Interview with Sam Brown

Brown, Sam, 1943- ; McKiernan, Stephen

Sam Brown is a politician and political activist. Brown was the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter, and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Redlands, and a Master of Arts from Rutgers University. He also completed his graduate studies at Harvard University Divinity School.

2010-03-02

In Copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

119:03

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Sam Brown
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 2 March 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:04:39):
Testing, one, two. This will carry very well. Done pretty good. I noticed something when I was reading your background. It was a quote. And I would like you to explain it a little further. "It never occurred to me that America could be wrong." You are quoted as saying that when you were younger.

SB (00:05:01):
Well, I grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa in an egalitarian, Republican, religious family. And part of the religion of America is that America's always right. We are the good guys, we saved Europe from itself twice. We ... You know. So as a young man, I thought that almost quasi-religious sense of America's role and mission. And it never occurred to me until, oh probably like a lot of other people I guess, probably about freshman year in college, that maybe all that history that I thought I knew, I did not know as well as I thought I knew it. And that there was another side to America that was ... That we were, in fact, just human. I should have thought ... I should have known that actually from just religious teachings. I mean if we were all fallen, then how would we create a perfect state?

SM (00:06:18):
Right.

SB (00:06:19):
So ... But in any case, you know I was a kid. I believed that that is where a simple vision of America, always right, always on the side of the underdog.

SM (00:06:38):
You think this was ... Because I think a lot of Boomers ... A lot of people do not like the term Boomer so I am going to say those born after 19, about (19)46 and beyond. Certainly, the first 10 years, the frontline Boomers, who lived in the (19)50s and experienced everything from the get-go. I think a lot of Boomers had that feeling, what you are talking about because the parents were home, they had defeated two of the really worst dictatorships in the world. And things looked pretty good at home despite the Cold War and McCarthy telling people they were Communists. And-

SB (00:07:17):
Well, and there was an enormous growth in the economy. There was all this surge in education. People who had never thought they would get a college education, knew that their kids would. I was born in (19)43 so I was very much in that ... One of my very earliest memories actually is the Army-McCarthy hearings in, which would have been I guess, (19)50, (19)51.

SM (00:07:47):
(19)51, yeah.

SB (00:07:48):
Yeah. I remember coming home from school for lunch and seeing it on our-

SM (00:07:52):
Black and white-

SB (00:07:53):
... black and white television set, yeah.

SM (00:07:56):
It is amazing. See, I had a little boy. I was born at the end of 1946 and I can remember before going to the school ... Actually, I am a first-grader or kindergarten. But we had half days in kindergarten. I remember being home and being on the floor and hearing this man yell. He did not ... I did not like him. I did not like that. Did you have a generation gap with your parents?

SB (00:08:24):
Well, sure. I mean they really were on that World War I ... I mean, my parents were both born at the end of World War I and so their formative years were the depression and World War II. And America's enormous achievements during those years were really quite remarkable. And so, they saw in a different ... They saw the world through different eyes than somebody born in the grow and prosperity and opportunity that we were born into. So, in that sense, I did not always get along with my parents. I mean we had political differences that drove us apart for a number of years. But we were never apart as parent and child. We grew apart politically. Some things were just off the table, and I thought they were old fogies.

SM (00:09:26):
Yeah. You were a Republican when you were young. What changed you? Was there a specific event that changed you to become a Democrat?

SB (00:09:34):
Well, what changed me was not Republican to Democrat so much as the Civil Rights Movement. Remember this was the days when there was actually a reasonable Republican Party. And it was the era of Rockefeller. And the idea that the Republican Party could actually, particularly on civil rights early on, there were probably more Republicans willing to vote for bills than there were Democrats because the demographic of the Senate being so Southern, the Democrats being so Southern. So, I mean what changed me was not anything in the parties. It was that it was seeing a little more of the world and what actually happened in that world. Seeing, particularly, foreign workers in California. I was involved very early on with some efforts to ... In the unionization efforts of-

SM (00:10:39):
[inaudible].

SB (00:10:41):
... all of the farm workers. Not at any leadership. Just-

SM (00:10:43):
Right.

SB (00:10:44):
But you know, helping out, setting up tables, volunteering for things, that sort of stuff. In fact, that is what I was doing the day that Kennedy was ... John Kennedy was shot.

SM (00:10:58):
Mm-hmm.

SB (00:10:59):
And you saw that the world was not all this ... The same as this sort of white, red world in which I had grown up in Council Bluffs. And even Council Bluffs probably was not that way if I had had my eyes open all the time. But I had grown up in a middle class, relatively privileged family. And then you see what is happening to other people and you say, "Well, wait a minute. This is not working very well." And so that, I think, that and the Civil Rights Movement probably, were the things that eventually ...

SM (00:11:38):
When you were young, were you ... I know you were involved in a college but were you an involved student in high school? Did you just study and did well in classes and when was that first point where you said to yourself, "I want to make a difference in this world? I think I have it within me to"-

SB (00:11:56):
Freshman year in college, probably. High school, high school was high school in the late (19)50s. I was a whole lot more interested in cars and girls than I was in politics. And freshman year in college, Allard Lowenstein came to the campus. He was at Stanford then. He was Dean of Men at Stanford and came to give a speech. And he had just come back from Southwest Africa. And a small group of us, for one reason or another, met with him and got to talking to him. And it was really Allard who gave me the sense [inaudible]. You focus your attention and make an effort, you actually can make a difference in the world. So really, freshman year in college was very important for me. Very important for me. I mean, by the end of that year, I was just on campus stuff. The administration shut down the student newspaper because of an article that ... Either because of an article I had written in the paper or an article. I mean it was never quite clear but they were very angry, in any case. And so, we started an alternative newspaper and I mean ... So, by the end of my freshman year, I was pretty much involved. Then, only on campus and helping out.

SM (00:13:42):
That is interesting you had that experience. I saw that reference someplace in some of the information on you. And if you look later on in your life, in your young life, there's that time when you were with the National Student Association. And then as you got a more important role within that organization, you saw that the CIA had admitted to infiltrating. The organization of the International Scholars Program over in Europe, I guess. And that really upset you.

SB (00:14:16):
Yeah, I would not say infiltrating it, so much as that was the CIA had been funding a number of cultural institutions, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other things in Encounter Magazine. And the National Student Association had turned out from sometime in the early 50s. And it really undermined the claim that we made because there were two sort of competing organizations of students. And the CIA knew what I believed to be true. That in developing countries particularly, the student leaders of today are likely to be the leaders of tomorrow because the very narrow elite. So, the student leaders tend to move into positions of authority. And certainly, the Russians and the Soviets knew that. And they were funding then an organization imported in Prague that was ... Pretended to be an organization of students who was really an organization of part of the Communist Propaganda Apparatus, basically. And the United States started funding an alternative organization of which the NSA was a leading player. And the agency was very smart. They knew that if ... That they probably could not fund it openly because of Congress. Because most of the people who were involved were people of moderate left persuasion because we were going to talk to European and African, Asian students. You could not go there. The right wing did not have much to talk to them about. So, from sometime in the early (19)50s until 1967, they had funded a variety, mostly of international activities for students, without telling many of the people that that is where the money was coming from. It theoretically came from a foundation in Upstate New York, Corning. That is the old Corning Glass money. So, the whole time we were pedaling along, we were saying, "Oh well, they are the bad guy, Communist Propaganda Apparatus. We are just the blossom of America's youth out to ... Because of ..." And many people did not know. I mean Gloria Steinem was on one of the first delegations to go. And there were a number of other people. I mean I have met other people through the years who were on that delegation of which Gloria was probably the most famous. But they did not know that it was CIA money. And it really was ... It just made a lie out of the whole thing because of it. I understand why it happened. I understand how it happened. But I disapproved then, I disapprove now. If it had been done directly through the State Department ... Maybe it could not have been done because of McCarthy and McCarthy [inaudible].

SM (00:17:54):
Yeah.

SB (00:17:55):
But if it had been done straight through the State Department, you just said, "Yeah, we got a grant from the State Department to go to this trip." Well, okay, that is fine. I mean nobody would have had any problem with that.

SM (00:18:06):
Upon reflection, after all of your experiences even beyond when you were in college and certainly the years you were organizing the Moratorium and the Anti-War Movement, it did not surprise you then that the CIA or the infiltrating organizations to-

SB (00:18:28):
It did surprise me.

SM (00:18:29):
Even during the (19)60s and the-

SB (00:18:32):
Yeah, it did surprise me. That was a great shock to me. It was a great shock to me. But it is now 40 years later. I can reflect back on it and say, "Well, it was this and that, I disapprove of it still." But I was shocked at the time. I mean I was in graduate school and was Chairman of the Board of NSA at the time and I had no idea. And then this allegation was made. There was a discussion at a board meeting about the allegation and everybody said, "No, it is not true. It is not true. It is not true. It is not true. It is not true. It is this crazy left rhetoric." And then three days later, I got the call saying, "Well, it was true." So the people that I had known for many years who were aware of it had been lying to me the whole time. So ...

SM (00:19:22):
Wow.

SB (00:19:23):
And they were sort of suborned into it. They signed an oath and they were, I think, basically threatened that they had to keep their mouths shut about it. I do not find that easy to forgive either. But ... You know, you get older, you understand.

