Interview with David Hawk

Hawk, David R. ; McKiernan, Stephen

David Hawk is a former Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA, UN human rights official in charge of the Cambodia Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and author. Hawk has been a visiting scholar at the Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights and taught at Hunter College, CUNY. Currently, he teaches in the International Relations Department at the University of South Florida (Tampa). Hawk is a graduate of Cornell University and Union Theological Seminary, and he also did postgraduate work in International Affairs and Strategic Studies at Magdalen College, Oxford.

2010-01-14

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

164:52

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: David Hawk
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 14 January 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:02):
Testing, one, two, testing. Testing, one, two.

DH (00:00:10):
That is one of those digitalized?

SM (00:00:12):
Yes.

DH (00:00:12):
Or is that a digitalized?

SM (00:00:15):
Oh, no.

DH (00:00:15):
Oh, no-no. It is got a little micro.

SM (00:00:17):
Yeah, but I have a digitalized one, but I am trying to figure it out. Maybe the closer I get there.

DH (00:00:21):
Okay.

SM (00:00:22):
First question I want to ask is, when you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? And please speak loud because it is catching. I have to check on this every so often too if it is working.

DH (00:00:37):
Yeah, the good old days.

SM (00:00:40):
Fine with the good old days?

DH (00:00:46):
The (19)60s and early (19)70s, well, I was in college and graduate school, and that was great fun, both. And that is the time when I met the young woman who is still my wife. And that was a time of successful political activism, the name of the civil rights movement, which worked. And the occasion of the... I dropped out of graduate school in (19)67. Took five years off to try to stop the war in Vietnam, which we did not succeed in doing. But I probably had more political influence during those years than any time since. So, even though we did not succeed to stop the war, we did at various points have a big impact on the course of events.

SM (00:02:29):
What was it about your background before you even went to Cornell University? Because I know you went to Cornell and I am from the [inaudible] area, so it is a small world. I went to Binghamton and grew up in there. I have quite a few relatives who went to Cornell. What was it in your upbringing, even before you got to Cornell University, that made you somewhat who you are? Were you an activist prior to going to college in your high school years? Were there issues that really upset you when you were younger? Things in the late (19)50s, early (19)60s?

DH (00:03:02):
Yeah. I was seized at, must have been junior high school by the... When I became aware of racial segregation and discrimination, that was offensive, which probably had most to do with my religious upbringing as a low church evangelical. And the fact that the civil rights movement in those years was led by ministers and the grievances articulated in the terms of the Old and New Testament. And we believe that segregation and discrimination were social evils that should be eliminated.

SM (00:04:21):
In the school you went to, the high school, were you the only one that felt that way? Did you feel alone, or were there other students that were thinking that as well? Seeing what was happening? Probably on black and white television.

DH (00:04:34):
Yeah. The years of Little Rock.

SM (00:04:38):
Right.

DH (00:04:42):
Of the attempts to integrate schools. Well, if you come from places like Allentown, Pennsylvania, or Lancaster or York, you go into the town squares, the monuments are, to the Civil War, dead. I mean, and they were [inaudible] Republicans. And it was not just preserving the union, part of that legacy you grew up with was ending slavery. No, so there were not many African Americans in my junior high or high school, but there were some, and the idea that they could not go to school with everybody else was offensive. But there was not much to... Where were we? Oh. Oh, right, so I remember the first occasion was... Well, so I followed that. I was interested in that. In those, I would have been a Eisenhower, Nixon-type Republican. That is what my folks were. Although the New Frontier Kennedy's administration caught the enthusiasm of a lot of young people. The idea of younger generation getting the country moving again, seeing the that as opposed to Eisenhower and the Dulleses. So I followed developments in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King was already the nationally known figure. And then, I remember the freedom rights and the sit-ins. And sit-ins was sort of outrageous that African Americans could not eat at those lunch counter in their local Woolworths. Every town had a Woolworths. And when I used to go to the YMCA in Allentown, it was right around the corner from the Woolworths in downtown. I would have lunch at Woolworths, go back to the Y. When I was, it must have been a sophomore year, I guess. Yeah, well, maybe. Yeah, I guess. Yes, sure it would have been sophomore year at Cornell when there was a nationwide picketing of Woolworth in support of the students in the South who were sitting in at the lunch counters. And I participated in that picket of Woolworth in downtown Wichita.

SM (00:08:31):
Wow, very good.

DH (00:08:33):
That was my...

SM (00:08:35):
I know Wichita. Where was that? Was that still there? Who is there now?

DH (00:08:38):
Oh, I have no idea. It would have been on that main street.

SM (00:08:41):
Yeah.

DH (00:08:42):
Or whatever, that State Street or what?

SM (00:08:43):
Yeah.

DH (00:08:44):
Whatever it is called. But anyway, so I remember that.

SM (00:08:55):
Your years at Cornell, what were the years that you were at Cornell?

DH (00:09:00):
It would have been (19)60 or (19)61 to (19)65.

SM (00:09:08):
Obviously, the Vietnam War was not even really picking up until about after (19)65. Was there any kind of small protests against the war?

DH (00:09:15):
Yeah.

SM (00:09:16):
I know that Phil Caputo's book talks about in The Rumor of War, that is when the first large numbers of troops were going over, around that (19)65 period.

DH (00:09:25):
Well, sure. I then worked in the summer of my junior year. I participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer, so I was in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in August of (19)64 when the Gulf of Tonkin happened. And we were afraid that if the US got into a war, Johnson would be distracted and he would not implement the civil rights measures that were in the process of... The Voting Rights Act was (19)65, but the Mississippi's Freedom Summer was building up to that. We were afraid that if there was a war, it would distract attention from civil rights and anti-poverty efforts. Does that mean that World War II replaced the new deal? The Korean War overtook Truman's fair deal? I was at Cornell. I was studying industrial labor relations, so I was studying economics and history and sociology, so I was studying this stuff.

SM (00:11:07):
Did you have any fear when you went South? Did you go by yourself and met a group down there? Did you go with a group of other students and did you have a fear that something could happen to you...

DH (00:11:21):
Yeah.

SM (00:11:21):
...when you went down there? What was that feeling like? And then, the experience itself and how it can change you somewhat?

DH (00:11:27):
Well, sure. I was in... I mean, this was part of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee Freedom Summer. And there was an orientation program. People went down in two waves. I was in the second wave, but they just assigned me to that. They just told me to go. The orientation program was maybe at Oberland or some college in Ohio or something, I recall vaguely. And it was the people who were in the first orientation included Schwerner and Goodman, and they were killed along with Chaney while we were at the orientation program they had. They had gone down a week, maybe two weeks before. So, security was a big concern. Although, my parents worried about it more than I did. Yeah, the 20-year-old, what did we... But it was clear that the organization was going to have a lot of security concerns. You did not go out at night. You went out and you never went out alone. So, there were whole sets of security regulations.

SM (00:13:10):
Was Scott Lynn one of the instructors?

DH (00:13:12):
Oh, sure.

SM (00:13:13):
Yeah. [Inaudible] person.

DH (00:13:16):
Oh, yeah. I have not seen him in decades. Decades.

SM (00:13:22):
Well, he was up there.

DH (00:13:24):
Yeah, he was up there. He was a generation, he was 20 years older than we were. You were very careful. We went to the Black churches on Sunday morning, but we were not allowed to go to the African American bars and nightclubs on Saturday night. And we did not integrate. We were doing voter registration. That was the goal. We would canvas Black neighborhoods and try to talk to people about registering. And then, there was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic [inaudible] Challenge.

SM (00:14:25):
Danny [inaudible]?

DH (00:14:26):
Mm-hmm.

SM (00:14:27):
Yes.

DH (00:14:28):
So, that was the project. And we did not try to desegregate things. We did not pair up with Blacks and try to go to white only places because of the security issues, and because the aim was voter registration. It was aimed at demonstrating. The aim was to demonstrate that these people were not being allowed to vote in order to get the Voting Rights Act, which followed the next year, so that is what we stuck to. I was there during the Gulf of Tonkin, and that is when I first heard of or paid any attention to Vietnam. And then, it was in my senior year. Then you had the escalation started right after it was on [inaudible]. And you had the first round of the teachings were actually in the spring of (19)65, my senior year. And so, there were two professors at Cornell, John Lewis and... He was a China scholar. Oh, the Indonesia scholar.

SM (00:16:10):
McCann?

DH (00:16:10):
George McCann. They published one of the first major history of the Vietnam War called the US in Vietnam. The teaching was supposed to be a debate between Hans Morgenthau and McGeorge Bundy. And it was going to be televised, or not televised, broadcast in some way in a dozen campuses. But LBJ forbade Bundy from debating Morgenthau, which would have been a fabulous debate. So then, a dozen, two dozen, however many universities, particularly ones that had strong Southeast Asian departments. So you would have Berkeley, University of Michigan, Yale, Cornell. Anyway, so there were two professors who gave the teaching. Lasted all night long, and these guys alternated it. And I was just astonished at how anyone knew so much about Vietnam. What they were doing was reading the chapters of the book that they were currently writing.

SM (00:17:54):
Oh, they were looking down and up.

DH (00:17:57):
They took turns. But it was like a six-hour lecture...

SM (00:18:03):
My God.

DH (00:18:04):
...where these two professors alternated back and forth on how the US was setting off entirely the wrong course, that it was not going to work. If it was not halted and reversed, it was going to be a disaster. Anyway, that then became the serious scholarly book on the Vietnam War for the next several years.

SM (00:18:39):
What year that book come out? I have a big collection [inaudible], (19)64 or (19)65.

DH (00:18:46):
Probably came out in (19)66. It would have been in the spring of... I cannot remember. Was it... Yeah, yeah, it was (19)65.

SM (00:18:58):
Sure.

DH (00:19:02):
Spring of (19)65.

SM (00:19:03):
Do you remember the cover?

DH (00:19:05):
It was green and white.

SM (00:19:07):
Yeah.

DH (00:19:08):
Paperback.

SM (00:19:09):
Oh, it was a paperback. I know there was a green book with a yellow Vietnam on it. It was [inaudible] kind of stuff. Way back.

DH (00:19:16):
[Inaudible], I do not know. But if you look, if you check it out, McKahin and Lewis, the US in Vietnam. And then, 10 years later, 20 years later, McKahin did a second edition of it. John Lewis left Cornell, went to Stanford and he was... I am still in touch with him.


SM (00:19:46):
Good.
DH (00:19:46):
Because he has done a lot of work on China and on North... Well, he is the China scholar, on North Korea. But he is retired from Stanford now. But in any event...

SM (00:19:58):
That is become a pretty conservative institution there with the Hoover Institution.

DH (00:20:01):
Well, it is separate. The undergraduate parts, there are parts of it that are liberal.

SM (00:20:19):
When you look at the boomer generation, now, again, people have responded differently to the question. Some people do not even like this concept of generations. Todd [inaudible] said, "Quit talking about it." People that were young during the era. But he said, for example, that when you look at the Boomers between (19)46 and (19)64, which are the years that are defined as boomers, experiences that the people in the front wave of the boomers are totally different than the last 10 years. And so, those people formed the group, say (19)46 and (19)54-(19)56, they really experienced the protests on college campuses. You cannot really say that some of the students did not that were in the latter group. So, he kept saying that, and I would be interviewing him. He was saying, "Oh, correct me again, just do not say boomer generation." But I have had a couple people that have been very sensitive to this, but I am just saying what other people have defined the group as. They define the World War II generation the silent generation, and what they call the cuspers, which is the second group compared to the first group. I have just learned that in my studies. Cuspers are those born between the (19)56 and (19)64. And then, you have got, of course, the Generation Xers, and then you got the millennials that are in college right now. But the basic question I am really asking, when you look at that generation of 70 to 78 million, and the numbers differ, what are the characteristics that you admired about that group and those that you least admired?

