Interview with Dr. Steven Hayward

Hayward, Steven F. ; McKiernan, Stephen

Steve Hayward is an author, political commentator, and policy scholar. He currently serves as a Fellow at Ashland University's Ashbrook Center where he directs a program in political economy. Hayward earned a B.S. in Business and Administrative Studies from Lewis and Clark College and a Ph.D. in American Studies and M.A. in Government from Claremont Graduate School.

2009-07-28

In copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

66:22

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Steven Hayward
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 28 July 2009
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:06):
Today's interview will be with Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute, which is a conservative institution in Washington, DC. This is July 28th, 2009. And this interview is part of my oral history project on the boomer generation. Looking at the (19)60s, the (19)70s, the (19)80s, some of the characteristics of the boomers and certainly, excuse me, issues related to boomer lives and the events that shaped their lives. This is... All right, the first question I would like to ask, when you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

SH (00:00:50):
It is just like word association, feel like a war shark test, hippies, rock music, Vietnam War protests. Gosh, I do not know. I struggle a bit. I write about these things. It takes me a long time to come up with my generalization, so it is hard on the spur the moment. But yeah. Well, I mean, I guess a lot of ferment and turmoil and uncertainty and changing rules of the game. And gosh, you could go on forever about all this. Maybe some of your follow-up questions will tease out more.

SM (00:01:23):
Is there one specific event in your life or in your mind that shaped you when you were young?

SH (00:01:30):
No, not really. I mean, I was fascinated by a lot of things. The space program, of course, that was one of the things that went right in the (19)60s was getting to the moon when everything else seemed to be going wrong. I was born in 1958, so by 1970, I am only 11 years old, so I am not quite... I mean, I was aware of what was going on around me. Looking back, I think the whole Woodstock thing was kind of an interesting moment. Because as I write in my book, the media and all the deep thinkers, and of course the people on the new left and the so-called youth or countercultural movement thought of that as the beginning of a new civilization. I mean, you had Time Magazine and the New York Times both talking about how Woodstock youth really were different, and that there really was something new to the counterculture. And in fact, what was it, four or five months later, you had the attempt to do a follow-up on the West Coast at Altamont, which ended up as a disaster. And that was kind of the end of the whole thing. The whole end... all the attempts trying to do Woodstock reunions have really worked. So Woodstock was kind of a one-off, and were it not for the neighbors and people in the surrounding area... I mean, back up a step, the Woodstock was supposed to be 50,000 deep or something, it ended up being 500,000 or something like that. And so they did not have toilets, they did not have food, they did not have water. And if not for the neighbors in those surrounding towns, you could have had a real catastrophe there. So that was always... I guess I am rambling a bit here, but what comes to sight out of Woodstock and a lot of other parts of those years was the pretentiousness of the baby boomers and the so-called counterculture or youth movement, that they really did represent some new phase of human nature, when in fact there really is no escaping some of the basic facts of human nature.

SM (00:03:22):
Following up to that question, what do you think, if you were to look at the boomer generation again, that is defined by the scholars as those born between (19)46 and (19)64 that fall within that generation, what do you think are the strongest characteristics of that group and the weakest characteristics of that generation?

SH (00:03:43):
Oh, let us see. Oh, boy. Yeah, that is another hard question to generalize about. I mean... Yeah, gosh, I do not have a good answer for that question. I mean, I sort of repair to some of my general... I mean, I think the scholars and intellectuals of that period share the same defects with the broader generation, which is a lot of self-indulgence. A lot of self-assertion. I think there is the idea that is quite typical of baby boomers is I mean, a popular form of it is we can have it all, right? But then the sort of more serious intellectual version is that through triumph of the will ideas, I mean, it is very nichey. I think it is people thinking that the only real obstacles to changing the world are failures of our willpower. And so there is a disregard of what conservatives would recognize as some of the lessons and requirements of tradition and authority. And, Tom, you know, those are some general traits, I think you see, I am trying to think of some good examples, but hard-pressed off the top of my head, but they will probably come to me later anyway.

SM (00:04:59):
Do you think that the term activism, because it was a highly activist period, not only in terms of the anti-war movement and the civil rights and the women's movement and the environmental, gay, lesbian, Chicano, Native American, all these movements came about at that time. Do you look at that as a positive quality in America?

SH (00:05:19):
Well, no. And it can be qualified this way, you had the activism for activism's sake. You had the notion that commitment was the way you exhibited your moral purity or moral seriousness. I mean, if you go back a century, let us take the abolitionists, who crusading to abolish slavery, or the early women's movement of people who wanted votes for women and suffragette movement. I mean, they were activists too, but their activism was subordinate to a concrete moral purpose that you could argue about. Whereas I think what you tended to see coming out of the (19)60s and (19)70s was activism for activism's sake. Activism became its own moral category. And you say... In other words, people would say, "I am an activist," and by the way, what you were activist about just flowed from one thing to another because Martin Luther King was a civil rights activist, but the civil rights took the priority over activism, right, whereas I think later in the (19)60s and the (19)70s, as I say, activism became its own moral category, and commitment became the most important moral tribute or moral... what do I say, a moral attribute, but in fact that it represents a certain value-free abstraction from more hard headed thinking about what the moral purpose is behind it. I mean, let us look at, for example, one of the great cultural divides would be abortion. Both pro-choice and pro-life people think of themselves as activists, but obviously on a very different side of a moral divide. But the media tends to treat them equally as well. They are all activists. And so that is why I think the term activism has acquired its own status, separate and apart from thinking about what it is you are activist about.

SM (00:07:05):
Good point. One of the things we would see on television, say in the (19)90s, we would see when Newt Gingrich came to power in (19)94, really, the Republican leadership and the conservative leadership, you would see George Will make comments about it. You would see Newt Gingrich and other people say that... They would really criticize that whole era, that boomer generation because of the breakdown of values, the breakdown of American society, the drug culture, the divorce rate, no respect for authority. Do you think they were blowing a lot of wind there, or do you think there was some truth into what they were saying?

