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Interview with Medford Stanton Evans

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Contributor

Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015 ; McKiernan, Stephen

Description

Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his masters degree in Economics from New York University.

Date

2009-08-06

Rights

In copyright

Date Modified

2017-03-14

Is Part Of

McKiernan Interviews

Extent

113:29

Transcription

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: M. Stanton Evans
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 6 August 2009
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:03):
Again, thank you very much. I will be sending a waiver form too, and you will sign it and then you will see the editing before it is ever.

ME (00:00:11):
Now, how is this an oral interview subject? Are you just going to publish the interviews, are you making a book from the interviews?

SM (00:00:17):
Well, no, I am actually making a book from the interviews. I take the picture of each individual in the ambiance, the special moment. That is why I like to interview in person. A few people I have interviewed over the phone, and those people I have met and I have taken their picture, so I can feel comfortable with interview them over the phone. This is an oral history project, but I have written a prologue and an epilogue already and I have written that and it is a lot about me and the magic moments for me as a boomer. This is really for an education for students and for general public to read about the boomer generation, some of the questions I ask. I guess it is also discovery for me, because I remember being in psychology classes. I am trying to still discover who I am as a boomer, and this generation I grew up in, I am fascinated by it.

ME (00:01:13):
I think your generation is more introspective than mine.

SM (00:01:18):
Tell you what, I am going to leave this close to you, so speak loud.

ME (00:01:22):
I will get closer up and closer to you.

SM (00:01:25):
What? Continue on, right on that note there about the introspective.

ME (00:01:29):
Well, I am looking, every generation has its own introspection, but our era, the era that is chronicled in this book you have, mine here from long ago, was we were very focused on things outside ourselves. Particularly, I am talking late forties, early (19)50s, I was class of (19)55 college. This was the very height of the coal. Korea was going, and all the McCarthy stuff was going on. There were huge battles being fought, all related to this coal question and the survival of the free world. These are the communists. That riveted our attention and everything we did was kind of, not everything, but a lot of what we did was linked to that. Certainly, in my own case, since this is some of biographical, that was the number one issue for me, as opposed to my intensity for something. That is kind of what I meant by that.

SM (00:02:43):
Right. When you think of the boomer generation, and again, these are the young people born between, and I think we made a few...

ME (00:02:50):
After the war, right?

SM (00:02:53):
Yeah, born right after the war up to 1964.

ME (00:02:59):
Yeah. That is a 20-year span.

SM (00:02:59):
Yes.

ME (00:02:59):
End of the war.

SM (00:03:03):
Yeah. What are your thoughts? If you look at that group of young people that were in college in the early, they would have graduated beginning in around 1965 from high school, and they would have continued for the next 22 years, basically, graduating from high school, going off to college, and they were involved in all these activities. When you look at the bloomer generation, what would you consider their strengths and weaknesses as a generation of 74 million? I know it is very general, but...

ME (00:03:33):
Yeah. Well, again, the difference in perspective, and I told you this over the phone, that I had never really thought about these matters so much in generational terms. Certainly, that enters in. There is always the tension between the older people and the younger people. That is just built into the situation. I was much more focused, picking up what we were just talking about a minute ago, on the issue aspect of things. That is, there was not so much how old people were, it is where they stood philosophically. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, in college and just out of college, I was much more focused on aligning myself with other people who thought as I did, as opposed to how old these people were. Some of them were quite old. Some of them were 60, 70 something years old then. Some of them were my age, and some of them were in between. It was much more a question of substance, of philosophy, of policy. Then the generational part of it kind of flowed from the avenue, but the generational thing was then itself divided by that. Of course, you have, and I am sure you know this, you had really on the campuses in the (19)60s, which is this book was written in 1961, before a lot of stuff happened in the (19)60s, you really had two different things going on the campuses. One was just one we have all read about, the SDS, and the new left, and the free speech movement, and all of that glorified in the Ken Kesey novels, and the literature of the times, about all the flower people and so forth and so on. That was sort of all on the left end of things to the degree had any philosophical meaning. Then there were whole other thing on the campuses of the conservative kids, Young Americans for Freedom, the Universal Studies Institute, Young Republicans. I read about those groups in this book, people on this campus way back when. Of course, a lot more happened after that book came up. You really had two different things within the same generation, left versus right. You had all the kids who followed Gene McCarthy, but you had a bunch of other kids who followed Barry Goldwater. These were the forces that were contending for leadership politically and intellectually. Those groups continued fighting through all the intervening years, after the Reagan era, and even into today. That is kind of the way I looked at it.

SM (00:07:12):
It is interesting. I do this in every interview, one of the first questions centers on commentary made by Newt Gingrich and George Will, who are the most well-known commentators on the boomers in the 1990s. Basically, they would, in every chance they could get, whether it be an article in of a magazine or on television, take a shot at the boomer generation for the breakdown of American society in so many ways, whether it be the breakdown of the American family, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the divisions that really came about that continue today. Do you think their commentary was fair to attack that 74 million boomers?

ME (00:07:58):
I have to hedge on that a bit, because I am not familiar with what they have said, but based on your paraphrase, I do not agree with that. I do not believe quite apart from you and George, that is another, them personally is another question, I do not believe that the problems that we confront in American society were created by that group of people. They were there long before. There had been a long history of philosophical breakdown in American culture for decades before any of these people were ever born. Bill Buckley's book, God and Man at Yale, came out in 1951.

SM (00:08:52):
Great book.

ME (00:08:53):
It is.

SM (00:08:54):
I have a first edition.

ME (00:08:55):
I was there when it came out. It is a very, I felt a very accurate indictment of what was then happening in Yale in 1951 or (19)50. That was long before these people ever made the scene. To pin it on them, well, some of them made it worse, some of them continued it, some of them whatever, manifested it, but there are others who opposed it in that same generation. That is the side that I was on, and the opposing side. That was the side that produced Goldwater and Reagan. Not an inconsequential movement that you produced with Ronald Reagan. That is where it came from. That is how I look at it.

SM (00:09:50):
When you look at that period that you have written about, the McCarthy era, and certainly Buckley back in (19)51, the early boomers were like six, seven years old at that time. It was very, for them to grasp much, but I can still remember as a little boy, watching that Black and white TV on the McCarthy hearings, being on the floor and my mother's in the kitchen, and having him say things to people who were testifying. I am not sure if that is subconsciously, I am not sure if I am one of the millions of baby boomers that were on the floor of the living room as the mother was doing her damn things when it was on television, whether that subconsciously went into boomers in any way in their youth. When you look at boomers, the question I want to ask is, boomers really questioned authority, a lot of them did. Again, maybe only 50 percent, but a lot of them questioned authority and challenged the status quo. That was the area that the beat writers came about. Some people will say the beat writers really had a subconscious or early influence, because they really did not respect authority and they wanted to speak up and be different. I do not know.

ME (00:11:01):
I remember them very well. I remember Kerouac...

SM (00:11:02):
Right.

ME (00:11:02):
Ginsburg and so on. Yeah.

SM (00:11:06):
Some people even say the (19)60s began with the beats, but what are your thoughts on that (19)50s era that could have had a negative influence on the early elementary school?

ME (00:11:17):
Well, I think that, I do not know. Again, I guess my approach is so different, it is hard for me to kind of put it in this chronological framework. I see it as a long-playing philosophical battle, cultural battle that way predates the (19)50s. Some of the things that are were said about the (19)60s had been said about the 1920s. The flaming youth, the people who were totally disenchanted because of World War I, that generation, the...

SM (00:12:00):
Pictures.

ME (00:12:13):
Yeah, sure. You had all the same, everything that would have been said about the (19)60s had been said about the (19)20s. Then of course, you had the depression in the 1930s. You had a very, very serious problem there with a lot of young people. Communists appeal to younger people at that time because of disillusionment with American institutions. The sweep of it is very, to me, much broader and longer than starting with the boomers. I think they just inherited a lot of stuff. One could argue that it is within that group that some kind of resistance was mounted to these tendencies. Again, I go back to the Goldwater, Reagan, and the Goldwater thing was very much fueled by younger people on the campuses, and who would have been in 1964, in their teens or early twenties. They would be boomers. If you get it from 1945, these people, almost all of them, were born after 1945. They led to the Goldwater movement, which then became the Reagan movement. I know this from being on campus, I took a little bit of a generational approach, but mostly I stressed the opposition within these generations, on either side of the question, which divided the older people and the younger people. I was only 26-7 when I wrote that book. I was certainly at that generation myself. Again, to me, that is what it is about.

SM (00:14:06):
Yeah, I think a lot of people perceive the early boomer lives, everything really started with a free speech movement or freedom summer, when some of them went south when they could. They were 18 years old, 19 years old.

ME (00:14:21):
Right.

SM (00:14:21):
Although the majority of them were, I think most of them were, most of the white participants were Jewish that went south, and a lot of African Americans as well. That whole period, a question I want to ask is whether these movements that came about during this timeframe when the boomers were young, the Civil Rights movement...

ME (00:14:47):
Let me interrupt you a minute, Steve. You done, Mark?

ME (00:14:51):
Well, no, I found these.

ME (00:14:54):
Okay. Do what you can.

ME (00:14:56):
I can come back. I just have to drop Tina off at work.

ME (00:15:00):
Okay, why do not want you to do that? I will tell you what, do you have to go right now to drop her off this very second?

ME (00:15:05):
Well, no, I have five minutes.

SM (00:15:09):
I will turn this up. You can do whatever you want. My time is your time. It is fine with me, because I am here.

ME (00:15:16):
Thank you.

SM (00:15:20):
I think I was, you were responding to my question. What was the question?

ME (00:15:24):
I do not remember.

SM (00:15:24):
What was my question?

ME (00:15:24):
I do not remember.

SM (00:15:29):
Something, oh, the movements, the different movements. If you look at the bloomer generation, people will define it often as the movements they were involved in.

