Interview with Robert William Edgar

Edgar, Robert, 1943-2013 ; McKiernan, Stephen

Robert William Edgar (1943-2013) was a businessman, administrator, and politician. Edgar was a member of the Democratic Party and congressman in Pennsylvania for six terms. He received his Bachelor's degree from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity degree from the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Edgar died from a heart attack after running on the treadmill at his home.

2010-12-03

In copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

137:41

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Robert William Edgar
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 3 December 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:01):
Thank you very much for agreeing to be part of this. The interview itself includes questions that have been asked to all people, but there are also some specific questions that have been geared toward your life as well. How did you become who you are? Could you describe your upbringing, your high school and college years, and maybe some of the role models and or historic figures you read about that inspired you?

BE (00:00:31):
I am glad I gave you a copy of my book so you can find out all the details because the book is more of a biography of how I have done what I have done. As you know, I have been a United Methodist minister. I have been a congressman. I have been a faculty member at Swarthmore College. I ran a finance area for Senator Paul Simon of Illinois when he ran for president. I was head of the Committee for National Security under Paul Warnke, who negotiated the SALT II agreement. I spent 10 years as president of a graduate school. I spent seven and a half years as head of the National Council of Churches. And now I have been three years as president of Common Cause. All of my vocational life in all those different professions have centered around my mantra, which I have kind of rephrased in the last couple of years. But it is to address fear, fundamentalism, and Fox News with a commitment to peace, poverty, and planet Earth. My wife of 46 years, who I have known for 52 years, will tell you I only have one speech and a thousand illustrations, focused on ending the poverty that kills, healing the earth, and working on peace and nonviolence issues. Now, you asked the question, how'd I get started? I grew up in a blue-collar family, in a white-collar community. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. While we were in a lower economic bracket than our neighbors and friends, my father never owned an automobile, never drove a car. I taught my mother how to drive when she was 48 years old. We did everything on buses and trolleys between Philadelphia, upper Darby, Chester, Media, communities around Philadelphia. We were, my brother and I, my older brother, we were sent to church so that my mother and father could sleep in on Sunday mornings. And I went to Sunday school and church services in the Methodist Church. And in those days, which was in the 1950s, there were an awful lot of progressive ministers who were linking gospel messages to civil rights, human rights, people's rights. When I became 15, 16, I went to a church camp, and I discovered some ministers that taught me that ministers do not have to be boring, that they can be committed to social justice. I also took a tour of some poverty areas in Philadelphia and was surprised by my reaction to seeing poor people. In June of 1968, the Methodist Church sent me to 11 countries in Europe... not (19)68, in 1961, they sent me to 11 countries, including Italy, Germany, Austria, France, but I also got in behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1961. And one of the most powerful experiences was in an orphanage that we visited in Naples, Italy. You had to travel by bus through a terrible slum, seeing the worst poverty you could see. And the bus went through a large, gated building, and inside were a couple hundred children who were orphans, all clean, all dressed, all cared for by faith-related folks, all singing and joyful. And so the contrast between the abject poverty on the outside of the building and the care that was given on the inside, had an impact on me. I had decided pretty early on to be a minister and thought that my whole life was going to be in the ministry. I wanted to be an urban minister, and in fact, that is the direction I went. A couple other incidents shaped my thinking. One was at age 19, I became pastor of my own church called the Gilberton United Methodist Church in Gilberton, Pennsylvania. This is June of 1962. I am all of 19, had never been to a funeral. I was given permission to do communion and baptisms and weddings, and most of it was to pay my way through college. After they had given churches to ordained elders in the Methodist church and retired ministers and seminary students, they had churches left over. And so as a young, beginning my second year in college, I was pastor of a church. And the interesting thing was, the church in Gilberton, the whole town was owned by the Gilberton Coal company. All of the parishioners were related to the coal mine. They owned only the inside of their houses. The coal company owned all the land underneath their houses. And it was a strip mining area. The men were all dying in their 50s of black lung disease. And even though the people were very poor, they were very loving and caring and adopted a young preacher, taught me a lot. So those kinds of experience began to move me. I would say another defining experience, which I do describe in the book, is in February of 1968, I was invited by William Sloane Coffin, who was at that time the chaplain at Yale, later to become a minister at Riverside Church in New York. But Bill Coffin invited a group of people concerned about the Vietnam War to a meeting here in Washington at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. And I boarded a bus in northern New Jersey where I was at seminary and traveled to Washington for the first time. And as we got to the door of the church, the bus came to the curb. The radical religious right of that day was a guy by the name of Carl McIntire, and he was out of Cape May, New Jersey. He was the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Dobson of that day. And he had organized a protest carrying signs that said, "Kill a commie for Christ's sake," and trying to get us not to cross his picket line. And as coming out of a blue-collar union family, I broke my father's dictum, never to cross a picket line, and went inside the church, went up into the balcony of the church, and listened to speaker after speaker connect the issue of poverty and war. And in doing that, I began to recalibrate my own thinking. And the keynote speaker was a young guy, 39 years of age, by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.

SM (00:08:48):
Oh, my God.

BE (00:08:48):
This is five weeks before he was assassinated. And he inspired me. I think of myself as a disciple of Dr. King, read his material. Less than 10 years later, by accident, I got elected to the United States Congress. And a couple years after that, I was one of 12 members of the Select Committee on Assassinations, looking into the death of Dr. King. These books over here are all the documents on the committee that was researching the death of Dr. King and John F. Kennedy. So I interviewed James Earl Ray, the assassin, as a young member of Congress. So Dr. King, by accident, has had quite an impact. This just gives you the smallest. It is only those persons that were serving-

SM (00:09:57):
Walter [inaudible]. Yes. Remember him, and met him briefly in California. Yep.

BE (00:10:02):
Yep. Chris Dodd. Bob Edgar. So this is a long answer to your short question. I think poverty and King vaccinated me to care about ending the poverty that kills, connecting poverty to war. And it was my father who connected me to the environment. He loved the trees and the land that he worked so hard on. So he paid $13,000 for a house in the suburbs without the ability to have an automobile or car. He worked 37 years at the same desk, testing relays for General Electric. Died at age 56, probably killed by the chemicals he was using in the workplace or the fact that he smoked a lot. He was offered a million dollars for his piece of land to build a shopping center, and he turned them down because the trees on his land were more important and the environment. And he introduced me to the early books in the (19)60s, The Greening of America. Some of the early conversations about the environment. When I decided to run for Congress, I became kind of the environmental candidate. And if the Republicans had run any candidate against me who cared about the environment, or cared about women's issues, I would have lost, because my district was the most Republican district in the nation and I am a Democratic congressman. And I got elected at age 31, as you know.

SM (00:11:56):
Yep. When you were in that room with, I did not know you were in the room with Dr. King six weeks before he was assassinated, I am-

BE (00:12:05):
We also marched in Arlington Cemetery that same day together.

SM (00:12:11):
Wow. He touched your life, obviously, with his words, and obviously, he was a great preacher in his delivery and everything, but I interviewed another person whose husband was in Harvard when Dr. King came, or excuse me, Michigan State, when Dr. King came to speak, and he had said that it was the greatest experience he had ever had in his life listening to him. But I do not know if he is putting me on, but he said there was something about the aura and the atmosphere that he said, "I did not think this guy was going to live long." And that was a commentary from his Michigan State speech when this person was in college there. I do not know if you felt that at all, because he was certainly different in his... he had a lot of enemies.

BE (00:13:09):
At the time, I was not smart enough to think those thoughts. I was all eyes and ears. Except for the assassination of President Kennedy, I was lulled into thinking we were a peaceful nation, but if you look back on the assassination of Kennedy, King, Bobby Kennedy, and the attempt on Wallace's life, and you go back and look in history in terms of all the attempts on presidents' lives, you realize we are a pretty violent nation. I think there is an author that wrote a book, Violence in America, [inaudible] Demery. It was a very popular book in the (19)70s and talked about Native Americans and all the things that we had done to people itself. It is interesting, we are about the same age, and I think I mentioned to your secretary that my grandfather was a Methodist minister, Peekskill, New York, from (19)54... excuse me, from 1936 to 1954, and he died in (19)56. And then I went to Methodist Church in Cortland, New York growing up as a kid, and Dr. Nason was our minister. And it is interesting you said about social messages. My mom used to tell me a story that we would go to church, I do not remember this, but we would go to church and I used to say to her, "I wish they'd cut all the singing out," because all I cared about was hearing his message. And this is a second-, third-, fourth-grade kid. There were messages that he gave. So you were right on about the social messages. One of the things, when one talks about the (19)50s and (19)60s, one rarely talks about the religious leaders that influenced the Boomers growing up this. So when I look at religion, not just politics, religion itself, I think of Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were very religious, Bishop Sheen, who-

SM (00:15:25):
Happy trails to you.

BE (00:15:25):
But they were very religious too, and they had Christmas albums and they took in kids. Bishop Sheen was on TV then. And then, of course, Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel and Jesse Jackson, Reverend Schuller, Pat Roberson, these are people that I think influenced Boomers over... founding of the National Council of Churches was founded in 1950, was very much part of the Civil Rights Movement. Brown versus Board of Education. The National Council Churches had, I was General Secretary of the Council, but in 1957, had Dr. King as its keynote speaker. Had a lot of lay people, including there was a guy by the name of Jay Erwin Miller. He was a layperson, and in October, 1967, Esquire Magazine had a cover that says, "The man who ought to be the next President of the United States." He was head of Cummings Engine, which was a big industrial thing. He was a Republican. Also, he was chair of the board at the National Council of Churches. And he was one of the founders of Common Cause. He worked with John Gardner. There were three Republicans who were on the articles of incorporation. One was a guy by the name of Andrew [inaudible], who was head of Time Publishing, one was John Gardner and one was Jay Erwin Miller.

SM (00:17:06):
Yeah, I had Gardner [inaudible].