SH (00:07:47):
Well, no, I think there is a lot of truth to it. Here is the... Couple of problems need to be sorted out about this whole phenomenon we are talking about. We tend to think of the (19)60s as when... essentially as America's cultural revolution, like you said, with cultural revolution in China or something. And that is narrowly speaking true. But I think that something that I did not think of, I first heard James Q. Wilson suggest this idea, that in fact, the seeds of what we now criticize of the (19)60s and the (19)70s were present way back in the (19)20s and (19)30s, especially the (19)20s. I mean, you saw in modern philosophy of existentialism, of modernism in the arts, the modernist poetry of certain aspects of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, people like that, bohemian culture, some of it linked of course to radical politics, modernist literature, all the rest. The beginnings of the sexual revolution and so forth, were all very much present back in the 1920s. And what Wilson points out, and a few others, and I think Francis Fukuyama has also talked about a bit of this, is you then had the Depression and World War II in short order when you could not afford to indulge in these kind of escapes from restraint or traditional restraints or traditional morality. I mean, both the Depression and the war, which of course were global phenomenon. In other words, call the halt to the progress of the diffusion of the ideas of modernity. And then, you know, you had the 1950s, you have us and the rest of the world getting back to order. But then with the baby boom and the prosperity that comes in the post-war years, you have a return to realizing the consequences of modernist spot in the 1960s. So in other words, the 1960s are partly the culmination of a long-term philosophical change in social and philosophical thought that really could arguably go back 200 years to the enlightenment when we start explicitly throwing over authority and tradition. And you also have a demographic problem. I think it was Pat Moynihan who said the principal job of civilization is to get young people from 16 to 24. We had a lot of them there in the (19)60s and (19)70s when the kids were surging into colleges and so forth. And Moynihan's argument was you were always going to have some trouble in the (19)60s of some kind just on demographic grounds alone. Too many young kids just surging through our educational system and into the workforce and all the rest of that. You overlay all that with, as I say, the long term social currents going back a century or so along with the particular events, especially the Vietnam War in this country, civil rights and unrest in the streets. And you have quite a phenomenon. One of the curiosities of the (19)60s is that what we think of as the student movement was not just an American phenomenon. Remember, I mean, you know, you had student unrest at universities in Europe and even in Asia and even in a couple of universities behind the Iron Curtain, you had had some student riots and whatnot suggesting that there was something beyond just the war and just the domestic scene in America that was going on in the 1960s.

SM (00:11:00):
Beautiful thoughts there. What is the one event in your eyes that changed the generation forever? What do you think, if you were to ask a room full of, say, a... If you were speaking at West Chester University and a bunch of boomers, particularly those boomers that were in the first 10 years of that age group, what would you think would be the number one event to shape their lives?

SH (00:11:25):
Well, I think it would... takes a little explanation. Probably the assassination of John F. Kennedy, although it did not happen immediately. I think the most interesting work on this subject lately is Jim Pearson's book... What is the title of it? I forget the exact title. It is Camelot and the Unmaking of Modern Liberalism or something like that. James Pearson. It is worth looking up.

SM (00:11:49):
I will get it.

SH (00:11:50):
Yeah. And he makes a very interesting argument in there. Remember that before Kennedy's assassination, the big concern of the establishment liberals was... Well, the radical right, the conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society and the McCarthyites, and people like that. And liberals were all for rationality and progress and incremental reform. And of course, in the immediate hours after Kennedy's killing, and then later it became through legend as well, it had to have been some kind of right wing plot. Well, it turns out it was Oswald who was a dedicated communist. And what Pearson points out is that Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War. This was a leftist who was out to kill Kennedy because Kennedy was against Castro and so forth. And what happened is in the years since then is the left essentially lost its mind over this. Now it is the left that is in conspiracy theory. Had to be the CIA and the mob involved in killing Kennedy. It could not have been Oswald. 9/11 was an inside job. We hear all these crazy things that have continued to this day. And suddenly it has the left that is interested in conspiracy theories and has gotten somewhat irrational. And it is really kind of amazing that within three or four years after Kennedy's killing, all his leftist ideas had caught on college campuses and had overwhelmed liberals. Portland and Johnson, I think he was kind of a fuddy-duddy to the youngsters searching through the universities of six... Of course, Kennedy had been kind of a hip, stylish young guy. So anyway, I think that was sort of the watershed event in the (19)60s that... and we will never know how it would have gone if Kennedy had lived, but I think it might have gone by differently. We will never know. I mean, Johnson thought after he won the election Ford-Goldwater, he still thought his problems were going to come from the right and from populous conservatism and from the John Birch Society type. And one of the things that, for Johnson and other liberals like him, mainstream liberals, is they were completely disoriented when their "most ferocious" problems came from their left. And they never did understand that and get over it. And I think that is how we get disrupted liberalism, at least in the (19)90s. I think in a lot of ways Clinton kind of righted the ship for liberals. We will see if Obama figures this out.

SM (00:14:13):
Kind of a follow-up, that term watershed, what do you think was the water... What was the watershed moment that began the (19)60s? Because a lot of the books that have-

SH (00:14:23):
Kennedy's assassination.

SM (00:14:24):
Oh, okay.

SH (00:14:25):
Yeah. I mean, until Kennedy was killed, you are still kind of... In my book, I described that year (19)64, right around then, as the tail end of the tailfin era, I call it. And that is because, I mean, Kennedy wanted to, as he created a slogan, was, "Let us get the country moving again." But it really was a continuation of a lot of Eisenhower policies. The economy was growing okay, but not... It was roaring after the middle of the years of the (19)60s. So I think that is the event that really snapped the country out of its sort of post-war stability that you had under Eisenhower and Truman.

SM (00:15:02):
One of the other criticisms of the boomer generation is that this was a generation of 70 million or 75 million and oh, really, only 15 percent were involved in activism of any kind during this timeframe. So it was really a small number. So thus their impact was not as great as people might think. People look at that sometimes as well, that is another attack on that generation and those that were involved.

SH (00:15:30):
Well, I have a couple of thoughts on that. I mean, the number may even be smaller. I mean, in some surveys thought that the number of people involved in campus activism was 5 percent or less. However, it is 5 percent of a large number. You point out if you are talking about 70 million people, you are talking about a couple million at least. And of course, the other thing is that even if it is a tiny minority, that is irrelevant in this sense. I mean, the history of politics is small, concentrated, determined groups that determine political outcomes. I mean, that is the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union, right? It is the Nazis in Germany in the (19)30s. It is the Federalists in the United States in 1787 saying, "We need to get a new constitution because the Articles of Confederation are not working." So, the history of politics and social change is small determined groups that become the use of shade the tail that wags the dog, and they sort of drag along the rest of the generation with them. And even though you may have only two to 5 percent or even 10 percent, if you want to of people involved in activist activities or sympathizing with the ideas of the new left in the student movement, you probably have at least an equal or double that number who sympathize with it or who find themselves influenced by it, because that is the sort of social dynamic of modern mass movement. So I think that although it is an important point to keep in mind that you did not have a lot of people burning their draft cards and marching in the street, it had a strong magnetic effect on the rest of the generation, I think.

SM (00:16:56):
My next question is actually a two-part question. How important were the college students of that era? And we are talking late (19)60s, and oftentimes when we talk about the (19)60s, we are talking about college students up to about 1973, because it is hard... The (19)70s is often thought about after, sometimes even after the helicopters took off from Vietnam in (19)75. So it is hard to separate those first three to four years in the (19)70s. How important were college students in ending the Vietnam War, number one? And number two, how important was this generation with respect to having a very important influence on the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and all the other movements?

SH (00:17:38):
Yeah. Got to take those in several different parts. I think it is overstated or exaggerated that the anti-war movement actually stopped the war. That that is been their big claim ever since then, "And gee, we stopped the war." In fact, as Todd Gitlin among others recognized, although the war was unpopular, the anti-war movement was even more unpopular with American people. Americans are funny that way. I mean, majority of Americans, they are capable of having conflicting ideas in their heads at the same time. We call that cognitive dissonance. So while the war was increasingly unpopular in the later (19)60s and especially into the (19)70s, a lot of people also do not like anti-war protestors. Whoop, hello? Hello?

