Interview with Paul Hendrickson

Interview with Paul Hendrickson

Hendrickson, Paul, 1944- ; McKiernan, Stephen

College teachers; English teachers; Authors; Journalists; Hendrickson, Paul, 1944--Interviews

Paul Hendrickson is an author, journalist, and educator. He is a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post. Hendrickson is the author of two books, The Living and The Dead and Sons of Mississippi. Hendrickson attended St. Louis University for his Bachelor's degree in English, and ennsylvania State University for his Master's degree in English.

2003-11-07

In Copyright

McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.2a; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.2b

2017-03-01

McKiernan Interviews

80:31

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Paul Hendrickson
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 11 July 2003
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:04):
All right. When you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first things that comes to your mind when you think of that period?

PH (00:00:15):
I guess I am speaking personally. Chaos, in terms of you almost woke up and did not know what the headline was going to be that day. I should back up and say that my own coming to awareness and consciousness in the world coincides with the (19)60s, which is why all my book projects, or so many of them, seem to be centered in the (19)60s. I was really an altar boy growing up in the (19)50s in a sheltered, Catholic, provincial, Midwestern town outside of Chicago and then I went to religious life, to the seminary, for seven years. In some ways, my awareness was stunted, not my intellectual growth, because the seminary was rigorous, but my awareness of the greater world outside me was stunted, so that when I came out of the seminary smack in the middle of the 1960s, literally July, 1965, I felt as if I were swimming straight out from shore. And it was overwhelming to learn about girls, to finish college, because I had done at least half of university in the seminary, and to connect with what was going on in the world around me. Kennedy, our great "Catholic" president, had been killed and that made a profound impact in the seminary, but we were still behind those seminary walls. That was (19)63. When I came out of religious life in 1965, so much in that short period of time had happened and I was trying to catch up with it. I mean, cities were starting to burn, Watts in Los Angeles. Vietnam was, not that I knew it, in the summer of (19)65, but America had taken over the war. It was now the Americanized war. All those years later, I would write a book about it. My opening word to you was chaos and that, even, is a personal statement of how I felt because interiorly, I had no grounding. It felt like I was on a sandbar or on a merry-go-round, trying to catch up. I was 21 years old. I had never been on a date and the world seemed to be swirling and I seemed to be swirling inside.

SM (00:03:17):
The boomer generation is characterized as a group of people that were born between 1946 and 1964. Now in recent years, there has been a lot of critique of this generation by news broadcasters or columnists or whatever. The basic criticism is the fact that they look at this generation of boomers as the reason why we have a lot of problems in this country, in issues like the drugs, issues dealing with sex, maybe even the increase in the divorce rate. All kinds of problems in our society meant there has been a lot of criticism of the boomers. Could you comment on whether that criticism is fair or unjust?

PH (00:04:05):
It is such a broad question that it seems to me there is truth in it and there is stereotype in it. There is myth in it that is unjust. I guess I am certainly part of that generation, even though I am just a little ahead of it. I was born in (19)44, so I am two years ahead of what might be technically or formally defined as the boomer generation and my own life, because of what I was just saying in the previous remarks, was more esoteric and eccentric than the classic boomer growing up, but of course, I am formed by that period of time. I am formed by the (19)50s and I am marked by the (19)60s. Is it fair? Yes. And is it unfair? Yes. It is fair in the sense that this generation had so much indulged upon it, extra expendable income by post-war affluence, a pampered quality, which has its flaws and sins and excesses in terms of the trouble, then, that people get into with their sense of affluence, with their sense of indulgence, and with their sense of, in a way, overeducated, not needing to be as accountable, both financially accountable and morally accountable, as the previous generation, as their parents and certainly going back to the depression of the 1930s, where no one had any money and people instantly had to start working and were grateful for any kind of employment. This boomer generation, the word itself, boomer, implies a lot about indulgence and laziness, maybe, and entertainment values. It is unfair in the sense that out of the boomer generation have come such already successful people, hardworking people, people that you talked about in your remarks before we even turned on the tape recorder, who have changed this country for the better. You have mentioned Tom Hayden. Okay, there is one.

SM (00:06:54):
When you look at the boomer generation when you were young, leaving the seminary, could you comment on the thoughts that you had on the generation when you were young in comparison to your thoughts today?

PH (00:07:09):
Just say that again. I am a little confused with what you want.

SM (00:07:14):
Your thoughts on the boomer generation, your generation, when you came out of the seminary, when you were in your early twenties, what were your thoughts about the young people that you were seeing in America of that period? Has that changed over time and have you thought about it and evolved in your thinking about this generation, and then where do you stand today on them?

PH (00:07:35):
Well, I will get in trouble here for what I am going to say. I am a teacher of writing at Penn, non-fiction writing, advanced non-fiction writing. These kids are the best and the brightest who get into these writing seminars. I am very, very proud of them because of how talented they are and how hard they work. I get the top of the pyramid, the creme de la creme, but what I am getting at here, Steve, is that I see all around me, when I said I am going to get in trouble, at the University of Pennsylvania, an elitism, an entitlement. When we were talking about the boomer generation being spoiled and too much income, the word that might come is entitlement. I feel that this generation of kids, and I am not talking about the ones I teach, because that is a very selective thing for them to get in. They are the committed, hardworking ones. I have to interview them before I allow them in. The run-of-the-mill, which is very, very high caliber of intellectual quality at Penn, those kids are entitled. They are too affluent for their own good. They are too smug for their own good. I feel that this generation has out-boomered the generation that I saw. You asked me what I thought of the world and young people my age when I came out of the seminary in (19)65. I still had blinkers on. I was still trying to learn. I went to a fairly conservative Jesuit university in the Midwest to finish up my education, St. Louis University, and the kids there were certainly boomers, but not in the real pejorative way that we think of it. I mean, just this term that we have been throwing around, boomer, strikes me as a pejorative idea. Do not you agree?

SM (00:09:55):
Mm-hmm.

PH (00:09:57):
And I think the rap is undeserved in some ways and in other ways, no. What you often find about me is that I am in the middle on everything. I, in many, ways see the grays of life. It is sixes and sevens with me. I am certainly not wanting to deny that the boomer generation caused a lot of problems. Do you know these two authors, Collier and Horowitz-

SM (00:10:39):
Yes.