BE (00:17:06):
You look at some of these pictures, Jay Erwin Miller is with Dr. King, in some of the signing of the Civil Rights Movement issues. And so there's a whole bunch of Republican, mainly, moderate Republican, Eisenhower Republicans, who began to speak up on civil rights, human rights, and people's rights, who were also people of faith. And I think it goes back to winning World War II. I am born in 1943, May 29th, Life or Look Magazine came out that week and had Rosie the Riveter on the cover, the woman who symbolized women working in factories to win the war. But the war is won, and the Congress passes the most important piece of legislation after the war, which was the GI Bill and-

SM (00:18:22):
(19)48.

BE (00:18:28):
-all of the blue-collar workers who went to war came back and became the white-collar workers of the (19)50s and (19)60s. Some of them became ministers, some of them became teachers, some of them became lawyers and doctors and other kinds of things. Sprawl started, people started to get wealthy from development of communities and suburbs expanded, people were moving out of the cities. Churches were being built, every few minutes a new church was being dedicated, and churches were packed. It was a sense of victory. We fought evil and we won. And every child will do better than their parents did. And their parents are doing better than their parents did. And the American dream is alive and well, and we had that sense. Brown versus Board of Education happens in (19)54. And some of the hostility of civil rights. And suddenly in the (19)60s, you have got not only the war in Vietnam, you have got the burning in the cities, you have got the tension around civil rights and human rights, you get the Commission on Poverty that comes out with a scathing report, that Johnson began the War on Poverty efforts. And I think the faith leaders had read the Bible thoughtfully enough to discover that God cares about poor people. I think some of the new religious leaders, the conservatives, have read the Bible and somehow did not find out that Jesus cared about poor people and misread all of those stories and somehow come out of the text believing God is a god of wealth, God is a god of prosperity. But the (19)50s and (19)60s, we were vaccinated by faith leaders who challenged government to respect people by race, regardless of creed or color and were willing, in a sense, to fight a civil war over it. And we did not go back to the battlefield with the South in terms of military war, but we did send in troops to make sure that schools were integrated and people who were part of our society became full partners. And Dr. King was kind of the disciple of that movement.

SM (00:21:23):
It leads into the area with I wanted to address, and that is these periods that Boomers have been alive. Keep in mind that those people born, say, between (19)37 and (19)45, I think are closer to the Boomer, the front-edge Boomers, that were born between (19)46 and (19)56 than those born between, Boomers, that are from (19)57 to say (19)64 because they were graduate students, they inspired, and were right by the side of many of the older Boomers. But when you look at the different periods in America since 1946, and we are talking 64 years here now, it was the first Boomers now coming into Social Security this year. You have already said something very important. When you look at church, and I can take the experience of my life, I love going to church, when every Sunday, all throughout the (19)50s, when in the (19)60s, then my dad moved and we were quite away from the church, but it was that period that I saw church attendants seemed to wane as we started to head into the (19)60s. And then something happened, like you mentioned, in the (19)70s, and I would like your thoughts on this. In the late (19)70s, the religious right seemed to come into power. Jerry Falwell, whether it be Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson.

BE (00:22:57):
Jim Bakker, Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart. What happened was that (19)50s and (19)60s were upward mobility, growing of the suburbs, challenge with racism, challenge with poverty, but a society that said, we have got to address these issues if we are going to be great. By the early (19)70s, parents were telling their kids, "Do not go into ministry, do not go into social service, get an education, go to college. Some of us got to college by the skin of our teeth, but you're smarter than we are, so get a degree so you can make money." And the prosperity gospel got caught in. And on the political side, you had the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's loss and the conservative political right. And then you had the emergence of religious conservatives who stayed out of politics mostly. Billy Graham stayed out mostly. And many of the evangelists were talking about personal salvation and not very interested in politics. But you get into the (19)70s, and alongside of the secular effort to make money, you had a whole bunch of what I call charlatan religious leaders who said, "Send us a dollar and we will pray for you. Put your hand on the radio set, and when we finish this prayer, write us a check for a dollar-

SM (00:24:54):
The Reverend Schuller?

BE (00:24:57):
-5 dollars, 10 dollars. And this is Jimmy Swaggart and Jimmy Bakker and those guys, the televangelists. They did not want the money as much as they wanted your name and address because they were smart enough to use computers and know that they could amass large amounts of wealth by putting those names and addresses on a computer and keeping track and talking to them by region and by area, and initially, putting a stamp on a newsletter and getting it out to folks, but then getting it into a computer, so it was even cheaper.

SM (00:25:38):
Like the DNC today.

BE (00:25:39):
Right. Well, I think in 1980, there was a civil marriage, probably started in (19)76, (19)77, (19)78, a civil marriage between these charlatan religious radical right and the political right that made Ronald Reagan the Christian president and Jimmy Carter an also-ran. Ronald Reagan would not go to church, but he was envisioned as being the guru. He was going to stop Roe versus Wade, which was an early (19)70s Supreme Court decision that all the conservatives hated. And the religious right and the political right out-hustled the left. The left took 50 minutes to answer a question. The left did not deep frame from the justice language. Whereas the religious right, the political right, were willing to sloganeer simple statements. And so the left gets out-hustled, and I think the religious right thought that if they had this civil marriage with the Republicans, that they would turn back Roe versus Wade. That they would be able to prosper in kind of not just the old-time religion, but focused on personal salvation. And the wealthy were blessed by God because they were wealthy, God must be blessing them. I think they forgot the passage that talks about how hard it is for a rich man to enter Heaven, where they said it is easier for a camel than go through the eye of a needle than for rich man to enter Heaven. And they saw Jesus in a tuxedo more than touching the hem of a prostitute, hem of the dress of a prostitute, or touching the leper or hugging a poor person. And so you have got this tension that I think has actually grown into the split in our country. We are divided three ways, radical Christian and political right on one side, moderate to progressive liberals on the other side, and a whole host of people that are in the middle. And the reason I wrote the book, Middle Church, which goes against... the reason I wrote that book was to go after Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the religious right, but it is middle church, middle synagogue, middle mosque. And my argument in the book is that the religious left failed, and we failed because we would do point-counterpoint with the religious right, we forgot to evangelize the middle. And you have got a whole host of Americans in the middle who are too easily swayed by patriotism and false morality that many on the left have forgotten to use that patriotism and morality language. And that book could have been called Middle America, it is more of a secular political book than a churchy book, but it will give you some idea if you read it, of some of these thoughts.

SM (00:29:50):
But where would you place... we all know what the Beatles did. They went into, not organized religion, they went off to the Maharishi or whatever. It was fairly common that a lot of people were going off into Zen Buddhism. I interviewed Peter Coyote and he told me, the actor, that if it was not for Zen Buddhism, he would not be alive today. I mean, it's that important for him to relax. He's been doing it for 35 years. And so a lot of people became Zen Buddhist. A lot of people like the Beatles, and not just the Beatles, because they were well known, but other people, got into all these Maharishi, and they came to college campus in the late (19)60s. You had the Moonies that were everywhere. And there was this attitude, and correct me if I am wrong, that a lot of the Boomer kids and a lot of the young adults for some reason went against anything that were position of authority. They were against their political leaders, they were against their religious leaders, they were against politicians, the college administrators. So the inner spirituality became the thing in the late (19)60s, in the (19)70s. Your thoughts on this inner spirituality where you do not need to go to church, it's just that kind of-

BE (00:31:14):
I will answer that question, but let me challenge something you said. I would not use the phrase "a lot." I would use "some" because I think the majority did what their parents told them to do. Go to college, become something, get a profession. But the (19)60s and (19)70s are marked by a search, a search religiously, a search psychologically, a search for meaning, a search for life. And not only did folks search alternative religions, but they also searched alternative lifestyles, commune movement, and others. And you remember some of this came out of Woodstock, some of it came out of the anti-war movement, the draft was there, and people had to ask themselves, "Is the United States worth dying for? And if not, do I go to Canada? What do I think about 58,000 people being killed in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands being wounded? And what do I think, if I care about integration, about the fact that liberals were disappearing here and there, being killed and lynched and blacks were being attacked," and it was a big struggle for the identity of America. So there is not one issue, it was a small, important cluster. I remember when I got elected to Congress, some of my friends said, "Why would you do that? Why do not you stay on the outside of government and fight the corruption, fight the bad guys who are in government?" And those days, you know, had Watergate and you had a lot of lack of modeling of good behavior. And I think there was that tension in our society. My own personal view is that you need people inside the tent and people outside the tent, people inside government, people outside government. I have got five honorary doctorate degrees, but only four arrests for civil disobedience. If I have any regrets in my life, it is that I have not been arrested enough.

SM (00:34:13):
Dr. King would be proud of you because Dr. King used to always say that, "If you are not willing to go to jail for your beliefs, what are you out there for?"

BE (00:34:20):
Right.

SM (00:34:21):
Not doing violent things, but.

BE (00:34:23):
My friend Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary sings a song for me once in a while about, have you been to jail for justice? Good words in that song.

SM (00:34:33):
You are right. Right. One of the things, you well know that when President Kennedy, well, when he was running for president, the issue with the Catholic Church and that religion would influence his decisions. Obviously, that did not happen, but what did that say about the America of 1960, about fearful that the Pope was going to run the United States government, and. The Pope was going to run the United States government, and John Kennedy obviously saw the concern, but he said that is not going to happen with him.

BE (00:35:11):
Yeah. Well, like John Kennedy, I believe in the separation of church and state but not the separation of people of faith and institutions of government. You want your elected officials to have an active faith statement, but you need to always remember that you are not serving in public office a particular denomination or religious tradition. Henry Waxman, who is Jewish, was elected with me in 1974. I want him to be a faithful member of the Jewish community, but he would never intend to have the Jewish community make the United States a Jewish nation. I think it is true of Muslims who might serve in Congress. I want them to be faithful. I want them to read the Koran, but I do not want to have Sharia law be the law of the land. For conservative Protestants, I want them to be themselves. I do not have any animosity to people who are in the religious right unless that religious right once elected thinks that it can make this a Christian nation. Our founding fathers were very smart to help all of us understand this is a nation that believes in religious pluralism, and we want people of faith and people of no faith to use morals and values that grow out of their tradition, but not to ever allow any individual faith tradition to dominate. In our history, we used to hang people who were Roman Catholics, and we used to torture people who were a different kind of Protestant than we had. I think the founding fathers and mothers said, "Wait, that is not going to make us a very healthy nation, so let us respect everybody's religious tradition."