SM (00:18:23):
I am here.

SH (00:18:24):
Hm. Uh-oh. Somebody-

SM (00:18:29):
That is me. I am okay. That is not my phone. We are okay.

SH (00:18:34):
Oh, okay. I am not sure what happened there. I have another extension here someone may be using. Anyway...

SM (00:18:37):
Okay.

SH (00:18:39):
Where was I in all that? Oh, the war story is a complicated one. I mean, I argue that the war was lost very early on, as early as 1964 when the Johnson administration decided they were not going to fight it like a real war, but fight it like an exercise in game theory. Once you committed that as your basic strategy, you were not going to win that war in any sense. And then the American people, you continued to support the war majority according to polls as late as mid-1968. And it was after Ted that they started losing heart for it. But yeah, it was... Hold on a second. Oh, mom, who did that? Huh? Nothing. Never mind. I got someone... Anyway.

SM (00:19:26):
Okay. It is okay.

SH (00:19:29):
So where was I? Yeah, I mean, yeah, that is a complicated story. I mean, Nixon, I think knew the war was lost, but wanted to get us out in some reasonable fashion, and that is why it took another few years. But the student movement... By the way, the anti-war movement really loses steam starting about 1971, I think, when draft is abolished, right?

SM (00:19:48):
Right.

SH (00:19:48):
That took a lot of the steam out of the anti-war movement.

SM (00:19:51):
And one of the other points is that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, if it was not for that particular group, the other groups were waning at that time.

SH (00:19:59):
Yeah, I think that is right. And one of the other things you noticed is when Nixon decided in 1972 to escalate bombing and whatnot in the spring, and then again at Christmas, the public opinion poll showed pretty strong public support for him. So at that point, we were already getting out our ground troops.

SM (00:20:17):
Right.

SH (00:20:18):
But the other question, civil rights, look, the civil rights movement, which mostly means the NAACP and people like Kang and Bill Randolph and all the others who have been toiling at that for decades, deserve the credit for making civil rights happen. An awful lot of... For the rest of the new left and the student activists and the baby boomers came to that quite late. And they showed up for the victory parade, you might say, right? Everyone is proud of marching in the South in (19)63 or (19)64, but at that point, the movement had been toiling for decades to get to that point. So that is always been a little bit of opportunism. If I were a Black civil rights leader from that era, I would have had mixed feelings about all of that. Nice to have the help, but where were you when we needed you in 1948 is what I would have been wanting to ask. And similar, the other thing, the environmental movement... The environmental movement spout itself after the civil rights movement. So the Environmental Defense Fund was sort of thought... was founded to be something like the Civil Rights Litigation Organization. But in fact, a lot of those organizations were not even founded until after the initial Clean Air Act was adopted. And quite the opposite of the civil rights, many whose organizations are now a century old.

SM (00:21:33):
You are right. When you talk about the women's and the gay and lesbian movement, I think even they will say in the beginning, they look to the civil rights movement as their...

SH (00:21:40):
As their model.

SM (00:21:40):
As their model.

SH (00:21:43):
What makes both those movements possible is prosperity. I mean, feminism does not work if you do not have prosperity. I can be flip about it a little bit, but not entirely and say, what makes the feminist movement possible is dishwashers and washing machines. Now, you can... the labor saving devices mean... and also expand educational opportunity. But all that is based on prosperity and technological improvements. So now, the ancient distinctions between male and female labor are eroded, and now women can join the workforce in any capacity at all in large numbers, which is what they did. And I always think there has been, and this is not an original thought, I always think there has been quite a distinction between what you might say, equity feminists, there would be no ordinary educated women who would like to be lawyers or doctors or managers or whatever. And then your ideological feminists who are all about gender differences and all that sort of nonsense that you get in higher education and gender studies and whatnot. That is a really tiny minority, I think. Most real women, I think, do not care anything about any of that stuff.

SM (00:22:47):
How important do you feel the boomer generation who are now in their early six... or in their sixties basically, and in aging, and many of them probably thought when they were young, they never would age.

SH (00:23:00):
Right.

SM (00:23:01):
Some still have their youthful ideas, but I am not sure really how many. What kind of an influence have they had on their children and their children's children because now they are becoming grandparents, and the millennial generation is now the largest generation in American history. There are more millennials than there were boomers, but generation X was basically their kids. And the generation Xers were the born from (19)65 to about 1980. And so what kind of influence have these boomers had, not only... I am not only talking about white boomers, African American boomers, Asian American boomers, even gay and lesbian boomers who have their own issues. What kind of an influence have they had on their kids and their kids' kids with respect to activism and having an influence in their lives in that direction?

SH (00:23:59):
Well, yeah, that is hard to say because I mean, it is hard to generalize about too much, but there is a couple of straws in the wind. I mean, the old joke is that a... One old joke is that a neo conservative is a liberal with a teenage daughter. I mean, one comparison I made in actually my next book that is coming out in a little while is the great politically charged TV show in the early (19)70s was All in the Family, right?

SM (00:24:28):
Yes.

SH (00:24:28):
Archie was the bigot and the son, Mike, Meathead, was supposed to be the enlightened liberal, right, and they were always fighting about stuff. 10 years later, the politically charged sitcom was Family Ties, right?

SM (00:24:43):
Mm-hmm.

SH (00:24:43):
And there what you had was boomer parents who had been hippies in the (19)60s who do not understand their conservative son, Alex, right?

SM (00:24:50):
Yes. Michael Fox.

SH (00:24:52):
His hero was William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman on the show. It was the exact opposite of All in the Family, just in 10 years. I mean, that really to my mind, is a difference between the Reagan years, in cultural terms, a difference between the Reagan years and the Nixon years, or the late (19)60s, early (19)70s. And I thought that was a real cultural marker of things. You know, you see other things, I mean, what I picked up from students today and people in their twenties, teenagers, is they think all this talk about the (19)60s that you folks and parents and grandparents talk about, a lot of them think it is a little puffed up and pretentious, and they have a, "What was that all about?" kind of attitude, and you guys were kind of silly. And the long hair, and God knows the bell bottom jeans and disco, the (19)70s, they look at with complete horror. So maybe that is just the wheel turning that happens in cultural terms. But you do not see, I mean, remember that in the (19)60s you had one of the big totems was the generation gap, the younger generation versus the older generation. And the younger generation... Or the older generation could understand the younger generation. I do not see that as around as much today. You do not see that represented. There has always been parents against kids a little bit, but I do not see it. It was not been blown up into what you might call a metaphysical dimension as it was in (19)60s and early (19)70s. The generation gap, you often see that in capital letters. It was a real social phenomenon. Well, I think that is gone. So to that extent, I think it is the baby boomer parents and grandparents today are maybe a little older and wiser, and their kids are not as, for whatever reasons, do not seem to be as easily swept up into some of these pretentious enthusiasms for the moral superiority of their new generation.