SM (00:19:53):
There has been so many events in your life, so many experiences that really had an impact on you. But can you pinpoint one event, whether it was something you were involved in or something beyond you where you had no control, that really had the greatest impact on you as a human being? We are talking it could be a tragedy, a ...

SB (00:20:20):
Oh. I mean probably the event that changed me the most was that first meeting with Al Lowenstein because it really changed the direction of my life. Beyond that, I mean I had things that were weird. I started to say, I was on a Thursday night. I was studying and slogging my way through a manuscript in German. And Sunday morning, I was on Meet the Press. I mean that is a fairly rapid change of venue. And that was the CIA stuff. And I came ... I got on the plane right away and I was in Boston at the time. I came down here and held a couple of days of hearings and then went on Meet the Press with Joe Clark and I cannot remember who. There were a couple of other people on that program. Anyway, that had an enormous impact. But so did the early successes of the McCarthy Campaign changed what I could do subsequently because I got known and got known among other things among contributor circles so that when it came time for the Moratorium, I knew where to raise the money. So, it was ... Anyway.

SM (00:21:54):
You were involved in a lot of anti-war activities way before the Moratorium.

SB (00:21:59):
Yes.

SM (00:22:00):
In college years and-

SB (00:22:01):
Yes.

SM (00:22:01):
And I remember reading the Vietnam ... I think it was Vietnam Summer which was the (19)67.

SB (00:22:08):
Yeah.

SM (00:22:09):
Explain what that is because people are going to be reading this now, most of them are not going to have a whole lot of knowledge of that particular period, some of the specifics. Well, the Vietnam Summer.

SB (00:22:22):
The Vietnam Summer was an effort, as you say, in 1967, to get some of the people who had been organizing on their college campuses to actually go do it more broadly on a community-based level. And the theory was that you get however many people you could get to spend their summer talking to friends and neighbors and trying to find beyond the campus or beyond their campus at least, a way to talk to people about the war. It was really, as I recall it, sort of a successor to the teach-in movement from before that. That was broader. It was an effort, it was a broad educational effort, an outreach effort, that was before everything went to hell.

SM (00:23:14):
Yeah. I remember reading that there were 500 paid staffers and 26,000 volunteers in that anti-Vietnam project all over the country.

SB (00:23:24):
Yeah, that sounds a little inflated, frankly. I mean-

SM (00:23:28):
Yeah.

SB (00:23:28):
... 500 paid staffers. Not likely.

SM (00:23:31):
That might be misinformation [inaudible]-

SB (00:23:33):
Yeah. Somebody's inflated notion about how good it was. I mean it was-

SM (00:23:38):
But those experiences, did they help you in prepping you for McCarthy and being involved in the McCarthy-

SB (00:23:44):
Oh sure.

SM (00:23:44):
... experience?

SB (00:23:44):
Sure.

SM (00:23:45):
And how did you ever get that position? Because my golly, people would die to get a position like that at such a young age.

SB (00:23:52):
Hawk, with David Hawkins, another ... I mean we worked on a bunch of different things. We worked on a series of letters from student body presidents and student newspaper editors that we published in the New York Times because the administration, the Johnson Administration, was trying to say, "Well, it' is just a radical, crazy, lefty fringe that is against the war." And we wanted to say, "No, no, no. This is a mainstream, student leader, student’s newspaper editor. This is not your ... You cannot dismiss this as just a bunch of crazies." And through that, and through NSA itself, I probably knew people on ... I do not know, 3, 400 college campuses around the country. And that was in the days when it was not so easy because without email ... I mean now you can be in touch with 400 people with the touch of a button. Then, you either had to pick up the telephone and call them or you had to send them a letter. I mean there was no real, easy way to communicate. You could do a fax, but it is the same thing. You could not ... We did not have mass blast faxes at the time. So, it was just sort of ... And a lot of students would not have access to a fax machine anyway. The newspaper editors would and probably the student body presidents, too. But in any case, it was a lot of hard work. So, we spent months making phone calls and pulling together those ads. And through NSA, which had a big gathering every summer, you would get together with people from 3 or 400 different campuses. Well that is a big benefit when you are trying to organize something to actually know people face-to-face.

SM (00:25:56):
See one of the things that I do not think is talked about enough in the literature on the (19)60s is the National Student Association. I think it was formed in the late (19)40s or something like that. Hubert Humphrey was somewhat connected or-

SB (00:26:09):
Yeah.

SM (00:26:09):
... at the very beginning. Why has that organization ... Obviously, it still exists. But why is that organization not being pushed to the forefront when we are talking about the Anti-War Movement and all the groups. I do not ever hear the NSA discuss or even the Young Americans for Freedom which was a Conservative group. You hear about SDS. You hear about Vets Against the War, those kinds of groups.

SB (00:26:34):
It is all ... NSA also had this broad educational function and education reform function. It was not a single representative it had. And it was composed of a broad range of people. I mean I remember Danny Boggs from the Harvard delegation, every year wrapping the ... Using very clever parliamentary tactics to delay activity. I mean it was a broad-based organization and it represented a lot of different people. I knew a lot of the leadership of Young Americans for Freedom because they were also at NSA. So unlike SDS which had a conscious ideology, NSA was less ideological and certainly more modest in its moderating, I would say. Because it was broadly based. And the membership of it was student governments, not individuals. So, if the student government was headed by somebody conservative, then you get to the convention in the summer and it'd be very hard to get certain things done because you would have a resistance. Now eventually, by the summer of (19)64 as I recall, I think we got a resolution passed supporting Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that year. And lots of people who then became well-known were there at the time. And that includes everybody from Tom Hayden and some of the people, more ideological people, to people like Rodger Reaper who was the editor of the student newspaper at Illinois or ... I do not know. There's a whole bunch of people that we knew. Rik Hertzberg is now at the New Yorker and then the editor of the Crimson and ... There are probably 50 of those people that I could Google and they'd come up with a long list of stuff.

SM (00:28:54):
Yeah. It is interesting that I am trying to interview him as well because he's a friend of Charles Kaiser, the writer. So, I just sent an email to him to see if I can interview him.

SB (00:29:06):
Tom? Oh, Rik Hertzberg, Henrik Hertzberg?

SM (00:29:11):
Yeah.

SB (00:29:11):
Yeah.

SM (00:29:11):
Yep.

SB (00:29:11):
Yeah.

SM (00:29:12):
So, I am hoping ... And I did not use a speech writer for Jimmy Carter and ... One of the things-

SB (00:29:20):
We spent the summer together, Rik and I, in the summer of 19 ... Must have been (19)65, I guess. At what later turned out to be CI Summer Camp. And then he went on to work for the US Student Press Association for a year.

SM (00:29:37):
The links between McCarthy, you were a very important person in that position because when you think of Chicago (19)68, that is something that comes to everybody's mind, the-

SB (00:29:50):
Actually-

SM (00:29:51):
Go ahead.

SB (00:29:53):
[inaudible]. I have just realized that I sort of filibustered the answer to your question about how I got there. I did not intend to, but I started a ways back.

SM (00:30:02):
Right.

SB (00:30:03):
So, the-

SB (00:30:03):
It started a ways back.

SM (00:30:03):
Right.

SB (00:30:03):
So, the end of all of that story is that when it came time for them... Oh, and then there was one other big piece in there, which was the summer of 1967. There was a huge fight at NSA about who was going to be president of NSA for the succeeding year. And I lost by a few votes to a guy, the name of Ed Schwartz, who lives in Philadelphia now, and Ed was really the education reform. He said that is what we should be doing. And I was the candidate of anti-war that said what we should do is that an NSA should essentially devote its resources to ending the war in Vietnam. I did not, of course, know at the time that it was... No, maybe I did. Because by that time, the CIA funding had ended that spring. That was when it blew up. Anyway, I said, what it should be doing was anti-war stuff, and I lost. But we then went on to form an organization called the Alternative Candidate Task Force, which was to be the student effort to find the new candidate, an alternative to Johnson. And I became the head of that. So, in the fall the campaign, when we found the candidate, I had already been working for months on the process of finding that candidate. I knew the people who were involved in campuses all over the country. Allard Lowenstein was the kind of Pied Piper. He would go out and give the speeches, and then Curtis Gans would do the follow-up and actually make an organization out of Allard's enthusiasm. Harold Ickes was working in New York at the time, and I was traveling around to campuses. I was doing the campus side of that. I ran the campaign to the college Young Democrats to elect the slate of officers that was against the war and then looking for an alternative candidate. And we won that to the great chagrin of the White House. And anyway, long story short is I would spent years doing this stuff. So, when it came time for the campaign to do something, there was my smiling face.

SM (00:32:37):
What amazes is, well, it is obvious. It comes out over and over again. Organizer, organizer, organizer. That is such a skill. Because I know, I have been working with students for 30 some years, and most of them do not know the first thing about how to organize. They have a lot of friends and they can get their friends to come to things, and they go to all these student organization lectures and conferences, but they still do not know. And so, I think it is something that we need to do a better job of, especially with college students today. That is just my personal opinion. Because the question I am tired of hearing about over and over again is, I do not know what to do. And I believe in young people. So, it is just that they need to have confidence that they can do it. But one of the things here is 1968 was such an unbelievable event. You were in Chicago?

SB (00:33:32):
Yeah.

SM (00:33:33):
What was it like being there? Tom Gorman, I interviewed too, and he told me the experience he had with Senator McCarthy in Chicago in (19)68. But explain what it was like to be there. Secondly, to be the link between Senator McCarthy and the protestors.

