Interview with Dr. Kenneth Campbell

Campbell, Kenneth ; McKiernan, Stephen

2002-07-14

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

163:15

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Nancy Cain
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 14 July 2002
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:03):
Okay, here we go. When you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

KC (00:00:13):
The (19)60s and early (19)70s. Well, I guess it has to be Vietnam if you are going to cover that entire period. The (19)60s growing up, but the (19)70s, and my Vietnam experience being really the division between my childhood and my family and my neighborhood and growing up. And me then going off to becoming an adult and having a much different life, leaving family, leaving home.

SM (00:00:46):
When you think of the (19)60s overall, because you are coming from not only growing up in the era but serving your country in that era, do you see a difference between the two in your perspective of that era?

KC (00:00:59):
The difference between the (19)60s and the (19)70s?

SM (00:01:01):
(19)60s, yeah. Well, the difference between if you had not served-

KC (00:01:06):
Oh.

SM (00:01:06):
... and serving your country during that timeframe.

KC (00:01:09):
Well, I cannot accurately imagine not having done that because I did do that. I mean, I guess that I would have been quite different if I had not done that, but I think that it was because I am who I am that I did. I volunteered. I was not plucked out of my life. I do not think that there was any question that I was going to go in the military in some way. As to which branch and at what time under what conditions, those are particulars that I think that I could have played with. But I felt strongly that it was necessary for me to not only serve in that sense of civic duty, but also to use it as a vehicle to grow up, to give myself more opportunities to mature so that I felt that I was going to get a lot out of it, not only give a lot.

SM (00:02:23):
What do you think of those individuals who did not serve?

KC (00:02:28):
That did not serve?

SM (00:02:30):
That did not serve during that timeframe, with particular emphasis on those that could have served but used deferments or any other alternative to get out of service?

KC (00:02:42):
I do not have a problem with those who used whatever devices they could to get out of serving if they had political or religious or moral objections to the military, in general, or to the war, in particular. That, I think, is a defensible position personally, ethically, defensible position to take. But those who either had no feelings one way or another about the war and about military service, and especially those who supported it, but then found ways of getting out of it themselves, I have problems with. I think that it is dishonorable to avoid your general civic duty, and particularly dishonorable to support someone else going off to die in your place.

SM (00:03:39):
How do you respond to historians or social critics or sociologists who say that the Vietnam War, and the people that served in the Vietnam War, were basically from working class, lower class backgrounds. They were thrust into it. The upper classes really did not serve, or many of the people that would have gone to college did not serve. Is that a description of the military of that era?

KC (00:04:07):
Well, it certainly seems like an accurate description of the Marine Corps that I experienced. If we are talking about my personal experience, I was in the Marines and enlisted. Not an officer, I was an enlisted person. And the description of working class, lower middle class, rural, poor, farmer, that is accurate regarding the enlisted people in the Marine Corps at the time I was in there.

SM (00:04:50):
Getting back to some of the criticisms over the last 5, 10, 15 years on television network shows, you will see people, like Newt Gingrich and George Will and many others, saying that the generation, the boomer generation, the people that were young in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, and when I say (19)70s, a lot of people defined the (19)60s going up to 1973.

KC (00:05:15):
Right.

SM (00:05:15):
And so, including those individuals, they think that one of the great reasons we are having problems in our society today is because of that generation with the sexual revolution that took place during that time. As I put down here, "The boomer generation of the (19)60s and early (19)70s is being attacked as one of the reasons for the breakdown of American society." Could you respond to this criticism and comment on the period and its impact on present day America? Is the criticism fair? And when this criticism is often directed to the youth of the year, what can you say about the boomers of the (19)60s and early (19)70s as a generation of 70 million?

KC (00:05:58):
I guess I would have to, first, address the description of the time as being the breakdown, or leading to the breakdown, of American society. I do not think American society has broken down very often in its history. You have to talk about questions of degree, not kind here, for the most part. Certainly, it was under great stress during the (19)60s and early (19)70s, but it did not completely break down. I would define breaking down as actual civil war. And although there were incidents that looked like civil war at times, whether it was a demonstration that got out of hand or an isolated pseudo revolutionary group uprising from the left, whatever, I think, by and large, American society, under great tension, basically held together during that period of time and after. But to address what, I think, is at the heart of that criticism, that the boomer generation is responsible for a lot of the social problems and political problems, and to some degree economic problems, of the (19)70s and (19)80s and (19)90s, and perhaps now, I think that that is horse hockey. Every generation is neither perfect nor completely worthless, and every generation has to take responsibility for some of the problems that follow it. But that does not make that generation any better or worse than the previous or following generation. I think there were, certainly, a lot of committed people, a lot of boomers committed to change, and good change, but there are also a heck of a lot of boomers that, despite what they say today, were not really involved in that change at the time. There is certainly a lot of anti-war stories told-

SM (00:08:10):
It never happened.

KC (00:08:12):
... and exaggeration today, what did I do in the anti-war movement, as much as there are veterans who tell stories, although they never got near any combat. I think it is just a human tendency to want to exaggerate one's importance. From my experience in leadership positions in the anti-war movement of that time, I know how hard it was to get more than a small percentage of people active in the anti-war movement, or any movement at that time, whether it was community movements, student movements, movements against apartheid, or whatever was around at that time, to get more than a handful of people involved, more than a small percentage of people involved. So, I would not credit the boomer generation as a whole with a whole lot of that, and I would not blame the boomer generation as whole for a whole lot of that. I think the so-called damage done is exaggerated, but so are the accomplishments. The accomplishments, I think, sometimes are exaggerated by the historians on the left. I think what was accomplished was great, and through a lot of difficult struggle and sacrifice on the part of some leaders, but the whole generation, certainly. Not even a majority of the generation was involved and had anything to do with that.

SM (00:09:50):
Good point. Because you read about this era, and they will say that of the 70 plus million that were in the boomer generation, again, the boomers are defined by years.

KC (00:10:02):
Right.

SM (00:10:03):
I have a problem with that, too. They say Boomers are (19)46 to (19)64, and now a more recent study by Howe and Strauss-

KC (00:10:09):
1946 to (19)64.

SM (00:10:10):
Yes, 1964. Yeah.

KC (00:10:12):
As opposed to an age.

SM (00:10:13):
Yeah, 1946 to 1964. But now, Howe and Strauss have just written a book on the current youth, which is the millennials, who states that the boomers were 1943 to 1961. And if you read earlier books on this period, a lot of the people who were born between (19)42 and (19)46 were upset because many of them were in the lead of the anti-war movement.

KC (00:10:37):
Yeah. Yeah.

SM (00:10:37):
So, what I am getting at here, really, the question is this. Another way that people have lessened the impact on boomers is to say that only 15 percent were really involved.

KC (00:10:48):
There you go.

SM (00:10:49):
And would you say that is true?

KC (00:10:51):
I would say that is very true. And I make the same point in my book about Vietnam veterans in combat, that are only 15 percent, and that is probably exaggerated, it is probably smaller than that, were involved in any sustained combat in Vietnam. Few people realize that, whether they are for or against a war, whether they are arguing for veterans’ rights, or just simply trying to study it objectively, few people realize that only 10 to 15 percent of all Vietnam veterans saw any significant combat. Now, that has an impact. That has an importance in certain areas-

SM (00:11:32):
Right.

KC (00:11:33):
... and I will not go into all of that right now, but that is an important figure for people to understand. And as late as two years ago, in 2005, when I got together with some old anti-war hands, some of them which were non-veterans, one of them, when I gave that figure at a public forum, came up to me and said that she was shocked, that she had been around for 40 years in the movement and working in the anti-war movement back in the (19)60s, et cetera. And she never knew that. No one ever said that. No one ever told her that. That that gave her a better appreciation of the intensity of the experience of combat veterans and the isolation that combat veterans feel, even among veterans as a whole.

SM (00:12:18):
Are we talking here, maybe, about 400,000 Vietnam vets who actually were in combat of the three plus million?

KC (00:12:25):
Well, I need a calculator.

SM (00:12:28):
Yeah-yeah.

KC (00:12:28):
I am not that great at mathematics.

SM (00:12:30):
Right.

KC (00:12:30):
But whatever it turns out to be, between 10 and 15 percent-

SM (00:12:35):
Right.

KC (00:12:35):
... because the so-called tail to tooth ratio, meaning those who were in support versus the tip of the spear, or the tooth of the war machine, was six to one. Six people in support for every person out in the bush with a rifle, and that is less than 15 percent.

SM (00:12:54):
Right.

KC (00:12:55):
And I have been told by folks who study this even more closely that 14 or 15 percent is still too high.

SM (00:13:00):
Wow.

KC (00:13:01):
That when you start subtracting people, like the clerks that worked in the combat units who were back in the rear with the typewriters, and you start doing all sorts of other calculations, it turns out to be closer to about 10 or 12 percent. But I still go with 15 just to be safe.

SM (00:13:18):
Yeah. Obviously, being down at the Vietnam Memorial on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, the people that are on that stage are the people that are in that 14 to 15 percent, obviously. Yeah.

KC (00:13:28):
I do not know. You find a lot of them there. Some of them are the most committed. But there are a lot of folks who, well, let us put it this way, a lot of Vietnam veterans that I would look critically at that take strong political positions on various issues, putting forth their experience in the war as their credibility, that really did not experience much or any war.

SM (00:14:02):
You hear that a lot from Chuck Hagel.

KC (00:14:03):
Is that right?


SM (00:14:04):
Yeah.
KC (00:14:04):
Yeah. I would not be surprised. Chuck Hagel is one of my favorite guys.

SM (00:14:07):
Yeah. He and his brother, and they did serve.

KC (00:14:10):
Yeah.

SM (00:14:10):
And I like him too. Yeah, some people would say, "Well, when is he going to run for president?" I do not think he is going to run. I think he's going to stay in the Senate. When you look at the characteristics, could you give some of the positive qualities, just some adjectives to describe the boomer generation in your eyes? And some of the negative qualities?

KC (00:14:27):
Yeah. I would say innovative in the sense that boomers thought outside the World War II depression experience. Not having that experience, we were able to think outside the box, so to speak. And imagine a world where, perhaps, you did not have segregation, racial segregation. Perhaps, where you did not simply go off to serve and fight for your country because someone in authority said it was necessary to do. Dared to question authority. Asked critical questions. As an educator, I think of that generic quality that we try to develop in students of critical thinking, being able to see contradictions, complexity, variation, nuances. And I think that politically, socially, that the boomer generation, especially those who were in the leadership on contentious issues, were able to have that kind of imagination. Now, it is not to say that the previous generation did not have that imagination, because the previous generation, certainly, was able to imagine well, in at least leadership, in many cases, how to deal with the depression, how to look beyond the state that did not provide relief, that did not provide welfare, that to be innovative when it came time to fighting a war that was necessary under very adverse conditions. But I think the boomer generation had its most impact for its domestic reforms, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, which was certainly focused at home. I mean, it was focused on a war, but it was focused on changing the system at home and finding out what was wrong with America that got us in there. And the women's movement.

SM (00:16:55):
Right. I guess you could include in there the environmental movement, too.

KC (00:16:59):
And the environmental.

SM (00:17:00):
Yeah.

KC (00:17:00):
Very good. The environmental movement, since were sitting here in a nice environment.

SM (00:17:03):
Yeah. And some of the other movements you think of in that era, you think of the Native American movement-

KC (00:17:08):
Sure.

SM (00:17:08):
... and the Chicano movement, too, as well. To get off the order of questions here, the civil rights movement and the practice of nonviolence and the methods used by people in those movements were forerunners to the anti-war movement. Do you think that all these other movements, their teacher was the civil rights movement? I have read that in history books, that the anti-war, women's movement, all the other movements you just mentioned were learned from the civil rights movement.

KC (00:17:43):
Well, I think a lot was learned from the civil rights movement. I think a lot was learned from the labor movement during the thirties, as well. Twenties and thirties, but the thirties in particular. Peaceful ways of protesting health and safety conditions or inadequate pay or the right to unionize, not having the right to unionize. A lot of ideas and experience were transferred by older folks who lived and worked through those eras, the twenties and thirties and forties, to not only the anti-war movement, but other movements, as well, community movements, et cetera. I remember Saul Alinsky-

SM (00:18:43):
Oh, yeah. Rules for radicals.

KC (00:18:45):
Rules for Radicals, Reveille for Radicals, he had established some kind of an institute in Chicago to train leaders on the left, or not on the left. He was not looking for left or right, but just people who were interested in grassroots democracy. And so, there are important links back to earlier generations and earlier movements. But there was a lot of innovation, as well. A lot of thinking beyond that or differently from that came out of the boomer leaders themselves, the generation themselves. A lot was learned from the civil rights movement. But I think there was, also, something that was very American about the anti-war movement in the sense that there is an understanding among many, if not most, organizers in the Vietnam anti-war movement, that the system probably worked well enough, on most days, for most people, that you were better off not using violent forms of protests. That it was unnecessary and, in fact, counterproductive to use violent forms of protest. So, that nonviolence was for a principle that maybe they built their whole life around it. Quakers or Passivists, like Martin Luther King.

SM (00:20:25):
Right.

KC (00:20:25):
But for others it was a tactic. It was something that worked better than violence. But if they had lived under a regime, like the Nazis, they might be using violence because they might give up on the idea of peaceful change.

SM (00:20:41):
Yeah. Right.

KC (00:20:42):
So, I think that the structural conditions in America, the fact that America was the way it was with a constitution and a long history of rule of law, et cetera, was a major factor, if not a defining factor, for most people in the anti-war movement. Because most people in the anti-war movement were not out-and-out passivists in the sense of never using violence, pure passivists. We're not the kind of people who would have refused to go to war during World War II.

SM (00:21:10):
Like Bayard Rustin.

KC (00:21:12):
Right.

SM (00:21:12):
Yep.

KC (00:21:15):
Right, right. So, I think that is an important factor, as well. Part of its civil rights experience and leadership, part of it, earlier struggles, but also part of it, the structural context in which all of us was occurring. America as, basically, a law-abiding country, and it is people recognizing that there are non-violent ways of achieving your ends. And if you choose not to use those, then you are probably at least as bad as what you are protesting against, if not worse.

SM (00:21:44):
Right. Yeah, I think, on college campuses, in particular, I think one of the lessons learned is that protest is still important, and a lot of people think it is outdated, but I think it is still important. However, you learn from the lessons and the mistakes of the past. You do not disrupt the university and shut it down because that really creates a big divide. So, maybe you can still protest, but learn that shutting a campus down and getting parents all upset. I am leading into another question here.

KC (00:22:16):
All right, go ahead.

SM (00:22:18):
And this question deals with the millennials, which are today's young people that are in college campuses, and-

KC (00:22:23):
Is that the term used to describe them? The millennials. Oh, geez.

SM (00:22:24):
Yeah, the millennials, yeah. Born after 1984.

KC (00:22:28):
I doubt that they came up with that themselves.