SM (00:26:43):
Right. I think I know your answer to this, but when I was... I am a boomer, and when I was in college, I was around friends who thought we were all the most unique generation in American history, and mainly because there was a feeling that we were going to cure everything. We are going to bring peace to the world, we are going to end racial injustice. Everything is going to be good, almost like a utopia. Your comment on that, just the feelings that be... a feeling of being the most unique generation in American history when they are young, I still think many boomers still feel that as they are old, in their old days.

SH (00:27:27):
Yeah, that is right. They probably still have that attitude somewhere consciously or subconsciously or from some level. I mean, one of the problems with the (19)60s is that the so-called establishment, the parents of the boomers went out of their way to affirm all that nonsense. In my book, my Age of Reagan book, I quote Time magazine saying... Time Magazine, remember, I think it was 1967, named the under 25 generation as Man of the Year.

SM (00:27:55):
Yeah, I have the magazine.

SH (00:27:55):
Yeah, that is the point, they called it Man of the Year, right?

SM (00:27:55):
Yeah.

SH (00:27:56):
Some of the prose in that article, if you got it is really astoundingly idiotic. This is just a new generation, but a new kind of generation, and I am paraphrasing here, but it said they really are better than their parents. They are going to really bring new hope. So if you are a kid and the establishment is telling you this, then what are you going to think? Of course you are going to run away with these intentions. I mean, that was not the only one. You had the Cox commission, Archibald Cox commission appointed by I think Johnson or somebody after Columbia University was sacked. Now, that was essentially a bunch of hooligans who trashed one of our leading universities, and the Cox commission went on about the wonderful idealism of this generation and how terrific they were. And it was just an unbelievable failure of moral... sort of moral accountability on the part of the older generation who should have... That I do not think you would see today. I do not see people today pumping up a younger generation and saying, "Oh, yeah, you are better than we are," in part because of the residue, as you say, of baby boomers who still think deep down inside, they probably are a little better than the World War II generation. And in part because I just think we are not going to run that movie over again.

SM (00:29:08):
I want to read something to you. This has a little bit to do with the meeting we had with Senator Muskie before he passed away when I was working at the university, and I took students down to Washington for our Leadership on the Rope programs. He was kind of... had just gotten out of the hospital, was not feeling well, but I am going to read this question first. Do you feel boomers are still having problems with healing from the divisions that tore the nation apart in their youth, the division between Black and white, divisions between those who support authority and those who criticize it, division between those who supported the troops and those who did not? What role has the wall played in healing divisions? Or was it primarily a healing for veterans? Do you feel that the boomer generation will go to its grave, like the Civil War generation, not truly healing? Am I wrong in thinking this or has 35 to 40 years made the statement, time heals all wounds a truth? And I want to follow it up with... We met with Senator Muskie and I asked that very question to him with 14 students in the room, and I think he was not expecting the question and he did not answer for a minute, and he almost had tears in his eyes. And then he said, "I just got out of the hospital and I had a chance in the hospital to watch the Ken Burns movies about the Civil War." And he said, "My only comment to you is that we had not healed since the Civil War." And then he went on talking about the generation that we lost due to all the men who died and making the comparisons of the populations. And I will tell you, the students, you could hear a pin drop in the room for the next 10 minutes. It was just an unbelievable experience. It was such an experience that one of my students went on to higher ed and got his PhD and that was the moment that he knew he had to go on. But your thoughts on that whole business about healing within the... Do you think there is an issue here on healing?

SH (00:31:07):
Well, yeah, I mean, I tend not to that language of healing and reconciliation and closure and all the rest of that. That is very much therapeutic baby bloomer language that we would not... Our grandparents from the World War II era, parents and grandparents, they would have never used... They would never have had midlife crises, first of all. Right? And they would not have used that therapeutic language about closure and all the rest of that. However, I do think that what is underneath all that though is, the way I sometimes put it, others have too. There is kind of a Hatfield versus McCoys intramural feud among baby boomers. I think on political terms, that is how you can explain Bill and Hillary versus Newt in the (19)90s. I mean, remember Newt calling the Clintons countercultural McGoverniks, which got everybody else that. And there was a business, by the way, last year in the presidential race, and something that, again, Sullivan and others pointed out, is that part of the genius of Obama was saying, "I am not part of all that." Hang on. It is a complicated story. But I mean, part of his genius, I think, was saying, "We ought to give a gift beyond this baby boomer feud that we have been carrying on since the (19)60s." He does not quite mean it because he is very much a product of the (19)60s and (19)70s leftism. But still, I think he had an insight there that yeah, this has now become a long running feud. The Civil War comparison I think is a pretty good one. If this is not geographical, it is ideological and cultural. And yeah, I think probably we will go to our grave with some of all that. I think they are going to have some of the young Americans for freedom fight some old SPSers in their nineties in their nursing homes, yelling at each other about the tent offensive or something. I think it will go on till the very end.

SM (00:32:51):
I know when I interviewed the late Gaylord Nelson, who I thought was a great statesman, I do not know if you ever had a chance to meet him.

SH (00:32:57):
Yeah. Never met him, but you certainly know his work.

SM (00:32:59):
Oh, my gosh. And he passed away and I went to... because he had helped us with some of our speakers and meeting people, and he came to our campus twice. He was kind of the real deal. And he always... When I asked him that question, he said, "People do not walk around Washington, DC with that they have healed on their sleeves." But he made one important point that I think was the most important memory of that meeting, he said, "But forever, it has left its impact on the body politic."

SH (00:33:29):
Yeah, that is right. Yeah. And I think it is interesting to say about Muskie. I mean, Muskie was one of those postwar liberals who I think was completely disoriented and surprised by what happened. And I mean, partly was Lyndon Johnson we know was upset about the riot. He did not understand why Blacks were rioting in Detroit and Newark and places like that after he put it all he can do for them. And I think that the new left, remember the new left was very radical, and their enemies were liberal. I think it was... I forget if it was Tom Hayden or Peter Collier, or which one of them said that our first object was to murder liberalism in its official robes. And so if you are going to establish a liberal like Muskie, you cannot understand... This is completely incomprehensible to you. And I think that explains why he hesitated in answering the question, because I think he still does not understand to this day or cannot accept it or finds it bizarre and hard to come to grips with. And I think he and people like Moynihan and others perceive how damaging this was to establishment liberalism. And it really was 20 years or more getting over it, and to some extent may still not have gotten over it. Clinton, I think, represented a walk back from the brink. I mean, Clinton signing on welfare reform, talking stuff on crime, and in other ways represented that we are no longer going to give in to the radical left and the new left on these subjects, even if he had some sympathies with it himself. But now under Obama, you have got a lot of those folks somewhat older and wiser and a little more shrewd who still believe some of that stuff, I think. As you saw this whole Gates affair the last... has been a real revealing moment, I think, for Obama and people on the left. But nonetheless, I think that is being blindsided by something that nobody could have foreseen as what so upset people like Muskie and probably Nelson too.

SM (00:35:29):
And of course, we had a chance to even have our students meet Senator Fulbright.

