Interview with Michael Barone

Barone, Michael ; McKiernan, Stephen

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a historian, and a journalist. Barone was a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, which is a reference work on Congress and state politics. He received a Bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a Law degree from Yale Law School.

2010-06-29

In Copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

89:54

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Michael Barone
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Benjamin Mehdi So
Date of interview: 29 June 2010
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(Start of Interview)

0:03
SM: Testing One, two. Yeah.

0:0:05
MB: I will speak right into it.

0:0:07
SM: And I have to double check to make sure.

0:0:13
MB: Yeah.

0:13
SM: First question I really want to ask is how did you become who you are early in your life or your parents, professors, role models, people to look up to when you were younger?

0:31
MB: Well, I was- guess I recounted that autobiography, that little fragmentary speech to the Bradley Prize you know I was an early reader. My parents were professional people. My father's a doctor. And his father was a doctor, my mother taught school for a while, it was full time. Homemaker and you know, we encourage reading and, you know, my mother claims I was a very early reader, I think she exaggerates, but, you know, trying to recognize letters when I was two. And I think I have just got a mind a brain that is kind of hardwired for-for reading. As I recount there, I was interested in things like statistics, the populations of major cities in 1940, and 1950. So, when I got an encyclopedia that had the 1950 census, when I must have been about six or seven, I was very excited to read this and to make tables and write up things and so forth. I just, you know, clearly had a desire to know these things. I think I tend to sort information out by geography, I would study the Detroit city map, I could recite all the streets, that cross seven mile from Woodward west to five points I was the- we went on a trip to Florida and road trip in the spring of 1951. And at one point, came to a traffic circle on a town in Tennessee or Georgia. And there was a dispute about which road they should take out of my parents that we should take this one, I said, no, you should take that one. And about 12 miles later, they said, we took the wrong one. And I became the family navigator, at that point; and stuff. So, I always want to know where I am. I learned north southeast to west before I learned right and left. And you know, one advantage when I am doing things like my Almanac, American politics is that I tend to sort information that comes my way by geography. So, if I am thinking about Lancaster County, Ohio, you the congressional district, [inaudible], I may remember about the boyhood home of William John Sherman, and stuff from your account of it, I will probably plug that information back and be able to plug that in, because it is sorted out by geography. It is not random. And, you know, I think that is one of the ways we do memory, is not it, we, we, we sort things out. And we have some organizing principle or something. Anyway, that is the way my brain works. So, I was sort of blessed with you know. So, high verbal being hardwired for reading, you know, very nonathletic, so I was terrible at that, wanted to avoid it. My mother made sure I was you know, advanced in school she sent me started sending me to elite private school in the fourth grade. Because she felt the public school was not doing enough for me. And so [crosstalk] so that I could, you know, boy that went on to the boy’s school in seventh through 12th grade. And I was so you know, intellectually very fast tracked or turns out there were lots of smart people there. This was a boarding and day school; I was a day student. We [inaudible] Cranbrook School, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, through a lot of smart people from the Detroit Metro area. I mean, I sometimes like to say that all the schools I went to the public school I went to from kindergarten through third grade Warren E. Bow School in Detroit, always the student body size about a third Jewish. And I always say if you want your kids to get a good education, put them in a school, that is about a third Jewish or more. And, you know, whatever the quality of the teachers, they are going to be a lot of smart kids around, and it will be a fairly-fairly fast track. So, you know, this was, I was always very interested in history. And so, I can sort things by dates. I tend to remember dates. I remember the dates of people's birth because it is easier to remember their eight o'clock back, remember their age later. So, when you mentioned Gene McCarthy, I remember 1916 first election of Congress in 1948, from the fourth district of Minnesota, Ramsey County, and that sort of information comes naturally to me.

5:09
SM: Gaylord Malcom, Wisconsin. Governor.

5:14
MB: Yeah, he was elected in, let us see, elected to senate 1962. I guess elected governor 1958 and (19)60 Pat Lucey succeeded at [inaudible]. Or no, they did they elect a republican governor for a while, yeah, they elected Warren Knowles as the republican governor. And then they went to Lucey one, later, and then stuff. So that was, so, you know, and I just wanted to you know, I wanted to learn more. And I wanted to know, how the world works. So, I want to learn those census figures. I was fascinated Detroit was the fourth largest city in the country in 1940. And then slipped a fifth in 1950 even though it grew, because Chicago, Los Angeles outpaced it, and everything. So, I wanted to know all that stuff. And I wanted to know dates. So, I have memorized, you know, the presidents, vice presidents, kings of England, stuff like that, I guess it is an attempt to want to make sense of the world around you and understand it better. And by having you know, precise geographic locations and dates, you can understand a lot, you know, absolutely cannot stand the whole theme of progressive education, which first goes back to 1920, where you do not want to make kids memorize dates, that is so dull and tedious. How the heck are they are able to understand things if they do not know that the revolution you know, 1776, the Civil War is 1861. No wonder they take tests now where the kids cannot figure out which one comes first. That little mnemonic of remembering four digits, the first of which is almost always won, is pretty easy way to sort information out. And even somebody that does not glass with high verbal aptitude or math aptitude can make sense of it. If you just make them memorize the dates, and if you make them memorize that at a young age, they will have it forever, like they have their times tables. When you I mean, adults do not forget seven times nine-

7:05
SM: When you look at, this is the question-

7:07
MB: If they have to make it up themselves to draw little boxes on the table to remember seven times nine, they are not going to remember it, memorize it-

7:14
SM: You like the way that higher education and the basically how they divided generations, you have got the World War Two, the greatest generation, you got the family generation, you get the boomers, which I am talking about.

07:28
MB: There is a lot to that.

07:30
SM: Your thoughts on how you like the identification of generations based on years, or you do [inaudible]?

7:38
MB: Yeah, I like that. I think, you know, Generations, that book by Neil Howe in the late William Strauss, pretty good book. You know, my first response is, gee, this is gimmicky, but I think they are actually on to something. And one of the things I have noticed in politics, you know, and I have been trying to analyze politics, when I first started off doing that, when I was in my teens, that I had to understand the point of view of people who were a lot older than I am an experienced and lived through many experiences, the 1920s (19)30s, (19)40s, and so forth. Now, I have to find out, and I have to find myself trying to understand people who have not lived through a lot of experiences, I have, and what the world looks like to them. And I think the point of the generations is that it works against the conceit of political science. Political science, you know, drawing from the analogy with the natural sciences, starting the 19th century wants to make generalizations that are always true. And what I find is that you want to- this generation stop being true after a while because people will bring to different experiences, they do not have the identical sort of experience going through. So that for that reason, I think that is the kind of flaw in political science and, you know, some of the lessons that everybody taught when I first started studying politics, the political scientists were teaching them subsequently disproved. You know, the President's party always loses seats in the off your elections. Well, as we sit here today, the President's party gained seats and two out of the last three off your elections. Yeah, well, there is some reason for the rule. You know, basically, the President's party is stuck with the President's program, the out party can adapt to local terrain. But the overall situation is that, you know, I am going to pause to eat for a while and so forth, but I sort of identify as baby boomer generation, even though I was born 1944, two years before the date of if you read the Generations book, they started in 1943 is the birth year, which gives them Newt Gingrich and Bill Bradley. Right. Hey, Tommy Haden was born earlier. Well, and you have got you know, John Kerry who was born in the last day of 1943. Or the last month took the there is something to it because generations teams tend to have the same experience with events and things. You know it is similar at least they confronted the same events and you know like the culture war within the conservative and liberal camps of the baby boom generation responded differently to it. But they, you know, they were they were facing many similar situations.

10:43
SM: We think one of the things that comes out that both early dinners those born between (19)46 and (19)54, are really totally different than the boomers that were born from the (19)55 to (19)64. Because they experienced different things even within the generation. And they [inaudible] went on college campus, when all this stuff was happening either.

11:07
MB: There is something to that. Um, now, Barack, Obama is technically a boomer-based disability or not being a boomer. Yet, I am above the culture wars of the boomer generation. That was the gist of his 2004 convention speech.