SM (00:22:30):
No, they did not. And the Generation Xers, which followed the boomers-

KC (00:22:35):
Right-right.

SM (00:22:35):
... which has been written about a lot.

KC (00:22:37):
Right. They are the tweeners here.

SM (00:22:41):
Right.

KC (00:22:43):
The Xers are the ones that were probably born while Vietnam was going on, but did not know anything about it. They were too young.

SM (00:22:53):
Yep. Yep. And they, also, now make up 80 to 85 percent of the parents of today's entering college students.

KC (00:23:01):
Yeah-yeah.

SM (00:23:01):
Where only 15 percent now are really boomers.

KC (00:23:04):
Right. That is right.

SM (00:23:05):
And so, here, we have got another 15 percent.

KC (00:23:09):
But the equivalent to that are those who were born in the, well, not born, but grew up in the late forties and the (19)50s, who are not really boomers-

SM (00:23:21):
Right.

KC (00:23:21):
... but are of the World War II generation.

SM (00:23:22):
They are the silent generation. They call them the silent-

KC (00:23:26):
Yeah. Okay. So, there is always a tweener generation-

SM (00:23:27):
Right.

KC (00:23:27):
... in there. It is either the X generation or the silent generation.

SM (00:23:31):
Well, one of the things that over the years, since I work in a university, and you are a professor, your comments will be important on this. For quite a few years, there was a reaction on generation Xers. They either wished they had lived in that era because then there were great causes that they could be involved in, or they would be the other extreme. They were sick of boomers because they were nostalgic, and they dreamed of all these things in the past, and let us live for the present.

KC (00:24:01):
Right.

SM (00:24:01):
And the millennials today have a sense of, this is my impression again, that it is not that they do not care, but I do not know if they want to learn about the history that preceded them. So, I have real concerns, and would like your thoughts on this about the parents of today's college students now, the generation Xers, and the millennials, in terms of how important is history to them? Do they want to learn from it? Or are the only thinking of today and tomorrow, and the past is the past? That is what really worries me.

KC (00:24:36):
Well, you have to understand. I think that we have to understand that the generation Xers reached the years when the boomers were the most committed, active, and making the biggest impact. That is late teens, early twenties, in a highly conservative period. You are talking about the Reagan era. And Xers really did not have the social context or support that boomers did. The issues were not as burning, and their lives were not directly threatened, either. That is the other thing.

SM (00:25:23):
Right.

KC (00:25:23):
There is always a sense of survival driving boomers during the anti-war movement, fear of being drafted, fear of being used, and even the boomers that became anti-war when they came back from Vietnam, anger for being misuse. The Xers did not have that context to drive them or support them. So, I think they have often been criticized and condemned by boomers in an unfair way. And when you add to that the fact that only 15 percent or less of those boomers really were as active as some much larger group of them claimed they were, you know, have to look at the boomers and say, "Okay, do not be hypocritical here. Do not condemn other people for something you did not do either."

SM (00:26:21):
Sure enough.

KC (00:26:21):
"Your generation might have, your leaders might have-"

SM (00:26:23):
Right.

KC (00:26:24):
"... but not all of you did. A lot of you sat on your ass when that demonstration went down. A lot of you threw Frisbees and smoked dope and did not listen to the speakers when you went to the demonstration."

SM (00:26:32):
Whereas, one person told me, "I went to Washington only to see bare breasted women."

KC (00:26:36):
That is right. Yeah, yeah. It became a happening.

SM (00:26:39):
Yeah.

KC (00:26:40):
Like a bee and only with a bunch of political noise in the background. So, I think the criticism of the X Generation has always been a little bit unfair to them because they were born in a different age and raised and came to fruition, to maturity, in a different age. And unfair by the boomers, because many of those boomers were not as committed as they claimed, as involved as they claimed, could take as much responsibility as they claimed for the great changes. So, I believe in being fair to people, and we should not be too hard on our sons and our daughters and our little brothers and our little sisters.

SM (00:27:24):
A thought that applies with the millennials today, too, as well.

KC (00:27:26):
Yeah, I do. Yeah.

SM (00:27:26):
Yeah.

KC (00:27:27):
But I think I have a better handle on the millennial because I think I think better now than I did 20 or 30 years ago about these kinds of things. And I was just thinking about this again a couple of days ago. I think that the millennials are being criticized too much by boomers and Xers for not being active enough against the war in Iraq, when in fact, that just isn't their issue. They view Iraq, as well as Vietnam, unconsciously, I think, for the most part. Unconsciously view it as old school. What to them is current and contemporary, AIDS, especially in Africa, Darfur, genocide in Darfur-

SM (00:28:20):
Right.

KC (00:28:20):
... human rights, the environment, all those issues that connect with globalization.

SM (00:28:28):
Right.

KC (00:28:28):
These are contemporary issues for them, and that is where you can find them active. If you look, you find them active, whether they are blogging, whether they are on websites, whether they are holding meetings, whether they are raising funds, doing 5K runs, whatever it is, that is where they are active.

SM (00:28:42):
Yep.

KC (00:28:43):
For the most part, it is the boomer generation that is active in the anti-Iraq war movement. Now, there are certainly plenty of exceptions, but I think, in general, that is true. And I think Iraq, created by a boomer generation by people from the boomer generation that never went, chicken hawks, and protested by those who did go to Vietnam. Or those who did protest Vietnam, but are back protesting Iraq now, or those who did go to Vietnam in turned sour on it. This is a within boomer generation war and within boomer generation issue.

SM (00:29:24):
Wow.

KC (00:29:25):
In other words, they are saying that this is all politics. Not only should you not have gone to Iraq, that that is wrong, but this whole argument over it is not relevant to us, for the most part.

SM (00:29:38):
See, one of the characteristics that Howe and Strauss, they wrote the book Generations, they have got the book on the millennials now-

KC (00:29:46):
Okay.

SM (00:29:46):
... they speak at national conferences. They have studied youth.

KC (00:29:50):
Yeah.

SM (00:29:50):
Some, like Dr. Levine from Columbia Teachers College-

KC (00:29:54):
Okay.

SM (00:29:54):
... have written some great books on youth of different generations. When we are talking about the millennials, the millennials have been compared to the World War II generation because they want to leave a legacy. And they are thinking about, according to the studies of Sprouse-

KC (00:30:12):
Okay.

SM (00:30:12):
... they want to leave a legacy, but they want to leave it when they are in their late thirties or starting in the forties. What concerns me, as a person who works in higher education with students, is, okay, we have got a generation now of students who do care about other people. They do.

KC (00:30:27):
Yeah.

SM (00:30:27):
They do care about the issues like you just mentioned of human rights, but they have got to wait until they are 40 to start leaving their legacy. And the question is, what happens between 22 and 23 and 40? From what I am gathering from the information is they want to raise a family, they want to get a lot of money in the bank, they want to get a home. So, I do not know if there's an issue here that we have to deal with.

KC (00:30:53):
Yeah. And I think it is the same issue that we keep coming back to, which is the 15 percent versus the 85 percent. Those people that are active, that are active now, not waiting till they are 35 or 40, are within the 15 percent. They are the ones that are really active, though, among the millennials on these issues of AIDS, of genocide, of environmental issues, et cetera, et cetera. And as I said, if you look for them, if you look at the organizations, if you go to the campuses, if you go to the websites, you find them, they are active, they are working. They are not doing the same things that the boomer generation did, but they are a different generation at a different time, and they found different ways of doing it. Just as a boomer generation did things differently than the depression era generation. It was active in the labor movement or the women's movement, women's suffrage, or whatever, twenties and thirties. The 85 percent are the ones, just like the 85 percent and the boomer generation, or whatever, were busy looking after themselves.

SM (00:31:57):
I think we are-

KC (00:31:59):
For the most part.

SM (00:32:00):
I think we are going to take a break here in a minute. I am- want to just mention here, could you comment on the importance of the boomers in respect to the Civil Rights movement and all the other movements, and with ending the Vietnam War? How important were the youth in ending the Vietnam War? And what do you think was the number one reason why the war ended? Then, we will take a break.

KC (00:32:21):
Geez. I could answer the first one, I think, easier and sooner than the second one. The first one, how important were the young people and the boomer generation in ending the war? An important part. Not a decisive part, an important part. We have to remember, the Vietnamese also contributed a lot to ending that war, to frustrating the United States in its attempt to win a victory in Vietnam. And whether we are talking about the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong or the liberation movement, whatever you want to call it, the Vietnamese, who were fighting against the Americans, contributed a lot to finally ending that war. Now, the home front, along the home front, I do not think. It was- Along the home front, I do not think it was until the movement was broader than just young people that it really became decisive. It was only when broader sections of society and many of them older sections of society whether it was church leaders, some of the liberal trade union organizations. Geez, by the time I became active in the movement in 1970 after I got discharged there was a businessman's organization against the war. I mean, they began to come from all facets of society and fill out any war movement so that it was much broader than just the youth or just the students. I think that is when it began to be recognized as legitimate by that silent majority or whatever you want to call it in the middle. Those who were not on the far right but certainly... Those who were open to the possibility that the war was wrong and they were in the middle as opposed to the far left or the far right. I think that middle ground, they were really the parents of those Vietnam veterans. The parents of the working-class kids, the parents of the farmers, the parents of the kid that went off from the rural area to Vietnam. From which so many of those lives were lost, they're the ones that needed to be won over and they were Nixon's silent majority and they were eventually won over. I think in part by the Vietnam minister turned against the war, acting as a bridge to them and bringing along that stuff. But more generally, the broadening of the anti-war movement to give it legitimacy in the eyes of those folks.

SM (00:35:14):
Okay. Kind of like the... But some of the history books say it is when the body bags start coming home, middle America responded.

KC (00:35:23):
Absolutely, yeah. The more body bags, the classic study is by John Mueller who War, President's and Public Opinion.

SM (00:35:32):
That is the book I...

KC (00:35:33):
Yeah.

SM (00:35:33):
Yep. Let us take a break right here and then [inaudible]. One of the things about the boomer generation, and I can say this from personal experience is when I was on a college campus. There is this feeling that we were the most unique generation in American history because we were going to... Well, not me. That the boomers were going to change the world, they are going to make everything better. Going to end racism and sexism, bring peace to the world, love, the whole thing not hate. Your comments on that attitude that boomers had when they were young and your thoughts about boomers over the years as boomers have gotten older regarding that question.

KC (00:36:29):
Well, and this question I do not see any great difference between the boomer generation and any other generation. It is youthful arrogance taking what is true at its core that is that you have people committed to change and meaningful, important, necessary change and exaggerating. This is a tendency it's not a uniform, it is a tendency many to exaggerate it and think that they are so different or we are so different and so great, so new, move over old people get out of the way. To some degree maybe we can thank JFK and his inaugural speech, go anywhere, pay any price, we are the new generation coming in. Eisenhower and that crew is the old tired, do nothing, lazy... Not lazy but ineffective generation. Geez Eisenhower had two heart attacks while he was in office, he was on a golf course a lot of the time. I mean, there is this whole sense that it was a new, young, vibrant generation and I think that inaugural address really does speak to the boomer generation and the way we saw ourselves. We were going to do stuff that nobody had done before. I think every generation thinks that though, they just think of it depending on the circumstances in different ways. So the oppression World War II generation certainly did plenty of new things. Only concentrated more in the conventional and the more traditional areas and they built newer and bigger businesses. That is how we got the Whiz Kids that wound up in a JFK administration.

SM (00:38:33):
Yes.

KC (00:38:33):
Yeah, that is right. Yeah. After all that depression era, World War II generation really created the large middle class in America where most people actually had the American dream eventually of their own home. Home ownership after World War II skyrocketed. So there were very conventional kinds of goals but that earlier generation was committed to doing things beyond which their previous generation... I think every generation does that and every generation tends to think when they're young. When they're in their teens or their 20s they think that they are greater than the previous generation. Well, they may be in some ways but not in other ways and compared to the generation that is going to follow them they are going to be less. So long as we keep improving in general, so long as humanity keeps improving in general. Next generation is going to do the things a little bit better and they will probably in an arrogant way think that they are better than they really are. So, I think it is a human thing, I would not pin it on any particular generation. It just plays itself out differently in different generations based on the circumstances, the larger structural or societal circumstances.

SM (00:39:56):
This is a very important question that I have asked in each of the interviews, the concept of healing. The Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. when it was built, I loved the goals to pay tribute to those who served, to remember those who served and to not be a political entity. It's about the warrior, it's about caring.

KC (00:40:26):
Right.

SM (00:40:27):
So the goal was to heal those individuals and hopefully to heal the nation as Jan Scruggs said in his book. The question is this, have we healed as a nation because of divisions that took place during that era? The divisions were so strong, you mentioned even earlier in the interview about we did not have a civil war here. But the nation was being torn apart and if you looked at 1968 at the Democratic Convention, even the Republican Convention. The threats for that convention that year and you saw the burnings in Watts, all that whole era-

KC (00:41:00):
We are talking about the worst division since the Civil War in American society but not as deeply as the Civil War.

SM (00:41:05):
Right. But here we are in 2007, I have been doing these interviews since 96 now so as the years progress. But where are we with the respect to healing on these particular issues? Healing over the divisions that happened in the war, the divisions... All the other issues, all the other movements that took place at that time. There were always barricades in many respects in all of these movements were... In short what I am saying is, has the wall truly healed the Vietnam veteran portion of the boomer generation? Secondly, where do we stand as a nation in terms of healing over Vietnam?

KC (00:41:54):
I think the wall helped and the wall helped in a big way in that process of healing, I do not think it has been the only thing. There have been a lot of other contributors to the healing that has occurred. But there has also been a real limit to the amount of healing that could occur regardless of what device we are talking about. Using a wall, using movies, using meetings of Vietnam veterans to talk stuff like this out, whatever the device is. Legislation to provide some more support for veterans. Whatever it is, it is meant to help heal. There are limits on it and it is not for lack of trying but because some of these wounds cannot be healed completely. Some of these wounds are so deep and remain so fresh that the scars just never healed, they remained open. Now, we are talking about emotional wounds for the most part. Because for some Vietnam veterans, and I would not want to in this case separate the 15 percent of combat intensive veterans from those who experienced very little or no combat. Because here, even the 85 percent that did not see much combat still suffered psychological damage because of the failure of the war and the cold shoulder of the American society when they came back. I think for some of those veterans Vietnam was the best and the worst of their life. On one hand it represented the worst while they were there for most of them, for 99.9 percent of them. I would suggest that one 10th of 1 percent that loved being there might have needed some psychological help but most of us could not wait to come home. Right?

SM (00:44:17):
Right.