DH (00:22:01):
I never thought about it. I do not object to the categories, but I am actually a little older. I was born in (19)43.

SM (00:22:14):
Well, a lot of the people, though, that ran were the leaders of the movement...

DH (00:22:20):
Yeah, we were.

SM (00:22:21):
...in that...

DH (00:22:22):
Yes.

SM (00:22:22):
That is why it was really ridiculous.

DH (00:22:24):
We were in graduate school.

SM (00:22:26):
Yeah.

DH (00:22:26):
I mean, I do not much like that question. I would not think about it in that way. I think about the times. And obviously, the music, it was fabulous.

SM (00:22:49):
Talk about the music because that is a question later on, but how important was the music in the anti-war movement and all the movements?

DH (00:22:56):
Oh, enormously important.

SM (00:22:58):
[Inaudible].

DH (00:23:04):
The freedom songs, I mean, during the civil rights movement were driven by... Again, because that movement is before the lawyers took over, it was still led by ministers and organized out of churches. And you sang all the hymns. And I came from a low church evangelical Protestant background. They were the same hymns that we sung. The Black churches sang with a little more fervor and better harmony, but same songs. We Shall Overcome, Amazing Grace, then that was when the folk music.

SM (00:23:54):
Oh, yeah.

DH (00:23:57):
So, you had folk music, which is what you listen to on the campuses, you had the gospel music, the church hymns that fed directly into is what you sang at the civil rights struggle. But you also had the first fabulous wave of rock and roll. Well, the first wave, I suppose would have been in the mid-(19)50s. But rhythm and blues and rock and roll either came out of Mississippi or came out of Tennessee. Or it was either Memphis or Alabama was. Pardon?

SM (00:24:54):
[Inaudible].

DH (00:24:58):
But he was covering stuff he picked up from the rhythm and blue singers, so that, you know, you had the oldies but goodies rock and roll, and the beginning of soul music, where sort of rhythm and blues went mainstream. The music was fabulous. And you had folk music. And then, Dylan merged folk music. But you had Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan. And they were the songsters, the musicians of the civil rights movement. And then, at (19)65... Whoa, was it (19)65? Dylan put folk music to rock and roll, Newport. That must have been Newport (19)65, I guess, or (19)64. But it was Highway 61 Revisited, whenever that was. So, the music was just fabulous. And then, you went (19)66, it was like the... That (19)66-(19)67 was not only the height of Motown, but also stacks and holes.

SM (00:26:46):
Oh, yeah.

DH (00:26:47):
The heavier rhythm and blue stuff, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, the more Southern stuff. So, you have the just fabulous music. And then, it went psychedelic.

SM (00:27:07):
Saturday Night Fever.

DH (00:27:09):
No, that was later. That was disco.

SM (00:27:11):
We were talking about...

DH (00:27:13):
The Stones and the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. So, I mean, that was the music of the anti-war group.

SM (00:27:23):
Yeah.

DH (00:27:24):
The Jefferson Airplane, all that stuff. And the civil rights movement merged into the hippies. In New York, in California, there was a heavy Stanford contingent in Mississippi, so it was a heavy Yale and Cornell contingent. But you had... What was his name? One of the Yippies.

SM (00:28:05):
Abbie Hoffman?

DH (00:28:06):
Abbie Hoffman.

SM (00:28:06):
And Jerry Rubin.

DH (00:28:08):
Abbie Hoffman was in Mississippi with Snick. And he left Snick when the Black Power movement sort of thing. And he set up shop in the East Village, but others went out to San Francisco. So you had the East Village.

SM (00:28:39):
[Inaudible] Berkeley there.

DH (00:28:42):
Yeah, so that fed into the counterculture.

SM (00:28:51):
Do you remember your years, the concerts that you went to, the ones at Cornell? The speakers? In that year when you were at Cornell, who were the most important speakers that came to your college at that time to talk about issues? And secondly, who were the musicians? Because when I went to Binghamton, I was there from... The last four years when I graduated [inaudible] and I still remember all the [inaudible] and how important they were. What were the concerts and speakers that you saw when you were a student?

DH (00:29:28):
Peter, Paul and Mary my freshman year. Peter, he was a Cornell graduate. They came through there. Who was the great? Bo Diddley.

SM (00:29:43):
Oh, wow.

DH (00:29:49):
And the Isley Brothers.

SM (00:29:57):
Oh, [inaudible].

DH (00:29:57):
They were hardcore rock and rollers. And for a while, Jimi Hendrix was their guitar man. But they would come every year. Speakers, though, there were a lot of them. Hans Morgenthau did come through, Paul Tillich gave a lecture series there. I am not sure I understood what was saying, but sounded existentialist theology. It sounded very interesting.

SM (00:30:41):
Did you ever meet Daniel Barica? Because he was the Catholic priest there.

DH (00:30:44):
Oh, he actually came after I graduated.

SM (00:30:49):
Okay.

DH (00:30:49):
I was very active in the... Well, the Cornell United Religious Works, the CURW, was sort of the head and the various chaplains of which Barica became a Catholic chaplain there. But that was probably as close to the headquarters for the civil rights activities and anti-war activities as there was on campus. Certainly more than the economics department. I do not know what else you would say was, but that is where a lot of student... That is where you did a lot of that kind of activity.

SM (00:31:42):
But later on in Cornell when the Americans took over the union with the Black Power period, that was (19)61, a lot of history there.

DH (00:31:53):
Yeah. I do not think Cornell ever recovered.

SM (00:32:00):
The guy who was one of the leaders of that ended up becoming a very big CEO and actually is on a board of trustees now. Some big thing. One of the questions I have asked everybody is back in (19)94 when New Gingrich came to power, a period that the Republicans came in. I have read a couple of his speeches, he made a lot of comments about the (19)60s and (19)70s about we went backward during that era. And he really criticized the generation, the young people from that era. And then, George Will has also done the same thing. A lot of his writings, whenever he gets a chance to take a shot at the [inaudible], at the (19)60s and (19)70s, the activists. And basically what they are saying is that all the problems we have in American society today, and certainly not the terrorism thing, that has come about since. But all the problems we have in our society today, that you can go right back to that era. The lack of respect for authority, the sexual revolution.

DH (00:32:59):
Yeah, well...

SM (00:32:59):
The breakdown of divorce rate.

SM (00:33:02):
...the breakdown of the divorce rate. All the people combating the victimization, everybody is a victim. So your thoughts on those kinds of comments, it is not just them, but there are others who really say that America really went backwards instead of forwards.

DH (00:33:20):
Well, I mean, that is the culture war. They were only partially... They could not be against the civil rights that they granted. The Gingrichs and the Wills granted that we were right about that. I do not recall what Will would have said about the war in Vietnam, but that was a Democrat's war, so I do not know, I do not recall what he was saying. But what they were mostly railing against was the counterculture. It was the hippies. That was what offended the Newt Gingrichs, and particularly the George Wills. It was the long hair, pot smoking, cultural aspect of the (19)60s and early (19)70s that they were attributing all matters of evil things to.

SM (00:34:48):
I know that Barney Frank wrote a book many years ago called Speaking Frankly, and in that book, he said around, he would not talk about those two guys, but as a Democrat, he was even making comments about the fact that the Democratic Party better get their act together because they fell apart in (19)72 when McGovern was running for president because it was the anti-war group. It was the anti-war group. And the Democratic Party became identified as that anti-war group. And that is when Nixon came into power and, of course, Board filed, of course, another history there, but then Reagan. So there was a lot of backlash that party had to get away from the anti-war people, those kind of things. And he wrote about that in a book. He actually agrees, not that he agrees with it, but he says another thing there about the burden. Everything seemed to change around that time and the recommendations that we need to change our course, the Democratic Party.

DH (00:35:50):
Yeah. Well, he was and remained a liberal Democrat. He was always, he was strongly against the war in Vietnam and strongly against interventional strong policy. But sure, in large part over race, but also, over the counterculture. The Democratic Party lost the Catholic vote, the working class, the Italian and Irish Catholic stalwart voting blocks for the New Deal. Sometimes they went with Wallace or they went with Nixon and Agnew over his attacks against the student elitists and the liberal media run by the Ivy League graduates. And there was apart from the solid South, that is when you had the party realignment. I mean, the liberal Republicans became Democrats, and the conservative Democrats became Republican as the South, which Johnson said was going to happen, is that he signed the Civil Rights Act. He said that, "South is going to be Republican, and I am the one who made it sell." But he did. But you had the loss of the Irish and Italian Catholics in the cities and the suburbs went with Nixon-Agnew, and then they certainly went for Reagan.

SM (00:38:11):
In your viewpoint, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end?

DH (00:38:40):
I do not know. I do not know when it started in, I would have to think about that one. For me, it started in 1960. That is when I went off to college. I would say it ended in (19)72 with Nixon's reelection. So I think that is sort of when it ended.

SM (00:39:16):
Right.

DH (00:39:16):
That is when I would end it.

SM (00:39:22):
Do you think the Beats from... They were a small group, but they were also pretty influential, the Ginsbergs, the Kerouacs, and all that group, Waldman. They were kind of rebels in the (19)50s, I think. Of course, Ginsberg goes through, though, everything, Ferlinghetti and all of that group. They had influence on all on the (19)60s generation, the Vietnam generation.

DH (00:39:50):
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. They fed directly into the counterculture. Well, they were all closeted homosexuals basically. Somewhere along the line, they came out of the closet, but they were involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, and certainly, in the counterculture. Oh, okay. Let us see... Started with maybe the free speech movement in Berkeley.

SM (00:40:32):
And that was (19)64, (19)65.

DH (00:40:34):
Oh, was that that late?

SM (00:40:35):
Yeah, that was (19)64-

DH (00:40:37):
Then it started before that. No, really?

SM (00:40:41):
Yeah, that was (19)64, (19)65. And then Ginsberg wrote Howell. Of course, that was a very big thing in the (19)50s was freedom of speech and [inaudible].

DH (00:40:51):
Yeah, that is why I thought the free speech movement was earlier.

SM (00:40:56):
Yeah, that was (19)64, (19)65.

DH (00:40:57):
Really?

SM (00:40:57):
At Berkeley.

DH (00:41:01):
Oh, okay.

SM (00:41:03):
Port Huron Statement was earlier. That was-

DH (00:41:06):
Yeah, that was good. When was that?

SM (00:41:07):
That was around (19)63ish when Tom wrote that.

DH (00:41:07):
Okay.

SM (00:41:16):
And I thought, what is interesting, I always make a comment, and this is not about me, but personally, in what I have written as far as the book is that 1973 to me was the end of the (19)60s. And that is because people were streaking at college campuses. And I knew something, that the seriousness of a lot of the things back then because I am working at Ohio University and my very first job in student affairs, and my buddy's from Ohio State, he called me up, said, "You got to get back here on the weekend." I said, "Why?" "They are going to be streaking all over the place. You love beautiful women." And I said, "Well, let us go." So I drove back from OU, and lo and behold, behind the law library that the women were coming out and doing the Rockettes, and the guys would then come out. It was unbelievable. I said, "What the hell's going on here?" The protests are over [inaudible].

DH (00:42:06):
Oh, okay. Yeah.

SM (00:42:12):
Well, that is just an experience. One of the things I want to ask you, too, the boomers oftentimes, and again, I know you did not like the category, but the students that were in college in those times, in the (19)60s to maybe mid (19)70s, felt they were the most unique generation of American history. [inaudible] uniqueness. And there was a feeling that we are going solve all the problems in the world, racism, sexism, homophobia, bring peace in the world, a utopian kind of a mentality. Your thoughts on that kind of attitude that many of them had? Because I know I saw students talk about it, and a lot of them that are now in their early (19)60s, some of them still feel that. They have not lost that feeling, even though a lot of them really had gone out and made a lot of money and did not really get involved in causes. Just your thoughts on that.