PH (00:10:39):
...who were radicals and then one of them, at least, Horowitz more than Collier, went totally over to the other side?

SM (00:10:47):
He has been on our campus.

PH (00:10:48):
Yeah.

SM (00:10:49):
He wrote Radical Son.

PH (00:10:51):
Yeah, you should interview him.

SM (00:10:53):
Well, we-

PH (00:10:54):
He is a difficult guy.

SM (00:10:55):
Yeah. We have had him twice on our campus. When you describe, can you break down the qualities that you most admire in the boomers and then the qualities you least admire in them?

PH (00:11:09):
Well, most admire are, this is almost flying in the face of some of what we were just talking. Most admire that they were idealistic. They want to change the world. They could not stand Vietnam. They could not stand the fact that African Americans were unjustly treated, so they were doing things, this is this element of the boomer generation, that was highly conscious and conscientious. I admire that tremendously. They wanted to change the world for the better. The things I do not admire are the ones who were listening too much to the Beach Boys and hanging out.

SM (00:12:01):
When you look at the anti-war movement, the anti-war movement is looked upon by most as college students, graduate students and undergraduate students who were very important in the ending of the Vietnam War. Your thoughts on how impactful these students were in ending this war?

PH (00:12:25):
I mean, we look back now and we see the excesses of the anti-war movement. A lot of the kids who were out there protesting, there were elements of peer responsibility, too much drugs, too much free love. All right, all right, all right, I agree to that, but I believe that, you said impact. It was tremendously impactful. That war would not have come to a conclusion. America would not have withdrawn its support if it were not for the boomer generation out there pushing and pushing and pushing and led by older generations, just as we mentioned Dan Berrigan before, Robert Lowell, the poet, Norman Mailer. All of the anti-war sentiment that grew has its roots in this same generation that is accused of so many sins. Yeah, they did tremendous things wrong and there were tremendous excesses, but the good of it, the power of it is far outweighed by history, it seems to me, which conservative Americans would want to write off and say, "Oh, it was irresponsible kids, stoned, who did not want to go to work and just wanted to protest something." Not true.

SM (00:13:59):
How do you respond to the critics who say that because of these college students who protested against the war or the Berrigans or the [inaudible] and so forth, they prolonged the war?

PH (00:14:13):
In what way? How could they have prolonged the war?

SM (00:14:15):
This is an attitude that comes from the Vietnamese and from the North Vietnamese, as some of the recent literature has stated that we knew when we saw this happening that we were going to eventually win, and so thus they can actually say that because of that, there are more names on the wall because they were not going to give up, period.

PH (00:14:34):
And it made the North Vietnamese, it gave them fodder for their cause. It made them hold together, but look how torn with dissension America is. If we just hang on, we will prevail. These people, these radical kids are on our side. Yeah, there is some truth to that and the grays are everywhere. There would be some truth to that, but far more, it seems to me, is the fact that all of that protest got the attention of the country because the lies that were being told within the government. I mean, I know what I am talking about. When I came out of the seminary in 1965, I knew nothing. It was so many years later when I was a reporter for the Washington Post and started looking at this and thinking about it and interviewing Robert McNamara, the architect of the policy, and when I started doing that, I knew nothing about the systematic and systemic lies that had been told. Those kids out there protesting, they did not have those documents, but they knew in their gut that it was a dishonest war and an immoral war, and God bless them. I, in my own way, only three years out of the seminary, joined the anti-war movement because I was at Penn State as a graduate student and I was passing out leaflets for Eugene McCarthy. I got with the program.

SM (00:16:17):
He was my first interview couple years back. He is not doing too well right now because he has got real bad back, but he is still hanging in there. When you look at the issues of the (19)60s, it is just a vibrant era, when you think of all the movements that came together. There was the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement evolved. I remember even the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, the gay and lesbian group. Is there one reason why this was all happening at this time? Can we look at the civil rights movement and say this gave the impetus for other movements? This was the example that allowed other groups to say, "We can do it. We can make a change in this world"

PH (00:17:06):
Maybe that is one theory, the bounce off theory, the synergistic theory. Synergism is all these forces colliding and coming off and positively reacting off one another. The Chicano movement synergistically gets its power from the civil rights movement, which synergistically, the civil rights movement gets its power from Vietnam protest or vice versa. Yeah, that seems to me as good a theory as any. I like that, Steve. You should talk to Sheldon Hackney, professor at Penn, who has written a book.

SM (00:17:43):
I have got it. Great book.

PH (00:17:44):
And he teaches in a course on the (19)60s and he is teaching a course this fall, or maybe it is a preceptorial, called The End of the (19)60s. You said, "Why did all these things come together?" I do not know the answer other than... All I can say is that I was in the middle of this thing and it was swirling around me, just like it was for you. That is why all of the writing power that I feel, so much of it is rooted there in the (19)60s. I am still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. What were the (19)60... Every great once in a while, these periods of time come along that are just so powerful, cataclysmic. If you believe in the pendulum swing of history, you go the (19)30s to the (19)60s to the (19)90s. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that it takes about 30 years for a generation to occur. The cataclysms of the 1930s, when did the 1930s began? They began on Black Monday, 1929, when the stock market fell. And when did the 1930s end? I think they ended on December 7th, 1941, when Pearl Harbor, because history does not go in these neat 10-year cycles, so let us say the (19)30s began the day the stock market crashed and ended the day that we declared war on Japan. The pendulum swing generation ... When did the 1960s begin? For me, the 1960s began on November 22nd, 1963, when Kennedy gets killed. And when did the (19)60s end? Tricky question, they ended on August 9th, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned. The (19)60s really, the (19)60s are not New Year's Day 1960 to New Year's day 1969, no, November 22nd, 1963 to August 9th, 1974, when Nixon resigned. Now swing the pendulum again. When did the, quote, when did the (19)90s begin? I mean, we are going on the paradigm of Scott Fitzgerald's 30-year swing. If there is supposed to be a revisiting, the (19)60s are [inaudible] generous, so we will never have a decade like that, I do not think, again. Maybe, who knows, but what happened in the (19)60s cannot compare, in my mind, to the (19)30s. The (19)60s is like a boa constrictor having swallowed a warthog. It just bumps up so large. When did the (19)90s begin, "the (19)90s?" If we are talking (19)30s, (19)60s, (19)90s, this is a trick question that I use on my documentary students. When did the (19)90s begin, Steve?

