [inaudible] knew anything about it. And I majored in [inaudible]. And in my senior year, I wrote... A lot of people think of it as a serious [inaudible]. You write a senior’s honors thesis to do with [inaudible] very long. And I realized... I think it was probably 100 pages. And I realized suddenly, just like a revelation, you're [inaudible]. Then I realized if I could do [inaudible] that way I could probably write a good thesis.

SM (02:57:28):
Wow.

WO (02:57:37):
Granted I could [inaudible] and I would not have to go to law school. By that time, I had moved... I had roomed with some law students, so I knew what a grind and how horrible it was, and [inaudible] and soul destroying. Then suddenly I realized I can make my living doing what I most like.

SM (02:57:51):
Discouraged?

WO (02:57:52):
It was [inaudible].

SM (02:57:53):
You went to Berkeley too, did not you?

WO (02:57:56):
Graduate.

SM (02:57:57):
Were you there during the free speech movement, or...

WO (02:58:00):
I left a year before.

SM (02:58:01):
Okay.

WO (02:58:01):
Knew some of the students that were involved in it, because free speech movement just did not come out of nowhere.

SM (02:58:06):
I know.

WO (02:58:06):
And [inaudible] in Berkeley in [inaudible] between 1968 [inaudible]. And of course, in 1960 there had been the big demonstration against [inaudible] in San Francisco, and a lot of Berkeley students participated in that. Oh, I knew some of the students at the sit-in. [inaudible] But I left in [inaudible].

SM (02:58:37):
When you wrote your book, American High and Coming Apart, and obviously you have written other books, and now your new one, what kind of feedback did you get from people when you wrote those books? Obviously, it is a sense of accomplishment to have written the first two that I mentioned, what I consider great books.

WO (02:58:57):
But you would be surprised, apart from reviews, but you would be surprised at the little mail books like that get. I once wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times on Solzhenitsyn, and this was in, I do not know, (19)78, something like that. And it made it because the Harvard Review was critical narrative. [inaudible] I did not know why me. I mean, I know nothing really about Russia. Anyway, I did write an op-ed piece on him. I got more mail from that single op-ed piece than I have from all my books put together.

SM (02:59:39):
Unbelievable. Wow.

WO (02:59:42):
I mean, if I get 10 letters in response to a book, that is huge.

SM (02:59:49):
That American High book is a classic book.

WO (02:59:53):
Now, over the years, I have gotten [inaudible] letters. But I mean, I still get them.

SM (03:00:00):
Mm-hmm.

WO (03:00:00):
That is because [inaudible].

SM (03:00:03):
In all of your experiences as a professor in the classroom with boomer students, are there one or two specific experiences you will never forget, that stand out?

WO (03:00:19):
Well, of course, the one I just told you about, the graduate students, that certainly-

SM (03:00:20):
Right.

WO (03:00:20):
... stuck in my mind [inaudible] this absurdity. No, in class, I think [inaudible]. In class I had a lot of really thought-provoking periods [inaudible], but not since.

SM (03:00:51):
Mm-hmm. Before I ask the first questions on individual persons, are there any questions I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask?

WO (03:01:04):
No, I think I had a lot [inaudible].

SM (03:01:04):
All right. This is the last part of the interview, and this is for just your immediate thoughts. You do not have to go into any depth, but just your thoughts on some of these individuals from the period, and terms of the era. Tom Hayden.

WO (03:01:24):
Oh, I admired him at the beginning, the Port Huron Statement and [inaudible] sort of thing, but by the time he became... By the end of the period, I felt sorry for him more than anything else. Living in this restrictive fear.

SM (03:01:38):
Jane Fonda.

WO (03:01:45):
I never hated... I do not hate her. I never hated her, or... I felt sorry for her too, I suppose. She did not have anybody to tell her who to... Well, and she's apologized.

SM (03:01:58):
Right. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

WO (03:02:07):
I admired them both in their early yippie phases. I thought they were funny and smart, and manipulated the establishment too. Abbie became kind of pathetic in later life. And Jerry Rubin was never able to find his bearings afterwards.

SM (03:02:28):
How about the participants in the Chicago Eight trial? The Eight.

WO (03:02:33):
Oh, yes. That was [inaudible]. I did not really have any opinion, other than they joined [inaudible].

SM (03:02:42):
I am interviewing Rennie Davis in 10 days.