DH (00:43:13):
On exactly what?

SM (00:43:19):
Oh, well, there was a uniqueness that they were the most unique.

DH (00:43:28):
Well, that is really, put that boldly is a little, off-puttingly arrogant. But you had different ways of it. You had the New Frontier getting the country moving again, and the idealism that was rekindled in various ways by the Kennedys, and the Peace Corps, that you did have that sort of optimism about getting the country moving again. And you also, you had the attitude so well expressed in Blowing in the Wind and some of the Dylan songs, get out of the way if you cannot make it. What was that song?

SM (00:44:35):
Blowing in the Wind or...

DH (00:44:43):
No, The Times They Are A-Changing. That is the one, The Times They Are A-Changing. You certainly had in the civil rights movement the sense that we were going to knock down the walls, and we did, but there was a consciousness that we were going to storm the citadels of segregation and knocked them down. I do not think you had quite that sense in Vietnam, because we had one short-lasting triumph. Well, we had two short-lasting triumphs. First triumph was the success of the Dump Johnson movement in the McCarthy campaign, both of which I was involved with. That is where I met Nixon and Sam Brown. But yeah, so we had such a good showing in New Hampshire that Bob Kennedy joined and LBJ dropped out. And then that soured real quickly and we ended up getting Richard Nixon. And four years later, I worked in the McGovern campaign. We succeeded [inaudible]. We succeeded in taking over the Democratic Party and then proceeded to lose every state except Massachusetts, I think, so that was short. And we were not succeeding. I mean, we were having big protests, and a lot of doors were open to us in Washington during the moratorium, but we were not... And we succeeded, it was actually Nixon. It was Nixon and Kissinger's plan to do what they finally did in the Christmas Bombing of (19)71, I guess. Was the Christmas Bombing (19)71 or (19)72? Must have been (19)71.

SM (00:47:38):
I know, in (19)70, is when they went in to Cambodia, though.

DH (00:47:42):
Yeah. Oh, no, maybe it was even later. Maybe it was his sec... Oh, it is all a little fuzzy now. But the massive bombing of Hanoi, it was later to force them to sign the... They were going to do that. They were going to do what became the Christmas Bombing. There is a name for it as a military operation, the Christmas Bombing is what we call it. It was not Operation Rolling Thunder. That was over Cambodia.

SM (00:48:22):
Yeah, that was early. That was earlier, yeah.

DH (00:48:24):
Whatever the name of it was, they were planning to do it in the winter of (19)69-(19)70. There was so much of an outpouring of peace sentiment that basically we organized in October and November of 1969 that they could not do it. They were afraid they would have the outcry that occurred in the spring at Kent State following the Cambodian invasion. So we forced them to postpone the carpet bombing of Hanoi for a couple of years. But you never had the sense that you were going to storm the citadels in the way we were storming them successfully in the civil rights movement. But in the civil rights movement, you had within SNCC a utopian faction called the... Well, sometimes they are called the crazy people faction and the better term was the beloved community. These were the interracial brotherhood of man folks, some of which peeled off into the hippies and yippies, but very pacifist, vegetarian, utopian. There were people involved in that who thought that they were creating the beloved community.

SM (00:50:25):
Is that Bob Moses? Was he in that?

DH (00:50:26):
Yeah, he was. Yes.

SM (00:50:27):
And John Lewis?

DH (00:50:29):
No, Lewis would have been in the realpolitik. Black Power really was sort of Black nationalist, the Stokely Carmichaels and Rap Brown.

SM (00:50:50):
Right, Eldridge Cleaver-

DH (00:50:52):
But you had Bayard Rustin from protest to politics. These people were going from protest to revolution or protest to Cultural Revolution and identity politics. But you had another stream represented by John Lewis and Julian Bond who said, "Hey, we got to vote. Let us run people from mayors and police chiefs, and I am going to run for Congress." So that was the protest to politics faction after the famous essay from Bayard Rustin. He said, "Oh, you got the vote. It is not utopia, but you will have Black policemen. You want Black sheriffs, Black policemen, Black city councilmen, you have the votes, go to it."

SM (00:52:07):
Yeah. When you think of some of the two most very important experiences, you already talked about Bayard Rustin, because he is from West Chester.

DH (00:52:16):
Yes.

SM (00:52:18):
And we did a national tribute on him during my time there. One of the great memories of that was the picture of him on stage with Malcolm X, because they debated each other. Actually, you can get that date, you can go right on the computer and get that and you can listen to it. So you got the debate between Malcolm and [inaudible 00:52:38] Malcolm says, "Your time has passed." And then there is that historic picture that I had not heard the transcript except to hear Stokely speak by himself. But those that witnessed that scene where Dr. King, his arms are folded as he is speaking to him, he was telling him, "Your time has passed." And so what you are talking, what you are seeing is you are seeing two men in their late 30s being told by people in their early 20s or middle 20s that their time was passed. Could you comment? Because you have already made reference to the fact that when SNCC went off into Black Power, it kind of disintegrated it. And the same thing happened with SDS when the Weathermen and the violent portion, people did not want to have anything to do with it anymore, including most people in SDS.

DH (00:53:31):
No. Yeah.

SM (00:53:31):
And so just what was happening there? What was this? How did they let this happen within their organizations? How did SDS and SNCC allow these more radical fringes to take over? Was it because of frustration and they were not feeling they were accomplishing anything?

DH (00:53:54):
That would have been part of it. I mean, I am sure there are a dozen books on this.

SM (00:54:00):
No, there are.

DH (00:54:02):
I would have to go back to, I mean, there are three or four histories of SDS, I am sure, or histories of the New Left that would detail its disintegration. But when would I date it from?

SM (00:54:31):
Well, when did you know, I got to get out of SDS?

DH (00:54:37):
No-no.

SM (00:54:37):
You were involved with David and Sam Brown organizing the moratorium. Obviously, you still had beliefs in (19)69, but the history says that the Vietnam Veterans Against-

DH (00:54:47):
No, they were already nuts by then.

SM (00:54:50):
Yes.

DH (00:54:53):
Well, you had different tendencies and debates within the anti-war. You had your old Left, you had your Trotskyites and your old fellow travelers from front groups originally set up by the CP 50s. And then you had your beloved community people and people like the Ginsbergs and the Ferlinghettis who were sort of in that cultural thing. And you had essentially the bulk of ADA, Americans for Democratic Action, which was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

SM (00:56:01):
Hubert Humphrey was in that.

DH (00:56:03):
Yeah, Hubert. That it split. But that had been organized by Reinhold Niebuhr, and Arthur Schlesinger, and John Kenneth Galbraith. And there was a hawk wing of that, but it was a small minority. Most went away. These were like Adlai Stevenson Democrats, Gene McCarthy. They were not Henry Wallace Democrats, but they were... Well, liberal Democrats. So you had the liberal Democrats turned against the war from the outset. They were opposed to the escalation of the war. And some of them were populists, like Frank Church, and the senator from Montana, he was Majority Leader.

SM (00:57:20):
Yeah, Mansfield.

DH (00:57:20):
Mansfield.

SM (00:57:21):
Mike Mansfield.

DH (00:57:25):
And some of the Democrats from California. But so were some of the Republicans from New York, Jacob Javits, they were not really. They were sort of liberals. So you had the utopians and you had the old Left. But out of frustration, I have not thought about this in a long time, why did this section of SDS go off the deep end?

SM (00:58:21):
I know Mark Rudd has written about it in his new book because he was part of that group.

DH (00:58:26):
Yeah, he sure was. I should read it. He is apologetic, I guess.

SM (00:58:35):
Yeah. Well, I did not know how much he was disliked by Bernardine Dohrn and some of those others. I mean, there is real dislike there.

DH (00:58:45):
Yeah. Oh, did he go underground?

SM (00:58:51):
Yes, he did.

DH (00:58:52):
Yes. Well, he was not exactly popular. I mean, he apparently had an abrasive personality, but that guy in Chicago who reemerged in the Clinton-

SM (00:59:11):
Obama.

DH (00:59:13):
Obama campaign. What was his name?

SM (00:59:15):
Oh, well, that is Bernardine-

DH (00:59:15):
Dohrn's husband.

SM (00:59:18):
Yeah. Oh, come on. It is Harris, I thought was his last name.

DH (00:59:24):
No-no, that is David Harris. [inaudible].

SM (00:59:26):
Yeah, I interviewed David over the phone. Yeah, so it will come to me.

DH (00:59:36):
But you started, I do not know where people got the idea that they could make a revolution. Well, yes, I do know. It started with the fact that the liberals were being seen as sellouts, the Carl Oglesby faction about Vietnam being a war of corporate liberals, that the liberals, you had people saying that it is the liberals who are the problem. Corporate liberalism was defined as the enemy. And then they got the weird idea that you could make a revolution. And people got into anti-capitalism, but not in the Ralph Nader sense, but in the Marxist sense of wanting to make socialist revolution and the goofball idea of Che Guevara about two, three, many Vietnams. Remember this slogan?

SM (01:00:58):
Two, three, many Vietnams?

DH (01:01:00):
Yeah, that is what-

SM (01:01:00):
No, I do not.

DH (01:01:02):
Oh, ah, yeah-yeah. So his thing, he thought that what you needed was two, three, or more Vietnam struggles where America would get bogged down and defeated in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. So one of his slogans that was picked up by the New Left crazies was, "Two, three, many Vietnams." Because they thought that would lead to the collapse of American imperialism. And he said, "No, wait a minute. We do not want more Vietnams. We want to stop the one that is." So they were going off in a different direction.

SM (01:01:55):
This is the complexity of the time then is trying to understand the times and all of its complexity. If I had 500 people in a room that were boomers, people that were born after (19)46, could be people that were in (19)43, (19)44, too, and in 19... Well, right now, they said, "What was the one event that had the greatest impact on your life?" What do you think a group of boomers would say, and what was the one event that had the greatest impact on your life?

DH (01:02:41):
Oh, I suppose it would have been the experience in Mississippi, Freedom Summer for my life, discovering a... I mean, I had not seen rural Southern poverty. I mean, I did not have the idea growing up in middle class Allentown, Pennsylvania. Bethlehem collapsed several years later, so there was a lot of... decades later. But growing up in Allentown, that was a prosperous little market town in between the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, the Bethlehem steel workers, and the anthracite coal miners. Well, Allentown is sort of situated in the middle and they had textiles. The (19)50s, that is when people got the postwar American dream. So I had no idea that there was poverty, like I saw in Mississippi. I saw racial, social hatred. People hated other people. Why there was this hatred, why there was this poverty, why was there this hatred? What was that? I suppose that was-

SM (01:04:47):
It shaped your life, even beyond the anti-war and the-

DH (01:04:52):
Yeah. Well-

SM (01:04:53):
Was it because of your work with... Could you talk a little bit about how that experience may have helped shape you in terms of your professional life beyond school with Amnesty International, with the things that you have written about, I think Cambodia and-

DH (01:05:06):
North Korea.

SM (01:05:08):
...North Korea, with some of the terrible things that people do to other people, it seems like there is a link there.

