Interview with David Horowitz

Horowitz, David ; McKiernan, Stephen

David Horowitz grew up a "red diaper baby" in a communist community in Sunnyside, Queens. He is a far-right writer, founder, and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), editor of FrontPage Magazine, director of Discover the Networks, and founder of the organization Students for Academic Freedom. Horowitz wrote many books and he worked as a columnist for Salon. He also was an outspoken adherent of the New Left, which he later rejected and became a proponent of Neoconservatism. Horowitz received his Bachelor's degree from Columbia University and his Master's degree from UC Berkeley.

2007-12-21

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

156:01

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: David Horowitz
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 23 October 1997
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:00):
...of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

DH (00:00:20):
The (19)60sand early (19)70was a political orgy, destruction, just of recklessness. I do not know. I do not think that way, one thing comes to my mind. Go ahead.

SM (00:00:59):
Yep. Could you speak up a little bit louder too, David?

DH (00:01:01):
Sure.

SM (00:01:01):
Okay.

DH (00:01:01):
I did not like that question. Go ahead.

SM (00:01:04):
Okay. When you look at the boomer generation, the boomer generation is defined as those individuals born between 1946 and 1964. Of course, we know that the boomer generation has a lot of different people from all political persuasions, different-

DH (00:01:21):
Yeah. The (19)60swas a complex phenomenon. I mean, there were parts of it that were fairly benign or just injurious to self. Some parts of it were creative and some parts of it were destructive.

SM (00:01:41):
When you look at the boomer generation, what are the positive qualities and the negative qualities of the generation?

DH (00:01:54):
Well, I am inclined not to see very many positive qualities anymore. As I say, it was a complex phenomenon. The music was great. It was interesting. I do not know if it is great. But it was [inaudible]. What is the scope of this? I mean, I do not really want to answer questions about the whole (19)60s, and people think about moonshot and they think... That is not my focus.

SM (00:02:31):
Well, basically I am looking at the boomer generation and the qualities that some of them have and the events that shape their lives. I have a whole series of questions, but-

DH (00:02:42):
[inaudible] generation. Are we talking about 45 million people?

SM (00:02:44):
We are talking about (19)70 million.

DH (00:02:46):
Well, I do not make comments about (19)70 million people. I do not think that way. I think people who make comments on (19)70 million people are talking through their ass.

SM (00:03:03):
Well, how about talking about the activist portion? Because that is what really what I am getting at here. The 15-

DH (00:03:12):
Yeah. The political (19)60swas a very destructive event. I have written so much about this. It started off fairly creative. We were anti-Stalinist, although we were basically socialist and communist, but we were critical. We wanted to see a hundred flowers bloom. We were innovative. We were against orthodoxy. By the end of the decade, the political activists became Stalinists themselves. They repeated everything that their parents, all the things they had objected to in their parents. They supported the worst forces, historical forces, and they showed that there is no such thing as a New Left. There is only the left. The left is a religious formation, pseudo-religious, which is in search of an earthly redemption, an impossible dream.

SM (00:04:45):
When...

DH (00:04:49):
I am really not happy with the interview. I think I will not finish it. Either I am not in a good mood today or I do not know, but...

SM (00:04:56):
Well, I have specific questions directly to you.

DH (00:05:00):
Well, then ask me the specific questions and strike everything that I have said. I am not happy with any of it. I have written about this decade ad infinitum, and I do not want what I have written undermined by stuff I say off the top of my head in a phone interview. So just-

SM (00:05:20):
Can I ask you about some specific-

DH (00:05:21):
[inaudible] to strike that I will answer specific [inaudible]

SM (00:05:24):
Yeah. Well, how did you become who you are? Because when I think of David Horowitz, I see a tremendous scholar, a person who's written a lot of books, a lot of different subject areas, a person who was the editor of Ramparts Magazine at one time, and then due to some of the experiences in your life, you changed and became kind of a different person, more conservative. How did you really become... I know you have written this in the book, too, but a lot of this oral history is about how people evolve and change over time. I have interviewed 100 people, and a lot of them have changed their lives over specific events. But how did you become who you are today and what were the major factors in your life that made you change during the time when boomers were fairly young?

DH (00:06:17):
Well, I was not a boomer.

SM (00:06:19):
I know that.

DH (00:06:24):
What strikes me about the political generation is how many of them have not changed at all and how influential they are, like Bill Ayers, who I despised him when he was active in the (19)60sand he was a radical. He was so shallow and so destructive, and here he is a close confidant of the President of the United States. I have written about how I changed. Black Panthers, who were held up by the New York Times and by all radicals as the vanguard of the revolution, were a bunch of murderers. And they murdered a friend of mine. The left rallied around the murderers to defend them. It told me everything I needed to know about the left because that was exactly what my parents and their friends and their generation, all of whom were probably somewhat decent people. My parents were certainly decent people. But they defended murderers. And that is what leftists do because their goal is so noble. If you are going to redeem the world, if you are saving the world, or now the phrase is saving the planet, you are capable of any crime, any monstrosity because the purpose you have is so noble that it will justify anything. That is the main thing that I learned. Then when this person, when Betty Van Patter was murdered by the Panthers, the Vietnamese communists, thanks to the so-called anti-war movement... There had never been a real anti-war movement in America. The anti-American movement was victorious in Vietnam, and the Vietnamese proceeded to slaughter two-and-a-half million people in Cambodia and Vietnam, more than that probably, but at least that, without any protests from the protesters, which showed me that they never really cared about the Vietnamese or the Cambodian. What they cared about was their hatred for America.

SM (00:08:53):
Those students have protested on college campuses in the (19)60s, do you think they were a major influence in ending the war?

DH (00:09:01):
Of course, they forced the end of the war. It is not do I think. There is no question. The country was being torn apart.

SM (00:09:12):
What do today's universities learn from the students of the boomer generation? Are universities prepared to handle new student protests? I know there is protests at Berkeley now over the increase in tuition.

DH (00:09:23):
No, the first of all, no. They are supine before... very destructive forces on the campus. First of all, a large, well, I estimate 10 percent of the professorial, but that is a much larger percentage of liberal arts faculties are radicals just as destructive as the people we are talking about. They encourage it and they incite it. The administrations are afraid to do anything. I think that is going to change. I think it is in the process of changing. But basically, university administrations let the left get away with murder.

SM (00:10:12):
But do not you think, David, do not-

DH (00:10:12):
They are doing just what they did. They are giving support to the Muslim brotherhood groups, the Muslim Students Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, all these leftist group are in league with the Jihadists, and the administrations coddle them and protect them.

SM (00:10:34):
But are not a lot of the people that are running universities today, I am not talking about faculty now, I am talking about the administrators, the presidents, the vice presidents of student affairs, are not a lot of them boomers who grew up and-

DH (00:10:46):
[inaudible]

SM (00:10:46):
...saw what happened on university campuses and basically are afraid of activism?

DH (00:10:51):
No. They support activism. On the contrary. It is quite reversed. I am about to sue the Vice President of Student Affairs at the University of Southern California precisely for siding with the racist and slanderers, because they happen to be Palestinians and leftists. That is not all administrators. There is some decent ones I have encountered.

SM (00:11:22):
When-

DH (00:11:22):
But more often than not, they are totally sympathetic to the radical.

SM (00:11:29):
A lot of the people of the boomer generations thought they were the most unique generation in American history. Your comments about that kind of an attitude?

DH (00:11:39):
Well, I just said, yes, that was their self-flattering, but they ended up being communists all the same and supporting the worst, the absolute worst forces out there. This child molester that runs Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, he was a big hero at the left. Of course, that was a little later. That was the (19)80s. But they supported Mao, supported the Vietnamese murderers, the communist murderers, and the Cambodian Pol Pot. I mean, the New Left supported Pol Pot. They were not unique at all. That was their self-flattery and one of their many delusions.

SM (00:12:33):
I think in recent years. I can remember when Newt Gingrich came to power in 1994, there were some interviews given, and he talked about the (19)60sand the (19)70s, and he basically made comments that a lot of the problems in American society at that time were due to the breakdown of the American family. He blamed the breakdown of the American family, the drug culture, and all the problems in our society were shooting it back to that era. Lack of respect for authority, the victim mentality. Do you believe that?

DH (00:13:14):
The (19)60s, if you look at it in perspective, it mainstreamed Marxist, communists, the Marxist and communist war against democratic society. That is [inaudible]. It. mainstreamed the Marxist and communist war against democratic society.

SM (00:13:38):
Yeah. Just-

DH (00:13:40):
The return of antisemitism can be traced to the Black radicalism of the (19)60s.

SM (00:13:49):
What-

DH (00:13:49):
Black radicals re-legitimized, Jew hatred in America. It is horrible to say, but that is what it did.

SM (00:14:02):
One of the characteristics of that era, in that generation of course, is the many movements that evolved and were ongoing during that period, and, of course, continue through today.

DH (00:14:13):
Wait-wait-wait. The (19)60sradicals who then went into the university now have made communism, Marxism... Really, I have written about this in Unholy Alliance.

SM (00:14:31):
Right. I have that, yep.

DH (00:14:31):
Similarities. They made it part of the school curriculum, both at the college and the K-12 level. They have destroyed a great institution. The university, the modern research university, of course, it is still a great university, great institution in terms of the sciences and the professional school. But as far as the liberal arts colleges are concerned, the tenured radicals have returned those institutions to their 19th and 18th-century roots as doctrinal institutions, as religious institutions that instill a doctrine. This happens to be the doctrine of... You know, [inaudible]. We do not have a term for it because they control the institutions that-

SM (00:15:36):
If you could-

DH (00:15:37):
...legitimize the terminology, but basically, they instituted a curriculum which is indistinguishable from what the communist party was running in the (19)30s in this country.

SM (00:15:49):
Well, one of the things that I have known, because I have worked in higher education after 30 years-

DH (00:15:54):
That is in regard not to, of course, the Soviet Union because that communism has failed, that they all condemn it now. But in terms of the analysis of American society, we get this Marxism with some racial and gender prejudice thrown in.

SM (00:16:16):
Well, I know you have written about this in terms of whether universities today are about education or indoctrination. How about the universities of the-

DH (00:16:29):
[inaudible] colleges. Not the whole university [inaudible]

SM (00:16:32):
Yeah. How about the universities of the (19)60sand (19)70s? Were they indoctrinating, too?

DH (00:16:38):
No.

SM (00:16:41):
And the colleges in the (19)50s?

DH (00:16:43):
No. Not in the sense... Indoctrination is when you present one side of an issue that is controversial or you are teaching...

SM (00:16:56):
One of the-

DH (00:17:00):
...an opinion as though it were a scientific fact. That did not really take place in the (19)50s. When I went to college, the height of the McCarthy period, we read Marx and we read the critics of Marx. Now you just read Marx and his disciples.

SM (00:17:24):
What was it about that 1950s that somehow subconsciously shaped so many of the boomers? Because I guess, kids are being raised in that era. Parents are giving them everything that they have really wanted because they had gone through the Depression and World War II. And so when boomers, the early stage boomers in the (19)50s, there seemed to be a lot of contentment, a lot of happiness, and all of a sudden after President Kennedy becomes president-

DH (00:17:54):
Radicalism is not about material deprivation. It is about unhappiness with existence itself.

SM (00:18:10):
What...

DH (00:18:11):
It is a desire that life be meaningful and that it have a particular meaning, which is that the life we experience is a preparation for a true life where there will be social justice and happiness for everyone.

SM (00:18:47):
What are your... just quick comments on, do not have to go in depth on any of these, but just your comments and thoughts on the women's movement?

DH (00:18:56):
There was no women's movement in the (19)60s. It was a movement of the (19)70s.