SB (00:33:57):
Yeah. Well, most of them were friends of mine. I mean, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis particularly. But I knew a lot of the other people around too. Carl Oglesby was there. They were people I knew from the years past. So, it was a natural thing that I should be asked really on behalf of the campaign to go meet with them, talk to them, try and figure out if there was a way to minimize the damage on the campaign by their actions. We had no idea, of course, that the police would turn out, that there would be a riot, a police riot as the Ryan Commission later said. We could not predict that. What we could try to do was to help the demonstrations be peaceful, well-organized, not destroy any chance of getting a resolution through the convention opposing the war. It turned out we probably did not have a chance to get that anyway. It was a kind of symbolic effort to get a peace plank in the platform, which we lost. But anyway, my job was to try to minimize the damage, which was all really, I mean, there was no way it was going to be helpful. So how do you minimize the damage is really the question. And it was natural that I should be the person asked to do that. And I spent some time with them over the summer and then early on at the convention, and then did not spend much time actually with them during the convention itself. But I was outside the Hilton Hotel when the police attacked, I was actually sitting in the street with Carl Oglesby and he said, "Well, the police are going to attack." I said, "Carl, come on. The whole damn world is watching. There is television cameras up on the ledge of the Hilton Hotel. They are not going to do anything stupid." Well, how wrong was I?

SM (00:36:26):
Oh my gosh.

SB (00:36:27):
Two minutes later. Tear gas every place and we were trying to get out of Dodge.

SM (00:36:35):
Yeah, just to be there. I saw it on TV.

SB (00:36:41):
It scared the bejesus out of you, I will tell you. Because you get in a crowd like that, the crowd is as dangerous. Just the panic.

SM (00:36:52):
Who was at fault? I have read many books on this. Were the young people at fault or were the police at fault?

SB (00:37:02):
I think there is no question it was the police. I mean, they just lost it. And they lost it, I mean, I understand most of the people in the street were kids of privilege. They were college students. They were college graduates. They were people who could afford to come, who were not working the second week in August, could afford to be in Chicago. And the cops did not have any of that privilege. Probably not mostly college educated. Their jobs to maintain order. They are pissed off because these are raggedy-looking, yada-yada, yada. I mean, in some ways they were attacking their own kids or their own family, I think part of it, or whatever. I mean, nobody will ever be able to fully explain the psychology of it. But there is no question that they lost it. I mean just completely lost it. Nothing would have happened. Maybe a few windows would have gotten broken, but I am not even sure of that.

SM (00:38:07):
Well, there was disruption within inside the convention too. And of course, when Ribicoff spoke, they were swearing at him up there.

SB (00:38:14):
Yeah.

SM (00:38:16):
Senator Ribicoff. So, it was happening within it, because we all know what happened to Dan Rather. They roughed him up. So, a lot of things were happening.

SB (00:38:23):
Well, and Daley was the lead. He is the guy standing up saying fuck you. What do you think the police think?

SM (00:38:30):
What was Senator McCarthy thinking though?

SB (00:38:32):
I have no idea.

SM (00:38:33):
He was seeing this too. Two things come out of this. I guess you were a witness, too, at the Chicago Seven trial?

SB (00:38:41):
I was.

SM (00:38:41):
And of course, there were eight of them. Then of course Bobby, they took him away. But what was it like to be asked to be in that room? Did you feel a lot of pressure? I mean, a lot of them were your friends, but you had to be objective.

SB (00:38:58):
Well, yeah, I had to say what I saw and knew, which is pretty much what I just said to you. That they did not have any, I mean, there was no plan on behalf of the leadership of those demonstrations to end up in the circumstances in which they ended up. I was there enough to know that nobody was passing out clubs or wearing helmets. None of the things that would make you think, whoa, wait a minute, what is going on here? Were there 10 rabblerousers, or 50? Maybe. I do not know. But there was no plan. I mean, Dave Dillinger was not planning some revolutionary action in the street. I mean, it was a stupid [inaudible].

SM (00:39:50):
They picked those eight people. I mean.

SB (00:39:53):
Who knows?

SM (00:39:54):
Some of them were well known. But a couple of them, Lee Weiner was not well-known.

SB (00:40:01):
No.

SM (00:40:01):
There is another one that is well known. He is a professor in California. But anyway, so being in that trial, in that room with Judge Julius Hoffman, you experienced him firsthand then.

SB (00:40:14):
Yeah. It was not exactly an objective courtroom. I mean, the atmosphere was very hostile in the room. But I did not have so much to say. They wanted me because they wanted me as a defense witness to say I had observed the preparations. I knew that there were no plans for riot. I was there that night. I was in the campaign. I certainly was not with the demonstrators. And just they did not do it.

SM (00:40:48):
Did the prosecuting attorneys try to make you feel like you...

SB (00:40:54):
Oh yeah.

SM (00:40:56):
William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass were on the other side helping.

SB (00:41:00):
These are your friends. And of course, you are going to say what you say. No, I did not say it that way because they were my friends. I said it that way because that is the way it happened in short. But it was very brief as I recall. They wanted to get that piece on the record, and I got that piece on the record.

SM (00:41:22):
Yeah, I have read so much about it, and I have read so many different opinions and thoughts of it. And now quite a few of them have, well, several of them have passed on. Abbie and Jerry and have passed on, and Dave Delinger too.

SB (00:41:41):
Yeah. Well, Abbie and Jerry were always wild cards. I mean, I did not know them so well, unlike Tom and Rennie, Dave.

SM (00:41:50):
I interviewed Rennie. Rennie is smart as the dickens.

SB (00:41:55):
Yeah, he is.

SM (00:41:56):
But he does not like to talk about it anymore. He into a different sphere. Spirituality, that is his life now. And actually, his girlfriend, the person that was with him, it is the first time I have heard any of this. He does not even to talk about it anymore.

SB (00:42:07):
Is he living in Colorado?

SM (00:42:08):
He lives in Colorado. I guess he has done real well. Goes all over the country in a big expensive Winnebago with his, I am not sure if it is his girlfriend or his partner or whatever the story is. But she is also very well-educated and they talk about spirituality together. So, she is well-known too. But he is an unbelievable person. He gave me two hours of his time in a restaurant when he was in DC that is way beyond the call of duty, because he had to give two speeches that night. So, he was great. And I have interviewed David Harris, and I have interviewed a lot of good people.

SB (00:42:48):
Dave was a very good guy.

SM (00:42:49):
Dave was a great guy.

SB (00:42:52):
Yeah.

SM (00:42:52):
One of the things that really struck me when I interviewed Senator McCarthy. He did not really say anything to me. I asked Tom Gorman, I have asked other people, David Hawk, I asked people who worked on his campaign, what happened to him after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Because you would have thought, with Humphrey and the other guy, you would have thought. He was sad, obviously, and he had his differences. But it's my understanding that that really did affect him, the assassination, even though he did not like him that well. Why did not he go gung-ho, pick up the reins and try to be the Democratic nominee?

SB (00:43:36):
Well, at the time, we were all very angry at him.

SM (00:43:39):
Let me switch. Here we go. Okay.

SB (00:43:48):
So, McCarthy in the summer of 1968, I think we were all very disappointed. Quite angry, in fact. About that time, there was that Paul Simon song, "Where have you have gone, Joe DiMaggio? The nation Turns its lonely eyes to you."

SM (00:44:04):
Yeah.

SB (00:44:05):
Well, that was a kind of theme song around the office, because everybody was saying, where have you gone, Gene? I mean, what the hell's going on? Now, I do not know that we'd ever would have gotten a completely straight answer to that question. But I think it was not so much being devastated by it as it was that he was a realistic guy, and he knew he was not going to get the nomination. Or that his view was that there was nothing he could do that would get him the nomination, and therefore it was just creating false expectations and hopes to be out. Maybe he was devastated by it. Maybe he was. But what happened, of course, is a lot of Kennedy people did not come over to McCarthy, but in fact went to McGovern. And McCarthy regarded that as only one more sign of the duplicitous nature of Kennedy's supporters and whatever. And remember with him, it goes also way back to 1956 in the Democratic convention.

SM (00:45:24):
Oh, that is right. When John Kennedy was going to run for vice president, and he did not have to. Yes, he had no shot. Stevenson was going to win.

SB (00:45:36):
But McCarthy nominated Stevenson at that convention. And so, the animus there was very deep and in some way’s kind of inexplicable. I mean, his vote against Teddy for the leadership position two years later. I mean, it was crazy stuff.

SM (00:45:59):
Yeah, I remember Tom Gorman. You know Tom?

SB (00:46:03):
Yeah.

SM (00:46:04):
He said he was up with McCarthy looking over the protest in their room. They had a little balcony. And so, they went out on the balcony and they could smell the tear gas and all the things going on. And he thought Senator McCarthy would get very upset with what was going on. But then he said it was listening to a professor talking about philosophy or something like that, no emotion. And he said he quit on the spot. He quit because he did not see the emotion of young people being beaten in and all the things. And this is America and he is running for president.

SB (00:46:43):
And he is a hundred feet from it straight above.

