Interview with Dr. Michael Kazin

Kazin, Michael, 1948- ; McKiernan, Stephen

Dr. Michael Kazin is a historian and professor at Georgetown University. Kazin's research focuses on the American social movements from the 19th and 20th centuries. He received a Bachelor's degree in Social Studies from Harvard, a Master's degree in History from Portland State University, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University.

2011-02-12

In copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

237:12

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Michael Kazin
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 12 February 2011
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:02):
Testing, 1, 2, 3, testing.

MK (00:00:11):
[inaudible] if you rather, but this is more comfortable.

SM (00:00:12):
That is fine. It carries pretty good.

MK (00:00:16):
You got two of them, huh?

SM (00:00:17):
Yep.

MK (00:00:17):
Stereo.

SM (00:00:18):
For the last maybe hundred interviews I have had two, because Peter Goldman gave me some advice there too. He said, you need to have two interview tapes because if you are redoing the tape and something that happens to one, you got a second one. Could you tell me a little bit about your growing up years? I know you had a famous dad who was a literary critic and a very well-known critic, but what were your early influences? Who were your role models, teachers, historians, and how important was your dad in shaping who you became?

MK (00:00:53):
Well, I will deal with him first, I guess. I was born in 1948. My parents were actually divorced when I was one and a half. I have no memories of them living together. So direct influence in terms of being by the house, there was not any, I saw him once a month or so. We had a difficult relationship. He was not very good with little kids. He was only comfortable with people if he could talk about books and ideas. And when you are five years old, you do not really do that. So, we had a difficult time, but by the time I started at junior high or high school, at least, I do not remember exactly when people said, "Oh, are you the son of Alfred Kazin?" He was part of this world of what Irving Howe called the New York Intellectuals. And I grew up in a suburb of New York, Pinewood, New Jersey, near just a one exit off the South East Parkway from George Washington Bridge.

SM (00:01:53):
It is Englewood, is not it?

MK (00:01:54):
Yeah, Englewood. So I kept hearing about him. I read his work when I was in high school and we argued about politics. When I was in high school. He was a Cold War liberal, and I was beginning to be an anti-war liberal. And then of course, later on, a radical. So I think the conflict between us, which was partly personal and partly political, was constructive, I think, to teach me how to argue about politics with someone who is very smart. And also I learned to take ideas very seriously. And also, without thinking about it at the time, I certainly learned that you could have a pretty good life being a teacher and a writer, which of course is what he was. He was more writer than teacher. He taught all the time, but his real passion was for writing. He taught only because he could not make enough money writing. If he could have made enough money writing, he would not have taught. Which is not true for me. I love teaching. So other influences. My mother, of course, who I grew up with, who was on the left politically. She had gone to Russia in 1936 when American liberals as still thought Russia was a pretty good place, at least a lot of them did. And just as a tourist, she went. And she had been involved in various popular front groups in the thirties, a fellow traveler, old term for that. And she had friends who I met, some of whom were emigres from Nazi Germany, who got out just in time in the thirties, and I met them growing up. And our next-door neighbors were left-wingers. They subscribed to a magazine [inaudible] called the National Guardian, which was a left-wing magazine. You might know of it. Again, late (19)40s. In fact, one 4th of July they had a barbecue, and they had The Weavers over to sing-

SM (00:03:59):
Oh my God.

MK (00:03:59):
In the backyard next door.

SM (00:04:01):
Pete Seeger.

MK (00:04:03):
That was pretty cool. This is, I forget exactly the year, sometime in the (19)50s. So I grew up in, what I understood later was a particular kind of left liberal background, people who had been close to the Communist Party at one point, but no longer were, it was mostly Jewish, not all Jewish, certainly. And my schools, I will not go into great detail, but my schools were influenced too. I went to a public school until seventh grade in my hometown, in Englewood, New Jersey. And it was an integrated school. And in fact, my first two teachers were Black, first grade and second grade teachers. And so, I think, again, in retrospect, I never had an experience of seeing Black people always under me. And I was a great baseball fan, still am. And I used to go to games in the [inaudible] grounds in Englewood and crowd was almost half Black at that time. Baseball was a very popular sport among Black people then, much more than this now. And that was important too. I was a Dodgers fan. The Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson. So this was all part of the gestalt of politics and culture at the time. So, I would not say I had any role models per se, but clearly my parents were the biggest influence on me and being part of this whole milieu. I met my father's friends. I met Norman Mailer, met Robert Loeb, Richard Hofstadter, who was his best friend. These, in retrospect, very important intellectuals. But at the time, I just thought were my father's friends. And I identified very early with left-wing causes, civil rights movement. There was a sit-in Englewood for integrated schools. And my mother would not let me go, but I talked about it at my school.