11:27
SM: Yeah, people try to identify him as a nation of boomer-

11:33
MB: I think that is part of his appeal. I think that is why he has not around to personal animosity that both Clinton and George W. Bush did. Because each of them happens to have personal characteristics, which struck people on the other side of the cultural divide, as just absolutely loathsome. And Barack Obama does not have those sorts of personal characteristics, in my view.

12:00
SM: The question I ask you right now is when you look at the boomer years 1946-(19)64. And the oldest boomers are now in the age of 64 and the youngest are 48 this year. Please describe, in your own words, the following periods during boomer live-

12:20
MB: [inaudible] One of my favorite things, to say good news is that the baby boomer generation will die out the bad news is that I am going to die about the same time-

12:32
SM: Yeah well, define that period 1946 to 1960, in terms of just a few words, your thoughts on-

12:38
MB: Well, you have got a period of you know, you are in a period of postwar app, once you are in a period where there starts to be a real commercial market for adolescent products, forms of entertainment, you start to get a split between the universal culture of, you know, 1930s, and (19)40s, movies’ 1950s and (19)60s television. And then you get generational niches in popular culture. You get this sort of oppositional sense adversarial sense to society. You have the episode of the military draft in Vietnam, which is technically an egalitarian thing, because-because of all the exceptions to the draft, it was actually go back you will find that fewer sons of members of Congress served in the military in Vietnam did in the Gulf War, or the Iraq war. Mostly worked out very inegalitarian place and you had groups of people worry and are identified as elite people refusing to fight which has vivid contrast with previous generations and most particularly, you know, the World War Two generation. [crosstalk] -generation, a match. See, you get the breakdown of universal cultural institutions of which the military draft does not operate in World War Two. And the years immediately, thereafter, was one.

14:09
SM: James Fallows talked about that in an article he wrote back in 1975, “What Did You Do in the [the Class] War, Daddy?”-

14:16
MB: You are right.

14:18
SM: Which is in the older generation book, and he talks about it in a symposium with Bobby Mahler and James Webb and Gen. Wheeler. If you look at the 1946, right after World War Two, right break through the time the President, we have already talked about it. But before President Kennedy was elected, boomers the oldest boomers are just starting to go into junior high school when President Kennedy comes on board. What were the major events and the business that kind of subconsciously or consciously affected those boomers?

14:55
MB: I think they came out of a society in which you had unusual high confidence in institutions. Bill Schneider and Marni Lipsett wrote a book about the confidence gap and was sort of saying, gee America starting in the (19)70s, or there abouts, late (19)60s loses confidence in institutions is a sort of theme is this is a country that always had confidences in their institutions. I think that is maybe an artifact of the fact that the pollsters did not start answering those questions till about 1950. If you could go back and pull people starting in 1787, or whenever he might have found that lack of confidence in institutions or discontent with them, was the norm rather than the exception.

15:42
SM: Now that was in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. But that is [inaudible] (19)50s, correct?

15:47
MB: Yeah, well.

15:47
SM: Because it was just a-

15:48
MB: We grew up in an America where they had consequences institutions. And they felt free to crash them. Particularly since it was to their advantage to do things like not serve in the military. I am speaking a part of the generation obviously, not the whole of it.

16:05
SM: What made President Kennedy so unique, so to speak, was that speech he gave when he became president resurrection ask not what you are going to do, or you can do for your country?

16:07
MB: Listen, these people got to sign up in the military, including me, right? Yeah.

16:25
SM: James Webb, we met many years before he became senator said that one of the weaknesses of the boomer generation is in this fear of them that speech was hoped to be the inspiration to service and that Peace Corps service or good managers and service to America that serving one country in the military would seem to be the norm after that point. Something try that top, top of the week recommended, this is in 1981. If the weakness was the fact that it is the generation that truly does not understand the meaning of serving one's nation, even though you had a president who inspired you.

17:05
MB: Yeah, I think there is something I think there is a lot to that. You just did not think- I am blaming [inaudible] the people structured the draft that way and gave exemption for college students. You know, this was based on some analogy in a World War One, where the British lost all these Oxford and Cambridge graduates, we, I mean, I have military deferments to all my college years. I went to law school; they gave me a deferment for that. Then they said, we are withdrawing graduate school deferments. But if you have already got one, you can renew it. Why the hell did the government need me to go to law school, but that was public policy and I took advantage of it. Then I got a job as a law clerk, for a federal judge. And I got a different occupational deferment for that. And then they announced they were getting rid of occupational deferments. But if you had one, you could renew it. Same thing, why was it so necessary that I be at a law firm to a federal judge instead of in the military? I mean, I would argue I was better at that than I might have been at something in the military, but from public policy point of view, pretty weak public policy, I sort of felt that way at the time, but I took advantage of these policies.

18:22
SM: When you look at the (19)60s, do you see a difference between the (19)60s and the (19)70s was like, overall?


18:32
MB: Well, the seeds of you know, mixed cultures, adversarial cultures, rejection, lack of confidence in society, which were nurtured by particularly by [inaudible] in the (19)60s then become the common norm in the (19)70s. I mean, Daniel Yankelevits wrote a book called New Rules that really sets that out back in 1981. And I think that is pretty definitive.

18:54
SM: Do You think that is why Carter was elected? They were-

19:03
MB: Well, that is a different question, we were talking about public more or less competence institutions to get a sense of whether you are supportive of or adversarial to the country and stop those attitudes, change. You get losses of confidence and some of its related to public policy failures, Vietnam, stagflation. You know, you have Presidents who are very experienced people, Johnson and Nixon who turned out to be grave disappointments to the public. That means the value of experiences just come by voters. So, they elect a peanut farmer from Georgia without Georgia as President. Then they become discontent with him. Then elect a former movie star far as they do not want to go. Because Reagan has one advantage that he was, unlike most of our current politicians could speak in the language of that universal culture of which he had been a part is a brave person and radio, movies and TV. When the purpose of those cultures was to attract universal audiences, everybody- Reagan just naturally fit into that he was the sort of person who in his personal values and character background, fitted him like a glove. I do not think that language. I think Obama tried to do that in just 2004 speech, but I think that it is hard to access that language for politicians today, maybe the next generations will find it easier. Boomers find it hard Clinton and Bush were never able to do.

20:54
SM: The People that protested five to 10 percent of the activists who were involved in the movements and protested against the war, a lot of them had a problem with President Reagan and President Bush one, because President Reagan really came to power in California based on his battles against the students out there during the student protest movement of (19)64.

21:20
MB: Well, he had a large riot. Right. I mean, you know, the democrats said, we are going to do lots of things for lots of people, and especially for students and blacks. And the students and blacks are rioting. And the taxpayers say what the hell is going on? People are the beneficiaries, and they are rioting. We need to have some exertion of control. And of course, that was an electorate that was tilted towards GI generation and silent generation and all that. They thought this stuff was terrible. So, you know-

21:53
SM: Well, the law I mean-

21:55
MB: I wrote, I wrote a piece in the Harvard Crimson, you can access by the way, any of my pieces of the Harvard Crimson. Yeah, [inaudible] too. It is not a particular friend of mine. He was on the Crimson later. If you look at the Harvard Crimson.com. It has got everything in the paper since 1873, you can access Franklin D, Roosevelt's writing.

22:16
SM: Oh, my God.

22:17
MB: So, you can go back to my columns 1963 through (19)65 and see what I was writing then when I was a liberal, but had some qualms about some aspects of liberalism, or just sort of predicted that Reagan had a chance to win. Fo-for example, in California, which was not the ge- the general perception was his way to the right. This is another Goldwater. He is too, you know, the political scientists were saying he is too extreme. And my conclusion, looking at the data and looking at some special election results was these people are embracing this and they do not like Watson Berkeley.

22:54
SM: Because that people [inaudible] talking about fifty-nine-

22:57
MB: Before that there was the Free Speech Movement in 1965-

23:04
SM: (19)64 [inaudible] Mario Savio-

23:05
MB: Well, that was the initial thing was that Berkeley would not give a permit to people who wanted to campaign for the Johnson Humphrey ticket on campus on Sproul Plaza. Seems pretty harmless in retrospect, but that was there was there was going to be no politics on campus. It is kind of stupid in retrospect, but lots of people at the Goldwater people go there, let everybody go there and have a booth and whatever.

23:29
SM: I think Parker was fired by President Reagan.