KC (00:44:18):
So most of us at the time wanted to get the Vietnam experience over with and forget about it as quickly as possible. But the irony is-is that in later years, most of those Vietnam vets cannot forget about it and do not want to forget about it. They gather as Vietnam veterans, they have reunions as Vietnam veterans. They email each other and have websites which they talk to each other because it was the most important experience in their life. It turns out that everything after that for many of them was anti-climactic, whether it was marriage or their job or having kids, who were traveling or success in their business or whatever it was. Now, that is true among a certain segment. I do not know what that percentage is, it is I think a fairly significant percentage of all Vietnam veterans that have problems like that. I do not know, it is certainly in double digits. I do not know whether it comes anywhere near a third or a half. But on the other hand, there are a lot of veterans who... I think they would probably be in the majority of Vietnam veterans who do not have those scars or they are not obvious. So, they are able to deal with them well enough that they have healed well enough, that they have been able to get over it. I am not talking about locking bad memories in a closet or artificially, where someday they are going to pop out and they will go crazy and kill 15 people in a bar for no reason. I am talking about people who really have, for the most part gotten over it and moved on and had more important chapters in their lives. Right? So that they can look back and not be troubled by that all that much and not have to think about it all the time. For those I think the healing has pretty much occurred, pretty much completed. Not completely but it is that other segment, that still significant segment of those who for whatever reason and there are probably lots of different reasons wound up in the strange contradiction of not wanting to stay in Vietnam. Wanting to get out as soon as they could, wanting to forget... Okay. Put it behind them as fast as they could and then winding up building the rest of their life around that experience. Now they're the guys you see that have the bumper stickers, wear the pins in their hats. The worst of them become professional veterans right? That is all they do and their wives are veterans’ widows.

SM (00:47:09):
What do you think of veterans who live off the Vietnam War?

KC (00:47:15):
Live off in what sense.

SM (00:47:20):
One of the... I am going to put this in the book. But one of the criticisms of the Vietnam Memorial is that Jan Scruggs is... I have heard Vietnam veterans saying he is living off it.

KC (00:47:27):
Yeah, right. I mean I know what you could be thinking about and I guess I am right.

SM (00:47:31):
But I know Jan and I know that is not what he said [inaudible].

KC (00:47:36):
Those who find a way of subsistence on the issue of Vietnam in some way, whether it is Veterans Affairs in some way or something connected directly to the Vietnam War and the history of it, etc-etc. I do not have any particularly ill will about that, if personally some of those folks are doing it only because they do not want to bother finding another way of making a living. In other words, they are not driven by principle, they are driven by opportunism. Right? I say shame on them, look at yourself and in the mirror and shame on you. But I would not make a big deal out of it, I do not worry about it. The people that I find most reprehensible are those who are so hypocritical in their involvement with the Vietnam War and with Veterans Affairs. That they're prepared to turn their own experiences into a lie in order to continue to profit from it, either financially or politically. Those who are prepared to twist the truth of their own experiences and other experiences in a way in which they get ahead financially, politically, socially, some other way. That kind of opportunity, if they are becoming opportunists by creating more unnecessary bodies or more unnecessary victims. Those are the folks that I potentially dislike.

SM (00:49:23):
How about the healing within the generation?

KC (00:49:27):
Yeah, that was the second part.

SM (00:49:29):
Was there a place to go to the restroom or should I go behind a tree?

KC (00:49:39):
There is a restroom, of course there is a restroom. Of course, yeah. It is right over here, let us stop this at this point.

SM (00:49:43):
Talk about the generation regarding the question of healing.

KC (00:49:47):
Right.

SM (00:49:49):
Your thoughts on the boomer generations, the divisions of the... Do we still have these divisions today?

KC (00:49:55):
I think in the fringe wings of the generation, we still have these divisions in a significant way today. That is that they are still deep and they are still bitter, still open wounds. The far left and the far right, I think most folks in between have agreed to disagree if necessary but probably agree more now than they did 20 years ago on a lot of issues. I do not think it is a big problem, I do not think it is anywhere near the kind of problem that it is for a lot of Vietnam veterans.

SM (00:50:41):
There were several books that have been written in recent years, I know Barney Frank wrote a book called Speaking Frankly. Other books have been written about that, that in 1972 when the nation was really torn apart and McGovern became the Democratic candidate. The divisions were intense even within the Democratic Party and the term liberal-

KC (00:51:02):
Was pejorative.

SM (00:51:03):
Well, yeah. Yes.

KC (00:51:05):
By the radicals according to most activists, if you were a liberal that was pejorative. That meant that you were not prepared to make the kind of sacrifices and engage in the kind of activities that would bring about real change. You just postured that way and you were probably part of the elite and benefiting from the status quo anyway. Part of the system rather than part of the solution.

SM (00:51:33):
Well supposedly people who were involved in the anti-war movement were labeled a radical fringe and it is stuck with them their whole lives. Do you think there is truth to that?

KC (00:51:45):
Well, there is certainly truths among those on the right and the hard right that they still think of the anti-war movement as a radical fringe. But I think most people who were involved in one way or another either slightly or intentionally in the anti-war movement. I think for the most part in general American society there is a recognition that the anti-war movement was not just the radical fringe, that it was a bit broader than that. But let me back off from that just a little bit and say that the more time passes, I think the more that myth of the anti-war movement thing, the radical fringe gains ascendancy. Because with passing time there is smaller and smaller space given in history books to that period, and awareness is simplistically deal with it is just to label the war movement a radical fringe and show a picture of a riot with tear gas and students throwing stuff and long hair and etc.

SM (00:52:59):
Why do you think just the word Vietnam, you just bring it up in a conversation today it creates all kinds of whoa.

KC (00:53:10):
Well, it depends on who you bring it up among. If you bringing up among folks of the boomer generation, it is going to have that reaction. If you bring that up among the millennials, "Huh? What?"

SM (00:53:25):
Right.

KC (00:53:25):
It is not relevant to them. "Yeah, that was my grandfather's war." Well maybe not quite that bad, but to them it is not bad it is a long ways removed. To them the first Persian Gulf War is ancient history [inaudible].

SM (00:53:42):
Yeah.

KC (00:53:48):
As you pointed out, even to some of them 9/11 is ancient history. So yeah, if you are talking about the boomer generation. Sure, there is a sharp immediate reaction to it because of how emotional the issue was then and the fact that it has never been completely settled. In the 1970s, essentially mid to late (19)70s we agreed to disagree in the country as a whole and move on, forget about it. But among those who were the most intentionally involved, either supporting the war or opposing the war. It always remained a sharp issue and an open wound.

SM (00:54:33):
We had just your thoughts on the word activism. We had for a couple of years activist days at Westchester University, I was asked to politely not to end it. We did it for five years, we brought people like Phillip and Daniel Berrigan to our campus. Elizabeth McAllister, Alan Canfora from Kent State, Tom Hayden.

KC (00:54:55):
So, it was all left-wing-

SM (00:54:56):
Holly Near... Oh, no. We did bring Michelle Malkin from the conservative.

KC (00:55:01):
Okay.

SM (00:55:02):
So, her activist days of last year, because Republicans they believe that activism is a very important part of what they do, the Young America's Foundation.

KC (00:55:12):
Sure, yeah.

SM (00:55:16):
What is it about the term activism that seems to turn people off when we actually want people to become involved? But-

KC (00:55:24):
Are you talking about students today?

SM (00:55:26):
Students today.

KC (00:55:27):
That population?

SM (00:55:27):
Yeah. Some universities responding to the fact that this is not the era the students they are volunteers, but they are not activists.

KC (00:55:36):
Right, yeah.

SM (00:55:36):
There is a fear about that term as I have done some educational sessions that at university conferences on this, and there is truth. There is something out there, and a lot of us within the boomers who are running universities but it is also following generations too. What is it about activism too that scares people? Am I-

KC (00:56:00):
Well, it might be confrontation. It might be bitter confrontation because they might associate activism with the (19)60s and that kind of bitter, nasty confrontation that they are not interested in becoming involved in. That it became particularly uncivil during that period of time in (19)60s and in early (19)70s, and they feel that they can be more civil. That they can disagree with other people in a more civil way. So that for them to become activists would mean for them to break away from those values. Reject those values and adopt values from an earlier period and an earlier behavior that they think perhaps was not the wisest kind of behavior to engage in.

SM (00:56:53):
See, the current scholars on the term activism will say that activism is any person who wants to make a difference in this world.

KC (00:57:00):
You cannot rely on scholars for definitions, they do not even agree among themselves.

SM (00:57:06):
But even activist handbooks will say that.

KC (00:57:09):
Yeah [inaudible].

SM (00:57:09):
What is wrong with wanting to make a difference in the world?

KC (00:57:13):
Yeah. There is nothing to the millennials that is wrong with making a difference in the world, but you are not putting it in those terms. If you said to them, we want you to try and make a difference in a world they would probably respond. As a matter of fact, you would not need to tell them that they are already involved and they are already responding trying to make a difference. They just do not particularly want to be associated with the kind of activism that, that word brings up.

SM (00:57:43):
Good point. When the best history books are written, you being a scholar. The best history books are often written 50 years after an event takes place. World War II books, some of the best ones are being written right now. 50 years after the (19)60s and (19)70s what will historians say about that era?

KC (00:58:08):
Well, first of all I have a question about your premise here. Who decides which is the best book and maybe it is the generation that lived through that period when they are getting old and awfully as nostalgic decide that the book's written and by their own generation and by them are the best books. How do we know that the books written immediately after the fact, or at the time were not better books? Who judges which of the best books? Well, if you let the generation that lived through that judge the best books they are probably going to judge the ones that they write themselves as the best books. Because that is just a little quiver with that, just sort of a bleak way of thinking of that question.

SM (00:58:50):
I think historians say that the best books are written 50 years after.

KC (00:58:55):
Well they probably say that because they believe distance and greater objectivity make for better history books and they may well be true, be right about that. But there are also other historians that believe that perhaps those who were very subjective and very involved in it can also contribute a lot to the history of that. Therefore, things like oral history are written and done. So maybe the best book on depression for instance, was written 40, 50 years later. But I loved Studs Terkel's oral history of the depression, Hard Times.

SM (00:59:51):
Yeah.

KC (00:59:52):
That was still written about 40 years afterwards, yeah. But it was all based on oral history and oral history is not objective. It is very subjective, it is the collection of very subjective first-person descriptions about that-

SM (01:00:16):
And that is in my interviews.

KC (01:00:18):
That is right, yeah. So, I do not know how to answer the question I guess. I have got a number of possible answers, but I do not know when the best books are written about something.

SM (01:00:37):
This little section of the interview-interview is just for me to mention some of the names of that period.

KC (01:00:41):
All right.

SM (01:00:42):
For your immediate response, does not have to be any long in depth but just quick response-

KC (01:00:48):
Kind of like a Rorschach?

SM (01:00:48):
Yes. I am going to start out with Tom Hayden.

KC (01:00:53):
Jane Fonda.

SM (01:00:53):
Jane Fonda was next.

KC (01:00:54):
Yeah. I thought maybe this was the scene from The Dirty Dozen where they were all being asked by psychologist to respond to different names or words or whatever.

SM (01:01:07):
It is similar.

KC (01:01:09):
Yeah, Tom Hayden. Jane Fonda.

SM (01:01:11):
Yeah.

KC (01:01:12):
Tom Hayden. Well, Tom Hayden to me evokes the era of student protest against the war, although I think he also was involved and may have been a leader in the protest for a free speech in California.

SM (01:01:29):
It was early on, yep.

KC (01:01:30):
Right, earlier. Well I think a student protest against the war, I think of Tom Hayden.

SM (01:01:35):
How about Jane Fonda?

KC (01:01:36):
Jane Fonda, that is a little more different. A little more personal in the sense that I have a great deal of respect for her for stepping up and siding and supporting Vietnam veterans against the war when she did. I had great regret for her, I feel badly for her that she made a young and foolish decision to sit in the seat of that anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam. I understand and support her motivations for doing that, which was solidarity with the people that did not deserve to be bombed. But it was not a smart thing for her to do, and especially be pictured in it and be laughing while she's sitting there. But that is a youth... Relatively, she was in her (19)30s at that point. But relatively youthful, inexperienced, and I do not blame her anywhere near the degree that many Vietnam veterans especially the right wing of Vietnam veterans blame her for that.

SM (01:02:42):
The big selling sticker down in Washington is Jane Fonda bitch, and they have it upside down and they also have a Jane Fonda... Some toiletries or something like that that they sell.

KC (01:02:54):
Yeah. Jane Fonda toiletry.

SM (01:02:56):
Yeah, something like that. So, the hate for her is still pretty intense.

KC (01:03:00):
Yeah. My personal pet theory about that is that that is the macho posturing right wing Vietnam vets that take particular offense that a woman has undercut their experience.

SM (01:03:14):
Oh, wow.

KC (01:03:15):
There have been a lot of men who visited North Vietnam and did at least what Jane Fonda did, who have not been singled out by Vietnam veterans the way Jane Fonda has. I think it is particularly interesting it is a woman that they singled out. How dare she? As if she is eviscerated them in some way or cut their balls off in some way and they are going to get her back.

SM (01:03:38):
Robert McNamara is the other one they seem to hate.

KC (01:03:41):
Oh, yeah.

SM (01:03:41):
McNamara and somewhat even when Clinton was president, they hated him too for-

KC (01:03:47):
Yeah, sure.

SM (01:03:47):
Yeah. So, your thoughts on Bill Clinton and Robert McNamara.

KC (01:03:56):
And they hate me too. Robert McNamara, I think that the hatred for him was more than Johnson. That is interesting because Johnson was commander-in-chief, it is not like they hey... Well, Johnson is no longer alive. Who knows? Maybe they'd hate more than McNamara today. I think the hatred for McNamara had more to do with him being so much an architect of that war.

SM (01:04:18):
Right.

KC (01:04:19):
At least in terms of the strategy and tactics. That war of attrition, that numbers war, he was a numbers guy, war by the numbers and the impersonal persona. Is that a contradiction, impersonal persona?

SM (01:04:39):
Mm-mm.

KC (01:04:39):
But the impersonal image that he presented, although we can learn by looking at his video or his movie that he cries and he is sensitive.

SM (01:04:49):
Right.

KC (01:04:51):
But that image that he presented and finally, and I think this is most important. That he actually concluded that the war could not be won long before he stopped directing it and I think it is rightfully in this case felt a certain betrayal, a lack of principle, a certain hypocrisy on his part.

SM (01:05:17):
Yeah. I remember the six... In Retrospect was the book that came out and my very first interview with Senator McCarthy in (19)96. The book had been out a year or so, and I asked for his comment on the book, and he did not believe him. "I do not believe him." I have that in the interview, and then also-

KC (01:05:39):
Did not believe that he had [inaudible] against the war.

SM (01:05:41):
No, he still-

KC (01:05:44):
There seems to be other I think independent verification of that in the documents now.

SM (01:05:48):
We still disliked him intensely.

KC (01:05:50):
Oh, yeah.

SM (01:05:50):
Then interviewed Bobby Mueller recently in the last year, and Bobby has actually done some things with him. Bobby-

KC (01:05:59):
With McNamara?