ME (00:15:39):
You are talking about free speech movement?

SM (00:15:41):
Yeah, the Civil Rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the women's movement.

ME (00:15:45):
Yeah.

SM (00:15:46):
Many of these were offshoots from the Civil Rights movement, the environmental movement, the Native American movement. All these movements came about in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s as offshoots from the Civil Rights movement. They often defined them within this particular generation with the exception of the Civil Rights movement, because it was already pretty strong. Your thoughts on trying to define those movements within this boomer generation?

ME (00:16:12):
Well, I guess that my big disagreement was all the folks you are talking about. It was very manifest at the time, and has been for the intervening 40 years, was that if you go to what was happening in Berkeley, Mario Savio, all that stuff, the new left, SDS, the Port Huron statement, on and on and on. The people involved in that positioned themselves that they were opposing the establishment, that they were hostile to the reigning orthodoxy of the day. They understood that orthodoxy to be liberal, as did I. They were very critical of liberals, and then I worked with the Liberal Establishment back in 1965. Some of the critiques that were made of the liberals were very stringent from the left, was that conformity and big governments, and centralized power, and executive authority out of control, and many-many things that conservatives had said in the past, many of the left were saying in opposition at Lyndon Johnson or letter to Nixon and so forth. For all I had with those folks was that philosophically speaking, they were not any different from the people they were criticizing. That is, they were, in terms of value theory, they were relativists or agnostic to put a mileage, they were not religiously devout people, except in a few cases, like the [inaudible] or something. Most of them are secular, agnostic people. That was kind of the, or liberal orthodox was also secular. In terms of political and economic action, they started out sounding different, but they were collectives. More power to the government, and more coercion, more welfare, more everything of government, obviously, going on now. This was all the same as the thing they were allegedly opposing, [inaudible] senator, who was secular agnostic collectivist, the very parts Bill Buckley made in God and Man in Yale 14, 15 years before. To me, there was no real likelihood that people of that outlook could do anything substantive to change the problems that we had. They could make them worse. They could commit violence. They could have riots. They could capture school buildings or blow buildings up. They could do things like that. In what way did that change anything for the better? I did not think it did. That was my belief then. I wrote that, I had a book, The Future of Conservatism, in 1968, in which I basically said in that book when I had part of it, what I just said to you. I think the history is one of that.

SM (00:19:56):
I think I know what you are replying, but I want to hear it from the tape. When the boomers said they were the most, I know I was one of them, and I went to college. Some of my peers felt they were the most unique generation in the history of America. At that particular time, they felt comradeship, in many respects, around different causes, that they were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society. That they were going to racism, sexism, homophobia, end war, bring peace to the world, bring sanity, so to speak. Then as they age, take on leadership roles and their ideals would continue. Your thoughts on the way boomers thought, and again, I am not talking to the entire generation.

ME (00:20:48):
Yeah.

SM (00:20:49):
Most people say that 15 percent were involved in activism, but that is a lot of people, 70 some million. Just your thoughts on the feelings that the boomers had then. I think some boomers still think that now, even though they are in positions of responsibility. Just your thoughts on that kind of?

ME (00:21:10):
My comment would be repeating what I already said. I think your point is well taken, that there is a lot of people, and there certainly were a lot of people, there are a lot of people, who had such attitudes, but they were not the entire generation. That has to be kept in mind. I think that the only thing I remember from tour, I used to spend a lot of time on campuses. I must have been on a couple hundred campuses in the 1960s, debating these people, and trying to work the other side of the street. The one thing I remember very well is I go to a campus, anywhere, University of Illinois, or I think I was in Binghamton, and some point and all that...

SM (00:21:54):
Right.

ME (00:21:54):
A lot of schools up in New York. I would ask the same question. I would not only speak, but I would interview, "Talk to me. I would only find out what is going on." I used to write, I would write newspaper article about stuff.

SM (00:22:13):
Right-right.

ME (00:22:17):
One of the questions I would always ask, "What is it like? What is going on here in this campus?" He said, "Well, mostly the students are just really apathetic," over and over and over again, and they were. What you really had, and I wrote about this a little bit on campus, was you had a whole bunch of people sort of in the middle, who were just typical college students, trying to get on with their lives, and go to football games, and have dates with good looking girls or vice versa if they were girls, and have fun, and get through college, and get on with their lives. That was it. There were minorities on the sort of either end of this thing who were intensely committed to certain causes, the left being the ones that were most publicized. Part of that was the fact, what I was talking about before, they were publicized because they fitted the mental framework of the people in the media. The media folks themselves, products of the campuses, saw and the new left in the various manifestations of that group. They recognized, this is what young people should be doing. They should be out demonstrating for the environment, or they should be opposing the Vietnam War or whatever. That is what the media themselves thought. Therefore, they catered to these young people who were preaching that doctrine and holding BNs. I remember I spoke at those things, and they were very well publicized. The teach-ins and all that stuff on Vietnam, I remember it all very well. The media recognized that and they amplified it. They communicated. On the other side of it got almost no attention for the conservative kids, doing what they were doing. They were promoting Goldwater and they were later promoting Reagan. That was the neglected part of it, this other side, the other (19)60s. That, of course, the other (19)60s turned out to be, politically speaking, the winning side. Reagan wanted to be president. George McGovern did not. That is the way they would play out. There is an imbalance there and perception, because it has been, I well remember, it was just so typical of this thing, that the day after, I think I am right, the day after the Gingrich republicans had won...

SM (00:25:20):
(19)94.

ME (00:25:23):
In (19)94, the control of the Congress, both house and Senate, which had not happened in ever before in 40, 50 years, the Washington Post, I could go back and get this, you could pull it up to the website, like the day after the (19)94 election, had a humongous article and all in the style section about alumni of the SDS, where are they now? Hello? The republicans are sweeping into control of the Congress, and The Washington Post is glorifying former members of the SDS. Well, that is kind of illustrative, what I am drawing it all. The focus is over here, but things are going over here that are ignored until there is two. All of a sudden, where did Goldwater come from? Where did Reagan come from? Where did Gingrich come from? What is going on here? They were utterly mystified by the development, because it did not fit any of their preconceptions.

SM (00:26:29):
Has the media changed at all since... People remember back in Watergate, that Woodward and Bernstein created that investigative journalist mentality. That was very popular for a while, but now it is not.

ME (00:26:46):
Well...

SM (00:26:46):
It seems like it is disappeared.

ME (00:26:49):
Well, I would have a hard, again, lots of things that happened. That is where I spent my life, of course, in media. I am a media person and in journalism, so this was very riveting. The media changed in so many different ways. It is hard to generalize. You now have all this blogging, and you have got all the internet stuff, and you have got talk radio, and you have got cable TV, a zillion different outlets all competing for the attention of the public, which erodes the power of the few institutions that used to be the major determinants of public debate. They were very, how well I remember on the TV, the three networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, the big magazines, many of which do not exist anymore, Look, Life, Collier, Saturday Evening Post, these were hugely important, had six, 7 million subscribers apiece, Time, Newsweek, and major newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and others. There is kind of a handful of really big media institutions that basically, they are in control, but they certainly influenced discourse in a very powerful way. That is all changed. Now, there all these different things. You have got stuff, I am sure you have noticed, and it gets a fair amount of attention. Newspapers are virtually going out of business.

SM (00:28:44):
Yeah, several going bankrupt.

ME (00:28:45):
Losing money, losing subscribers, including the Washington Post and New York Times.

SM (00:28:46):
The Inquirer had problems.

ME (00:28:46):
The Inquirer, you could list them all, Chicago Tribune.

SM (00:28:46):
The San Francisco Chronicles and all of them.

ME (00:28:58):
On and on, it is a long list. Same thing with the networks. They are struggling because cable TV has eroded. They are...

ME (00:29:03):
And because cable TV has eroded their audiences, although they are still by far the largest entities in television, but not the way they used to be. And you have many, many alternatives now that did not exist back in the (19)60s. And the internet and the talk radio and blah-blah-blah, it is such a totally different ballgame. So, it is really hard to get your arms around it as to what it all means, I am not sure what it means. I do believe that the media, by and large, I am not talking about the blockage because of who knows, but by and large there is still a strong tilt to the left. And the reason for this is basically that the personnel of these institutions come out of the colleges. That is where they come from. And so that they are, and particularly the ones that are interested in journalism, and I have taught journalism for a long time, there is a definite tendency to the liberal side and the surveys of media personnel over the years. It is an 80 to 90 percent voting liberal Democrats and very large majorities. I mean, I have not seen anything like that recently, I must admit and work for it. But that internal reflects the campuses where you have majority, the seven to eight to one in favor of the liberal position among faculty. And they are the ones training these young people then going to the media. So, I think that that problem is still out there in a very large way, but I do not really have a lot of hard data to back it up. That is just what my impression is.

SM (00:30:56):
Check to make sure the... because it is 45 minutes each side and we are doing fine, okay. I have a question that we asked actually, I am not going to mention the politician. I am not sure if I mentioned on the phone when I talked to you, but took a group of students to Washington DC about eight years ago. Came to DC to see a former senator. And the question that I have been asking all of my interviewees is a general question. And it is about the concept of healing within the nation because of all the divisions that took place in the (19)60s, many people have thought that we came close to a second civil war with all the divisions between Black and white. I like your thought on that, but the divisions between Black and white, those who for and against the war, the divisions are pretty strong. And whether we, as a nation have healed from all those divisions at that time in the (19)60s and the (19)70s, some people might say that the divisions continue right into the halls of Congress because they do not get along. But I do not think they got along even when FDR was president. So, your thoughts on this particular issue of healing within the boomer generation, and I say this because I go to Gettysburg a lot and I have studied a lot about the north and south coming together as they got older and some healed, some never did. Some went their graves never healing. And the senator was Senator Musky. We asked him his thoughts on whether we had healed as a nation since 1968, because that was a real rough year and he did not respond right away. And the 14 students would look at each other. And finally he had some tears in his eyes and he mentioned he just got out of the hospital and he had been watching the Ken Burn series on the Civil War. And that he was so touched by the loss of all the men and the loss of maybe an entire generation of children that we really have not healed since the Civil War, let alone the (19)60s. Your thoughts on both two thoughts on what Musky had to say and then secondly, just a general question on healing since the (19)60s and early (19)70s.