SM (00:37:29):
What is interesting is that we all know the founding of this country, and the people that come here are made up of people who left their homelands because of religious persecution in many cases. We all know that America is a xenophobic nation that is afraid of people who are different. It has been the whole history. I mean, the Irish. I was even educating my dad more about some of the things that happened between England and Ireland and the Potato Famine and so forth and the treatments. What amazes me today, I am very concerned about that, and I like your thoughts. Some of the attacks on President Obama, and some people say his close links with the Muslim faith. Some people say he is a Muslim. He says he is a Christian. They will not listen to his word. They have their personal opinions. It shoots me back to what was happening in 1960 about the fear of the Pope. Well, now there is a fear that Islam will take over. I know they use the issue of terrorism, but I see this continuing oftentimes a trend where-

BE (00:38:38):
Just remember that the kid that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City was a Roman Catholic, raised in the United States. And if there are terrorists in 60 countries, we do not stop terrorism by bombing capitals. Part of our problem in this country is racism. Part of our problem is fear of the other, and part of our problem is we carry around in our head World War images of what war is about. I think some of the leaders that Obama has, many of the leaders that Bush had were focused on World War II images of the world, and we got to change that view. We need an international police effort on terrorism, but we ought to cut in half our military expenditures. I laugh when I read the newspapers with a tear in my eye when I think about all of the conservatives who say, "We have got to balance the budget, but you cannot cut defense. We have got to balance the budget, but we are going to go to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq without paying for it, without raising taxes." And we got these big deficits. "Oh, those deficits are caused by overspending on healthcare and education and Social Security." That is hogwash. We are in this predicament because we, after 9/11 were manipulated by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush on the issue of fear. We went after a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 called Iraq. We went after it even though the inspectors were there. There was no hint that they actually had nuclear weapons, or nuclear capability. On the one hand, the political right and the religious right want more expenditures on defense, more expenditures for war, but somehow that does not impact on their thinking on deficits.

SM (00:40:53):
Do you see the link here? You're talking about the fear. Now. The fear in the (19)50s was the fear of the Cold War, the boomer generation when they were younger. The fear of the Cold War, of the potential-

BE (00:41:11):
The Cold War fear started this before the Boomers were elected. The fear of the Cold War grew out of separation of Germany right after World War II. The building of... Russia was a world-class military but a third-class country without the ability to really have an economy that worked. There were all these myths about the former Soviet Union, and I think people who lived through World War II saw it in terms of the exchange of nuclear weapons. I think by the time the boomers got here, and they were very small and children at the time, that fear not only got intensified with the East West struggles, but it also pointed out that even when you tore down the Berlin Wall, you had to find another enemy to be fearful of. So, I think Rumsfeld and Cheney were able to use 9/11 as a way of tapping into the fear that people have. My complaint about Americans is we are dumb. We do not learn from history.

SM (00:42:34):
We do not read history.

BE (00:42:35):
We do not read history. And we do not realize that we have got to send our young people to get an international education and not just a domestic education.

SM (00:42:47):
Global? Yeah. That is been the tough. We have to prepare students for the global world. I remember Henry Cisneros at a conference, way back in the early (19)90s. He was speaking from a Mayor I think of San Antonio. This beautiful college administrator stood up and said, "Well, what is America be going to be like if it is the majority are minorities?" It was shocking to hear it from her, but she was asking a question. I will never forget what he said. He said, "You should not be fearing the future. You should be preparing for the future, because you are going to have bosses who are Latino. You are going to have bosses who are Asian-American, from India, you name it. So we have to prepare students for the world they are going to face because it is a global world." You raised some good points. It is interesting also that McCarthyism, which was trying to label people who spoke up or were politically active as Communists. I see sometimes today for people who may support Muslims in America, they are sometimes paying a price, too. We did a conference, Islam in America, at Westchester University. It was my last coup before we left. We packed the place the entire day, and we brought in the spiritual leader from Detroit who had written a book, and we brought in two authors from New York and we did a tremendous program. It was nine straight programs. We had 400 for every session, and we got criticized for it. In fact, some of our professors went out to speak at other universities and they had people in the audience trying to, "Do you remember when you were at that conference?" That kind of stuff.

BE (00:44:46):
It is the same thing that is happening to Obama by calling him a Socialist and some of the Tea Party folks making him a Fascist. They do not know what a Fascist is. My own concern is that he is not socialist enough.

SM (00:45:05):
One of the things too, that I think it is important, when you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, and you think of the Boomer generation, and particularly the activists of that period who were anti-war, they were involved in all the movements. Many of them were the New Left, so they attacked liberals as well as conservatives because LBJ was a liberal, and he was running the war. Nixon, even though he was conservative-

BE (00:45:33):
They defeated Humphrey because Humphrey was not liberal enough.

SM (00:45:37):
Right. How we doing time wise?

BE (00:45:41):
I have got about 15 minutes and then I have got to close up. Sorry. I talk too much.

SM (00:45:46):
That is okay. When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and when did it end?

BE (00:45:56):
It is a silly question.

SM (00:45:56):
It is a silly question?

BE (00:45:56):
I am pulling your leg.

SM (00:45:56):
Okay.

BE (00:46:03):
It began 1960. It ended 1969. I think the (19)60s, this is going to sound strange to you, but since you are talking about the boomers, I do not think the (19)60s had as much impact on the boomer generation than the 1970s had on them. I think the 1960s had more of an impact on my generation, those of use that were born in the late (19)30s and early (19)40s and came to adulthood in the (19)60s. And those of us... I was... In 1961, entered college (19)65, graduated from college, (19)68, graduated from graduate school June of (19)68, was full-time minister in city of Philadelphia, riding with the Philadelphia police clergy unit. I think that, starting with the assassination of President Kennedy, where we all were taught about guns in America and war and violence, plus the civil rights tension and the dogs and the fire hoses and that kind of thing, I think that had much more of a psychological impact on my generation. I think that the boomers coming were teenagers in the (19)60s, some of them. Early boomers. Some were tainted by the drug culture and LSD and that kind of thing. But most of them who got into adulthood in (19)71, (19)72, (19)73, where they were tainted, they were tainted by Watergate. They were tainted by prosperity gospel. They were tainted by some of the televangelist movements. They were tainted by money being God as opposed to God being God. And I think it led to the resurgence. They brought us Ronald Reagan, they brought us George Bush. They modified a little bit with Bill Clinton, but I think of President George Bush Jr. was not as impacted by my generation as he was by the...

SM (00:49:03):
1960s.

BE (00:49:05):
Well, more of the 1970s. I think the late (19)60s, (19)70s part of that. So to answer your question, for me the 1960s have not ended.

SM (00:49:21):
You are not the only person who said that.

BE (00:49:24):
Okay. But it is diminishing in that it is smaller and smaller group of us who were impacted by the (19)60s. And I think the next generation is going to be modified by resource depletion. Dr. Jonas Salk spoke at a group of us in Congress before he died. He invented the polio vaccine. And he had a great lecture about what he called epoch A and epoch B. Epoch A for him was those that came after World War II. They are going to raise their kids, they are going to have more money, everything is going to get better. And epoch A was symbolized by consumption, quantity of life, competition. And he said, we need to evolve into epoch B, where we replace competition with cooperation, quantity of life, with quality of life, where the whole limited lifestyle was his view of the future compared to the past. Someone asked him, "Dr. Salk, how do you get from Epoch A to epoch B?" And he said, "Well, in every change in human history, there have been intellectual mutants." And he said, "What we need are teachers and ministers and prophetic leaders who help to bridge the old and the new view." And I think that is at the heart of our current political trauma. We have got people who are lamenting the demise of epoch A, and resisting moving to more stewardship of fragile resources, and are denying things like global warming, denying that we are running out of fossil fuel oil denying that we are running out of natural resources. So I think there is, kind of put it this way, I think there is a new civil war going on that is going on without guns and weapons, but it is going on for the heart and soul of Americans. And in a sense, the heart and soul of the world. And I think those of us who are progressive and liberal need to figure out how we do a better job of being the intellectual mutants that we need for this time.

SM (00:52:22):
The generation gap was certainly well documented. If you remember, there was a Life magazine cover with a young man with the glasses on, and he had the father pointing a finger at him, and the son was pointing a finger back. And in 1980, because you are a very... You care about Vietnam vets, that is where I first met you for the first time when you did a symposium on Agent Orange in Philadelphia. And this book was called The Lost Generation. And it was Senator Webb, Phil Caputo...

BE (00:53:07):
Ford Foundation found out that I had been a leader of working on Agent Orange back in the late (19)70s and early (19)80s, and forcing our government to care for our veterans that they sent me to gather a religious allegation and go to Vietnam and see the impact 35 years after the war on the children and grandchildren of the Vietnamese who are being exposed to Asian Orange.

SM (00:53:35):
Can I have a copy of this?

BE (00:53:36):
That is yours.

SM (00:53:37):
Because that is how I first met you. You probably do not remember, this is even before you came to Western. You were at a symposium, I think it was down near Temple. It was full of Vietnam vets, and you were talking about Agent Orange. And I was very impressed, and I know I am a friend of Harry Gafney. I do not know if you know Harry. And Dan Fraley and Steve Silver and that whole group, Dwight Edwards. And that is how... That was the beginning of I getting to know a lot of the Vietnam vets. And what I am trying to get at you here...

BE (00:54:07):
Do you need more than one copy?

SM (00:54:12):
If I could have a couple of these, I had appreciated it. I think I am going to turn this... It was a book that had a symposium documented, and the symposium was with Phil Caputo, Jim Webb, I think it was Bobby Mueller and James Fallows. And one other person, it was unbelievable.