SM (01:06:00):
Yeah, with McNamara and some programs. So, he would be upset with him, but he's-

SM (01:06:03):
And some programs and so he would be upset with him, but he has grown to understand him. I am not speaking for Bobby, I get-

KC (01:06:08):
And not just understand him, work with him-

SM (01:06:09):
You are right.

KC (01:06:10):
Too.

SM (01:06:10):
Yeah.

KC (01:06:11):
And work in common cause with him on certain issues, maybe the landmines issue.

SM (01:06:15):
Yeah, I am not quite sure, I have to go back to the interview, but there was not the hatred that I expected and Bobby was to be the first one, I respect him so much. If he's against somebody, he will outright say it and-

KC (01:06:27):
Sure, but I can understand Bobby Mueller's approach to McNamara because at least McNamara admitted that he was wrong, eventually and has taken a position that is against that kind of wasteful destruction now.

SM (01:06:46):
What is interesting, why I like Mr. Scruggs and also when Lewis Puller was alive back in... They brought Bill Clinton to the wall and I thought that took a lot of courage on their part to do that, and Lewis would went right up to... With his wheelchair and made sure that he was seen next to Bill Clinton, even though he disagreed with him. Although when-

KC (01:07:10):
It is also a smart political movement.

SM (01:07:12):
Yes.

KC (01:07:12):
Part of Scruggs.

SM (01:07:15):
Yeah, but also Lewis though, and back in February of 19-

KC (01:07:20):
Well, wait, you said Lewis? You said was-

SM (01:07:21):
Yeah, Lewis.

KC (01:07:21):
Lewis, [inaudible].

SM (01:07:22):
Yeah, Lewis was involved in that. And Lewis was up there in the States. Of course, the next year he died, he killed himself, but he had made a point that he was trying to... It was part of the healing process and also I guess in February of that year, some issues between Lewis and other Vietnam vets and President Clinton and promises he had made fell through. So Lewis was pretty bitter, I think, toward Clinton. It was not that same other vets, but I have always found, and I am going to get into the questions here, but what makes the law program so important is they brought some very key people there since 1982, and I think the epitome of healing is to bring the people like McNamara and Jane Fonda to speak there. I think it would do an unbelievable part of Jane Fond and McNamara before he passed away, visited and were there at the ceremony, for example, this 25th anniversary, I'd do anything in my power to bring them to this.

KC (01:08:29):
I think that if Jane Fonda tried to speak in front of that memorial-

SM (01:08:32):
I know.

KC (01:08:32):
There would be some right wings there to try and assassinate her.

SM (01:08:36):
Well, McNamara too, maybe.

KC (01:08:37):
Maybe McNamara, but certainly Jane Fonda. They associate Jane, she is the epitome in their eyes of everything that was wrong about Vietnam.

SM (01:08:52):
Lyndon Johnson.

KC (01:08:57):
Responsible for Vietnam. Tragic figure. On one hand he did a great deal for civil rights and for the poor in America, but on the other hand, he was so wrong on Vietnam and was... Well, it is a paradox. He is a typical tragic figure. I mean, on one hand, you feel sorry for him. On the other hand, he has to take... I feel anguish towards him too, you just take certain responsibility for that. To some degree, he was a victim of the circumstances, the Cold War. I am not sure any president would have done much differently than he did, so I am not sure we can separate him from any other president, even if Kennedy had lived. I strongly disagree with those historians who say that if Kennedy had... There is evidence, if Kennedy had lived, that he would not have done what Johnson did, that he would have pulled us out or not. Certainly not escalated to the level of using combat battalions and brigades. I disagree, I think that Kennedy was at least as much a politician as Johnson and said different things to different people depending on what he felt they should hear and that he could no more escape the politics of the Cold War than anybody else could at that time.

SM (01:10:35):
This brings me right in just John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

KC (01:10:38):
Yeah, John Kennedy has to share a great deal of responsibility for what Johnson did because John Kennedy, it was on his watch that the overthrow of Diệm, and the assassination with Diệm took place and in my view, the only reason that overthrow occurred, I will separate the assassination out from it because it is possible that Kennedy wanted Diệm to make it to the Riviera alive. Where the emperor Bao Dai was at that point in time too, where most Vietnamese escape wound up [inaudible]. So, I will separate the assassination part of it, that might have been the officers themselves. The Vietnamese officers had decided to do that, but certainly Kennedy wanted the coup to occur, allowed the coup to occur, gave orders for the coup to occur, whatever you want to call it, helped orchestrate that coup through the CIA. The evidence is absolutely crystal clear and credible that the CIA had everything to do with that, and the only reason they would do that is because Kennedy administration and Kennedy having to take most responsibility with the buck stopping there, it's because they intended to carry on the war only with more American involvement, not less, because Diệm at that point in time was an obstacle to them. He did not want the war Americanized. He was digging in his heels and beginning to even desperately talk, he and his brother talk about some neutralization process and talking to the VC and talking to the North, finding some other way out of it in order to keep that war from becoming so Americanized because Diệm was a nationalist. He had plenty of other false... He was all always a nationalist, and he began to conclude that the Americans were simply replacing the French and wanting to control that area, and the war was going very badly under Vietnam and the only way the Americans felt that they could have a chance of keeping the south from going communist was putting American troops in there. [inaudible] was an obstacle, get them out of the way and then put the troops in. So, I think if Kennedy had lived, he would have done what Johnson did. Maybe not exactly the same way at the same time, but I think he would have... The Democratic Party would not have allowed him to do anything differently because the Democratic Party did not want to be labeled as pro-communist, having lost a yet another country, let Vietnam go after China, they wanted the White House. I do not think there is any point in time where one of those two parties says, nah we do not need the White House. We will stand on principle. Uh-huh. They wanted the White House and they would do what they needed to do in the context of the Cold War. This is not the late (19)60s, this is the early and mid (19)60s, and Kennedy could not have gotten it past the Democratic Party, would not have gotten it past the American Electric... The American society, American public as a whole saying, "Oh, we will let Vietnam go south on us, we will let it go to a communist because we do not want to put American ground troops there." Uh-huh, would not have happened.

SM (01:13:59):
How about Bobby Kennedy? Just a quick thought on Bobby and-

KC (01:14:00):
Yeah, just Bobby, I did not know very much about Bobby. Bobby died when I was in Vietnam, he was assassinated. I heard about it as I was in Vietnam. I was around Khe Sanh at the time, in the mountains around Khe Sanh and him, and Martin Luther King. I was in the bush when I heard about it, finally. He seemed to... Well, I could say was he younger seemed to be more idealistic than Robert, or not Robert, than John. Robert was more idealistic than John, I think. Probably not as clever and as realistic politically as John Kennedy was. I think John Kennedy was just politically more bright than Bobby, but I am not sure of that. I think Bobby Kennedy turning any war was opportunistic, probably if he was against the war, it might have been before he ever decided to turn against it publicly. I mean, it might not have anything to do with his decision to publicly come out against it. I think he publicly came out against it because he saw that as the best route to the White House.

SM (01:15:12):
Yeah, how about Eugene McCarthy? Because I was-

KC (01:15:14):
Eugene McCarthy, I think was more on principle. That is my impression, but again, I did not work with these guys, I was too young, my sense of it is far less direct. My experience with it is far less direct and far less knowledgeable even as a scholar than most of the other questions I have asked so far. I just have not spent a whole lot of time looking at either Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy.

SM (01:15:41):
You got Hubert Humphrey in there and you have got-

KC (01:15:43):
Oh, I got arrested over Hubert Humphrey.

SM (01:15:45):
Yeah.

KC (01:15:46):
Hubert Humphrey was running for president in (19)70... The primary in (19)72, and I got arrested as VVAW in Philadelphia here protesting at his speech because he was not anti-war enough. He was still trying to keep one foot in each camp in (19)72, and the government was a clear anti-war candidate, and we supported McGovern and opposed Humphrey, and I got arrested for civil disobedience. That is my immediate association with Hubert Humphrey.

SM (01:16:16):
Yeah, [inaudible] your thoughts of George McGovern, because we have had him on our campus.

KC (01:16:20):
Yeah. McGovern is a highly principled, is he still alive?

SM (01:16:25):
Oh yeah.

KC (01:16:25):
I think he is, yeah. Highly principled, a good guy, hearts in a right place. He made few mistakes in his presidential campaign just in terms of tactics that alienated them, but now without doing a close study of that, it was an overwhelming victory for Nixon. It is a landslide for Nixon. McGovern only won Massachusetts. There had to be other things that went wrong with that campaign, or perhaps in the McGovern's case, he simply had to be prepared to sacrifice the White House for principal. I think he was, and I think it was only because there was a revolution within the Democratic Party at the (19)72 convention that enabled grassroots people to get leadership pissed off Daley, as I recall, John Daley, because his whole delegation I think was unseated or something at that convention. But they got control of it, and that is the only kind of leadership in a Democratic Party, and it's an anomaly, that kind of leadership that would say, we would rather lose the White House than sacrifice this principle. I do not think they thought that-

SM (01:17:47):
You see any of that-

KC (01:17:49):
They prepared to take that risk.

SM (01:17:50):
You see any of that in the candidates today in the Republican or Democratic?

KC (01:17:53):
I am a governed kind of approach that it is better to-

SM (01:17:55):
Yes.

KC (01:17:56):
No, I do not see any of those candidates that way. None of them stick out to me as being that way. I think they are all more political than not. When it comes down divide between principle and... If [inaudible] gets in a race, I might lean towards him being more principal because I think he has grown a lot and come a long way, but I do not trust any of the rest of them if it came down to a division between principal and winning to go with principal and risk losing.

SM (01:18:30):
Okay. How about... These are some quick responses to Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers general thought.

KC (01:18:42):
Some of the most tragic figures in the left and some of the most tragic history. Those with the most grievances and the most legitimate grievances in American society, winding up using some of the worst tactics, embracing violence, seeing violence as the only way to do it. Tragic in that sense that it backfired on them and they suffered personally. The movement, the black liberation movement of that time suffered as a whole and the left suffered as a whole, but... Well, I also have a lot of understanding too. I do not understand it the way a black person can understand it, the way a poor black person can understand it, but I was a poor white kid and I can understand at least some of it, some of the rage, economics, feeling of isolation from the system and the powers at be, opportunities forever closed off or pretty much forever closed off. At least poor white kids had some opportunity, poor black kids had virtually nothing. But the opportunities for poor white kids were nowhere near what it was for middle class white kids. Poor white kids did not know anything about conscientious objection and how to go about doing it. Whereas we're simply getting into the National Guard, or getting into college and getting a deferment that way.

SM (01:20:19):
Dr. King, particularly with his speech in Vietnam on the go.

KC (01:20:23):
Yeah see, I did not realize that until many years later how eloquent and how thoughtful he had become on the war. I knew he had turned against the war publicly, not long before he was assassinated, but it was only in later years that I actually read some of the speeches from around that time and saw how truly sharp, at least according to what I read, how truly sharp his thinking and how much courage he had to speak that way regarding in particular America's role in the world at that time. Because to go beyond Vietnam to America's role in the world as a whole was the step that most of the left did not even go because it was focused so narrowly on Vietnam as a foreign policy, as a foreign affair, and King recognized that America had become the greatest purveyor of violence. It might have been even been his phrase, I forget exactly the phrase, but the greatest generator of violence in the world by that point in time. He was essentially saying, we are the bad guys, not just in Vietnam, but in general, in the world, we have to change our attitude about intervention and opposing every indigenous struggle because by calling it communism, whether it's in Asia, Africa, Latin America, I mean, it was pretty far-reaching kind of conclusion he came and a decision he made to say it.

SM (01:22:13):
He had a lot of courage, I was talking with a couple civil rights leaders on our campus this past year, and no one has written a book on Dr. King in Vietnam.

KC (01:22:22):
Oh, that is a great idea.

SM (01:22:24):
There has been a lot of books on Dr. King and his speech is well known.

KC (01:22:28):
I am going to talk to David Cortright and ask him if he... Do you know who David Cortright is?

SM (01:22:28):
No.

KC (01:22:33):
Okay. David Cortright's a former active duty GI leader soldier, Soldiers in Revolt is a well-known book of his from that time. He is now a professor at Notre Dame, and if there was ever a face on the GI movement, it was David Cortright. So, I mean, he was probably the most famous leader of the GI movement against the war, and that is how I first met him, because I was one of the mid to higher level leaders in the-

SM (01:23:05):
Is he still at Notre Dame?

KC (01:23:06):
Vietnam vet. Yeah, he is associated with it. There is the Four Freedoms Foundation, and he is the director of it is called, so that is the way he would find them on the internet. Four Freedom Foundation, either the fourth freedom or four freedoms might be the Fourth Freedom, try either one of those.

SM (01:23:22):
Okay.

KC (01:23:22):
Or just Cortright, C O R T R I G H T.

SM (01:23:29):
Okay.

KC (01:23:29):
David Cortright. And David is a great follower of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and he would be ideal to write this, he just published his memoirs on nonviolence. So, David Cortright did.

SM (01:23:42):
Oh, really?

KC (01:23:42):
On nonviolence and the anti-war movement and just in a movements in general.

SM (01:23:46):
Is that Notre Dame Press or?

KC (01:23:48):
No, that is paradigm. It is my own press, it is the same press that [inaudible]-

SM (01:23:52):
That is out now?

KC (01:23:54):
Yeah, it came out before mine did. Matter of fact, I used his as a model for when I was doing my citation, so I wanted to get the paradigm citation process right, I simply used his as an example.

SM (01:24:06):
What are your thoughts on the, again, just quick responses, the Berrigan brothers? Daniel and Philip.

KC (01:24:11):
Yeah. Again, great contributors, highly principled people. They were clearly religious, and it is something that I am not. I was born and raised Catholic, but I lost God in a fox whole. I began doubting a higher being when I looked around me and saw what was going on and all of the myths, religious myths, they became more and more unsupportable to me as I came more directly in contact with the worst of reality. You know what I mean? And plus, that whole Catholic upbringing in a Catholic Church reflected to me and represented to me the rigidness of the conventional life that produced the conventional society, the conventional structure and leadership that produced Vietnam. And I saw many of [inaudible], people like Cardinal Spellman blessing the bombers before they go off for, I do not want to go into great details there. There's some personal connections to include my uncle [inaudible]-

SM (01:25:27):
Did you become an atheist?

KC (01:25:28):
Atheist in the sense that I-

SM (01:25:31):
Or agnostic?

KC (01:25:32):
Yeah, I do not have a positive belief in God. It is possible that God exists, but if I am wrong about... I do not think it is going to be any big thing, because I think it is most important that you live your life in the best way you can, that you live a good life, that you be good to other people and try and be good yourself, do not always live up to it. But I think that the essence of every religion I accept, which is to do the right thing, that short, sweet version of what is his name? The black film producer, do the right thing.

SM (01:26:20):
Spike Lee.

KC (01:26:20):
Spike Lee, in a tradition of [inaudible], just do the right thing. And I think you could gather every serious and sincere religious person to gather around that same thing. Do the right thing, I believe in doing the right thing, that is my religion. Do the right thing-

SM (01:26:34):
Dr. Benjamin-

KC (01:26:34):
Of course, I do not always live up to it.