DH (01:05:13):
Of course. I mean, it was called at the time, the civil rights movement. Okay, but what it was about was civil and political rights. King was never successful in turning the corner and tackling economic rights. I mean, he tried, the Poor People's Campaign, the stuff he tried in Chicago, but tackling urban poverty, and it never succeeded. But it was called the civil rights movement. 20 years later, if it were happening now, it would be called the human rights movement. And it was called the woman's movement. The gays took over- [inaudible] though the gaze took over, took the language. By the (19)70s, when that got up and going, the word human rights had entered the vocabulary. But human rights is civil right, political rights, economic rights, and social rights. Civil, political, economic, social, and cultural. The five sets of rights and that is what we would call it nowadays. The human rights movement was called the civil rights movement then. But that is what I have been doing ever since. And the Vietnam experience, working in international affairs has sort of internationalized it, so it was not just a purely domestic issue anymore. It was internationalized and it was not just Vietnam and the Tiger Cages or the treatment of POW's, our POW's or theirs. But it was the traction gained by the apartheid movement, that was international human rights. So essentially the Vietnam War gave it an international focus, but it is essentially the same kind of work that I was doing domestically in the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Georgia.

SM (01:08:17):
Basically what you was doing is what Dr. King wanted to do when he was expanding, because he talked about economics beyond race.

DH (01:08:26):
Sure.

SM (01:08:28):
And then he went north when they told him not to go north. A Cicero incident. We all know what happened there. And then of course, his speech on Vietnam, which people told him he should not do. Even people in the civil rights community.

DH (01:08:42):
Yeah, sure.

SM (01:08:43):
It was Rabbi Heschel who promoted and pushed it and said, "You need to do this."

DH (01:08:48):
Yeah. My old professor.

SM (01:08:50):
Well, he is an unbelievable person. There is a biography on him you ought to read. It is unbelievable. He has not talked about enough. People do not know him and he is very important.

DH (01:09:02):
I certainly remember him fondly. I took three classes with him. I went to Union to study with Lionel Neber. Neber had a stroke my first year, so I never got to study with Neber. But I ended up studying with Heschel.

SM (01:09:18):
You were lucky. My goodness.

DH (01:09:18):
Yeah.

SM (01:09:18):
You were close to Dr. King.

DH (01:09:18):
Pardon?

SM (01:09:22):
You were real close.

DH (01:09:22):
Oh yes, yes. I got to [inaudible]. I met King in those years. I went to his, before King gave his speech at Riverside Church. He had several meetings at Union Seminary, which is right across the street.

SM (01:09:47):
Really?

DH (01:09:47):
Yeah, because that is where Heschel was then. Heschel was still at the Jewish Theological, but he actually took a leave for two years and taught Old Testament at Union. And I was one of his students. And I taught Old Testament theology. But King, the president of the seminary was a guy by the name of John Bennett, who was Lionel Neber's main disciple. He taught Christian ethics also and wrote on ethics and international affairs, but became the president of the seminary. And he was challenging the students at Union to do more about Vietnam.

SM (01:10:40):
That is a great professor.

DH (01:10:43):
He was the president of the seminary, probably the only professor, the only president of a university that was exhorting students to do more about Vietnam. But King had several meetings and he was trying to figure out if he should come, if he should oppose Johnson as strongly as he did. If he should really break with LBJ.

SM (01:11:11):
Were you in those meetings?

DH (01:11:13):
I was. Well, I was in a couple of them. Some of them took place in Dr. Bennett's apartment at Union and others took place in his lawyer's office. He had a left wing lawyer. I forget the guy's name.


SM (01:11:34):
Oh, not Alan Mosley?
DH (01:11:36):
No-no, not Alan.

SM (01:11:37):
He was a professor at, I do not know. I do not remember the lawyer's name.

DH (01:11:42):
Oh. But Alan was very...

SM (01:11:43):
Cussler.

DH (01:11:44):
Pardon? No-no-no-no. It was not Cussler. It was...

SM (01:11:54):
Cussler worked [inaudible]. Yeah. Cussler was involved in defending people who got busted in the civil rights community. Yeah, that is what he did. Could you describe, because the only person I have ever talked to whose ever been in a meeting with Dr. King was James Farmer. In our campus and he shared so much with me at dinner and then I went with him for an hour and a half. And then of course we talked about it. But what was that like? I have some other basic questions here, but what a meeting like being with Dr. King in the room?

DH (01:12:29):
Well, he had these meetings to listen to what people had to say. He actually talked very little. I mean, he had these meetings to hear what people had to say. So he was very modest and soft-spoken. But you were obviously sitting in a living room with a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was thinking about something that was a world shaking impact and importance. So the meetings were not particularly dramatic. They were really him thinking, a little bit of thinking out loud.

SM (01:13:36):
Were you in a meeting where he actually said, "I had made the decision that I am going to go," or "Yeah, I am going to make the speech at church," or because if he had been wavering because what I read about Rabbi Heschel, you should not waiver. You ought to do it. And because people within the civil rights community, African American ministers were really upset with him.

DH (01:14:00):
Oh, sure. Well, they did not like him in the civil rights part either. Yeah. And then they, certainly, the Roy Wilkins and the Bayer trust in factions.

SM (01:14:16):
[inaudible] young was in that group.

DH (01:14:18):
Certainly opposed going against LBJ on foreign policies since what he had done so much for civil rights and was trying to do the war on poverty and going to, so it was really extraordinary, and I expect that Rabbi Heschel, who really was his spiritual mentor, he was Dr. King's rabbi.

SM (01:14:52):
I think Rabbi needs to be uplifted and not hidden. There is just so much history of this year that is hidden that our young people need to know about.

DH (01:15:04):
Yeah. Well, they do not study history anymore. But at any rate, okay, what are some of your questions?

SM (01:15:10):
Yeah, okay. Answering the one question there about what do you think the a group would say, the number one of event would be to shape their life? Yours was going down south. What would be the...

DH (01:15:25):
I have no idea. You would have to ask other people.

SM (01:15:30):
I have asked a lot of other people. Some people think John Kennedy's assassination, there is a lot of individual...

DH (01:15:36):
Oh wow.

SM (01:15:37):
It is more individual. I want to read something here. There is two basic issues that I am trying to get at in this interview process. One has to do with the issue of healing. And the other is the issue of trust. Oh, I am going to read this because we took a group of students to see Senator Edmund Muskie about a year and a half before he passed away. I got to know Gaylor Nelson and we had these unenrolled leadership trips, eight to 14 students [inaudible] meetings. And the students planned a question to ask him because they thought he was going to respond based on what happened at the 1968 convention. But, he totally gave a totally different response. This was the question the students came up with. Do you feel that the boomer generation or the young people that period are still having problems with healing from the divisions that tore the nation apart and their youth, divisions between black and white, divisions between those who support authority and those who criticize, divisions between those who supported the troops and those who did not, including those that went to war and those who did not? What has the wall played in healing these divisions? And is it, or was that just primarily healing for veterans? Do you feel that the boomer generation will go to its grave, like the civil war generation not truly healing? Am I wrong in thinking this after it was then last 30 years, now it is 40 years. Taking this after so many years, or has the statement, time heals all wounds, stay true? Now there is a lot there, but what we are trying to get at is it is like the people going to the Vietnam memorials and rethinking, or maybe I should not have been in the war. Maybe I should not have done what I did when I was young. Kids ask their father what they did in the war. Those kind of things, the healing. And I would go to Gettysburg a lot and you know, you even lived near Gettysburg when you were young. And one of the things you find at Gettysburg is the fact that on the southern side, so many things are left. People come up from the south, leave decals that they have not really forgotten.

DH (01:17:45):
No-no.

SM (01:17:45):
And you do not see anything on the northern side. Nothing. And I have noticed that for years because I go there four or five times just to get a feel of the terrible... You know, war is, it is just terrible. But Senator Muskie, basically his response was this, and then I will hear your response. His response was, he did not respond. Typical of what you saw on the news, he started to have tears in his eyes and he did not speak for a minute. And then he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War." Instead of talking about the (19)60s, he went out, I am talking for the next 10 minutes, 15, about the Civil War. Because he had just seen the Ken Burns series when he was in the hospital. The fact that we had lost almost an entire generation, 440,000 died, men died and all that other stuff. So that is what he talked about. But do you think we have a problem with healing in this nation? Is that this group of 70 million is, you know, you cannot do individually, but I have talked to enough people, there is something going on there. Is that an issue?

DH (01:18:55):
I do not think any more than any other people, and perhaps less. I bet that, well, I do not bet. I know there is more unhealing between Vietnamese who supported the North and Vietnamese who supported the South, there is still rank hostility there. That would be more comparable to our civil war, I suppose. I do not have this, and I bet Chilean people have not healed between those who were pro-Pinochet and those who were opposed Pinochet, the people who supported Allende and those who supported Pinochet probably are more hostile to each other than people who supported McGovern versus people who supported Nixon. Our disputes were, for the most part, not life and death struggles. Those other struggles were life and death. And people on both sides lost their lives.

SM (01:20:40):
Wow.

DH (01:20:41):
So I...

SM (01:20:48):
I preface this by saying, Jan Scruggs wrote that book, the founder of the Vietnam Memorial, 'To Heal a Nation', which was his book, very well received. And of course the goal of the Vietnam Memorial was to create a non-political entity [inaudible] to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice and to help their families and to heal, and the veterans themselves. I know there is still not a lot of healing within the vets, but...

DH (01:21:12):
Oh, I think it succeeded enormously. I do not know of anybody who has not moved, whether they were draft resistors or whether they were Vietnam vets. Everybody I know of whose ever seen it is enormously moved by the wall. It was just a genius of an idea.

SM (01:21:39):
Oh yeah. Well, it is still...

DH (01:21:42):
Compared to the idiotic [inaudible], the memorial to the Korean War vets is just awful. And the new one to the World War II vets is just awful also. It is that gargantuan circle with the columns in Washington. That is really ugly. Any rate, so I do not think, but I am sure there is some bitterness, but I think a lot of people have gotten over it.

SM (01:22:23):
So the walls painted, it does not have a decent job [inaudible] that is even beyond the vets.

DH (01:22:30):
I think so, yes. I mean because it is so successful as a memorial that the vets feel that their friends who lost their lives are recognized and memorialized. So, you have small, small traces of the POW mentality. But that is faded as it is now ceased to become tenable. That there are still people being held. And also by the fact that the Vietnamese and the Americans get along so well.

SM (01:23:26):
Well, 85 percent of the people I believe that live in Vietnam now, were not even alive when the...

DH (01:23:33):
And they love Americans.

SM (01:23:34):
Right. It is beautiful.

DH (01:23:36):
And veterans go back there and are received, they got up and they are received with open arms.

SM (01:23:43):
There is a respect between the warriors ever since then.

DH (01:23:48):
Yeah. Or the young people who enlist their parents and grandparents, not them.

SM (01:23:57):
The other issue is the label of trust. Boomers, people saw so many leaders lie to them in their view. And actually as they have gotten older, it is like lies continue amongst other presidents. And I guess we are looking at leadership here, whether it be Watergate with Nixon, whether it be President Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin. Even recent things written about President Kennedy and what he did or did not know about the overthrow of Diem. You know a little bit about Eisenhower lying about U2. A lot of people did not trust Ford when Nixon was leaving. And of course, Reagan and Iran-Contra. It goes on and on. So there is a lack of trust. And I am wondering if this goes back to something when I was in college where a professor said, "If you cannot trust people that you may not be a success in life. You have to trust others. Being able to trust others is important for a human being." As a generation if they are advertised or labeled as a non-trusting generation, is that good or bad? Or am I wrong in this interpretation?

DH (01:25:07):
I have no idea. I do not know. I mean, it seems so routine that governments lie. They just do. But yeah, I have no idea.

SM (01:25:36):
A political science professor would say, because they teach politics, is that the art of politics is really about not trusting your government because you do not trust your government, that is healthy. That is what a political scientist would say.

DH (01:25:50):
Okay.