SM (00:06:19):
How old were you at that time?

MK (00:06:20):
14, I think.

SM (00:06:20):
Okay. Wow.

MK (00:06:22):
She was afraid of violence. I wanted to go to the March on Washington (19)63. I forget why I did not go, but I did not for some reason. But I started to go to anti-war demonstrations very early in early (19)65. And also my stepfather, Mario Salvadori, who was a professor of engineering Columbia, helped to sponsor the anti-war teach-in at Columbia. It was one of the first anti-war teach-ins in, I think it was January (19)65, February (19)65. I do not know exactly when. And I ran for a school president at one point too. And I was [inaudible] because I had talked about my views about the war and so forth. And I remember one poster of the candidates who ran against me showed Khrushchev on one side, Castro on the other side and me in the middle all of us shaking hands. So, I lost, that is why I lost. And also, I worked on political campaigns. I worked on John Kennedy's campaign as a 12-year-old in Englewood. And at the time, when Englewood was basically Republican and Nixon was very popular. I worked on Johnson's campaign in (19)64. I was head of a group called Young Citizens for Hughes. Richard Hughes was running for reelection as governor of New Jersey. So I was not a new leftist yet. I was still a liberal Democrat. But I like a lot of people I knew, there was a continuum in some ways between being a liberal Democrat, at least there and being leery about the Cold War. My mother took me to a SANE nuclear policy, the group SANE rally in Madison Square Garden in I think (19)58, which was part of their campaign for a nuclear test ban treaty. And I heard Dr. Spock speak, he was a lead speaker at the time.

SM (00:08:25):
William Sloan Craws was connected to that.

MK (00:08:25):
So as I said, there was a lot of stuff going on.

SM (00:08:28):
Did you talk to your dad? When I looked at what your dad, the people that he liked the most, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, they were the really big thinkers of the 19th century that he, and, of course, they were role models to a lot of people on the left, especially Thoreau and Emerson. Did he ever talk to you about them?

MK (00:08:45):
Not so much. Part of our conflict was that I tried to stay away as much as possible from people he liked. He loved Henry Adams, I did not meet Henry Adams until I was much older. He loved Dreiser loved. I did not meet Dreiser until I was much older. So if my father wrote about somebody, I made a point of not reading until I was older.

SM (00:09:00):
I can understand.

MK (00:09:01):
We read Thoreau and Emerson High School a little bit.

SM (00:09:07):
How did you end up at Harvard? How did you pick Harvard?

MK (00:09:12):
Well, it was Harvard. Obviously, back then, if you get into Harvard, you would try. And also, my father had always wanted to teach there. He was a great admirer of people. He was friends with [inaudible] Junior. He looked up for Perry Miller, a great scholar of the Puritans who was a Harvard teacher. And he would have wanted to teach at Harvard if he could have. So certainly, to get into Harvard back then for a upwardly mobile intellectual Jewish kid was the pinnacle of academic success. So that is why I applied. I did not think I would get in, but I did. I applied other schools. I did not get in everywhere. I did not get into Stanford where my daughter goes Now, I did not get into Haverford, but I think I was very political. Harvard probably liked that in my application. I think my statement I wrote about why I wanted to be US Senator. I said, "I do not want to be president because it is not time for a Jewish kid to be president yet. But I would like to be Senator."

SM (00:10:27):
Was Chuck Schumer in your class?

MK (00:10:30):
He is one year younger, I think.

SM (00:10:31):
And was David Eisenhower also there at that time?

MK (00:10:39):
Yeah, actually, no, he went to Amherst, I think. He did not go to Harvard. But in my freshman dorm, he was friends with one of the kids in my freshman dorm. And we used to have parties and he and Julie Nixon would come to these parties and bring their own bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Like the secret of service, they do not drink from anybody else's.

SM (00:10:58):
I remember years ago reading about him that Fred Grandy, the actor, his father had picked him to be kind of the role model for David when he went there as a first-year student.

MK (00:11:10):
I think it was Fred's room where the parties were.