SM (00:46:45):
Yeah, and that is amazing, knowing the man. I have met him three times. That is not the man that I talked to, but maybe he is different personalities, multiples at times. One of the things too, you said something that is very important, I think this is important. I mean, I am trying to interview Brian Lamb at C-SPAN, and I know his philosophy, and this is comparable to what you just said. This is a quote from you: The worst thing that can happen to an organizer is to become identified as a leader. And that is Brian Lamb at C-SPAN. We took students to see him. He said, there is no superstars at C-SPAN. If you want to be a superstar, go to ABC. He does not allow any superstars to see it at C-SPAN. And he is very sensitive when he was thrust to the front. And I know it was at a time when all young people were questioning leaders, did not trust any of the leaders, but is that very important, a little bit about who you are as a human being?

SB (00:47:50):
Yeah. I mean, partly it was, as you say, at the time, it was do not trust leaders, watch the parking meters. It was partly that. It was partly, too, that if you are trying to organize something, what you want is as broadly as possible for everyone to think they are a leader, for everyone to be a part of it. And if you are either self-proclaimed or proclaimed by others to be the leader, you lose people at that point. I mean, when you become visible in that way, people take shots at you, or think you are gotten too big for your britches, or you are this or you are that or the other thing. So, I mean, it is both a real sentiment about that it is better that it be broadly shared. And it is a tactical thing as well, that the more people you can drag in and make them feel good and important, the broader base of activity. Now, that is not always true, but I think it was true then. At that time, in that circumstance, I think that was true.

SM (00:49:21):
What is interesting is when you look at the Boomer generation of perception out there is it is a generation that does not trust, and for very obvious reasons, because so many of the leaders lied to them, whether it be Lyndon Johnson or the Gulf of Tonkin. We all know about Watergate. And even as they progressed into older age, or even older, you could say, Iran Contra with Ronald Reagan. Nobody trusted Gerald Ford.

SB (00:49:50):
When he pardoned Nixon.

SM (00:49:53):
Pardoned Nixon. Because there has got to be some sort of a deal there. Jimmy Carter at times was attacked for the amnesty for people up in Canada. And then of course, you can even go back to Eisenhower where the U2 incident relayed on public television, on TV. And I remember seeing that as a little boy, him talking about Gary Powers and saying that we are not spying, Ike-like.

SB (00:50:18):
No kidding.

SM (00:50:19):
On national television. And then of course, as you read later on, John Kennedy, and he was involved with the coup in Vietnam. I do not think Kennedy wanted him killed, but I think he was upset. But he gave the okay for the overthrow. So here we got leader after leader after leader, after leader, not trusting. And college students at that time did not trust anybody with responsibility, whether they be the president of the university, or a minister, or a rabbi. They did not trust anybody in leadership. And I think you hit something very important here. Do you feel that your feeling was really [inaudible] amongst many of the Boomers?

SB (00:51:03):
I do not know. I mean, I cannot speak for other people. I just know that it was a sentiment. My sense of the people with whom I worked was that you wanted to be very careful, that claiming leadership is likely to lose you the ability to actually be a leader.

SM (00:51:31):
Once you were designated a leader though, when you became the head of Action, when you became the head of these other organizations later in life, you were a leader. You were assigned, you were picked just like you were picked by McCarthy. You were the Clean for Gene, which I want you to talk about there, but you were picked to be the leader of this. So, you might feel that, but you are showing a lot of sensitivity here that you are more about collaboration than you are about...

SB (00:52:03):
Yeah. Even when I was at Action, we brought in a series of consultants to work on something that the Congress then later countered me around for called Workplace Democracy. I thought that it was important to bring people into the governance process. Not always into the policy making process because that is really the Congress and the President set direction and my job was to carry out that direction. But to set the tone of the workplace and the way to get it done, I thought the way to do that was to bring as many people as possible into it. So, we had this sort of ongoing thing, and we hired.

SM (00:53:03):
I know you hired Dick Celeste. I am a big Dick Celeste person.

SB (00:53:06):
Yeah. Well, but we hired this consultant to come to do workplace democracy. Anyway. Oh, yeah. I was very fortunate because the president gave me a lot of room to succeed or fail, and I was able to get Dick to come to the Peace Corps and John Lewis to come to run the domestic programs. And John Podesta to be my chief of staff. I mean, I had a good crowd. Betty Curry, then Betty Mitchell, but later, Betty Curry, the president's secretary, Clinton's secretary was my secretary for four years. So, for a little tiny agency, we had a lot of very high-quality people. Tom Glenn, who was later Under Secretary of Labor, worked there. I do not know. We had a good crowd.

SM (00:54:09):
Good people then. And then the Moratorium is something, when you look at your history, I think me personally, I think of the Moratorium and I think of Action, and certainly all your involvement as a great organizer. These things really stand out. I know I have read about the Moratorium, but how did it come about? Before we go there. Clean for Gene.

SB (00:54:36):
Oh, Clean for Gene.

SM (00:54:37):
Clean for Gene, and then we will go right to the Moratorium.

SB (00:54:39):
Okay.

SM (00:54:40):
Because those are big decisions, both by you.

SB (00:54:44):
Clean for Jean was, I mean, I think probably Mary McGrory probably invented the phrase, but the idea was a simple one. We are going to a place that is essentially New England, conservative, small-town America. We are trying to talk to people about voting for our candidate. You want them to listen as open-mindedly as possible to the argument and not be put off by appearance. Therefore, you need to appear in such a way that people, when they see you standing on the doorstep are inclined to open the door and talk to you or offer you a cup of coffee, rather than slamming the door in your face. So, if you are not sorted around, that is if you are not dressed properly, if your hair is too long, if you look like you are not going to be able to have that open conversation with people by and large older, a generation older in many cases, who had expectations that were framed in the forties, not in the (19)60s, then you need to appear appropriately. I mean the rules were pretty clear. If you are going to get on a bus to come to New Hampshire, do not bother if we cannot use you. Now, sometimes when people got there, if their appearance was not appropriate, then we put them to work in the basement of the headquarters filing, keeping track of file cards. But we did not put them out on the street unless we thought they had a chance to actually influence people in a positive way.

SM (00:56:44):
That is the New York Yankee way too. The Yankees have this thing about appearances, remember? Because Johnny Damon had the... And that is what Bobby Cox does for the Atlantic Braves. You got to look at your part, look like a pro.

SB (00:56:56):
Yeah.

SM (00:56:57):
And they can still have a mustache.

SB (00:57:01):
Right-right.

SM (00:57:01):
Yeah.

SB (00:57:03):
So anyway, that then the press picked up on it and sort of loved it. So, there you go. But that was really, I was in charge of that organizing effort in New Hampshire, and so I made the rules.

SM (00:57:27):
How were you appointed to this very important role, again in McCarthy? McCarthy had to make the final decision. He picked you.

SB (00:57:37):
Well, they were not initially focused on New Hampshire. In fact, there was some discussion of not even contesting New Hampshire because it's a conservative state. We did not have that good an organization on the ground. Maybe we should focus first on Wisconsin, a more congenial place. But some of us in the campaign felt that we had a shot at New Hampshire in an important way. And one way to say that was to say, okay, well, I believe it so strongly, I am want to go there. And then it turned out I ended up. I mean, they were not going to make a 60-year-old in charge of the student volunteers coming in. So, I was at the right place at the right time. Just lucky.

SM (00:58:37):
Now, the Moratorium, that idea came from... Oh, I remember some name came out of nowhere. I never heard of the person, but you were one of the leaders of starting the Moratorium. But originally the idea of a strike, and I have done a lot of reading about-

SB (00:58:54):
That is Jerry Grossman.

SM (00:58:56):
Yeah. Now who is he?

SB (00:58:57):
Jerry was the president of Mass Envelope Company. He is an older business guy who was the head of Massachusetts Peace Action Council. He is actually still alive. His son is running for Congress, the Senate, I do not know.

SM (00:59:13):
Oh, wow.

SB (00:59:15):
And used to be the Democratic National Committee, the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, his son. Jerry is now probably in his (19)80s, writes a blog. And he had this idea, Mass PAC actually had the idea. I mean, Jerry was the president, but the idea, I think grew up sort of organically through the organization, through Mass PAC to call a national strike. And Jerry went to see, I do not know, probably Marty [inaudible] to talk to him about money to do this thing. And Marty said, "No, go talk to Sam Brown." And I was teaching a course at the Kennedy School at the time.

SB (01:00:02):
... I was teaching a course at the Kennedy School at the time, and because I was not very good, I was young, I was kind of intimidated, most of the students were more or less my age. I was 25 and I had only graduate students and juniors and seniors, so it was ... Everybody in there was more or less my age. And I was fairly intimidated by that and not really very good at what I was doing. So, I threw out the standard way of doing it and said, "Look, since it is a seminar in contemporary American politics, what we are going to do here is we are going to talk about what you would do. We are going to learn about how politics works and what might work or might not work by taking a real issue, ending the war in Vietnam, and whether you agree with that or not, it does not matter. What we are going to talk about in this seminar is what might work." And at some point, in that seminar, we were talking about everything, demonstrations, letter writing campaigns, congressional campaigns, cutting off the budget, da-da, da-da. At some point, the idea of a strike came up, and Jerry had come to talk to me about it as I recall. And I said, "Nah, that can never work. It is too militant. It is too labor oriented. It does not sound like something that you can talk to people in the Midwest about. It sounds like the 1930s. It sounds like some lefty idea from the (19)30s. We cannot do that. But maybe we can find a way to think about that idea and not say we are going to have a strike and shut down American business, but to say instead, we are going to put aside a day to think about, to focus on this national issue and that they will put aside business as usual. Not shut down the factories, but put aside business as usual to contemplate what we are doing." And anyway, that grew over a period of time through that spring, in that seminar we refined that idea, and we needed ... Refined it to the place where we thought it was a pretty good idea. And then I raised some money to start the organization. And I had friends who I'd worked with in other things, David Hawk, David Mixner, Marge Sklencar, and a couple of students from my seminar, two or three students, in fact, from my seminar, who came to work in the office. And so, we started with a core staff of six or eight people, 10 or something like that. The core probably being the four of us, David and David and Marge and me as co-coordinators, term of art appropriate to the 1960s. Not leader and followers, but co-coordinators [inaudible].