23:33
MB: He was born religious. And I was talking about the knowledge base.

23:38
SM: When you look at the (19)80s in terms of the links to boomers, they are now getting older. They are in their (19)40s [inaudible] generation fee, and then in the (19)80s, and the (19)90s with Bill Clinton?

23:53
MB: Well, I think it is one of the things you see, and I guess sort of foresaw this going back to the late (19)70s, late (19)60s, early (19)70s. And, in my experience in the McGovern campaign, you know, if you are looking at who enters politics is sort of the peace movement almost entirely the Democratic Party, not quite entirely. It is affluent people. I mean, I was, you know, I was involved in precinct delegates and Oakland County Democratic Party and the-the working-class towns did not elect PC. They elected union hacks, and sort of party loyalists went back 25 years. And the [inaudible] areas where there were very few Democratic voters at that time, elected peaceniks. A small number of people there that were Democrats were-were away to the left and stuff. And that sort of thing goes on, you know, and that is a harbinger. One of the things we have seen, and it comes most prominent, starting in (19)96 election is the movement of affluent professionals towards the Democratic Party. Based on liberal issues on cultural. This is the liberal half of the baby boomer generation, and they are voting for the democrat on California, they are running for Democrats who are bankrupting the states to enrich the public employee unions. But hey, they cannot bear to have anybody say anything bad about abortions. So, they are going to keep voting against their own immediate financial interest. But more importantly, for a bunch of, you know, greedy hacks who are bankrupting a private sector economy for no good reason-

25:27
SM: When we go into [inaudible] time the first 10 years of this century, President Bush was the first to talk about and we are about a year and a half into President Obama; there has been some writers out there in the past couple of years that have said that a lot of problems in our economy goes back to that boomer generation, that-that-that want it now generation got to have it now. That is the kind of mentality where people get in debt.

26:02
MB: Well, I do not know, it is just boomers, I mean, I think you got a lot of people. You know by this decade, the boomers have been homeowners, you know, for quite a while, my wife, they suddenly went out and bought a home. You know, on a dodgy mortgage. You know you had a period a period of extended low interest rates, this is maybe a product of the successful anti-inflation policies of the Federal Reserve and various administrations, when you have very low interest rates, you got an incentive not to save and you got an incentive to borrow. Right. I mean, that is what the market is suggesting you do. So yeah, I mean, one of the things that is good, I mean, as a general proposition, I think, you know, our method of home finance, over the long run of history has been a good thing. And it has helped people get a stake in society by owning property. You know, you look at 1945, we were a nation of renter's majority renters, we have become a nation of homeowners, that is probably a good thing. We got up to about 65 percent, that worked pretty well, when we got to 69 percent homeowners that fell apart. Well, that should tell us something which is, you know, 65 percent about as high as you want to go.

27:22
SM: That would be a quality, then oftentimes [inaudible] it is hard to talk about 74 million people, but if you were to get the positive or negative qualities. Thank you very much. of the people, you know, are the generation as a whole, can you say? Like, you know, that technology is basically coming from boomers. Technology, talks about the housings of certain things that come out that make this generation look good, as opposed to bad.

27:54
MB: Well, you know, [inaudible] arguments made by a lot of liberals is they are socially, culturally more tolerant. That culturally marked our and there is something to that, you know, if you go back and look at the racial attitudes that Robert Byrd was appealing to at the beginning of his political career, when he moved from Kleagle to state representative, they are not very attractive to us today. They were not very attractive to me in the 1950s, and (19)60s, and so forth. So, you know, I think there is, you know, clearly an improvement there. And when the liberals make that point, they got a good point. You know this generation to self-indulgence, so forth, you can make that argument. I do not know if I want to go through the whole generation and so forth. You know, I think the boomers were the first generation to make their way through life and niche cultures rather than universal culture. We lost the universal popular culture. Just as, we were losing, you know, we lost the universal news cast. Everybody used to watch one of three networks. In my view, they abused their responsibility died by being claiming to be objective, while in fact being fiercely partisan. They got what they deserve. But it is technology as much as anything else that shames that.

29:26
SM: Do you think the media though and the time the boomers were in the (19)60s, we know how important television was the first time that generation or never seen the war on [inaudible].

29:39
MB: Well, they had seen the violence attended to enforcing legal segregation in the south and part of the genius of Martin Luther King that he had a sense that when people saw this on television, you know, you have got the Birmingham rebellion in (19)63. That is the same year they could go to a half hour newscast.

30:00
SM: Do you think that-

30:06
MB: So, there is some of that, you know, illustrates the unpleasant side a side of achieving progress. I mean, if we had had that kind of you know, Jim Woolsey, he is friend of mine, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, I think back in the (19)90s worth looking up. That is how the present press would have reported the D Day landings.

30:27
SM: Oh my god. Yeah.

30:29
MB: And, you know, it would have been the headline would have been [inaudible] resignation. You know, you know, and there were people, you know, we- newspapers made a whole lot of things about, you know, the 1000 deaths in Iraq, 2000 deaths in Iraq. I mean, in D Day, they- I forget the figures. But you know, that 24–36-hour period, you are having multiple people killed every minute. You know, and the public did not see, you know, footage comparable to searching for private Saving Private Ryan yet. At that time, they did get a still photography, almost all newsreels were set in black and white, except for the movie maker, George Stevens did color. But it was censored. And it was by a press that basically said, we want people to think well of this country. We want the good guys to win. The good guys are us. It was a we and they press.

31:33
SM: That for that-that [inaudible] changed in the (19)60s so this-

31:37
MB: The (19)60s changes-

31:39
SM: We were the bad guy and the view of many, I know Bobby Muller dropped [inaudible]. He went off the serve and came back to love this country even after but he then he started seeing the way he was treated in the hospitals and how getting better being treated. Just something wrong here. And then the-the bottom line is that a lot of veterans realize that we are not the good guy. We are the bad guy.

32:08
MB: Well, I do not think we were the bad guys. I- in fact, I was you know opposed to this war after a while and sort of Prudential grounds, but I did not believe we were the bad guys. I mean, I am, I am not ready to have a discussion with anybody about Vietnam, who does not believe that would have been better for the Vietnamese of our side and prevail? Because I think the subsequent history makes that very clear. Because the premier ruse, and wow, these people massacred people, they were a bloody mining dictatorship, you know, the government we were supporting was not perfect, by any means. But it was not like a totalitarian dictatorship. And, yeah, you look at the Vietnamese government today, things are somewhat better in a variety of ways, get started tolerable. They want to be a trade partner with the United States. That is fine. This is, you know, 40, 50 years later. But I think that you have to say that it would have been better for the South Vietnamese if-if our side had prevailed. Now you can then go on to make prudential things about was it worthwhile to do so did we do so in the right way ahead of them better to allow these bad things to happen as we have in history allowed other bad things to happen? I mean, at the end of World War Two, we cooperated with the Soviets by repatriating Russian prisoners of war, sending them on trains, you know, they were clean with their fingers trying to get off and stuff because they knew they would be executed in Russia. They were so we colluded in this process. As a price of winning that war, could we have won the war without the Soviet Union? Not likely, or at least with very much higher casualties and horror in that difficulty? You know, and so forth. I mean, you know, Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union. You know Britain was already saved, but what about the rest of Europe? What about all this stuff, you know? So, history gives us gives our leaders and ultimately our voters, some tragic choices to make. Churchill goes on. After this, Hitler invades the Soviet Union. And makes a statement is saying, if the devil were to come and fight Hitler, I would at least find myself able to make some favorable reference to hell, in the in the House of Commons. You know, that was, you know, June 22, 1941. That is a very, very big date in history. We have to do that. And, you know, I think in some sense, the boomers are holding their elders to an impossible standard. You have to do something that is purely good. You have to do it perfectly well. And that is not the way history works. That is not the way human societies work. That is not a standard by which our World War Two effort stands up to scrutiny.

35:04
SM: I have one person I interviewed that she actually broke down. I am sorry. But whenever I see that scene in 1975, on April 30, of the helicopter going off the roof. At the very end, I guess Ellsberg [inaudible], knowing the people that could not get on that last helicopter have ever been in last.

35:28
MB: He was going to be tortured and killed.