BE (00:54:42):
Bobby Mueller is working with us on this.

SM (00:54:45):
Well, Bobby was at my retirement. I asked Bobby to come. He is one of the six people that was at my retirement. And what came up in this program is that I think they were talking about the generation gap and Jim Webb made a comment. The comment was, the generation gap is not between parents. Well, it is between parents and sons and daughters, but the real generation campus is within the generation between those who went to Vietnam and those who did not. And Bobby will remember this. It was a great interaction. And it was documented in the Wounded Generation book. Your thoughts on that commentary, whether, and this gets into my real big question here is, as a nation, I ask a question oftentimes, have we healed from the tremendous divisions that took place in the (19)60s and (19)70s between those who supported the war and against, between those who are black and white and all the other issues? And I took students to Washington to meet Senator Musky in 1995, and we asked this question to him, and I will give you his response in a minute. And I know Senator Nelson said it affected the body politic. But people do not want walk around Washington saying, I did not heal from the Vietnam War. Your thoughts on whether we as a nation have a problem with healing within this generation that grew after World War II, particularly those who served in Vietnam, 3 million plus, and those who may have been the anti-war people.

BE (00:56:25):
Well, before I answer your question, let me just say, I was the first anti-war activist on the Veterans Affairs Committee. And had I not been put on the Veterans Affairs Committee, I would have lost my elections. And at first, I did not want to be on the Veterans Affairs Committee, but I learned that even though you oppose the war, you can love the warrior. And even though you oppose the war, you can work on things like readjustment counseling centers, Agent Orange, post-traumatic stress disorder, et cetera. I would go to your question about the healing. I would only modify the comment about the generation gap being between those who went to war and those who did not. I think it is more complicated than that. I think it is between those who went to war and those who did not. Those who supported integration and those who did not. Those who understood the need for African Americans to be part of the quality of life in America and have resources. Expanded to those who believe that you cannot build walls to keep out Mexicans or people crossing your border, because the world has gotten complicated. I think there is a division between those who live by the God of money and those that live by the commitment to social justice and caring for people. So it is too simplistic to say it is just as though every... Because every veteran who served in Vietnam was not a hero.

SM (00:58:24):
So you know that from me, Eli, right?

BE (00:58:27):
Yeah. Many were. But there were good people and bad people in the war, and there were good people and bad people in the anti-war movement. And as human beings, what we have done to each other has been to pour salt on the wounds of race, the wounds of violence. And I think there is a division, a generation gap between those who think you can solve the world's problems by military action, and those who think you need to solve the problems with something like three cups of tea. The book that gentleman wrote is my thinking about how we should have handled Afghanistan. We are handling it with weapons and war, and every time we inadvertently kill a civilian, we have made a family of terrorists. And that is where the gap is. And I think you see it every day on nightly news. The gap is between Fox News and MSNBC. The gap is between Colbert and Rush Limbaugh. Glenn Beck is the hero of the anti-movement. And I would say both the left and the right, but mostly the right love and thrive on not allowing the nation to heal. And you see it internally in the Senate today where McConnell says, we are going to be the... We are going to be no until we can defeat Obama. And we do not want Obama to succeed. And one of the reasons I am president of Common Cause is I think John Gardner was right, that everybody had special interest in Washington except the average, ordinary people. And hostility of the generation gap is an internal gap between those who, once elected, serve the public interest as opposed to the special interest. And money is a corrosive influence in our whole system. So it is too simplistic to say it is those who went to war and those who did not, because those of us who did not go into the war, many of us worked very hard to provide the warrior healing through Regis counseling centers, the new GI Bill for the all-volunteer military, and to make sure that whether you are for or against a war, you are always for healing the soldier who goes to war. Some of us work to try to stop war.

SM (01:01:42):
Do you believe that the people who were the anti-war people, many of them are college students and well-known anti-war people, that they consider themselves veterans of the war too?

BE (01:01:59):
They are. We just gave an award, a lifetime Achievement Award to Daniel Ellsberg.

SM (01:02:06):
I am interviewing him. I am interviewing him a week from Monday.

BE (01:02:10):
He just received the John Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award in California. And he was introduced by Pete McCloskey, a marine. Former congressman. Former Democrat now... Former Republican now Democrat. But Pete McCloskey introduced him. The three of us were on the same stage together. There is two former congressmen and Daniel Ellsberg. I think of Dr. King as a hero. I think of William Sloane Coffin as a hero. I think of Kate McCloskey as a hero. I think of Daniel Ellsberg as a hero.

SM (01:02:52):
Daniel and Philip.

BE (01:02:53):
And Philip. I think of...

SM (01:02:57):
Malcolm Boyd.

BE (01:02:58):
Malcolm Boyd was a hero. Yeah. You do not have to go to war to be a hero. I think that people have given their lives for justice, peace, they are heroes too. My picture, and I have got to leave... My picture of a real hero, is the Chinese guy with two shopping bags standing in front of the tank.

SM (01:03:28):
We do not know whatever happened to him.

BE (01:03:30):
He is my hero.

SM (01:03:38):
Wow.

BE (01:03:38):
I guess I respect those who are willing to stand in front of the tanks.

SM (01:03:42):
Do you have any final thoughts on the boomer generation itself with respect to... A lot of the boomers when they were young, felt that they were... Last question. They were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society, that they were going to hopefully end war, bring peace, end racism, sexism, really kind of cure everything. Kind of be the panacea for a lot of the issues that were facing us in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. Do you feel that because of the fact that we still have a war and that we still have a lot of the, we still have racism, although we have come a long way, we still, as David Garrow said to me, the historian, I said, the accomplishments for gay and lesbian Americans has been unbelievable in terms of one of the results of the (19)60s. And of course, you got the environmental movement of Gaylord Nelson.

BE (01:04:42):
Let me answer your question because I got to go. I think that the every generation makes its contribution. When I grew up, everybody I knew smoked. No one smokes anymore. When I grew up, women were making 30 cents on the dollar that men were making. That gap is closing, and there are more rights and privileges according to women. When I grew up, there was segregation. There is still separation of the races, but much more tolerance, much more sharing, much more riding in the same bus together, in all the seats, any seat being used. So in terms of racism, there have been good movements. Environmental movement has been good. Much more quality of life issues have been improved over time. So there is good things. And one other good thing we have not talked about, which I want to think about in your book, I think the Boomer generation is going to teach us how to retire better than previous generations. They are going to want exercise rooms and theater and all of the amenities to be close to retirement. But hopefully they will also teach us that there is life after retirement. That 65 to 95-year-old need a job. They may not need a...

SM (01:06:22):
I am going back to work in a year.

BE (01:06:24):
They may not need as much of a salary, but they will need a stipend and benefits. We need a whole Peace Corps for senior adults. We need to find out how the 65 to 95-year-old can make a contribution to our society. So there is lots of positives. I think the negative is that there has been an increase in greed. Hold on second. See what happens when you talk about greed, whole thing goes up.

SM (01:06:50):
Let me just turn this over here. This is the slow one. There we go.

BE (01:07:08):
I think there has been an increase in greed, an increase in selfishness and cause of the religious right's personal salvation push, There is too much everyone for themselves. And I think one of the negative legacies that this generation is leaving us, and part of my generation is responsible for it too, is that nobody wants to pay taxes. And if you think about it, all the states are now moving to casinos to fund their schools and their elderly programs because nobody wants to pay taxes, even though we pay less in taxes than we did 30 years ago as a percentage of our income. And I think that is a very damaging legacy to leave. The other damaging legacy that has been left by those who are about to retire is that too many politicians have been caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. And too few young people see public service as an honorable profession. And my tears this week over Charlie Rangle was more about how many young blacks will avoid going into public service because they saw an 80-year-old black politician tarnished by his own lifestyle. And much of Charlie Rangel's problem was not corruption, it was sloppiness and arrogance and all of those kinds of things.

SM (01:08:48):
And how about the Vietnam veteran Cunningham, who was revered for his Vietnam service, now he is in jail.

BE (01:08:54):
Well, he took almost $5 million from military folk. So the handful of boomers who modeled bad behavior impacted more than a handful of others and other generations to have soiled views of the future. I have got to go.

SM (01:09:23):
Let me take two more pictures and then... I am going to take one definitely with only the backdrop. So this one is the one you are going to give to your wife. So if you stand right in front of it, and I will make sure the only thing I have in the back. Okay. Right there. So the only thing I am going to have in the backdrop is going to be that.

BE (01:09:42):
I think you should turn it on.

SM (01:09:42):
Yeah. And maybe one more.

BE (01:09:42):
That camera still have film in it?

SM (01:09:53):
Yes, it does.

BE (01:09:54):
Oh man, you are old fashioned.

SM (01:09:56):
Yep. Well, I have a digital, but this camera is good. There you go. Very good. Do you think when Janrus wrote his book...

SM (01:10:03):
Very good. Do you think when Jan Scruggs wrote his book, To Heal a Nation, that the wall has done some sort of a job in healing the nation? He not only talked about healing Vietnam vets and their families, but he talked about the nation itself.

BE (01:10:17):
It has helped, but remember Ronald Reagan said, "Tear down the wall." Maybe we need to tear down walls, but we need memorials. So I think that more as a memorial. Memorials are healing.

SM (01:10:36):
Here, if you can sign that to me, and I am glad you are in charge. I have John Edgar... Oh, not John Edgar, John Gardner's books. I have. I think I have all of them. Remember I read, No Easy Victories and then I had his book that I remember. I kind of encourage students to read, which is his book-

BE (01:10:54):
What do you go by in terms-

SM (01:10:56):
Stephen.

BE (01:10:57):
Stephen?

SM (01:10:57):
Yep.

BE (01:10:57):
P-H?

SM (01:11:12):
Yep. P-H-E-N. The interview itself includes questions that have been asked to all people, but there are also some specific questions and that have been geared toward your life as well.

BE (01:11:21):
Okay.

SM (01:11:22):
How did you become who you are? Could you describe your upbringing, your high school and college years, and maybe some of the role models and or historic figures you read about that inspired you?