SM (01:26:35):
Dr. Benjamin Spock.

KC (01:26:39):
Benjamin Spock, baby doctor? I mean, that is how I associate... Well, I know that through reading and history that he was... And I might, if I taxed myself, recollect, but I cannot trust my recollection that he was connected in the Air War movement. I now know that he was. But no other recollections beyond that.

SM (01:26:54):
Well, I think this [inaudible], did not it? Yeah, it did. It all is still going. It was... Cannot tell. No, that good click, I heard it. Amazing. Well, it is still in the middle.

KC (01:27:11):
It is on a very slow speed.

SM (01:27:14):
Yeah, that is a very slow speed, did not know.

KC (01:27:16):
Yeah. You wind up, I think with less quality though, when you have it that slow speed, right?

SM (01:27:23):
Not sure, just something is wrong with this. I think this one comes out fine.

KC (01:27:29):
All right.

SM (01:27:29):
Abby Hoffman, Jerry Ruben, the Yippies.

KC (01:27:32):
Assholes.

SM (01:27:32):
Okay.

KC (01:27:41):
Yeah, assholes. Infantile leftist, people who might have had their heart initially in a right place when they decided to oppose things like the war and the establishment, but certainly were silly, stupid, infantile. To me, they were taking middle class tantrums. This was a middle or upper middle class tantrum, carry on the way they did. And they did great destruction to the image of the anti-war movement in the minds of middle America out there. Their thing was to goof on Middle America.

SM (01:28:19):
They got [inaudible] as the pig to run as president.

KC (01:28:23):
Yeah, they had no respect for middle America.

SM (01:28:25):
Malcolm X.

KC (01:28:27):
Malcolm X, militant, extremist. They are the words I think of first for my oldest, and my oldest recollection of that name from when I was much younger when I was a kid, fear. We in working class white America, row house, inner City America, and the white neighborhoods feared Malcolm X and black militants. In particular, the black Muslims because they were armed and they were fiery and they were angry, and they predated the Black Panthers. I mean, the Black Panthers, as we talked about it, adopted some violent tactics himself. But I have a better appreciation since then, since my earliest experiences listening to on a radio or seeing on television or reading about the black Muslims and Malcolm X, that this guy... Another tragic figure, this guy was attempting to do something for his people who were clearly wronged and perhaps in the most extreme cases, did not use the best approach, made strategic errors. But I do not know a great deal about them, I have never read a biography of them. I have not studied him. So I begin with my sense of him from when I was a kid in a racist white neighborhood of fearing him and fearing that riot that took place in 1964, I think it was in north Philadelphia, which spread up to our neighborhood, it was only a few blocks away. And to the point of better understanding, respect, but also a tragic sense of, it is a shame that he was not able to adopt the methods of a Martin Luther King and strengthened King's movement.

SM (01:30:50):
Of course, he was changing toward the end of his life. I think there is a direct link between that change and his death.

KC (01:30:58):
Yeah, sure.

SM (01:30:58):
Yep. Timothy Leary.

KC (01:31:02):
Acid, something I never used and never wanted to use because I was afraid I would not be able to control my Vietnam nightmares and my temper and my anger and my violence if I ever took acid. But that is what I associated him with.

SM (01:31:16):
How bad were drugs in Vietnam?

KC (01:31:18):
Well, not acid, geez when I was in Vietnam, grass was the thing. (19)68, early (19)69 grass was everywhere. I did not know at the time, I came in a complete novice, a complete virgin to drugs and learned while I was there that grass was ubiquitous and that a significant portion of the guys in Vietnam when they were off duty, downtime in a relatively safe area, smoked dope. And then I eventually got involved with some of those folks and started to smoke myself, that is where I was initiated into. But the heroin that eventually racked the armed forces in Vietnam did not make it is entry until well after I left. It really did not become a big thing until 1970. And those who have tracked that story, who have researched and told that story many years ago, in fact, like Alfred McCoy for instance, in his classic book, the Heroin in Southeast Asia, I think it was called, or was it the heroin Traffic... I forget the exact name. I have a copy of it on my bookshelf. But it showed that, in fact, the big influx of it was almost overnight. The big influx of it took place sometime in 19... It might have been a spring of 1970 now. It was there before then, but it was as well as opium [inaudible], it was pretty much relegated to the Vietnamese or the Chinese ethnic minority in Vietnam. It was not popular among American troops, but Heroin did become popular tragically after about spring of 19-

SM (01:33:24):
Just in continuing the names here.

KC (01:33:26):
Yeah.

SM (01:33:28):
Ralph Nader.

KC (01:33:30):
Just [inaudible]. I do not have much to say about that.

SM (01:33:36):
Daniel Ellsberg.

KC (01:33:38):
He is one of my heroes with the Pentagon Papers, former Marine. I have to be sympathetic to the former Marine. A guy that certainly did his time in Vietnam as an advisor, and then worked in the Pentagon and got access to the papers and based on conscience, the people who follow their conscience I have a lot of respect for, who do the right thing, put the principle over personal advantage, and he is one of them. I have a lot of respect for him.

SM (01:34:13):
Now, you have mentioned a couple people that had that conscience to the effect of Daniel Ellsberg, can you just list some other ones from that era? For who you think [inaudible].

KC (01:34:22):
Martin Luther King, certainly George McGovern, Bobby Muller, certainly.

SM (01:34:27):
Oh yes, definitely.

KC (01:34:32):
People who followed their conscience and risked a lot or maybe even sacrificed a lot to do that. Yeah, they are my heroes. I do not want to waste your tape sitting here, trying to think of more negatives, but I could come up with more if it was necessary.

SM (01:34:50):
George Wallace.

KC (01:34:53):
Never liked his politics, certainly he was a racist, but he was coming around at least to some kind of a conciliatory politics near the end of his life. Just he represents a negative image in my mind.

SM (01:35:08):
Richard Nixon.

KC (01:35:10):
Oh boy, tricky dick. I harbor more dislike... Hate. Okay, hate for Richard Nixon than I do for LBJ. Richard Nixon, as far as I am concerned, was far more responsible for prolonging that war than even most people understand and did absolutely everything he could to not only keep the war going, but hurt those who were legally and morally trying to oppose it back home. He was absolutely vindictive, absolutely. Vindictive is the word I could think of that would most associate-

SM (01:36:00):
Was the enemy's list as real as we... As it stated it is real in the history books?

KC (01:36:08):
Yes. He went after people and he had his executive branch bureaus and agencies go after people. So, it is well documented, whether it is IRS people he used, or military intelligence or CIA. I mean, it does not matter. And he used them illegally. I mean, the records clear on that.

SM (01:36:42):
This gets into the whole issue of the imperial presidency, there has been a book... Well, I cannot forget who worked with him now, the imperial presidency.

KC (01:36:52):
Oh, it is Schlesinger. It is Arthur Schlesinger.

SM (01:36:52):
Arthur Schlesinger.

KC (01:36:52):
Yeah, classic.

SM (01:36:53):
When did the imperial presidency begin? And where would you rate Nixon in that?

KC (01:37:01):
Well, I think you have to look at the 20th century as the era of imperial presidency.

SM (01:37:09):
FDR on?

KC (01:37:10):
No, even earlier than that. I would start with Wilson because of World War I and then FDR following him because of the Depression first and then World War II. It's the whole sense of national crisis and the need to centralize power in a national crisis. The willingness of the American society as a whole to defer in a special period and an emergency period and a period of real national crisis to a smaller and smaller group of people to make decisions so that they are able to do it quickly and with authority and with unity and all of those aspects one needs to have when dealing with an emergency. If there are 18 of you in a lifeboat and you are out there in the middle of the ocean, you cannot have 18 leaders. You have to figure out some way of pointing the boat and come up with somebody to make a decision. So, if there is a real national crisis, whether it is a world war or a great depression, the natural human, and in our political system, systemic tendency, and I do not think it's just in our political system, I think it is in any political system, the tendency is for a very frightened national population to want something to be done quickly about it. And the only way you can do that is by streamlining, even if it takes some temporary tweaking of the system legally to streamline the decision making so that decisions can be made effectively and quickly. Now that-

KC (01:39:03):
Well, that I think is not only natural for human beings to do and for political systems to do in general, but it is necessary, because you are talking about survival here. If it is a true national crisis, not a manufactured one. The problem was that, is that when the crisis lets up, you have to go back to normalcy, and you have to let loose those, peel back away those emergency powers that you have, the society has temporarily allowed the executive to take, the president in this case to take. And you have to be, and this is even more important, doubly on guard that some individual president, some president does not manufacture a crisis for you and usurp that authority and scare the hell out of the public with a pretend crisis.

SM (01:40:02):
Which the Gulf of Tonkin was, was not it?

KC (01:40:05):
Well, that is what I would say. Sure, yeah. Yeah. It was the creation of a national crisis. So, I think that is where the imperial presidency went wrong. I would not fault either Wilson or FDR for the powers they drew to themselves and used in those two world wars or the Depression, in the case of FDR, economically and socially, and during the Depression. Even in the areas where they overstepped their constitutional rights, because in those circumstances, the public was at least sympathetic, if not outright support of the president doing it, taking the actions he did, he took, and most of Congress generally agreed and did not, so that if you have got the public and Congress not objecting, the president can get away with it. And the President gets away with it, because, gee, it is a real crisis. And we have to survive. But once you are out of that crisis mode, and the Cold War was the structure that enabled fake crises to occur, you have abuse of those powers. And you have the runaway imperial presidency.

SM (01:41:21):
I know Tom Eagleton, he just passed away recently. He wrote a book on the role of the president to declare war. And it is a really good book. And the question always gets to me is we all knew about Wayne Morse, and I think the Senator from Alaska who-

KC (01:41:41):
Yeah, [inaudible].

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

KC (01:41:44):
It begins with a J.

SM (01:41:46):
They were against the war, but the other-

KC (01:41:48):
Gravel.

SM (01:41:48):
Yeah, but the other-

KC (01:41:49):
Was it Gravel?

SM (01:41:50):
No, not Gravel.

KC (01:41:51):
Oh, I am thinking of someone else.

SM (01:41:52):
Yeah, they were against the war. But the other (19)98, it was Wayne, because then of course you had Senator Fulbright and his challenge, and we all know what happened to him when he challenged President Johnson. And then Gaylord Nelson and that whole group. But why it took so long for Congress to... I guess-

KC (01:42:13):
Well, Congress-

SM (01:42:14):
Congress should have done more.

KC (01:42:16):
... Congress is the sackless branch for no small reason. It does not have a backbone, in general. The exceptions or the principle, ones that will sacrifice their political careers for principle. But in general, just the way Congress is made, just the way it is instituted. It has meant to follow public opinion. It has meant to follow the electorate. It was the one that most closely represents the population, and it has meant to be a check on the tyranny of the executive. But that has a downside. The upside is that, yeah, it checks the tyranny of the executive. The downside is you cannot lead with 535 people trying to represent their constituencies, so that Congress defers in periods of crisis. And Congress defers because it knows its own constituency wants Congress to defer in a crisis, in a true national crisis. If it turns out to be a fake national crisis, first of all, Congress has to be convinced it is fake. And they generally give the benefit of the doubt to the executive, which the population does. And even if they have the evidence that they, Congress have as elites, and they are elites, have evidence that it is a fake crisis, they still will hesitate, because of opportunism, they want to keep their political careers, to go against the President, so long as the people yet do not know that it's a fake, have not arrived at the conclusion it is a fake crisis. And they may even hesitate to inform their people to let the secret out of the bag because they are afraid of what it might do to the system and to their nice state seat. So, there is a lot going against principle here.

SM (01:44:16):
Maybe-

KC (01:44:16):
There is a lot of structure, a lot of history, a lot of just human character going against principle here, so that I do not think we should be surprised. We should not accept it, that we still should be surprised that Congress is a sackless branch.

SM (01:44:35):
Wow. Yeah, it is interesting. Just bringing up, there should be some sort of test given to every leader that goes into Congress, the profiles and courage test.

KC (01:44:44):
Oh, sure. Yeah. Absolutely.

SM (01:44:46):
Require them to read the book. And if you do not pass this, you cannot be our senator or our Congressman.

KC (01:44:50):
Absolutely. That is right. And any elected official presidents too should be required to read that book. I was tempted to write a book not long ago called Profiles In Cowardice.

SM (01:45:04):
That would be an interesting thing, because I think students need to see the other side, because students do want-

KC (01:45:10):
And give clear examples of when you had people who should have stepped up, and did not.

SM (01:45:15):
Yep. Yeah.

KC (01:45:16):
The causes of that.

SM (01:45:17):
Yeah. In fact, I know that Caroline Kennedy wrote another follow-up book to her dad, which is a very good book, of people that she felt, and they give the Profiles In Courage award up at the Kennedy Library every year. And I remember reading the one about the congressman from Alabama, I forget his name. He wrote a book. He has passed away since, but I had never heard of this guy, and he got the award, so I wanted to, I never heard of this man. And then, he lost his seat because he was a man of conscience, and he has unheard of. And he got the award. He was in a wheelchair.

KC (01:45:52):
Yeah, very-very rare case.

SM (01:45:53):
Right. He was a Southern congressman who lost everything. And he was, yeah, Republican just does not act that way.

KC (01:45:56):
Yeah.

SM (01:45:57):
So, Spiro Agnew.

KC (01:46:04):
Spiro Agnew, what a reprehensible guy. What was that term he used? Effete snobs or something like that? In describing at least the leadership of the left. Well, of course, he... I say of course, because I know better now. Of course, he was right to a limited degree that the leadership of the left was pretty much upper class and to some degree opportunistic. But there were a lot of people in the leadership that worked, of the left, that were not. And I am sure the vast majority of people who followed the leadership were not effete snobs. So yeah, this guy was a... Agnew was, I put him at the level of the gutter.

SM (01:47:05):
He was [inaudible]. Let us see, some of the other, Gerald Ford?

KC (01:47:10):
Tragic kind of guy. He was a caretaker. Gil Scott Heron referred to him many years ago as Oatmeal Man on a... part of a record he called, Pardon me, Mr. President, a great rift he did. And I could not forget that. Could not help remember that when they were doing all of these eulogies honoring Ford after he died. And I kept thinking, "Boy." It's not that he was a bad guy, but he was not all that good. He was brought on because he was neither. He was as bland as you could be. And the system produced that. I mean, and the system needed that at that point in time. They needed somebody to follow in the heels of Vietnam and Watergate that would not divide the country further. And the country was so divided that they had to find somebody that the Democrats and Republicans could support, because after all, you are talking about somebody who was not elected either to vice president or to president. And that is the other anomaly. It is not just the end of Vietnam and Watergate, but it's also making somebody president who was never elected to either of those offices, president or vice president. And they knew when they brought Gerald Ford in as vice president, that the president was not going to be around for very much longer. I mean, they were pretty much sure of that. So, they knew that he would be, so that is why they chose him. He was a tweener. He was a bridge. He was just, in that sense, he had a strength in that he could accommodate both sides in a principled way. I think he was probably a pretty principled guy, but he was tragic in a sense that he got to clean up after all that.