SM (01:26:00):
I do not know if there is any reaction to that or not, but do you, and again, maybe you cannot answer this, but I have asked a lot of people the question is, have boomers been good parents, have they raised good kids and grandkids now? Now I cannot talk about grandkids in terms of doing some of the things they did where they were young in terms of activism. Where has activism gone? There is a lot of good things being done and there is always examples of it everywhere and Amnesty International. There is a lot of great groups out there that do great things. But did they really passed their experiences on, have you passed your experiences on to younger people? Because sometimes that is very important as they evolve [inaudible] into adults.

DH (01:26:48):
I do not know.

SM (01:26:58):
I think what I am really getting at here is, are you pleased... Forget about the boomers. These young people that were young in the (19)60s and the (19)70s who have now gone on, who are now reaching social security age this year for the first time. Have they really lived up to their beliefs, their idealism? And again, we are only talking even about 15 percent of 70 million. That is still a lot of people. Are you disappointed?

DH (01:27:29):
Never even thought about it. It is not a question that would have occurred to me. And I do not know how you generalize about that. I am just drawing a blank on that one.

SM (01:27:50):
Yeah. What were we just talking about? Had not thought...

DH (01:27:57):
I do not know about trust.

SM (01:27:59):
Yeah. But it is about the responses that many people have had is that I am very disappointed in these young people as opposed to the young people from then. So...

DH (01:28:13):
Well, I mean, I meet a lot of young people. The young people I meet, are the committed ones. The activist ones. Those are who I meet and they are great.

SM (01:28:27):
Well, a couple more questions here. And that is looking at the movements of that period because movements are really part of what the older generation was all about. There were so many movements that about, you already talked about being in the civil rights as a young person, civil rights movement and the anti-war movement itself. But the other movements that evolved around this period, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the Chicano, the Native American, the environmental movement, all these movements kind of looked to the civil rights movement as kind of a teacher.

DH (01:28:57):
Yeah, sure.

SM (01:28:59):
And it seemed like they were together. There was a lot of togetherness. When you did that 1969 moratorium, I would assume that you had probably individuals from all those groups there. Earth Day had not happened yet, but...

DH (01:29:15):
The what?

SM (01:29:15):
Earth Day had not happened until 1970, but...

DH (01:29:18):
No, we knew the Earth Day people very well. And we agreed with them. And they agreed with us. I mean, they were all opposed to the war. They came to our demonstrations. We had not thought about the issues they were raising, but when they raised them, we agreed with them. But yes, so Earth Day was that spring.

SM (01:29:57):
Right.

DH (01:30:00):
So they were interested in us because we had run big demonstrations and that is what they were doing. So we knew them and liked them.

SM (01:30:10):
All these other groups that I mentioned. You were linked to them though in some way, were not you? Explain more of that moratorium. How much work went into that, explain when the idea came up and you know that, how long it took you and you had a big crowd, but that kind of was the last hurrah.

DH (01:30:29):
No-no-no. It was probably nothing bigger than the October (19)69 moratorium because that was decentralized. But I would not be surprised if some of the Earth Day things. But certainly you then had bigger demonstrations in Washington for various things over the years. The idea for the moratorium... Oh, excuse me.

SM (01:31:07):
I hope I am not tiring you.

DH (01:31:13):
Pain from... Oh, I think I need to make some coffee. After the McCarthy campaign, I was working for the National Student Association as their anti-Vietnam and anti-draft coordinator in Washington. And there, Sam Brown was at the Kennedy School at Harvard. There was a peace group, an old line peace group in Boston called Mass PAC, Massachusetts Peace Action Council or something. And the guy that ran it was his named Jerry Grossman. He was a businessman. I think he made envelopes. But Mass PAC had the idea of an expanding student strike of you would start off at the campuses for one day, then the next month you would try to expand it for two days and then the third month expand it for three days and you try to make it larger, bigger, and longer each month. We changed, and it seemed like a good idea. I have been at the National Student Association, you work with student governments and college newspaper editors as opposed to your local peace committees. So there is always a student body president, there is always a student council, there is always college newspaper's. So it sort of institutionalized. And by that time, almost all people who got to be student body presidents or editor of their college newspaper were anti-war. And with the editors, you had a base to get your opinions out because they ran the student newspaper, they wrote the editorials and with the student... We took the idea. No, so we had this network of student body presidents, college newspaper editors and changed the idea. Instead of calling it a strike, we called it a moratorium because there had been that spring, the spring of (19)69, I forget what campuses erupted then. Maybe Cornell, Columbia.

SM (01:34:02):
Oh yes, Cornell for sure.

DH (01:34:05):
Harvard. You know you...

SM (01:34:07):
Harvard Yard. Yep.

DH (01:34:10):
So this was not designed to, this was not a protest against the college administration. This was against, it was designed to show Nixon and Kissinger that if they wanted to close out the war in Vietnam, there would be a lot of public support for doing that. So we did not like the term, students strike because of what had gone on the campuses that preceding spring. The word strike would sound as if it is directed against the college administration. And it was not. But at any rate, it seemed like this was mixed. The four of us who did it who were the national coordinators all met in the moratorium, I mean in the McCarthy campaign.

SM (01:35:20):
Okay.

DH (01:35:20):
So we were like the liberal wing of the anti-war movement who were not opposed to electoral politics or working with capitalist politicians. So we had got a bunch of these student body presidents and editors together in my office in Washington. And Sam came down from Boston and pitched this idea, which he had gotten from Jerry Grossman. And they sort of liked it. So we set up an office and over the summer with two or three people, called college administrations to find out the name and home phone number of the student body presidents.

SM (01:36:28):
And they gave it out.

DH (01:36:29):
And in those years they gave it out.

SM (01:36:33):
They do not do that now.

DH (01:36:33):
They do not do that now. And then we tracked these people down on their, wherever they were for the summer and say, "We have this thing that we wanted to see if you are interested in. Send me some information." And because we wanted to start in the middle of October, so you would have to start organizing it as soon as kids come back in September. So there was only three, four weeks to organize it once you return to school. But originally the press was interested in us and the reporters that were assigned to cover what we were doing were the reporters for Time, and Newsweek, and US News & World Report who covered the campus, who covered education. They wanted to know what was going to happen on the colleges tonight. And so we went public about what we were doing. And so the Press Corps in Washington, we knew a lot of them. We knew the journalists who covered the McCarthy, the political journalists who covered the McCarthy campaign. Ayi-yi-yi.

SM (01:38:07):
I think you answered that pretty good. Okay. Quick question here and with respect to why the Vietnam War ended, just your thoughts on why it ended, if there is one major reason, and number two, how important were the college students in ending the war in Vietnam?

DH (01:38:47):
Well, they were probably the major, they were the face of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. It was the faculty...It was the faculty and students, and a lot more students. They were more important than the faculty. The war ended. We were able to build up enough pressure on the administration that they had to withdraw the troops in dribs and drabs. If they did not keep bringing the troops out, the pressure would have built up again. And by that time, pressure would be coming from Congress as well. It was clear enough that Congress wanted the war to be brought to a close. The clearest indication of which was the growing congressional support for resolutions that cut the funding.

SM (01:40:20):
Yeah.

DH (01:40:22):
That is real clear. And it was...

SM (01:40:29):
I believe Senator Nelson was involved in that, too.

DH (01:40:35):
Oh, sure.

SM (01:40:35):
Yeah.

DH (01:40:35):
Yeah. So it was a Republican, Goodell?

SM (01:40:42):
Yes. Yeah.

DH (01:40:43):
From New York.

SM (01:40:44):
Yes-yes. A big, big person for this.

DH (01:40:46):
Hatfield, McGovern. There were two.

SM (01:40:47):
Yep.

DH (01:40:48):
There was a softer one and a harder one. I forget which is which. But Hatfield and McGovern. Were they... That must have been the harder one.

SM (01:41:01):
Right.

DH (01:41:06):
I do not recall them exactly. They had nixed it, I remember.

SM (01:41:10):
I know that senator, the one from Alaska, too.

DH (01:41:13):
Oh, it is Stevens. Ted Stevens, yeah.

SM (01:41:15):
Hruska? I forget the... He was against it, too.

DH (01:41:21):
Oh. Oh, it was not-

SM (01:41:22):
Yeah, Stevens.

DH (01:41:22):
He is the terrible guy.

SM (01:41:23):
Yeah.

DH (01:41:40):
Oh...

SM (01:41:40):
It was H-R-U-S-K-A. I know. It was Senator Hruska. And Senator Harris was also involved in that as well.

DH (01:41:40):
Kissinger and Nixon thought that they were going to be able to rely on US air power. They were only withdrawing the troops. The US bombing in support of the South Vietnamese troops was supposed to continue. But then Congress did cut off the funds, and they could not continue the bombing. And without air support, neither the North Vietnamese nor the South Vietnamese abided by the terms of the Paris Agreement. That was a face-saving mechanism to get us out. But neither the North nor the South followed it. So it was clear that they were going to fight each other once we left. Kissinger and Nixon thought they would be able to use US air power to tip the balance, but they could not, so the two armies fought it out. And from the very first battle, the South Vietnamese Army collapsed. Precipitously, they lost the first two battles. After that, they did not fight anymore. They all just fled, and it ended in a rout.

SM (01:43:01):
In 1975, when Phil Caputo was there in Vietnam as a reporter, not as a Marine, he talks about the fear of being shot by the South Vietnamese military for "They are abandoning us." Those kinds of things. Real fast here. Books. What were the books that people were reading? Do you remember what you were reading when you were in college, and in the (19)60s? What were the Students for a Democratic Society students reading? What were the anti-war students reading? Were there any books that stood out, the authors? You mentioned Che already, Che Guevara, what he had to say.

DH (01:43:46):
No, but he was-

SM (01:43:47):
Yeah. Yeah, [inaudible].

DH (01:43:48):
He was a nut case.

SM (01:43:49):
Yeah.

DH (01:43:51):
Oh, I do not know. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society.

SM (01:44:02):
Big book.

DH (01:44:03):
That was a... Oh. Oh, the...

SM (01:44:12):
Going to the back stretches of your mind here. We are bringing stuff out.

DH (01:44:25):
Erich Fromm, the psychologist.

SM (01:44:28):
The psychologist. Right.

DH (01:44:37):
He wrote books. Ah, Samuelson, Economics 101. Everybody read Samuelson. I am trying to think. I mean, I do not know. You could read the same...

SM (01:45:05):
Were books like The Greening of America, does that... Did you read that?

DH (01:45:09):
Yeah, but that was later. That was not college. That was much later. Yes, I remember reading it. I thought it was a very odd book to come from a law professor. But we were part of it. It was sort of fun. It was a book about us.

SM (01:45:33):
And there was Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture. There was Harry Edwards' Black Students. There were a lot of really good ones. Most of them were in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, those books.

DH (01:45:44):
Yeah. When I was at Union, I did read everything [inaudible] wrote. I mean, I read all of his books.

SM (01:46:03):
Did you read King?

DH (01:46:05):
Oh, you mean his-

SM (01:46:05):
He wrote six books.

DH (01:46:11):
I am sure I did, but they were mostly sermons. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Or Manchild in the Promised Land. Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land.

SM (01:46:31):
Oh, yeah.

DH (01:46:32):
And the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

SM (01:46:34):
Alex Haley wrote it.

DH (01:46:36):
Yeah. C. Wright Mills.

SM (01:46:43):
White Collar?

DH (01:46:44):
Yeah.

SM (01:46:45):
Tom Hayden wrote a book on that.

DH (01:46:46):
Pardon?

SM (01:46:47):
Tom Hayden wrote a book on C. Wright Mills.

DH (01:46:53):
His...

SM (01:46:54):
Recently.

DH (01:46:55):
Oh.

SM (01:46:55):
He is a prolific writer. I mean, he is putting a book out every year now. Couple of the-

DH (01:47:03):
Oh. Oh, I am trying to think. Guy who just died. He used to write for the Village Voice. No-no.