SM (00:20:52):
I would think it would begin when Ronald Reagan became president.

PH (00:20:55):
Wrong. No, we are talking about upheaval, cataclysm. We have got the paradigm of the (19)30s. We have got the (19)60s. When did the (19)90s begin? This is a trick question. This is a trick question that is absolutely compelling if you stop and think about it.

SM (00:21:13):
It was not when Bill Clinton came in.

PH (00:21:14):
No, it is not cataclysmic enough.

SM (00:21:16):
Okay, yeah.

PH (00:21:18):
Now remember, history does not go in the-

SM (00:21:20):
Oh, you are talking about 9/11.

PH (00:21:21):
The (19)90s began on September 11th, 2001.

SM (00:21:27):
Okay.

PH (00:21:28):
That is when the (19)90s began. (19)30s, (19)60s, (19)90s.

SM (00:21:31):
You are right.

PH (00:21:33):
The world has been different since September 11th, 2001.

SM (00:21:36):
Oh, definitely.

PH (00:21:37):
That is the pendulum swing of history.

SM (00:21:39):
Right. Good analogy. Very good. When you think of the boomer generation, the Vietnam Memorial was open in 1982. The goal of the Vietnam Memorial was to heal within the veterans and with the families of the veterans itself, but also hopefully to heal the nation. It was meant to be a non-political entity. Could you talk about your thoughts on the impact that the Vietnam Memorial has had on healing, not only within the veterans and the family of veterans, but within the nation as a whole? And I preface this question with, what effect does this have on those individuals who are involved in the anti-war movement or as some people say, may have guilt feelings for not serving?

PH (00:22:34):
I love the Vietnam Memorial. I have been there many-many-many times. I have been there at all times of the day, in the middle of the night, in the early morning, on weekends, on national holidays. I have experienced it in a wide spectrum and variety of occasions and emotions and anything I can say about it is positive and powerful. I have never been to the Vietnam Memorial when I do not see some expression of powerful emotions, some display of something beautiful, somebody breaking down, crying as they are tracing a name on the wall, motorcycle veterans who are terribly overweight with long hair who are holding onto each other for dear life, and that is their humanity, not their physical appearance. It is their humanity of suddenly being called back to the fact of where they were when somebody died, some comrade died, whom they knew. I always wanted to go down there with Robert McNamara. I always wanted to see Robert McNamara there. He said to me in his office when I interviewed him, "Yes, I have been there." I am not even sure he has. If he has, maybe he has been there with a hat over his head and dark glasses in the middle of the night. I do not know. He said he was there. I hope so. I hear your question and about those who guilt and who did not serve and that, but I can only think of it as a positive healing slash of granite coming out of the earth. James Webb, who was the (19)60s figure who was Secretary of the Navy and was a decorated winner, I think he even won the Congressional Medal of Honor, certainly won a lot. No, I think he won bronze stars and things. He was a marine combat veteran and has written novels and he hated the Vietnam Memorial's design when it came out. He was leading the protest about this. They did not accept us when we came back and now they were trying to build a monument that is ugly and is a slash of marble coming out of the ground. That was wrongheaded. I mean, I forgive him tremendously. He could not see the power, the perfect power of that monument. Its form follows function. You walk into that monument. As you go down the descending steps, the wall gets higher and those names get higher and the power and the profundity of 58,000 dead grows on you that way. I am in awe of this monument. I am of the belief that it has brought great healing to the country, not enough.

SM (00:26:06):
You brought up McNamara again. I am going to go on a limb here and have your comments on McNamara because when I have been to the wall and the veterans that I have known in the Westchester area and in Philadelphia, there are three names that they seem to, I use the word hate. Robert McNamara is one. Jane Fonda is the most, and for some reason, Bill Clinton. Now, I would just like your thoughts again on these three names and why these three names seem to bring such ire to them, Vietnam veterans, and they will never heal from their thoughts from them.

PH (00:26:50):
Yeah. They bump up large. It is symbolism. McNamara seems so sure. To our generation, you say that name, it is like a knife point, McNamara. It is a knife point of remembering of consciousness. It has to do with his look, that swept back hair, those steel rim glasses that were both scary and I mean, daunting and awesome at the same time. Gee, there must be tremendous intellect there. And the body was so rigid and tight. His body seemed to fit in an envelope. It was all about lies, as it was later revealed, and then he fell. He felt so large because he quit believing that the war could be won and yet, he kept trying to pretend, so there was this mask. When all this later began to be exposed, I mean, he just became such a figure of enmity and among the veterans I know, he will never be forgiven. I have always wondered why he did not get murdered. I mean, people tried. Why did not he get murdered? There is just such hatred out there, such incredible hatred, and he is still an arrogant man. He is an old, old, old man, but he is still arrogant. The story of McNamara is that he falls and then he comes back into his arrogance. He comes back into his pridefulness. The stone monument of his pridefulness is a line that I used in the book, and that is very hard to forgive. It says in the Bible, "Pride goeth before destruction," and that is the McNamara story. Hubris, McNamara symbolically came to stand for such hubris of that administration, far more than Lyndon Johnson, who was devious and power diseased, but McNamara came to stand for this incredible hubris. People who put their lives on the line over there can never forget that and can never forget the feeling of how they were betrayed, and that goes for Jane Fonda, of whom I know of so much less about. Hanoi Jane can never be forgiven.

SM (00:29:32):
Hold that thought. I am going to put [inaudible] Okay.

PH (00:29:45):
Hanoi Jane cannot be forgiven because it just seemed that people were dying and she, in her arrogance and her smugness in her ignorance, went to North Vietnam and was spitting on the valor and spitting on the struggle, the blood of these GIs. Clinton is a much more complicated case. It has to do with his lying and his hypocrisy and boomer, who seems to have gotten away with a lot of things, who avoided because... Boomers get the rap, and not undeservedly, for being able to have stiff armed service in Vietnam, where the ordinary guy coming out of Westchester, Pennsylvania on his high school education or his modest community college education, does not have the leverage, the political sophistication, financial leverage to avoid service, skillfully avoid service because of his upper middle class economic sophistication and abilities to hide behind certain deferments. That is what Clinton seems to stand for. Hanoi Jane seems to stand for her traitor, her traitorousness. Clinton seems to stand for his manipulations of the system and McNamara seems to stand for hubris, for pride.