SM (01:48:56):
How about Jimmy Carter? Because when Jimmy Carter came in, he-

KC (01:49:00):
Oh, Jimmy.

SM (01:49:00):
... pardoned all the...

KC (01:49:01):
Yeah.

SM (01:49:03):
Does he play into any of this?

KC (01:49:04):
Well, that was a good move on his part, and that was courageous of him. But his courage was limited. Carter's idealistic side has always been overplayed since he has left office. We tend to think of him now as the kindly human rights, Habitat for Humanity, healing, elderly statesman. And everything he has done in those realms is good, and I will give him credit for that. But he also has to take responsibility for some of the nastier stuff he did, which was to become a born again warrior, Cold warrior when he heard the footsteps of Ronald Reagan getting closer and closer in 1979 and 1980. Because we have Jimmy Carter to thank for the B-1 bomber, for registration for the draft, for increasing the size of the military, for much of the militarization that Reagan then launched into was begun by Jimmy Carter, who finally, "Saw the light," in his words of the Soviet bear after 1979, 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a crushing of solidarity, that kind of thing. You have a guy, who for a short period of time, becomes the most saber-rattling warrior that, just as bad as any one of the Cold War presidents for a very short period of time, because then he loses the election, and he has to leave office. But it not only coincides with increasing of crises with the Soviet Union. If one were to be overly kind, one would say, well, he got that way because he actually saw what was going on around. But I think more tellingly coincided with the poll numbers getting closer and closer between him and Ronald Reagan. He tried out to out-Reagan Reagan, and nobody does that.

SM (01:51:13):
Yeah. You lead right into Reagan, because Reagan has got a history here too, as the governor of California, disliked by students at Berkeley and a lot of students around the country. He seems to be a voice that symbolizes the establishment. And then, of course, with being president. And then that whole issue, even when George Bush is vice president, when he came in, I think it was George Bush Sr. who said, "The Vietnam Syndrome is over."

KC (01:51:41):
Yeah. Well, he said that when he was president.

SM (01:51:43):
Oh, he did say that as president?

KC (01:51:44):
Yeah. He said that at the end of the first Gulf War.

SM (01:51:46):
Yeah.

KC (01:51:47):
"We finally kicked the Vietnam Syndrome," that is the quote.

SM (01:51:49):
Yep.

KC (01:51:50):
Well, he was full of crap on that issue. He just did not understand it as well as some of us who have spent so much time looking at it. But in fact, that that experience that he was summing up, that first Gulf War in 1991, reaffirmed the Vietnam Syndrome. It did not undercut it at all. At least it reaffirmed that, certainly among those in the military who believed that they learned lessons from the Vietnam War, which was to sort of the Powell Doctrine approach, which was to make sure that not only you have sufficient military strength to go after your enemy, but you win over the public, you win over Congress, that there is a real national commitment, yada, yada, yada. All of that was strengthened by the Persian Gulf War, so that, and historians now looking back at that period have come to a consensus that in fact it did strengthen the Vietnam Syndrome, because it was still around during the 1990s. It did not go away during the 1990s.

SM (01:53:03):
That is why when you talk about Vietnam period and why people have such an alarming reaction, obviously, is all the activism and all the other things. But so many lessons can be learned about how we deal with people, how you build trust, the concept of serving your country and what it truly means.

KC (01:53:26):
Yeah, and a lot of them are bad lessons.

SM (01:53:28):
Yeah, a lot of bad lessons, but a lot-

KC (01:53:30):
I mean, in the sense that you have a lot of contradictory lessons.

SM (01:53:31):
... You learn a lot about human nature. Yeah.

KC (01:53:34):
As you know from my book, that it depends on who you ask as to what the set of lessons are. And they often conflict with each other. There are too many lessons of Vietnam, and they contradict each other.

SM (01:53:44):
What are your thoughts on Barry Goldwater and the conservative movement, the Bill Buckleys, and American, some of the things that really upset a lot of conservatives in the last couple years, so, I interviewed Lee Edwards and a couple other people, is that they have been totally left out of the anti-war movement. The Young Americans for Freedom were against the war. There were conservatives that were against the war.

KC (01:54:10):
I did not realize that.

SM (01:54:10):
Yeah. And-

KC (01:54:11):
They were probably Libertarians, right? Are you talking about against the Vietnam War or against-

SM (01:54:14):
Against the Vietnam War.

KC (01:54:15):
Yeah. Yeah. I did not realize that. Perhaps they were against it because they thought it was not being fought properly. Perhaps they were against it because they did not think enough force was used.

SM (01:54:25):
How important was Barry Goldwater in this era, though? Because he-

KC (01:54:28):
Oh, he was critically important in the sense that he was what Johnson feared on the right. Johnson feared the left, and Johnson feared the right, and tried to split the difference. And Goldwater was his fear on the right, so that in Johnson's mind, it seems to me, gradually escalating with ground troops beat the hell out of dropping the nuclear device on Hanoi, which he thought Goldwater, or some people thought Goldwater wanted to do. But it also was a hell of a lot more acceptable than just saying, "Well, we will give up Vietnam. We will withdraw." And in Johnson's view, that is that world, Munich appeasement lesson that you do not accept peace at any price. You have to take a firm stand, or sooner or later the Red menace will be in Isla Vista or Long Island or somewhere like that.

SM (01:55:30):
What about Muhammad Ali?

KC (01:55:33):
Muhammad Ali.

SM (01:55:33):
Cassius Clay.

KC (01:55:34):
One of my heroes, and I remember when he was Cassius Clay, I followed. As a young kid I loved... I paid some attention to boxing, and I loved Cassius Clay. I loved Rubin Hurricane Carter, Cassius Clay, and Benny Kid Paret, who was a Philadelphia fighter who died in the ring, yeah.

SM (01:55:52):
He died. Yeah. I did a paper on him in college on against boxing.

KC (01:55:58):
Cassius Clay, yeah. I certainly did not understand his whole black Muslim conversion and his refusal to accept be drafted, because again, I was the kid and a teenager in a white working class, largely racist neighborhood that was afraid of any militant blacks. Anybody from a black community took not only a firm stand, but a firm militant stand, who was willing to fight, and that was my sense at that time. But that is a gap in between my admiration, beginning with Cassius Clay and then carrying on after I got back from Vietnam, of course, and turned against the war. But also just as a boxer, his comeback. I would listened to the radio in 1976 to that Zaire fight.

SM (01:56:55):
Oh, yeah.

KC (01:56:55):
You could not watch it on television, but I listened to the round by round summary of it when the radio broadcasted summaries of it from Zaire. I just loved that, that rope-a-dope thing. I was a big Cassius Clay fan.

SM (01:57:14):
Do you think-

KC (01:57:14):
[inaudible] Muhammad Ali fan.

SM (01:57:16):
When you look at his stand against the Vietnam War, boy, some people go after him, but some admire him when he would fall into your conscience?

KC (01:57:28):
Well, I admire him now because I have a different take on the war now than I did when I was a kid, when he was, I think it was in (19)67, was not it? That he refused to go to the draft?

SM (01:57:40):
Yes.

KC (01:57:42):
And I was a senior in high school, and then in bootcamp, and then preparing to go to Vietnam. That was my whole 1967. And my only impression of Cassius Clay was from the neighborhood and from my family background, from the social era, social milieu that I was in. And I was very apprehensive and put off by Clay's... I was disappointed in him. I thought that a great fighter like that, I could not understand it. It was just too much for me to grasp.

SM (01:58:25):
But when he beat Sonny Liston, I know, I thought nobody beat Sonny Liston. That guy was a-

KC (01:58:29):
Yeah, he was huge. I remember seeing Floyd Patterson knock out Ingemar Johansson, and the film reel at the movies in between, and I will never forget it, and out cold on the floor. His foot shook. He had those tremors or whatever they call them. I was a big fan of boxing.

SM (01:58:56):
We cannot, been just mentioning men, but people like Gloria Steinem. I have only got about 10 more minutes. Gloria Steinem and the leaders of the women's movement. Your thoughts on...

KC (01:59:07):
I think first of people like Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan. They, to me, were the earlier ones. And Gloria Stein probably was around or right after them, or right, maybe the later part. That was also something that I had trouble grasping, understanding, did not get on a visceral level or a gut level or an immediate reaction level at first, but all of this was taking place in the context of me becoming anti-war. And I began to adopt the politics of the left in general, and have a far more open mind there to some of the things I did not immediately get, and therefore became acceptable and tried to understand and incorporate that in the way I lived and the way I understood the world. But it was not on the same sort of gut level as Vietnam.

SM (02:00:05):
What are your thoughts that some of the women complain about of that era, is that in the anti-war movement and the Civil Rights Movement, women were secondary figures? That men were male dominant, and they put women in secondary roles, and that is a lot of the reason why the women went out on their own to create the women's movement, because the secondary rules in both of those movements.

KC (02:00:29):
Well, I think it is true in general, and it is true in particular in most organizations, but that is not the end of the answer, because it was more or less true with certain organizations in certain periods. I think that if you are talking about (19)66, (19)67, you're going to find a lot more of that. If you are talking about (19)70, (19)71, you are going to find a whole lot less of that, because women were being far more assertive and taking leadership roles, if not on a national level, at least on a local and regional level, a lot more. And it depends on the organization too. For instance, resistance, which was based in Philadelphia, resistance to the draft, and they had the Omega as the sign [inaudible].

SM (02:01:14):
Oh, yeah. Right.

KC (02:01:16):
And Vietnam Veterans Against the War were very close. They supported us a lot because they worked with active duty GIs. That was their specialty at Fort Dix, at the Naval Hospital, other military bases. They did GI organizers, and they knew that the better they got to know us, the better they could speak to the GIs. Or perhaps they just knew by working with the GIs how to relate to us when we came back. And we actually shared offices together, we socialized with each other, etc. And that was a largely women's organization, all women in leadership there.

SM (02:01:48):
Very good.

KC (02:01:49):
And they actually taught us a lot about how to deal with women in the movement. I mean, I was not familiar with women who did not shave their legs and did not shave their armpits until I met women from resistance and did not wear bras. By that point, most young women were not wearing bras.

SM (02:02:07):
Right.

KC (02:02:07):
So, that became fairly common in the culture at that time.

SM (02:02:11):
Right.

KC (02:02:12):
But what was not common in the culture was having really hairy legs and really hairy armpits.

SM (02:02:18):
You see that over in Europe and Germany.

KC (02:02:20):
That is right. It was very European-

SM (02:02:21):
Yeah, very European.

KC (02:02:23):
But it became strong among women who were strong and on the left in America.

SM (02:02:30):
We have a professor. I will not even mention her name. I'd better not.

KC (02:02:34):
Yeah. Okay. Not on tape.

SM (02:02:35):
Not on tape though. Finally, the Watergate Committee people, Sam Ervin, Baker Thompson, even Weiker, the Watergate Committee-

KC (02:02:47):
Yeah, I know them well.

SM (02:02:48):
Just your thoughts. John Dean and that whole situation there.

KC (02:02:52):
Well, I am so happy Congress stepped up and took a leading role in that case. It may sound as though what I just said contradicts something earlier, that the Congress cannot lead because they are the sackless branch, 535 them, etc. But there are exceptions, and again, national crisis, but in this case, created by an imperial presidency creates the room for Congress to be that exception. Does not mean that Congress will automatically step into that vacuum, but the vacuum and real leadership in a crisis, because it is clear to much of the nation, most of the nation, the president's taking the wrong direction, Congress has to step up and fill in that vacuum, because there is not no other branch to do it. The Supreme Court by its very nature is passive and waits for cases to be brought to it, and cannot play that kind of leadership role. So, it has to be. If the imperial executive is leading in the wrong direction, and not only manufacturing a national crisis that was not there, but creating a national crisis because of the imperial presidency, then Congress had better step up. And in this case, the Watergate Committee and much of the new leadership and that, old leadership and new leadership, the Joe Biden and so forth, that were brand new coming in, and that Vietnam generation that came in, they stepped up and they played a good role, but it took also others, like good leadership among some principled, courageous journalists to do that. And it took the conditions of the American public being prepared to support that too, being not only ready but overripe for that kind of thing. Because again, Congress, the limit, even in a national crisis created by an imperial president, the Congress is still going to want to make sure that they have their asses covered in some way before they step out there, and the coverage is to have public support for it.

SM (02:05:02):
When did the (19)60s begin? When was the magic moment when the (19)60s began? By the way-

KC (02:05:07):
In my view? Or history's view?

SM (02:05:09):
By the way, my book's title is going to be The Magic Moment.

KC (02:05:14):
Yeah. Are you talking about in my personal view or in history?

SM (02:05:16):
No, in your personal view, what do you think was the beginning of the (19)60s and when did the (19)60s end? Was there an incident? Was there a happening?

KC (02:05:28):
For me, the (19)60s began as the (19)60s that we know and love or hate, depending on what their perspective is, in 1965, when I first sat around late at night listening to a Bob Dylan album, as people around me were drinking and smoking dope and talking about controversial issues. I forget whether it was about the war or civil rights, but clearly had a non-establishment, if not an anti-establishment attitude. And that occurred at a Benedictine seminary.

SM (02:06:09):
Oh, my God.

KC (02:06:11):
My uncle's Benedictine seminary. It was a monastery, but they trained seminarians there, Benedictine seminarians in Hingham, Massachusetts. My uncle was the abbot.

SM (02:06:24):
Oh, my God.

KC (02:06:24):
And I was up there with my brother as guests for their annual picnic, and after the picnic was over, and after everything was cleaned up, and people were going to bed, some of the young seminarians asked if we wanted to join them in the tower, which they had this big tower. They still have it there, big stone tower. You could hang out in the tower, and just talk and hang out. Well, they were playing Dylan. I mean, I was Motown all the way or-or classic rock or whatever you want to call it, and they are drinking, and they are passing joints around, and they are talking about social issues. And in a clearly critical way, as their attitude. I mean, this blew my mind. Now, after that, left and went right back to my own very conventional working-class situation. That did not change me, but that was my first peek at it. That was my first peek at an alternate, alternative lifestyle. Let us put it that way. If I were to pick anything, that is the one thing I can think of, the very first glimpse of an alternative lifestyle. And after all, that is what the (19)60s was supposed to be about.

SM (02:07:51):
Right. It is like my brother, when he got married in 1985, the priest that married him was young, and his music he played in his office was Led Zeppelin.

KC (02:08:06):
Oh, Jesus.

SM (02:08:06):
My brother said, "What have we gotten ourselves into?" He was a legend.