SM (01:47:17):
I know who you are talking about. Not William Sapphire. It is... He just passed away, but... Kempton?

DH (01:47:25):
No, not Mary Kempton. No-no.

SM (01:47:28):
Well, couple of the... There were slogans. Slogans were very important part. You already mentioned Che Guevara's slogan, and "We Shall Overcome," which is the Civil Rights Movement. There were three that I have been mentioning in the last part of my interviews. The last 50 people I have interviewed. Not the first 50 because it has been going on a long time. Three that may define the entire era. One of them is Malcolm X, too. "By any means necessary." That is number one. The second one is Bobby Kennedy, which was a Henry David Thoreau quote, "Some men see things as they are and ask why, I see things that never were and ask why not." That is kind of the activism, the anti-war.

DH (01:48:14):
Mm-hmm.

SM (01:48:14):
And then you have got the counterculture, which is really the Peter Mack posters with the artists who put unbelievable quotes. And I had it on my door as one of the biggest selling posters in 1970, (19)71, at Ohio State. The words were, you do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, it will be beautiful." And that is kind of the counterculture, hippie-dippy kind of....

DH (01:48:36):
Yeah. That is the new one. Never heard of that one. That one passed me by.

SM (01:48:41):
Well, I regret not having the poster. The poster is worth about $500. Those things you bought in the store that were in the round, they only made so many of them. Do you think those really define... If you were to say the quotes, when I mentioned those three, someone said, "You have got to say, 'We shall overcome.'" Do you think that really combines the era? "By any means necessary" is symbolic of SDS and Black Power?

DH (01:49:11):
Oh, I do not know. I mean, no, that is just, well, I do not know. My response to it is that that is empty rhetoric. There is no substance to that. What does it mean? I mean, this was just rhetorical militancy. That is like the other slogan associated with Malcolm X. "He was ready. Are you?" No, I was... The only one of those that... To me, "any means necessary" is empty rhetoric. What does it mean when the other people have all the guns?

SM (01:50:03):
Right.

DH (01:50:05):
And sometimes you have the vote, sometimes you do not. What is "any means necessary"? What is that? It is meaningless. And I never heard of the last one you mentioned. So, by a process of elimination, the Thoreau quote is probably the best example of the nerve and spirit that Bobby Kennedy struck during his last year of his political life. And that which rekindled the idealism that John Kennedy had, the new frontier had sparked five, six years earlier. Bobby Kennedy revived that, and that quote is probably the core or the essence of what he was aspiring to when he ran for president.

SM (01:51:44):
Yeah. Because, boy, that speech he gave in Indianapolis was just-

DH (01:51:47):
Whew.

SM (01:51:47):
...Off the cuff, and it was just unbelievable. There was something that Senator McCarthy, when I interviewed him in (19)96, the only thing where he basically said, "I will not comment, read it in my book" was when I mentioned Bobby Kennedy. So there was still-

DH (01:52:04):
Oh, yeah.

SM (01:52:05):
Yeah, he... Being a person, as you and David and others who worked for McCarthy, were you upset when he just simply disappeared? I mean, he decided not to run? That is still a mystery, why he just kind of gave up.

DH (01:52:22):
No-no. No. I mean, I actually stayed close with him for all of... I saw him a couple weeks before he died.

SM (01:52:36):
Oh, you did?

DH (01:52:36):
Yes.

SM (01:52:37):
I went to... Were you at the church when they had the memorial?

DH (01:52:41):
Yes.

SM (01:52:41):
I was there. I sat over to the left.

DH (01:52:43):
Oh.

SM (01:52:43):
You could see me on C-SPAN. All the dignitaries were in the center. I sat over to the left. He was just a nice person. We got along because we were both Irish, and I had met him four times. And I gave him a sweatshirt at Westchester University when we went down once. And I said something to him, "I think probably most of the people give these sweatshirts to secretaries." He says, "well, I am not going to give it to a secretary. I want to keep it and wear it because it was green." And I get this letter at home. I sent him a letter thanking him for meeting our students. And I got this nice, nice note from him that he sent to me. And then he had two pictures. He was standing in front of his home, wearing the Westchester sweatshirt. And he said basically, "See, I told you I was going to wear it." Yeah, I liked him. I liked him because we hit it off, and I love the fact that he always would quote the poet, Lowell. So he was good.

DH (01:53:50):
Yeah. How many years was he the senator? 12, 18?

SM (01:53:52):
I think it was 18. He went out along with... Boy, the 1980 coup with all of... Senator Nelson.

DH (01:54:01):
Yeah. There was a-

SM (01:54:02):
Senator McCarthy, Birch Bayh, I mean, it was unbelievable. They all went out at the same time.

DH (01:54:07):
Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah. 18 years at the same job. I have never had the same job. He had been a congressman too. Yeah. So there was nothing that he was going to do as a senator that he had not done. He had no aspiration to be head of... Speaker... Not Speaker of the House. Yeah, no. Yeah. Whatever that was.

SM (01:54:42):
Majority leader.

DH (01:54:44):
Yeah. He did not want to. He was much too much of a poet to do back room deals, which is what the majority leader has to do. And nothing he was going to do as a senator would match what he did in (19)68. So-

SM (01:54:59):
Right.

DH (01:55:10):
He was really a poet. He was an intellectual. He was much more-

SM (01:55:12):
He had a PhD, did not he, in history? And he was a professor and he was chair of his department.

DH (01:55:17):
Yeah. Yeah. He was a serious Irish intellectual. Literature, I think. Or what? Politics.

SM (01:55:28):
Yeah, I am not sure either. But I know McGovern has a PhD too.

DH (01:55:32):
Yeah, he does.

SM (01:55:33):
Very smart people.

DH (01:55:35):
So at any rate, I was not surprised. And then he wrote poetry. We stayed in touch. My wife is much more interested in poetry. So they would talk a lot because they could talk about the poets. And she was in English Lit major.

SM (01:55:59):
They said when he passed, he was in a senior home someplace or...

DH (01:56:01):
Yeah. Yeah. We went to see him there. And he was basically in and out of consciousness. Or in and out of recognition. He recognized Sam Brown. Sam and I and our wives went to see him. And he recognized Sam and he recognized me. And you would have snatches of conversation for a couple of sentences, but... So of course, we were really glad that we got to see him because he died several weeks later. So I was glad to see him before he-

SM (01:56:40):
Nice to see Bill Clinton there. Bill Clinton was there and spoke too. That was nice. I am at the last part of the interview. Thanks for going over, too. I have gone over by time here.

DH (01:56:51):
Oh, yeah.

SM (01:56:51):
Yep. But I want to just end by just, if you can just give me quick responses. These are just names of... Whoops. These are just names of people or terms or events. And just, I know it is hard to put in a few words, but just your overall quick reaction to these. What does the Vietnam Memorial mean to you?

DH (01:57:13):
Oh, the fitting and appropriate way to honor those who died, even though the war was lost and should not have been fought.

SM (01:57:41):
What does Kent State and Jackson State mean to you?

DH (01:58:00):
The tail end and the height of the protest against the war, and the increasing repression that was stimulated by the Mitchells and Agnews in their response to our protests.

SM (01:58:20):
Watergate.

DH (01:58:25):
Latent dishonesty of the administration. And its willingness to violate the law, knowingly, purposefully.

SM (01:58:37):
Woodstock and the Summer of Love.

DH (01:58:41):
Well, Woodstock was just the rock and roll and the counterculture, and the awareness of the size of the countercultural constituency. Summer of Love, because that was (19)67. That was... No, it is not San Francisco.

SM (01:59:07):
Yeah, it was San Francisco.

DH (01:59:09):
Oh. No, that was the beginning of-

SM (01:59:10):
Haight-Ashbury. Golden Gate Park, all that.

DH (01:59:14):
That was the golden era of the flower children, before bad drugs turned it nasty.

SM (01:59:30):
How about just the words hippies and yippies? They are different.

DH (01:59:36):
Yeah, sure they are different. Oh, I liked the hippies. I admired the political theater of the yippies and the idea of going to the Stock Exchange, throwing dollar bills from the balcony. I mean, you got to admire someone who came up with that idea. But for the most part, they were crazies. And we wanted them to do their thing somewhere different from where we were doing our thing. Because they were not as counterproductive as the pro-Vietcong left. I mean, those people, with their Vietcong flags, were setting us back. Because that is what drove the union people, the working people, nuts. That was really unpatriotic. Because we wanted the hippies not to do their thing at our demonstrations. So if they did their thing on their own, like bills from the Stock Exchange, fine. That is great political theater. But do not do it at our demonstrations.

SM (02:01:06):
How about the year 1968?

DH (02:01:09):
Great year.

SM (02:01:14):
That is-

DH (02:01:18):
Great Year. We drove LBJ from office.

SM (02:01:22):
We lost some important people, in Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. That was sad.

DH (02:01:30):
Oh, yeah. It surely was. But when I think of (19)68, I think of... And obviously, the Chicago convention was awful.

SM (02:01:45):
Right.

DH (02:01:47):
But I think of... (19)68 to me is New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries.

SM (02:01:49):
Were you at the (19)68 convention?

DH (02:01:49):
I was, yes. And I was in New Hampshire and Wisconsin too.

SM (02:01:58):
Oh, my god.

DH (02:01:58):
Yeah, so...

SM (02:02:01):
How about Vietnam Veterans Against the War?

DH (02:02:07):
Fabulous. Fabulous. It was invaluable.

SM (02:02:15):
They kind of took over the movement after the SDS kind of faltered.

DH (02:02:20):
Well, SDS was involved in the first... They sponsored the first anti-war demonstration in Washington in 1965. They then dropped out of the anti-war movement and went into community organizing. And Hayden went over to Newark and did that project there. And they did not reenter the anti-war thing until [inaudible] and The Weathermen, by which time they were totally destructive. They were involved in the anti-war movement at its founding, but then they did not pursue it. They actually dropped out. They were into global revolution and anti-imperialist throw.

SM (02:03:15):
But the Black Panthers, which is really there is seven or eight of them, because you have got to think of H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. But you think of Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Norman... Angela Davis. They are all Black Panthers in their own way. They all had a... And Elaine Brown and Dave Hilliard. There is a lot of them. Just your thoughts on the Black Panthers as a whole.

DH (02:03:42):
Well, most of them were praised nut cases. The one I remember the best is Fred Hampton.

SM (02:03:56):
Yeah, he was killed.

DH (02:03:57):
Yeah. I went to his funeral in Chicago. The police went after them in ways that violated their civil liberties, to put it mildly. And the police targeted and killed them. Those were police executions. Totally unjustified. But you know, you sort of admired the bravado of the early Panthers, but [inaudible]. And I am not sure that, what is her name... Angela Davis was never a Panther. She was really an orthodox Marxist-Leninist, Communist Party member. But a lot of the Panthers were sort of crazy. They were going off. They were off the deep end. And some of them were heavily involved in criminality. They were actually criminals who picked up on human rights, civil rights rhetoric. But they were flaky. And I guess Eldridge Cleaver wrote well or something.

SM (02:05:21):
Wrote for Ramparts.

DH (02:05:22):
Oh.

SM (02:05:24):
Yeah.

DH (02:05:24):
But after Ramparts had its... Its best [inaudible] were behind it.

SM (02:05:29):
Yeah. And Kathleen Cleavers went on to be a lawyer at Emory. So she is writing her biography right now.

DH (02:05:36):
Oh.

SM (02:05:36):
And she is a pretty nice person. Of course, she is kind of different than the rest of them. So anyways-

DH (02:05:45):
Well, you know, they burned themselves out.

SM (02:05:49):
Right. Jane Fonda. These are just names now. Just real quick thoughts on names.