ME (00:33:09):
Well again, I have a different way of looking at it. It is a matter of the lenses that you are wearing. I did not feel even in the (19)60s that the country in general was that divided. But I did think, and I still think is that there were certain people within the country who were intentionally hostile to the traditional values of the country. I think that is still true. I think that goes on. There are people that are just the [inaudible] blame America, that if there is some controversy overseas, we are the villains, we are at fault. There is a lot of that back then. Those demonstrators on the campuses in the (19)60s, and I saw them face to face, were not against war. They were against the United States and they glory in the victory of the Viet Cong. They were pro Viet Cong. So, they were not just against the war, they were against the United States and they were against the effort by the United States to oppose communism. I happen to be pretty much a critic of the Vietnam policies that were followed by Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon. I was never a big fan of any of those policies. But these people, as I said, I went toe to toe with them campus after campus, after campus. I debated and I was at these teachings. I spoke at these teachings. There was an intense hatred of America there. It was not philosophical oppositions of war, violence of the country. But those people did not represent very much. Those people with those attitudes. Praising the Viet Cong, the people that rejoiced in the fall of Saigon, and they did rejoice in them, did not represent the large segment of American society. Never did. And I think that is gone on. I think that is continuing to this day. There are people that sort of ritualistically take a stance like that on any foreign policy question. We saw it very much in the opposition of President Bush. And again, I was no big fan of his. I think he made a lot of mistakes, but just the hatred of him and Cheney and went way beyond just policy disagreement. And it really was sort of an extension of what I remember seeing back in the (19)60s, this Vietnam stuff. I do not think that those attitudes, which however can be very powerful, represented any large percent of the American people. I mean, most Americans even then and now hold to fairly traditional conventional ideas and do not want to see any big revolutions and any kind of violence or any kind of Vietnam type demonstrations, even though they might be upset about the course of policy. And I have certainly have been, but I am not out the streets bringing turn cars over and buildings. And so again, it is my different way of looking.

SM (00:37:02):
How important were those college students ending that war in Vietnam?

ME (00:37:06):
Well they were pretty important. There was a synergism of the college students, the college faculties even more so and the media. And of course, the thing that was different then and which was driving a lot of that had nothing at all to do or very little to do with the merits of the Vietnam War, although it had many things longer than I thought. It was the draft. They did not want to be drafted. Once the draft was not there, you do not see that anymore. There is no draft. So the college students are not in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in all these wars. That is a huge difference. And so that was what was driving a lot of it.

SM (00:38:01):
Would you say that a lot of times people, I am using a general statement here, but that when you think of the young people of that era, you think of activism. The term activism. I am not talking about volunteerism now. I am talking about activism now. Now we have on college campuses now, and we have had since the (19)90s and the (19)80s, (19)90s, massive amount of volunteers. And if you read the literature on higher education, they say when you have greater numbers of volunteerism or a large percentage of volunteerism, that is the sign of a conservative era. I do not know why people say that, but-

ME (00:38:35):
I do not either.

SM (00:38:39):
But that volunteerism is when a person commits himself or herself to so many hours a week toward a cause. But when you think of activism, you think of a 24/7. It is part of being, the human being, it is the whole person's life fighting for issues and causes. And so sometimes people will separate that group of people, the Boomers from the Generation Xers and now the Millennials as a totally different group because they were more 24/7 as opposed to today's young people that are two hours a week or mandatory in volunteer work and not really activists.

ME (00:39:19):
Well usually if someone is [inaudible] I did not really know. This volunteerism thing is big now, right?

SM (00:39:25):
It has been big for over 20 years.

ME (00:39:27):
Oh, it shows how much I know, because I was not aware of that. I knew it was out and how big it was. And that is good. I do not think there is anything particularly conservative about it, but [inaudible] volunteer with a Peace Corps or Action or whatever and that might or might not be conservative [inaudible] But if [inaudible] by desire to help other people, that is a good thing. And philosophically, and I would describe it, but the other thing you are describing, the activism that is the groups I was talking about earlier. Those are the people who are committed, philosophically committed. They are not just partially involved. They are really involved. And so, they are the ones that fight on either end of the spectrum for dominance, in terms of the debate and rhetoric and substance of policy. And I think that is always been the case. Now, I think what has happened recently is a lot of the people that things went in two different directions. All the people from that era back then and now, of course would be in their (19)50s and (19)60s.

SM (00:40:53):
Yeah. Make sure we are doing okay here. Let is see here, how are we doing?

ME (00:41:03):
Must be getting done [inaudible].

SM (00:41:03):
Should click friend.

ME (00:41:10):
That the people, alumni of that, all those fights that I was witnessing and in part as a participant in the (19)60s, which is the most intense part of this process that you are talking about, went in two very different ways. And by and large, the more conservative kids went off and one thing that happened is the conservative kids tend to be more oriented toward existing institutions. So, they are looking to make careers of themselves in business or law or medicine or whatever it might be engineering. And so they have very strong vocational orientation. So, they are not going to be out there all the time as activists in the sense that you just defined it. The more leftward kids are not committed to existing institutions. They tend to be much more verbalizers. They tend to be writers, they tend to be speakers, they tend to be the kind of folks that go into media and/or into back into academe. And so you have a buildup on the two sides of this of a very, very strong imbalance to the left on the campuses. And it replenishes itself as more of the people who graduated of that outlook, they tend to come back to the campuses and so what you have now is the tenured people from 40 years ago-

SM (00:42:55):
I am going to switch the tape.

ME (00:42:56):
Go ahead.

SM (00:42:56):
That should have...

ME (00:43:08):
There is people now who were activists back in the (19)60s who are now professors, much more so than conservatives, have many conservative professors are out there? And the conservatives either went into business or some went into politics. And so you have a lot of people of that generation are Reagan staffers or whatever, work for Republican administrations. And there is a real divide between the philosophical, intellectual, verbalizing people and the more practical everyday people based on these philosophical differences. And I think that is what you have got now in campuses and then that feeds into the media and then it is a self-perpetuating cycle.

SM (00:44:04):
How did that develop? How did conservative students really develop knowing that the issue of trust is something that seems to be lacking, in my opinion, amongst many voters? Because of what they saw failure in their leaders, lying from their leaders. I say this because we now know about Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin and all the fake numbers that came back that McNamara would announce that young people saw on the Black and white television every night. Of course, Watergate and Richard Nixon and then in the revelations even more recently of President Kennedy and his possible link with the Diem overthrow. And then, of course, Eisenhower had lied on national television about the U2 incident. And then you have got the whole issue of, even in later years, Brown Reagan was hard to tarnish. But the Iran-Contra comes out of there. And they even questioned Gerald Ford that there was a behind the scenes move to pardon President Nixon and it was all-

ME (00:45:11):
Well he did pardon Nixon.

SM (00:45:13):
Yeah, he did but the question is you cannot trust him, because now he is pardoning him. There was no trust in any of the leaders. What does this due to a generation of young people that cannot trust?

ME (00:45:25):
It makes you cynical and but it did not affect just... it affected a lot of conservatives kids too. They did not trust their leaders. You talk about the Kennedy overthrow Diem, I knew about that at the time. There was no secret. And that was just a terrible thing. And of course, it led to this collapse of all kinds of chances of resistance in Vietnam, because there was no leadership, the whole thing just went down the drain. But I knew about that. I wrote about it. I wrote a whole chapter done in a book I wrote in the (19)60s about what happened in Vietnam and how that was done. Well it is pretty hard to have much confidence in the leadership that does something like that. Each of the overthrow and murder of our alleged ally. And I have since found, I have a chapter on my book that they tried to do the same thing to [inaudible] to overthrow him, but that was thwarted but I have the documents that show it. So there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on. That was under Truman, the actions and State Department. They are planning to overthrow [inaudible] in 1950. So, it makes you very cynical and very, very doubtful about the honesty of the people running this country when things like that are going on, and I certainly, Lyndon Johnson, I am a native of Texas and I knew about Lyndon Johnson a long before it became common knowledge. Anybody in Texas knew how he got elected in the first place, 1948 when they stole votes down in Duval and Jim Wells counties and people called it Land Slides Lyndon he was called. And the Caro books. You have read them, Robert Caro biography of Johnson.

SM (00:47:30):
I read the first one. I did not read the second one.

ME (00:47:33):
Well it is all pretty negative on Lyndon and it was all basically true. And so that pretty hard to have much confidence in that that and again, Nixon [inaudible] here where he and Kissinger were bludgeoning two in Vietnam to knuckle under has come out in recent tapes. Well how do you have any confidence in people that do stuff like that? So yeah, most of the people I knew and was involved with way back when were pretty much disillusioned with a lot of these. We did not know everything we know now. We knew a lot. We knew about Diem, we knew about that and we were very disillusioned by it. No question.

SM (00:48:28):
The Boomers who, if they were cognizant again of McCarthy and what was going on in the (19)50s, the red baiting and that whole business. And of course, certain movies have come out in recent years, documentaries on the Hollywood 10 and certainly McCarthy. And then you get the enemies list of Richard Nixon in the (19)60s. And then you have got most recently in George Bush, the Patriot Act, that they all kind of come together, a lack of almost a fear of speaking up. Fear of expressing one's views. And if you do, you are either going to go before a hearing in front of McCarthy for being a communist. Your career is going to be destroyed by Richard Nixon's people for standing up against the Vietnam War. And then of course, Patriot Act, even George Bush. What does this say about America? And this is all during the time that the Boomers have been growing into old age.