BE (01:11:35):
Well, I am glad I gave you a copy of my book so you can find out all the details because the book is more of a biography of how I have done what I have done. As you know, I have been a United Methodist minister, I have been a congressman, I have been a faculty member at Swarthmore College. I ran the finance area for Senator Paul Simon of Illinois when he ran for president. I was head of the Committee for National Security under Paul Warnke who negotiated the SALT II agreement. I spent 10 years as president of a graduate school. I spent seven and a half years as head of the National Council of Churches, and now I have been three years as president of Common Cause. All of my vocational life in all those different professions have centered around my mantra, which I have kind of rephrased in the last couple of years. But it is to address fear, fundamentalism, and Fox News with a commitment to peace, poverty, and planet Earth. My wife of 46 years, who I have known for 52 years will tell you I only have one speech and a thousand illustrations focused on ending the poverty that kills healing the earth and working on peace and non-violence issues. Now you asked the question, how did I get started? I grew up in a blue collar family in a white collar community. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia while we were in a lower economic bracket than our neighbors and friends. My father never owned an automobile, never drove a car. I taught my mother how to drive at age, when she was 48 years old. We did everything on buses and trolleys between Philadelphia, Upper Darby, Chester, media, communities around Philadelphia. Yeah, we were, my brother and I, my older brother were sent to church so that my mother and father could sleep in on Sunday mornings. And I went to Sunday school and church services in the Methodist Church. And in those days, which was in the 1950s, there were an awful lot of progressive ministers who were linking gospel messages to civil rights, human rights, people's rights. When I became 15, 16, I went to a church camp and a couple ministers that I discovered, some ministers that taught me that ministers do not have to be boring, that they can be committed to social justice. I also took a tour of some poverty areas in Philadelphia and was surprised by my reaction to seeing poor people. In June of 1968, the Methodist Church sent me to 11 countries in Europe, not (19)68. In 1961, they sent me to 11 countries, including Italy, Germany, Austria, France. But I also got in behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1961. And one of the most powerful experiences was in an orphanage that we visited in Naples, Italy. You had to travel by bus through a terrible slum, seeing the worst poverty you could see. And the bus went through a large gated building, and inside were a couple of hundred children who were orphans, all clean, all dressed, all cared for by faith related folks, all singing and joyful. And so the contrast between the abject poverty on the outside of the building and the care that was given on the inside had an impact on me. I had decided pretty early on to be a minister and thought that my whole life was going to be in the ministry. I wanted to be an urban minister. And in fact, that is the direction I went. A couple other incidents shaped my thinking. One was at age 19, I became pastor of my own church called the Gilbert and United Methodist Church in Gilbert and Pennsylvania. This is June of 1962. I am all of 19 had never been to a funeral, had never... I was given permission to do communion and baptisms and weddings, and most of it was to pay my way through college. After they had given churches to ordained elders in the Methodist Church and retired ministers and seminary students, they had churches left over. And so as a young, beginning my second year in college, I was pastor of a church. And the interesting thing was the church in Gilbert, the whole town was owned by the Gilbert and Coal company. All of the parishioners were related to the coal mine. They owned only the inside of their houses. The coal company owned all the land underneath their houses, and it was a strip mining area. The men were all dying in their (19)50s of black lung disease. And even though the people were very poor, they were very loving and caring and adopted a young preacher, taught me a lot. So those kinds of experience began to move me. I would say another defining experience, which I do describe in the book, is in February of 1968, I was invited by William Sloan Coffin, who was at that time the chaplain at Yale, later to become a minister at Riverside Church in New York. But Bill Coffin invited a group of people concerned about the Vietnam War to a meeting here in Washington at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. And I boarded a bus in northern New Jersey where I was at seminary and traveled to Washington for the first time. And as we got to the door of the church, the bus came to the curb. The radical religious rite of that day was a guy by the name of Carl McIntire, and he was out of Cape May, New Jersey. He was the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Dobson of that day. And he had organized a protest carrying signs that said, kill a commie for Christ's sake, and trying to get us not to cross his picket line. And as coming out of a blue-collar union family, I broke my father's dictum, never to cross a picket line and went inside the church, went up into the balcony of the church and listened to speaker after speaker, connect these with poverty and war. And in doing that, I began to recalibrate my own thinking. And the keynote speaker was a young guy, 39 years of age by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.

SM (01:19:22):
Oh my God.

BE (01:19:22):
This is five weeks before he was assassinated. And he inspired me. I think of myself as a disciple of Dr. King, read his material. Less than 10 years later by accident, I got elected to the United States Congress. And a couple of years after that, I was one of 12 members of the Select Committee on assassinations looking into the death of Dr. King. These books over here are all the documents on the committee that was researching the death of Dr. King and John F. Kennedy. So I interviewed James Earl Ray the assassin as a young member of Congress. So...

SM (01:20:13):
Wow.

BE (01:20:14):
Dr. King by accident has had quite an impact. Let us just give you the smallest, it is only those persons that we are serving-

SM (01:20:27):
Walter Cronkite.

BE (01:20:28):
Yes. Remember him and Sam briefly in California.

SM (01:20:31):
Yep. Yep. Chris Dodd.

BE (01:20:34):
Yep.

SM (01:20:37):
Wow.

BE (01:20:39):
So this is a long answer to your short question. I think poverty and King vaccinated me to care about ending the poverty that kills, connecting poverty to war. And it was my father who connected me to the environment. He loved the trees and the land that he worked so hard on. Someone... He paid $13,000 for a house in the suburbs without the ability to have an automobile or a car. He worked 37 years at the same desk testing relays for General Electric, died at age 56 with probably killed by the chemicals he was using in the workplace or the fact that he smoked a lot. He was offered million dollars for his piece of land to build a shopping center. And he turned them down because the trees on his land, the environment were important and environment and introduced me to the early books in the (19)60s, The Greening of America.

SM (01:21:48):
Oh yeah.

BE (01:21:49):
Some of the early conversations about the environment. When I decided to run for Congress, I became kind of the environmental candidate. If the Republicans had run any candidate against me who cared about the environment or cared about women's issues, I would have lost because my district was the most Republican district in the nation. I had a Democratic congressman.

SM (01:22:16):
Yep.

BE (01:22:17):
And I got elected at age 31 as you know.

SM (01:22:19):
Yep. When you were in that room with, I did not know you were in the room with Dr. King six weeks before he was assassinated, I am-

BE (01:22:28):
We also marched in Arlington Cemetery that same day together.

SM (01:22:31):
Wow. Did... He touched your life obviously with his words and obvious he was a great preacher and his delivery and everything. But I interviewed another person whose husband was in Harvard when Dr. King came, or excuse me, Michigan State, when Dr. King came to speak. And he had said that it was the greatest experience he had ever had in his life listening to him. But I do not know if he is putting me on, but he said there was something about the aura and the atmosphere that he said, I did not think this guy was going to live long. And that was a commentary that from his Michigan State speech, when this person was at college there, I do not know if you felt bad at all that because he was certainly different and he had a lot of enemies.

BE (01:23:27):
At the time. I was not smart enough to think those thoughts. I was all eyes and ears except for the assassination of President Kennedy. I was lulled into thinking we were a peaceful nation. But if you look back on the assassination of Kennedy, King, Bobby Kennedy, and the attempt on Lawless' life, and you go back and look in history in terms of all the attempts on president's lives, you realize we're a pretty violent nation.

SM (01:24:06):
I think there is an author that wrote a book, Violence in America. Olga Demery was a very popular book in the (19)70s and talked about Native Americans and all the things that we had done to people in the south, you... It is interesting, we are about the same age. And I think I mentioned to your secretary that my grandfather was a Methodist minister Peekskill, New York from 54, excuse me, from 1936 to 1954. And he died in 56. And then I had, we went to Methodist Church in Courtland, New York growing up as a kid. And Dr. Nathan was our minister. And it is interesting you said about social messages. My mom used to tell me a story that we would go to church, I do not remember this, but we would go to church and I used to say to her, I wish they would cut out the singing out. Cause all I cared about was hearing his message. And this is like a second, third, fourth grade kid. There were messages that he gave. So you were right on about the social messages. One of the things when... The one talks about the (19)50s and (19)60s, one rarely talks about the religious leaders that influenced the boomers growing up. So when I look at religion, not just politics, religion itself, I think of Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were very religious, Bishop Sheen that-

BE (01:25:33):
Happy trails to you...

SM (01:25:33):
But they were very religious too. And they had Christmas albums and they took in kids. Bishop Sheen was on TV then. And then as we, and of course Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel and Jesse Jackson, Reverend Schuh and Pat Robertson, these are people that I think influenced Boomers over the-

BE (01:25:49):
Founding of the National Council of Churches was founded in 1950, was very much a part of the Civil Rights Movement. Brown versus Board of Education, the National Council of Churches had, I was General Secretary of that Council, but at 1957, had Dr. King as its keynote speaker, had a lot of late people, including a guy by the name of J. Irwin Miller. He was a late person. And in October 1967, Esquire Magazine had a cover. It says, 'The man who ought to be the next President of the United States.'

SM (01:26:28):
Wow.

BE (01:26:29):
He was head of Cummins Engine in, which was a big industrial thing. He was a Republican. He was also chair of the board at the National Council of Churches. And he was one of the founders of Common Cause. He worked with John Gardner.

SM (01:26:49):
John Gardner. Yeah.

BE (01:26:50):
There were three Republicans who were on the articles of incorporation. One was a guy by the name of Andrew High School who was head of Time publishing. One was John Gardner and one was J. Irwin Miller. And you... I had Gardner look at some of these pictures. J. Irwin Miller is with Dr. King in some of the signing of the Civil Rights Movement issues. And so there's a whole bunch of Republican, mainly madder Republicans, Eisenhower Republicans who began to speak up on civil rights, human rights, and people's rights who were also people of faith. And I think it goes back to winning World War II. You get, I am born in 1943, May 29th Life or Look Magazine came out that week and had Rosie the Riveter on the cover, woman who symbolized women working in factories to win the war. But the war is won and the Congress passes the most important piece of legislation. After the war, which was the GI Bill-

SM (01:28:20):
(19)48.