SH (00:35:32):
Oh, yes.

SM (00:35:33):
And he probably would fall into that same category there.

SH (00:35:38):
Yeah.

SM (00:35:38):
Overall, now that you mentioned that you were 11 when these things happened, so you are in the younger group of the boomers, but over the years, have you changed your feelings toward boomers? Obviously, you have degrees, you have done a lot of thinking and writing about it as you have gotten older. But have you been consistent in your thinking, or have you been really evolving and changing?

SH (00:36:04):
I think I have probably been pretty consistent in my thinking. Yeah. No, It would take a while for me to sort out my thoughts on all that.

SM (00:36:14):
Yeah. What do you think might be the lasting legacy will be of the boomer generation in... Of course, when I talk boomers now, I am really not only talking about the (19)60s, I am talking about the (19)50s when they were young and raised in that post-war era where hopefully a lot of parents were there. I reflect on it on the (19)50s and on. When I think of the (19)50s, I think of Dwight Eisenhower. I think of security, even though we had the McCarthy hearings and the threats of Russia, seemed to be a much more stable time. I remember that personally. And then all of a sudden, as I got to be a teenager, things, so many things changed. So really, when you are talking boomers, you are talking about the (19)50s, the (19)60s, and the (19)70s, and of course when Ronald Reagan came in and Assay Bay. So you are talking about a lot of things here.

SH (00:37:07):
Yeah. Yeah. I think what explains the (19)50s is, well, a lot of things. But you come out of World War II with a couple things. One is that the whole world's exhausted and broken, destroyed except for the United States, really. And so all that rebuilding time, I think, we have a whole generation of people coming back from national service, and they are very service and dutifully oriented people, and they start having kids like crazy. And I think I recur to the answer I gave a little earlier. I think it takes a while for the rise of prosperity and for some of the social ideas I was talking about that were fermenting back in the early part of the 20th century to exhibit themselves. It is hard to trace out causation on this because there is so many things that overlap. But yeah, I mean, that is why were the (19)50s so sort of placid and quiet. Well, I think the other thing about the (19)50s is, and other people have made this point, is that you had, in the (19)50s, you had the... and coming out of World War II, you had the triumph of bigness. I mean, in the (19)50s you used to talk about three things: big government, big business, and big labor, and big projects. We built the interstate highway system and out here in California, we built the water projects and the modern university system and lots of three ways. We built the suburbs all over the country. And that was regarded as a great success. That is back in the days when people would tell pollsters that by large margins, 60, 70 percent said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost all the time. Today that number's under 20 percent almost all the time. So the collapse of confidence in big institutions, like especially big government, but also big labor and big business. So it is a sort of simpler framework for the world then. And most people looked up from their morning newspapers and what they saw the government was a record of success. You had won a big war. You have built a big highway system, you have built middle class prosperity and new communities all across the country, and things went pretty well. It is not still (19)60s when things start going wrong with riots in the streets and the war that cannot be won and all the rest of that. But people start changing their minds about all this.

SM (00:39:18):
How important... Could you comment on the music of the year? Because when you think of the (19)60s, the music continues to be played on the radio. Every generation seems to love it. Most of the young people that I have been around, both generation Xers and millennials, they loved the music of the (19)60s, but it had seemed to have had a very important impact on that generation. When you look at the era when my parents grew up, the big bands were very important to them in the (19)40s and the (19)30s, late (19)30s into the (19)40s. Then you had the Sinatras, and of course Elvis came about in the 1950s and that whole period, rock and roll. But the (19)60s, could you just comment on how important you think when you defined the Boomers, how important music is?

SH (00:40:05):
Well, I mean, obviously, so (19)60s style music was the soundtrack to the student activism and whole youth movement. I mean, I am not a music critic, so I am not going to offer an opinion whether it is better or worse. But I do notice a couple things. One is that if you look at popular entertainment today, TV shows, especially in movies, you will find that for music background, they tend these days to use two periods, use music of the (19)60s and maybe in the (19)70s, and then rap, and rap-inspired styles today as you see in movies and TV shows. Whereas, in other words, the music of the (19)70s, disco especially, and a lot of the music of the (19)80s, has just disappeared. I mean, it is still a little bit of a round. And when Michael Jackson dies, people buy his records again and play them for a couple of days before putting them away again for good. But yeah, there is something, and I do not know if that is because it is connected with historical moments in some way or not, but yeah, I mean, that was the rock fest. Before the (19)60s, big musical events were just big musical events. But of course, bigger rock festivals of the (19)60s, and Woodstock being the best example I already mentioned, those became political events as well, in some sense, larger social events. And they are kind of still thought of that way a little bit today. I do not know if you had benefit concerts before the (19)60s, but nowadays, benefit concerts for political social causes are a big thing and pretty prominent. And all musicians think they have got to be part of doing something like that.

SM (00:41:41):
Right. Like Willie Nelson and Farm Aid, which began in, I think in (19)81. He was just on television last week talking about it. He thought it was a one-year happening, and it is every year since.

SH (00:41:52):
Right. But then you had... I remember one of the first ones was in the early (19)70s was the concert for Bangladesh, which I forget what that was, but that raise... in London or somewhere, that raised some millions of dollars for famine relief, I think was (19)70s. I forget when it was, sometime in the early (19)70s. But yeah, so yeah, music became politicized. That is the other thing is, music has always had some political content to it, but I think it... You know, you saw more of it starting in the (19)60s than you had before. You actually went out and tried to measure it.

SM (00:42:26):
If you were to list some of the bands or personalities music-wise, entertainment-wise who may have had a great influence on the boomers, who would they be?

SH (00:42:36):
Oh, I do not know. That would be a purely subjective response. I mean, you had the leading artists who broke the ground, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, of course. And then certain individual performers like Jimi Hendrix, but then some of... and they were not especially political, I do not think, I mean they had their politics, but their songs with a couple of exceptions. I mean, one of the Beatles, most famous tracks is their right-wing song Tax Man, right?

SM (00:43:04):
Yeah.

SH (00:43:06):
They was shocked that having to pay 98 percent tax rates on the large amount of money they were starting to make. And so that was kind of an irony in their case. But then you would have Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills & Nash, they were much more explicitly left wing, anti-war, so forth. And help, I mean-

SM (00:43:26):
Mr. Hayward, I want to change my tape here. Hold on one second.

SH (00:43:29):
Yeah.

SM (00:43:34):
Okay. I am back.

SH (00:43:39):
Yeah, I am not sure what else to add to all that. I mean, that is...

SM (00:43:41):
Certainly, we cannot forget the Motown sound because when we are talking about rock, Motown was big.

SH (00:43:46):
Right, right. And that was not especially politic. I mean, off the top of my head, that does not strike me as especially political. Popular with civil rights folks, but I do not think of any... Off the top of my head, I do not think of any particular Motown ballads that were highly politicized in their content. Unlike some of the rock bands who wrote explicitly anti-Vietnam War songs and so forth.