35:29
SM: Yeah, tortured and killed. And we knew many who had served in the South Vietnamese Army were throwing away their uniforms, hoping that they would not be identified as being on the other side.

35:39
MB: So, it is like putting those [inaudible] Red Army [inaudible], the POW is on the trains. Where we actively did that, and World War Two, we proactively put them on the trains. We could have told Stalin; we are not going to do that. Our leaders had agreed to do that. And we could have well done that agreement. We decided not to because we were not. We did not want to go to war with the Soviet Union right after World War Two, for a lot of good reasons.

36:07
SM: This person said that, right around that same time, President Ford, they tried to ask questions after the helicopter, thank you very much. Yeah, he would not comment. He walked away, he would not comment on the [inaudible].

36:22
MB: He was pretty upset.

36:26
SM: I do not know if you want to continue here-

36:27
MB: Maybe we should continue downstairs, we will be a little quieter.

36:31
SM: Okay. Say that again.

36:32
MB: The boomers held their elders to a standard of protection. You know, how can you criticize me for smoking pot when you are having a martini every night? I think the boomers continue. Many of them, particularly on the sort of liberal side have a sort of adolescent attitude that they carry far into life. We are going to criticize the old folks. And we do not have any standards, you know, we can go out and get drunk, that is fine. But the old folks have two martinis before dinner, we are going to give them a hard time. And we are going to hold them up to an impossible standard. And at least on the liberal side, and maybe you can make this argument about the conservatives as well. They hold the society up to impossible standards. As I say they do not acknowledge the necessity of making tragic choices, they do not acknowledge the imperfections of human activity and so forth and they-they make these sorts of adolescent criticisms of everybody that become kind of incoherent after a while and you know, um, you have also the-the delight childbearing. I mean, if you got back in, I think it read 1972 Richard Nixon and Wilbur Mills colluded in you know, big increases Social Security checks. The first one arrived October 3 a month before the election (19)72 they put in double colons which had to be changed, they actually heading into the highest inflation period in recent American history, they doubled [inaudible] with everybody. So, the benefits went away, it was a hell lot more than they should have started glitched when you get when you write a big bill. And the- you know, in some ways you can see that is and this is an argument Strauss and how making generations the, the GI generation gets paid off and allows the culture to be dominated by the boomers or the liberal half of the boomers and just sort of seeds cultural leadership and stewardship Johnson and Nixon did not turn out well. So, what the hell we will take our money and run and go off to the Florida retirement community or whatever. And the boomer’s kind of attitudes, including those by people who were actually older than boomers, you know, like the Gary Hart's in politics, the David Halberstam is in journalism. We were actually silent generation people by their own years. Take over institutions like the media, which then became mainstream media becomes very adversarial to the largest society critical of it. And a mainstream media which in the 1950s did not really matter much in the way of a murmur of protest against the legal segregation of the South in the way that it was enforced, often by violence and terror. Did not see fit to make much noise about that. By you know, the 19- by the 1970s, is now vigorously critical of American mores, as racist and is always ready to see racism and stuff, when in fact, the performance of the country in terms of its behavior had hugely improved. I mean, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1964,1965 were hugely effective legislation. You know, the mores of the South changed, I think, very rapidly. The public accommodation section, which is crazy grandpa Kentucky was questioning was hugely successful in the South, I think because basically white Southerners decided that if they have to serve black people in restaurants, well, they should be polite like everybody else and say, y'all come back. And what do you want, sir, ma'am, and so forth. And they just applied the sort of Southern culture of politeness, which is a cultural style that is fairly distinctive. They applied it, which they had always applied to white people, they applied it to black people, too. And, you know, what are we seeing now we are seeing migrations, for example, not very large, but perceptible of black people from Los Angeles, where most people are rude now, to Atlanta, where most people are polite.

40:54
SM: I got a whole bunch of questions here. So, they are going to go through fast and- Newt Gingrich said something in 1994. And actually, George Willis has written several times in some of his commentaries that, that the problems we have in our society today, the problems, the divorce rate, the-the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the beginning of the isms, the, you know, bad employees on the boomer generation, (19)60s and (19)70s. And so, the problems we have, in many respects are-

41:37
MB: What the data show is that sort of this these behaviors symbolized by people, you know, living together before getting married, which becomes popular among the elites in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s. The ankle oval, book, new rules published in 1981, documents pretty thoroughly that this becomes widely applicable across the society. By 1981, the (19)70s for most Americans, the (19)70s were that the (19)60s were actually occurred in the 1970s. And what we have seen in subsequent data is, in a number of people have written about this deal, David Brooks has written about a Kay S. Hymowitz, it is in the Manhattan Institute has written about this, this sort of upper half of society by education, income, whatever, is behaving actually, according to the old rules, now. They-they may live together before they get married, they do not have children until they get married, they tend to have lower rates of divorce, they tend to, you know, be pretty stable and steady people. You know, divorce is hugely harmful to, you know, long term lifetime wealth accumulation. I mean, it is just a huge setback. And it is kind of the lower half of society, roughly, that you got these very, and of course, with huge situation when black people, you know, unmarried parenthood, serial divorce, serial marriage, which are, you know, harmful. That, you know, the children who come out of those situations have much worse outcomes than the children that come out of the traditional rule’s thing. And the, you know, divorce is, you know, a way to make the- you know, most people should be able to accumulate, most people in America do accumulate significant wealth in their lifetimes. And I think this continues to be true, despite the financial crisis and so forth, which has put a dent in the nominal wealth of very many people, but I think is not eliminated the path by which most people can assume can well accumulate significant wealth in housing and financial instruments in the course of their lifetime. All these measurements that say, well, most Americans do not have wealth, do not stratified by age, you do not want to have 25 to 30-year-old have wealth, if they do not know how to handle it, they do very poorly with it, as rich people about how they try to train their children to live intelligently with wealth and that screw up their law habits screw up their lives. Rich people spend a lot of time and effort and thought about that, because they know that it can be, you know, a screw up, you know, they can treat it like basketball players or something and you get a lot of bad outcomes there. From this sudden wealth at a young age. If you bet that the affluent people are basically, you are playing by the old rules that the non-affluent, the more vulnerable claimed by the new rules and you know, divorce kills your lifetime wealth accumulation. It takes to one household that has accumulated some wealth and distribute and creates to households with zero wealth. And dad is a [inaudible], you know, that burdens and income and so forth. It is just devastated.

44:48
SM: Sure. Overall, he made references to it, but the counterculture is very well known. There were two classic books that came out around that (19)71, (19)72 timeframe. And it was The Greening of America, by Charles Reich [crosstalk]. And then the second one was The Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak. I do not know if you saw that.

45:07
MB: I am not that familiar that.

45:08
SM: He talked about the different consciousness of [crosstalk], you think of a counterculture as long hair, bell bottoms, communal type of living–

45:21
MB: I saw Charles Reich. He was a teacher at Yale when I was a Yale Law School, I did not take his class or happen to be in his course. You know, and he was a teacher. [audio cuts] Right to welfare in the Constitution, we were going to have judges that were going to say you got a right to a standard of income from the government. Pure lunacy. I remember seeing him one time there was a little branch of [inaudible] on York Street in New Haven, right here Yale Law School. And I remember seeing Charles Reich sitting there, and he was cashing a gift certificate buying a sport coat. I guess his mom had bought him a sport coat or something. No, this is the man that wants to redistribute income, but he is still getting gifts from his gifts from his family. They have an interesting counterculture, is not it?

46:13
SM: I think he is actually living in California right now.

46:15
MB: Yeah. He has been out of public eye for a long time. And that book, I think, is pure lunacy. I mean, well, it basically makes the argument that the problems of production are all solved. We are going to have all live in affluence without any effort, whatever. And now, we can just sit around and groove. I mean, what an adolescent view of life, it is the adolescent is boys’ dope, it was mother's still buying him a sport coat? It is funny that a-a lot of people like that would wear a sport coat.

46:45
SM: You have made a comment to that a lot of the boomers, particularly activists that make up five to 10 percent of that 74 million, many of them did not grow up. And even though they may be 63 years old, they still have not grown up, they may have had a family, they have not grown up, you think a lot of them have not grown up, they still have that?