ME (00:49:29):
Well I guess I would have to take everything you just said and go step by step through it, because I do not agree with it. And first of all, the McCarthy thing, I wrote a 600 page book going into these questions. And my brother did not call anybody before for disagreeing with him. I do not know of anybody, maybe a couple of people, but most of the people that he was looking at, and the charges he brought were based on information that came from the FBI about the infiltration of our government by communists and Soviet agents. And this stuff had been covered up. It was denied. And we are getting a lot of this information now from recent disclosures from FBI files. I have hundred thousand page of FBI files downstairs. And that is what my book is mostly based on and these files show that these people McCarthy was pursuing were basically what he said they were. They were not just dissenters from [inaudible] So you got that whole thing. That is a whole big deal itself. Then you get into the Hollywood thing. Those were communists. Now, you may want to argue that so what? But they were not just... people like Dalton Trumbo.

SM (00:50:52):
Absolutely Trumbo.

ME (00:50:54):
Albert Maltz. They were Stalinist agents. They were communists. They are clearly so, they had party cards. So again, these are not just dissenters, these are agents of a hostile foreign power and Patriot Act? What the Patriot Act tried to do, and I am not sure what the details of it anymore, [inaudible] We had basically in the (19)70s destroyed all of our intelligence agencies. And prevented the FBI from surveilling terrorists, hostile people in our country who were pouring in here, pretty much without any things to hinder them. They were running all around.

SM (00:51:54):
Is that because of Richard Nixon and they got tired of the enemies list and they give them a, "We are not going to do that anymore." That kind of mentality?

ME (00:52:15):
[inaudible] I was on that enemies list, by the way. I personally know it, because I was a conservative dissenter against Nixon.

SM (00:52:15):
It must be a badge of honor then.

ME (00:52:15):
Well I took care of us. I was never too worried about being on Richard Nixon's enemies list. But what happened was there was a crusade in the Congress led by Teddy Kennedy, Birch Bayh by who was then senator, the father of the Senators in there now. I knew Birch Bayh, I was in Indiana then. And the Civil Liberties Union to dismantle all our intelligence agents. And their position was that you could not conduct surveillance of somebody unless they were in the act of committing a crime. It was just mere advocacy or mere membership at the time in each party or mere membership in any other group was not itself sufficient to justify being under surveillance by the FBI, so called Levy Guidelines imposed under Gerald Ford. And these guidelines basically put the FBI, and then there was FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, these enactments, that was (19)78, basically put the FBI out of the antiterrorism business. So when people were coming in here to do what happened on September 11th, nobody was minding the store. Every entity that could have done anything about them had been shut down. So, what I have known, all those people had died September 11th, died because of them, so the Patriot Act is an effort to correct that.

SM (00:54:04):
You are a scholar. What were the books that had the greatest influence on the Boomer generation when they were college students when they were teenagers, college students, and young adults? Because there were a lot of non-non-fiction books written at that period that were directly linked to that generation. Plus, there were a lot of novels written by... and then you had the beat writers from the (19)50s. Are there specific ones that you remember?

ME (00:54:36):
Well again, you got a divide because there was the left and the right. And I was much more familiar with the right. I know the books that were read by young conservatives, they were pretty much the same for a number of years. I think it has changed now. But one of the books that was most influential, although it was mostly a political book, was the Goldwater book, Conscience of a Conservative. Very widely read and it was readable because it was short. It was not a huge tome and it helped promote Goldwater, but also promoted his ideas. So that was very important. But then there were other books that I remember reading myself when I was in college that were read by these other young folks, the Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. Ideas have Consequences by Richard Weaver, The Witness by Whittaker Chambers was white is red and so forth. That was on the conservative side, on the other side. I do not know. I know that there were certain writers who were popular for a time being, but I do not know how much influence, I remember there was guy named Paul Goodman, who was very widely [inaudible] and I read a lot of his stuff and some, what he said to say made sense.

SM (00:56:05):
He was kind of linked to some of the beats too.

ME (00:56:07):
He was.

SM (00:56:07):
Some of his writing.

ME (00:56:09):
There was an overlap. I remember reading Kerouac and I was about that age. Kerouac, if he was still, I guess deceased.

SM (00:56:19):
Yeah.

ME (00:56:19):
If he was alive, he would be about my age. I am 75 years old. But back then I remember reading Kerouac, On the Road and those books. And I kind of identified with some of it. There was this libertarian side to it, the hostility to oppressive authority. There was a lot of that on the right, the Libertarians and people that they are still out there. I do not know if you are familiar of the Cato Institute.

SM (00:56:52):
Oh yes.

ME (00:56:52):
Well that is where they are coming from. They are very, very libertarian. They are very against big government. They do not like any kind of big government. They would be more, also, they would be sort [inaudible] what you feel about the Patriot Act. I am not, I am Conservative but I am also a libertarian. And I believe in the limited government of free markets and individual liberty. And I consider that an important component of my own philosophy. So, the beats had some appeal for people like me as well as the more left-wing types.

SM (00:57:33):
A couple of books that were very popular in the late (19)60s was the Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak, which was-

ME (00:57:43):
I never read that.

SM (00:57:44):
And then a Greening of America by Charles Reich.

ME (00:57:47):
I did read that.

SM (00:57:49):
And of course, Ken Kesey, who you have already mentioned and Wolf and a lot of his novels.

ME (00:57:56):
Tom Wolfe?

SM (00:57:58):
Yeah, Tom Wolfe.

ME (00:57:59):
Who was the right winner though?

SM (00:58:01):
Yeah. Mailer. Mailer was red.

ME (00:58:03):
Norman Mailer.

SM (00:58:03):
Um, Mailer, Mailer was [inaudible].

ME (00:58:03):
Oh, Mailer. Of course, he had been out there a long time. He was actually the first.

SM (00:58:04):
Right.

ME (00:58:11):
All true, but all those books were out there, and I am sure had their impact. Wolfe is the one that is different because he is still around.

SM (00:58:18):
Yeah. Kurt Vonnegut is another one.

ME (00:58:22):
Vonnegut, mm-hmm, from Indianapolis, and Vonnegut's Hardware, I remember that. I was in Indianapolis for many, many years. I guess you remember that?

SM (00:58:29):
Mm-hmm.

ME (00:58:35):
And Wolfe, I could detect, even back when, like the Kesey book and the other stuff he wrote, very interesting, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and Radical Chic. But you could see that he was an equal opportunity critic to me. He was puncturing. Radical Chic was about Leonard Bernstein. I always remember reading that. It was about this cocktail party being thrown on Park Avenue for the Black Panthers, you know. And he ridiculed them. So you see there was kind of a conservative side to Wolfe that became more and more apparent later, Bonfire of the Vanities, and so forth. And he was very influential. And, of course, The Right Stuff, you read things by Tom Wolfe, you do not see too many people whom he respects, but he respected those guys.

SM (00:59:33):
Yeah, when you think of the (19)50s and (19)60s, you think of Hugh Hefner, too, and Playboy, because-

ME (00:59:34):
You certainly do.

SM (00:59:38):
Oh, my God. That is an important... He evolved during the boomer lives.

ME (00:59:43):
Well, of course Playboy was popular when I was in college so it predates the [inaudible]. But, yeah, of course the playboy ethic and all of that was just a kind of this erosion of traditional standards where anything goes, and if it feels good, do it, and all of that. And that is contributed to some of our problems, no question.

SM (01:00:12):
I have a question here again. I have got some names here that I would just like you to respond to, some terms and some personalities, if you do not mind? When you think of the Vietnam Memorial, what does that mean to you?

ME (01:00:28):
It means a lot of people died in a bloody treadmill war, very sad, very tragic, because it was a war... And I am no military type, I do not know much about it first-hand, but I do remember all of that. It was a war, basically, that was fought without any intention of winning it. And there was [inaudible] Goldwater saying, "Why not victory?" Just saying it was the same thing that happened in Korea under General MacArthur, and so you have a lot of people who died, and it is a very tragic thing. That is what I think of it.

SM (01:00:59):
Why did the war end, to you? Why did we leave?

ME (01:01:18):
Because we did not have the will to win, and the Congress was undermining what little that we were doing. I remember all of it very well. That was when you had that whole bunch who were elected in (19)74 who were refusing... And I am no Kissinger fan, believe me, but he was trying to play both ends against the middle, and he needed more aid from the Congress, and they would not give it to him. So, we just bailed out once they [inaudible].

SM (01:01:49):
When you think of the (19)60s, again, when these boomers where young, we were always talking about white people, white Americans, but certainly African-Americans was a very crucial part of the (19)60s.

ME (01:02:00):
It certainly was.

SM (01:02:00):
In fact, Kent State is very meaningful in many ways, because there were no African-Americans to be seen that day. One was near the... They were kind of escorted away. And what was happening on college campuses is that, in (19)69 and (19)70, there was a split where African-Americans just basically, "We are going to fight for civil rights here in America, and you can go ahead and be against the Vietnam War," even though people were saying the Vietnam War had more people of color serving than there were white Americans. And of course that became famous in speech against the Vietnam War. Just your thoughts, when we are talking about boomers and we are conservative students and liberal students to the left, where do the African-Americans fall into the whole scheme?

ME (01:02:49):
Well, I think you just stated it very well. I remember seeing, not that I knew a lot about it... I did not and do not. But it was very clear that the impulse of the anti-Vietnam stuff was white kids. You did not see too many Black faces, and I did not see too many Blacks there. They had their own struggle, and that was the civil rights struggle. And so, there is a real division there. I think you summed it up really well. And so there were two different things going on there. And I think that it confuses things to kind of lump it all together, but [inaudible] very different things.

SM (01:03:36):
Yeah, Tommie Smith and John Carlis with the fists in (19)68 at the Olympics.

ME (01:03:41):
I remember it well. I remember it well.