SM (00:19:03):
Yeah. Well, [inaudible]

DH (00:19:10):
I think it was, in practical terms, it was pushing on an open door. The liberation of women is attributable mainly, or if you want to call it that [inaudible] it is sort of hyperbolic, but if you want to call it that, is attributable to the development of modern antibiotic and modern methods of birth control, particularly the pill, but any contraceptives which allowed women... Because yes, there is always going to be resistance to anything somewhat new, but there was no serious resistance to women gaining equality in the workplace, going to work, and so forth and so on. That is ridiculous. Anybody who has witnessed or remembers or has seen, say, Adam's Rib, the movies of the (19)40s and (19)50s, will see the enormously important roles that women played way before the women's movement itself had started. The women's movement today is just another anti-American, anti-capitalist... The movement, that is what it is. Women's studies programs, what they teach is hatred of America, American capitalism, calling it racist and sexist. It is not about women. If it were about women, if feminists cared about women, they would be out in the streets marching against the oppression of women in Islam against the clitorectomies that are forced on little girls, against the medieval status of women in the Muslim world. But they do not do that because their main agenda is to attack the United States and [inaudible] Islamic fascists are attacking the United States. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, that made the feminists feel an empathy with them, with the worst women abusers in human history.

SM (00:21:53):
How about-

DH (00:21:53):
That tells you how much their commitment to women.

SM (00:21:55):
How about the Native American movement and the Chicano movement?

DH (00:22:00):
Look, these were all radical movements that had nothing to do with the welfare of Indians or Chicanos, who were also motivated by their antagonism to what used to be called in the (19)50s the American way of life.

SM (00:22:23):
Where would you place the environmental movement?

DH (00:22:28):
What? The environmental movement is the new communism you are talking about under the guise of saving the planet. I wrote an article called From Red to Green about this.

SM (00:22:37):
You have children-

DH (00:22:50):
Environmental movement. It is saving the planet. Everything is justified. It is a radicalistic dream. So, all the radicals have gone into it because what they really want to do... The core of radicalism is a desire to redeem the world. It is inherently totalitarian. Environmentalism is the perfect excuse to be totalitarian. We already have a totalitarian bill, a cap and trade bill proposed by the Obama administration, which will allow them to basically control your life. If they can erase your carbon footprint without any proof that it has deleterious effect on the actual world environment. But if they can do that, they can regulate every aspect of your life.

SM (00:24:02):
Of course then you talk about the ongoing Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement.

DH (00:24:07):
Say what?

SM (00:24:09):
The Civil Rights Movement, we all know the change that it took-

DH (00:24:14):
I supported the Civil Rights Movement and I still support it. But the Civil Rights Movement is no longer the Civil Rights Movement. It turned into a... The kind way to describe it as a racial grievance movement. It is a racist movement. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the two titular little leaders of this movement, are racist. Institutional racism in America is the racism of racial preferences, which is what the Civil Rights Movement supports and has supported for the last 30 or 40 years.

SM (00:24:57):
What are your thoughts on the Beats? They were very important in the (19)50s because they showed young people that you can really-

DH (00:25:07):
My thoughts about what?

SM (00:25:08):
The Beat generation, because several people that I have interviewed said they were very important in influencing many of the boomers in their protests, in their challenge of the status quo, people like Allen Ginsberg and-

DH (00:25:23):
Yeah, look. The formative influence, the influence was Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin, of course, there was a little bit of a criticism of Stalin for a while. No longer. Lenin. This was the influence on the (19)60s. At the end of the (19)50s, the Beats were a kind of model because they basically was a flipping of the bird to America. That is what it was. Oh, and Ginsburg turned out to be a loon. So, anyway.

SM (00:26:25):
Some of these names right here are people that I have talked to who, again, David, I have talked to them all a hundred people. It is very important to have your point of view here because you are about the 21st person on the conservatives. I just met last week with several individuals. I interviewed many individuals from the Heritage Foundation, Ed Volner and Lee Edwards. I have interviewed several people from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. So, I am making sure that I am fair in all this. I know your voice is very important, but these are some of the names that people have given me that they read when they were in the (19)60sand the (19)70s.

DH (00:27:11):
Well, anybody who you interview who is still a leftist is not going to tell you the truth because leftists, again, I cannot repeat this too often, in their minds, they are redeeming the world, and that is so important, that they will hide what they think and what they feel, particularly through an interview where they do not know. But in any of the interviews that they claim they are for peace. That was their concern. Social justice. Baloney. That was not their concern. If they were concerned about peace, for example... Let me give you a more recent example. The war in Iraq. There was not a single peace demonstration at the Iraqi Embassy to protest Saddam Hussein's violation of the UN resolutions and the Truce Agreement. There was not a demonstration there because it was not a peace movement. And neither was the anti-Vietnam movement. It was against American power. Anybody who says different is just not telling you the truth. So, if they say that... Of course the Beats were an influence, big deal. What kind of influence? They wrote poetry. I mean, well, Ginsburg, they wrote poetry about their disillusion with America. But why was this generation and the people who liked them, why did they like the Beats? Why did they look to the Beats? And I was one of them. They looked to the Beats because Stalinism, which is what they had, had been discredited. Communism had been discredited by Stalin for a season, as it were. Because now you have a lot of people who openly say they are Stalinists. But in those days, it was in very bad odor, and it had tainted Marxism as well. After all, they killed 40 million people. So, what people will say is, "The Beats influenced us." Why were they interested in the Beats? Were they poetry aficionados, or did the Beats write poetry, is a better question? No. It is because they were radicals who were looking to legitimize their radicalism. They were radical because they were Marxist and they were part of this perennial leftist delusion, illusion, unhappiness with the human condition as such, inability to cope with life as it is, inability to recognize that the source of social problems is human beings, not social institutions. What you are going to be told is they are always going to put the best face on it. They are not going to say, "Well, we really wanted to see communism succeed, but it became discredited by some mistakes that Allen and his cohort made." They are not going to tell you that.

SM (00:31:03):
Well, some of the... Let me just read these. There is just a few names. Herbert Marcuse, Bertrand Russell, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolf, Ken Kesey, Ginsberg, James Baldwin.

DH (00:31:15):
Yeah. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Gramsci. Yes, of course. Marcuse was a Stalinist. So, fine.

SM (00:31:31):
I have got a few more here with Theodore Rosak, Charles Reich, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and William Buckley.

DH (00:31:39):
Yeah.

SM (00:31:40):
Those are some of the writers that-

DH (00:31:43):
William Buckley was not radical.

SM (00:31:49):
Yeah. He wrote God and Man in Yale, which is a great book. One of the things that... I took a group of students... I just retired from Westchester University, David. That was in my email, and that is why I...

SM (00:32:03):
...University, David. That was in my email, and that is why I am working full-time on this. I eventually plan to go back. I have seen you six times speak. I saw, of course, you came to our campus twice. And then I saw you in two unique different environments. I saw you at Villanova and then I saw you at the University of Delaware. What a difference. They treated you with respect at Villanova, and they treated you terrible at the other place. Do you remember that?

DH (00:32:33):
Yeah. You probably did not know this, but I think I was actually wearing a catheter. That is the one where I just had to stop, because I could not get the tongue. My tongue would not move. I was so tired. I had been going 17 hours or something. I do not remember, but I had just had my prostate operation.

SM (00:32:58):
How you doing? You okay?

DH (00:32:58):
Covered? Yeah, I am okay.

SM (00:33:06):
I tell you, I said in the book or in my email to you that I have all your books. And the one book, of course, I love Radical Son, but the one book that I really love is the one you talked about your illness.

DH (00:33:21):
I think that is sort of my best book. I have written another one in that vein about my daughter called The Cracking of the Heart that came out.

SM (00:33:29):
When is that coming out?

DH (00:33:30):
It is out.

SM (00:33:31):
Oh, I got to go get it. Because you see, at that time when you were ill, my dad was dying of cancer. And so my dad died right after I bought the book, and I read it [inaudible]. It is just a tremendous book. I wonder, I took a group of students to Washington DC to meet Edmond Musky before he passed away. It was part of our leadership on the road programs, and we asked him this question and the students actually wrote this question up. And we thought he was going to talk about the 1968 convention, but he did not mention anything about it. And this is the question we asked him: Do you feel that the boomers generation is still having problems from healing from the divisions that tore the nation apart in their youth? Divisions between black and white divisions, between those who support authority and those who criticize it, between those who supported the troops and those who did not. Will the boomer generation go to its grave, like the Civil War generation not truly healing? Am I wrong in thinking this after 40 years? Or is the statement, "time heals all wounds," a truth?

DH (00:34:42):
The war is still on.

SM (00:34:42):
Pardon?

DH (00:34:46):
Of course it will not heal. The war is still on.

SM (00:34:54):
Could you talk a little bit about that?

DH (00:34:54):
Well, if you understand, we are talking about the political movement of the sixties was a movement to reintroduce communist values, communist Marxist values, Leninist values and analyses into the American mainstream, and they succeeded. And so there is an ongoing war over this. Now, of course, some people will ween when I say Marxist. And I will say, "Well, Marx did not talk about sexual orientation bias." Marx believed that a lot of the oppression of capitalism took place only at the workplace. He did not, although Engels wrote about the oppression of women, Marx really did not. But we are not Marxists. Well, sure, if you understand Marxism as a view that capitalism is a system comparable feudalism, slavery, and all previous systems of domination, and that needs to be overthrown so a classless [inaudible] and now genderless society can be introduced. And of course all these radicals are Marxists. And what the sixties and seventies did was to reintroduce this heinous, poisonous ideology into the heart of American culture so that you can have a terrorist. One of the most shallow human beings ever encountered, Billères, a counselor, the president who probably ghost-wrote his autobiography. You can have a communist, an avowed communist like Van Jones, given a White House position. You see this country is in the throes of a major political cultural crisis in which the sixties and seventies generation of communist radical, that played a huge role because they not only legitimize these poisonous ideologies, but they have now made them part of the school curriculum, both at the university level and at the K-12 level. So this is a civil war that is going to go on for generations.

SM (00:37:52):
See, Edmund Musky said did not even comment about any of that. He commented the fact that we have not healed since the Civil War. And he went on to talk about the Ken Burns series that he had been watching and actually had tears in his eye just like we had seen on television.

DH (00:38:10):
Musky was a sappy liberal. Ken Burns is a leftist. Which series? The Civil War?

SM (00:38:19):
Mm-hmm.

DH (00:38:20):
It is not over in the sense that there has been a revenge here in which the Civil Rights movement itself now is the force of racism in our society, as I have already said.

SM (00:38:36):
But where would you put the gay lesbian movement too?

DH (00:38:39):
Well, I think that the movement you are talking about, these political movements are all controlled by the anti-American left. I think that the acceptance of gays is a good thing. And I think that making gays a privileged group, like Black are a privileged group, is a bad thing. I do not believe in these. I believe in the 14th amendment and one standard for all. So all racial preferences are the poison of racism reintroduced by the left into American life, in that sense, if you want a civil war [inaudible].

SM (00:39:34):
In your opinion, what was the watershed moment when the sixties began and when it ended?

DH (00:39:41):
Well, I wrote about this in an article in a book called Deconstructing the Left. I think the real sixties, the sixties decade that I am describing began in 1963 with the assassination of Kennedy and the assassination of [inaudible].

SM (00:40:08):
And when did the sixties end?

DH (00:40:22):
It really ended around (19)70, (19)71. It was over. I wrote about that too.

SM (00:40:31):
Say that again.

DH (00:40:35):
I think it was over by 1970.

SM (00:40:40):
If we were in a room with five-

DH (00:40:43):
Okay, I am sorry. It ended when Nixon ended the draft, I think. Whatever.

SM (00:40:50):
Right.

DH (00:40:53):
What happened was the anti-war so-called movement was driven by radicals like myself who were basically hostile to America, because they were Marxists in the way I have described Marxists. But its ranks were tremendously swelled. People joined it because they wanted to get out of the draft. They did not want to risk their alliance for their country. When the draft was over the sixties were over.

SM (00:41:29):
Is there one specific event that you think had the greatest impact on this generation of (19)70 million?

DH (00:41:39):
Well, I think it was probably the assassination of Kennedy and the Kennedy administration was bumbling of the war in Vietnam.

SM (00:41:48):
One of the qualities that I have asked, a question I have asked, is the issue of trust, because so many of the boomers, when they were young, saw all these leaders that lied to them, so to speak. Whether it be Eisenhower and the U-2, Johnson with the Gulf of Tonkin, of course Nixon and Watergate.