47:04
MB: Well, I think there is some of that. I mean, I think the sense of being adversarial to a larger society, it comes naturally to many adolescents, because you have got adversarial to your parents after having been nurtured by them. And, you know, seeing them as part of your world is the process of separation. And so, there is something inherently inclines you towards adversarial in adolescence. And I think, you know, in some of their, you know, if you are still voting in California for these ruinous democrats that are destroying the state, enrich in the public employees, because you do not want to have any-any-any restrictions on abortion. Boy, that is a pretty adversarial way of looking at society, in my view.

47:47
SM: When did the (19)60s begin? And when did it end, in your point of view? And what was a watershed moment?

47:51
MB: Well, the (19)60s did not begin until well into the (19)60s. You know, assassination of President Kennedy, I think was, I think that was an important event in reducing competence in America. And of course, it was nobody's fault except the communists that did it. Which of course, if you read James Pearson's book makes the point about how Mrs. Kennedy and the liberals wanted to see Kennedy as having been killed by right wingers and they have constantly nurtured this and they did not like the idea that he was killed by some tacky communists, which was in fact the case. But I think you know, it. It violated the sort of intuitive sense that we had about American history that things turn out well. We-we had seen to wartime, you know, our experiences of presidents dying. We have seen President Lincoln, you see President Roosevelt age, during the course of huge war, you have the Mathew Brady photographs, Americans still know need to be looked at the pictures of Roosevelt during the war and the physical deterioration and so forth in the world. They come to a successful moment of triumph, and then they die, assassinated in Lincoln's case, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage and so forth. This at the moment of victory, roughly, and so forth. And so, there is a sense that things come out well even though the president trial leader tragic, our great leader, tragically dies, that things will come out well, and, you know, Kennedy died did not die in a moment of victory. It was not it was not that narrative did not hold it seems senseless and weird. And, you know, people might have anticipated you know, if he conducted a successful military intervention in Iraq, and then have presided as president over the moon shot and they have been assassinated after that it might have made sense to us.

49:52
SM: Yet do you consider that the watershed moment-

49:55
MB: I think that that becomes a moment where confidence in the society is significantly eroded and the goodness and rightness and the blessedness, if you will of American society since things turn out well for us, as we know that we will pictures more complex. Yeah, I think, and I think then you start getting more adversarial things you would get the elites, you know, the college elites not signing up for Vietnam, but nestling into the academy. You get the Watts riots, you know, Berkeley and the Watt riots (19)64, (19)65, you have a Harlem Riot in (19)64. All this effort to give more to students to get more blacks seems to be resulting in rioting in the streets and stuff and go back and read some of that stuff. It was truly frightening. Now there is this left-wing writer, what is his name, Rick Perlstein that does a history of Nixon and I gave it a somewhat critical-

50:47
SM: Nixonland.

50:49
MB: Yeah, but what Rick does really well, if he goes back and gets the footage of this stuff, and what was appearing on television, in 1967, and (19)68. And it gives you a sense of a country exploding and violence and growing and so forth. So, the (19)60s happen that I mean, I guess if you really had it, you know, the bad year was 1967. And Nelson [inaudible] is to say (19)68 was the worst campaign, year presidential campaign year in American history. I think there is a lot to that. And not just because Hubert Humphrey lost which Nelson supported. But yeah, he was speaking, he was speaking much more generally about that.

51:29
SM: Is there a lean line of demarcation where you see the (19)60s is over, I know you mentioned the (19)60s, or (19)70s, a lot of people-

51:38
MB: Well, it goes into the (19)70s, as he goes into the (19)70s, in the new world sense that behavior of an elite gets transferred to the whole society to a large extent. And, you know, if you go back and look at welfare dependency, crime rates, divorce rates, and stuff like abortion zooms peaks in the early (19)90s, crime peaks in the early (19)90s, late (19)80s, welfare dependency peaks about that time, some of these things are solved by changes in public policy to an important extent. But you have got these hugely negative tracks, all three of those metrics are hugely more negative than the amount after the 1930s, (19)40s and (19)50s, hugely more negative. They go on for a long time for a long generation. And without, you know, everybody just seems to think you cannot do much about it. You know, like, Gandhi had criminologists and these, so you cannot do a lot about crime when you are-when you are oppressing people, like we are oppressing black people, you just have to expect it. You know, this is part of the vibrancy of living in a city that you might get mugged. And hit over the head.

52:43
SM: And I have been, have you-you have ever been mugged?

52:45
MB: No.

52:45
SM: I got mugged in Philly. And the first day I was talking at Thomas Jefferson University, and I was going back from a dance was getting off the topic here. But when I came back, and then the next day, I went and done the work. And two people said bet you they were black, were not they? Yeah, well, they were. But you know, I did not really-

53:05
MB: Well, the uncomfortable fact was that you have, you know, unfortunately, a disproportionate number of black people commit crimes. I mean, that is just black young males, I mean, look at the prison profile and so forth, that some people were in prison, they probably should not be, we should do something about that. But you know, the numbers are there. I mean, it is just obvious. And essentially, I my theory is-is it is a function of why you also saw huge crime rates in Russia after the fall of communism, and bad behaviors, like alcoholism, accidents, and so forth. And a huge rush of crime in the US in post-apartheid South Africa. You know, both of which strike me as true, and you get this in America post success in the Civil Rights revolution. And my-my saying on this is liberated men tend to behave badly. Liberated women are just a pain in the neck. Yeah, when we are in it, men tend to behave badly. Why the black people do not commit more crimes in the south. Because these white people would kill them. They did not beat them up if they did, or if they thought they did. Now, they know some people that had not done this stuff. They thought you had a sort of terror. And you know what, terror does work to reduce crime. It is just not a measure we Americans want to employ.

54:22
SM: What is what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on the movements that evolved at the end of the (19)60s because the civil rights movement was already well established? It was kind of a role model for all the other movements and certainly the antiwar movement as well.

54:40
MB: That is an example that people always throw back at you, you know, you are saying, are you saying the society is basically decent? What about the civil rights movement? Well, you know-

54:48
SM: Right, and the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement and of course, a lot of the women left the- those movements because of sexism and the women's was one but the question I am really asking here. Yeah, that when you look at the women's movement and organizations like National Organization for Women and [inaudible], you have got the gay and lesbian movement they evolved after Stonewall in (19)69. You have got the environmental movement that really came about Earth Day in 1970. You have got the American Indian Movement that was from (19)69 to (19)73. And we all know about Alcatraz and-and then what happened at Wounded Knee? And then you have the world Indian civil rights movement.

55:25
MB: Well, what is the question?

55:26
SM: The question is, what do you think about those movements in terms of they were supposed to be really empowered in the 1970s. That was their time, they seem to have waned.