WO (03:02:46):
Oh, he was one of the ones. Oh.

SM (03:02:48):
Yeah, he has become a very successful entrepreneur. I think he is a millionaire.

WO (03:02:53):
Really?

SM (03:02:53):
Yes. If you go onto the web, you will see he is involved in the environment and he's still an activist doing unbelievable things. He does not talk about the (19)60s anymore. That is the past. But he is going to be... He has got his own life now, totally different.

WO (03:03:12):
Remarkable.

SM (03:03:14):
John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

WO (03:03:18):
I never liked John Kennedy [inaudible]. He was basically a very conservative Democrat. I liked Adlai Stevenson. I did not care for him. I did not like Robert Kennedy either until 1968, when he really seemed to have... At which time he really seemed to have gone through a change and become [inaudible] about being ruthless. But he really seemed to have become less ruthless and more deeply concerned with the social problems, so I came to admire him [inaudible] being assassinated.

SM (03:03:57):
How about Teddy Kennedy, since he just passed, and has got a big book out right now?

WO (03:04:02):
Yes. Well, I think like almost everyone, I thought Chappaquiddick was so despicable. For years bear the thought of it, but still he outlived it, and he paid his dues and became a great senator. And by the time he died I admired him a lot.

SM (03:04:21):
Lyndon Johnson.

WO (03:04:23):
Oh, he was so disappointing. I thought Johnson in (19)64 was just great, and the campaign was great. And he stood for peace and justice and civil rights and everything desirable, and then he sacrificed everything to the war in Vietnam. I was just crushed.

SM (03:04:45):
Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

WO (03:04:46):
Well, Spiro Agnew was definitely successful. I do not know if he is still alive or not.

SM (03:04:53):
No, he passed away.

WO (03:04:54):
I never changed my opinion about him. Richard, I spent a large part of my adult life hating Richard Nixon. I hated him from about the time of the [inaudible] case on, I would say. And I got to vote against him repeatedly, because I voted against him in (19)56 and then in 1960, and then in (19)62 I was in California, so I got to vote for him again, against him again. And then in (19)68 and then in (19)72. So, I had a long record there. And there was nobody I hated more in public life. But years later, like, oh, starting in the end of the Vietnam War, I began to develop a grudging respect, because he did get us out of the war in the face of great [inaudible]. I have mixed feelings about him. He was an evil man who did open up China. Who ended the war in Vietnam. Who expanded the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts, and signed off on clean air and clean water legislation. [inaudible] I am ambivalent toward Nixon.

SM (03:06:08):
How about Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern?

WO (03:06:12):
Oh, I loved Eugene McCarthy. I worked for his campaign. [inaudible] But he was disappointing too because he frittered away the reputation that he had built up in 1968. He did not run again for quite some time. And then when he did start putting himself up as a presidential candidate it was under hopeless circumstances. He just threw his following away. It was one of the really... [inaudible] I never understood. McGovern. I liked McGovern, but I thought even at the time that he was going to ruin the Democratic Party.

SM (03:06:57):
The buses.

WO (03:06:59):
He was the captain of every little...

SM (03:07:03):
Sargent Shriver.

WO (03:07:06):
Oh, there is somebody, you know, solid life of service. Have to admire him.

SM (03:07:11):
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

WO (03:07:15):
Well, Martin Luther King is the greatest of all my political heroes. He changed the country. I did not know anything about Malcolm X until after... I used to see him occasionally on television when he was still a Muslim or a Black Panther.

SM (03:07:34):
Uh-huh.

WO (03:07:35):
And I thought he was kind of dangerous, because he was so smart and so clever, and pursued a Black racist agenda. It was only after his death I learned that he was a... through the autobiography, that I learned he was actually a more complicated person.

SM (03:07:55):
Right. Yeah-yeah, yeah. He said all white people were not devils.

WO (03:07:57):
Mm-hmm.

SM (03:08:00):
Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.

WO (03:08:05):
Well, I know people who hated Ronald Reagan, and I never could because I grew up on his movies. My feeling now, while he was president of the States I always voted against him and I was really unhappy with his presidency in many ways. Since his death, there have been some books that came out that have explained in great detail what was never explained at the time which was how he and Gorbachev negotiated an end to the Cold War. And so now, while I still think his domestic program could hardly have been worse, I have come to respect his role in ending the Cold War, which it turns out was really an important one.