SM (00:11:13):
Yeah. Fred was a year older than him. Anyway, now, you were very active at Harvard and you became president of the Students for a Democratic Society, which had one of the largest-

MK (00:11:23):
Co-chairman was the actual name.

SM (00:11:26):
That was one of the largest chapters. Even I remember this back then, it was the one of the largest chapters of SDS, I think, in the country at that time.

MK (00:11:34):
I am not sure.

SM (00:11:37):
What was your student life like? I really want you to talk about the experience of the Harvard Yard experience because that is a historic event. When you think of Columbia of (19)68, when you think of Harvard in (19)69, when you think of Ken State in (19)70, these are really historic events to me, as a person who studied the (19)60s. What was the main issue? Describe what was going on there in (19)69, how this all evolved.

MK (00:12:08):
Well, of course, this happened after the student of the left had been growing for a couple years, beginning with in many ways, with the free speech movement from Berkeley in (19)64 and going onward. And of course, things got really amped up with the escalation of the war. And then with the Columbia strike in the spring of (19)68. In Some ways there was a kind of emulation competition going on. I think without emphasizing it too much, we felt, "Well, Columbia SDS can shut down their school. How come we cannot shut down our school?" Because I had a lot of friends in Columbia SDS, some of whom died in the townhouse explosion. Ted Gold and I was friends with Mark Wood. We worked together at SDS regional office in New York in (19)67. So, I knew a bunch of people. But anyway, the key issue, of course, was the war as it was everywhere. That is why you had a large new left as you know. It would not have happened without that. And we were very responsible, I think, contrary to the image that a lot of people have about the students running amok and going crazy and smashing things. We believed in organizing. We had a careful campaign, which is probably detailed in that WHRP book. We began in the fall of (19)68, some ways coming off the Democratic Convention in Chicago where I was and got arrested. And we decided, "Well, what is the main tentacle of the octopus of the war machine on campus? Well, it is RTC." Now, there was not much. RTC maybe had 30 people in it. It was not a big deal. But other people in the country were attacking RTC. It was one way we could localize issues of the military and the war. So, we started petition to, in a very responsible way, to try to get the administration to abolish RTC on campus. And they refused. And so we kept going to meetings and making some noise, faculty meetings, and some people got arrested for disrupting a meeting. But in the end, we got, I do not remember how many, but we had many thousand signatures because the war was very unpopular at Harvard, as it was a lot of campuses like that around the country, so it was not a problem. And then had house meetings at the Harvard houses. We had house meetings in Harvard Yard where the freshmen lived. We did what organizers have always done. I spent probably, that was my junior year, I spent most of the year organizing, not much time on classes. And we basically had The Crimson on our side, the daily newspaper, which was useful, of course. They would report on our meetings. I do not want to go into great detail about this, but we had two pretty antagonistic factions within SDS as you probably read about. One was my faction, which is we sort of called the new left faction. It was sort of loose. We liked rock and roll, and we thought there was nothing wrong with smoking dope. And we wanted a sort of vaguely radical democratic society. Was not too sure what that might mean. We were very pro Vietcong, we were pro the Cubans, but we were very supportive of Black Panthers and other Black power groups. But we were very critical of what we saw as sort of dogmatic Marxism. And of course, the other side was the Progressive Labor Party, which was a group, as you probably know, that was [inaudible] for the Communist Party in the early (19)60s over supporting the Chinese and the Sino-Soviet Split. And they were very hard-nosed about how you have to organize workers and do strike support and men should cut their hair, women should wear dresses and very counter-culture of all kinds. So we had a lot of divisions and they tended to be actually on campus actions more militant than we were. So when it came down to deciding, when the faculty did not agree to abolish RDC, we had to decide what to do. And at first, people in our faction were not in favor of taking a building, taking University Hall, which was the administration building on campus, the main one. But the PL group called the Workers Student Alliance always was in favor of it. They believed in being more militant. And also they wanted to build their faction nationally. And they knew, if they were the leaders of a chapter which shut down Harvard, this would be a feather in their cap. And there were three co-chairs of SDS. I forget exactly why we had three, but that is the way it evolved. Two of them were from their faction. I was the only one from our faction. But PL because they were so hard line on dogmatic had a certain, was not as popular in the wider student body as our faction was. So, a lot of people who were not in SDS looked to me, I think more as a leader than they did to those people. So again, and this, of course, is always true at the time, if you want to have a militant action, you do it when the weather is nice. And, of course, up in the Boston area, it did not really start until April. So April 9th I think is when we took over University. Again, this is all detailed in these books. But we had a very tempestuous meeting the night before going back and forth. And I thought we had to seize the moment or seize the time as the Black Panthers used to put it. And so if we were going to force the issue, we had to do it then. So, I was always in favor of taking the building, even though the first votes in this meeting were not in favor. So somewhat manipulatively, I must admit, I kept the issue alive. And PL was prepared with that too. So in the end, I think the vote was inconclusive. I forget exactly what the vote was, but I have not gone back and looked at these books to check. But we decided we were going to have a march after the meeting was over that night, I guess April 8th it was and march through campus. And I had a list of our demands. And I, the historian already, nascent historian, I knew about Martin Luther tacking these 95 theses up on the door of the cathedral in Germany. So, I decided to go to the President's office and tacked the demands up on his door and made some little speech of some kind. And then as we walked around Cambridge after that, our faction and the PL faction decided we were going to take the building. So we spent much of the night putting together leaflets, passed them out on campus. And at noon we went to University Hall and kicked the deans out. PL people picked the deans up and took them out. They wanted to show them a little of who they were, which in the end they got arrested. Some of the people who did, they got arrested for that. And you want me to go into University Hall, what happened there?