DH (00:42:06):
Oh, I just think that is an excuse. It is an excuse. Well, I do not want to excuse Johnson for lying. He lied because Democrats, even by then I guess, just did not have the stomach to-to fight a war for freedom. So he had to lie and pretend that our boats were attacked.

SM (00:42:42):
You do not think that the issue of trust is-

DH (00:42:45):
[inaudible] bring up the U-2 incident. Those are unreconstructed radicals whose deep sympathies are with communism, and that is why they did not like the U-2 incident. Geez, what was wrong about protecting... What do you mean lie? Anybody who says that is somebody who does not understand that we were fighting a totalitarian monster in communism. Anybody who told you that falls into that category.

SM (00:43:20):
Well, I have only put it into a question for them, and the people have responded.

DH (00:43:26):
You are the one who came up with it?

SM (00:43:28):
No. I have read about it in history books.

DH (00:43:31):
I know, but that is the excuse mode. I told you. People who aim at the destruction of a system that people are pretty happy with, which is ours, will make up stories. They are not going to tell you that they are just opposed to the system, because nobody wants to be isolated as a fringe kook. So they lie. They tell you it is about deception or it is about peace, or it is about justice. They are just lying. They find reasons to be communist.

SM (00:44:16):
So you do not see this is an issue within the boomers then?

DH (00:44:18):
Hold on second.

SM (00:44:25):
No. I would like to ask you, I have been asking this to everyone. Photography plays a very important role in defining a time. What were the pictures that you most remember of that period of the sixties and seventies that really defines the times? Looks like you got some dogs.

DH (00:45:04):
Oh, sorry about that.

SM (00:45:06):
I got dogs on an interview. That is great.

DH (00:45:10):
Fine protection, huh? Anyway. I am not saying that people cannot be distressed about this or that thing, but that is not what makes them radical.

SM (00:45:23):
What were the, in your opinion, pictures that-

DH (00:45:28):
America. If Black people in America were oppressed, they would be leaving. Not only are they not leaving, but they are coming here, and they are risking their lives to get here, the Haitians. There is no oppression in America. People do not revolt over they did not like that the government lied to protect one of the flyers. That is the excuse that so-called liberals make for their appeasement and desire to capitulate for our enemies.

SM (00:46:06):
I do not know if you got the question on the pictures. When you think of that period, what are the pictures that come to mind to you?

DH (00:46:12):
Which period?

SM (00:46:12):
The sixties and the seventies when boomers were young. The pictures that could define the era, the ones you saw in the magazines.

DH (00:46:25):
I do not know, because as everything I have said here reveals my view that as a whole the era is misrepresented.

SM (00:46:50):
Well, the three pictures that I mentioned to some of the other people-

DH (00:46:52):
Well, for me... You want an actual photograph?

SM (00:47:02):
Yeah, actual photographs.

DH (00:47:06):
Well, nobody took a picture of Bernardine Dohrn giving the fork salute to honor Charlie Manson. That would be certainly one, I would think.

SM (00:47:21):
The three that I mentioned was the girls standing over the body or kneeling over the body of Jeff Miller at Kent State.

DH (00:47:27):
Yeah, that is an example of the perverse. That is a picture which is taken to symbolize the bad authorities who killed an innocent student. In fact, it was Billy Ayer's friends who provoked those National Guardsmen. They were being attacked. The real picture would be the National Guards being attacked with rocks who panicked. You are talking about a media that was sympathetic to the protest.

SM (00:48:20):
And there is the one with Kim Phúc, being the girl burned walking down the-

DH (00:48:24):
And there is another one. Right. Like I said, the decade is completely misrepresented.

SM (00:48:30):
And then the Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics.

DH (00:48:33):
I think that is a disgusting spectacle.

SM (00:48:34):
I have three slogans here that I think defined the period. I would like your comments on this. First one obviously the slogan is Malcolm X's. I am going to mention all three before you comment. "By any means necessary."

DH (00:48:57):
Malcolm X was a racist who should not be honored. He was an interesting racist, but still he was a racist. He was at war with America. He hated America.

SM (00:49:14):
The second one was the slogan that Bobby Kennedy mentioned or quoted. I think it was a Henry David Thoreau statement, which is, "Some men see things as they are ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not."

DH (00:49:25):
But Bobby Kennedy, come on, he is an overrated punk.

SM (00:49:35):
And then Peter Max, the painter, had a lot of slogans on his paintings. And one of them was, "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, it will be beautiful."

DH (00:49:49):
That was the benign sixties. I have no quarrel with it.

SM (00:49:52):
I am going to mention some names. This is very important, because I wanted to do this when you were at our campus. I remember you mentioned when I had let you off at the airport there, that you wanted to answer this part, but we did not have time. Just quick reactions to some of these personalities of the period plus some of the terms of the era. I will start out with Jane Fonda.

DH (00:50:17):
An airhead who betrayed her country and her countrymen and worse, because she did not do it in the abstract. She betrayed heroic men in a Vietnamese prison. And may she rot in Hell.

SM (00:50:32):
Tom Hayden.

DH (00:50:32):
Not really, not different. A pathetic individual, Tom Hayden, who betrayed his country.

SM (00:50:32):
And then Rennie Davis was the-

DH (00:50:32):
And who has learned nothing. I did not know Rennie Davis.

SM (00:50:32):
Okay.

DH (00:50:32):
I do not know much about him. I would not think much of him, but I do not know him.

SM (00:50:32):
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

DH (00:50:32):
Oh, Jerry, I cannot have ill will towards Jerry Rubin. They were clowns, basically.

SM (00:50:32):
Timothy Leary.

DH (00:50:32):
An irresponsible and destructive narcissist.

SM (00:50:32):
How about Benjamin Spock?

DH (00:51:33):
I do not really know much about Spock. He had a pernicious influence on almost child-rearing on politics, but I do not really know much about him.

SM (00:51:42):
Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

DH (00:51:51):
Well, Agnew discredited conservatism by being a crook, and Nixon was a liberal.

SM (00:52:01):
Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.

DH (00:52:10):
Well, I think McCarthy was a dilatant who played with people's lives. I think his dropping out after leading everybody up the primrose path was reprehensible. I debated him. I did not debate him; I was a speaker at an event, I guess. He spoke before me at an event at Stony Brook, which showed that he was also a fool. He just doped up all of the nonsense.

SM (00:53:07):
George McGovern?

DH (00:53:07):
I would not characterize him any differently.

SM (00:53:07):
You had already commented on Bobby Kennedy. What are your thoughts on John Kennedy?

DH (00:53:13):
Oh, I think John Kennedy was an interesting figure. I am sorry that he was president, because he was reckless and it had consequences. Personally [inaudible], but his politics were identical to those of Ronald Reagan, which shows you how far the country had fled towards the left in these matters.

SM (00:54:00):
LBJ and Huber Huntley.

DH (00:54:00):
I do not have any thoughts about them.

SM (00:54:00):
Robert McNamara.

DH (00:54:14):
McNamara was an arrogant... He was so arrogant. He was semi-comatose when he came to the important things. He was responsible for the death of the Edsel and for a lot of the debacle in Vietnam. And then he spent his later years apologizing for the good things that he did instead of the bad ones.

SM (00:54:48):
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

DH (00:54:53):
I knew Daniel Ellsberg very well. He was another festively narcissistic individual who betrayed his country.

SM (00:55:04):
George Wallace.

DH (00:55:07):
Well, Wallace was a racist and a demagogue who became the unfortunate victim of a would-be assassin. I interviewed him when I did the Kennedy book, and it was amazing. He was just sucking up to the Kennedys. I did not understand it. I do not think very much of him.

SM (00:55:49):
What about Barry Goldwater?

DH (00:55:51):
Well, when Barry Goldwater was Barry Goldwater, I was a leftist, so I hated him. When he ceased to be Barry Goldwater and became a liberal, I did not think much of him.

SM (00:56:00):
How about John Dean?

DH (00:56:00):
A worm.

SM (00:56:12):
I will just list all these individuals. Gloria Steinem.

DH (00:56:14):
The futility of this. I do not do these things well. I am unhappy with these.

SM (00:56:21):
No, you have given some great responses. No, seriously, David, because some people have given one-word responses and then that is it. They have one-word response, and then some will go over somebody, and then they will be one person that, "Oh, I got to talk about this person." I am almost done here with these names anyways. But I put this group in. Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan. Shirley Chisholm. That group.

DH (00:56:53):
Well, Bella Abzug was just a communist. And Gloria Steinem is another airhead. Who was?

SM (00:57:05):
Betty Friedan.

DH (00:57:08):
Well, I have written a lot about Betty Friedan. She was a fraud. She was a communist and a fraud.

SM (00:57:13):
The other was Shirley Chisholm.

DH (00:57:16):
I do not have anything.

SM (00:57:18):
And then I know you are going to make some comments about these individuals. I want to list all seven of them before you say anything. And that is Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale. I am missing one here. The one that died in Chicago.

DH (00:57:39):
Hampton.

SM (00:57:41):
Yeah. They are kind of different. They are all Black Panthers. Oh, H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. A lot of them are different.

DH (00:57:51):
So Hampton and Newton were basically street thugs who had some kind of appeal with that. That is not to say that street thugs do not have their own kinds of charisma. Angela Davis is a not very bright communist hack. Who else? Oh, Kathleen Cleaver. Oh God, another over-privileged, very angry, very dishonest.

SM (00:58:33):
There is Eldridge Cleaver.

DH (00:58:36):
Eldridge is probably the most interesting one, but he is the rapist.

SM (00:58:44):
Then of course Huey Newton.

DH (00:58:45):
That is another comment on the sixties [inaudible]. Made a rapist into a national figure.

SM (00:58:51):
I think Ramparts published his book.

DH (00:58:55):
Bob Shea wrote the introduction. Famous.

SM (00:58:58):
Yes. Daniel and Phillip Berrigan.

DH (00:59:01):
I do not know. They were out of my orbit. There is not much variety in them, because they are all party-lining America haters.

SM (00:59:19):
William Buckley.

DH (00:59:24):
Well, I have written a lot about Buckley too. I think that Buckley was a heroic individual. He did not need the grief that was given to him for what he did. Very bright man.

SM (00:59:43):
These last few here, you do not have to go in any depth, just some reaction. What does the Vietnam Memorial mean to you?

DH (00:59:56):
I have never been there. That is very sad. The Vietnamese and our troops were abandoned and the left had a tremendous amount to do with that for their everlasting.

SM (01:00:14):
What does Kent State and Jackson State mean to you?

DH (01:00:20):
Oh, excuses of the left for their heinous role in the murder of two and a half million Indochinese peasants.

SM (01:00:33):
What does Watergate mean to you?

DH (01:00:41):
Stupidity. Typical Republican stupidity and then a failure of nerve. Nixon should never have resigned.

SM (01:00:54):
Woodstock. The summer of Love.

DH (01:01:04):
Well, Woodstock was a big mud fest. I do not know. I have watched the film. Way overrated. People's longing for meaning. When you see the wood Woodstock film, everybody yearning to be that it was some kind of big, meaningful event. And it was just a lot of people rolling in the mud.

SM (01:01:29):
Summer of Love in that same category.

DH (01:01:32):
I was not around for the Summer of Love. I am sorry I missed. Again, I think that, it is one of those things that starts out benign and then has not so benign consequences.

SM (01:01:47):
The year 1968.

DH (01:01:49):
The love part, but the drug part.

SM (01:01:54):
1968.

DH (01:02:03):
Well, but 1968, a lot of bad things. Tet Offensive, that was misrepresented by Walter Cronkite and other ill-wishers towards America. Two terrible assassinations. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

SM (01:02:23):
What do you think of Dr. King?

DH (01:02:28):
I am an admirer of Dr. King.

SM (01:02:29):
What did you think of his Vietnam speech?

DH (01:02:37):
It was terrible. It was written by Newhouse. It was the worst thing that he did in his entire life.

SM (01:02:41):
Why is that?

DH (01:02:45):
Because he joined. He gave a rhetorical cover to the communist left.

SM (01:02:54):
The hippies and the Yippies.

DH (01:02:57):
The whiches and the Yippies?