SM (01:03:20):
Yeah, that was what SDS was supposed to be about, everybody's ...

SB (01:03:25):
Yeah, right.

SM (01:03:25):
Yeah. No leader, just...

SB (01:03:32):
Yeah. So, we just came down here in June after school was out and opened an office and announced we were going to end the war. Fairly audacious undertaking, but there you go. And because of the McCarthy campaign and the CIA thing, and one thing and another, I knew a lot of press people, so I knew we could get decent coverage for whatever we were going to do.

SM (01:04:01):
Boy, it was big. Because I can remember students from my college going to it, and it was big.

SB (01:04:11):
Yes.

SM (01:04:11):
And I know that we had students going to it from Binghamton, and of course that was ... It was in October, I think?

SB (01:04:20):
October 15th.

SM (01:04:22):
Yeah, October 15th was the actual across the country. And then November 15th was the actual event.

SB (01:04:25):
The [inaudible]".

SM (01:04:27):
Now, how many people were actually at the Washington Monument, because that is on Thomas Power's book, the front cover of his book?

SB (01:04:33):
Yeah.

SM (01:04:34):
That is the picture.

SB (01:04:35):
Yeah, that picture is actually hanging over there. My wife just gave it to me for Christmas this past year.

SM (01:04:41):
Oh my gosh.

SB (01:04:42):
Yeah. That was ... Who knows? I mean, everybody lies and nobody really knows. Estimates vary, but it was probably a half a million people, something like that. But I think you'd ... On any given day, depending on somebody's political instincts, they would say it was a hundred thousand or a million, 500,000. I mean, people ... But I think it was probably around 500,000.

SM (01:05:15):
It was a tremendous success. But from what I gathered, Nixon, as he always did, "Yeah, it was a big event, but it is not going to affect me at all on how I run things." Is that true? He was ...

SB (01:05:29):
No. Well, Dan Ellsberg tells me that it is not true, and Dan was still there, and he says that Nixon, that there was serious discussion about the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, and that the moratorium ended that. Certainly, it forced them to rethink how they were going to conduct the war after that. And their first rethink was in the spring when they actually escalated the war, substantially in April when they ...

SM (01:06:07):
Oh, yeah.

SB (01:06:11):
And then that led to its own new round of demonstrations and opposition. But I think, I mean, Dan says he knows this with absolute certainty that from inside ...

SM (01:06:33):
That movie is out right now, The Most Dangerous Man in America is opening tonight in Philadelphia at the Ritz Theater. I am going tomorrow to see it.

SB (01:06:43):
Yeah. I saw it a few months ago.

SM (01:06:44):
I am heading off to the 40th remembrance at Kent State too. I have a question about that, but I have a question about who the speakers were at the moratorium in ...

SB (01:06:54):
Oh God.

SM (01:06:56):
... 1969. I know Benjamin Spock spoke ...

SB (01:06:58):
There was a struggle all the time because McGovern spoke, but the left did not want him to speak. I do not remember. David Hawk spoke there. I do not know. I just do not remember. I'd gotten arrested with Spock the night before. There was an effort to do something to say this was going to be non-violent. So, we were going to show the way by a demonstration at Lafayette Square, where a bunch of us got arrested. But I do not remember who ... I mean, I remember the fights about who should not speak.

SM (01:07:49):
Right. You had musicians there too that performed?

SB (01:07:53):
Yeah, I think Peter, Paul and Mary performed then. I am not sure who else. I just do not know.

SM (01:07:57):
I think Teddy Kennedy came and spoke too, did not he? I think.

SB (01:07:59):
I do not ...

SM (01:08:01):
I have some literature here ...

SB (01:08:02):
Maybe.

SM (01:08:03):
... that says that he came out and said a few things.

SB (01:08:04):
Okay.

SM (01:08:07):
Kent State, obviously after the moratorium in (19)69, and the reaction that I thought that Nixon gave to that particular event, then the peace activities were going on, so people looked at him more as the peace candidate, so it kind of died. So, the protest movement kind of ended there until the Kent State killings?

SB (01:08:30):
Well, it was not clear what he was doing at that point. And what happened really, in my recollection is, in October and November, we spent so much energy that when it came time for December, everybody ... Students were home. They were not on their campuses. It was hard to organize. You could not reach people. We had become sort of sclerotic. We had offices all over the country at that point. We were spending a lot of money to keep alive, not much real activity, so we decided ... I mean, we just sat down with our staff and said, "This is crazy." So, we closed. And then in the spring, of course, with the bombing, the Cambodia bombing over there, yeah, it just sort of blossomed from that. I mean, that was the ...

SM (01:09:37):
Now that was ... I asked quite a few of my interviewees where they were when two or three of these tragedies happened. Where were you when you heard about Kent State, number one, and where were you when you heard about John Kennedy's assassination?

SB (01:09:51):
Well, John Kennedy, I remember distinctly, I was at Redlands and I was working on a conference, a farm worker conference that weekend. And we were setting up tables and getting ready to do this conference when I heard about it. And then went to the cafeteria, and we were just sort of all in shock. And Kent State, I was here in Washington, but I do not recall precisely where, but it was so ... I mean, that two or three days around there, it was all kind of mushes together because it was such a blossoming, really, of anti-war activity. I think that spring ... I have this vague recollection that spring was the first Earth Day.

SM (01:11:06):
Yes. It was April 22.

SB (01:11:08):
And I had been working on Earth Day with Dennis Hayes and a bunch of people.

SM (01:11:12):
I have interviewed Dennis.

SB (01:11:12):
Yeah, he is a good guy.

SM (01:11:12):
He is.

SB (01:11:15):
He is a really good guy. So, I was around here because of that, and I had probably traveled someplace on the 22nd to speak, but I was living here and I do not remember exactly where I was.

SM (01:11:30):
You knew Senator Nelson too, when ... Because he was very involved in Earth Day.

SB (01:11:35):
Yeah, oh, sure.

SM (01:11:36):
The organizing of it.

SB (01:11:36):
Yeah.

SM (01:11:36):
One of the things that fascinate me about your background too, and I know you are probably very proud of this, was the book that you Wrote, which is called the Storefront Organizing.

SB (01:11:50):
Oh, Storefront Organizing.

SM (01:11:51):
And what really got me excited because it was dedicated to Jesse Unruh. I know him real well from living in California, and Senator McCarthy. But I love this quote, and I am not sure ... I get these quotes out of the ... But I think this is beautiful. You got to be proud of this.

SB (01:12:11):
Whatever.

SM (01:12:12):
"The bias is against the status quo rather than for it, because the few have always been well organized. The many have never been organized and never had a voice. Grassroots organizing is the way to change this." Now, that to me is beautiful. That is something that is about grassroots organizing. That says it all, but ...

SB (01:12:35):
Thank you.

SM (01:12:35):
But no, that is beautiful. But that booklet, you saw the need, just like I mentioned about students today ... I think, I do not know if this book is out of print. I think you ought to get this book back in print, I think, and put it on college campuses, because I think they are lost.

SB (01:12:51):
Well, it was just, it was largely a technical manual. It is sort of where you get office space and how you do various kinds of things. And of course, the times have changed so much that the techniques would have to have necessarily changed with it. There is actually another thing you may not have seen that I am, in some ways, even prouder of a piece wrote for the Washington Monthly called The Politics of the Peace.

SM (01:13:17):
When was that?

SB (01:13:19):
That would have been in late (19)69, early (19)70.

SM (01:13:26):
Can you get that, or?

SB (01:13:29):
It is probably archived, or it is certainly in a library, or ...

SM (01:13:33):
Okay.

SB (01:13:37):
I do not know. That is what I was looking for over there was to see if I might see a copy of it, but I do not know that I have a copy of it here. Anyway, but that it was a long piece that The New York Times then wrote a very laudatory editorial about, saying that they thought it was real smart, which is always a nice thing to have someone say.

SM (01:14:05):
Has that ever been put into a book as a ... Like essays of the (19)60s or the (19)70s or?

SB (01:14:10):
No, no. I think the only place it has been published was in the Washington Monthly. But Random House then came to me and offered me a contractor to write a book, and I went to write the book and discovered when I got to writing it that I really had about 12,000 words to say, and I would said them all. So, I returned the advance to Random House and got on with my life.

SM (01:14:39):
Wow. That is an interesting story. If I get a copy of that ... I am going to try to find it, but ... Not today, but down the road.

SB (01:14:46):
Yeah. I do not know whether you can find ... Maybe you can Google or maybe it is ... Or, whatever. Anyway, the Politics of Peace.

SM (01:14:56):
I have interviewed quite a few people from the Peace Corps in this project. Bill Jacobson ... Bill, he's great. We had a Peace Corps conference that I organized at our camp with Harris Swafford and [inaudible] ...