BE (01:28:25):
All of the blue-collar workers who went to war came back and became the white-collar workers of the (19)50s and (19)60s. Some of them became ministers, some of them became teachers, some of them became lawyers and doctors and other kinds of things. Sprawl started, people started to get wealthy from development of communities and suburbs expanded and people were moving out of the cities. Churches were being built. Every few minutes a new church was being dedicated and churches were packed. The sense of victory, we fought evil and we won. And every child will do better than their parents did. And their parents are doing better than their parents did. And the American dream is alive and well and had that sense. Brown versus Board of education happens in (19)54 and some of the hostility of civil rights. And suddenly in the (19)60s, you have got not only the war in Vietnam, you have got the burning of the cities, you have got the tension around civil rights and human rights. You have got the Commission on Poverty that comes out with a scathing report on the, that Johnson began the war on poverty efforts. And I think the faith leaders had read the Bible, thoughtfully enough to discover that God cares about poor people. I think some of the new religious leaders, the conservatives read the Bible and somehow did not find out that Jesus cared about poor people and misread all of those stories and somehow come out of the text believing God is the God of wealth. God is the God of prosperity. But the (19)50s and (19)60s, we were vaccinated by faith leaders who challenged government to respect people by race regardless of creed or color. And were willing in a sense, to fight a civil war over it. And then we did not go back to the battlefield with the South in terms of military war, but we did send in troops to make sure that schools were integrated and people who were part of our society became full partners. And Dr. King was kind of the disciple of that movement.

SM (01:31:07):
It leads into the area where the ones you address, and that is these periods of boomers have been alive. Keep in mind that those people born, say between (19)37 and (19)45, I think are closer to the boomer, the front edge boomers that were born between (19)46 and (19)56. Then those born between boomers that are from (19)57 to say (19)64 because they were graduate students, they inspired and were right by the side of many of the older boomers. But when you look at the different periods in America since 1946, and we are talking 64 years here now in the First Boomers now coming into Social Security this year, you talk very, you have already said something very important when you look at church, I can take the experience of my life. I love going to church when every Sunday, all throughout the (19)50s, when in the (19)60s, then my dad moved and we were quite away from the church. But it was that period that I saw church attendants seemed to wane as we started to head into the (19)60s. And then something happened, like you mentioned in the (19)70s, and I like your thoughts on this. In the late (19)70s, the religious rights seemed to come into power. Jerry Falwell, whether it be Oral Roberts, they were very Pat Robertson.

BE (01:32:36):
Jim Bakker, Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart. What happened was that (19)50s and (19)60s were upward mobility, growing of the suburbs, challenged with racism, challenged with poverty. But a society that said, we have got to address these issues if we're going to be great. By the early (19)70s, parents were telling their kid, do not go into ministry, do not go into social service, get an education, go to college. Some of us got to college by the skin of our teeth, but you're smarter than we are. So get a degree so you can make money. And the prosperity gospel got caught in. And on the political side, you had the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's loss and the conservative political, and then you had the emergence of religious conservatives who stayed out of politics mostly. And Billy Graham stayed out mostly. And many of the evangelists were talking about personal salvation and not very interested in politics. But you get into the (19)70s and alongside of the secular effort to make money, you had a whole bunch of what I call charlatan religious leaders who said, send us a dollar and we will pray for you. Put your hand on the radio set. And when we finish this prayer, write us a check for $1, $5-

SM (01:34:25):
Reverend Schuller or-

BE (01:34:28):
$10. And this is Jimmy and Swaggart and Jimmy Bakker and those guys, the televangelists, they did not want the money as much as they wanted your name and address because they were smart enough to use computers and know that they could amass large amounts of wealth by putting those names and addresses on a computer and keeping track and talking to them by region and by area. And initially putting a stamp on it, on a newsletter and getting it out to folks, but then getting it into a computer. So it was even cheaper.

SM (01:35:06):
It is like the DNC today, right?

BE (01:35:08):
Well, I think in 1980, there was a civil marriage between, probably started in (19)60, in (19)76, (19)77, (19)78, a civil marriage between these charlatans religious radical and the political right that made Ronald Reagan, the Christian president and Jimmy Carter and also ran Ronald Reagan would not go to church. But yeah, he was envisioned as being the guru. He was going to stop Roe versus Wade, which was an early (19)70s Supreme Court decision is all the conservative state and the religious right and the political right out-hustled the left. The left took 50 minutes to answer a question. The left did not deep frame some of the justice language. Whereas the religious right, the political right were willing to sloganeer simple savers, and so the left gets out hustled. And I think the religious right thought that if they had this civil marriage with the Republicans, that they would turn back Roe versus Wade. That they would be able to prosper in kind of not just the old time religion, but focused on personal salvation. And the wealthy were blessed by God because they were wealthy. God must be blessing them. I think they forgot the passage that talks about how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven, where they said, it is easier for a camel than go through the eye of a needle and for a rich man to enter heaven. And they saw Jesus in a tuxedo more than touching the hem of a prostitute, hem of the dress of a prostitute or touching the leper or hugging a poor person. And so you have got this tension that I think has actually grown into the split in our country. We are divided three ways, a radical Christian and political right on one side, moderate to progressive liberals on the other side, and a whole host of people that are in the middle. And the reason I wrote the book, Middle Church, which goes against, goes against now that is-

SM (01:37:54):
Oh, Okay. Yep.

BE (01:37:55):
The reason I wrote that book was to go after Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the religious right. But it is middle church, middle synagogue, middle mosque. And my argument in the book is that the religious left failed, and we failed because we would do calpoint, point, counterpoint with the religious right. We forgot to evangelize the middle. And you have got a whole host of Americans in the middle who are too easily swayed by patriotism and false morality that many on the left have forgotten to use that patriotism and morality language. And that book could have been called Middle America. It is more of a secular political book then a churchy book. But it will give you some idea if you read it, some of these thoughts.

SM (01:39:01):
But where would you place in, we all know what the Beatles did. They went into any now organized religion. They went off to them, Maharishi or whatever. It was fairly common that a lot of people are going off into Zen Buddhism. I interviewed Peter Coyote and he told me, the actor, that if it was not for Zen Buddhism, he would not be alive today. I mean, it is that important for him to relax. He has been doing it for 35 years. And so a lot of people became Zen Buddhist. A lot of people like the Beatles, and not just the Beatles, because they were well known, but other people got into all these maharishis and they came to college campuses in the late (19)60s. You had the Moonies that were everywhere. And there was this attitude, and correct me if I am wrong, that a lot of the boomer kids and a lot of young adults for some reason went against anything that was in a, were position of authority. They were against their political leaders. They were against their religious leaders, they were against politicians, the college administrators. So the inner-inner spirituality became the thing in the late (19)60s, in the (19)70s. Your thoughts on this inner spirituality where you do not need to go to church. It is just that kind of-

BE (01:40:21):
I will answer that question, but let me challenge something you said. I would not use the phrase a lot. I would use some because I think the majority did what their parents told them to do. Go to college, become something, get a profession. But the (19)60s and (19)70s are marked by a search, a search religiously, a search psychologically, a search for meaning, a search for life. And not only did folks search alternative religions, but they also searched alternative lifestyles, commune movement, and others. And you remember some of this came out of Woodstock, some of it came out of the anti-war movement. Some of it, the draft was there. And people had to ask themselves, is the United States worth dying for?

SM (01:41:30):
Yeah.

BE (01:41:31):
And if not, do I go to Canada? What do I think about 58,000 people being killed in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands being wounded, and what do I think if I care about integration, about the fact that liberals were disappearing here and there being killed and lynched and blacks were being attacked. And it was a big struggle for the identity of America. So there is not one issue that it was a small important cluster. I remember when I got elected to Congress, some of my friends said, why would you do that? Why do not you stay on the outside of government and fight the corruption, fight the bad guys who are in government in those days, you know, had Watergate and you had a lot of lack of modeling of good behavior. And I think there was that tension in our society. My own personal view is that you need people inside the tent and people outside the tent, people inside government, people outside government. I have got five honorary doctorate degrees, but only four arrests for civil disobedience. If I have any regrets in my life, it is that I have not been arrested enough. And-

SM (01:43:09):
Dr. King be proud is because Dr. King used to always say that, if you're not willing to go to jail for your belief, what are you out there for?

BE (01:43:16):
Right.

SM (01:43:17):
Not doing violent things.

BE (01:43:18):
But my friend Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary sings a song for me once in a while about, "Have You Been To Jail For Justice." Good words in that song.

SM (01:43:28):
You are right. Right. What other things we... Well know that when President Kennedy, well when he was running for president, the issue with the Catholic Church and that religion would influence his decisions. Obviously, that did not happen. But what did that say about the America of 1960, about fearful that the Pope was going to run the United States of government? And John Kennedy obviously saw that the concern, but he said that is not going to happen with him.

BE (01:44:05):
Yeah. Well, like John Kennedy, I believe in the separation of church and state, but not the separation of people of faith and institutions of government. You want your elected officials to have an active faith statement, but you need to always remember that you are not serving in public office a particular denomination or religious tradition. Henry Waxman, whose Jewish was elected with me in 1974, I want him to be a faithful member of the Jewish community, but he would never intend to have the Jewish community make the United States a Jewish nation. I think it is true of Muslims who might serve in Congress. I want them to be faithful. I want them to read the Quran, but I do not want to have Sharia law lead the law of land.

SM (01:45:02):
Right.