SM (03:08:54):
Gerald Ford.

WO (03:08:55):
Oh, he is just nobody. Through pure accident got to the presidency.

SM (03:09:03):
How about Dwight Eisenhower and Hubert Humphrey?

WO (03:09:09):
Well, Eisenhower, I have been a lifelong Democrat so [inaudible] heart is not in these the way... And one of my great political heroes, probably second only to Martin Luther King, was Adlai Stevenson. I thought Eisenhower was a peaceful president. And I thought that until I started writing Coming Apart and then I had to write a chapter on Eisenhower. 1960 was Eisenhower's last year. And then I had to start Googling up his record. He ended the Korean War. He did not start any others. He held the line on the [inaudible] anyone could. He nearly balanced the budget. He balanced the budget three times and he came pretty close the fourth time. [inaudible] Started the Interstate Highway System. He was actually a pretty good president, something I did not understand while he was president.

SM (03:10:00):
How about Hubert Humphrey?

WO (03:10:06):
Oh, Hubert Humphrey. Oh, I always liked him. He was such a great liberal. But he really sullied his name by becoming a cheerleader for the Vietnam War.

SM (03:10:16):
Yeah, I agree. How about Edmund Muskie, his running mate in (19)68?

WO (03:10:21):
Well, I admired him, and I am sorry he did not win. I think he was... In all the dirty tricks that people did, I think the one that was most [inaudible] the only ones that were really effective were the ones that [inaudible] Muskie.

SM (03:10:37):
Right. How about the women leaders like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug?

WO (03:10:42):
Oh, I like them all.

SM (03:10:48):
What kind of an influence have they had on boomers?

WO (03:10:54):
You know, it is hard for me to tell, not being [inaudible].

SM (03:11:03):
Right. How about U-2?

WO (03:11:07):
Oh, the band?

SM (03:11:09):
No, not the band, the Gary Powers.

WO (03:11:11):
Oh, oh, oh, the U-2 incident.

SM (03:11:15):
That seems to be the first time when boomers saw a person who lied to them, which was Eisenhower.

WO (03:11:21):
Yes. That was probably the worst thing Eisenhower did. In a sense, the big summit with Khrushchev in Paris was coming up and he allowed U-2 over-flights to be made right up until the wire. If he canceled them like two months before the meeting... And of course, he knew the Soviets knew all about them, they just were not saying anything because it was so embarrassing. Yep, it was a major blunder. [inaudible]

SM (03:11:55):
Robert McNamara.

WO (03:11:58):
Oh, did I ever [inaudible] him. I mean, bringing all that brilliance to bear in order to stop a war. And I [inaudible] for waiting 25 years to [inaudible].

SM (03:12:12):
Right. He just passed away. How about Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Berrigan Brothers?

WO (03:12:19):
Oh, I liked Spock. I mean, [inaudible] influenced on [inaudible] book. As an antiwar protestor I thought he was pretty dignified and effective.

SM (03:12:33):
Mm-hmm.

WO (03:12:44):
Because the Berrigan Brothers could be rather [inaudible] appreciate that they alienate more people than they persuade beyond a certain point.

SM (03:12:52):
Jackie Robinson.

WO (03:12:55):
I am not a sports fan.

SM (03:13:00):
Okay.

WO (03:13:00):
Of any kind.

SM (03:13:00):
All right.

WO (03:13:00):
[inaudible]

SM (03:13:01):
The original seven astronauts.

WO (03:13:03):
I thought the manned space program was a [inaudible] in the beginning. And I think it has been proven [inaudible] it is incredibly [inaudible]. All the successes have been in the unmanned [inaudible].

SM (03:13:24):
Just a couple more here. I think I may have already mentioned Huey Newton.

WO (03:13:31):
Oh, I thought he was a scoundrel. Yeah.

SM (03:13:33):
Yeah.

WO (03:13:33):
[inaudible]

SM (03:13:35):
Walter Cronkite?

WO (03:13:40):
I appreciated him.

SM (03:13:43):
Daniel Ellsberg?

WO (03:13:45):
Oh, I thought what he did with the Pentagon Papers was just great and took a lot of courage. [inaudible] go to jail.

SM (03:13:53):
And some of the simple things that influenced boomers when they were really young, Walt Disney and Howdy Doody.

WO (03:14:01):
Oh, I miss Howdy Doody. Yeah. Yeah, I did grow up on Walt Disney.