DH (02:06:03):
Good actress, gorgeous lady. Made great fitness videos. Got in over her head on the... And lost her head on Vietnam. Said some dumb stuff.

SM (02:06:40):
Tom Hayden.

DH (02:06:40):
Very good writer. Went off the deep end, in my opinion, very early on.

SM (02:06:51):
About Rennie Davis?

DH (02:06:53):
A sweet guy. Rennie was a friend. We enjoyed each other's company a lot. But he burned himself out too. I do not know what he ended up doing.

SM (02:07:13):
Yeah, I interviewed him. He is doing the spirituality things right now.

DH (02:07:17):
Is that right?

SM (02:07:18):
Yeah.

DH (02:07:18):
Oh.

SM (02:07:19):
And of course he went on to be very successful in technology and things.

DH (02:07:24):
He is a very-very bright guy, but really sweet. Very nice guy.

SM (02:07:29):
Timothy Leary.

DH (02:07:43):
Oh. Someone else who also went off the deep end. Took too much LSD, I suppose. It may have happened to him anyway, but certainly, certainly he lost it.

SM (02:07:55):
Phillip and Daniel Berrigan.

DH (02:08:05):
Made a terrific contribution. I wish there were thousands more. There. Along with Pope John, the Berrigans are my favorite Catholics.

SM (02:08:20):
I think, yeah, we had them both on our campus. And actually, we brought Philip in, his last speech. His last speech was given in Philip's Library five weeks before he died. I went to his funeral.

DH (02:08:32):
Oh, my.

SM (02:08:32):
Yeah, so...

DH (02:08:34):
Yeah. Well, they were great. Yeah, the McCarthys were a little bit like that. A stream of Irish Catholicism that... They were the redeeming strain. They were really good. There was the Jesuit-trained intellectuality.

SM (02:08:55):
He was an expert. I was going to ask too. Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, just quick thoughts on both of them.

DH (02:09:07):
Well. Oh, well, McCarthy was terrific. Bobby made up for, in the last year or two of his life... Because previously, I do not know what he did that amounted to much good other than I suppose helping his brother get elected president. But he was a spoiled rich kid.

SM (02:09:53):
How about, talking about-

DH (02:09:53):
But his last two years redeemed.

SM (02:09:57):
He was very important in the missile crisis. Very important. If you read Thirteen... Well, I think one of the classic books of all time is Thirteen-

DH (02:10:08):
Oh, yeah.

SM (02:10:08):
And there is no question that he did help his brother. And thank the Lord, because they were the only two that were not going to go bombing down in Cuba. John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

DH (02:10:29):
Well, I was... The New Frontier sparked something in my life, but I was actually never much of a fan of Kennedy's presidency. At the time, I was critical that he was not doing enough on civil rights, actually. Who was the other one? Oh, Nixon.

SM (02:11:13):
Nixon. Nixon.

DH (02:11:14):
Oh, what a very complex, very complex guy. And it is too bad about Vietnam and Watergate because he did two things in foreign policy that were terrific. One of which was the reconciliation with China, and detente with the Soviet Union. And those were brilliant. And he was-

DH (02:12:01):
...and he was such an odd liberal in his domestic policy. He did wage and price controls. He started the Environmental Protection Agency and was interested in a guaranteed annual income. Do you remember that?

SM (02:12:26):
Mm-hmm.

DH (02:12:28):
He was toying around with that idea. So he was willing to do what was then considered radical welfare reform, of the sort that welfare rights organization and only leftists were arguing for.

SM (02:12:46):
What is interesting is Dennis Hayes, who I interviewed, he mentioned that Nixon really did not give a darn about the environment. What he ended up doing is he created what you just mentioned, because he thought it was going to bring votes to him, so...

DH (02:13:00):
Well...

SM (02:13:01):
He was a pragmatist, a pragmatic fellow.

DH (02:13:04):
Yeah. But he...

SM (02:13:05):
I think of Spiro Agnew, another one from the period.

DH (02:13:09):
Oh, just a wretched crook.

SM (02:13:17):
George McGovern.

DH (02:13:20):
Very nice man.

SM (02:13:22):
Benjamin Spock.

DH (02:13:27):
He was a good guy. He played an important role. I just saw McGovern, by the way, about three weeks ago, like four weeks, a month ago.

SM (02:13:36):
Was he at the National Press Club, were you there?

DH (02:13:38):
No-no. He came up here for the memorial service for Mary Travis, of Peter, Paul and Mary.

SM (02:13:45):
Really.

DH (02:13:46):
Yeah, he spoke at it.

SM (02:13:49):
Oh my gosh. Where was that?

DH (02:13:52):
The Riverside Church.

SM (02:13:53):
Oh, geez.

DH (02:13:55):
Any rate, yeah, so I had not seen him in a decade or so. God, I hope I am in half that shape when I am his age.

SM (02:14:08):
Yeah, he is pretty sharp. He spoke at the National Press Club, talking about his new book on Lincoln. He did a great job. The women, we have not talked a lot about the women, but your thoughts on Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan and that particular group, because the women's movement evolved out of the anti-war and civil rights, and there has been a lot of things written about the sexism that took place in the anti-war movement and civil rights movement-

DH (02:14:39):
Yes.

SM (02:14:39):
...the women's movement [inaudible] because of it.

DH (02:14:42):
Yes.

SM (02:14:45):
I know I am going overboard here, but you are a great interview and you have a lot of experience. Could you talk a little bit about, because Dr. King would be very sensitive about this today, if he was alive to see it, it was happening. In fact, I had talked to Edythe Bagley, who is the sister of Coretta Scott King, and even she brought it up. I have talked about Martin, but those kind of things. So talk about that particular thing about sexism and also about how important these women leaders were in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s.

DH (02:15:17):
Well, the leaders of the Civil Rights movement were men who took advantage of their position with women. I mean, it was really women staffers in SNCC who were the ones who rebelled against the treatment of women by the Black civil rights leaders. And most of the people in the anti-war movement initially were men also, of the four coordinators of the moratorium, one out of four was a woman, Marge Sklenkar.

SM (02:16:15):
Is she still alive?

DH (02:16:18):
No-no. She died a long time ago. But the women were important in that movement. Bella, of course, who was wonderful. She was a good friend. She was a terrific lady.

SM (02:16:41):
She always wore a hat, that is why I am wearing one.

DH (02:16:46):
She was terrific. She is a real character.

SM (02:16:48):
By the way, I can tell you why I am wearing the hat. Ohio State won the Rose Bowl.

DH (02:16:54):
Indeed.

SM (02:16:58):
I am an Ohio State graduate, and I had a bet that they were going to lose.

DH (02:16:58):
Oh.

SM (02:17:01):
Because they had lost every big-

DH (02:17:02):
Yes, they had.

SM (02:17:03):
…for a couple years. And so, I have a bet with Dr. Adell from Westchester University. The bet, since I am no longer at the school, he said, "You have to wear a hat to everything when you leave your house for the next month." So that is why I am wearing it, and I am following through because if he had lost, he was going to have to grow a beard.

DH (02:17:31):
Okay.

SM (02:17:32):
I am not going to grow a beard, I had a beard. So that is why I am wearing the hat.

DH (02:17:36):
Well, you know, other people who were... I mean, Joan Baez was real important in the anti-war movement, as was a woman by the name of Cora Weiss. She was really a mainstay of the mobilization committee. So you know, what Gloria Steinem and... I never met her, or Betty Friedan. I actually did not read Feminine Mystique, so...

SM (02:18:17):
She had a follow-up, too.

DH (02:18:20):
Yeah. So I am not familiar with their work, but of course they were pivotal figures in the women's movement.

SM (02:18:30):
Founded Ms magazine.

DH (02:18:31):
Mm-hmm.

SM (02:18:32):
Pretty good.

DH (02:18:33):
Yeah. So...

SM (02:18:37):
Lyndon Johnson ... there is three of them here. Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, and Barry Goldwater, all key figures.

DH (02:18:50):
Johnson was such a tragedy. What a complicated guy. Really. And he did the Civil Rights Act, and he did the War on poverty. And then the Kennedy liberals, the Harvard intellectuals, the best and the brightest talked him into going down the wrong path, which undid the good that he did, domestically. Unfortunately. McNamara, I have very little use for the McNamaras or Bundys of this world. They all were smart enough to have known better. And McNamara...

SM (02:20:00):
Okay.

DH (02:20:06):
I do not know when they realized they had made grievous errors and set the nation on just a horrendously wrong course, but they did. And I have read some of the books on the Bundys, but I do not remember. But McNamara clearly was saying different things in public about the war being winnable than he believed, for a couple of years.

SM (02:20:45):
In fact, when I had my interview with McCarthy, Senator McCarthy, at the time that been out for a while. In Retrospect came out in 1995, and he had read it. And it was not one of my questions, I had [inaudible]. "Bunch of lies." He got real upset. Well, and now that I am thinking about it, the only time he got upset was Kennedy. But he got upset. "Bunch of lies." Tragedy.

DH (02:21:13):
I did not read it, so...

SM (02:21:16):
...say that.

DH (02:21:16):
But I had no use for it.

SM (02:21:19):
What about Goldwater? Three years in Conservative building?

DH (02:21:29):
Well, at least he was against the draft. He was. I mean, he was in favor of an all-volunteer army. He was against conscription. Of course, he also was against the Civil Rights Act. He had more redeeming qualities as a politician than did Ronald Reagan.

SM (02:22:02):
And yeah, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were the next two. I am going to preface when we talk about Reagan, Carter and George HW Bush, it was George HW Bush who said the Vietnam syndrome was over, when he became president in 1989. And it was Ronald Reagan who boldly stated that we were back, basically. The army back in shape, America back in shape, it was kind of like what had happened previously was real-real negative. And then Jimmy Carter, because he was amnesty for the people that had gone to Canada, and of course, he got criticized for that, too. And particularly among Vietnam vets, who [inaudible] heels. Just your thoughts on those three presidents. Personal. Just short thoughts on them.

DH (02:22:53):
Carter? I mean, obviously I was an enormous fan of Carter's, primarily because of his human rights policy. Which I was executive director of Amnesty in those days, when he became president. And his espousal of human rights was an enormous lift and boost to those of us who were working in organizations. Unfortunately, he did not apply his own principles when it came to Iran, let Kissinger talk him into being nice to the Shah. And we paid dearly for our relationship with the Shah, of course that went back 30 years before Carter came into office.

SM (02:23:54):
Right.

DH (02:23:55):
But the US paid a heavy price for our closeness with the Shah. And Carter paid the political price for having listened to Kissinger and given the Shah asylum here.

SM (02:24:23):
Reagan and President Bush, first President Bush. And the way they talked about... to me, it sounded like a slap against the previous generation, so...

DH (02:24:35):
I would not care about that. I do not like Reagan because of his Central America policies. I think he made some unnecessary wars. We should not have gotten in bed with the people in El Salvador, and the Sandinistas were not a threat to the United States. And he slightly redeemed himself by... he finally did come around and work on detent with Gorbachev. Somehow Schultz turned out to be a good Secretary of State, who prevailed over that dreadful guy in defense.

SM (02:25:39):
Not Regan. Regan did not get along with him.

DH (02:25:45):
Oh...

SM (02:25:45):
Schlesinger?

DH (02:25:45):
No-no.

SM (02:25:45):
No-no-no. James Schlesinger.

DH (02:25:49):
That was Ford.

SM (02:25:51):
Melvin Laird?

DH (02:25:52):
No-no.

SM (02:25:52):
Yeah, he was-

DH (02:25:53):
That was Nixon.

SM (02:25:54):
Yeah. Oh.

DH (02:25:57):
A guy with a real skinny face.

SM (02:26:01):
God, I do not know.

DH (02:26:03):
But any rate, but she will... pardon?

SM (02:26:06):
Cyrus Vance?