SB (01:15:08):
He is a really great guy.

SM (01:15:08):
Yeah, and we brought in five or six of the original people from the beginning, and ... Of course, Sergeant Shriver could not come because he is not well, and he has got Alzheimers, but they told him that this was happening. We have got it all on tape. But that must have made you feel really good, I mean, to be picked by President Carter to be the head of action and to oversee the Peace Corps and Volunteers in Service to America, which were ... When you were a boomer in the (19)60s, you knew about SDS, you knew about Black Panthers, you knew about certain things. But you knew about the Peace Corps, and you knew about VISTA and they were important. And just any thoughts you have about that experience of working for the Peace Corps, and maybe working with Sergeant Shriver, and knowing the people that were linked to ... And being a part of the continuity of its history?

SB (01:16:09):
Yeah. Well, again, I was lucky. I mean, I was the state treasurer in Colorado at the time, and I have gotten to know Carter during the course of the campaign. So of course, I was ... When he asked me, I did not hesitate. I probably could have been more gracious to the people who would help me get elected state treasurer by at least having a momentary pause before leaving the job to go to Washington. But, yeah, it was a terrific opportunity. And the Peace Corps is a very interesting institution because it has the theory that people will only be there five years, can only work there for five years, and then have to go out in order to renew. It has a funny opposite effect part of the time, which is that it tends to create the myth that it is ... It clings to its founding myths more strongly, I think, because of that than it might have if the same people had just stayed on. So, I am never sure about how that idea, which seems like a really smart idea, and I thought it was a smart idea, and it seemed like the right idea, but I am not quite sure that it actually works the way the founding fathers would have wanted it to work. And it also may be that just like any other institution, when it gets to a certain size, it becomes very difficult to move it in any very substantial way. I mean, it sort of has its own path and I was too young really probably to figure out that you could not go in and say, "Okay, now we're going to do this," and not have everybody say, "No, we are not going to do that." So, it was difficult for me. I mean, thank God for Dick Celeste, because action had been sort of forced together by the Nixon administration. There was a strong year irredentist movement in the Peace Corps that said it should be independent again. I thought it should be sort of policy independent ... Well, it cannot be policy independent. It's driven by the president. The Congress and the President give the policy. So, it cannot really be ... You know, you cannot go out and remake it into something that is not. But I thought there could be more ways of cooperating and training between Vista and Peace Corps. Peace Corps resisted that pretty systematically and consistently, because they were ... Okay. They would deny this, but I think it is true because they saw themselves as the sort of elite volunteers, VISTA volunteers. I thought being a VISTA volunteer was at least as hard as being a Peace Corps volunteer because you got to deal with your friends and neighbors.

SM (01:19:20):
When I was in high school, I knew kids that looked at them equally. I know a couple went into VISTA, before they went off to college, they wanted to do the VISTA thing.

SB (01:19:31):
Yeah. Well, it was a terrific opportunity and a wonderful four years for me, and I could not replace it, and I could not replace the people I had a chance to work with those years, for me.

SM (01:19:43):
You seem to be a little bit like the person who founded it though, because Sergeant Shriver believed in ... From reading his biography by Stossel, he had a whip in his office. I do not know if you have ever saw the whip?

SB (01:19:54):
No.

SM (01:19:54):
Yeah. In the early offices of the Peace Corps, and people asked him, "Why do you have a whip in your office," and being the guy he is, he said, "Well, it just means that I am a hard driving person. I work very hard and I work hour after hour," because he believed that this is the toughest job you will ever have. That was kind of the philosophy, but it is the greatest feeling because he ... Stories about he would sleep on the floor of an airplane when he flew. He did everything that the workers were doing. He was a great example. And one of the things says he believed in the think of hard work, and from what I am gathering and I read about you, you would be working 18-hour days. You had the same kind of philosophy, working all kinds of ... That was one of the qualities, when I read about your background, people admired you because you were a one heck of a worker.

SB (01:20:50):
Yeah. Well, who is it says, Woody Allen? "Success is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration." Right? Or whoever it was that said that. I think a lot of that is true. And the only thing that they left out is that there is also a good deal of luck involved, in my experience. Being there the right time, in the right place. Now, sometimes if you're working ...

Allison (01:21:14):
Hello.

SB (01:21:17):
Hi! If you are working additional hours in one thing than another, you're more likely to be in the right place. Because we are there all the time.

SM (01:21:27):
In the 2004 election with Senator Carey, you made some comments too, you know one of ...

SB (01:21:34):
My wife, Allison.

SM (01:21:35):
Oh, hi.

Allison (01:21:35):
Oh, do not ... That is okay. We [inaudible] ...

SM (01:21:39):
One of the things that happens is the Vietnam syndrome. Today, you cannot even bring up Vietnam, or ... At least in the university, and I have been the university for 30 years. Whenever you bring up the word Vietnam or quagmire, it sends all kinds of unbelievable waves amongst fellow boomers that run universities or students who either their parents have told some them about bad things about that particular era or whatever, or maybe not explained it properly. But when Senator Kerry was running for president, you were very upset over bringing ... About his service record, when they were not talking about ideas. It was more, they were making comments about whether everything that he said was true.

SB (01:22:24):
Oh, [inaudible] because they were lying about his service record.

SM (01:22:28):
Yeah, yeah. And this is another quote of yours, and I think it is very important because it is somewhat symbolic of what I have witnessed in universities for the past 30 years whenever we talk about Vietnam. And the quote here is that "36 years after the idealism that produced the McCarthy insurgency, I see nasty, mean spirited, politic politics on all sides." You compare it to the Chicago comity pits. I thought that was interesting. And I do not know if that is true, whether that is an exaggerated quote, but you bring up a good point, because in that election, to me, that was ridiculous to bring those things up.

SB (01:23:10):
Yeah, it was [inaudible] ...

SM (01:23:11):
Had nothing to do with ...

SB (01:23:12):
Nothing to do with it.

SM (01:23:13):
... what was going on. And to me, it is like the battle of Vietnam never stops.

SB (01:23:21):
Yeah. Well, the right has sort of demonized the (19)60s, and it was an era of loose morals and loose living and rejection of authority. And I mean, all kinds of things that the right says about it. And I just think that what they confuse, what gets conflated here is, there were really several things going on. One was a kind of cultural identity and revolution in politics, and Abby and Jerry and that crowd were into cultural revolution. Then there was the anti-war movement, which had to do ... Which was focused on political change. And sometimes those got ... They overlap, but frequently they were quite different. That is, the people who were working in the anti-war movement were not also spending their time promoting free love and free drugs and whatever other things that the right has said, "Oh yeah, well, the anti-war in the (19)60s. It is all the same." It was not all the same. There were distinct currents going on, and the anti-war current was, in fact, in some ways ... It certainly questioned authority, but it did not ... Most of us who were deeply involved did not intend to overthrow the cultural life of the world. I mean, we were more interested in ending the war and stopping the killing, and whatever we had to do to effectively do that. And we did not think that meant that the way to get that done was to go around breaking windows and making a fool of yourself. But the right has sort of stuck all that together and called it the (19)60s. And it's really quite different.

SM (01:25:30):
Because Newt Gingrich, when he came into power in (19)94, made some very strong comments about that particular period and blaming the breakdown of our society, the divorce rate, the second revolution, the drug culture, the isms, the welfare state, everything was blamed on that particular period.

SB (01:25:49):
Yeah. But I will tell you, you have been around interviewing people. David Hawk has been married for 30 years. I have been married for 30 years, and make a list of whoever you have gone to see. And by and large, I mean ... David Harris, I mean, was first divorced and then his wife tragically died.

SM (01:26:12):
Died, right.

SB (01:26:14):
But by and large, the people I know from that era have pretty stable personal lives, and family lives with a spouse or a partner or whatever. And frequently, the people throwing those rocks are the ones who themselves have personal lives that are a mess, and ...

SM (01:26:40):
Now George occasionally will take shots too.

SB (01:26:43):
Oh, yeah.

SM (01:26:46):
In his columns, in his books, he will have one or two little articles really attacking the (19)60s, but attacking the boomers, basically. And yeah, it is 78 million people is what we're talking about. One of the issues that I have tried to bring up with all of my interviewees is the issue of healing. I know we are getting toward the hour and a half here. We took a group of students to see Senator Musky about eight months before he passed away. It was a program we worked with Senator Nelson. I knew Senator Nelson real well. We would brought him twice to Westchester University, and we had organized nine trips. Okay.

SB (01:27:30):
It has been rescheduled. I am going to need to take it.

SM (01:27:31):
Right.

SB (01:27:33):
But they will call and let me know.

SM (01:27:34):
What was I ... I was starting to ask something here.

SB (01:27:39):
Senator Nelson, some trips?

SM (01:27:41):
OH, yeah. Yeah. It was about the issue of healing. The students actually came up with the question. The question was this, due to all the divisions that took place in America in the 1960s, particularly witnessing 1968, and since you were the vice presidential running mate at the Democratic Convention, I would like your response to this question that is, have we healed as a nation since those times or were those Black against white, male against female, gay against straight, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, those who did not, Vietnam veterans, against the anti-war people. The list goes on and on here. And the thought was that these young people who had not been born when all of these things were happening had heard that we were close to a second civil war in the United States? We were close to tearing this nation apart. Just your thoughts as-as Senator. And of course, he ... I would like your response to that first, and then I will tell you what Senator Musky said.