KC (02:08:11):
By the way, if my uncle ever had gotten wind around, he would have had a stroke. Honest to God. We never told anybody about that. My brother and I just only recently talked about it again, and see, I did not realize. I do not think I remember. I cannot clearly recall seeing the dope being passed around, but my brother, who was two years older than me told me, "Oh yeah, they were passing around marijuana. They were smoking marijuana." I am not sure my brother ever smoked marijuana before, so it is not like something that he would make up, but I know they were drinking and playing Bob Dylan and talking and acting in alternative ways. These were seminarians. I do not know how many of them remained in there, but actually several of them did because we met them many years later.

SM (02:08:56):
When did it end?

KC (02:08:58):
When did it end?

SM (02:08:58):
For you?

KC (02:09:01):
I think (19)70, '72 was the end, the loss of McGovern's campaign, the overwhelming reelection of Nixon. The war was over for all intents and purposes. The war was not over for the Vietnamese, but the American involvement was over. After that it became... I mean, the war for me is the most direct connection to the (19)60s, the most, I guess the brightest characteristic. And yeah, one of your very first, if not the very first question about what is it about the (19)60s? It's the war, right?

SM (02:09:38):
Yeah.

KC (02:09:39):
Well, the war was... That was the last I was active in 1972 because I figured it was pretty much all over. It was time for me to move on and do other things. I mean, I still remain very active in an alternative sense, but not with the war.

SM (02:09:56):
What did that helicopter flying off the rooftop-

KC (02:10:00):
That was (19)75.

SM (02:10:02):
... In (19)75, how did that strike you? Just seeing that on the news?

KC (02:10:05):
Well, I felt it was much too late.

SM (02:10:08):
Yeah.

KC (02:10:09):
This should have happened a long, long time before. There would be hell of a lot fewer deaths. We should not have gone in the first place, and it is happening much too late. I did not feel a kind of loss or anger or alienation that I suppose some veterans did. But for me, it was a good thing that that last helicopter was finally leaving so the Vietnamese could have their own country back. And I thought it should have happened a hell of a lot earlier than that.

SM (02:10:48):
We are going to end with, I got about 15, 16 words of an era or an event. Just very, very quick responses.

KC (02:10:57):
All right.

SM (02:11:00):
Number one, Woodstock.

KC (02:11:03):
Oh, I think of my time floating around in the Mediterranean, still in the Marines and on a ship, and reading about Woodstock in August of, or September of (19)69, as we got the latest Life or Look Magazine, whatever it was in. And I am thinking how cool that was. I wished I had hair that long at that point. I had side, high and tight cut of the Marine Corps, and you're only allowed two to three inches on the top in the middle of your head. I just could not wait to get out. I was back from Vietnam by that time, so I was done with that, but I still had time to do the Marine Corp. I could not wait to get out, could not wait to join them.

SM (02:11:44):
Black power.

KC (02:11:46):
Frightening at first. Understandable, eventually tragic in the end.

SM (02:11:52):
Communes.

KC (02:11:53):
Commune?

SM (02:11:53):
Communes.

KC (02:11:53):
As in commune?

SM (02:11:55):
Communes.

KC (02:11:55):
Like a commune? Like a hippie-dippy commune?

SM (02:11:59):
Yeah, communes. Yes.

KC (02:11:59):
Yeah. Attractive for a while in my most-

KC (02:12:03):
Attractive for a while in my most hippy-dippy phase, but then too idealistic. I never could bring myself to trying to live on something like that because I did not think it could survive. And I thought that life in established American society would inevitably take over, would engulf it and swallow it up and make it disappear.

SM (02:12:30):
Hippies?

KC (02:12:30):
Hippies. I think I was one. Sometimes some of my old friends tell me I was not because... Well, I must have demonstrated too many of those old establishment or conventional, not establishment, but conventional traits. But I enjoyed it the two or three years I think I was a hippie, with few cares and few resources, little money, living cheaply, hitchhiking. I hitchhiked across the country several times. You could do it then safely with long hair and a beard. Hung out with people in lots of different places. I enjoyed that. But sooner or later, you have to grow up and take responsibility.

SM (02:13:20):
Yippies?

KC (02:13:21):
Yippies. Assholes.

SM (02:13:24):
Counter-culture?

KC (02:13:28):
A good idea for a while, until you jarred the prevailing culture, and there was a sense of necessary change. But after that, it becomes less and less relevant.

SM (02:13:43):
Pentagon Papers?

KC (02:13:45):
Loved them. Great thing that they came out.

SM (02:13:49):
Chicago Eight?

KC (02:13:51):
Heroes to some degree, in a sense that they took a stand and suffered through that trial and the fear of long prison terms. But they were, other than that, a pretty diverse group. That is my sense of them, that they were not a close-knit group of people. They were all snatched up together doing the same thing. They were very different people. Dillinger and Bobby Seale are tremendously different people.

SM (02:14:23):
Oh yeah. And Tom Hayden-

KC (02:14:25):
And Redman and-

SM (02:14:28):
The Rubin and Hoffman. And they got the lesser known John Froines and yeah-

KC (02:14:31):
Yeah, not Redman. Not Redman. I guess Redman was not part of it. Who was Redman in, SDS or something like. I forget. Anyway.

SM (02:14:36):
Oh, Mark Rudd.

KC (02:14:37):
Mark Rudd, yeah.

SM (02:14:39):
He was in SDS at Columbia. John Lennon?

KC (02:14:41):
John Lennon, fellow atheist, imagining a world without God.

SM (02:14:53):
Good movie out. US Versus John Lennon, which just happened recently.

KC (02:14:57):
Yeah-yeah, yeah. He was a good guy. I think he probably was a little temperamental and could not get along as well as he probably should have tried to with his buddies, but he was part-

SM (02:15:11):
How about the Beatles?

KC (02:15:12):
Just the Beatles. Yeah. I love The Beatles, but they are not what I consider to be my youth's music. Motown.

SM (02:15:26):
Oh, yeah.

KC (02:15:27):
City kid dances, fuss times, dating, listening to music on a radio, slapping on that English leather. Motown.

SM (02:15:37):
Motown, because that is the music of the year. Because when you think of the music of the (19)60s, you think of Motown, but you also think of-

KC (02:15:44):
The Beatles-

SM (02:15:45):
Woodstock, all the rock bands, the folk singers.

KC (02:15:47):
Well see, Woodstock was after I went to Vietnam and after I came back. So that, to me, I am an adult. That is no longer my safe home, comfortable, great carefree time of shelter to some degree. We were living in a poor working class neighborhood. You're exposed to some bad stuff, but nevertheless, you still have a family, a house, a neighborhood, kids you go to school with. There is a normalcy there and a carefreeness, because your parents, you are not having to work. I had to work part-time, but you know. You know what I mean?

SM (02:16:19):
Yep.

KC (02:16:20):
You do not have to take adult responsibility yet. By the time Woodstock happened, well, I was hippie-dippy. I am still not taking adult responsibility, but I took responsibility to lead politically. I did do that. And I took care of myself. I managed to pay the bills.

SM (02:16:34):
Kent State and Jackson State?

KC (02:16:36):
Kent State, Jackson State. Triggers for my radicalization. The first trigger was of course the invasion of Cambodia. That son of a bitch, Nixon led. And then Kent State and Jackson State were reactions to that. And then my reaction to Kent State and Jackson State were, because there were demonstrations within days of the invasion of Cambodia, and were protests against the war because of the Invasion of Cambodia. And I am at home, not politically astute at all, not involved in any way. Could not even conceive myself involving any war movement. I am out of the service only a couple of months, and I see this stuff on television, and I cannot believe this war is not ending. I had a gut level of revulsion against the war because I did not think it was worth anything. It was stupid. It was a lie, I knew that much, because the leaders, my leadership, military and political leadership were telling lies about what we were really doing there, and what the people there actually thought about our presence. But I had no political consciousness as an activist yet. But boy, that me pissed off, the Cambodia, and then went right on into Kent State and Jackson. Mostly Kent State, because of course I could relate to the white kids more.

SM (02:17:52):
See, April 30th, to me, is a big day that we do not ever think about that much. Particularly the boomer generation.

KC (02:17:58):
What was April 30th?

SM (02:18:00):
April 30th was the invasion of Cambodia.

KC (02:18:02):
I always thought it happened around May first, but definitely April 30th.

SM (02:18:04):
May 4th was when the killings took place.

KC (02:18:05):
That is right.

SM (02:18:06):
But April 30th was also when the helicopter went off the roof.

KC (02:18:10):
See, I was not traumatized by that.

SM (02:18:13):
April 30th was also when-

KC (02:18:13):
Good enough. Close that chapter.

SM (02:18:14):
FDR died.

KC (02:18:15):
Is that right?

SM (02:18:15):
What is amazing is that April 30th and Kent State had so much bearing on me because I was a senior at SUNY Binghamton, and I broke my arm. I was in the hospital, had a very bad arm break, and I went to my graduation at SUNY Binghamton on May 17th, but May 7th was when the Grateful Dead were coming to our campus. I was looking forward to it.

KC (02:18:37):
Oh, boy. So, you are two years older than me. I just did the math. You were graduating from college in 1970.

SM (02:18:43):
I graduated college in 1970.

KC (02:18:44):
So, you graduated from high school?

SM (02:18:45):
(19)66, yeah.

KC (02:18:45):
So, you are one year older than me. I am sorry.

SM (02:18:45):
Yeah, (19)66.

KC (02:18:49):
(19)67, I graduated.

SM (02:18:50):
Yeah. But Kent State was just unbelievable. It has affected me my whole life. Because even when the tragedy of Virginia Tech took place, and they talked about the worst tragedy ever around the... It was terrible, all the killings and everything. But we seem to forget the four students who died at Kent State, the seven who were wounded, and the two who died at Jackson State. We cannot forget them. Universities pay tribute to the Montreal, the women who were killed in Montreal in (19)89, and they had the Women's Center paid, and we have ceremonies, and it happens all over the country.

KC (02:19:27):
And the women were killed for what?

SM (02:19:29):
The doctor who came and killed the nurses.

KC (02:19:31):
That is right, yeah.

SM (02:19:32):
So, Montreal (19)89. And so we paid tribute to the tragedy of the women dying. But you could not even bring up paying memorial service to the ones that died at Kent State. It is activism again, it is bringing up all the past.

KC (02:19:44):
Well, it is because it is politically controversial, and universities do not like political controversy. It makes their trustees nervous because it makes the potential donors nervous.

SM (02:19:55):
Yeah. When I think of, I went to the Remembrance ceremony at Kent State 35th, and I went there and I spent the entire four day... There is no question to me that when you look at Sandy Scheuer and Bill Schroeder and Jeff Miller and Allison Krause, that they were destined to do good things. You look at their background, their families, what their majors were and everything else. The tragedy is that we lost those four, and then we lost the two at Kent State. And I do not know about one of them. I mean, Jackson State. But to me, that tragedy sticks with me because it is part of the Vietnam War. When I go to the wall in Washington, I know they did not die in Vietnam, but I see them all the time there. Here is some names, just quick responses. President Q?

KC (02:20:50):
Sleaze bag.

SM (02:20:53):
The other one, I forget.

KC (02:20:54):
Key?

SM (02:20:54):
Yeah, General Key?

KC (02:20:56):
Yeah.

SM (02:20:56):
We almost brought him to Westchester.

KC (02:20:58):
Yeah. A better dressed sleaze bag. He always used to wear an Ascot.

SM (02:21:05):
William Westmoreland.

KC (02:21:07):
Oh, God. War criminal.

SM (02:21:13):
How about Creighton Abrams? Neighbors found him.

KC (02:21:19):
Probably tried to do the best he could with a bad situation.

SM (02:21:23):
The two ambassadors, Ellsworth Bunker and Henry Cabot Lodge?

KC (02:21:28):
Bunker, I do not know much about Bunker, other than he was largely ineffective in dealing with the Vietnamese. Cabot Lodge was far more effective, but in a sneaky CIA way.

SM (02:21:45):
Dwight Eisenhower?

KC (02:21:51):
A president that was seen as very inactive in the Cold War, that actually was very active in covertly making sure that the dirty deeds were being done covertly by the CIA.

SM (02:22:14):
Do you think Vietnam went all the way back to Truman, when he rejected the letter from Ho Chi Minh? Because Ho Chi Minh had written a letter when we first became president, and he did not even acknowledge it because he was a communist.

KC (02:22:27):
Well, I would trace it back to Truman, but not for that reason. You could reject the letter and still not get yourself involved in Vietnam. America became deeply involved in Vietnam. That is why we are here. America's involvement began under Truman, with Truman's winking and a nod to the French using American equipment, to American money, American equipment, American uniforms, rifles, to win the front door of France for the purpose of solidifying France as a bulwark against the Soviets rolling into Europe, going right out the back door to Indochina. Truman knew all about that and increasingly supported the French effort in Indochina covertly. So, he takes the initial blame and everybody else gets in line after that.

SM (02:23:22):
It is a long line. couple other final ones here. The beats?

KC (02:23:28):
Oh, the beatniks? What do you mean, the beats?

SM (02:23:30):
Yeah, Marilyn Young, the history professor at NYU said that she felt the (19)60s began with the beats.

KC (02:23:37):
Yeah. See, she might be a little older than me. Yeah. The beats were...

SM (02:23:42):
Kerouac and Ginsburg.

KC (02:23:44):
I know who they are in history, but they were not real to me at the time. To me, the beats were what I saw on television. People in berets going, "Hey man..."

SM (02:23:56):
Maynard G. Krebs.

KC (02:23:56):
Maynard G. Krebs. That is right. Dobie Gillis. That is where I associate, that is the beats as far... Or the TV show called Bourbon Street Beat.

SM (02:24:07):
Cannot remember that one.

KC (02:24:08):
Yeah, that was not a long-lived one, but anyway.

SM (02:24:11):
(19)62 Missile Crisis?

KC (02:24:14):
I thought I was not going to live very much longer. I thought that was going to be pretty much it. We all certainly went to church a lot more, or synagogue, or wherever our beliefs led us, fearing that the country would go up any day in thermonuclear disaster.

SM (02:24:37):
The astronauts. 1969, Neil Armstrong.

KC (02:24:40):
The astronauts, yeah, pride, but not as much pride as the Europeans had, because I was in Europe when that hurt happened in (19)69. And when we went ashore from the ship, whether it was Spain, or France, Italy, that is all the people we're talking about around that period of time, how great this was. "You Americans had put somebody on the moon." And we said, "Oh, that is cool, and then give us another beer." We thought it was cool, but we did not take it as that big of a thing. But then again, all of us had been to Vietnam, so our own risks, to us, were more immediate, more memorable, and in some ways more direct than what we thought the astronauts were. They had, I think, a better chance of surviving that trip than many of us did going into combat Vietnam.

SM (02:25:37):
How about that Cold War, and we know that the Cold War was started right after World War II, but Cold War and Vietnam?