DH (02:26:06):
No-no-no. Vance is Carter.

SM (02:26:07):
I am getting them all mixed up here. Yeah.

DH (02:26:11):
Whoever... the first Bush was not that bad, actually. I mean, I knew Dukakis, and obviously we liked Dukakis. And the Bushes run nasty ... he ran a nasty, nasty campaign. But in fact, once in office, he closed off. He ended the wars in Central America. He just closed it off. So I was glad he closed off the wars there. And he withdrew nuclear weapons, not only from South Korea, but we used to have a lot of nuclear weapons on a lot of bases around the world, and a lot of aircraft carriers. He pulled them back. There were many fewer nuclear missiles on US submarines and aircraft carriers, and stationed in our bases abroad, so that was good. And I agree with his ... I mean, he did some dumb stuff like going after Noriega, but actually, I agreed. I supported the first War on Iraq. I thought that the US national interests and the regional balance of power would be adversely affected should Saddam Hussein be enabled to have kept Kuwait. I think that would have adversely affected the balance of power in the Mideast. And I supported the war to expel Saddam from Kuwait. Unlike some of the friends from the anti-war movement, who opposed the first Iraq war, I supported the first Iraq war.

SM (02:28:50):
The Uber generation has had two Presidents, George Bush, second George Bush and Bill Clinton. Do not the comment very much detail on them. But the comment I want you to react to is what some people have told me. "They are just typical boomers."

DH (02:29:08):
I have never thought of-

SM (02:29:09):
That is what they have in common. They are typical boomers.

DH (02:29:14):
Is not George Bush...

SM (02:29:15):
George Bush is...

DH (02:29:15):
Is not he too late for a boomer?

SM (02:29:16):
No-no-no. He is the same age. He was born in (19)46, I think.

DH (02:29:29):
Oh, okay. Oh no, so he is.

SM (02:29:30):
Yeah. I think Bill Clinton and him are the same age.

DH (02:29:31):
Oh.

SM (02:29:34):
I think what they are referring to was some of the qualities, when I mentioned this, some of the qualities that some people have given me of what boomers are, they are positives and negatives, and they will use the negatives for those two. I wonder your thoughts on that?

DH (02:29:54):
Well, I have yet to find what... well, if there is a redeeming quality to George W. Bush, I have not discovered it. Clinton was the political genius of our generation. He really is a political genius. There is nobody in our generation that had better political instincts, but he squandered it.

SM (02:30:26):
Right.

DH (02:30:26):
He totally squandered it. So the only thing you can say about his presidency is that he did not get convicted for impeachment.

SM (02:30:51):
He survived.

DH (02:30:52):
But...

SM (02:30:54):
I am down to my final two. One is a very general question, and the other one is that, are there pictures, when you think of the period when you were young, are there pictures that were in the news that you say, "That is that picture." You know how a picture says 1000 words? These are the pictures that really define the time when I was young. When I talk about young, I am talking about teenager, twenties and thirties, before you turned 40.

DH (02:31:26):
Sure.

SM (02:31:28):
What were the pictures that were either in the newspapers, or the magazines that really upset you or that stood out amongst all the pictures during the Vietnam War, and...

DH (02:31:38):
Well-

SM (02:31:38):
...the (19)60s and (19)70s.

DH (02:31:40):
The Vietnam War would have been that naked girl running down the street.

SM (02:31:43):
Kim Phuc. Yeah.

DH (02:31:49):
In Vietnam and the... the Viet Cong guy getting assassinated, shot in the head at Tet.

SM (02:31:53):
Yeah.

DH (02:32:02):
The civil rights movement, people getting hosed. Was it Selma? Birmingham.

SM (02:32:10):
Birmingham.

DH (02:32:11):
No. Was it... where did people get hosed?

SM (02:32:13):
Well, near the bridge. They were heading to the bridge, and-

DH (02:32:16):
Well, that was-

SM (02:32:19):
That was downtown. No, it was not Birmingham.

DH (02:32:22):
Either Selma or Birmingham.

SM (02:32:24):
It had to be Selma, because Birmingham was... King was there, and that was the...

DH (02:32:30):
But the people getting hosed, getting blown off their feet by hoses, fire hoses. The force of the water. That would have been... that one.

SM (02:32:41):
There are three pictures from that period who made the top 100 pictures of the 20th century. One of them was Kim Phuc running down ... the other two were Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the (19)68 Olympics.

DH (02:32:58):
Oh yeah-yeah.

SM (02:32:59):
Remember that? And they were not Black power. And Tommy Smith has really been upset about it. He was not a Black power person, did not like the Black Panthers at all. It was about discrimination against Black people in America. You have written about this, but we had them on our campus. And the third one was Mary Vecchio over the dead body of Jeff Miller at Kent State.

DH (02:33:20):
Oh yeah. Yeah.

SM (02:33:21):
Those were...

DH (02:33:21):
Yes. Iconic.

SM (02:33:24):
...monumental pictures. The other one, and the last question I am going to ask is that if you can go back to those (19)50s, not for the experience that you had down south, but say the experiences when you were in elementary school, and junior high school. The (19)50s, the black and white TV, the television shows that we all watch in that era. Everything seemed so calm and peaceful, even though we had the threat of nuclear war. The Cold War was going on. If you were young enough... I was four years old, but I was a four-year-old, I saw these hearings on television. That man scared me. Senator McCarthy. McCarthy hearings, blaming these people for doing things. Oh boy, he scared me. So I remember McCarthy hearings, I remember... but still, most of the people in the (19)50s that I knew, it was a great time. Your parents gave you everything you wanted. You had Christmases and Easters and everything. And the television shows were Howdy Doody, and Ed Sullivan Show and all the cowboy and Indians. And I was not sensible about what Indians should be, Native Americans. And they were portray bad. And all the sitcoms and all the other things seem to be so calm and peaceful, yet it was that generation who went into the (19)60s and really rebelled. We all know about the generation gap. So in your (19)50s, was that your (19)50s, before you went down South?

DH (02:35:07):
Oh sure. Oh yeah. Wonderful childhood. It just revolved around family, church and sports.

SM (02:35:17):
Did your parents ever-

DH (02:35:18):
-and rock and roll.

SM (02:35:19):
Did your parents ever bring up anything that was going on? Because I love my parents, but I do not ever remember ever talking about what was going on in the South.

DH (02:35:31):
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, they would have been like Eisenhower Republicans, but they were politically... well, I would not say they were politically engaged. I mean, they were not active in politics, but they followed it. Huntley Brinkton. And that is when they first started televising the national conventions. So they would have been unsympathetic to the discrimination, and to the mistreatment of...

SM (02:36:27):
The Black religious people?

DH (02:36:30):
...who were... so, they did not have the kind of identification with it that I had, but they thought it was wrong. I mean, they thought discrimination was wrong.

SM (02:36:48):
I wanted to ask you last, what do you think the lasting legacy will be of the young people, of the boomers, once the best history books are written? And normally the best history books are written 50 years after a period. Sometimes after the generation has passed on, too.

DH (02:37:14):
Well, I am not sure of much of anything. I mean, I think it sort of... there was a population bulge, and we gave ourselves, and other people gave us a sort of identity, which was... and then within the last five years or so, our parents' generation, the World War II generation, was proclaimed to be the greatest generation. Is that?

SM (02:38:06):
Mm-hmm. Yep.

DH (02:38:09):
But other than this bulge, this demographic bulge, I am not sure if 50 years from now... if there is any lasting legacy, it is probably rock and roll. Music.

SM (02:38:30):
What do you hope your lasting legacy will be? What do you hope it is, when people remember you?

DH (02:38:36):
Let me think about that.

SM (02:38:41):
That is okay. You got a lot. If you were before an audience of college students today, and during the question and answer period, somebody stood up and said, "What was it like to be young in the 1960s," as a general question, and why cannot we feel that way today? How would you respond to that?

DH (02:39:16):
Well, the first thing I would say is it is like being at the center of the universe. You felt that kind of fight ...in one sense connected the world, from Footer Hill, was enormously intense. And I think if they do not feel that way, I think part of their reason is that they did not narrow in their own interest. And you have to go out and get that feeling of vitality. You have to [inaudible], and if you do not invest in anything then you do not have a thing.

SM (02:40:15):
That is a good point.

DH (02:40:17):
So start caring about something and acting on it. And at the very least, vitalize your life.

SM (02:40:29):
I was not as activist as you were, and some of the other people, but being in college at that time and being young, I do not think I have ever lost it. I remember Roy Campanella, the baseball player, he said, "If you ever lose the kid in you, it is over." And certainly when I say the kid, the youth in you, because this seemed to be a feeling that anything was possible, that your voice counted. "I can make a difference in the world." There was all these feelings among a lot of the young people of that period. And we are not only talking about white people, as one of my interviewees said, we are talking about African Americans as well, people of all colors. Because I have interviewed one about Latino boomers, and working with Cesar Chavez. And there was a feeling amongst even Native American youth. I mean, there was a feeling that they could make a difference, that things were really changing. And today's young people, again, either when we had a program on the Generation Xers, they were either sick and tired of hearing boomers talk about when they were young, or they wished that it was like that when they were young. Just your comments-

DH (02:41:43):
.. know that anything was possible, but that anything was missed.

SM (02:41:47):
Yeah. Yeah. So I do not sense that amongst today's young people, although they are concentrating so much and getting a job and getting their degree, and getting on with life, and times are very difficult economically. But it is-

DH (02:42:06):
...far before the economy collapsed from modern university and become job trained. In the attitude of most students, and most administrators, and a lot of the faculty.

SM (02:42:18):
Do you feel, and final question, do you feel that the Beat generation had anything to do with influencing the Boomer generation? Alan Ginsburg, and Kerouac, and Burrows and the writings of that period? Because they basically challenged authority.

DH (02:42:36):
They certainly had enormous impact for me. I mean, part of that, the Bay Area, always go to City Lights Bookstore there. And I remember [inaudible] (19)60s, and of course, [inaudible] Dan and Mary Frank. Kind take off from that starting point.

SM (02:43:12):
Is there any question that you thought I should have asked, or did not ask that you would like to make a comment on?

DH (02:43:21):
No, I do not have any questions. I just have answers.

SM (02:43:26):
Well, David, what an honor to talk to you. I will keep you updated on my project. Do you have a color picture of yourself too?

DH (02:43:32):
I have a black and white.

SM (02:43:37):
That will be fine. Because I take pictures of everybody and I am using my photographs at the top of each little section for the oral history project, so I would need a picture of you.

DH (02:43:49):
I have got the book jacket picture, but I can send it.

SM (02:43:54):
Okay, very good. And...

DH (02:43:56):
Send me an email reminding me.

SM (02:43:58):
Yep, will do. Boy, I would love to interview your former wife.

DH (02:44:02):
Good luck. She is on the road right now.

SM (02:44:04):
Yeah. Well, I do not know, but David, thank you very much. And you are still living in the Bay Area, you are lucky.

DH (02:44:11):
Yeah, well, I live in Marin County.

SM (02:44:13):
All right. Right across the bridge.

DH (02:44:15):
Yep.

SM (02:44:16):
Very-very lucky. Well, you have a great day.

DH (02:44:20):
Okay.

SM (02:44:20):
And carry on and continue to be who you are.

DH (02:44:23):
Well, thank you. Good luck with your project.

SM (02:44:25):
Thanks, bye now.

DH (02:44:25):
Okay.

SM (02:44:30):
What you just heard was the ending of the tape for David Harris, given on the 7th of November, 2009. Excuse me, 6th of November, 2009. Thank you.

(End of Interview)

2010-01-14

Stephen McKiernan

David R. Hawk

164:52

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Amnesty International; Authors, American--20th century; College teachers; Hawk, David R.--Interviews

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