SM (01:03:43):
A couple of other things here? What do you think of when you think of Kent State and Jackson State?

ME (01:03:56):
I think they were, again, great tragedies. You got to remember that the... Jackson State, I do not remember too well, but Kent State, Neil Young, [inaudible] and Ohio. You had scared kids on both sides of that. The Ohio National Guard kids were not any different than the kids who were demonstrating. They were trying to control a scene that they could not control, and so that was the tragedy of it. And those demonstrations, it is a pretty well-known fact, were calculated to produce things like that. The hard left wanted these confrontations. They wanted police brutality. They wanted violence. They wanted open conflict. They felt that would spark... You go back to the days of rage of all those people, the [inaudible] and on, and on, and on, that is what they were trying to do. They were trying to provoke [inaudible] it is all there. It goes all the way back to the Bolshevik Revolution. That is the way you ratchet up your revolution. You get people out in the street. You have conflict with the police or military, somebody gets hurt or killed, that becomes the pretext for more, and it escalates, and that was its deliberate strategy. Those kids that died at Kent State, they were tragic victims of this process. Now who, in fact, is responsible for it individually? I do not know. That is what I think about it.

SM (01:05:38):
I know some of the students at Kent State that were involved in that.

ME (01:05:38):
Very sad, very sad.

SM (01:05:53):
When you think of Watergate, what does that mean to you?

ME (01:05:55):
It means-

SM (01:05:55):
What did that mean to America?

ME (01:06:00):
I got to tell you, Steve, it was the biggest exercise in hypocrisy I ever saw. Nothing that Nixon was accused of doing had not already been done by Kennedy and Johnson, and you mentioned some of the things earlier. They did everything Nixon was accused of doing, and more. The difference was, they got away with it.

SM (01:06:25):
And he did not admit. He made it much deeper by not admitting it.

ME (01:06:28):
Well, Kennedy and Johnson did not admit it, but they were not challenged.

SM (01:06:32):
Right.

ME (01:06:33):
There is a book by Victor Laskey called [inaudible]-

SM (01:06:36):
I think I have that book. What is the name of it?

ME (01:06:42):
It Did not Start With Watergate, and it delves into all that stuff. I mean, they had, again, I wrote about it in Time, plans to use the Internal Revenue Service to silence their critics, use the Fairness Doctrine to keep people from broadcasting hostile broadcasts, this was Kennedy and Johnson, using the power of the FBI to investigate people they did not like. They did break-ins. They did wiretapping. They [inaudible] rifled his office. They drove him out of the government because he was a dissenter. The list is long. And so, there was not a single thing that Nixon was accused of doing that had not already been done by his predecessors. The difference was that the media, Washington Post in particular, hated Nixon, and a lot of left hated him because of the Hiss case. And, of course, he was not any particular favorite of mine. Like I said, I was on the enemies list. I was chairman, at that time, of the American Conservative Union, and we had supported opposition to Nixon in the 1972 primaries by John Ashbrook. So, I wound up on one of these enemies lists as the chairman of this thing. [inaudible] interviewed me about it, and I was not in the least concerned that I was on list. So I was no big Nixon fan, but the whole Watergate was just a complete exercise in hypocrisy.

SM (01:08:25):
Obviously, that year, 1968, so many things happened then. Your thoughts on that year, not only with Tommie Smith and what was going on at the Olympics, but the (19)68 Democratic Convention, which led to the Chicago Eight trials, the Chicago police going up against protesters.

ME (01:08:39):
Mayor Daly.

SM (01:08:40):
Yeah, even some politicians were arrested, and even, I think, Dan Rather was arrested, or something like that.

ME (01:08:46):
[inaudible].

SM (01:08:48):
And then there were a lot of other things. Of course, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race that year, just so much.

ME (01:08:55):
That is true. Well, yeah. I wrote about it at the time, and I would have to go back and look, but what I remember writing when I used to be was that what was happening in that Chicago convention, it was a culmination of a long series of things, was the crack up of the Democratic coalition. On one side, you have got Mayor Daly and the big city machine politicians who were supporting Humphrey, who was, of course, the surrogate for Lyndon. On the other side, you had the Eugene McCarthy people, you had the [inaudible] Kennedy camp, Bobby Kennedy campaign. And these elements were at each other's throats within the Democratic Party. And that is what that convention showed. And everything that went on there was internal fighting among Democrats is what it was. And that led, of course, to the collapse of the Democratic Party in that year's election and the election of Richard Nixon, with George Wallace getting 11 million votes, or whatever he got, which was quite a [inaudible] because that separated the South, the Old Roosevelt Coalition, it was all these things. It was the big city bosses. It was the left-wing intellectuals. It was the academics. It was the Blacks. It was Southern Democrats. It was everything. There was a coalition of all these people. That all fell apart in (19)68 and that was the main thing, I think, that showed.

SM (01:10:43):
And Senator McCarthy was the first person I interviewed for this process back when I started this and my parents were ill, and now I am back finishing it up. But I asked the question I wanted him to answer. I asked him, "Why did you drop out?" I just want an answer, because I have read his books and I know he still-

ME (01:11:06):
What did he say?

SM (01:11:08):
Oh, he still got very upset when I asked him about Bobby Kennedy. He said, "Read about it in my book." [inaudible].

ME (01:11:12):
He did not like Bobby Kennedy.

SM (01:11:18):
He did not answer me. He did a roundabout.

ME (01:11:18):
[inaudible].

SM (01:11:20):
I think that is the ultimate question. I saw him three times in my life, and that is the one question I think a lot of people want answered, "Why did you drop out?"

ME (01:11:30):
I do not think he could have won. I think he knew that. But you would know better.

SM (01:11:37):
It petered out. He was still strong at the convention. He had a lot of people there. He did not want people to be involved in the violent stuff because they were clean-cut.

ME (01:11:47):
No, clean for Gene.

SM (01:11:50):
Yeah.

ME (01:11:50):
I knew Senator McCarthy. [inaudible]. I did not know the other one. I knew this one.

SM (01:11:55):
Right.

ME (01:11:55):
And I got to know him a little bit later, let me say. Also, he was very different from his image. He was not a radical person at all, but he was deeply offended by the war, the way it was being conducted. He did not like Lyndon Johnson. He certainly did not like Bobby Kennedy. And I think what you ran into, and you would know better than I if you interviewed him several times, was that Bobby Kennedy, in his view, opportunistically jumped on a bandwagon that Gene McCarthy had created.

SM (01:12:31):
Yes. And I believe he thought that there was an agreement that he would not do it. And within a matter of less than three weeks’ time, he did it.

ME (01:12:39):
I think that is what happened.

SM (01:12:43):
And then he said, "Read about it in my book." I got that on tape, "Read about it in my book."

ME (01:12:46):
I think you know the answer to your own question.

SM (01:12:49):
I will go through these real fast. Just your comments on the hippies and yippies? They were two different unique groups?

ME (01:12:58):
Hippies and yippies? Hippies were part of this whole thing I was talking about earlier. They are flower children, going to San Francisco with a flower in your hair, and all that. And, I do not know, it was kind of a circus. I do not know what it signified of any great importance but it was there. You had a whole bunch of people drifting around smoking dope and thinking that that is the answer to the world's problems, then you have got problems. And we did. And so the yippies were a tougher breed. I saw some of them down in Miami Beach at the (19)72 Democrat convention. They were a little tougher guys, but I am not sure what they signified except they were hard... they were more the activist types. They were not just floating around saying, "Peace and love." They were activists who were trying to do left-wing things.

SM (01:14:06):
I thought it was interesting that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were the yippies, and I saw Jerry when he came to Ohio State.

ME (01:14:13):
I saw Jerry.

SM (01:14:13):
He was a really good speaker, and they were both very good speakers. One thing that is tragic, and I will put this as a note, probably, someplace in the book, is that Abbie Hoffman committed suicide.

ME (01:14:23):
Did he?

SM (01:14:24):
Yeah. He had $2,500 left. He was living in an apartment in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It is outside Philadelphia. He committed suicide, and in the note, he said, "No one was listening to me anymore." And you know what is really interesting is that the Abbie Hoffman that we saw in the yippies and the Abbie Hoffman that kind of hid all those years, he had changed his look on his face. He had been working to save the Hudson for many, many years. People did not even know who he was. He had to hide his name because he was in hiding. And he came out on the Phil Donahue show, I will never forget that, when I was living in California. He was a man that was totally committed to the cause of saving that river, and people were not listening to him because they kept going back to that earlier period.

ME (01:15:14):
Yeah, in life, as in the movies, you get typecast. And once you have a strong identity in one thing, it is real hard for people to related to something different. And what you just told me is news to me. But Hoffman and Rubin, I did not know Hoffman. I met Rubin once, and he definitely was a piece of work. I do not remember Hoffman, but Rubin, obviously in some ways, was not serious. He was joking at just anything, craziness. But I guess it all had a serious intent. What exactly it was, I am not sure.

SM (01:15:56):
They actually debate each other later.

ME (01:15:56):
Did they?

SM (01:15:57):
Because he ended up becoming a business man, and Abbie was still Abbie.

ME (01:16:05):
Well, there you are.

SM (01:16:05):
A couple of other terms, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which, actually, they took over the anti-war movement in early (19)70s, they were very powerful? Your thoughts on them?

ME (01:16:09):
I do not know much about them. Then [inaudible] came out of that.

SM (01:16:19):
Yeah, but a lot of people in that movement did not like him.

ME (01:16:20):
Yeah. I gathered that from some discussion [inaudible] but I really do not know a thing about them.

SM (01:16:28):
Here are some of the names, just quick replies. You have already kind of mentioned about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, so I do not have to say anything more. Timothy Leary?