KC (02:25:44):
Well, some trace it all the way back to the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1917. And World War II was just a temporary break, a marriage of convenience between Stalin and FDR and Churchill, and that we went right back into our anti- Soviet approach after that. But one has to point out the exception, it was FDR that recognized for the first time, formally recognized Soviet Union in 1933 when he came into office. So he was at least willing to deal with them. But Cold War, what a huge mistake. I probably differ from a lot of other of your respondents in that sense. So, I think the entire Cold War was a mistake.

SM (02:26:27):
John Wayne?

KC (02:26:30):
Great movies, but certainly not like real combat people.

SM (02:26:37):
He played all those roles.

KC (02:26:42):
Played all those roles, and all of us who watched him developed all these myths about what combat really was like.

SM (02:26:46):
Cannot think of anything else here on. Make sure I covered it. Well, the generation gap, too. What is interesting today is there is obviously, I like your thoughts on the generation gap during the (19)60s, but comparing it today with the generation Xers, and even some boomers and their kids, they have never been closer. They are involved in students’ lives, and there does not seem to be any generation gap between generation Xers and millennials, or even the older boomers and millennials. What is happening there?

KC (02:27:16):
I think it is there, but it is more subtle. Unless you define gap in a certain way, that it takes a real qualitative aspect to it. That is, we are not talking about degrees here. We are talking about something in kind. One could say that, yeah, there was a generation gap among many during the (19)60s, of those boomers with their parents, but not all. I mean, again, we would have to sit down and say, okay, in reality, what percentage of boomers were truly alienated from their parents? And if I had simply come back from Vietnam and did what so many other Vietnam veterans did, there would have been no gap. I would have just simply come back to the life I led. I would have gotten a job or continued to go to church on Sundays with my family, and there would have been some differences because I have been in a war, certainly. But the gap would not have been there. I think the generation gap is most clearly evident between those who took, certainly that 15 percent who took leadership or acting role in a sustained way in the movements of the (19)60s and their parents. But for the other 85 percent, I would take a hard look at that before I would judge that as a gap, because I know a lot of people just simply went home and lived their own lives, and there was never any real gap.

SM (02:28:34):
What is your perception of the media's role in coverage of the Vietnam War, and coverage of social issues in that timeframe comparing to today? Some people think it is irresponsible that today's media is basically being controlled. That favoritism, for example, access to the White House, is that if you are in with the White House, you are favored, you get access. Has that always been the case, or has a Woodward and Bernstein type of a mentality gone? Investigative journalism?

KC (02:29:02):
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Because we still have it. Seymour Hersh is still writing good stuff. Nobody's thrown him in jail. Nobody's tapped his phones lately, that I know of. Well, I am sure the NSA is busy tapping everybody's phone, tapping their cell phones and intercepting their email. But he does not seem to be singled out on anybody's enemy list or anything like that. You can still do investigative journalism to some degree. You do not have to anymore to some degree, because it is just not necessary because there is so many media organizations, outlets, forums, whether it is in cyberspace or print media or whatever, that there is a great deal of competition to constantly expose stuff. The Bush administration cannot keep it secret for God's sake. As powerful as they became in their most powerful years, the earliest years, when the neocons were truly on a roll, and they were doing some truly what I considered dastardly stuff. They still did not have full control, even over their own people, let alone everybody else. So, it has been a lot of stuff. A long list of books have come out critical of this war. Tell-all books from the administration itself, whether you are talking about inside the intelligence community, inside the military, inside the White House. Wherever you are talking about, there has been a lot of stuff uncovered that is been uncovered faster and in a broader way than ever happened during the Vietnam period. And I just think it is a difference. It is a difference in the technology. It is a difference in the times. We did not have cyberspace back then. We did not have the internet back then, so you are going to have differences. So I think the media plays pretty much the same role now as they did then, only in a much different way, because their communications facility, their communications tools in an information age are much different and much better than they were back then. The media plays just as good and just as bad role as, say, other institutions like Congress in these political controversies. Congress waits until they are absolutely sure public opinion is at least turning to their side, if not on their side, before they will act. The media is the same way. The media did not turn against the war first and public opinion followed. It was vice versa. Public opinion according to that polling figures that John Buehler and many others have come up with show that the public opinion swayed against the war before Walter Cronkite ever stepped out and said, "I think we have a stalemate here. We better think about new ways." So that the media does this. Why? Because the media has to sell those papers, sell that airtime, sell those advertisements, and they need to, as a responsible institution, be careful before they go out on a limb. They are careful. So, they are careful that the public has already turned against them before they start, as a mainstream mass turned against you. Of course, among the public, you have a fringe that turns against it earlier, and you have a fringe in the media that turns against it earlier, The Nation, or Ramparts, or something like that. So, I do not fault the media. I do not honor them for doing great things, and I do not condemn them for doing bad. They are doing what they are supposed to do. I cannot condemn them any more than the desert for being hot or the wind for blowing.

SM (02:32:22):
I keep coming up with questions here and we are going to end this, but I keep going back to Dr. King about one of the statements he made in one of his speeches that the Vietnam War had a disproportionate number of African Americans who served in that war. And when you got down to the wall in Washington, there is a disproportionate number of African Americans who were on that Wall.

KC (02:32:43):
How do you know?

SM (02:32:44):
See, I do not know. But then of course, this Dr. King, he died in 1968, and there were other people that died after (19)68, through (19)73. The question is this: the role of minorities in the Vietnam War, and you have made reference already that they at many times did not have any choice but to go through service. Some of it did it to better their lives, because they did not have any other alternatives.

KC (02:33:11):
Probably because they were drafted, probably because they did not have a job.

SM (02:33:12):
What was it like when you were there in terms of, we have already talked about drugs, but in terms of black, white, Latino, white, Native American, we have heard about, there has been some things written about Native Americans being thrown to the point because they were natural and-

KC (02:33:33):
Good trackers.

SM (02:33:34):
Good trackers, and then a lot of them died because of that.

KC (02:33:36):
I do not know about that.

SM (02:33:37):
But Asians, In terms of what was it like, and secondly, just being there, how strong was the anti-war movement amongst the troops?

KC (02:33:47):
Okay. That is a lot to answer in a short time, but I am going to try and do it briefly.

SM (02:33:50):
Do it short.

KC (02:33:55):
The area where there was clear and obvious tension between troops in Vietnam was between black and white troops. That is not to say that there were not racial tensions between Hispanics and whites, Hispanics and blacks, Asian, but I do not remember any Asian Americans in the units that I was in, but certainly Native Americans here or there. I do not recall anybody being singled out and put on point because of any of that, whether they were Native American or black or white or what. But I do recall that there seemed to be a higher concentration of black troops in grunt units, combat units, than in the Marine Corps in general. And I have heard and read and seen figures, I do not know how hard they are, that indicate that that was true in the Army as well. But then again, I have read since I started doing research on the war, that those figures are soft, and that the real story says that blacks did not die in any higher proportion than whites. So, I do not know what the actual figures are, or whose figures to use, but my personal experience tells me that there was a higher concentration, a disproportionate concentration of black troops in the grunt units. They still were not the majority. Whites were still majority of grunts, but if blacks were making 10 to 20 percent of the population up around that time, there was probably 30 or 40 percent of marine grunt units. When I was there in (19)68 and (19)69, they were blacks. Now the tension between there was manifested mostly when one was in the rear. The further in the rear, the more tension. The closer to the bush, the less tension. Because the closer to the bush, the closer to the danger, the more you needed each other. And the bush, you did not let those arguments get in the way. And you were your brother's keeper. And back in the rear, there was a luxury to take on political questions like that in that sense, social questions or whatever. And people could start to congregate among the cliques and shun others. And actually, at the worst times, get into fist fights, gun fights, knife fights, that kind of stuff. So that that is... And then either in Germany or Japan or back in the States, it was even worse. So the further got away from combat in Vietnam, the more the hostility. Because by (19)69 and (19)70, the hostility, you could cut it weather nice. It was so thick. It was really bad. At Camp Lejeune, we were getting ready to go on this med cruise after I was back from Vietnam, getting ready in August of, July of (19)69. And had a big going away party, I did not attend the party, but for the battalion, I was part of the battalion going away. They had a fight in the enlisted man's club after the club let out, and two people were killed, and a bunch were seriously wounded. And it was a racial fight. And by the time we had to leave the next day to go embark for Spain. But by the time we got to Spain, they were waiting for us. The Criminal Investigation Division with witnesses and a motorized, this box of wheels that had only a slip of everybody to get off the boat, single file, and picking out people that were part of this fight. They got shipped back for a trial. And that was a really bad scene. You could not go around a military base without several other people for fear of being jumped, knifed, robbed, maybe just simple robbery, drugs. I mean, the military was coming apart. There's no security on the military base. That was a bad scene.

SM (02:37:37):
Any final thoughts that you'd like to mention here, or anything that I maybe did not ask that you were expecting me to ask?

KC (02:37:43):
Yeah, Mỹ Lai. Why no Mỹ Lai? That is my question to you.

SM (02:37:54):
That was on my list here. I did not read it. Mỹ Lai. Yeah.

KC (02:37:55):
Well, on a much smaller level, much smaller level, far more typical in Vietnam, that is that killing innocent civilians, purposely killing innocent civilians, two or three or four at a time was not all that uncommon in Vietnam. Sometimes 10 or 20 at a time. Mỹ Lai was unusual that it was four or 500. That is what made it unusual.

SM (02:38:15):
And that it was Kelly and Medina, the names.

KC (02:38:15):
Yeah, sure.

SM (02:38:15):
Kelly got off, and they...

KC (02:38:15):
They got pardoned by Richard Nixon.

SM (02:38:27):
Okay. And Medina, whatever happened to him?

KC (02:38:29):
He was found innocent. Acquitted.

SM (02:38:32):
We had Country Joe McDonald on our campus a couple of years back, and Dan [inaudible 02:38:35] were in a dinner.

KC (02:38:35):
An old friend of VVAW.

SM (02:38:35):
No, he is a good guy. And he said that, Jan, did you want to tell Steve and everybody else in the room why there were no prisoners of war on the other side? They were only talking about on this side. And he wanted me to tell, and he was kind of making a reference to that there were no prisoners of war on the other side, that Americans took them. They gave them to the South Vietnamese troops, and the South Vietnamese troops summarily killed them all.

KC (02:38:59):
Well, they kill a lot... From my understanding, from my evidence, I did not experience it firsthand. I certainly had experience with prisoners of war, but they got passed on and I did not know where they went. But I found out later they did get turned out in South Vietnamese government, but not always right away. Often the Americans, usually Americans are targeted first, and then South Vietnamese, and it was not all that unusual for those detainees, those Viet Cong suspects or confirmed VC during the interrogation to somehow die, or certainly be seriously injured. And there were various ways of doing this with, field telephones, or water torture, or half a chopper ride.

SM (02:39:42):
Yeah. I heard the story about how they took them up in the helicopter.

KC (02:39:45):
Yeah. You never wanted to throw out the important one. You threw out the one that you knew did not have any information, to intimidate the important one. But again, I did not have any firsthand experience with this, but I certainly have been among enough Vietnam veterans, and some of them took pictures of this stuff. I mean, that is what sealed it with Mỹ Lai. If it was not for the journalists taking pictures, and then those pictures by other journalists being distributed through Life Magazine, Mỹ Lai would have passed largely as no big thing, because you would not have had the pictures. We thought we were out. The pictures make it. The stories can occur, but they only go so far without pictures. You got pictures.

SM (02:40:17):
That is a very sensitive issue for Vietnam, that Mỹ Lai.

KC (02:40:18):
Absolutely.

SM (02:40:19):
That labels them all as baby killers. And they all come back at you-

KC (02:40:22):
That is the 15 percent. That is a figure that is really important. When I first brought that up to you, I said, it's relevant in certain ways, but I won't go into it. This is the connection. And I do not delve deeply into it, but just point out that those of us in the anti-war movement who were Vietnam veterans, who began to talk about, and I did, as a young man, began to talk about what we saw or did ourselves, that were either possibly or probably war crimes, did not take care enough, did not understand and know and take care enough, to make that distinction between the 15 percent that were in combat, and 85 percent that were not. So that it looked like we were saying all Vietnam veterans. And what we were saying was not that... We were also saying that we do not hold most Vietnam veterans responsible, directly responsible for this. We hold their commanders, and especially the people in Washington who created the conditions for this to happen, like free fires on a body camp, all those things to put pressure on the uses of the Geneva Convention, who looked the other way, et cetera. But what I understand today that I did not understand then, and can tell people about, is that most Vietnam veterans deny that that ever happened because they never saw it. And they did not ever see it because they were never in a position to see it. You had to be part of the 15 percent to have a chance to see it firsthand. So, when a Vietnam veteran says, "I never saw anything like that." Well, 85 percent of them certainly did not see anything like that, because they were never in a position. And of the 15 percent who did some of those did not say anything because their particular commander did not let them do that. None of them. It has been buried among the commanders, too. And the time you were there, a lot of more about the early part of the war than later in the war.

SM (02:41:47):
Back in 1974, my very first job at High University of Lancaster campus, outside of Columbus, there was a Vietnam vet that had an office there. And I can remember that when they were hiring at the university, we were talking about affirmative action for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Vietnam was not even an issue.

KC (02:42:00):
There was for Vietnam veterans, yeah.

SM (02:42:00):
Vietnam veterans are having a hard time sometimes getting a job because they were labeled.

KC (02:42:00):
They are still federally considered protected under federal law. Still protected. Equal opportunity protection. So those Vietnam veterans who absolutely deny the atrocity stuff you have to ask him, "Were you a grunt?" If you were not a grunt, you're probably not going to have had a chance to see any of this stuff. Well, they are sure did not happen anyway, but they wanted [inaudible] prior to the Vietnam war.

SM (02:42:00):
He was a little older. He had been in the service and very close to he and his friends. And I remember he was joking. Tell them the real story, how there were no POWs. And the POW stories and other issues, there is a brand-new book out now on POWs, that it has been a conspiracy all along that [inaudible]. America knows darn right that there are people over there. There are still people filing out. [inaudible].

KC (02:42:00):
Always a ton of stuff coming.

SM (02:42:00):
How can you say there were no POWs [inaudible].

KC (02:42:00):
I suspect it is horseshit. That does not sit right with those right-wingers. How can anybody want to say [inaudible].

SM (02:42:00):
Thank you very, very much.

KC (02:42:00):
You are welcome.

(End of Interview)

2002-07-14

Stephen McKiernan

Kenneth Campbell

Dr. Kenneth Campbell is a scholar, reseacher and political scientist. Dr. Campbell is a Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations at Universtiy of Delaware, and he is the author for several journal articles and a book titled A Tale of Two Quagmires: Iraq, Vietnam and the Hard Lessons of War. He has a Bachelor's degree in History, as well as a Master's degree and Ph.D. in Political Science from Temple University.  Dr. Campbell served in Vietnam during the Vietnam War in 1968 and 1969 and received a Purple Heart for his bravery. Due to his expertise in international affairs, he has testified before Congress on the Iraq War. 

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Political scientists; College teachers; University of Delaware; Campbell, Kenneth--Interviews

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