SM (00:31:47):
What is interesting about Clinton is the person who wrote the letter so that he could go to Oxford was Senator William Fulbright, who ended up going as head of the Senate for Relations Committee, who supported the war in the beginning, but then criticized it and wrote The Arrogance of Power. The irony that the man who became one of the most disliked individuals during the Johnson presidency ended up being the man that helped Clinton. There is a little bit of irony there.

PH (00:32:16):
There is a little bit of irony there. Fulbright did not know much about Bill Clinton, just wrote him a letter, wrote a letter on his behalf. Fulbright was a great man. He had the power. He had the moral capital to change when he saw that it was corrupt. We called Fulbright as an old man in a K street law firm, long retired from government. I am interviewing him for the McNamara book and I said, "Sir." I mean, he was a hero of mine. And he was old by then, and he basically did not have a job. He was just in a law firm as a emeritus associate guy. And I said, "Sir, I was so naive when I started this McNamara project. I did not understand how these..." He said, "Do not feel bad. I was naive, too. I was a US senator."

SM (00:33:04):
Yeah. He wrote a really good book, The Price of Empire, and I guess he co-wrote it with Mr. Tillman or something like that, and we ended up taking students from Westchester University down to meet him as our first Leadership on the Road program. Gaylord Nelson helped us secure it right during the Gulf War in (19)91, and it was a tremendous meeting. He had had a stroke, but he was back fully strong. And he walked into the room and he had that gut and the suspenders were up and everything and his sport coat. And he said, "Why do you want to listen to an old man?" I will never forget that, but at that point forward, he challenged our students and you knew right away how powerful he was. We had a student government president at the time who was so gung hoed for the war and of course, he was against the war, so it was a great learning experience for our students to give him the pro viewpoint. When you look at the lasting legacy of the boomer generation... You are a writer and some of the best World War II books are coming out now, almost 50 years afterwards. When the best books are written on the (19)60s and the (19)70s and the boomer generation, what do you think the lasting legacy is going to be of the boomers via the greater period of time to really reflect and understand the history of this period?

PH (00:34:28):
That they sought to make a change and it was a human enterprise. Any institution that they became part of, like the SDS, is flawed and full of excesses because it is run by human beings, but they were idealistic and felt that the world, there was corruption and that they were being lied to and they tried to do something about it. That, to me, has to be saluted and remembered. When we wash off or want to write off the (19)60s crowd as dope smoking, long-haired, irresponsible, that is inexact and inaccurate. The greater part of it is that they were large elements were trying to make a difference.

SM (00:35:30):
How do you even deal with the subtleness that some people use, maybe not to go as far as attacking the extreme elements of the (19)60s, but stating that this particular generation of 70 million people, only probably 15 percent were truly involved in any form of activism, whether it be in the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, whatever the cause, and they used that as an excuse to show that they are not really, the numbers were not really there? It was just a small number in a big generation.

PH (00:36:05):
I do not know. What do you think about that?

SM (00:36:10):
Well, my thoughts on that is that I disagree with them. I disagree because when you take 15 percent of 70 million people, that is still a lot of people.

PH (00:36:18):
That is a lot of people. That is what I was going to say.

SM (00:36:20):
And you are dealing with a lot of different causes.

PH (00:36:23):
And that 15 percent made enough noise that they were tremendously heard.

SM (00:36:27):
Oh, yes.

PH (00:36:34):
You can light a match. You can light a match in a dark room and see that light.

SM (00:36:43):
This issue that is really important, I sense it today, and I do not know if you sense it amongst your students, but it really concerns me. It is this lack of trust that we seem to have in our leaders. I have been in college education for 25 years. I saw it in the (19)80s with students. I see it in the (19)90s. I see it today. A lack of trust in leaders, whether they be political leaders, corporate leaders, even ministers. No matter where a person is, that there has got to be something wrong with that person. They cannot be trusted. I am wondering if the effect that Lyndon Johnson had and Richard Nixon and I even had someone tell me in the interview process that the lack of trust began with Eisenhower. Eisenhower? Yeah, because of the U-2 incident. He lied to the American public. It was right on television. He knew he was lying. If you really want to go back, you can talk to Eisenhower, and then you can even go back to FDR if you want to for some things.

PH (00:37:47):
Yeah, for Pearl Harbor.

SM (00:37:47):
Yeah, for Pearl Harbor and then Truman had opportunities with... The question I am really asking is the issue of trust.

PH (00:37:58):
Trust in our trust in government, trust in our leaders, gosh, it is a huge problem that concerns me, too, that automatically there is a tendency to distrust. Does that come out of the (19)60s? Does that come out of Vietnam? Oh, well, you are just pointing that it goes back further, but it seems like it was so pronounced during the (19)60s, and that is a fearful thing. If we think that everybody who comes forward to try to run for office or to lead us should be distrusted, I mean, I do not know how we correct that.

SM (00:38:41):
You see that when you think of the periods that I am just describing, that the (19)60s was the period where this trust and lack thereof really evolved and developed. The question I am really trying to get at now is what had the boomers done with respect to their children in terms of passing on the qualities that they possessed in activism into the next generation? Have you seen that the children of the boomers are like them or not like them?

PH (00:39:11):
My wife says that when you are raising children, we have two boys, the notion of be careful not what you say to your children as much as what you show them by your actions, what you do, because that is what they are watching. That is what they are picking up. I do not think that answers your question, but I mean, this thing you are getting at about how do we restore some basic positive, I do not know the answer to that. It is very worrisome.

SM (00:40:04):
I am wondering whether boomers have actually sat down with their kids or their grandkids now and talk to them about the (19)60s and the (19)70s and what it meant to them, so that in their lives they can believe they are empowered as well to be change agents for the betterment of society. A question that has arisen through this process of these interviews is, what have the boomers done with their kids and why, in the generation that followed the boomers, they do not vote. And if you talk to them, "My vote does not count." [inaudible]

PH (00:40:39):
They stress their officials. They do not think it is going to do any good. And as I said, they are over-boomered. They have out-boomered the boomers, so maybe the boomers are negligent and culpable here for not giving enough of their time to sitting down with their kids and telling them. And why would that happen? I do not know. It is interesting that my own kids know about the (19)60s without... My 15-year-old, 5, 6, 7 years ago, he knew all about the (19)60s. Where did he learn it? If I said to him, "John, what are the (19)60s about?" He would go, "Hey, man, peace." Where did you get that, from television? I do not know, but the true values of the (19)60s, does he know about those? Maybe not enough. The true values of the (19)60s that I would think of is all these things we have been talking about, protesting.