SM (01:03:00):
The whiches and the Yippies?

DH (01:03:03):
I do not know. Again, I do not like these one-word things.

SM (01:03:12):
The last two are Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen.

DH (01:03:27):
The Weatherman were terrorists. The Students for a Democratic Society were trying to overthrow the best system that human beings have ever defined.

SM (01:03:27):
Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

DH (01:03:30):
Traitors.

SM (01:03:40):
I got a few more questions here, and then we will be done. Boomers are often called... You have written a lot of this yourself, and I have read a lot of books on this generation. A lot of people that I have interviewed, David, have said, "Well, when you start talking about the boomers, that really you are only talking about the first 10 years of the boomers. The second 10 years of the boomers, you cannot throw into this group." Ten years of the boomers you cannot throw into this group. So there is a lot of negativity towards putting generations... labeling people in generations.

DH (01:04:10):
I think it is very important.

SM (01:04:16):
You do?

DH (01:04:17):
Yeah, because the Boomers were the really destructive ones. I mean we set the stage. I do not want to exculpate my generation, but when they took over, they were the force behind The Weathermen and 1969. Those were all Boomers. Well they were not all Boomers, but they were the main... they were Boomers. I Boomers knew nothing, they knew nothing and they did not care to learn.

SM (01:04:58):
The Boomers are often defined along these terms. Boomers are often defined as the most educated generation in American history. How do you respond to that?

DH (01:05:09):
Well, I mean they went to school, you know?

SM (01:05:10):
Yeah.

DH (01:05:10):
I do not put that much stock in the Boomer education.

SM (01:05:20):
Boomers are called the Vietnam Generation. Is that a good label?

DH (01:05:30):
Yeah, I mean if you mean by that people who did not want to serve their country in the cause of freedom, sure.

SM (01:05:37):
Others say Boomers are called the Wounded Generation.

DH (01:05:41):
Oh that is self-serving horse crap.

SM (01:05:47):
That has a lot to do with the Vietnam War I believe. Boomers are often defined as the Counter Culture Generation.

DH (01:05:54):
That is right.

SM (01:05:56):
And then the Woodstock generation.

DH (01:05:58):
Definitely.

SM (01:05:58):
One of the things that is really fantastic about you and makes you unique is that when you are on college campuses I think you say a lot of things that students have never heard before, and there were some speakers in the (19)60sthat I remember this, but as you go onto college campuses today, do you ever think back over your entire life and think when the Golden Era was in higher education, when all the views were desired, listened to, accepted as part of American democracy? Can you think of any period David? You are highly educated, you have been teaching... you have taught in the classroom, you have been on university campuses for forty-plus years, was there a golden era when even you felt good?

DH (01:06:47):
A golden era what?

SM (01:06:47):
A golden era when you could go on a college campus and you knew that the people were listening and they were not being, I do not want to say indoctrinated, but-

DH (01:06:53):
All right this jerk is at my door again.

SM (01:06:58):
Okay I will hold here.

DH (01:06:58):
April [inaudible].

SM (01:06:58):
That is okay.

DH (01:06:59):
Okay so the golden age, what are you asking me?

SM (01:07:24):
I am just asking, because you are obviously pretty upset with the way universities are run today and a lot of them are supposedly because of faculty and administrators that were reared and grew up as Boomers, but was there a period of time when you went to college, was there a few years where it was a golden era where you felt real good about college environments?

DH (01:07:49):
I loved my college education.

SM (01:07:54):
Yeah. Because you went to college in the early ... was it (19)60s?

DH (01:07:58):
No, (19)55 to (19)59.

SM (01:08:01):
Could you describe what it was like? Because that is still part of Boomers' lives, and they were in elementary school, what it was like to be on a college campus then?

DH (01:08:10):
Well of course there was a problem, because it was the McCarthy era, so that was fairly apolitical, although communists came to campus, John came to campus, of course it was when he was disillusioned with [inaudible] Norman Thomas [inaudible]. So the public square at the university was a little constricted, but the university community was hostile to McCarthy. The influences of McCarthyism which are now pervasive in the university because they come from the Left and the faculty Left were absent from the university. The university classroom was a very free place. Yeah and the college... you know you learn a scholarly disposition, which was skeptical, which was civilized, and reflect.

SM (01:09:30):
And-

DH (01:09:31):
There were no ideologs teaching then. I never encountered any. Whereas today there are whole fields that are totally dominated by ideologs.

SM (01:09:48):
And you did your undergrad at Columbia and then you went to Berkeley for your master’s degree, and then the Free Speech movement took place. Now that is interesting. What are your thoughts on that Free Speech movement? That was (19)64 [inaudible]-

DH (01:10:05):
I was not around. I do not think much of it. It was not a free speech movement ... even that, I mean it is perfect because... and it was led by... one of the leaders was Bettina Aptheker, who was a card-carrying communist, but it was not a free speech movement because America has a First Amendment, it was a state institution, so of course there was free speech at Berkeley. It was about the right to recruit students to political movements on campus, that is what it was about. It was the right to intrude the political world into the university, and they basically [inaudible] you know, it is weird to present problems of the modern university, and-

SM (01:11:06):
Wow that is interesting because you know Mario Savio is highly revered for-

DH (01:11:14):
Of course he is, because the university is a left-wing institution.

SM (01:11:18):
I am going to be interviewing Bettina... Dr. Aptheker in January.

DH (01:11:24):
Yeah.

SM (01:11:25):
She is on sabbatical. She is actually going to be teaching at Columbia.

DH (01:11:29):
No doubt.

SM (01:11:30):
Yeah, she is going to be there. I have got about three more questions then we are done. When you look at the presidents of the time that Boomers were alive, from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush One, Clinton, Bush Two, and now Obama, and actually Obama is a Boomer, he was two years old, the tail-end of the Boomers, but when you look at those presidents, do you give any of them As, Bs, Cs? How do you rate these presidents and how do you think these presidents influenced this generation?

DH (01:12:11):
Who was the presidents?

SM (01:12:12):
It is all of them from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama. I guess Obama's just recent, but you know, these are the presidents that-

DH (01:12:32):
I do not rate presidents. I just do not do that. Can I ask you... I would like you to send me the transcript.

SM (01:12:38):
Oh yeah, you will get the transcript.

DH (01:12:39):
Yeah because I... you know, I... all right. But I do not... my wife has always asked me to rate things, I cannot. I do not-

SM (01:12:54):
That is all right.

DH (01:12:54):
Not what I do.

SM (01:12:56):
The best history books are written on the Boomers' generation, what do you think... which is usually 50 years after a generation has passed, what do you think they will be writing about this generation? What do you think they will say? And the people that will be writing will be the people that are not Boomers.

DH (01:13:10):
I have no idea and I do not really care. You know I have written what I... you know I disagree with that, I think that basically everything is already known, all the important things. If you visit controversies like what were the origins of the Civil War, you will find that at the time, you know, all the positions were already taken. So I have written what I know about the [inaudible] I hope people will read it but I am not confident they will, given the dominance of the Left in our universities. The ideological Left that does not really want to hear a different point of view.

SM (01:14:10):
Do you think Boomers have-

DH (01:14:15):
I personally do not think that any one individual or any one spectrum of individuals writing about a period like this would have a monopoly of proof, and therefore it is very important that you... if you are trying to evaluate the (19)60sfor example, that you [inaudible] a spectrum on views.

SM (01:14:44):
Do you think Boomers have been good parents?

DH (01:14:58):
I am not confident that that will be happening in American universities. [inaudible].

SM (01:14:58):
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Do you think overall Boomers have been good parents and grandparents in raising their kids?

DH (01:15:01):
I have no idea.

SM (01:15:02):
No?

DH (01:15:05):
Do people actually answer that question?

SM (01:15:07):
Pardon?

DH (01:15:09):
Have you had people actually answer that question?

SM (01:15:12):
Yes. But they always do it on a personal basis. So they all say, "I cannot generalize an entire generation but I can tell you about a lot of my friends who are Boomers," and you know they go to the personal, they do not put a general statement, they just give a personal, and-

DH (01:15:31):
Okay let me ask you another question. Do you find people who are still Leftists taking the view that Boomers raised their kids horribly?

SM (01:15:46):
No.

DH (01:15:47):
No.

SM (01:15:48):
I have not had anybody-

DH (01:15:50):
So they conform, in other words their estimates of how Boomers bring up their children reflects their politics, correct?

SM (01:16:02):
Yeah, you know it is interesting, some have not gone into any details, some kind of pass over the question. Some do not have any kids. But you know, I have got over 100 interviews, I lot of them are Vietnam vets, and so I have gotten a lot of different responses from them, because of course a lot of them were treated pretty poorly when they came back and so they kind of answer these questions a lot differently than some of the scholars and writers and so forth. So I guess the final question I want to ask is something that Jan Scruggs, the founder of the Vietnam Memorial in (19)82 when it opened, he wrote a book called To Heal a Nation, and of course he was referring to, I think overall, the healing within the Vietnam veteran community and their families and so forth, but he did make a reference that he felt the wall was kind of the first step in healing the nation from the war. We are not talking about all the other things, just the war issue. Do you think... you know and I think he probably still believes it to-

DH (01:17:16):
[inaudible].

SM (01:17:18):
Has it helped heal the nation?

DH (01:17:25):
Well I think, you know, that is a mouthful what you just said. It did not heal the nation. So what I would say is that I think it did a great service in bringing the Vietnam veterans into the bosom of the nation, and that was a great service, but it did nothing to heal the nation, because the nation cannot be healed... it was not, you know, mistaken views of the war or different views of the war, it was a radical movement that fundamentally hates America and the system that it represents, and is at war with it, and so that war is going to go on, and you cannot make a monument to end that war.

SM (01:18:30):
You know I never said this in any of my other interviews, but I can remember when I was living in San Francisco in the early (19)80s and they had a minster on, he was on every week, he was kind of like a [Coughing] type minster, and he was on every week and I will never forget... my ears went up when he said this, "America will be a better place when the last Boomer dies." I was shocked when I heard it. And he was referring to the entire generation. So I think that is a little too strong, would not you say?

DH (01:19:01):
I do not know about that.

SM (01:19:03):
I felt that... and that was a minister that was really preaching. David are there any other-

DH (01:19:10):
I think... let me put it this way. I understand where he is coming from, as the sheer frustration of it, but the fact of the matter is that Boomers have children, and worse than that, they are indoctrinating other people's children through their corruption of the university system. And that is going to have an impact for generations.

SM (01:19:38):
Do you have any other final thoughts? Or was there a question that I did not ask that you thought might be appropriate to ask?

DH (01:19:46):
No, that is fine. But I am a little concerned about some of my answers.

SM (01:19:53):
Well first off it takes a while for me to get these transcribed David, and I had a partial interview with you, remember in the car when I was driving you to the airport?

DH (01:20:02):
No. Yeah, I have no memory of anything.

SM (01:20:02):
Yeah. So I also had sent-

DH (01:20:10):
It is just my state of being. You know I-

SM (01:20:10):
You what?

DH (01:20:16):
And you know, this Bettina Aptheker, a horse's ass.

SM (01:20:22):
Well I have actually interviewed David Harris and-

DH (01:20:25):
Another horse's ass.

SM (01:20:26):
And [inaudible] Davis.

DH (01:20:29):
Yeah.

SM (01:20:30):
And some of the top feminist leaders too, but I am trying to get all sides because I am... the-

DH (01:20:41):
I mean it is good.

SM (01:20:41):
The book is about... and I think you would be happy, even though you do not like some of the people, I like everybody.

DH (01:20:46):
It is fine, I like the idea. You know it is a kind of... I do not do well in these kind of... I do not think this way, you know with the [inaudible] answers and the-

SM (01:21:01):
Well I am a big fan of yours, you know I am-

DH (01:21:01):
I appreciate that, it is the only reason I have stayed on the phone.

SM (01:21:06):
Well no I am a fan of yours, because I just think you are the type of speaker that we need on university campuses, that is why it works with the Young Americas Foundation, I interviewed Mr. Robinson this summer as well, and it does not matter what my politics are, what matters is that I want young people-

DH (01:21:23):
I have to go with an armed guard to campuses.