SM (00:19:41):
Yeah, you took over the hall. How long did it take?

MK (00:19:45):
We were there for basically from noon until about 6:00 AM the next morning when the police came in. And there was a big debate. Actually, I was not inside University Hall when the police came in. I thought someone should go out of the hall and first of all see if they were in and if they were, tell people that the police were coming. And then I thought I would go back in the hall. But I went outside and the police started to come in almost as soon as I got outside. So, I said, "Well maybe I will stay outside and not get arrested and get the stuff going." And also, to be honest, in retrospect, I was a little scared too. I did not like the idea of just sitting there and getting my head beaten. And again, I think it was probably a good decision because the other leaders of the chapter were arrested. So I was able to start a rally on the steps of Widener Library right in Harvard Yard, denouncing the police and calling for a student strike as other people were doing too. And the student strike basically started spontaneously, in large part, not necessarily because everybody at Harvard thought we had done the right thing by taking the building. There was a lot of people... Got the dog on your tape there?

SM (00:21:05):
Yeah [inaudible].

MK (00:21:06):
A dog passed by [inaudible], but it is her turf.

SM (00:21:08):
Brody does the same thing.

MK (00:21:10):
Zoe shut up.

SM (00:21:13):
Brody just barks because he does not want anybody to leave.

MK (00:21:15):
Really? She gets upset when we go on a trip. As soon as we bring her back downstairs, she knows what is going there.

SM (00:21:22):
Oh, boy. Does she bark?

MK (00:21:23):
No. Sits in front of the front door and says, "You are not getting past me." Where were we? Oh yeah, the strike. So as often happened, it happened at Columbia too, other places, the student movement grew large partly because students were in support of our basic anti-war position, even if they were not in support of our specific politics, dogmatic imperialism, supporting the people fighting American troops and so forth. But they really got active when they saw their friends getting clubbed by police. And we would not have had a huge, good strike without that if we just sat there. In fact, ironically, if the administration just let us sit in that building and they just waited us out, we probably would have had to leave in defeat. But in the end, the calling the police in, which of course they had a legal right to do, galvanized the student strike. And we had big meetings at the Harvard stadium across the river, 10,000 people, 12,000 people, obviously the cover of Black Magazine because it was Harvard. Now, what we were doing was not all that different really from what was happening on hundreds of campuses around the country.

SM (00:22:45):
In happened in Hamilton too.

MK (00:22:45):
It was Harvard. That is the reason it was a big deal. And we knew that. We knew we would make a splash by doing this. I must say though, one of the things that I realized, and I have written about since then was, you can see how happy or glad I should say, the police were to bust our heads when they came in. And this a [inaudible], the idea of driving their cruisers into Harvard Yard, leaving deep ruts in the grass of Harvard Yard. These were mostly middle class white guys from Cambridge, from other parts of the Boston area who all thought Harvard was these stuck up, privileged, rich people. And to them, I think, even though all of us certainly were not rich, lots of [inaudible] kids and so forth, but to them it was pretty clear, they took a certain glee I think in smashing into Harvard and smashing up these unpatriotic freaks who had [inaudible].