SM (00:44:07):
Were there any books, you are an intellect, and yeah, I have asked this to some people, and I am a book person. I read a lot of books, and I was reading back when I was in college, so I had deep feelings on books. But were there any books that you think college students or young people or the boomers were reading when they were young that influenced them?

SH (00:44:26):
Well, yeah, I mean this I would want to think about, but off the top of my head, I think of a Charles Reich, Greening of America, which is a pretty late book in the (19)60s or maybe early (19)70s. J. D. Salinger's, Catcher in the Rye was popular, I think, for its sensibility. And which swathly fits into the beats out of the (19)50s, with Jack Kerouac and all the rest of that. Herbert Marcuse was very popular. What was his book called, One-Dimensional Man or something, I want to say. I am not sure if that is the right one. And a lot of stuff is kind of impenetrable, but it was popular for especially superficial leftist intellectuals. I know I am missing a whole bunch of books [inaudible].

SM (00:45:11):
I know that Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture was very big and-

SH (00:45:15):
Yeah, but I guess that was in the (19)60s, or was that a little later? I do not remember.

SM (00:45:18):
No, that was in the... I went to grad school and it was required reading. And then anything that Erickson wrote, the psychologist was-

SH (00:45:28):
Oh, yes. Right. Yeah.

SM (00:45:30):
He wrote a lot about the (19)60s and identity politics. It was so funny.

SH (00:45:33):
I have thought about the books of that era for quite a long time. So once upon a time I did, but I really sort of lost touch with that.

SM (00:45:41):
Right. I have a question here regarding kind of a follow-up to the healing issue, and that is the issue of trust. I start my question by stating that when I was in college in my 101 class in psychology, and I will never forget this professor talking to us, saying that it is very important to trust others. Because if you have an inability to trust, then you most likely will not be a success in life. Now, I was a college student first year, I did not really take that in, but I never forgot it. And then I saw what many boomers thought were lies that leaders did not... Nixon lying, President Johnson lying, Gulf of Tonkin, you studied... Even President Eisenhower lied with the U-2 incident. Now, recent John Kennedy lied about what was going on in Vietnam with saying goodbye to the Diem, the murder of Diem.

SH (00:46:40):
Right.

SM (00:46:40):
And then you have got so many others during that period when people were evolving, do you think that there is an issue... that boomers have an issue, have had an issue their whole lives with trusting others? They do not trust leaders, and in that era, they did not trust anybody in authority, whether it was a minister, a rabbi, a president of the university, a politician, anyone in a position of responsibility, I do not trust you.

SH (00:47:08):
Yeah, that is right. I know. I think that is a common theme is you just do not trust large institutions, public or private. And part of that has got its postulates. And again, some of the intellectual ideas of authenticity and individuality going back at least a century, you know, you want to trust yourself first before you trust somebody else. And partly it is the increasing complexity of the modern world. I mean, anyone who thinks about this seriously for more than five minutes understands that responsible governments and leaders have to conceal certain things and prevaricate about the truth. If you believe otherwise, you would say we would not have any spies at all if we would disband the CIA tomorrow, which no responsible person would ever do. And again, there is some cognitive dissonance in play. We are cynical and distrustful of institutions, and to a certain extent that is healthy, right? I mean, that is not too far from Thomas Jefferson's idea that the Tree of Liberty should be watered with the blood of pirates every 20 years or so, or should have periodic revolutions to renew things. And on the other hand, we always say, "We really want a leader we can believe in." This is part of the enthusiasm for Obama, change we can believe in. And we will always end up being disappointed. People like that. We were disappointed with Jimmy Carter, who told us he wanted to give us a government as good as the people, and then within a few years he was telling us the people were no good.

SM (00:48:32):
And even Ronald Reagan, who most people loved, but then Iran Contra toward the end, and then people started to question him.

SH (00:48:39):
Exactly. I mean, that was the worst part of the whole thing, was as somebody put it, it was as though you had learned that John Wayne had been selling rifles and whiskey to the Indians, and then that was a huge problem, yeah. And right. So no, I think there is something to all that, and we will probably never actually get that back. And that is a mixed bag. Yeah, I do not know what else to say about that.

SM (00:49:07):
Do you think that boomers have pressed this onto their kids and their grandkids, and is that healthy?

SH (00:49:14):
Well, it depends. I mean, a great book about this is now quite old, but I think is onto the origin of this was Robert Nisbet's Twilight of Authority.

SM (00:49:23):
I think I have that.

SH (00:49:23):
Back quite a long time, the erosion. So social reasons for the erosion of respect for authority in any forms, and it is not brand new, did not really start with the boomers, but accelerated around then for some of the reasons you mentioned, read the newspaper headline. If you trust the newspapers.

SM (00:49:37):
Right.

SH (00:49:41):
Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, right? We do not even watch the network news anymore. I mean, if Walter Cronkite were still alive, we would not think of him that way anymore. It is impossible to recreate Walter Cronkite now, but that is just the way we have gone. And I do not think there is any changing that back.

SM (00:49:57):
If some people, even Johnson's, they talk about two things that caused President Johnson to resign. One of them was Cronkite making those comments on television, the second being that McCarthy had finished in second place up in New Hampshire.

SH (00:50:10):
Right, yeah. But then he was going to beat him in the Wisconsin primary the next week.

SM (00:50:14):
Right.

SH (00:50:15):
He knew he was going to lose.

SM (00:50:17):
Why do you think the Vietnam War ended?

SH (00:50:23):
Well, yeah, a complicated story. I mean, as I said a little earlier, I mean, that war was lost at the very beginning when it was decided to run it not as a traditional war, but as an exercise in game theory in one sentence, in this whole theory of graduated escalation with pen signals to the North Vietnamese. I mean, in other words, Johnson's people completely misjudged the character of the North Vietnamese in thinking they were rational actors who could be bargained with. In fact, they were revolutionaries who were determined to win and figured out early on that they could outlast us and were willing to do so. And the failure to recognize that fact meant the war was lost in the beginning, unless you were going to change your tactic. Well, it was too late after 60 days. That is when we made our final flint and said, "We are not going to effectively prosecute the war." But then at the other end of it, it finally ends... Well, it finally ends with North Vietnamese victory, right in 1975. But it ends for us when Nixon decides that he is going to escalate enough to make them conclude some kind of agreement to let us get out in one piece, which we more or less did. I mean, you put up the helicopters taking off in (19)75 was not exactly getting out in one piece, but it was... came pretty close.

SM (00:51:29):
Right. Let us see here. I am coming toward the part where we asked you some of the names for your mission response, but what does the wall mean to you in Washington? I lived in California too until 1983, and of course it opened (19)82. And the first thing I had to do when I came to Philadelphia is I had to take the train down to Washington to see the wall. Because it meant an awful lot to me and I have been at every Memorial Day in Veterans Day ceremony since 1994, and I am not a veteran, just because I feel I have to be there to pay my respects to those who serve. Your thoughts on the impact that this wall has had on America?