SM (01:21:26):
Well that should not happen in America.

DH (01:21:40):
I agree.

SM (01:21:40):
That should not happen David.

DH (01:21:41):
Okay.

SM (01:21:41):
[inaudible].

DH (01:21:41):
All right.

SM (01:21:42):
There has been a lot of commentary in the news in the last couple of years that the reason why we have so many problems in American society is because of the Boomer generation, because they are responsible for the breakup of the American family and the lack of respect for authority and people in positions of power and responsibility, the increase in drugs, what are your thoughts on that commentary leveled against the Boomer generation?

DH (01:22:08):
Well you know I would not pin it on a generation as though it is an age thing, there is plenty of Boomers who support traditional family values, who are opposed to drugs, and voted for Ronald Reagan. It is the Left- wing Boomers, it is the... it is really the (19)60s, and the Boomers were just one wave of the (19)60s. I was born in 1939, so I am not a Boomer, but it was my generation of the Left that created the political framework of the radicalism of the (19)60s. And then there were evidently quite a few people who... from my generation as well who started the drug movement and you know, there was a kind of fusing of the, what you might call the cultural rebels, which had something to do with drugs and something to do... I do not know, with electric rock, and of course you know since I came out of a Marxist background I do not have too great of a feel for that. But by about 19, I guess, (19)67, when they had the Be In in Golden Gate Park and people were lighting up joints, there was that kind of rebellion against authority, and then we on the political Left integrated it with our anti-American revolt against the Vietnam War and you know, sundry other oppressions that we imagined were taking place. And you know Tom Hayden and others would say that... who were not especially... you know, they were not drug enthusiasts, I guess everybody did drugs, they felt it was very useful to have middle-class kids lighting up joints, breaking the law, because that made them into rebels. In order to make a revolution, particularly in a democracy where you can vote, you have to break the law, and it was important to make people cross the line through draft resistance and through drug use, so that they disrespected authority. And of course it was the Left that invented the word, "Pigs," for policemen and began the assault on civil authority that helped the crime wave that followed, and it was... you know and the drug epidemic that followed was a direct consequence of... you know Hayden, in his Berkeley liberation statement, had the absurd clause of... or part of the Berkeley liberation statement was we will protect people's right to use hard drugs, even though they may be harmful for that. It was lunacy... lunatic decade, but the general assault on the family from the feminists and the use of drugs and the assault on police, you know it did definitely fuel the fires of all these social... the social holocaust that followed.

SM (01:25:49):
I just want to double-check here to make sure that is working properly. Testing.

DH (01:25:49):
I will do it.

SM (01:25:50):
Okay. It looks like it is.

DH (01:26:14):
[inaudible] Yeah.

SM (01:26:14):
What I normally do is... see if this is working right. [inaudible] Batteries or the ... I do not see the red light on here. I am trying to see if I see a red light on here. Testing one, two. Okay. I will be able to do it.

DH (01:26:21):
Okay.

SM (01:26:29):
Okay next question is could you give some of the, what you consider some of the positive characteristics and then some of the negative characteristics of the Boomers? Just brief descriptions. Your thoughts-

DH (01:26:40):
Okay but I want to... I mean just make that distinction between the first wave of the (19)60s, which was people of my generation pre-war or wartime, and then the Boomers who... the Boomers really fueled the phenomenon like the Weathermen, you know, they were really revolutionary, and they were more reckless, and they really carried it through in the (19)70s. I think my generation got a little tired. Positive, I think first of all, my periodization of the (19)60sis that it began in 1963, in the fall after the... with the assassination of Kennedy. I consider the movement of Martin Luther King to be a movement really of the (19)50s, something that started in the late (19)50s and in a way ended with the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts, because what followed that was a movement... the Civil Rights Movement that was taken over by Stokely Carmichael, the radicals. The guiding spirits became Malcolm X, not Martin Luther King. So you know I consider the Civil Rights Acts, you know, the tremendous triumphs of the (19)60s, but they really were pre-Boomer, let us put it that way. And your idea of Boomer is good there, because it was not the Boomers. The Boomers are the Black Power enthusiasts. But what the (19)60sdid that I think was very important was to widen the public space. It was the inclusion of Black America into the popular culture, is the most striking result of that, but there was a general tolerance for square pegs that did not fit into round holes. I think that we greatly expanded our public space in the (19)60sand that is something that was truly beneficial, and I have not only no quarrel with that, but I feel good about having played a small part in it. I liked the music, not the clothes but the music was kind of neat. And you know I... one has to separate it. In my view, the entry of women into the workplace and into public life was really effortless, I mean I think it had more to do with the development of the pill, than anything else, because until women could really control their reproductive cycle, there was no possibility for them to pursue, or there was, let us say, restricted possibility for them to pursue careers. I do not think there was tremendous resistance to women moving into the workplace and I do not think that Betty Friedan had much of a positive impact, or the Women's Movement, I think it was mainly negative. Except other areas, I think maybe sports, I do not know that women would have proceeded as directly into sports. You know maybe it accelerated it at some points, but it created so much bitterness and so much sexual confusion that... you know, unbalance, I do not think it was too positive. I am speaking of the organized Feminist Movement.

SM (01:30:28):
What are your thoughts on today's generation of young people and also the parents who are the Boomers, who have raised them? Have they shared their experiences of what it was like in the (19)60sand the (19)70with their children? I bring this question up because when you see the voting patterns of today's young people, and you compare them with some of the Boomers who actually were fighting for the right to vote, the voting patterns are pretty comparable with young people voting under 50 percent, and probably a lot of Boomers doing the very same thing. What impact have Boomers had on their kids' lives, from your perspective?

DH (01:31:05):
Well I am... you are talking about vote apathy. I have never been concerned about vote apathy, I mean I think that people do not vote either because... you know mainly because they are too busy to pay attention to what is going on in politics and I guess they are fairly satisfied with the way things are and the way things are going. I mean I have never seen it... I prefer people who are not interested, that they do not vote. But I think that the present generations are more conservative, certainly, than the Boomers were. I think that the... you know, people have seen the (19)60sdid not work. They tried to... the Boomers tried to create an alternative to the family, it failed miserably. They promoted drugs, we have a drug epidemic. You know you cannot tune in, turn on, and drop out now. If you drop out you never come back, it is too competitive. You know it was a unique period where the middle-class young people had the luxury of partying throughout their 20s and growing in politics and then coming back and getting careers, and of course what have they done? The people who said they were going to burn down the university in the (19)60s, and you know, revolution and on the barricades, they went on and they became PhDs. You know, they were the bureaucrats that run the contemporary university and have made it a more restrictive environment, ironically, than it was in the (19)50s. You know there is more university oversight and intervention in undergraduate's lives these days than there ever was in the 1950s, and so they were not exactly a revolutionary inspiration. I mean they were the thought police, if you like, they were the ones who enacted the speech codes and this very restrictive idea of political correctness. You know and Americans have a kind of... they have an innate rebellious spirit which is more anarchical than communist, and their parents are more communist than anarchist, and I think that creates a certain tension. Also the Boomers showed that although they changed the American life a lot and, in my view, a lot for the worst, they showed that you can bring about the millennium, and so their children are much more practical and looking much more to careers and things like that.

SM (01:34:06):
One of the slogans of the (19)60swhen Boomers were young, I know because I remember it from college, it said, "We are the most unique generation in American history," just your thoughts on that mentality when people were young and whether you think Boomers have carried that to adulthood, and your thoughts on that kind of an attitude when they were young?

DH (01:34:26):
Well I think everybody who is young thinks they are unique and that they know better than older people. You know there is a truth in that. I do not... you know America has not seen such an upheaval since... a domestic upheaval since the Civil War, so it is a watershed decade, the (19)60s, and in that they may be right. I think that (19)60speople are sort of gloomy. You know I think they have to feel that they failed, because their expectations were so unrealistic to begin with, so they could never succeed. That was built in. And I think they were an unhappy lot in that sense.

SM (01:35:22):
[inaudible].

DH (01:35:23):
An unhappy lot in that sense.

SM (01:35:27):
How important were the Boomers with the respect to the Civil Rights Movement, knowing that Freedom Summer really took place in (19)64, and if you look at the age group of the Boomers, they were born between (19)46 and (19)64.

DH (01:35:39):
Right, I do not think the Boomers were important at all. It was more my generation. While they were in high school or something at the time, so they did not play a role. The Civil Rights Movement as I say was really a movement of the (19)50s, it was a much... it was a very traditionalist movement a lot of religious values, you know, non-violence.

DH (01:36:01):
Values, nonviolence, the idea of integrating into American life. I mean, the Boomers rejected American life. It is quite a different phenomenon and agenda.

SM (01:36:18):
How important, again, getting to another major issue that has shaped the lives of not only your generation, but the Boomers themselves, the Vietnam War. In your opinion, what was the main reason that the Vietnam War ended, and how important were the students on college campuses in ending that war?

DH (01:36:36):
Well, I think they were... it is not that they ended the war, it Is that they caused the United States to lose the war. And I mean, you can have an end. The Korean War ended. In the Korean War, the communists were prevented from conquering the South. But the Vietnam War of the United States was forced by the American protestors to retreat from the field of battle and surrender it to the enemy. And the consequence, of course, was that two and a half million people were slaughtered in the communist peace. I think they were absolutely critical. Without the protestors, the United States would have won that war.

SM (01:37:29):
One of the terms that we often try to talk with young people about today, college students, is searching for empowerment in the sense that their voice counts, that they can actually change the world to make it better.

DH (01:37:40):
This is what you... what?

SM (01:37:42):
The concept of empowerment.

DH (01:37:44):
I hate the word.

SM (01:37:45):
Well, young people at that time felt empowered. Not all, but a lot of young people.

DH (01:37:51):
Arrogance of youth, yes. They felt they could run the world and run it better than anybody else but the President.

SM (01:37:59):
But have they carried any of that empowerment into their adulthoods? Because we see that many Boomers have gone on to become very successful in life and have gone into the materialism that they so often attacked.

DH (01:38:10):
And they got sober. Look, the schemes that the Boomers had were Marxoid schemes, were a crackpot, and they were bound to fail because they were not based on any accurate assessment or appropriate assessment of what human beings are capable of or how societies need to be ordered. They have this fantasy. Woodstock was the big fantasy that you do not need police, that there does not have to be any institutions of order. This is a [inaudible] myth. And of course, they have to sober up and get into the workforce and come to terms with reality and produce. What do they do now? They produce ice cream.

SM (01:39:08):
Ben and Jerry's?

DH (01:39:09):
Ben and Jerry's, yeah. And even Ben and Jerry's. I mean, the guy, he had to get a CEO in that was a corporate CEO. And so Ben and Jerry's is now a complete corporate... Those guys just gave up a lot of personal fortune for nothing.

SM (01:39:28):
Can you comment on a term that was well known from the (19)60s, the generation gap? Compare that generation gap of what may be a generation gap today between boomers and their kids.

DH (01:39:40):
Oh, well, I do not know. Look, the generation gap of the sixties was created by drugs and by the war, the draftable... the anti-draft movement. I do not know. I mean, I do not pretend to be an expert on the boomers and their children. And I suspect that the boomers have come to terms. They are much more conservative in their lives than they were when they were 20. So that I would say it is not as great.

SM (01:40:29):
I want to get into the issue of healing. Do you think-

DH (01:40:29):
And now, do not forget, the boomers' parents had lived through the Depression and were bound to be nervous about the downside. So the boomers have, as they say, come to terms with being in the workforce and doing the bourgeois thing. And their children certainly understand that they have been born into a very competitive environment. And if they slip by the wayside or they do not focus on their careers, they will be left behind. So as I say, there is a much narrower gap.

SM (01:41:09):
Do you think it is possible to heal within a generation, where differences of opinions of positions taken were so extreme? I say this because we took group of students several years back [inaudible] that had not been well and he asked them that question and he said, "We have not really healed since the Civil War," when we were talking about what happened during the sixties. Your thoughts on the healing process within the generation as the next generation gets older?