SM (00:41:41):
Well, working with students as I do day in and day out, one thing that I have seen, at least the last 16 years at Westchester, is the fact that there is two ways that they look at the (19)60s. There is either, "I wish I lived in that period so that my life could be as exciting as," because there were causes and issues, and number two, "I am sick of hearing it. I am sick of hearing about nostalgia. You are trying to relive your past. Come on, we are in the future now. I am tired of hearing about it." And of course, these are all responses before 9/11, because we had a lot of the interviews that I have had are before 9/11 and the causes and now there seems to be, this is a major cataclysmic event in student lives.

PH (00:42:23):
What are you going to do with this? Put a book together about what the (19)60s stands for?

SM (00:42:27):
Yeah. It is based on these questions. It is oral histories and some taken people who were leaders at that particular time. That is why we got McGovern. We got some of the older leaders, so people that were in positions upon responsible at that particular time, certainly a lot of vets and civil rights people and then boomers, people in the anti-war movement and people in the intellectual community. It is a combination of different points of view. I am in the process now of trying to get more women, because I am finding, it is interesting, that when you look at the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, men were in the major roles. Men mostly served, even though the nurses did serve in Vietnam. And I am working with Diane Carlson Evans now to try to make sure that I get a lot of women to be interviewed in the next several months. It is a composite, lots of views, because it is like any oral history interview. It is taking a person's feelings, people reading these oral histories of different individuals from different perspectives, and trying to get a grasp of some of the questions that I have been asking and-

PH (00:43:34):
Tucker.

SM (00:43:34):
...trying to understand the period a little better.

PH (00:43:38):
Listen. There is a book that is somewhere around this house, but you probably know about it. It is a similar tack of what you are doing, except it was done a long, long time ago, 20, 25 years ago, right as the (19)60s were finishing up. It is called From Camelot to Kent State.

SM (00:43:56):
Oh, I have got that book.

PH (00:43:57):
And Craig McNamara, McNamara's son, is one of the interviews in the book.

SM (00:44:02):
Oh, wow.

PH (00:44:05):
And he is a great guy. He is McNamara's own son. He is proof that Robert McNamara has a heart because Craig McNamara, people who want to write off McNamara think he is the tin man searching for a heart. No-no. McNamara is much more complicated. McNamara is the fact that he betrayed his own predilections and his own desire. He grew up on the cusp of the country in the (19)30s at Berkeley, where there was all this intellectual ferment. He was idealistic. McNamara sold out. He sold out, first of all, in cars, but then he came to Washington, where the line really had to begin. The McNamara story is far more tragic than some soulless money idiot. People who think that that is what he is about or a soulless numbers cruncher, they do not get McNamara. They are all wrong. Craig, his son, is a walnut farmer in Winters, California, is a truly good human being. And when I say he is proof that McNamara has a heart, Craig McNamara, the son, the only son, could not have gotten his goodness from his mother alone. His mother alone, McNamara's wife, was a tremendous person, but Craig could not have, he had to get it equal parts or not maybe equal, but he had to get parts from his father and parts from his mother. I do not want to get off on that, but he is one of the interviews in that book and you should dust that book off and look at it again because I think some of what you are trying to do is, although that is mostly... That book, I think, is mostly interviews with just the boomers, just the protestors.

SM (00:45:40):
Yeah. Well, I have got a lot of older people and a lot of Vietnam vets.

PH (00:45:43):
You have got the range.

SM (00:45:44):
Got a long way to go. I think I am going to get David Eisenhower and I am hoping I can get Julie. David will interview, but Julie probably will not. And I want...

PH (00:45:55):
She is so protective, is not-

SM (00:45:56):
Yeah. David came to our campus and she has written me some letters a couple years back, and so I think she trusts me, but I got to get through David again to try to get to Julie.

PH (00:46:08):
He is much loved at Penn.

SM (00:46:09):
Is he? David?

PH (00:46:10):
He is in the Annenberg School of Communication and teaches courses on the presidency.

SM (00:46:17):
He is a great guy.

PH (00:46:18):
Well, the students love him.

SM (00:46:22):
I just admire the man. He came to our campus about eight years ago and that is been eight years now, but I had some correspondence with his wife, trying to get her to come, and that is before her dad died, and so she was really concentrating on her dad at that time. We have one final question then I am going to go into some individual personalities here, and you can comment on perceptions of these individuals. I have been talking a lot about the anti-war movement, but I want to get back to civil rights. I had an interview with John Lewis, a very good one, for about an hour. It was took three and a half hours to get the hour because he was a busy man, but we talked a little bit about the civil rights movement that he was involved in and the (19)60s as a whole. I would like your thoughts on the civil rights movement period from the (19)60s and a sense that this person, this person, Steve [inaudible] feels, that somewhat, the civil rights history and the civil rights movement is not, well, am I saying being forgotten? I do not see the sense of the leaders that we saw in the past to keep this issue alive. We have the issue of affirmative action, which has just become before the Supreme Court, but how important is civil rights today?

PH (00:47:38):
Well, you analyzed it very well, it seems to me. Vietnam superseded everything. Civil rights started. We talked about that synergy. Civil rights actually started before Vietnam because the Vietnam protest did not really take off until the spring of 1965, as America was taking over the war, and civil rights protest and civil rights movement was in deep, full swing before that, before 1965. Civil rights precedes Vietnam, but then Vietnam supersedes everything about the (19)60s. And your point is extremely well taken, that those leaders, just like John Lewis, who was willing to go down and get his head beaten in, in such charismatic power, dignity, quiet power, but for every John Lewis, you could name so many others, known and celebrated and not so celebrated. James Foreman of SNCC and so many, where are those people today, because the civil rights movement seems to have atrophied. That is my comment. I am just looking at my time. Let us get on with these other-

SM (00:48:58):
I would just like some comments or just your perceptions of the following individuals that are personalities from the (19)60s and early (19)70s. Tom Hayden.