SM (00:23:48):
James Fallows was there too, I believe around that time.

MK (00:23:50):
Yeah. [inaudible] here now.

SM (00:23:52):
And then, of course, just recently, the death of John Wheeler, the murder. And I had interviewed him for my book. And he had been at Harvard too later on after he had served in Vietnam.

MK (00:24:02):
Jim was president of Crimson. I am not sure if it was that year, but maybe the year before.

SM (00:24:09):
And he had written a lot about how guilty he felt about avoiding the draft.

MK (00:24:12):
[inaudible].

SM (00:24:12):
Yeah, yeah. And of course he became close friends of Jack Wheeler over time, The Long Green Line, the book that was written. You went on to Portland State and then you went on to Stanford. Were you as active politically on those campuses?

MK (00:24:25):
Oh, yeah.

SM (00:24:26):
Now when-

MK (00:24:27):
Did not have much at Stanford. By then it was the mid (19)70s. And if you are getting a PhD, you do not have much time. But I got active in the early (19)80s again in the nuclear freeze movement. But Portland State, well first of all, I went to Portland not to go to school, not to go to university, but because I was kicked out of Harvard in the fall of (19)69 for leading a demonstration against the people of the Center for National Affairs, which Henry Kissinger had set up, sort of a think tank/elite department. And I went to New York, started work on Liberation Mews Service, this underground press service, sort of like the AP of the Radical Press and long story. But basically they had taken a feminist turn. There were too many men on the collective. They said I could work there, but I could not join the collective. My girlfriend who I met there was not happy about it, but basically, I would not be able to stay there as a man. So, they liked my work a lot. So, I looked at all the papers that were coming to the office there from all around the country, all over the world, for that matter. And the one from Portland, Oregon was a really nice paper. And I always like the idea of living on the West Coast for a while. I had lived in Berkeley for a while, in the summer of (19)69. Actually. Oh, it was (19)68. And so I called up the Portland paper, I said, "Do you need a staff member?" They said, "Sure, $25 a week." And so I hitchhiked out to Portland. And while I was there, the paper, long story, it fell apart basically after about a year. And I had a few jobs, working restaurants and working at Portland State University and Tate Library. And I said, "Well, I always liked history. The revolution might not be happening. I would better think of something to earn a living. I do not want to be short order cook for the rest of my life." So, I applied to Portland State history program just to try it out.

SM (00:26:41):
And then you went on and got your PhD?

MK (00:26:42):
Yeah, but while I was there, I was involved in the anti-war movement, which, of course, still going on.

SM (00:26:47):
A very liberal area out there too, Portland.

MK (00:26:51):
Yeah. And of course, we had that newspaper that I helped edit, called the [inaudible] Bridge. And I got involved in a free clinic. I was involved with a group called Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was in favor of national health insurance. And actually, it had been originally started by this guy, Howard Levy, who was an army doctor who turned against the war. And I was also involved in, we had a little campaign to impeach Nixon during Watergate. So whatever was going on, I was involved in. And I worked for McGovern, which was sad. But I did for a short time.

SM (00:27:26):
That was quite at a defeat. I saw McGovern in 1972 when he flew into Columbus, Ohio. He got off the plane but never really left tarmac. And I could not see him very well, but I heard him, Ohio State had a big contingent there. Big.

MK (00:27:39):
Is that where you went to school, Ohio?

SM (00:27:43):
Yeah, grad school. I was there for five years I noticed that you had been a professor, and adjunct professor at a lot of different schools from San Francisco State, Stanford, Santa Cruz, even went to Europe for a while and taught there. And then of course-

MK (00:27:59):
I went to Europe; it was after I was already a tenured professor.

SM (00:28:03):
And that of course, you have taught at American and now at Georgetown. When you look at your peers, and you have probably been asked this before, and it was not any condemnation of the two generations that have followed the Boomer generation in terms of... But when you compare the students from your era, the students that you went to class at Harvard and Portland and so forth and the students that you have been teaching over the years, do you see a big difference within the generations? And what would those differences be? Because I like the millennials that are today. I know they are doing a lot of things, but...