SH (00:52:12):
Well, I do not know. I think it was a bigger deal when it first opened up. I mean, in my next book on Reagan, as we were talking about, I have a couple paragraphs about how controversial the whole thing was when it was first announced and then opened up. And also people changing their mind. It is interesting. National Review Magazine initially criticized the design, and then when it opened up, they wrote an editorial saying, Tensiter saying, "Well, we were wrong. This is actually pretty good." So, I do not know, people bring their own aesthetic, philosophical judgements to that kind of memorial. I once reflected that, and actually, I think I tried to do the math once, but if you... In Europe, for example, did the memorial in that style to the dead of World War I, it would stretch down the entire length of the Mall, right? Because the numbers are so much larger. The idea of putting every single person's name on the wall is that is very modern American. It also reflects now our commitment to individuality. And there is certain things about that that are noble and laudable. I do not really have any strong feelings one way or another about those, the Vietnam War Memorial.

SM (00:53:20):
What does Kent State and Jackson State mean to you?

SH (00:53:24):
Oh, gosh. I do not have a strong response on that either. In both those cases I am now sort of vague on the facts about how much it was a provocation, how much was overreaction by the National Guard troops. You can always bring in the old themes of town and gown there. An awful lot of... I mean, this is certainly true of the police in Chicago in (19)68, but true National Guard troops, as long as there are working class people who resented what they were perceived of as these privileged kids who are acting up. And it does not excuse what happened, but I think it sometimes gets forgotten that there really is... Those particular moments, you mentioned Kent State, are reflective of the cultural division amongst the baby boomers. And that is where I mentioned before that Hatfields versus McCoys. So that was one place where real shooting broke out, like the old Hatfield-McCoy feud.

SM (00:54:23):
Right. I am to the part now where I am going to ask just some... give some names of people of that era just for some brief comments, and then also terms of that era.

SH (00:54:35):
Yeah.

SM (00:54:36):
Watergate.

SH (00:54:38):
Oh, the great crown and catastrophe of the (19)60s, you might say, even though it was in the (19)70s, but it was had its origins in the (19)60s, of course.

SM (00:54:47):
Woodstock.

SH (00:54:49):
Yeah, I already said my part about that. It was sort of the cultural apogee of the youth movement.

SM (00:54:57):
1968.

SH (00:54:59):
Oh, yeah. The worst year for America since 1861.

SM (00:55:10):
The term counterculture.

SH (00:55:10):
Yeah, the pretentious name that the youth movement gave for itself.

SM (00:55:11):
Hippies.

SH (00:55:15):
People who did not bathe at all.

SM (00:55:17):
How about yippies?

SH (00:55:20):
Yeah. Well, that was the sort of formalized what? That actually was the acronym for Youth International Protest, was not it?

SM (00:55:24):
Youth International Party.

SH (00:55:26):
Yeah, Youth International Party. Yeah. Right. Jerry Rubin and those guys.

SM (00:55:29):
Yep. SDS.

SH (00:55:33):
Yeah. Students for Democratic Society. I mean, I do not really have a sort of summary one sentence about them. I mean, they were the organized radical force of it.

SM (00:55:43):
The weathermen.

SH (00:55:45):
Yeah, the violent streak of the whole... They were the mad bombers of the New West.

SM (00:55:52):
Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

SH (00:55:55):
Well, John Kerry comes to mind immediately. Yeah.

SM (00:55:59):
Boy, there are a lot of people that do not like him in this group. It is amazing.

SH (00:56:05):
When he was emerging as a candidate, what, four years ago, very early on, I thought, oh, this is all going to come back in a big way, and this election is going to end up being about Vietnam to some extent. And I am kicking myself for not having written an article about that, because what happened with swift boats and all the rest of that, I foresaw all that quite clearly. And yeah, that is another... That was really a classic example of something that Obama understood, is that one of the things that was wrong about the 2004 election is that we were fighting out our old divisions from the (19)60s, especially over the war, because Kerry was really a bad candidate for precisely that reason. But he had all that baggage.

SM (00:56:43):
The people that, not the Swiffo people, but there were other Vietnam veterans against the war that had problems with him. They did not dislike him because he is a Vietnam vet, but there were issues around that period that they liked his speech in front of Fulbright, that took a lot of courage and they praised that, but the fact that he was one of the few guys because he was wealthy that could fly to locations where everybody else had to hitchhike, take planes, ride in old cars, and he was flying in airplanes. That really upset a lot of the Vietnam vet. Young Americans for Freedom, which Lee Edwards has talked about a lot, but is a forgotten group when talking about the anti-war movement.

SH (00:57:26):
Yeah-yeah. Oh, was that your next question?

SM (00:57:30):
Yeah. Just your thoughts on the young Americans for Freedom, which was a conservative group.

SH (00:57:33):
Yeah. I mean, they have finally gotten some of their due. There have been a couple of liberal writers who have talked about how... This is ironic that at one point in the early (19)60s, it was generally thought across the spectrum that the youth movement was going to be a right-wing phenomenon, and Young Americans for Freedom starts before SDS, for example, and it turned out some pretty impressive rallies and turned out some impressive numbers of people who never got the media coverage for it.

SM (00:58:00):
Well, I think there needs to be a book written about it.

SH (00:58:02):
I think there was one by a guy named Andrews a few years ago, a short little book [inaudible] side of the (19)60s. It was mostly about... Yeah.

SM (00:58:09):
Yeah. I think there needs to be more information for scholars because-

SH (00:58:13):
Yeah, I do too. Yeah. That is right.

SM (00:58:14):
The enemy's list.

SH (00:58:17):
Oh, well, Nixon's paranoia again. But all politicians have their enemy's list, whether they write them down officially or not. That was a little bit exaggerated, I think.

SM (00:58:25):
Okay. Ted?

SH (00:58:25):
Yeah. A military victory for the US and a political defeat for the US.

SM (00:58:37):
Cambodian invasion.

SH (00:58:39):
Yeah. Another thing that was puffed out of all proportion. It turned out that key members of Congress had been informed about what was going on, and the Cambodian government knew what was going on, but it was supposedly "secret" for diplomatic and political reasons. You wanted to have certain amounts of public deniability for political reasons, and so that was one of those events that spun out of control.

SM (00:59:03):
Black power.

SH (00:59:05):
Yeah, the militant side of civil rights, which dismayed even Martin Luther King, of course.

SM (00:59:10):
The American Indian Movement.

SH (00:59:13):
A sideshow. Native Americans wanting to get in on all the fun.

SM (00:59:18):
Mm-hmm. Again, these are some names of personalities now. Andy Hoffman.

SH (00:59:24):
Oh, yeah. Sort of the clown prince of the new left.

SM (00:59:27):
Jerry Rubin.

SH (00:59:29):
Same thing. Yeah. He is even more the clown prince of the new left.

SM (00:59:32):
Timothy Leary.

SH (00:59:34):
The pharmacist of the new left.

SM (00:59:36):
Of course Richard Nixon.

SH (00:59:38):
Yeah. The perfect hate figure for liberals of all stripes.

SM (00:59:43):
Spiro Agnew.