55:38
MB: Well, I think each one has a different trajectory. You know the feminist movement gets Roe v. Wade seven to decision and the very gets, you know, you have a lot more women entering the workforce, that is an Yankelevich to that, basically women entering the workforce is a (19)70s phenomenon, which is mostly continued. You have got now in universities and graduate schools, you know, female dominance, numerically. You know, at the same time, you look at millennials, and they are less pro-abortion rights or these pro-abortion than their elders. They have seen the sonograms; abortion does not seem so wonderful and liberating to them. And again, as you know, highwoods points out the upper half strata of women do not get many abortions, very few of them do. And so, what was a huge symbolically important thing, where you had all these gray-haired feminists who are long past menopause, you know, hugely got to have a right to abortion is central to my being. That is just not the case. It seems with most of these younger women now. It is just something that is always been there. It is in the air. It is unremarkable, and actually rather unpleasant. So, they do not particularly like that. Enviro movements, they had huge policy successes in the (19)70s. That, you know, on balance, I mean, the Endangered Species Act was written in a bad way and is really a pain in the ass and the superfund act was crap. The clean air and water acts worked very well, by and large, and managed to do it. My friend, Bill Drayton, in the Carter administration invented what he called the bubble, but it is basically the cap-and-trade idea, or, you know, buying pollution allotments as a way of enforcing clean air and water act and so forth, which the Carter administration which also proceeded on a lot of the economic deregulation getting rid of the New Deal policies that were intended to and did hold up costs. So, in transportation, communication, we squeezed huge amounts across the society, but the environmental movement had a lot of successes there. And, you know, you know, today's enviros will not believe it when you say so and cannot bear to have it set. But our you know; our air and water standards and stuff are hugely cleaner than they were in 1970. I remember going to Los Angeles 1969 could not see the mountains almost any day. Now, you see the mountains almost every day. But I mean, that is just, you know, particulate emission, but well, smog, you know, the stuff is much better. So, they had a lot of success. Over time, I think that, you know, I think they have now become a vested interest. These people executives have $300,000 jobs they are protecting, they send out direct mail that always direct mail always takes the form, the sky is falling, everything will be worse than ever, unless you send in money today. So, we have got crackpot hoaxes, like global warming, which in my opinion, is more or less that where they are bending and cheating and lying about the science, and so forth. Part of this is that a lot of these people have a statist agenda, they want to run everybody's life completely and you have, you know, some of these other environmental causes, you know, we cannot get oil from Arctic National Wildlife, that is a complete crack. I mean, the idea that you are protecting some beautiful resource, I mean, I think of the North Slope, I have seen what that is like you are talking about, you know, prospecting the oil footprint, oil exploration footprint, the size of Dulles Airport, in an area the size of the state of Connecticut. They have got a pretty good record of environmental protection and so forth, and a pretty good culture in the North Slope. That is just stupid. You know why they do that to raise money. They show pictures of the beautiful Brooks Range and the caribou, and they rake in money and they know that the oil companies will always the state of Alaska will always press for that because it is absolutely asinine not to do it and make a profit bias. And so that there will always have this they will be able to bring in the money till they retire, pay off their kids’ tuition, keep that $300,000 rolling in. I think it is one of the most cynical operations the campaign against oil drilling. And why have any political classes been carried just feathering their own nests?

1:00:04
SM: But would you agree, though, that the movement of the (19)70s that we are all unique and fairly strong fighting are different for me, because they were very visible had become somewhat invisible. They become more singular.

1:00:20
MB: Well, enviro–

1:00:21
SM: They do not work together.

1:00:22
MB: No of course they do not work together. I mean, the feminist is now kind of an antique movement, because life is so different from what they were objecting to, and you read this stuff, and some of them, I guess, are very lesbian and do not like man, I do not know much about that, you know. Antiwar movement. Well, the antiwar tilt is still a very important factor in the Democratic Party read the debates on the Gulf War as recent in 1991, on the Iraq War resolution 2002. And you hear people arguing against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that their arguments make much more sense in terms of Vietnam, than they do in terms of the actual situations we faced in the Gulf War with Iraq. In my judgment, or at least the arguments of a lot of that continued, they have huge influence in the Democratic Party and on public policy there by the environment. As I said, I think it would become a vested interest lobby, more in feathering their own nests, than they are in really improving the environment. And in some cases, in promoting status controls and environment. Gay Rights Movements takes a long time to be successful but has had huge positive changes from their point of view, in public opinion over the last 15 years. I mean, the country's flipped totally on some case, serving openly in the military. This is an issue on which there are huge differences between this over 65 and the under 30s. And, you know, it is one of those issues, you know, the marijuana movement, where now, you know, in 1972, it looked like legalizing marijuana might be the wave of the future, California had a referendum, 33 percent voted for it. And I thought, well, you know, if marijuana you have all these under 30s, who are marijuana users grow up and still be for marijuana, then we are going to eventually see that 33 percent grow to 50 percent or something like that. And that did not happen. And so, one of the interesting questions on these cultural issues is, will the liberal attitudes that young people tend to have on these issues continuously grow old or not? And the answer is on some of them they have and some of them have not. My hunch is on the gay rights issues, they will continue to have these liberal attitudes as they grow older, it is beginning to look that way-

1:02:41
SM: Native American rights, you just do not hear about it anymore.

1:02:43
MB: You know, inherently tragic, you know, I mean, credit, the problem was, what is their solution? Well, tribal autonomy. Well, the tribal governments are not very good. We see, I think the best solution to Aboriginal peoples in the United States is Oklahoma and Alaska. Oklahoma, no reservations, integration. You get along, you are proud of your Indian glide, you make it a payment for something, or other. Alaska the Native Claims Act, Alaska Native Claims Act and Ted Stevens and others put together with which provides certain incomes to people. And what it is enabled them to do, I think, is it, it gives the individuals a choice of where they want to live on the continuum between the Aboriginal lifestyle and the mainstream lifestyle. The core problem with, you know, the autonomy for the reservation and political, political elections and reservations as you get (19)51, (19)49 elections in which the (19)51 steal for four years, and they were thrown out. And then the (19)49 becomes (19)51. And they may steal for four years. And they do not cover and effectively. And it does not give people it does not give people a range of choices of where they want to live on the continuum between the Aboriginal lifestyle and mainstream lifestyle, it tends to cabin in the end. I think, the Aboriginal lifestyle, or some variant there on a dependence lifestyle, which-which people do not do very well. I mean, look at the data. You know, it is tragic. And you have these problems in other countries, too, with how you deal with Aboriginal populations and people with those traditions in a free society. Those are difficult problems to handle. But I think Alaska and Oklahoma have done better than we have done in the reservation cultures. And, you know, the Eisenhower administration that the American Indian would criticize the Eisenhower administration for wanting to, you know, mainstream people. This was oppression, just as in Australia, there is a big move against big protests that were against the policies they had tried to mainstream Aborigines. I think That thrust of policy is the wrong thrust. I think the right thrust is not to cabin people into the Aboriginal lifestyle, but to give a continuum where people have choices, and they can partake of that lifestyle or not. You provide as the Alaska Native Claims Act does some income support for people to do that, they have the mineral rights and so forth. And in 12 native corporations, there is a pooling of the revenue so that there will not be huge windfalls for one over the other like the North Slope. But that is, that is a much better policy solution for Aboriginal rights. And so, I think, you know, the American Indian Movement was a dead-end, I am going to put you under some of those people, because were violent and stuff like that, which is pretty awful.

1:05:45
SM: I know, we are running out of time here. And but just real quick responses to these and then the boomer generation, many of them and still do think they were the most unique generation in American history, because there was this attitude, at least amongst the activists that they were going to change the world bring peace to the world, and racism, sexism, homophobia, there was a spirit of-

1:06:07
MB: Yeah, and a civil rights and revolution happens before they are adults.

1:06:10
SM: Right. But there was a feeling of empowerment. And again, some that are 63 years old still feel that because they are working old age, and they think they can change that too. So, what just a quick response to that. The second part of the question-

1:06:27
MB: It is pretty adolescent stuff, is not it?

1:06:29
SM: Yeah.

1:06:29
MB: That is the response–

1:06:31
SM: Okay. How important were the beats, some people felt that the (19)60s really began with a beat in the (19)50s that Kerouac, Ginsburg, Baldwin, Snyder, fairly Getty, those writer, Leroy Jones, those writers were basically the precursors to the anti-authoritarian. You know, I am not going to be like IMB or Titan mentality that through their writings, a kind of an independence, I am going to do it my way or the highway kind of mentality.

1:06:58
MB: I do not think they were probably very important. I do not think they were very widely read. I do not think mine are important. I mean, it is like, you know, the SDS port here and statement here in 1960 some importance too but I think this was not what inspired masses and masses of people to do things, I think, you know, the personal situations that people encounter, because the draft and things like that have much more effect then reading jack Kerouac are performing across the country.

1:07:28
SM: I interviewed Noam Chomsky and I had an hour with him. And then very difficult took me almost a year to see him. But I had a great time with him. And in one of his first books, which you probably read The American Pwer and the New Mandarins. Dr. Martin Duberman, and other well-known historian states, and Noam Chomsky, in his first books quoted this, about the generation, you recognize the anarchist spirit that lies at the heart of the rebellion of the young. he says Chomsky not only recognizes that but admires it. Your thoughts.