BE (01:45:02):
I do not want to have Sharia law be the law of the land. For conservative Protestants, I want them to be themselves. I do not have any animosity to people who are in the religious right, unless that religious right once elected thinks that it can make this a Christian nation. Our founding fathers were very smart to help all of us understand this is a nation that believes in religious pluralism. We want people of faith and people of no faith to use morals and values that grow out of their tradition, but not to ever allow any individual faith tradition to dominate. In our history, we used to hang people who were Roman Catholics. We used to torture people who were a different kind of Protestant than we had. I think the founding fathers and mothers said, "Hey, that is not going to make us a very healthy nation, so let us respect everybody's religious tradition." What is interesting is that you do not know the founding of this country and the people that come here are made up of people who left their homelands because of religious persecution in many cases. We all know that America is a xenophobic nation, that is afraid of people who are different, in the whole history. I mean, the Irish. I was even educating my dad more about some of the things that happened between England and Ireland and the Potato Famine and so forth and the treatment. What amazes me today, I am very concerned about it, and I would like your thoughts on some of the attacks on President Obama, and some people say his close links with the Muslim faith. Some people say he is a Muslim. He says he is a Christian. They will not listen to his word. They have their personal opinions. It kind of shoots me back to what happened in 1960, about the fear of the Pope. Well, then there is a fear that Islam will take over. I know they use the issue of terrorism, but I see this continuing, oftentimes a trend where-

SM (01:47:17):
Just remember that-

BE (01:47:19):
The kid that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City was a Roman Catholic raised in the United States. And if there are terrorists in 60 countries, we do not stop terrorism by bombing capitals. Part of our problem in this country is racism. Part of our problem is fear of the other. And part of our problem is we carry around in our heads, world war images of what war is about. And I think some of the leaders that Obama has, many of the leaders that Bush had were focused on World War II images of the world, and we got to change that view. We need an international police effort on terrorism, but we ought to cut in half our military expenditures. I laugh when I read the newspapers with a tear in my eye when I think about all of the conservatives who say, "We have got to balance the budget," but you cannot cut defense. We have got to balance the budget, but we're going to go to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq without paying for it, without raising taxes, and we got these big deficits. All those deficits are caused by over-spending on healthcare and education and social security. Hogwash. We are in this predicament because we, after 9/11, were manipulated by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush on the issue of fear, we went after a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 called Iraq. We went after it even though the inspectors were there. There was no hint that they actually had nuclear weapons or nuclear capability. And on the one hand, the political right and the religious right wanted more expenditures on defense, more expenditures for war, but somehow that does not impact on their thinking on deficits.

SM (01:49:24):
Do you see the link here? You are talking about the fear now. The fear in the (19)50s was the fear of the Cold War from the boomer generation. They were [inaudible] the fear of the Cold War, the potential-

BE (01:49:41):
Cold War fear started before the boomers were elected. It was the fear grew of the cult war grew out of the separation of Germany right after World War II and the building of... Russia was a world-class military, but a third-class country without the ability to really have an economy that worked. And there were all these myths about the former Soviet Union, and I think people who lived through World War II saw in terms of the exchange of nuclear weapons. And I think by the time the boomers got here and they were very small and children at the time, that fear not only got intensified with the East-West struggle, but it also pointed out that even when you tore down the Berlin Wall, you had to find another enemy to be fearful of. And so I think Rumsfeld and Cheney were able to use 9/11 as a way of tapping into the fear that people have. And my complaint about Americans is we are dumb. We do not learn from history and-

SM (01:51:01):
We do not read history.

BE (01:51:01):
We do not read history, and we do not realize that we have got to send our young people to get an international education and not just a domestic education.

SM (01:51:10):
Global. Yeah. That has been the talk. We have to prepare students for the global world. I remember Henry Cisneros at a conference, golly way back in the early (19)90s. He was speaking for a mayor, I think, of San Antonio. And this beautiful college administrator stood up and said, "Well, what is America going to be like if it is the majority are minorities?" And it was shocking to hear it from her, but she was asking a question and he said... I will never forget what he said. He said, "You should not be fearing the future. You should be preparing for the future because you are going to have bosses who are Latino. You are going to have bosses who are Asian American and from India, you name it. And so we have to prepare students for the world they are going to face because it is a global world." And you raised some good points. It is interesting also that McCarthyism, which was trying to label people who spoke up or were politically active as communists. I see sometimes today for people who may support Muslims in America are sometimes paying a price too for... We did a conference, Islam in America at Westchester University. It was my last coup probably before we left. We packed the place the entire day and we brought in the spiritual leader from Detroit who had written a book, and we brought in two authors from New York, and we did a tremendous program, and it was nine straight program. We had a 400 for every session, and we got criticized for it. In fact, some of our professors went out to speak at other universities and they had people in the audience trying to, "Do you remember when you were at that conference," and all that kind of stuff.

BE (01:53:04):
Well, it is the same thing that is happening to Obama by calling him a socialist, and some of the Tea Party folks making him a fascist. They do not know what a fascist is. And my own concern is that he is not socialist enough.

SM (01:53:19):
Well, one of the things too that I think is important. When you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, and you think of the boomer generation, and particularly the activists of that period who were anti- war. They were down in all the movement. Many of them were the new left. And so they attacked liberals as well as conservatives because LBJ was a liberal when he was running the war. Nixon was the... Even though he was conservative-

BE (01:53:47):
They defeated Humphrey.

SM (01:53:49):
Right.

BE (01:53:49):
Because Humphrey was not liberal enough.

SM (01:53:51):
Right. How are we doing time-wise?

BE (01:53:54):
I have about 15 minutes and then I have got to close up. Sorry. I talk too much.

SM (01:53:59):
That is okay. When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and when did it end?

BE (01:54:03):
It is a silly question.

SM (01:54:12):
Silly question?

BE (01:54:14):
I am just pulling your leg. It began in 1960 and it ended in 1969.

SM (01:54:18):
Oh, yeah.

BE (01:54:27):
I think the (19)60s... This is going to sound strange to you, but since you are talking about the boomers, I do not think the (19)60s had as much impact on the boomer generation than the 1970s had on them. I think the 1960s had more of an impact on my generation, those of us who were born in the late (19)30s and early (19)40s and who came to adulthood in the (19)60s. And those of us, I was... In 1961, entered college in (19)65, graduated from college in (19)68, and graduated from graduate school. June of (19)68 was a full-time minister in the city of Philadelphia, writing on the Philadelphia police clergy unit. I think that starting with the assassination of President Kennedy, where we all were taught about guns in America and war and violence plus the civil rights tension and the dogs and the fire hoses and that kind of thing. I think that had much more of a psychological impact on my generation. I think that the bloomers coming were like teenagers in the (19)60s, some of them early boomers. Some were tainted by the drug culture and LSD and that kind of thing. But most of them who got into adulthood in (19)71, (19)72, and (19)73, where they were tainted, they were tainted by Watergate. They were tainted by the prosperity gospel. They were tainted by some of the televangelist movement. They were tainted by money being God as opposed to God being God. And I think it led to the resurgence. They brought us Ronald Reagan. They brought us George Bush. They modified a little bit with Bill Clinton, but I think of President George Bush Jr. was not as impacted by my generation as he was by the...

SM (01:57:05):
1960s.

BE (01:57:08):
Well, more of the 1970s.

SM (01:57:08):
(19)70s, yeah.

BE (01:57:12):
I think the late (19)60s and (19)70s were part of that. So to answer your question, for me, the 1960s had not ended.

SM (01:57:22):
You are not the only person that said that.

BE (01:57:27):
Okay. But it is diminishing in that it is a smaller and smaller group of us who were impacted by the (19)60s and think the next generation is going to be modified by resource depletion. Dr. Jonas Salk spoke at a group of us in Congress before he died. He invented the polio vaccine, and he had a great lecture about what he called Epoch A and Epoch B. Epoch A for him was those that came after World War II. They are going to raise their kids. They are going to have more money and everything is going to get better. Epoch A was symbolized by consumption, quantity of life, and competition. And he said, "We need to evolve into Epoch B, where we replace competition with cooperation, quantity of life with quality of life," where the whole limited lifestyle was his view of the future compared to the past. Someone asked him, "Dr. Salk, how do you get from Epoch A to Epoch B?" And he said, "Well, in every change in human history, there have been intellectual mutants." And he said, "Well, we need our teachers and ministers and prophetic leaders who helped to bridge the old and the new view." And I think that is what is at the heart of our current political trauma. We have people who are lamenting the demise of Epoch A and resisting moving to more stewardship of fragile resources and are denying things like global warming, denying that we are running out of fossil fuel oil, denying that we are running out of natural resources. So I think there is kind of a... Put it this way, I think there is a new civil war going on. It is going on without guns and weapons, but it is going on for the heart and soul of Americans and in a sense, the heart and soul of the world. I think those of us who are progressive and liberal need to figure out how we do a better job of being the intellectual mutants that we need for this time.

SM (02:00:13):
The generation gap was certainly well-documented. You remember there was a Life magazine cover with a young man with the glasses on, and he had the father pointing a finger at him, and the son was pointing a finger back. And in 1980, because you are a very... You care about Vietnam vets. That is where I first met you for the first time when you did a symposium on Agent Orange in Philadelphia. And this book was called The Lost Generation, and it was Senator Webb, Phil Caputo... Wow.

BE (02:00:55):
Ford Foundation found out that I had been a leader of working on Agent Orange back in the late (19)70s and early (19)80s, and forcing our government to care for our veterans that they sent me to gather a religious delegation and go to Vietnam and see the impact 35 years after the war on the children and grandchildren of the Vietnamese who are being exposed to Agent Orange. So, I-

SM (02:01:21):
Can I have a copy of this?

BE (02:01:22):
That is yours.

SM (02:01:23):
Because see, that is how I first met you. I am trying to remember, this is even before you came to Westchester. You were at a symposium. I think it was down near Temple. It was full of Vietnam vets and you were talking about Agent Orange. And I was very impressed, and I know I am a friend of Harry Gaffney. I do not know if you know Harry and Dan Fraley and Steve Silver and that whole group, Dwight Edwards. And that was the beginning of my getting to know a lot of the Vietnam vets and what I am trying to get at here-

BE (02:01:52):
You need more than one copy?