PH (00:49:07):
Some of these I do not have as an informed feeling about as I would like to, so if I do not have it, I am just going to say that. Certainly, my knowledge is sketchy, like anyone else's. It has its holes and its gaps. Tom Hayden is a committed guy who did tremendous work and I think there is a line of integrity all the way through where he is now and where he was back then.

SM (00:49:39):
Lyndon Johnson.

PH (00:49:42):
A man who is so complicated. Robert Caro's biographies are powerful and good. Sometimes they miss the juice of Johnson, which seems to be this whole kaleidoscopic notion of Johnson was everything. There was a compassionate side of Johnson that was so truly invested in the civil rights movement. That has to be admired. He was a liar, a cheat. He was power diseased. He just bumps up so large. I am endlessly fascinated by Lyndon Johnson, fascinated, much more so than by McNamara.

SM (00:50:24):
Hubert Humphrey.

PH (00:50:28):
Tremendous man, tremendous man of conscience, of idealism, who again, held that line all the way through. Got politically neutered by Lyndon Johnson and lost his way, but that cannot undo the grocer's son from Minneapolis, who rose from mayor and whatever else he did, idealistically to really want to help downtrodden people, great admiration.

SM (00:50:57):
John Kennedy.

PH (00:51:03):
Not nearly as fascinating or as complicated as his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. John Kennedy, a hugely bright man with a native intellectual ability, but spoiled, lazy, brave in the sense of what he endured with his physical problems and his heroism in World War II, but narcissistic, selfish, spoiled as a rich kid, and yet came out of that to be a leader. What Kennedy has about him in memory and history, it was style. It was this panache, it was this class, it was this finesse, it was this charism. All of those things are true and surface and thin, as opposed, in my mind, to this immense complication of someone like Lyndon Johnson.

SM (00:52:26):
Robert Kennedy.

PH (00:52:30):
Oh, tough, shrewd, hard, politically astute. That word ruthless, which was attached to him, was not undeserved, but who also had tremendous conscience and he changed after his brother died. The last five years of Robert Kennedy's life are something to behold. They are powerful and emotional and committed and I think that death sincered him, that he began to see the world in a powerfully different way. The last five years of his life are beautiful and to be admired.

SM (00:53:17):
Eugene McCarthy.

PH (00:53:19):
A guy who certainly had ambition, who had intellectual pride, who had ego, but who also was brave enough to stand up, to challenge his own party and was a committed guy. I feel that the problem with Eugene McCarthy is that he has never quite broken a sweat. He has always been a little bit on the fringe of not wanting to get in there, roll up his sleeves, and fight all the way, and part of that might be his intellectual [inaudible].

SM (00:53:58):
Martin Luther King Jr, and if you could comment on his stand against Vietnam War.

PH (00:54:03):
I thought it was brave that the guy who was so leading the civil rights movement felt that if he were going to practice the integrity of what he believed, that he had to expand all his thinking toward all the injustices of Vietnam, which certainly were unjust to African Americans, but just unjust in a political worldview. And Martin Luther King is a great man and a great leader who had large, private, personal demons and flaws. He was one of God's sinful creatures, just like we all are, but none of those flaws and personal failings can override the great, great life.

SM (00:54:56):
Malcolm X.

PH (00:54:58):
Do not know enough about him. Would like to know more. What I do know is that he had a kind, it seems to me, an intellectual core of belief. That vision is something prominent and powerful to be paid attention to. I do not know. I would be interested in knowing about his anger and his hate. I have feelings that there was too much anger there.

SM (00:55:35):
The Black Power advocates, the Bobby Seales, the Huey Newtons, the Eldridge Cleavers, Kathleen Cleaver.

PH (00:55:40):
I met some of them and I interviewed some of them. I interviewed Bobby Seale years later when he was hawking barbecue sauce, which he still is.

SM (00:55:48):
Yeah, that is right. Yes. He was at Temple, or he was.

PH (00:55:51):
Yeah. Again, those guys were brave. They were angry as hell and they were brave and were all the things we talked about earlier, their excesses. They screwed up, but you have to look at the whole life and they helped change the status quo. A lot of them were scary dudes. Maybe they had a right to be scary dudes.

SM (00:56:28):
Any thoughts on the fact that they had certainly put a lot of pressure on Dr. King and Bayard Rustin and James Farmer and Roy Wilkins, that their time had passed?

PH (00:56:38):
Yeah. You have heard the thing that radicals can get along much better with conservatives rather than liberals. Radicals cannot stand liberals because liberals talk the talk. They talk the talk, but-

SM (00:56:53):
They do not walk the walk.

PH (00:56:54):
They do not walk the walk and the radical wants it right now, right fucking now, and do not give me the talk the talk. If you want to fight with me, put a conservative in here because I know where that guy stands and I will be able to duke it out with him, but the liberal is mouthing all of these nice pieties. The hell with those nice pieties. I think that is the problem with the Stokely Carmichaels and the Dr. Kings.

SM (00:57:24):
How about the Abbie Hoffmans and Jerry Rubins, the Yippies, so to speak, of that era?

PH (00:57:29):
They were crazy and narcissistic and selfish and weird, but the other part of it is that there was something genuine and real in them that they were not out just to make a buck.

SM (00:57:47):
Richard Nixon.

PH (00:57:53):
I guess he was very, very unbalanced and he did some good things, but was so burdened by his... He was so brought down by his neuroses and his pathologies that I see him not as a tragic figure. That word is too thrown around. McNamara is a tragic figure, basically because he betrayed his own ideals. In the Shakespeare construct, you have to have a great single tragic flaw. McNamara's single tragic flaw is this pridefulness, his hubris. Nixon is more a victim of his own pathologies, and in that sense, he is not a tragic character. You do not agree?

SM (00:58:54):
No, I do agree. I do agree. I do agree. Spiro Agnew.

PH (00:58:58):
Ted Agnew, a mean man, a mean, vindictive guy who probably did some good things.

SM (00:59:12):
Here we go.

PH (00:59:21):
He probably did some good things as the governor of Maryland, but overall is a shit. He is like Frank Sinatra. They were friends for a while. Frank Sinatra is this eternal mystery, it seems to me, of great art and shit life, the things that Sinatra did. Now, Agnew does not have any great art. Agnew is just a shit. Nixon is brought down by his pathologies and you can almost feel sorry for Richard Nixon. You cannot feel sorry for Agnew. You cannot feel sorry for Sinatra. I mean, we are mixing art and politics here. You can be uplifted every day of your life by listening to Sinatra's music. I listen to it around here all the time. Every day of your life, you can be uplifted by Sinatra's music, at what the human voice is capable of, and every day of your life, you can be brought to the floor by the awful things Sinatra did, which have come out.