1:08:06
MB: So, you get a celebration of adolescence. And, you know, I found out mom and dad are imperfect and affects their real skunks. Am I not clever? And I am going to be a good person, the whole world, make the whole world better, and everything will be perfect. Now that is about that. What are we talking age 13, 14, 15. It is pretty adolescent stuff. I mean, I think ultimately, you know, if you want to, if you want to govern, if you want to be a responsible leader, if you want to exert positive forces, to contribute in some way to society, through your work, community surface elements, scenery, activities, or whatever else, it is better to start acting. It is better to become an adult than to remain an adolescent–

1:08:51
SM: You got to write an article on it. Yet, I think it is important to because I think a lot of boomers are confused, and I am not even going to go there. But I think a lot of them-

1:09:04
MB: When you are a grandparent, it is a little It is like watching, you know, Mick Jagger up on the stage being a rebellious 19-year-old and he is 66 years old, and-

1:09:11
SM: I think he is 70.

1:09:13
MB: Well, he has got a lot of, well he is actually quite a smart man, but he has got a lot of miles on the odometer, you know? I mean, it is kind of ludicrous, is not that, you know, when we go to these baby boomers, you go to these baby boomer rock concerts, they have a lot of Wolf Trap and stuff like that. And people they are all they are of a certain age. You know, we got these niche cultures like on the satellite radio, you know, got each decade different. You can get your decade and you can find your six different kinds of country music. There is, you know, you have got niches and stuff. So, these people go and watch, you know, 65-year-old watching 65-year-old sing teenage songs. [chuckles] I guess it is sort of wonderful that we have a society that is affluent enough where people get to have a chance like this and in an enjoyment dentistry of remembrance of what it was like to be young and-

1:10:03
SM: A lot of the band members are dead and they have replaced them entirely-

1:10:05
MB: Yeah, on the trajectory of life. Yeah, well, of course, it is a high. It is a high mortality occupation and given their social lives and their private plane traveling plans.

1:10:16
SM: You just you. These are quotes that came from Noam Chomsky, power for its own sake is unjustified power, unless justified is inherently illegitimate. And this is what he was talking about when we talked about the Vietnam War.

1:10:34
MB: I do not think that kind of generality gets you very far in terms of an intelligent critique of public policy. I mean, I think they are-they are serious prudential, there are serious arguments to be had about prudentially whether it was wise for the United States to intervene as it did in Vietnam. And whether, if you thought such an adventure, as well as what should have been done, but I do not think that that sort of generality is sort of, if the guy does not do what I like, he is illegitimate. I think that is kind of the that is the academy thing. Everything is legitimate except my personal preferences. Well, that does not tell us anything, except that you are ready to put people you know, you are ready to run 1984 if you get the chance. Instead, they can just run campus speech codes, and send people to re-education classes and stuff. But–

1:11:24
SM: Do you think that what Phyllis Schlafly said, she said, I interviewed her at the [inaudible] conference, and she said to me that she is still flying how? Yes, he is strong as ever. If she is very, she is not-

1:11:38
MB: She is a really petite woman. She has got a terrific body. She is great.

1:11:39
SM: She is. She has not lost anything up here. And she is sharp, but she gets tired very fast now. So yeah.

1:11:49
MB: Well into her 80s.

1:11:50
SM: Four I think 84 or 85. But she said the troublemakers of the (19)60s now run today's universities. And she and then she was said she was making a reference to the people that run them probably student life people as well as the women's studies programs, the gay studies, Asian studies, Native American studies, Black studies, she was referring to the studies program, do you think that is-

1:12:16
MB: Oh, yeah, I think it is run by the student radical. They are, you know, the descendants. Now the student radicals? I think it is becoming, you know, and I think they have become the most intolerant institutions in our society. Where do you have speech codes in our society? Well, corporate HR departments will tell you, you are not supposed to call people ethnic names and stuff on the workplace and things like that. But the real speech codes that are enforced against people that have the Roth, politically incorrect ideas are on campus, these supposedly havens of free thought, are in fact, the most intolerant part of the society. Your corporate employer does not care if you are Republican or Democrat. universities do.

1:12:58
SM: Oh, yeah, there has been actually, there has been stories of people actually being fired.

1:13:04
MB: Oh, yeah. That happened is that well was one of the things that is happened is that a lot of people like the people here at a lot of people here at AI have just fled the university for more congenial environment, and one where they will not be disfavored. So, you have got people like Chomsky sitting with the powers that legitimate unless it agrees with me have their own little niches of power, you know, there is different studies departments. You know, my sense is that they probably produce some good scholarship here and there. I mean, you know, just made to see Henry Louis Gates in this whole controversy last summer, is my understanding that he has produced some pretty good scholarship and- and has done some worthy work. I think a lot of those people are, do not produce much this worthwhile. You know, that, you know, a lot of it is kind of a scam. But there, I am sure are people in all those things that have produced some scholarship, that is, that is, that is worth serious consideration. You know, it tends to be one sided and so forth. I mean, the stuff I have read of Gates, which is not anything like a large sampling of his work, suggests that he is a fairly clear eyed and non-propagandistic sort of guy that is trying to understand a very different past and to enter sympathetically into the minds of people that are as to how they were behaving, including, you know, some people whose behavior we currently, all of us consider repugnant. That is, you know, that is an interesting thing to do. I think that, you know, a lot of the departments have just become garbage though, have not they? I mean, you have got areas you know, a lot of the English departments you know, this deconstruction stuff, because that is all crap. I mean, I remember a friend of mines daughter was at Wesleyan. She said, you know, these literature crisis, you go there, and they denounce dead white males all day or all our she says I want to read some Shakespeare some Jane Austen. Okay, well, you know, a student that wants to read Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Yeah, that is a pretty worthy motive. And then to be encountered these, these harridans, screaming about the dominance of dead white males and so forth. Boy, that is a pretty lousy educational experience. And it is hard to believe people like that are going to produce any good scholarship.

1:15:35
SM: I think the only got four more points that I have been one of the commentaries, because I have worked in higher ed about 35 years, is that I think the biggest battle today in higher education, the battles have been going on between conservatives and liberals for a long time is between liberals and liberals in the liberal, that can become a friend of a conservative, a liberal that can bring in conservative speakers and understand that it is important that all points of view are listened to and heard, and preparing students for the world they are going to face manage on diversity.

1:16:08
MB: My sense is that is not the case that a lot of university venues and you know, in a sense, it is almost worse, at the knot I suspected is worse at many of the non-elite places.

1:16:19
SM: State universities.

1:16:20
MB: Well, you have got a lot of places where I think you have got some not very smart people left wingers in control. And, you know, if you read the fire, the foundation for individual rights in education, you know, the speech codes and stuff they encounter at some of these colleges you never heard of, are pretty hair raising. And you have to say there is a large amount of stupidity involved. I mean, I used to think when I was growing up those academics were generally smarter than the rest of us. And I have come to think they are- they are not as smart as people in a lot of, you know, the top part of the law profession or something, certainly medical, hard sciences. They are a lot smarter than these left-wing academics, most of them.

1:17:01
MB: I think you and James Fallows agree on the point that you brought up earlier about the elite education back in the Harvard's and the Yale's because, because he felt that the Vietnam War was a class war, because he says so beautifully in his What Did You Do in the War, Daddy, that the voice of Chelsea, the lower income voice from Boston when often fought the war, yet the rich kids who went off to Harvard, not only-

1:17:32
MB: He did not talk quite right about Chelsea, because people from the lowest demographic do not get drafted. But that is, well-

1:17:38
SM: He mentions that. But he talks about the fact that not only they invaded the war, as opposed to protesting the draft, the annoying that they evaded the draft as opposed to protesting. So, he calls it a kind of a class war. Do you really think that Vietnam was more of a class war?

1:17:55
MB: Well, I think I discussed that earlier. Yeah.

1:17:58
SM: Yeah, what one of the things? This is, these are two very important questions that I have tried to raise to every person I have interviewed with starting with Senator McCarthy in 1996. And this may not mean anything to you, but it is something that I have been raising, and that is the fact that students at our campus came up with a question when we took a group to see Senator Muskie in 1995 in his office, they had they these students had not been born in 1968. And so, they saw (19)68 in the (19)60s through their classes, as a time of disruption coming close to a second Civil War, no one getting along with each other, riots in the streets, but (19)68 defined at our two assassinations with the Chicago convention with police and students fighting each other and oppress poles.

1:18:46
MB: We call it the worst eleven years in American history. For exactly those kinds of reasons.