SH (00:59:45):
Oh, yeah, I do not have a good quick one for him. Nixon's designated hitman, you might say.

SM (00:59:53):
Eugene McCarthy.

SH (00:59:57):
Interesting guy. One of the unappreciated geniuses of American politics, I think. And certainly this is more appreciated, one of the great wits of American politics.

SM (01:00:07):
Pretty well educated too.

SH (01:00:08):
Yeah.

SM (01:00:09):
And boy, was he a poet. A lot of people-

SH (01:00:11):
Exactly. Yeah.

SM (01:00:12):
He could have been a poet and never been in politics.

SH (01:00:14):
Right.

SM (01:00:15):
George McGovern.

SH (01:00:17):
Yeah. Sort of a tragic figure in a lot of ways. Yeah, I will leave it at that.

SM (01:00:23):
John Kennedy.

SH (01:00:24):
Well, as his reputation had it, but somewhat naive about the movement that he wrote to the nomination.

SM (01:00:32):
John Kennedy.

SH (01:00:34):
Yeah. Well, the boy prince of liberalism and we will never know how that might have turned out.

SM (01:00:39):
Bobby Kennedy.

SH (01:00:43):
The other boy prince of liberalism, about whom I think we have a quite inaccurate perception.

SM (01:00:50):
Sergeant Schreiber in the Peace Corps.

SH (01:00:53):
You do not have too much to say about that. He was this little decent guy, but that was not... a marquee job, but I think actually a fairly ordinary one.

SM (01:01:03):
Lyndon Johnson.

SH (01:01:05):
Yeah. The tragic figure of establishment liberalism.

SM (01:01:08):
Robert McNamara.

SH (01:01:11):
Oh, oh, God. The face of technocratic liberalism.

SM (01:01:17):
George Wallace.

SH (01:01:20):
Yeah. I do not... What do you say about him? Do not have much to say about him really.

SM (01:01:25):
Ronald Reagan.

SH (01:01:27):
Yeah. The other... Boy, what do you say about him? The fulfillment of the Goldwater Revolution in the Republican Party, I guess you would say.

SM (01:01:39):
Jimmy Carter.

SH (01:01:44):
Oh, I do not know. What do you say about him in one sentence? He campaigned on the slogan of Why Not the Best, and we are still asking that question about him.

SM (01:01:57):
Gerald Ford.

SH (01:01:59):
Oh, a very decent man who did well in a bad situation.

SM (01:02:02):
Daniel Ellsberg.

SH (01:02:05):
Oh, yeah. An opportunist little runt.

SM (01:02:10):
Dr. Benjamin Spock.

SH (01:02:13):
Oh, yeah. Another sort of shooting star, sort of overblown... of overblown reputation.

SM (01:02:19):
Norman Mailer.

SH (01:02:23):
Oh, I do not have anything to say about him really.

SM (01:02:23):
Okay. The Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Phillip.

SH (01:02:26):
Yeah. I do not really care about those guys either. I do not have anything to say about those guys.

SM (01:02:36):
All right. Let us see who we have here. Barry Goldwater.

SH (01:02:36):
Ah, yeah. The breakthrough figure for modern American conservatism.

SM (01:02:40):
About Huey Newton, Bobby Seal, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, that group.

SH (01:02:45):
Yeah. That would be the same as the Black Power folks, the militant side of civil rights.

SM (01:02:50):
Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan?

SH (01:02:55):
Yeah, they are the gender... They are the vanguard of gender feminism.

SM (01:03:01):
Mm-hmm. Okay. Let us see. Is there any question that I did not ask you that you thought I was going to ask you that you would like to comment on, on the boomers in the (19)60s?

SH (01:03:13):
No, not really. That covers quite a lot.

SM (01:03:17):
I think I am missing one thing here. I know I have asked most of... You have answered some very good... You have done some deep thinking on these, I can tell, on some of the questions. I want to fill you in also on what I am doing is I will be getting these transcribed, but I am going to send you... I did not realize this because this was my first book, and I actually did early retirement to do this book because I have been working on it since (19)96 when I first interviewed Eugene McCarthy. And then I had my parents were... I had a lot of issues, and I went back and forth. Now I am finishing it up. And so the first 30 people, I did not know about, you had to get a waiver signed by all the people. They all agreed to do it, but they did not... Nobody ever asked about a waiver, but I am sending now waivers to the individuals, and you sign it, send it back to me, and then when I get it transcribed and I send the transcript to you to give the final okay in editing. And that is what I am doing with everyone. The original 30 is kind of an issue because seven of them have died. So I do not know what is going to happen there.

SH (01:04:23):
I have no idea. You will have to talk to your publisher about that or something.

SM (01:04:26):
Yeah. But waivers are important, even though they agreed to do it.

SH (01:04:31):
Yeah.

SM (01:04:35):
You have any other thoughts you want to say on anything?

SH (01:04:37):
I do not think so. We covered a lot of the waterfront.

SM (01:04:39):
Yeah, what I usually do with each interview, I take pictures of people, and I have really good pictures of you when you were here, but you may have gotten a little older looking. I do not know.

SH (01:04:51):
Well, I am balder, I am pretty sure, and I am a lot thinner. I lost a bunch of weight here a couple years ago, so we will be around September if you are in through Washington, or October, if you are in through Washington.

SM (01:05:00):
Yeah, why do not I do this? Because I got great shots of you, but I would like to have a more current, so when you are back down there, I will come down and take some pictures because I am actually going to be interviewing Dr. Sally Satel.

SH (01:05:11):
Oh, right, sure.

SM (01:05:12):
I am going to interview her along with M. Stanton Evans next week. Next week. And then I am going out to Dr. Murray's home to interview him.

SH (01:05:22):
Oh, good. Yeah.

SM (01:05:23):
So I will be down... And I am actually interviewing Ron Robinson from the Young Americas Foundation sometime when he is not having that conference of the... that is coming up for him. And even Dr. Ornstein is interested in doing an interview as well, but he has got a lot of family issues in August.

SH (01:05:42):
That is right. Yeah.

SM (01:05:43):
So, well, Dr. Hayward, thank you very much.

SH (01:05:47):
Sure thing.

SM (01:05:49):
And I will be in touch with you. When will you be back in...

SH (01:05:52):
Early September.

SM (01:05:53):
Okay. I will send you... Do you want me to send the waiver at AEI or at your home in California?

SH (01:06:01):
Oh, how soon do you want it? Do you want it end of this month or...

SM (01:06:04):
Yeah, I am going to be mailing them all out in September.

SH (01:06:05):
Oh, send it to AEI then.

SM (01:06:07):
Okay. And then you just send it back to me, and then of course, then you will see the transcript when it is transcribed and you can edit it and whatever.

SH (01:06:13):
Right. Okay.

SM (01:06:15):
All right. You have a great day.

SH (01:06:16):
Yeah, you too. Bye-bye.

SM (01:06:16):
Thanks. Bye.

(End of Interview)

2009-07-28

Stephen McKiernan

Steven F. Hayward

64:55

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Authors; Journalists; Hayward, Steven F.--Interviews

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