ME (01:16:35):
Yeah, he is out there with the flower people and the LSD and the drugs and tuning in and turning on and dropping out. What can one say? Anything where you get into drug things, it is a little hard to have any rational discourse about it because it is not a rational-

SM (01:16:57):
Your thoughts on the Black Panthers, which includes Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis? That, George Jackson, Norman, the one that was killed in Chicago? Just your thoughts on the Black Panther Party?

ME (01:17:17):
Well, I think the Panthers were a very serious power. I had run into them on the campuses. They were pretty formidable folks. They would come to my lectures with bandoliers of ammunition, and so on. I remember that. Interesting that Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver, I do not know about Kathleen, but Eldridge Cleaver seemed very, very disenchanted with the whole left thing. And what disenchanted him was he went to places like Cuba, and he went into Russia, and he hated it. And, towards the end, he became almost a conservative [inaudible].

SM (01:18:01):
I remember that. And he also was living on the streets of LA, very sad. His wife is a lawyer, a very successful lawyer at Emory University Law School.

ME (01:18:10):
Is she down at Emory?

SM (01:18:11):
Yeah, she is very good.

ME (01:18:15):
No, that is the sad thing about some of those folks, and Hoffman, that they ended up like that.

SM (01:18:21):
Yeah, he was shot, you know?

ME (01:18:24):
Yeah, well, a lot of them died.

SM (01:18:26):
Yeah, Angela Davis is still going strong, a professor Santa Cruz.

ME (01:18:31):
Professor at Santa Cruz, right.

SM (01:18:33):
Yeah, Bobby Seale is writing cookbooks, or something like that.

ME (01:18:36):
Is he?

SM (01:18:38):
Yeah, just a quick comment on Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew?

ME (01:18:40):
I was never a huge fan of Nixon. Initially, I was not of Agnew. But Agnew, contrary to most people in politics, moved from left to right. Usually, particularly in Republicans, it goes the other way. Nixon is a good example. Agnew started out as a Rockefeller person. I do not know if you knew that?

SM (01:19:10):
No, I did not.

ME (01:19:11):
He was the Governor or Maryland here.

SM (01:19:12):
Right.

ME (01:19:13):
And he sort of identified with the Rockefeller wing of the Party. And that is one reason Nixon picked him was that he thought he had a way of getting Rockefeller without Rockefeller. And but then Agnew sort of blossomed as this right wing critic in the media, something like Pat Buchanan. And I met Agnew once, only once when he was Vice President. I wrote about him in National Review. And I think that he was sort of truly turned in a more right wing direction. And then, of course, he crashed and burned in (19)73 and that stuff caught up with him from Maryland. I do not know the details about that, but I remember that happening. And Nixon, I always felt, was trying to overcome the problems that he created for himself. In his case, he was always trying to reach out more and more to people on the other side. And I am not sure how philosophically-oriented he might have been. I give him top marks for what he did in his case, [inaudible]. For whatever reason, he was crucial in that case. I have been studying that case very carefully in a book that I am working on. And he was never forgiven for that by the left to this day, and I think he was trying to make up for that in some of things he did. Of course, he was very ambitious. He wanted to be President, became President. And it was always this balancing, and that is what I did not like.

SM (01:20:53):
Eugene McCarthy? Just quick thoughts on him, and George McGovern?

ME (01:21:05):
I knew both of them. I personally liked both of them. Gene McCarthy, I just happened to meet. We shared a dais together at some meeting back in the 70s, and I enjoyed chatting with him. I thought he was a very interesting and intelligent person, very different from almost anybody else in American politics that I have known, but liked him. And I supported him in (19)68 being a Republican. Senator McGovern, I debated in 1973. We had a great debate in Indianapolis at Butler University, 3,000 people.

SM (01:21:53):
Wow.

ME (01:21:55):
And I liked him. I do not know if he liked be. I thought he was a well-meaning man, a man of principle, principles I did not necessarily agree with, who maybe himself went through some changes later, and I do not know that. But I found he was an amiable fellow and I liked him.

SM (01:22:24):
He was a World War Two hero and he never talked about it.

ME (01:22:25):
He was. He was.

SM (01:22:27):
28 missions over Europe.

ME (01:22:28):
Right. That is right.

SM (01:22:30):
I think he got a Purple Heart for that, and he never talked about it.

ME (01:22:32):
No, he did not.

SM (01:22:33):
He was a humble person.

ME (01:22:34):
He was.

SM (01:22:34):
John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, LBJ? The three of them, just quick comments? Just your thoughts?

ME (01:22:47):
The Kennedys are very, very different from their image. They were, essentially, conservative. And I would just point out to you, you were talking about Joe McCarthy, they were friends with Joe McCarthy.

SM (01:22:48):
Right.

ME (01:22:48):
And Bobby Kennedy worked for Joe, [inaudible]. And old man Kennedy, Joe Kennedy was McCarthy's [inaudible].

SM (01:22:48):
And he dated Sargent Shriver's wife at one time.

ME (01:23:22):
Yes, Eunice. He did. And there are many interconnections there, McCarthy and the Kennedys. And Kennedy's people were very much of the ilk of conservative, Catholic Democrats. And Jack Kennedy did a mixture of things in his very short time as president, some you would not know. Some of the things he did were [inaudible] tax cuts, were used by the late Jack Kemp to justify the Reagan tax cuts, supply side stuff under Jack Kennedy back in the early (19)60s. And he had all the anti-Communist rhetoric and the Cold War-type posture. But then he had other people around him like Schlessinger and Sorensen. Certainly Sorensen had a very different outlook. So, again, a balancing act. They are all kind of doing things. Bobby, I think, was a much tougher customer, and maybe more calculating. And I think that is what Gene McCarthy did not like. But, again, if you look at the way Bobby Kennedy ran in (19)68, he was running on, basically, a conservative campaign. "We got to get away from big government," is what he was saying. "We need reforms, decentralization of tariffs," talking about stuff like that. But, of course, he was shot down in June of (19)68, so that was the end of that. But they were very different from the image of this Camelot stuff.

SM (01:25:12):
Your thoughts, quick at the end, McNamara, who just passed away?

ME (01:25:20):
I never cared for McNamara. I did not know much about him. I thought that the whole approach to the war, which he later repudiated-

SM (01:25:32):
In retrospect, yeah.

ME (01:25:34):
Yeah, it was wrong. All this body count stuff. And, of course, you look at it logically, and I am not military expert at all [inaudible], but if you have a war in which you are not trying to win, where you are just trying not to lose, and you do not really try to take strategic objectives... In other words, they are not trying to go out and take Hanoi. They were not trying to do that.

SM (01:25:57):
Is this the new one? You can continue, okay.

ME (01:25:57):
Well, again, remind me what we were talking about?

SM (01:26:17):
You were talking about McNamara.

ME (01:26:19):
Yeah. You look at the situation there... Getting back to World War Two there was a lot of, "So, today we captured whatever. We crossed the Rhine. We are now on the outskirts of Berlin." That is the way you measured what was happening in that war. Vietnam was not like that. No advancing through, taking Hanoi, or whatever. So how do you measure who is winning and who's losing? The answer is how many people you have killed, and that is where the body count.

ME (01:27:03):
... answering how many people you have killed, and that is where the body count came from. I remember even McNamara was [inaudible]. He was seemingly very warm and very [inaudible] as secretary.

SM (01:27:12):
In my interview with Senator McCarthy, which in retrospect had just come out within six months after I interviewed him, he said it was a bunch of garbage. He was furious at him.

ME (01:27:20):
Oh, McNamara.

SM (01:27:22):
Yeah, at McNamara. Because he goes off in (19)67 to go to Aspen and ski, when he left in (19)67. He knew years before that this was a failure, and he should have told President Johnson and really been strong with him.

ME (01:27:36):
Well, J. McCarthy would have known a lot more about it than I do.

SM (01:27:42):
A couple other names here. George Wallace, thoughts on him?

ME (01:27:45):
Wallace was a major factor in what we were talking about earlier, the collapse of the Democratic Coalition, that and the Roosevelt Coalition. That had depended on holding the South. The solid South always meant solidly democratic. Thanks to Wallace, although it had been eroding before, by (19)68 that was no longer the case. And the whole nature of our politics changed because the South was uncoupled from the Democratic Party. Now, if you look at the majorities, most of the people are Republicans. By far, the largest number of their senators are from down there, in the South. Two Republican senators from Mississippi, two from Texas, two are from Georgia, two from South Carolina and so on. Well, prior to 1968 that was almost inconceivable. And now it is just wall-to-wall Republicans all over the place in the South. That was a huge change in American politics, and Wallace was a major factor in that.

SM (01:29:07):
Of course, he was gunned down as well.

ME (01:29:10):
(19)72 election.

SM (01:29:12):
During that-

ME (01:29:12):
Right out here in Laurel, Maryland. Right here.

SM (01:29:15):
Your thoughts on the Berrigan Brothers, Daniel and Philip?

ME (01:29:18):
Do not know much about them. They were just part of that whole mix. That is all I remember.

SM (01:29:22):
What about Dr. Benjamin Spock?

ME (01:29:24):
Same thing. I did not pay a lot of attention to those people. They were there, they were being promoted, but I did not spend a lot of time studying what they were doing.

SM (01:29:34):
How about Tom Hayden?

ME (01:29:36):
Same thing. Hayden, of course, he and I were kind of on opposite sides from the beginning. Port Huron Statement, SDS, I was [inaudible] statement.

SM (01:29:48):
Did you ever debate him at all?

ME (01:29:49):
Never met him. No. I debated a bunch of those people. Clark Kissinger and... but never Hayden.

SM (01:29:56):
What did you think of that Chicago Eight trial that had Bobby Seale and Rennie Davis, and Dave Dellinger, and that whole group?

ME (01:30:05):
Well, [inaudible] the same. Joe Hoffman.

SM (01:30:06):
Julius Hoffman. Right.

ME (01:30:13):
Yeah. That was just more of that strategy, provoke, provoke, violence, provoke oppression, and then that becomes a pretext for more protest.