1:18:51
SM: The question that they came up with, they wanted to ask him because he was the democratic vice-presidential candidate is due to all the divisions that were happening in America that time do you feel that the boomer generation, I know that it is very general do You think the boomer generation is going to go with the grave like the Civil War generation, not truly healing from the divisions that they had when they were young, but they carry these into adulthood whether it be for or against the war?

1:19:19
MB: Not fully healing is my answer. Yeah, you know, I think, you know, we saw this period between (19)95 and (20)05, where you have very static reason, political alignment, voting behavior, in large part to focus on to baby boom generation president. So, the two halves are the different parts of it. And his personal characteristics reinforced their identification, you know, I mean, Kennedy was an Irish American, but he looked and acted like a British Lord, or at least most Americans regard him that way. He went against type. Clinton went with type and Bush went with type the liberal baby in the conservative baby but-

1:20:01
SM: What were those types?

1:20:04
MB: Clinton's you know, your positive way of looking at it is articulate in this the negative way a slippery immoral behavior and so forth. George W. Bush's positive way to look at its steadfastness, negative way to look at it stubbornness, the idea of a sort of moralism there is a right and wrong and the ultra-left eyes want to say, oh no, everything is relative nice and clear right or wrong, you know, we let us just talk about it for a while. And Bush is saying now some things are right or wrong and I mean, I think Bush is, right you can argue about which things are right and wrong and where you ought to go to shades of gray, but I think there are, you know, there are some real rights and wrongs you know, George Orwell, you know, thought so, too. And totalitarianism was just wrong. And, you know, so yeah, I think the boomers will continue as I that is my thing. The good news is the baby boomers will die out. The bad news is I will die about the same time.

1:21:11
SM: Do you think the wall Vietnam Memorial, what does it mean to you? Does that help you personally to know that you think is Jan Scruggs says in his book to heal a nation, it was meant to be a nonpolitical entity to help the families and those of those who died and answer why you are having to memorialize them. And it is not to be a political statement. But he also says, we hope it heals the nation.

1:21:36
MB: Well, I think it is interesting, you get five, you know, lots of people go over there and look at it. But the here is the interesting thing, to me is that the final product is a bifurcation. I mean, the complaint was made against that it was non heroic treated, treated soldiers as victims and not as heroes. And so, you get the, you know, the lifelike statues of the GI attendant with it, which is, which, if not heroic, at least, says that they are doers, not victims. And I think one of the problems in America has, you know, the call for change this to some extent, I said, Americans are seeing their military as heroes not victims, as or at least as doers, not victims. I think one of the things that I find unpleasant about valid statement about the class war, which is, you know, reasonably good description, I put it somewhat differently. But he has seen-he has seen people served in the military as victims, and I think that is selling them short. And you know, and he is saying that people who are clever enough, like himself and me, to avoid being victims, so out of the somewhat ashamed of ourselves, which I agree with, and but, you know, perhaps what we ought to be ashamed of, is not having avoided victim status, but have had it been avoided making a positive contribution.

1:23:09
SM: I know that in the symposium that they were involved, and then I am pleased before Senator Webb. And certainly, Bobby Mahler and General Wheeler and the whole group is that that it was when we talk about the generation gap between parents and their kids. But really, the severe problem is between the generation itself prior to having some served in Vietnam sitting next is somebody who graduate from Harvard when I become a lawyer. Put them in a war together, that is where the divisions come from together, that sort of

1:23:41
MB: depends on which subjects you focus on. But yeah, if you bring that up, yeah.


1:23:47
SM: Why did we lose Vietnam? In your opinion? Why do we lose that war?

1:23:54
MB: I think we have poor military strategy. I think we hadou know, I think that I think President Johnson had great military strategy, he did not elicit a winning military strategy out of his military as he should have been read Elliot Cohen and Supreme Command. I think that is good work on that. I think President Nixon had a potentially winning strategy. I mean, read, Lewis thoroughly said good war, that was undercut by Watergate in history, Henry Christian argued by Watergate and by the election of a democratic congress that refused to vote any aid to South Vietnam in 1975. So, I am not sure I agree with whether I agree or not with thoroughly status that Abram’s strategy was essentially a successful strategy. But I think that is a pretty strong argument. So, the answer, to some extent is a failure of leadership in America to produce the result. I mean, it was what George Bush failed at in 2005, (20)04 or (20)05 and (20)06 interactions conceded out in 2007 and (20)08.

1:25:01
SM: Are you supportive of Dr. King's speech in 1967, where he went against the Vietnam War, he was criticized heavily by his own–

1:25:09
MB: I just observed it.

1:25:10
SM: Do you think that is important, schemed of things?

1:25:16
MB: Somewhat, I do not think it was. I really do not know. I did not have strong. I thought it was, you know, my reaction to time was it is not really your issue.

1:25:28
SM: Yeah.

1:25:30
MB: It is interesting. I have been reading about it. I read something about Eisenhower was on Eisenhower and civil rights, and he has King and as a 28-year-old. And this guy, research these documents, his stuff, and it will be fascinating King’s, comments were really quite wise. And he really, he had, he really was a gifted man.

1:25:49
SM: We had James Farmer on our campus. It is totally visually impaired at the time, but he was still strong and very speaker. And he said, the Dr. King that we saw in the church and the Dr. King that we saw at rallies was not the real Dr. King. The real Dr. King was the man who stayed in the room. During when we were talking about the issues, and he was very quiet. He was a quiet man. And he would go get it out of Martin, what do you think? And then he would open up people and have to vote against neutral for a while-

1:26:24
MB: Interesting, the comments he made, you know, he is in the presence of President Eisenhower all these things, and he is 28 years old, and he was during Montgomary, Alabama. And he does very well. It was fascinating, frankly-

1:26:38
SM: I think we are almost done here.

1:26:39
MB: Got to retail and branch refuge was probably terrific. Anyway, yeah, I have got to go.

1:26:44
SM: Yeah, the very last question is, what do you think of lasting legacy will be on this generation will make your best history books are written 50 years from now, or when maybe when the last boomer passed away?

1:27:06
MB: A generation that did not fully live up to its responsibilities.

1:27:14
SM: And those responsibilities would have been?

1:27:24
MB: Lots of different things. And you are asking me to write the book. Right.

1:27:24
MB: And I used to work for you I just leave it at that.

1:27:32
SM: The very last thing is the issue of trust. One of the things that seems to define this generation is they do not trust because they saw leaders that lie so many of them lied to them from Watergate to Eisenhower lying about U-2 on.

1:27:46
MB: I think that is, I think that is an overbreeding for a long moment in history. I think that, you know, already talked to you about the decline in confidence. And the fact that the American that was so confident and believing in its institutions from the 1940s to the mid (19)60s was not unusual America. We had had great success. And we had two great successes that had not really been anticipated, say, circa 1940, which is success in the World War, which most Americans did not want to get into. And, no, it was a pretty terrible war, and the success of post-world economic prosperity, which almost no one anticipated, and so those huge successes that seemed to be produced by men born in the 1880s, and 1890s.

1:28:37
SM: Very good. That would be okay. Thank you. Let us-

1:28:40
MB: We had this country that had the narrative, the Lincoln Roosevelt narrative, where everything turns out well, and even the tragic death of the president comes from moments of great victory.

1:28:55
SM: Actually, one more-

1:28:57
MB: Photographers always say one more.

1:29:01
SM: Very good.

1:29:02
MB: Yeah, that moment of history. And I think, I think that was something.

1:29:05
SM: That was one of the things you know, you learn in political science class, the first thing you learn is that not trusting your government is actually healthy for democracy. So, if you are saying a generation does not trust, then-

1:29:19
MB: Yeah, you have these people, Nixon and Johnson, that were so ex- for Johnson and Nixon that were so experienced and turned out to be great disappointment. So, I think that, you know, the idea that in fact, the idea of not trusting experts, but we are not trusting people in power you know. I think that that is, you know, that is a long, long, decade long feeling rather than something that persists throughout time.

1:29:47
SM: I have been to the store to try to find your book-

(End of Interview)

2010-06-29

Stephen McKiernan

Michael Barone

89:54

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

1 Microcassette

Audio

Historians; Journalists; Barone, Michael--Interviews

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