DH (01:41:38):
Well, look, I mean, I disagree with Musky. We have healed since the Civil War. Even there is this big controversy about the flags at Ole Miss, But the kids who are waving the flags and not waving them because they support slavery or even because they are racists. I mean, it is a pride in the school and the symbols. So I do not understand what it could mean we have not healed in that sense since the Civil War. The race issue, and I am thinking now like North South, if you are thinking of black, white, the race issue has been heated up by liberals and leftists, by multiculturalism, by emphasizing ethnicity, by a constant drum beat about how racist America is And by affirmative action, which is put black intellectuals in contexts often where they are non-competitive. But I am worried about the noise here.

SM (01:42:53):
Yeah, the noise is happening. We got a window open back here and that is why we are getting that sound.

DH (01:42:54):
Which is a prescription for resentment, racial resentments. The (19)60s, the problem is not what happened in the sixties, and it is certainly not, for example, over the Vietnam War. I mean, Ronald Reagan did a lot to heal the wounds by not attacking the left when he was president. The left has got away with murder. The people who call themselves progressive supported the communists right to the end of the Cold War, or at the very least said there was no difference between America and the Soviet Union. And nobody went after them when the Cold War was over, and they dominate our liberal arts faculties today, the people who supported communism. So that is not the problem, healing from issues that were fought out in the sixties or in the past. The problem is the carrying of those agendas into the present. The problem is the difference between people who think that we should have government, have racial preferences, who think that the government should make people equal and redistribute income and people who do not. And there the gap is as wide as it has ever been.

SM (01:44:14):
[inaudible] tape here if we are doing okay. Yeah. I cannot tell. You cannot even tell if there is light on, here, but it is working, so.

DH (01:44:21):
Okay.

SM (01:44:28):
How important has the Vietnam Memorial been, as [inaudible] when he wrote that book, To Heal A Nation, the wall was built to basically be a non-political entity to pay tribute to those who served. But if you read the book, you see the goal was not only to heal the veterans, but to heal the divisions in America and just in terms of remembrance. How important was that wall and how important, in your opinion, has the wall been in healing America as a nation, especially those who may have been on opposing sides of the war?

DH (01:44:59):
Well, like I say, I do not think that the war is divisive anymore. I think that the memorial, everybody supports the memorial. I do not know anybody... And I mean when I say everybody, not every individual, but all sides of the political spectrum have embraced the wall. I think everybody feels that Vietnam was a failure one way or another, the war. And you rarely... it is not a big issue anymore. It is too long gone.

SM (01:45:38):
The issue of trust is something we see today. A lack of trust in elected leaders, no matter what party they belong to, that this lack of trust not only is directed toward political leaders, but it is directed oftentimes towards religious leaders, presidents of universities, anybody that... CEOs, people in positions of responsibility. Your thoughts on the impact of that (19)60s era and the concept of trust?

DH (01:46:06):
I think the sixties was an era where the left set out to sow distrust and was helped by things like the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission report. And I think it is endemic in American life. I would not really blame the (19)60s. Conspiracy theories are as old as the republic. The idea that Washington is the enemy is as old as the republic. I think it is normal.

SM (01:47:00):
[inaudible] we will just check this again to make sure. We are almost here, by the way. We are not far. Yeah, it is almost over. I am just going to, again, [inaudible] flip before and I will switch over and just mention a few names of people and just instant quick response and your thoughts on them. George McGovern.

DH (01:47:07):
George McGovern, a fellow traveling, dimwitted political has-been.

SM (01:47:23):
Bobby Kennedy.

DH (01:47:23):
Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy was a... oh God. He was an aggressive, mean, arrogant, younger brother who felt was stricken by personal guilt when his brother was killed because he felt responsible and jumped on kind of the bandwagon of leftist causes as a way of assuaging his guilt, his personal guilt.

SM (01:48:03):
Eugene McCarthy.

DH (01:48:07):
A at dilettante, a political dilettante, Gene McCarthy.

SM (01:48:14):
The Berrigan Brothers.

DH (01:48:16):
Communists. Destructive, arrogant, religious, communists.

SM (01:48:22):
The Black Panther leaders of that era. Huey Newton, Bobby Seal.

DH (01:48:26):
Murderous thugs.

SM (01:48:26):
Eldridge Cleaver and that group.

DH (01:48:31):
Thugs. These were political gangsters.

SM (01:48:34):
Benjamin Spock.

DH (01:48:39):
A mushy-headed fellow traveler.

SM (01:48:44):
Timothy Leary.

DH (01:48:47):
An irresponsible, destructive destroyer of children.

SM (01:48:56):
John Kennedy.

DH (01:48:59):
John Kennedy, an interesting and admirable personality who ran an administration to which we could trace an awful lot of the troubles that followed.

SM (01:49:20):
Lyndon Johnson.

DH (01:49:23):
Jesus, a smarmy political operator.

SM (01:49:37):
Robert McNamara.

DH (01:49:40):
Oh, an evil robotic... an evil robotic... well, evil and robotic.

SM (01:50:02):
Richard Nixon.

DH (01:50:03):
Nixon? Oh God. A...

SM (01:50:05):
[inaudible] I think we are still... is it still going? It is.

DH (01:50:06):
Oh God. A treacherous leader with a huge ego problem who did a lot of damage to American life.

SM (01:50:36):
Malcolm X.

DH (01:50:40):
Malcolm X, a brilliant racist and a lot of psychological insights, very useful, but has had a very pernicious influence in his afterlife.

SM (01:50:56):
Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

DH (01:50:57):
Clowns.

SM (01:51:01):
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

DH (01:51:04):
Well, they are very different. I mean, Jane Fonda is a pathetic slave to her men, shallow beyond conception, an imitation communist when she was involved with Tom Hayden and a proper corporate wife when she is married.

SM (01:51:38):
What airline are you flying?

DH (01:51:40):
Oh, well, God, airways, US Airways.

SM (01:51:41):
US Airways.

DH (01:51:41):
And Hayden is a Machiavelli-

SM (01:51:42):
There is Transatlantic [inaudible]. Is this it? US Airways [inaudible]?

DH (01:51:49):
Yeah, that is it. Not, Transatlantic. Oh my God, maybe that is it.

SM (01:51:53):
[inaudible]. Last one, Hubert Humphrey.

DH (01:51:59):
Well, Hayden was a Machiavellian political operator. Humphrey, I have very little recollection. All I remember him saying is, "I am pleased as punch."

SM (01:52:09):
[inaudible].

DH (01:52:10):
Yeah, that is it. Yep. One of the last of the old-fashioned anti-communist liberals. We did not have those last ones. Stu Wagner, a crook.

SM (01:52:26):
Did that flip or no?

DH (01:52:29):
Yeah, I do not know. Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin clowns. Hubert Humphrey, the last of the old-fashioned anti-communist liberals.

SM (01:52:37):
And last but not least, I guess two people, Dwight Eisenhower and Muhammad Ali. That is it. I got-

DH (01:52:43):
Two American heroes.

SM (01:52:45):
Great. All right.

DH (01:52:56):
[inaudible] going to have to prove that [inaudible] national security, and therefore it is going to have to reveal a lot more about this agency and then it is going to want to probably. And therefore there is a very good chance that you will not be prosecuted. And that was enough for us and we did it. And I mean, this is only one of many, many acts in the (19)60s, which were done, which violated America's national security laws, which could be called treason and probably literally were, and nobody has talked about it. I talk about meeting with the KGB or they sought me out. I rejected their advances, but they met with a lot of people. I do not know who did or who did not. And why do I think this is significant now? I think it is significant because it is not only a matter of the historical record, but for the country itself. It is important to exonerate the people who were concerned about national security and who defended this country in the (19)60sand the (19)70against its enemies. And the FBI is one of them. My experience with the Panthers showed me that the FBI, of course, COINTELPRO was ended in 1970. The FBI was inept in dealing with the Panthers. How could they kill so many people and not be prosecuted? And as I say, I am not the only writer who has discovered this. If the FBI was doing what we had said it was. And of course everybody now views the police as brutal and repressive. I point out in the book how the head of the Oakland Police Force called Huey Newton to warn him that the pimps of the East Bay had a contract on his life. And this is something that his lawyer even said. They did have a contract on his life. And Huey's response was he wanted a permit to carry a concealed weapon. But it shows... the head of the Oakland police that we have been calling the police fascist, racist and so forth. And here they are warning Newton, knowing full well that the reason the pimps had the contract on Newton was because he was shaking them down. I mean, he was extortion, shakedowns, a lot of criminal operations. And this affected my whole view of the social political struggle, if you will. I had a different appreciation of the police force, the difficulties they operate under, how hard it is for them to apprehend criminals that are protected by left-wing lawyers and the liberal press.

SM (01:55:43):
In addition to the politics of the book, you talk a lot about your personal life. Why did you do that?

DH (01:55:46):
Well, I had noticed even as when I was a radical, how left-wing memoirs often avoid the personal entirely. You can read, Irving How's memoirs, for example, and it is really a history of his political thoughts. And I understood because I had thought so much about this. I mean, these events happened in 1974, (197)5. So I have been thinking for 20 years about the impact of being a leftist on myself, of having that worldview. And I was determined to write a very personal story as well, to show what it means to be in the, what is called now, the progressive left. I believe it is a kind of religion. It is as powerful as a religion and that it has that impact. And that is my little family.

SM (01:56:50):
How about the top picture here, who is that?

DH (01:56:54):
That is Lisa, who is the mother of my children, and that is our wedding picture.

SM (01:56:59):
What year?

DH (01:57:00):
That is 1959. And I often wonder if my root, the reason that I have become who I am ... I am I guess the most prominent critic, if you like, of the left... is not because I had a nuclear family in the sixties. That has a very powerful impact on you when you are responsible for children, for leading them into a productive life. You have quite a different attitude towards some of the things we encourage in the (19)60s, like drugs, like basic kind of contempt for family structures [inaudible]-

SM (01:57:44):
Are all these your children?

DH (01:57:46):
Those are my children. They are now in their thirties. Except that I have one that is still in her late twenties.

SM (01:57:54):
How long were you married to Lisa?

DH (01:57:56):
20 years.

SM (01:57:57):
What year did you get divorced?

DH (01:57:59):
We got divorced in probably, I do not know technically, but in 1978, the Fall of 1978 is when I left the family, which is the hardest, was extremely painful and is a painful memory. And it was a direct consequence of the disintegration, I would say, of my being after the death of Betty Van Patter. The analogy I would draw is of somebody who was born to the priesthood or their rabbinate and had become a priest or a rabbi, and that had found that his church had murdered an innocent mother of three children and that the whole congregation would support the church against him. And my whole life had been lived. And that that is one of the reasons. I guess it was also working backwards, seeing the disintegration, feeling the disintegration of my person and personality. I understood how important being a radical was to the constitution of my identity. I felt I had followed all the rules. I was the good student. I was never tardy when I was in elementary school. I got As. I was responsible.

SM (01:59:25):
Where did you go to school?

DH (01:59:27):
I went to Columbia as my college.

SM (01:59:29):
But you went to... your grade school was-

SM (01:59:32):
Bryant. I went to music and art in New York City and then transferred to William Cullen Bryant. It was just a neighborhood school. Whitey Ford was probably its most illustrious graduate.

SM (01:59:45):
A famous pitcher.

SM (01:59:46):
Yes, a famous pitcher for the Yankees. I wanted to break rules. I felt I had denied myself. I had sacrificed, I had done all the right things and it had made me complicit, in a way, in a murder. I never suspected that the Panthers were that kind of... at least Huey, the people I dealt with were a vicious criminals. I did not-

SM (02:00:14):
You did not think they were.

SM (02:00:17):
I did not. And a lot of my contemporary critics, people who were in the left say, "Oh, everybody knew the Panthers were criminals." And David got involved with them. But the reality is that Murray Kempton was writing, as a left-wing journalist, wrote a review of Huey Newton's autobiography on the front page of the Sunday Times book review, comparing him to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther in 1973. And Gary Wills wrote a similar review about the Panthers in that year. And Eric Erickson, who I guess he has kind of forgotten now, but he was the leading psychologist in the country in that period. And he held a joint seminar at Yale with Huey Newton in 1973. And just two years, well, three years before you remember, Yale University was shut down by demonstrations on behalf of the Panthers that Hillary Clinton was part of. So the Panthers were pretty well thought of.