SM (03:14:09):
Yeah, Walt Disney, I am learning more about him after he died. Whoa. Things that I did not even realize.

WO (03:14:18):
He was pretty conservative.

SM (03:14:20):
Yes, he was. But his movies really had an influence. And John Dean.

WO (03:14:28):
Oh, I was [inaudible] very impressed with his performance at the time. Like everybody, I was glued to the TV during the hearings. And since then, as more and more revelations have come up, I have been staggered by the accuracy of his memory. Most people, including me... memory's kind of a fragile thing. And he had practically total recall that has been proven out for the most part.

SM (03:15:02):
He has written some pretty good books recently.

WO (03:15:06):
I bought his book Blind Ambition. [inaudible]

SM (03:15:09):
Oh yeah, that was very, very good. I think that is about it. Trying to think if there is any other names here. I cannot think of any. Finally, I just want to thank you for taking the time here. I wish I could take your picture. I take pictures of everybody. Somehow, I got to get a picture of you. But I will figure it out.

WO (03:15:31):
[inaudible] have pictures on my dust jackets.

SM (03:15:35):
Yeah, maybe if you could send me a picture on the computer or something like that. But all the pictures I have taken are ones like... You are the first person I would not have taken their picture. I have even interviewed people then I actually went to their place and just passing through took their picture. So, we might have plenty of time to do that. And I guess my last question is this, again, I want to get back, because you are probably a great professor. I have read all about you for years. You are not only a great writer but you are a professor with unbelievable academic backgrounds. When you think of all your years in the classroom, and again, I am going back to the boomer generation here, were there specific events where the students themselves walked into the class and said to you, "Today, can we discuss what is happening in the world as opposed to your lesson?" Because that happened a lot when I was a college student. Did you ever have that?

WO (03:16:34):
No. No. The way it worked... I came to Rutgers in 1971, and Rutgers is in a much more [inaudible] campus [inaudible] by a whole lot, and so the students I had were not political at all. Now, what would happen to me is that I would be talking about some historical event in the past and then the students would compare that to what had just happened. And then we would end up, through that door, talking about current events. I do not remember specific occasions [inaudible] when they would lead with it.

SM (03:17:21):
Okay. Very good. I am looking through my list at names here, see if I missed anybody. I think I did not mention... Did I mention the communal movement? That is the one thing I... Your thought on communes?

WO (03:17:35):
Oh, they always baffled me.

SM (03:17:39):
There is only three in existence today, as my understanding.

WO (03:17:46):
Really? Out of over 100.

SM (03:17:46):
Yep. And the thing, they were young people in the (19)60s, and they still live in these three communes, and they are now in their (19)60s. I do not know how they did it, but... They're in different parts of the country. Again, finally, are there any questions that I did not ask that you would... Any final thoughts on the boomers?

WO (03:18:07):
No. No.

SM (03:18:07):
All right. Well, that is it. Want to thank you very much for the interview. I will certainly send a transcript once we get the transcripts done, for you to give the final okay.

WO (03:18:17):
Okay. [inaudible] Edit out the ums and ahs.

SM (03:18:24):
Yeah. And again, I got a lot of transcripts to do here. I am doing this myself. I am transcribing it all myself, so it takes a little while. But got great interviews. And it has been an honor to talk to you. Just hope you continue to keep writing. I cannot wait to read your new book.

WO (03:18:43):
Well, I hope you like it.

SM (03:18:46):
Yeah. Have you gotten any reviews? What is the feedback?

WO (03:18:49):
The pub date was 10 days ago, and so I have not gotten any reviews yet.

SM (03:18:56):
Right. And you are still teaching part time though?

WO (03:18:59):
Yes, I teach one course a semester.

SM (03:19:01):
Yeah, please do, because you are good at what you do. And thanks again for writing Coming Apart and American High. They are unbelievable books.

WO (03:19:09):
Well, thank you very much.

SM (03:19:12):
Well, you have a great day. And it was an honor to talk to you.

WO (03:19:15):
Same thing to you.

SM (03:19:16):
Bye now.

WO (03:19:16):
Bye.

(End of Interview)

2010-03-18

Stephen McKiernan

William L. O'Neill

199:22

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

3 microcassettes

Audio

Historians; Scholars; Authors, American; College teachers; Rutgers University; United States—History—20th century; O'Neill, William L.--Interviews

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