SM (02:01:53):
Yes. If I could have a couple of these, I would appreciate it. I think I am going to turn this one over. The question I have is, there was a book called The Longest... Let me get this here. Sorry. It was a book that had a symposium documented, and the symposium was with Phil Caputo, Jim Webb, I think it was Bobby Mueller, James Fallows, and one other person. It was unbelievable.

BE (02:02:28):
Bobby Mueller is working with us on this.

SM (02:02:32):
Yeah. Well, Bobby was at my retirement. I asked Bobby to come. He was one of the six people that was at my retirement. And what came up in this program is that I think they were talking about the generation gap, and Jim Webb made a comment. The comment was, "The generation gap is not between parents. Well, it is between parents and sons and daughters, but the real generation gap is within the generation between those who went to Vietnam and those who did not." And Bobby will remember this. It was a great interaction. And it's documented in the Wounded Generation book. Your thoughts on that commentary, whether... And this gets into my real big question here. As a nation, I ask a question oftentimes, have we healed from one of the tremendous divisions that took place in the (19)60s and (19)70s between those who supported the war? And again, between those who are Black and White and all the other issues? And I took students to Washington to meet Senator Musky in 1995, and we asked this question to him, and I will give you his response in a minute. And I know Senator Nelson said it affected the body politic, but people do not want walk around Washington saying, "I did not heal from the Vietnam War." Your thoughts on whether we as a nation have a problem with healing within this generation, the group after World War II, particularly those who serve in Vietnam - 3 million plus - and those who may have in the anti-war people?

BE (02:04:06):
Well, before I answer your question, let me just say, I was the first anti-war activist on the Veterans Affairs Committee, and had I not been put on the Veterans Affairs Committee, I would have lost my elections. And at first, I did not want to be on the Veterans Affairs Committee, but I learned that even though you oppose the war, you can love the warrior. And even though you oppose the war, you can work on things like readjustment counseling centers, Agent Orange, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, et cetera. I would go to your question about healing. I would only modify the comment about the generation gap being between those who went to war and those who did not. I think it is more complicated than that. I think it is between those who went to war and those who did not, those who supported integration and those who did not, those who understood the need for African Americans to be part of a quality of life in America and have resources expanded to those who believe that you cannot build walls to keep out Mexicans or people crossing your border because the world has gotten complicated. I think there is a division between those who live by the god of money and those that live by the commitment to social justice and caring for people. So it's too simplistic to say it is just as though every... Because every veteran who served in Vietnam was not a hero. We know that from Eli, right?

SM (02:06:01):
Yeah.

BE (02:06:01):
Many were, but there were good people and bad people in the war, and there were good people and bad people in the anti-war movement. And as human beings, what we have done to each other has been to pour salt on the wounds of race, the wounds of violence. And I think there is a division, a generation gap between those who think you can solve the world's problems by military action. And those who think you need to solve the problems with something like three cups of tea. The book that gentleman wrote is my thinking about how we should have handled Afghanistan. We were handling it with weapons and war, and every time we inadvertently kill a civilian, we have made a family of terrorists. And that is where the gap is. I think you see it every day on Nightly News. The gap is between Fox News and MSNBC. The gap is between Cobert and Rush Limbaugh. Glenn Beck is the hero of the anti-movement. And I would say both the left and the right, but mostly the right love and thrive on not allowing the nation to heal. And you see it internally in the Senate today where McConnell says, "We are going to be no until we can defeat Obama, and we do not want Obama to succeed." And one of the reasons I am President of Common Cause is I think John Gardner was right, that everybody had a special interest in Washington except average ordinary people. And the hostility of the generation gap is that internal gap between those who once elected, serve the public interest as opposed to the special interest. And money is a corrosive influence in our whole system. So it is too simplistic to say it is those who went to war and those who did not because those of us who did not go into the war, many of us worked very hard to provide the warrior healing through Regis counseling centers, the new GI Bill for the all-volunteer military, and to make sure that whether you are for or against a warrior, you are always for healing the soldier who goes to war, and some of us work to try to stop wars.

SM (02:09:05):
Do you believe that the people who were the anti-war people, many of them are college students and well-known people, that they consider themselves veterans of the war too?

BE (02:09:21):
They are.

SM (02:09:21):
And we-

BE (02:09:22):
We just gave an award, Lifetime Achievement Award to Daniel Ellsberg.

SM (02:09:28):
I am interviewing him. I mean, a week from Monday.

BE (02:09:31):
He just received the John Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award in California. And he was introduced by Pete McCloskey, a Marine, former congressman, former Republican, now Democrat. But Pete McCloskey introduced him. But the three of us were on the same stage together. There are two former congressmen and Daniel Elizabeth. I think of Dr. King as a hero. I think of William Sloane Coffin as a hero. I think of Pete McCloskey as a hero. I think of Daniel Ellsberg as a hero.

SM (02:10:11):
Daniel and Philip.

BE (02:10:12):
And Philip. I think of...

SM (02:10:15):
Malcolm Boyd.

BE (02:10:16):
Malcolm Boyd was a hero. And you do not have to go to war to be a hero. I think that people have given their lives for justice and peace. They are heroes too. My picture... And I have got to leave. My picture of a real hero is the Chinese guy with two shopping bags standing in front of the tank.

SM (02:10:44):
You do not know whatever happened to him.

BE (02:10:46):
He is my hero.

SM (02:10:48):
Wow.

BE (02:10:53):
I guess I respect those who are willing to stand in front of the tanks.

SM (02:10:56):
Do you have any final thoughts on the boomer generation itself with respect to... A lot of the boomers when they were young felt that they were going to... This will be my last question. They were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society, that they were going to hopefully end war to bring peace, end racism, sexism, and really kind of cure everything. Kind of be the panacea for a lot of the issues that were facing us in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. Do you feel that because of the fact that we still have of war and that we still have a lot of the... We still have racism, although we have come a long way. We still, as David Garrow said to me, the historian said the accomplishments for gay and lesbian Americans have been unbelievable in terms of one of the results of the (19)60s. And of course, you got the environmental movement, Gaylor Nelson, and...

BE (02:11:54):
Let me ask you a question because I got to go.

SM (02:11:56):
Yep.

BE (02:11:59):
I think that every generation makes its contribution. When I grew up, everybody I knew smoked. No one smokes anymore. When I grew up, women were making 30 cents on the dollar that men were making. That gap is closing, and there are more rights and privileges according to women. When I grew up, there was segregation. There is still a separation of the races, but much more tolerance, much more sharing, much more riding in the same bus together at all the seats, any seat being used. So in terms of racism, there have been good movements. Environmental movement has been good. Much more quality of life issues have been improved over time. So there is good things. And one other good thing we have not talked about, which you might want to think about in your book. I think the boomer generation is going to teach us how to retire better than previous generations. They are going to want exercise rooms and theater and all of the amenities to be close to retirement, but hopefully, they will also teach us that there is life after retirement. That 65 to 95-year-olds need a job. They may not need a-

SM (02:13:30):
Yeah, I am going back to work in a year.

BE (02:13:31):
They may not need as much of a salary, but they will need a stipend and benefits. We need a whole Peace Corps for senior adults. We need to find out how the 65 to 95-year-olds can make a contribution to our society. So there are lots of positives. I think the negative is that there has been an increase in greed and an increase in selfishness. And because of the religious rights of personal salvation push, there is too much everyone for themselves. And I think one of the negative legacies that this generation is leaving us, and part of my generation is responsible for it too, is that nobody wants to pay taxes. And if you think about it, all the states are now moving to casinos to fund their schools and their elderly programs because nobody wants to pay taxes, even though we pay less in taxes than we did 30 years ago as a percentage of our income. And I think that is a very damaging legacy to leave. The other damaging legacy that has been left by those who are about to retire is that too many politicians have been caught with their fingers in the cookie jar and too few young people see public service as an honorable profession. And my tears this week over Charlie Wrangle was more about how many young Blacks will avoid going into public service because they saw an 80-year-old Black politician tarnished by his own lifestyle and much of Charlie Wrangel's problem was not corruption. It was sloppiness and arrogance and all of those kinds of things.

SM (02:15:37):
And how about the Vietnam veteran Cunningham, who was revered for his Vietnam service? Now, he is in jail.

BE (02:15:43):
Well, he took almost $5 million from military folk. So the handful of boomers who modeled bad behavior impacted more than a handful of others and other generations who have soiled views of the future. I got to go.

SM (02:16:10):
Let me take two more pictures and then I am going to take one definitely with only the background. So this one is the one you are going to give to your wife. So if you stand right in front of it, and I will make sure the only thing I have in the back... Okay. Right there. So the only thing I am going to have in the backdrop is [inaudible] do that.

BE (02:16:29):
[inaudible].

SM (02:16:29):
Yeah. Three, six. One more.

BE (02:16:29):
That camera still have film in it?

SM (02:16:39):
Yes, it does.

BE (02:16:39):
Oh, man. You are old-fashioned.

SM (02:16:41):
Yep. Well, I have a vision over this camera is good.

BE (02:16:44):
There you go.

SM (02:16:45):
Very good. Do you think when Jan Scruggs wrote his book To Heal A Nation that the wall has done some sort of a job in healing the nation? He not only talked about healing Vietnam vets and their families, but he talked about the nation itself.

BE (02:17:02):
It helped. But remember, Ronald Reagan said tear down the wall. Maybe we need to tear down walls, but we need memorials. So I think of it more as a memorial. Memorials are healing.

SM (02:17:20):
If you can sign that to me. I am glad you're in charge. I had John Edgar... Oh, not John here. John Gardner's books. I think I have all of them. I read No Easy Victories and then I have his book that... I remember I kind of encouraged students to read, which is his book.

BE (02:17:37):
What do you go by in terms-

SM (02:17:38):
Steven.

BE (02:17:38):
Steven.

SM (02:17:39):
Yeah.

(End of Interview)

2010-12-03

Stephen McKiernan

Robert Edgar, 1943-2013

137:41

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Legislators—United States--Pennsylvania; Democratic Party (Pa.); Edgar, Robert, 1943-2013--Interviews

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