SM (02:01:25):
You had an affair with Abby Rockefeller.

SM (02:01:28):
Yeah.

SM (02:01:28):
Who was she and how did that figure into your divorce?

SM (02:01:33):
Well, the divorce, it was part of my disorder at that time. This happened actually simultaneous with these events. And Abby was a radical. She was younger than I was, and she still had a kind of purity of faith. And although I no longer... I had many doubts, I had lots of doubts because of what happened in the Vietnam War. I guess I felt invigorated by being connected to her. It was mainly platonic, although it was not wholly platonic and it created a crisis in my marriage. But Lisa and I had been married a very long time, and we had these children, and I think a marriage would have survived something like that if that was not just an indication of much greater problems to come. And that was that I could not keep my commitments and I could not keep myself in order. I was so depressed. I felt like a dead person, and I needed to discover how to get myself out of this pit. And I could not get that out of my marriage and out of... so-

SM (02:03:02):
Where is your first wife now?

SM (02:03:05):
She is in California. I am very... as the book tells the story, you will know that I am very close to my family and I consider that one of the great blessings of my life. She is a very good woman, and we have this bond from having raised these children and the children are the joy of my life.

SM (02:03:30):
Who is this one right here?

SM (02:03:33):
That is my third wife.

SM (02:03:37):
There is no picture in here of your second wife?

SM (02:03:39):
No, I actually do not have a picture of her. It was a very... the book tells a part of the story in this book is the difficulty of putting together a life in midlife. I think a lot of people out there will identify with this. It is very hard. When you are young and romantically in love and you sort of are getting into the same boat at the same time in your life and setting out into this great unknown and then you have children... I mean, there is a lot to be said for the whole traditional way of doing things. I am a conservative now, but I have become one the hard way. And so there are a lot of bonds that strengthen the marriage, the family union, the... of course men and women, despite what some feminists think, are very different, and it is part of the excitement of any kind of heterosexual connection, but it is also fraught with difficulties, and-

SM (02:04:42):
Who was the second wife?

SM (02:04:44):
She was a California woman who had been married to a Count. I knew her as the Countess Crespi, although she was not exactly a valley girl, but she came from sort of the Los Angeles region and was a film producer at the time. But it was a very brief... Oliver Stone was at my wedding. That was part of the intoxication of being in Hollywood. See, I was somebody who had lived a very Spartan life for the revolution because I felt that was the good life. As I say, it was like being a priest or something. And when all of that collapsed and when I saw that my church was a church involved in huge crimes and unable to deal with those crimes itself, I mean still covering them up to this day. It is 20 years later and the left still covering this stuff up will not deal with it.

SM (02:05:50):
How long was that second marriage?

SM (02:05:51):
That was very brief. That was less than a year. And it just was an episode. The third one was more significant. And what it does is... this woman had a drug problem that I was not aware of how serious it was.

SM (02:06:10):
Name was Shea?

SM (02:06:11):
Shea, and I was on a... it shows how deep in my character is the rescuer. I think that people on the left are rescuers. I tell another story about a childhood friend named Ellen Sparer, who was also a missionary to poor people and to blacks and she was brutally murdered, I believe as a direct consequence of her unguarded attitude.

SM (02:06:40):
Where did she live?

SM (02:06:41):
She lived in Inglewood, New Jersey, which is an integrated area. She was a high school teacher and was sodomized and strangled by a 15-year-old whom she had helped.

SM (02:06:51):
At what time, year? What year?

SM (02:06:54):
Right after Betty's murder.

SM (02:06:55):
(19)74?

SM (02:06:56):
I had a double... two huge traumas. And anyway, I told this story of that last marriage in the book because I had actually started the autobiography when this woman disappeared. I mean, I came back one weekend and the house had been half-emptied and-

SM (02:07:24):
Shea?

SM (02:07:24):
Yeah, Shea, she was gone.

SM (02:07:25):
What year was this?

SM (02:07:26):
That was 1993.

SM (02:07:28):
No, so not too long ago.

SM (02:07:30):
It was right when I wrote the article about Elaine Brown. And in looking at myself, I have to see that I am the kind of person who a conservative person would look and say, look at this woman's past and make certain judgements about it. And as a radical, I always wanted to leap over boundaries. I mean, Huey Newton, I mean had a knife wound in his side. He had been to jail. Why would not you avoid somebody like that? Because we were making a new world. I mean, that is what it is to-

DH (02:08:03):
Because we were making a new world. I mean, that is what it is to be a progressive. You do not accept the world as it is. You want to make a new and much better world. You want people to be different. And as I said, I invoked the feminists before, but they want to end five thousand years of history between the sexes has been recorded. We know how males and females behave and think about each other. And they want to transform these relationships into something we have never seen before. And my book is a book about how dangerous that can be. And I had to tell my personal story to show what a huge price I have paid.

SM (02:08:45):
Is that hard to talk about now?

DH (02:08:47):
Well, some of these things I am even talking about them, this is fairly intimate. It is difficult.

SM (02:08:55):
I have always wondered, if people write this and then they come talk about it, it seems like watching them, it is harder to talk about it than it is to write it.

DH (02:09:03):
It was hard to write, let me tell you. It was hard to write. But of course a writer, it is a lonely profession. I mean, you are really communicating with a page and then the page goes out there. I know it is almost, that is a story about somebody else. I am already onto a new phase of my life, which is much happier. I am engaged to a woman with a very good heart. And I discovered that that is very important. It is very important to have... This woman is a very... I mean, she has a child and I have tried to learn this process through my life, to look at people and see them as they are and to realize they are not going to change very much. So if I see somebody who is loving towards their child and takes care of them and protects them, then I can know that if they love me, that it will be transferred to me. If I see somebody like Shay who is rootless, who has no connection, who had no friends, I should have been much more. I should have been warned that this is going to be dangerous.

SM (02:10:12):
Where is she now?

DH (02:10:13):
I have no idea. She disappeared.

SM (02:10:16):
Let us talk about these two people and these two pictures.

DH (02:10:20):
That on the left is my father, right near the end of his life. And on the right is myself and my mother who had some strokes. And that was near the end of her life, and I had brought her to California and took care of her out there. And below that, of course, is Ronald Reagan. And I took great pleasure in receiving an award from Reagan because Reagan, to me, symbolized all those decent Americans who stood on the Ramparts during the Cold War and defended this country against communism while I and all my fellow new leftists supported communist dictators. Whether it was in Russia or in Cuba or in Vietnam, and worked very hard to undermine the institutions of this country. And I see people like Reagan still scorned by the literary crowd a lot, who will probably watch shows like Book notes and getting no credit for what they did. And when I saw Reagan, he smiled at me and he said, "I had second thoughts before you," reminding me of how he had started out also somewhat on the left.

SM (02:11:41):
Who, by the way, would want to tangle with you today, who did not leave the left that you knew back then? Who would love to take you on and say you are nothing but a...

DH (02:11:50):
Well, they do it, but they will not do it in person. When Peter and I surfaced-

SM (02:11:57):
Peter Collier?

DH (02:11:58):
Peter Collier.

SM (02:12:00):
There is a picture in here I will show this.

DH (02:12:01):
Of Peter-

SM (02:12:01):
And his wife.

DH (02:12:02):
...and his wife Mary. When Peter Collier and I first surfaced and brought to light these stories, particularly about the Panthers, we were really savagely attacked by the Washington Post and The New Republic. Although as you know, The New Republic has at least two personalities. But the left personality attacked us, accused us of everything that we had revealed, that we were the only ones who had done it. And so, there are a lot of them, but they will not appear. I mean, I have a writer now, I have a column on Salon Magazine on the internet, Salon1999.com where I have a column opposite James Carville. And they invited Todd Gitlin, who is a very well-known professor, and he wrote a book about the (19)60sto debate me and on the internet. And Todd refused to do it. And to me, I would never confuse Todd with a Stalinist, but it reminds me of when Stalin used to airbrush Trotsky's picture out of the photographs. The left does not like to engage in dialogue or debate. I spoke at the University of Pennsylvania two nights ago, and they had a large undergraduate course in the (19)60s taught by three professors. All of them were kind of a new leftist tenured radicals, [inaudible] Kimble in Harlem. And none of them would come. They were all invited to come and debate me. None of them would. They did not invite me into their class. I am a kind of living historical specimen. You would think a professor who was teaching instead of indoctrinating their students, but actually trying to teach them, would leap at the chance to have me come to the class and just discuss my life. So, there is a wall out there that the left does not like to engage this book or me.

SM (02:14:09):
Make a connection. Did I read in your book that Marty Peretz started Ramparts?

DH (02:14:13):
Marty was an early funder of Ramparts and I think that Ramparts-

SM (02:14:18):
Current owner of New Republic.

DH (02:14:20):
Yes. And Marty Peretz, although we will disagree on some things, like Al Gore, is a good friend. He is a good man, Marty.

SM (02:14:30):
And Marty Peretz is a big fan of Al Gore's.

DH (02:14:33):
Yes. Well, I accept people and their contradictions. I welcome any people from my past, even if they are still on the left. After all, we are all getting older. This book is about mortality. I think being on the left is about mortality. It is an attempt to stay young forever, to be always present at the creation, the year zero of the revolution. But I think that any of us who have lived long enough, tend to get pretty tolerant of each other.

SM (02:15:12):
Go back to your dad and mom. They grew up where?

DH (02:15:16):
My father was born in Russia, but he came here when he was young, one. And my mother was born here. They met in the (19)30s. My dad went to the Soviet Union in the early (19)30s and I found-

SM (02:15:34):
Is this him in the picture?

DH (02:15:34):
That is my dad and I tried to understand myself through my dad.

SM (02:15:39):
And this is you?

DH (02:15:42):
And that is me. And this is a biography. I mean even people who might disagree with the political conclusions, that is not really the center of the book. This is about... It is about my odyssey and it is about fathers and sons. I mean, I think, we all, as John F. Kennedy said, we all have fathers. I think people can identify with that. The New Age people talk about having have past lives and in a sense our parents are our past lives and all of our ancestors are, because they are deeply... somewhere in the genetic code is a core of personality. I discovered this through my children. I have four children, same. Lisa and I brought them all up and they almost came out with different personalities. I mean, it was not like a child is a mere reflection of the parent. There is something in the DNA that creates that personality. And that of course is a very conservative idea. [inaudible].

SM (02:16:55):
What were the politics of your father?

DH (02:16:57):
My father was... Both my parents were members of the Communist Party, and that means that they were part of a vast international conspiracy. And that was orchestrated from Moscow. As we now know because of the opening of the Soviet archives and coding of Venona transcripts. There is a lot of vindication for the sort of anti-communist right in this book. And that is the way our lives were lived. They were middle class school teachers. They never broke laws, but they belonged to these secret cells. They had secret names. My mother told me hers, Anne Powers, from when they would move into their illegal modes to overthrow the government.

SM (02:17:42):
Because they were loyal to the Soviet Union?

DH (02:17:45):
Well, because they believed as we all did, that there was a new world possible in which there would be no war, no racism, no poverty, no, we called it male chauvinism then, no war. Oh, I said no war. Basically all social problems would be solved. And that this new world had already begun. It existed in the Soviet Union and that is why they could support a mass murderer like Stalin. Just the way the left would not believe 20 years ago that Huey Newton was a murderer. So we did not believe that Joseph Stalin was a murderer.

SM (02:18:28):
When your father went to Russia, what year was it?

DH (02:18:30):
(19)32.

SM (02:18:31):
And what did he see there?