SM (01:00:31):
In the women's movement, the Gloria Steinem and the Betty Friedan, your thoughts on their importance.

PH (01:00:38):
They are tremendously important. Friedan is a more powerful figure, more important figure than Steinem. Steinem took her abilities and her intelligence and went with it as far as she could go, and that was a lot and that was far, but Friedan is much more of a Moses. I wish I had a female image. Friedan is much more of a pioneer and has much more intellectual firepower.

SM (01:01:17):
Daniel Ellsberg.

PH (01:01:21):
A screwed up, really good man of conscience, who did things for ego and ambition and notoriety as well as conscience and realizing, "This thing stinks and I have to be the one to bring it forward," but a guy who also had tremendous personal problems and was undone by a lot of those personal problems. I met him. I have talked to him. I have met him. I know him.

SM (01:01:54):
Dr. Benjamin Spock.

PH (01:01:55):
Do not know enough about him other than what you know.

SM (01:02:01):
Muhammad Ali.

PH (01:02:04):
I have been around him. Ali is so curious to me. A guy who has a gift that you would think is based in intellect, but it is not because I do not think he... I am not talking about whether he is an educated man or he is not an, not an educated man. I am talking about his intellect. You would think that a man of such rapier-like wit, is so fast on his feet in the ring and in life, would be high intellectual power. I do not think he was. I think he was not particularly a smart man, but he has some kind of gift, some kind of instinct. Maybe it is a kind of animal instinct for protecting himself and giving lightning jabs, and he was very brave, too, and I believe that what he did in embracing Islam was based on conscience.

SM (01:03:20):
I can remember that when he was dethroned and he could not fight after staying on the Vietnam War, he came to Columbus, Ohio. I was working at Ohio University then and he went to the Ohio Theater downtown, gave a speech. They pay him $3,500, and he came on stage with $3,500 in cash and gave it back to the group that brought him in and said, "Use this to help the homeless or the poor." That is the kind of man he was, because he was a millionaire from his boxing.

PH (01:03:52):
Yeah, I love it.

SM (01:03:53):
But that was tremendous of what he had to say.

PH (01:03:55):
I love it. I love that story.

SM (01:03:57):
Noam Chomsky.

PH (01:03:59):
Do not know enough about him other than certainly a guy who has done all of the things we have talked about from the intellectual standpoint.

SM (01:04:09):
George McGovern.

PH (01:04:12):
A great guy, a great sense of humor, a guy who kept his feet on the ground in political Washington. Of course, ambition wanted to be president. He basically railroaded and sold out on his running partner, Tom Eagleton, when it was discovered that Eagleton had mental problems. He did not support him in backing like he should have, because we were all scared. You have to put that in context. The country was scared about mental problems. McGovern falls there, but McGovern is a World War II hero. McGovern is a man of conscience all through the Senate years. McGovern has a wonderful Midwestern, he is from Dakota, as you know, he has a wonderful stability. His feet are on the ground. He is not going to be swamped by these eggheads. So many of the people who came to Washington to work in the Kennedy administration got their heads turned by the glamor of Camelot. That, again, is that style, as opposed to substance. McGovern is a man of substance.

SM (01:05:19):
Timothy Leary.

PH (01:05:21):
I do not know enough about him other than he seems, in some ways, a creation of the media.

SM (01:05:30):
Ralph Nader.

PH (01:05:32):
A flawed, good man who was tremendously motivated to help change these things that are wrong in industry, but a guy who was so aesthetic that he was difficult to know. His personality is prickly and there was a hardiness there. He has been held back by his lack of people skills. You see, you get back to Lyndon Johnson. The juice of Lyndon Johnson is this immense people skill. He knows everything. He has a PhD in people. McNamara has an eighth-grade education in people.

SM (01:06:26):
George Wallace.

PH (01:06:34):
A demagogue, a fiery little guy who did some decent things for Black people early on, but was killed by his ambitions, and that he was a nasty guy, finally.

SM (01:06:49):
John Lennon, the Beatles, and John Lennon in particular.

PH (01:06:59):
Lennon is a great songwriter. I guess he is an immortal songwriter. He is the most talented of the four. His talent far out shines Paul McCartney's. He is an intellectual all the way. I guess I have pretty strong good thoughts about him, but in a funny, queer way, I have to tell you, I do not like the guy.

SM (01:07:32):
Just the music of the (19)60s, the Jimi Hendrix, the Janis Joplins, that whole era, The Rolling Stones.

PH (01:07:40):
I went back and tried to-

SM (01:07:43):
The impact the music of this period had on the generation.

PH (01:07:46):
Yeah, Vietnam was our first rock and roll war, as has been pointed out. You cannot think about the (19)60s without listening to the stoned, Benzedrine quality of that music. And Janis Joplin's cry and Jimi Hendricks's wail with that guitar are just so emblematic of the (19)60s. I mean, Joplin I have written about. I went back and tried to understand the legend of Joplin. I did this with the Washington Post about four or five years ago. She was so hurt, tormented by her own self-worth, and somehow or other... She dropped out of the University of Texas as a freshman. She did a couple semesters at Texas and the fraternity boards at UT Austin voted her the ugliest man on campus, ugliest pig man on campus. That was just one of her insults.

SM (01:08:59):
You think of the Phil Ochs and Joan Baezes and the Arlo Guthries. You remember those musicians coming to our campus and the impact that they had, just of the words, the music. There is so many people like that of that period.

PH (01:09:14):
Phil Ochs hanged himself. I love Arlo Guthrie.

SM (01:09:17):
I am going to close with just a couple terms here of the period. When you think of SDS, what do you think of?

PH (01:09:23):
I think of obviously the scary, radical edge of protest of the (19)60s. Not the edgiest and the scariest, but a group that was out there toward the fringe.

SM (01:09:46):
Counterculture.

PH (01:09:51):
Counterculture is a beloved word for me. I think everybody should have an element of counterculture in them. The streets that we live on here is too culture. I hope to hope be the counterculture of Colfax Road.

SM (01:10:07):
The Pentagon Papers.