SM (01:30:19):
What about the women leaders like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan. How important would you look at that era?

ME (01:30:27):
They were pretty darn important.

SM (01:30:27):
How important were they?

ME (01:30:38):
They were important. Not in a good way, from my standpoint. What they did was that they were part of this sort of process by which protest against the liberal establishment was always to be more left than the establishment. So that you had a situation where people of my persuasion were protesting against big government and that oppression and so forth and so on, and therefore we need more freedom. All of a sudden comes the feminists saying, with all this oppression we need more regulation. We need to do something to stop people from being oppressive to women, so they sort of... It was sort of a jiu-jitsu effect there of turning the protest thing in a more leftward direction. And that was what I thought mainly about that. I did not follow it very closely. It was kind of hard not to know about it, because it was everywhere.

SM (01:31:36):
Right.

ME (01:31:36):
But that is about all I have to say about it.

SM (01:31:36):
Getting down to the final one here. There is just a couple names. The importance of Tet. How important was Tet?

ME (01:31:48):
Very important.

SM (01:31:49):
(19)68. Because that is...

ME (01:31:53):
Very important. What happened was, and I am sure you know this as well as I, there was actually military defeat for the North Vietnamese, was portrayed the opposite by Walter Cronkite and others as this terrible defeat for the Americans. And that psychology was what it meant, [inaudible] defeat. And really started the negativism. That was also in (19)68.

SM (01:32:21):
That was early (19)68, yes.

ME (01:32:30):
But again, there was a guy named Peter Braestrup. I do not know if you know about Peter Braestrup. He wrote a book called the Big Story. His book, you might want to get it. Published by [inaudible]. He was The Washington Post correspondent in Saigon at the time of Tet.

SM (01:32:44):
Name of the book?

ME (01:32:44):
Big Story.

SM (01:32:44):
Okay.

ME (01:32:50):
And he, Peter, I knew Peter slightly, later, shows it in great detail. And he shows how the media took what was basically a Communist defeat and turned it into a Communist win. And he was a correspondent for The Washington Post.

SM (01:33:07):
Mm-hmm.

ME (01:33:12):
So it was huge. It was very decisive in terms of that war, because that war was shit from the beginning. And I, again, I have not studied it carefully, and I had not even thought about it in years. Was a liberal war. It was a war from the beginning under Kennedy and then Johnson fought. McNamara. Dean, Russ, all these people. It was a liberal establishmentarian fight. The best and the brightest [inaudible], who thought they knew what was good for Vietnam. And what was good for Vietnam was to overthrow Diem and get a different government in there that would be more democratic, and so they did that. They overthrew him. And I think McNamara, to his credit, was opposed to that, but Russ was there. And Russ, he had been involved in the previous thing over [inaudible] Chiang Kai‐shek. He knew all about overthrowing our allies. And that whole thing, all that presumption is a good example of why people became very disenchanted with American foreign policy, this idea that it is up to us to go around the world setting it right, everything that is wrong. Is not going to work, for one thing, and it leads to all kinds of wars and problems, and you see that continuing even Iraq and all of that. It is the same mindset.

SM (01:34:54):
Two thoughts on your response, one of them is things that I have read is that Eisenhower encouraged Kennedy not to get out of Vietnam, and that the actual day of the inauguration, [inaudible] at the White House, before they got into the cars, he was talking to Eisenhower in the White House about Vietnam, trying to get his thoughts on it. Secondly, in Sorensen's recent book, which I read, which I think is pretty good, he is a great writer, he claims that Kennedy wanted the overthrow, but he did not want the murder, and that Kennedy was furious when he found out about the killing.

ME (01:35:31):
You would have a hard time overthrow without a murder.

SM (01:35:34):
Yeah. They were supposed to be escorted out of the country to France, that is what Kennedy thought, supposedly.

ME (01:35:39):
Well, when you have a coup d'etat, the military, little hard to fine tune it. You have got people that know, military guys, that Diem, for all his faults, probably is a more popular leader than they were. Nobody elected them to anything.

SM (01:36:01):
Mm-hmm.

ME (01:36:04):
So get rid of him. And they killed him and his brother. So Kennedy had that blood on his hands. [inaudible] "I just wanted a coup, but not to kill him," so that is hard to do.

SM (01:36:19):
Three more names and then I have one final question. Daniel Ellsberg.

ME (01:36:26):
Well, it is funny, I read the Pentagon Papers. Why in the world... I am no supporter of Ellsberg. Why the Nixon administration went to the mat to protect those papers, I will never know. They were basically showing how Kennedy and Johnson had screwed up. That is what they showed. And why in the world would the U.S. Government go to the mat... the Nixon government, go to the mat to hold those back, I did not understand. And that is about all I have to remember there.

SM (01:37:04):
The thing I always remember growing up was the big four, the civil rights leaders and Martin Luther King, Wilkins, Whitney Young, James Farmer. Your thoughts on them as leaders of that time, particularly Dr. King and that group, that foursome.

ME (01:37:20):
Well, I think he did not want to [inaudible].

SM (01:37:28):
He found Farmer.

ME (01:37:30):
Yeah. Cole.

SM (01:37:33):
Kissick, I think.

ME (01:37:34):
Oh, Kissick, [inaudible]. Yeah.

SM (01:37:34):
[inaudible] Yeah.

ME (01:37:37):
I did not know a lot about those people. Certainly, Dr. King was a tremendously charismatic leader. There were all kinds of internal things there. I do not know if you have read David Garrow's book about-

SM (01:37:50):
Yeah, I-

ME (01:37:52):
Between King and the Kennedys. And all this to-do about the wiretapping of Dr. King that was authorized by Bobby Kennedy.

SM (01:37:59):
Yeah. [inaudible]

ME (01:38:00):
And with the approval of Jack Kennedy. So very different from this mythology of all these heroes together, working with civil rights. Here is President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy authorizing this, and they tried to get King to get rid of a couple of people in his entourage. One of them was a guy named Stanley Levison, and the other one was Hunter Pitts O'Dell. They were both commies. They were known commies, so Garrow says, and I think he i's right. And that is why they authorized a wiretap. And King had told them... They took him to the White House, in the Rose Garden, "Get rid of these people. They are bad. They are trying to corrupt the civil rights movement." And King said that he would, but he did not. And so that is why that was going on. Well, that is very different from the standard story about Dr. King and the Kennedys, and Bobby, and civil rights, and they are all in it together. Dion singing you got Abraham, Martin and John, All of that. The reality is quite-

SM (01:39:17):
I think it is pretty confusing too as to who was the one that encouraged President Kennedy to call the Kings to try to get Dr. King out of jail, because I read Sargent Shriver's book, and supposedly he is involved with getting the credit. I have read that Bobby Kennedy was somewhat involved. But I think the true hero of this is Harris Walker, because I believe it was Harris Walker who-

ME (01:39:39):
[inaudible]

SM (01:39:40):
And I know Senator Walker, and he is such a humble man that he would probably take the back seat to... He is the man.

ME (01:39:47):
Would not had a [inaudible].

SM (01:39:48):
Yeah.

ME (01:39:50):
And Kennedy, he had a political [inaudible].

SM (01:39:51):
Right. He was pragmatic. Yeah. Barry Goldwater.

ME (01:39:57):
Well, I knew Senator Goldwater somewhat, and I was a supporter of his, but he was an unusual person also. And he was very much his own man. He went his own way. He did things that I thought were not wise. I remember sitting in my living room, must have been 1960, what, September of 1964, in Indianapolis. And I am hearing a report that Goldwater had gone to Tennessee and attacked TVA. Was this smart to do this? And then he went to St. Petersburg in Florida and criticized Social Security. So he is going around almost deliberately provoking these constituencies, when he already has enough problems to keep him busy. But it was just his nature. He was a very independent person. And of course, I guess if he had not been very independent, he would not have made the race, because he never had a prayer from the beginning. He knew that. We all knew it. And he was a very courageous man. But he was his own man. He went his own way. Not always the way that I personally would have advised.

SM (01:41:21):
Two final things, and then the [inaudible] question. The Cambodian invasion of 1970 which ended up [inaudible] Kent State, [inaudible] the country erupting. There were rumors that we had already been in there, and yet [inaudible]. Nixon's speech at nine o'clock on the night of April 30th, 1970 was historic to me, because it set a chain up. Was it necessary to go into Cambodia?

ME (01:41:50):
Well, again, my knowledge of it is very remote, but basically what I recall is that the North Vietnamese were using that as a sanctuary.

SM (01:41:58):
Yes.

ME (01:42:01):
So that was one of the problems in the whole war was that they had these sanctuaries where they could retreat and they were safe. This started in Korea, where [inaudible] get back close to [inaudible], they were safe. And I think, as I remember, the Cambodian government was in favor of what Nixon did. So, the notion that we were invading Cambodia, we were not. We were just trying to stop the North Vietnamese from using it as a raft to invade South Vietnam. But that is about it. I do not really know much more about it.

SM (01:42:42):
The last question I have, and that is just about the music, the culture of the era. The movies, the rock music, Motown, folk music, social message. I interviewed Peter Seeger from the [inaudible].

ME (01:42:57):
Pete Seeger?

SM (01:42:59):
Yep. Pete was raised by his father to say that making a name for yourself is not what the music is about. It is about making sure that the people-

ME (01:43:08):
[inaudible] song of Pete Seeger.

SM (01:43:09):
Well, this is actually Pete Seeger.

ME (01:43:11):
The Pete Seeger.

SM (01:43:12):
The Pete Seeger.

ME (01:43:12):
The man.

SM (01:43:13):
Yeah, the man. I interviewed him a week ago in Topeka, New York.

ME (01:43:16):
How old is he now?

SM (01:43:16):
He is 90.

ME (01:43:16):
Yeah.