SB (01:28:46):
Yeah. No, I do not think, I mean, we were not close then. And I mean, in some ways I think we are closer now because the politics is deteriorated into ... There used to be adults in politics who could criticize each other, but still go out and have a drink. And I knew those people. I mean, I knew that time. And it seems like that time has now sort of passed. And the politics has been debased into essentially name calling and special interests trying to demonize everybody they are against. And the (19)60s make an easy target for that. But the idea that somehow or another in the (19)60s, we were close to civil war is preposterous. I mean, we were divided, but some things began to grow. I think, I mean, the moratorium was the first thing that a major trade union, the United Auto Workers, endorsed the moratorium, which we were very proud of because the unions at the time ...

SM (01:30:03):
...We were proud of because the unions at the time were widely regarded as sort of flag waving. Whatever America wants to do was okay with us. And we had the usual little lefty unions, 1199 and the Leather Workers and stuff. But when we got the union, when we got the UAW of endorsement, even that, there was always a kind of tension in the room. Here's a bunch of young lefties, and here is people who are more worried about what happens on the shop floor than they are about what happens in Vietnam. And you could still have that discussion. I am not sure now you can have the discussion with the teabags. I do not know if there is any basis there to talk about. Their vision of the world is so different. So, no, I think we were not even close, and I think we're more divided in many ways right now than we were then. We thought Senator Musk, his response is, we have not healed since the Civil War. And then he went on to talk about the loss of 430,000 to 440,000 men in the Civil War where South almost lost their entire generation. And because he had just seen the Ken Burn series and he says, "I am not going to talk about (19)68". He did not even mention it.

SB (01:31:36):
Yeah. Good for him.

SM (01:31:42):
And if you go to Gettysburg, I do not know if you have been to Gettysburg. It is amazing when you go there that you see the flags on the southern side, the Confederate side, you see nothing left on the northern side. And yet I will interview Phyllis Schlafly, who I interviewed about three weeks ago here, and she said, "Oh, the North has not gotten over it, but the South has." So, we cannot even agree on the Civil War because she says the South has healed and the North has not. And if you go to Gettysburg, you would think it is the other way around. But those are pretty good comments. The students were expecting of different responses.

SB (01:32:20):
Yeah.

SM (01:32:24):
I want your thoughts on the split between the white students and the black students in the (19)60s. They were together for a while against the Vietnam War, and then toward the latter part of the (19)60s, you could see it on college campuses, they were distancing themselves from the Anti-war Movement and more toward the Black Power Movement here in the United States with Black Panthers and everything. At Kent State, you can hardly find any African American students at the protest. Although I recently saw one of an African American students holding one of the students that was wounded, so there were a few there. But did you sense the split within the moratorium? Did you sense the split that African-American students or the Latina students, the-

SB (01:33:09):
African-American and Latinas were never deeply involved for the reasons that I am not quite clear about, but I do not think it was so much as a split as there was never a common ground. The African-American students that I knew and the movement people tended to be focused, as you say, on identity questions of black politics, of black power, of war on domestic issues of racism and poverty. And most of the people I knew in the Anti-war Movement took a nod in that direction. Many of us came out of the Civil Rights Movement, but were focused first and foremost on the war. I do not think it was so much a split as it was never really together.

SM (01:34:02):
Were you pretty cognizant and-

SB (01:34:04):
Except during Civil Rights era. And during civil rights era, it was very much together.

SM (01:34:10):
You obviously went to three different schools, I think you went to the Red lands, I think Rutgers, and then you went up to Harvard Divinity School. Did you have a knowledge and a sense that the free speech movement of (19)64 and (19)65 was very important for college students beyond Berkeley? Because of the fact that those students believed in freedom of speech. Most of them had experience, which we already talked about, of going the Freedom Summer in the South. Many of them came back like Mario Sabio and Bettina after, and Tom Hayden and Casey Hayden, I am interviewing her as well. And what I am getting at here is that ideas were more important than careers. Mario Sabio talked about that all the time, that when he grew up in the (19)50s and then in the early (19)60s, the difference between his parents and that generation and our generation is that we are different. We believe that a university's for ideas, not preparing people for careers. Did that have any sense within the movement south where you worked with David Mixner and David Hawk and the others, that they were really more into ideas and not into career?

SB (01:35:31):
The, it is a comment of privilege, frankly. We grew up in a new prosperity that our parents had not experienced. And they were, I think more driven by career because their life experience was that it is fragile and you do not know what's going to happen, and you need to focus on that. For us, at least in my experience, it was quite different than that. Jobs were readily available. You always knew you could do something. Money was not... None of us needed a lot of money to live. Our expectations were not, at least mine, of having any substantial amount of money. You're working for 30 bucks a week or 50 bucks a week and doing organizing stuff. Well, that was fulfilling and it was enough money. We had to share houses because nobody could afford to live on their own, so you end up renting a house with six other people or something, because that was the only way we could afford it. But that was in some ways a time of... That is a comment about privilege as much as it is about the times. My kids do not feel that. They know it is going to be really hard, jobs are tough. It is hard to figure out what you are going to do. You do not have the privilege of assuming, "Oh, well I will go do that for three or four years and then I will be able to land on my feet someplace else." And so, at least in the case of my career, it is serendipitous. It certainly was not planned. I could never have planned that. I did not think when I was a young man that I was going to be a US ambassador. that I was going to be right here now. That I was going to run an agency. That I would be an elected official, none of that. It was all just sort of one thing led into another and I was in the right place at the right time.

SM (01:37:33):
You talked earlier about the fact that you have poor violence, because it is only negative when you have violence and it hurts the image of a group. But do you think that the violence when students from Democratic Society, which was a really legitimately good group, went to become the Weathermen, and when the Black Power Movement with the Black Panthers and a bunch Chicano movement, when the Young Lords. And when the American Indian Movement from (19)69 to (19)73 became violent around wounded knee. All these groups tended to head towards some sense of violence. Is that a first?

SB (01:38:16):
Yeah, sure.

SM (01:38:16):
Does that permanent [inaudible]?

SB (01:38:19):
And it destroyed them. It effectively destroyed SDS when the Weatherman split off. Suddenly you had to either denounce them or be identified with them. And I just think it is a fruitless short term, stupid dead end. It is not as if you are going to change this country by violence. And we should have learned from Dr. King, that you can change the country, but not with violence. And so, all of those split offs ended up destroying the very movement that they thought they were being the cadre or the radical cutting edge or the leadership, whatever kind of crazy terms they applied.

SM (01:39:21):
Your thoughts on the Vietnam Veterans of America who kind of took over the Anti-war Movement of (19)71, because SDS basically went. And the other groups had their own problems, but they seemed to carry on the anti-war movement from 71 until almost the very end.

SB (01:39:38):
That is true.

SM (01:39:40):
Yeah. How important were they overall in the scheme of things?

SB (01:39:43):
Well, it was terribly important because the politics of it were important. The right did not have a singular monopoly on saying, "Well, we support the troops." If the troops are saying, "We do not like this war," then those people who are against it are actually supporting the troops. So, it changed the politics dramatically. They have that, it was a big deal. It was a big deal.

SM (01:40:12):
When you look at, after all your years as an activist, an organizer, a leader, or an ambassador, like you said, I have not even gone into some of the other things you have done in the last 30 years. Because we'd be here five hours if that was the case. What lessons can you pass on to young people today based on your experiences, especially if young people are willing to listen in the tough times that they are living through right now, where they are just trying to survive and struggle with?

SB (01:40:46):
Yeah, it is very tough.

SM (01:40:47):
And in oftentimes had no time at all to even be involved in the classroom activities.

SB (01:40:53):
That is right, because they are working.

SM (01:40:54):
Yeah.

SB (01:40:54):
I remember that was also at a time when the great public universities were still accessible to people of modest means, which is decreasingly true as time has gone on, and vanishingly true now. So, what would I say? Well, I would say, I guess what I say pretty much to my kids, which is, you need to care about these things, they matter. They will matter to your children. They will matter to you. Whether it is the war or healthcare. You need to care and you need to be informed. But you also need to find sort of your own muse in terms of what you do with a career. It's not for everybody to be actively involved on a daily basis. One of my kids is an actor. One of them in graduate school at Berkeley. One of them is in a PhD program at University of Virginia.

SM (01:42:02):
My nephew is going there next year.

SB (01:42:04):
Yeah. Well, they are doing other things, but they have, all of them, a great consciousness about the common good, about the public good, and about their obligation to pay attention to that. To be involved in campaigns. To be active voters. Everybody can do that. Everybody can do that. And if you do not do that, then I do not know what it means to be a good citizen. That is the core of what it means to be a good citizen, is to pay attention.

SM (01:42:44):
Good words. What do you think the legacy will be of the... Yeah, we are talking 78 million people here. Todd Gitlin said... I kept talking about Boomers. He had a problem with it from the get go. And I have had several people decide, I am going to talk about Boomers.

SB (01:42:57):
Yeah.

SM (01:42:57):
I am going to talk about the period, the times, the issues.

SB (01:42:57):
Well, I agree with Todd about that.

SM (01:43:04):
And people your age, a lot of the people were the graduate students that were leading the undergraduates in the (19)60s. And Abby and Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden, they were in the early and-

SB (01:43:16):
They are all a little older than me. Slightly older than I am. I think.