PH (01:10:10):
Everybody knows what they are. The Pentagon Papers are one of the great treasure documents of the (19)60s, (19)70s,

SM (01:10:19):
Okay. Chicago Eight.

PH (01:10:27):
The Chicago Eight, Bobby Seale was one of them. You say Chicago Eight and you think of a courtroom and Judge Julius Hoffman and people being restrained in their seats as Bobby Seale was. That trial was unfair and it caused such commotion because they thought that those eight who were on trial were murderers and rapists. Well, they were not that at all. It was unfair.

SM (01:11:03):
Watergate.

PH (01:11:06):
Watergate. I interviewed a man who had been imprisoned in China all during Watergate and came out in the late (19)70s and he had been in a hole in China and he heard the word Watergate. He said, "What is it? Is it something to do with the dam? Is it something to do with water?" Watergate. You say Watergate and I can only see the buildings themselves along the Potomac, where we lived in Washington for 30 years.

SM (01:11:38):
Hippies and Yippies.

PH (01:11:44):
I like hippies better than Yippies. The instant connotations for me are yippies have too much money.

SM (01:11:59):
And how about the communes?

PH (01:12:06):
There were something that I always secretly wanted to try because I wanted to run around naked.

SM (01:12:17):
I am going to close out with a few personalities linked directly to Vietnam. William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, both of them.

PH (01:12:25):
Yeah. Okay. William Westmoreland, whom I knew a little, I mean, I have interviewed. Not a terribly bright man. A soldier, a strong soldier, but a guy who should not have been in charge of that war at such a critical time. He was not smart enough. Abrams was a bulldog of a warrior.

SM (01:12:54):
And Maxwell Taylor would be the other one.

PH (01:12:56):
Yeah, he was the soldier scholar and he was beloved by the Kennedys precisely for that reason because he could bring history and intellectual thought to it. I think he was a pretty good guy. I really do. I mean, he, of course, was caught up in the lies and the political. People like David Halberstam hate Maxwell Taylor. I do not really understand that.

SM (01:13:17):
General Cao Ky and President Thieu.

PH (01:13:24):
Cao Ky is a cowboy. He is all about his style of his dress and his daring exploits in the air and he is a little Hollywood guy who wants to be on the cover of People Magazine. General Thieu, he is more interesting and a person of more integrity in some ways for me.

SM (01:13:49):
Kent State.

PH (01:13:52):
You can only picture a slope of hill and a people on the ground and a girl reacting in horror, bent down over a body. Whoever heard of Kent State, Ohio the day before that happened?

SM (01:14:13):
Moratorium.

PH (01:14:14):
I was there in October of 1970 or was it (19)69? The moratorium is, the moratorium is-

SM (01:14:30):
I think it is (19)69.
PH (01:14:30):
Is October (19)69. I was there. Masses of people.

SM (01:14:38):
Gerald Ford.

PH (01:14:42):
A good guy. Lyndon Johnson's great comment, "The trouble with Gerry Ford is that he played too much football at Michigan without a helmet." Gerry Ford was a guy who used all of his abilities to their max, but did not have huge abilities as a thinker, but who was skillfully pretty good in the House of Representatives, pretty good as a Congressman. I am being too flip. Good for the years that he was president. We needed somebody. We needed a Midwesterner to help us be okay after Nixon.

SM (01:15:27):
April 30th, 1970 and April 30th, 1975, April 30th, 1970, being the Cambodia invasion, which eventually led to Kent State on May 4th, and April 30th, (19)75 when the helicopter [inaudible]

PH (01:15:42):
The people trying to climb the ladders into this helicopter.

SM (01:15:44):
Yes. Get your thought on those two.

PH (01:15:46):
Well, I can picture the second one much better. The Cambodian invasion? No, and it leads to Kent State, but the April 29th, which is my birthday, and April 30th of (19)75, those helicopters lifting off from the Embassy roof, it is all about our failure there and human desperation and us leaving this country behind and we are trying to claim victory, but we know we have lost. I mean, it is a terrible moment.

SM (01:16:21):
The Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel.

PH (01:16:25):
Great men and we talked about them and models of conscience and heart, and both artists in their own right, Dan more than Phillip.

SM (01:16:39):
And Ramsey Clark.

PH (01:16:43):
There should be a thousand Ramsey Clarks in Washington DC and there are not many.

SM (01:16:50):
And of the books that have been written on the (19)60s or the books that were written during the (19)60s, what would be the books that you think are the most influential and important?

PH (01:17:03):
I cannot do it, Steve, because I would leave out the ones that I think of. Michael Harris's Dispatches is one of the great books in the (19)60s. I will have to email you.

SM (01:17:16):
How about The Making of a Counter Culture with Theodore Roszak and the Greeting of America?

PH (01:17:20):
Yeah.

SM (01:17:21):
Those are very important books. Final question, and that is, it is on the boomers themselves again. Are boomers in middle age or approaching old age now? Are they doing what they did when they were young or have they given in. Like a lot of people said during the (19)60s and early (19)70s, "When you guys get older, you are going to change." Remember that, no one over 30 that Jerry Rubin did?

PH (01:17:50):
Yeah.

SM (01:17:51):
Are the boomers still idealistic or have they just gone into the society and raising families?

PH (01:17:59):
It is so hard. Yeah. It is so hard to maintain who you are and your ideals.

SM (01:18:04):
That is all right. Idealism continued.

PH (01:18:06):
It is so hard to maintain it. I guess I will answer it personally. I have said that on my best days as a writer, I am doing something priestly with a small p. I went into seminary and religious life out of some misformed, misguided ideas, but still idealistic. And the goal was to try to make the world better and to help people. On my best days as a writer, I am doing that. And the continuum, I feel, continues with the spectrum, with the teaching I do at Penn, on my best days as a teacher of non-fiction. I am teaching these kids to be better human beings and I am maintaining that idealism.

SM (01:18:53):
And finally-

PH (01:18:54):
You said finally a minute ago.

SM (01:18:56):
Well, this is it. Is there a question that I did not ask?

PH (01:18:57):
No.

SM (01:18:57):
You bastard.

(End of Interview)

2003-07-11

Stephen McKiernan

Paul Hendrickson

80:31

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/wav

Sound

Audio

College teachers; English teachers; Authors; Journalists; Hendrickson, Paul, 1944--Interviews

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