SM (01:43:21):
But he is still sharp as a... He forgets. He is very forgetful, but when you get him in a room, he is like an encyclopedia. He does not forget things when he is not distracted. And he was taught by his father that the purpose of the music is for people to remember the words so they continue to sing the music. It is not so much that we are remembered as the musicians, it is that the music itself is remembered because of the messages, the social messages.

ME (01:43:47):
Well, certainly, Seeger, that was what he did. Those people were very skillful with it. And I am sort of an anomaly, because I liked a lot of the music. I am a big pop music fan.

SM (01:44:03):
Right.

ME (01:44:06):
So, I remember the (19)60s music very well, and I remember all the different... not everything, but I remember lots of different strains in it, and people who did it. There were a lot of things going on in the (19)60s music that really had nothing to do with revolution. I saw in the paper the other day, maybe a week ago, that Gordon Waller had died. Gordon Waller was Gordon to Peter and Gordon.

SM (01:44:29):
Oh, that is right. Yes.

ME (01:44:39):
And he was 60-something. Well, that music had nothing to do with... A World Without Love and Lady Godiva, those were Peter and Gordon songs. I loved those songs. Just good music. They did not really have a lot of social significance, at least that I am used to. But then you think of all the Dylan stuff and... And Dylan is another person who is, I think, in reality, is very different from his image. Dylan, there is an undercurrent in Dylan, had this very negative attitude towards some of these hippy types. And when you think... Do you remember his songs, and one is called-

SM (01:45:16):
Rolling Stone, I know.

ME (01:45:17):
Right. And How Does It Feel. I mean, think of that. Think what that song says. To be young, [inaudible], like a rolling stone. It is a very hostile type song. And then Positively 4th Street. These songs are not peace and love, they are very putting down people that he thinks are pretentious. And they are definitely people on that side. And some of this has come out in Dylan recently. I have not paid a lot of attention to Dylan. I was never a big fan of Dylan, but he wrote some really good stuff. Different. Different from what the conventional image is. So to me, that music, some of it is just good music. I like it to this day.

SM (01:46:08):
Yeah. Of course, folk music of that era, well, you had Pete Seeger, who was about 50 then, at the time that all this is happening, but then you have got Arlo Guthrie, and you got-

ME (01:46:19):
Guthrie. Woody Guthrie.

SM (01:46:21):
Joan Baez.

ME (01:46:22):
Woody before all of them.

SM (01:46:23):
Then you got Joan Baez and Tom Paxton, and-

ME (01:46:26):
All of that.

SM (01:46:27):
David Bromberg. Cohen. The list goes on and on. Judy Collins. Joni Mitchell. But a lot of them had the social messages. I get back to the fact that when the criticism of the generation has a lot to do with their mores and their values, there is a lot of values in this music, because a lot of the words come out. And even as you head into the 1970s, Black music is changing, because Marvin Gaye is doing What's Going On, and making criticism what is going on in the inner-city and... So, it is Black, it is white, it is folk, it is everything. And then of course, you go back to Elvis back in the (19)50s, which is against the modern trend. They could not even show his... That was the year of-

ME (01:47:14):
The Ed Sullivan Show.

SM (01:47:16):
And the question is, when people like that went on TV and young Boomers saw them, I mean, what are they hiding here? I mean, come on, man.

ME (01:47:24):
Well, music is Dionysian really, the desire to express yourself, maybe to destroy things if they are in your way. Music, rock and roll music, has a lot of that in it, there is no question of that. And of course it has the sexual themes, and sometimes the drug themes. But a lot of it is just music is music, and some of it is good and some of it is not so good. I mean, it just depends on... To me, a song like, well, let is go back to Dylan. We were just talking about some of the stuff he wrote. I thought it was pretty good. Pretty darn good music, but some of it I did not like. I did not like everything he wrote. And sometimes I thought his message was very harsh, very negative, but he was a talent. And so, some of it I like, some I did not. And so that would be true of many of these people. I would take somebody even like... You mentioned Arlo Guthrie. I thought The City of New Orleans was a great song. That is just a tremendous song.

SM (01:48:41):
Alice's Restaurant.

ME (01:48:43):
Alice's Restaurant.

SM (01:48:44):
Yeah.

ME (01:48:46):
But City of New Orleans is a wonderful song, really powerful. And it has... I do not know, what is the significance of it? It is a lament for the fading away of the railroads, and I can totally identify with that. My grandfather was an engineer on the Illinois Central, as you might have [inaudible] in The City of New Orleans line. And I think he might have been on the City of New Orleans. It ran from Chicago down to New Orleans. I think that is just a fabulous song and I can listen to it anytime.

SM (01:49:27):
The music of that era also, you think that Elvis was an American, but The Beatles were English, and the British invasion just changed American music.

ME (01:49:33):
Huge. Huge.

SM (01:49:34):
And of course, folk was here.

ME (01:49:36):
Well, Peter and Gordon were British. They were both British.

SM (01:49:38):
Cannot forget the jazz of the (19)50s, that we never really talk much about. That influenced some of the Black entertainers in Motown in (19)60s, and just so much here. When the best history books are written in 50 years after event, what do you think historians will say about the Boomer generation? I know we are talking about... I know you have already given your comments about the- [inaudible]

ME (01:49:58):
I think-

SM (01:49:59):
That we must be very inclusive of both conservative and liberal students. When we get beyond 50, as the Boomers pass away, what will they say about this era? The (19)60s, to me, ended in 1973 too. Because a lot of people think the (19)60s were really (19)63 to (19)73, because when streaking started happening on college campuses it was (19)73, and I will never forget Ohio State. Worked Ohio University my first year, they did come on up here... A friend of mine said, "The (19)60s are over." I said, "What do you mean?" "They are streaking. It is over."

ME (01:50:39):
You were at Ohio University?

SM (01:50:40):
I worked at Ohio University in Lancaster Campus from (19)72 to (19)76 in my first job. And they had actually purged the students out of Ohio University when I got there from 18,000 to 13,500 campus, and the branch campus were kind of saving the university as backup now, but they were afraid to send their kids off to that liberal Ohio University, which was much more liberal than Ohio State or even Kent State.

ME (01:51:08):
Yeah. Yeah. I was on many a campus in Ohio in my day. [inaudible] Antioch.

SM (01:51:16):
Oh, yes.

ME (01:51:16):
[inaudible]

SM (01:51:17):
Oh, yeah.

ME (01:51:18):
They got a liberal campus.

SM (01:51:19):
Ohio State?

ME (01:51:20):
Oh, many times Ohio State.

SM (01:51:23):
You were probably in Mershon, were not you? Were you going to Mershon Auditorium, or...

ME (01:51:26):
I could not tell you.

SM (01:51:27):
Yeah. Sykes Union had big spaces there.

ME (01:51:27):
Ohio Wesleyan.

SM (01:51:27):
Yep.

ME (01:51:32):
In Delaware, Ohio.

SM (01:51:35):
Denison University.

ME (01:51:36):
Yeah, I have been to Denison many times. Miami.

SM (01:51:38):
Capital University in Columbus.

ME (01:51:40):
Not there.

SM (01:51:44):
Wayne State. That was a Black school.

ME (01:51:46):
Yeah. Wright State.

SM (01:51:47):
Yep. Yep.

ME (01:51:48):
Youngstown.

SM (01:51:49):
Miami of Ohio.

ME (01:51:51):
Many times.

SM (01:51:53):
Yeah.

ME (01:51:53):
I was always-

SM (01:51:55):
Bowling Green.

ME (01:51:55):
Bowling Green.

SM (01:51:56):
Dayton.

ME (01:51:57):
Dayton, yep.

SM (01:51:58):
Yep.

ME (01:51:59):
All of them. Every one of them.

SM (01:51:59):
Cleveland State?

ME (01:52:00):
Not Cleveland State. I do not think.

SM (01:52:03):
University of Akron?

ME (01:52:04):
I think I did Akron.

SM (01:52:05):
Yeah. When the best books are written, what do you think they are going to say? What do you think, if they define the era?

ME (01:52:13):
Depends on who writes the books. I think that looking back on what happened in the 40 years from 19... 50 years. 1945 to 1990, that if you wanted to sum up what that generation did, it was pretty good. I would not knock it. That was the generation that brought about the fall of Communism. Something I never thought I would live to see. That happened. That was done by people at that age cohort, of course, it is a big cohort, it is huge, [inaudible] so many people [inaudible]. But that is not too bad. So I would tip my hat.

SM (01:53:19):
To the Boomers.

ME (01:53:19):
Yeah.

SM (01:53:22):
Thank you very much.

ME (01:53:23):
Thank you, Steve. I know you want me to sign this again. I will do it.

SM (01:53:26):
Yeah, want you to sign that.

(End of Interview)

Date of Interview

2009-08-06

Interviewer

Stephen McKiernan

Interviewee

M. Stanton (Medford Stanton) Evans, 1934-2015

Biographical Text

Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist, and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his Bachelor's degree in English from Yale University and his Master's degree in Economics from New York University.

Duration

113:29

Language

English

Digital Publisher

Binghamton University Libraries

Digital Format

audio/mp4

Material Type

Sound

Interview Format

Audio

Subject LCSH

Journalists; Authors; Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015--Interviews

Rights Statement

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Keywords

Beat Writers; Communism; The Goldwater Movement; Free Speech Movement; Change agents; liberals; Civil War; Ken Burns; Edmund Muskie; Vietnam policies; College students; Activism; Peace Corps; Voluntarism; Conservatives; Trust; Lyndon B. Johnson; The Hollywood Ten; Joseph McCarthy; Richard Nixon; Birch Bayh; FBI surveillance

Files

Stanton Evans.jpg

Item Information

About this Collection

Collection Description

Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s and 2010s. The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and… More

Link to Collection Overview

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Citation

“Interview with Medford Stanton Evans,” Digital Collections, accessed March 29, 2024, https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/878.