SM (01:43:19):
So, they call them pre-Boomers. And Richie Hayden, when I interviewed him, said, "I consider myself a boomer, Steve. I am a boomer. I was born in 1940, but I am a boomer."

SB (01:43:30):
I do not much like the term myself. But that post-war generation had a different life experience then. If the one before was the depression era, we lived through the prosperity era.

SM (01:43:44):
Yeah. What do you think the legacy will be when the best history books are written about the generation, particularly after on the 78 million have passed away?

SB (01:43:56):
I am hoping that the memory will be that we took our country seriously and we took seriously our obligations to try to set it right when we thought it had gone wrong. We were not always right, but I think it's changed and I think you see that now in, for instance, the openness toward gays. I think that is a legacy of that idea that all people should be acceptable for who they are. That is a direct derivative of the civil rights movement it seems to me. It took more years than it should have, but I think that openness of spirit is an important legacy. I would hope that would be seen. The (19)60s would be seen as the time when we began to take our country seriously enough and our fellow citizens seriously enough to really raise questions about the treatment of black people, for people. Hispanic people. Native American people, whatever. Gay people. It gets caricatured by the right as being so open-minded that our brains fell out. And I do not think that is the way it was. That is not my recollection of it. We thought hard and worried about the impact of our actions and took it seriously.

SM (01:45:46):
See, the no movements, you could say it, were a movement generation because a lot of these movements came about as a result of studying the Civil Rights movement and using it as an example, as a model. And certainly, the Anti-war Movement historically did that. Certainly, the Women's Movement and the separation. But if you study any of the movements, whether there's Chicano, Native American, even the Environmental Movement. Because I can remember, I have interviewed some people about how important it was with the Anti-war people making up with the Environmental people before Earth Day, and the consulting that went on between the two groups. To me that was collaboration, which should be a quality that we cannot forget. You have to collaborate to be successful.

SB (01:46:29):
Yeah.

SM (01:46:31):
And that to me, and I will get your thoughts on that, as a person who was involved in the Moratorium and the Anti-war that had the Environmental Movement student or young people consulting the Anti-war Movement, we're not going to step on what you're doing. Do you remember how important that was?

SB (01:46:47):
Oh yeah. That whole spring, the whole Earth Day, the first discussions were... I had been involved with this major event in the fall or events in the fall. So of course, they wanted to say, "Well, how would you do this? And what do you do about that? How do you get this done? Who do you talk to there?" So sure, there was a lot of that going on.

SM (01:47:11):
I only have three more questions and I will be done. I am not going to give you a name. I had this thing at the end where I give you names and terms, and what are your thought? I am not going to do that because you have given me already a lot of time. In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end?

SB (01:47:29):
Oh, it probably began in the mid (19)60s, actually, or the (19)60s, like (19)63, (19)64. And probably ended about (19)70, early (19)70s sometime. It did not start in 1960, at least in my recollection and experience, it did not start in 1960 before end in 1970. they certainly carried over through a year or two to get-

SM (01:47:56):
Stay Earth Day. In (19)73, a lot of people say went into (19)73, and you could even see on campuses the change in the fall of (19)73.

SB (01:48:03):
Really?

SM (01:48:04):
But the guy was there, and (19)72, (19)73, there were still things happening. And then on the fall, something streaking happened, and I knew it was over.

SB (01:48:14):
It was over.

SM (01:48:17):
Was there a specific event? (19)63 is the Kennedy assassination or the-

SB (01:48:22):
Well, the Kennedy assassination. The following year of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Civil Rights Movement. Everything sort of came together to raise questions about the American narrative. And it was that questioning, which really led to many other things.

SM (01:48:42):
When you look at your fellow Boomers, I consider you a boomer. I consider pre-Boomers as Boomers, they are all one. When you consider the 15 percent that were categorized as activists, which is still a lot of people in 70 million, can you, from the people you know, because that is all you can really talk about, what were their strengths and what were their weaknesses? If you were to, from a person who worked with so many?

SB (01:49:15):
Well, the biggest weakness was probably clarity of analysis. There was a lot of bullshit in the rhetoric at the time. There was a great deal of inflammatory language and schismatic politics so that you would have the, not just SDS, but Socialist Workers, Progressive Labor, the Shack Mantes, the Trotskyite, the boot-boot, boot. everything was split up. And now partly that reflected the fact that people were thinking about ideas and so they were driven in various directions by what they thought about those ideas. But I think our biggest weakness was really probably a lack of consistency in the analysis. A lack of rigor about how people thought about their own actions. The greatest strength, I suppose, was simply the incredible energy. And aside from that intellectual piece, the brains, the attention to getting things done. That is a funny thing to say, that the weakness was analysis, but one of the strengths was it was a bunch of very smart people.

SM (01:50:55):
My last question is, and I asked this probably on about half of the people I have interviewed, because I have been doing this since (19)96. Now the last year I have been asking, this is important. That might be your call, right?

SB (01:51:01):
Yeah.

SM (01:51:01):
And then I going-

SB (01:51:20):
Hello? Yes. Hey, Steve, can I call you back in two minutes? I will call you right back. No, that is not the call I have to take.

SM (01:51:28):
All right. Well, this is the last question though. But in your eyes, I have asked each person who has experienced the 60 plus years that Boomers have been alive from (19)46 to 2010, just a couple sentences to describe the decades that these people lived. And I break it down from right after the war, (19)46 to (19)60. (19)60 to (19)70. (19)71 to (19)80. (19)81 to (19)90. (19)91 to 2000. 2001 to 2010. Just characteristics of the legacy.

SB (01:52:01):
Well, the (19)50s, my experience in the (19)50s was classically late 1950s. It could not have been more suburban, bland, ordinary. That was my experience of life is everybody's stereotype of it was the life I lived.

SM (01:52:24):
Right.

SB (01:52:27):
Bland food, bland politics, bland everything. The (19)60s was in my experience as you know on a time of this incredible intellectual engagement and in ideas. And so, I kept going to school. And when I was not going to school, I was writing something or reading something or whatever. And also, of enormous change. I would say most of my best friends are people in most cases that I have known since the (19)60s. There was a kind of bond forged there in common action that even when it turns out sometimes later in life, you do not even like them much, you still think of him as friends because you shared so much, such an experience together. The (19)70s, well, for me, it was the enormous hope of finally electing a president who seemed to have some vision for the country, and then the incredible loss that it turned out that he could not actually govern. The (19)70s are a sort of lost hope generation. It went from really thinking, "Wow, the war is over. We can begin to rebuild the country. We can do some exciting things." To Ronald Reagan. The (19)80s. The (19)80s for me are all Ronald, they're just Reagan. He was the dominant figure. It was the dominant politics. It was the change and it was rejection of the two previous decades in a fundamental way, which is really what he ran on. And just to fall back into some vague America hurrah kind of thoughtless politics. In the (19)90s, we are once again an era of some hope, but much more tempered than for me. My expectations, Clinton's a friend of mine for many years before he was elected president. I thought he was the political genius that he turns out to be. Now, there is a guy that Luke Gingrich could say was undisciplined. But sadly, because he is the political genius of our generation indisputably. There is nobody even like him. The next generation has Obama, but our generation, Bill Clinton. So, the (19)90s were a much more tempered hope. Economic recovery, for me, of course, the (19)80s and (19)90s were the time when my children were young. So, a lot of that time was spent with family not doing something else. And then the first 10 years of this decade lost again to war and to growing anger. I just find it depressing. I find right now, I have never been so discouraged about the country as I am right at this moment. We have got this fabulous president who offers a real opportunity, and yet we cannot get passed the... We cannot have a real discussion about healthcare because one party has decided we are not going to have that discussion, that it is in their interest. Well, I cannot imagine it is in the country's interest to not have a discussion, a real discussion about healthcare. It is in the country's issue to fix this problem not to just say no. Anyway.

SM (01:56:54):
And I am done. But I would like just your thoughts. What do you think about the Vietnam Memorial? What has it really done to the nation, and why did we lose the war? I am, I am actually going over there. I go over there every time I am here. What does it mean to you that wall? James Scrap said he wrote the book to heal a nation. He said it was not only about healing the families of those who served, but and also to be a non-political entity.

SB (01:57:25):
Yeah. I find it terribly. I think everyone, I find the symbolism of it moving and a visit to it because of the that incredible list of names. We have now been at war for eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have lost 3,600,

SM (01:57:47):
Oh no. More than that.

SB (01:57:47):
5,000.

SM (01:57:51):
It is in the 4,600 right now. We are heading to five.

SB (01:57:53):
Yeah. But you walk down there and walk past the 55,000 names on that wall, it reminds you of... When we went to 125,000 troops in Afghanistan that was a huge deal. Remember, we had 550,000 troops in Vietnam.

SM (01:58:13):
And in your opinion as a person who fought to end that war, what was the main reason that Vietnam War ended?

SB (01:58:20):
Oh, exhaustion. Country just got tired of it, it just wore us out. And also, if you think about what it did to Vietnam, we would pretty... There was not much left to fight over by the time we got done there. We had so destroyed that country, and it has been so remarkable the way that it's been rebuilt since then. So disappointing in many ways and some of the things that the Vietnamese leadership did after the war. But anyway.

SM (01:58:59):
Very good. Well, thank you.

(End of Interview)

2010-03-02

Stephen McKiernan

Sam Brown, 1943-

119:03

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Politicians--United States--20th century; Political activists--United States; Brown, Sam, 1943--Interviews

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