DH (02:18:32):
Well, he saw a lot of poverty and I think he understood that there was some... I do not know if he realized there was a famine going on because that was fairly concealed, but he blamed that on the capitalist powers. He did not realize that it was the Marxist government. The Marxism is a crackpot economics as we now know because... But not everybody realized that. As late as the (19)80s, Harvard professors like John Kenneth Galbraith, very distinguished economist, Paul Samuelson were saying Russian's economy was catching up to the United States when in fact it was like a third world country. So that Marxist delusion has been very powerful in our century. And my father thought that this was the first time that the people owned their government. I mean kept writing in this book about how the people are the real owners. In capitalism, of course, he was just a peon. He was just a... And he also wrote... The thing that struck me the most was that he felt... My father was a very depressed individual and a very unhappy one. And he felt at home in Russia and he felt that there was true comradeship. He kept talking about going to events and feeling that everybody is one, it is a community. I think a lot of the left is about that, and it is a religious desire to be part of the flock.

SM (02:20:01):
Where did he go to school?

DH (02:20:03):
He went to Townsend Harris, which was a kind of special school where they taught Latin and where he had a very hard time. And then he went to City College, which was the kind of fountain of a lot of the New York intellectuals. But my father was not able to go on to an academic career. He had to support his parents. He went into teaching.

SM (02:20:27):
There have been a lot of people that have come through over the last year or two with books to talk about beginning at City College, becoming communist or socialist, transferring over to being neo-conservatives. Doing what you did, go to Columbia, have some of the same experiences. Why did you pick Columbia? What impact did that have on you?

DH (02:20:47):
I have no idea actually why I picked Columbia except it was an Ivy League school in New York. My father felt betrayed. I will never forget when I, as a freshman walking on the campus with him and being awed by the great names on the library, Socrates, Dante. And my father was distressed and I did not understand that distress till later. But he thought that I had kind of left the fold by going to the rich man school. I mean, I was a scholarship student. And when I was in my mid (19)30s, he asked me if it was Columbia that had kind of stolen my soul. But I was thrilled by learning. I mean, I loved my college.

SM (02:21:32):
How much of the radical son in you came from college, how much of it came from your parents?

DH (02:21:37):
Well, none of it. College, because I remember I belonged to the NAACP at Columbia, and we had a hard time getting signatures on a petition for a federal anti-lynch law. There was no radical activity in the (19)50s at campus. I wrote papers as a Marxist and I will say that it was freer in the McCarthy (19)50s for people on the wrong side of the kind of ideological tracks than it is today for conservatives. Conservatives in today's academy are graded politically, and they are persecuted for their political ideas. Whereas I was not at Columbia as a Marist. I am grateful to my professors for not doing that. And some of the outrage I still have... I am somewhat mellowing as I get older, but as for those students in today's colleges that are not getting the education they should be.

SM (02:22:39):
There are all kinds of connections in this book that I wanted to ask you about. By the way, there is a lot of books that have been written by people who used to be on the left to have gone to the right. How many do you know that have been on the right that have gone to the left in the last 20 years?

DH (02:22:51):
Well, there are two that I am aware of. One is Gary Wills, who was not treated the way Peter Collier and I were. One does not identify Gary Wills with being an ex-right-winger who did 180 degree turn or being a renegade. And all these terms are ritually used about Peter and me when we are treated in the press. And the other, well, I would say Gary Wills is the one. Michael Lind has also written a book, but Michael Lind was never, by his own account, in his own book, a conservative. He says he is a lifelong Lyndon Johnson democrat.

SM (02:23:35):
Name that pops up in the middle of your book on page 274, if I can find it, is Michael Lerner. Is that the same Michael Lerner of Tikkun?

DH (02:23:42):
That is the Michael Lerner of Tikkun and the...

SM (02:23:45):
I will just read it here. It says, "Michael Lerner, who came to recruit me into a vanguard, he was calling the New American movement, summed up their reactions with characteristic crudeness. Even to raise such questions, he said to me, is counterrevolutionary."

DH (02:23:59):
Right. I was trying to ask at that point. It took me many years. I did not switch sides in the way Michael Lind did or even Gary Wills. I never was an active leftist after the death of Betty Van Patter, the murder of Betty Van Patter in January (19)75. I wrote an article in The Nation in... It was not until the second Reagan election and the support for the Sandinista Marxists in Nicaragua that made Peter and me sort of come out and be political again. And when Michael Lerner said of me that my ideas, my questions were counterrevolutionary, this was part of my process. This was about 1977, and I was asking whether socialism was viable, because I say it is comparable to a religious faith. Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher compared it to idolatry in a book he wrote in 1905. Because you believe that you can create, in effect, a heaven on earth. Only you can do it without a divine intervention. And therefore what you are worshiping as saviors is the vanguard. Now that is the problem with radicals. You worship the vanguard and you give them enormous power. And of course they commit enormous crimes because the objective is so normal, which is the redeemed world. And around that period I was very influenced by the Polish philosopher, he had been a Marxist, Leszek Kolakowski, in questions that he asked, which I discussed this in the book. And I wanted to know, I did not think socialism was workable at that point. And I wanted somebody to convince me that it was, and Lerner's response was to ask those questions is counter-revolutionary. And there is a whole series of incidents I described that taught me that the left is unable to think itself and to really deal with these questions. It is a matter of faith.

SM (02:26:17):
You say that you have something in common with Whitaker Chambers and we just did his biography on this program.

DH (02:26:22):
Yes.

SM (02:26:23):
What in common do you have with Whittaker Chambers?

DH (02:26:26):
Well, Whittaker Chambers was somebody who... He had been a communist and then he was recruited into the Communist underground and did a lot of illegal things and basically spied and then went public with the fact that Alger Hiss was a spy. That was the big thing that he did. And first his attitudes was dismissed, and then he was crucified. And to this day, I mean, I am so glad you did the program on the Chamber's biography. Because I have interviewed many college students who have never heard of Whittaker Chambers, although they have heard of Alger Hiss. That is the work of the left. That is that airbrushing out of the picture. Peter Collier and I were bestselling authors when we became conservatives.

SM (02:27:18):
Having sold what?

DH (02:27:19):
We wrote biographies of the Rockefellers and the Kennedys that were not only bestsellers, they were front page New York Times reviews. The minute that we revealed that we had voted for Ronald Reagan, our literary careers, and at that level were over. We knew we were not going to get any awards because the Pulitzers... And we had been nominated for National Book Award, a heavily political. We did not expect that we did not get a front-page review in the New York Times ever again. I will say that since this... I do not want to suggest that there is a conspiracy, it is just an attitude. And there are always individuals who are very principled and whom I respect. And Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the daily reviewer for The Times did give our Ford book and he said it was our best work. The Sunday was not the same. We found ourselves excluded from the principal magazines of the culture. Harper is the Atlantic, the New York Review and the magazines, the New York Times magazine, the Washington Post Magazine. This became terrain that we could not walk on again.

SM (02:28:39):
What is the worst thing you think you did against this country?

DH (02:28:47):
Well, I have no idea what the consequences of that one act that we did, I described earlier, were. I think the worst thing is in sowing cynicism about this country. I think what the left does, they are like termites that eat at the social foundations. And a book I wrote as a leftist, Free World Colossus had a bad influence on the National Security Council chief, the point man for Nicaragua was Robert Pastor says he was influenced by my book not to intervene in behalf of the Democrats in 1979. Nicaragua could have been saved a lot of grief if we had intervened and protected the Democrats against the Sadinistas. But the general indictment of America, my book, the Free World Colossus, was the first book that indicted, that did the litany of the CIA in Guatemala, and Iran, in Vietnam and Cuba and so forth, as though that is American foreign policy. Or even as though that is always a bad thing. But the left has gone much further. It is demonized now, not only in America, but white males, European culture. It has created a whole new racist attitude, an anti-white racist attitude that is terribly divisive and is destructive to minorities and to black people in particular. And I was part of... I was being a new left intellectual, we had a pretty wide influence in the new left. I was responsible for that. And that is one of the reasons that Peter Collier and I, instead of going on and sort of just making money or something like that, I mean, we could have written literary books. Only our biographies were not very political, have decided to get back in the fray and pay some of our social debt. I said, we have a serious debt to society. That is the way we feel.

SM (02:30:48):
You say that AIDS created your move from left to right? Yes. The AIDS epidemic and the attempts to combat it have been pretty much controlled by the liberal left. It is one of the most politically correct parts of the culture. Peter Collier and I did an early story on AIDS, 1983. There were I think only 300 cases in San Francisco at the time. And we did it... We were inspired to do it because they were attacking Ronald Reagan as the source of the AIDS epidemic. And we knew there was something wrong with that. And I contacted Randy Shilts, I tell this old story in Radical Son. I contacted Randy Shilts, who wrote And the Band Played On and was the San Francisco Chronicle's gay correspondent covering the gay community. And Randy gave us a remarkable story, it was before HIV was isolated. And the fact was that the gay community leadership, the leadership, who were highly political people and tended to be new leftists, were denying that AIDS was sexually transmitted even though the doctors knew it was, had made the literature in any health clinics not mention anything like this. And were of course, opposed to closing the bath houses, which were the kind of Petri dishes where this culture was spreading. And I went and we did an investigative report and interviewed a lot of gays, gay leaders who were terrified to state what was going on, that there was all this misinformation. It was like the McCarthy period. It was the same atmosphere, and gave us the story. And we printed the story in California magazine, and the magazine was instantly picketed. But I understood that there was a political correctness which had seeped into the battle against AIDS, which then went on to effect. There was no testing, no contact tracing. The bathhouses were not closed. And I firmly believe that the tens of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. And they are now 200,000 dead. And you could extrapolate it right then by just doubling the number every six months, which was... So I knew in 1983 that there would be two, three hundred thousand dead. Now if this politicization of the epidemic continued. And to this day, the media has not ever done an investigative report just on the issue of testing. And the big argument is people would be outed with... It is like we are going to throw gays in concentration camps, which is... it is paranoid. The reality is that when Liberace died, I mean there was this national outpouring. I mean there is tremendous feeling in the... Of course there were bigots everywhere. I mean, there has always been bigots, but the nation as a whole is not going to do that. When I interviewed Don Francis, who was the hero of And the Band Played On, he said... An epidemiologist at the Centers for the Disease Control. I asked him about the confidentiality issue and he said, "Look," he said, "we have been studying gay diseases since before Stonewall, and I do not know of a single case of breach of confidentiality." And then you have the hypocrisy of gay groups that have outed people. Like they outed Pete Williams when he was... And that is a good example. They outed Pete Williams when he was a spokesman for the Pentagon. And Pete Williams being a Republican and being in the Bush administration. And there were no consequences for Pete Williams. I mean, the fact that he was gay, republicans are not intolerant. He went on, now he is at ABC, but he was not fired or anything. And so there is a lot of... The left feeds off paranoia. It tells black people that there are government conspiracies against them, that now Tom Hayden, who is a figure in this book, is running for mayor of Los Angeles and was in a parade, a march in which he said, "The CIA is planning crack in the ghetto." I mean, that is just an incitement to race warfare, which is what the left is really about these days.

DH (02:35:15):
By the way, we are about out of a time, where is this picture? Where were this taken?

SM (02:35:18):
This was taken in the studio. I look like somebody in the witness protection program. But the publisher thought, and it probably was a good idea that that would intrigue people. And it does. It indicates, I mean, I am looking at it now, to me, although I would have liked a genial smiling picture on the front, because there is a tendency to demonize me. It shows a troubled, thoughtful... That is the look, troubled and thoughtful. And that is the book.

DH (02:35:49):
David Horowitz, our guest, Radical Son, the book. A Generational Odyssey. Thank you very much.

SM (02:35:54):
Thank you, Brian.

(End of Interview)

2007-12-21

Stephen McKiernan

David Horowitz

David Horowitz grew up a "red diaper baby" in a communist community in Sunnyside, Queens. He is a far-right writer, founder, and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), editor of FrontPage Magazine, director of Discover the Networks, and founder of the organization Students for Academic Freedom. Horowitz wrote many books and he worked as a columnist for Salon. He also was an outspoken adherent of the New Left, which he later rejected and became a proponent of Neoconservatism. Horowitz received his Bachelor's degree from Columbia University and his Master's degree from UC Berkeley.

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Authors, American--20th century; Radicals—United States; Horowitz, David--Interviews

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Baby boom generation; Environmental Movement; Communism; Robert F. Kennedy; Black Panthers; Civil Rights Movement; Nineteen sixties.