MK (00:28:43):
I do not think as deeply about generations as some people do, I guess. I think about groups within generations and they have to all... We know from polls today that Boomer generation is probably more conservative on a lot of issues and has been for a while than younger generations are, certainly on issues like gay marriage, on abortion, on US foreign policy. So, the image that people often have that the Boomer generation was full of leftists, it was not true then, and it is not true now. There was a certain group within it who certainly were, and college students tend to be more than people that did not go to college. But I often tell my students that the most popular candidates in 1972 among people who were from my generation, a lot of them had been voting for the first time, were both for George McGovern and George Wallace. So rebellious figures were popular, it was just not necessarily rebellious figures on the left. And I have written a little about this in my book on populism. So, there is a real division within the generation, I think, more than there was some lock step. One of the things which is true though, and of course, I see these younger generations mostly through my kids who are now 19 and 22 and through my students over the years, and one thing I have noticed since I have been teaching for, wow, 35 years now in college and some in high school too. I taught some high school in the late (19)70s. One of the things I see is that there is less desire, I think, to mix it up ideologically, less desire to really fight over essentials, more inclination to be civil towards other people's opinions, sometimes to a fault, I think. I am always trying to get my students and talk my kids too, to really see that that is a lot at stake in these different points of view. And there is nothing wrong with having sharp arguments about these things. But I notice, especially kids my age, to a certain degree, I have noticed this for the last 10, 15 years of my students too, that they are loath to really take on someone from their own generation, really argue fiercely with them about issues. They feel somehow being impolite or perhaps that in the end, the differences do not matter as much as getting along matters. And that is very different from our generation's feeling as you know. We can be accused of a lot of things, but not taking politics seriously is not one thing we cannot be accused of.

SM (00:31:48):
Kind of the Rodney King mentality, cannot we all just get along?

MK (00:31:50):
Yeah. And it is fine. I am not in favor of revolution. I have not been for many, many years now. I am a liberal democrat basically today and I think conservative Republicans have terrible ideas. And I think if they do not explain why I think they do is fine. And I have considered this with my class and I am very empathetic with them. I draw them out, evaluations they give me show that they respect that, and they know I do not agree with them, but they do not argue for conservatism as much as I would like them to, to be honest with you. There is a lot of lazy liberalism on my campus anyway, and my views in general. And I think it is important for my liberal students to hear arguments well-articulated and well defended and vice versa. [inaudible].

SM (00:32:42):
I was feeling, when I read the first biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, I remember when she was in high school, her teacher-

MK (00:32:49):
In Illinois?

SM (00:32:51):
Yeah, in Illinois. She was a Goldwater girl, and her friend was a big supporter of LBJ. They had a project, you probably know, have heard about this, and she wanted to debate her friend representing Goldwater. Well, he said, "If you are going to learn about the other point of view and the positions of the people that you are opposing, then you need to learn backwards and forwards what they stand for. So you are going to represent LBJ and your friend's going to represent Goldwater in the debate." And as a result of that experience, Hillary became a liberal. That is a true story.

MK (00:33:26):
I did not know that.

SM (00:33:27):
And it was all based on this teacher who realized the true learning and we tell this to students all the time that you can be emotional about your feelings, but knowledge is just power. Know the issues. When you hear Newt Gingrich make statements about President Obama, well you study President Obama and where he stands on things, but you need to study Newt Gingrich too. Just do not take a line here and then-

MK (00:33:51):
I started to write about conservatism about 20 years ago and it was partly because I wanted to understand why they were doing so well, for someone who did not agree with them. But also it is useful because you learn to not demonize the other side and actually-

MK (00:34:03):
It is useful because you learn to not demonize the other side. And actually it leads to more civil dialogue, I think. It does not mean you agree with them more, but you at least understand why they have come to that position.

SM (00:34:13):
Do you like the term, the Boomer generation? I get a sense you like groups within the generation as a-

MK (00:34:20):
I mean obviously generations matter. I mean they listen to some similar kinds of music. They are affected at the same time of their lives by certain kinds of events. So, I am not saying generations do not matter. I just think this is a big, big country and it is also a big, big world. And to assume that somehow generational experiences are all the same, that is just not the history. I mean also more and more historians; it is just sort of transnational ways of looking at things. And I do that some too and obviously the generation I was part of, especially the cohort of it, there were people in Italy and France, and Germany and Britain, and Japan and Argentina, and Mexico were going to a lot of the same experiences. And to generalize about how the experiences affected them would be presumptuous. What I really know about without studying it, about what a kid growing up in Tokyo who happened to join Jim [inaudible], the Japanese left-wing kids’ organization. What specifically was driving that person? Was it same thing as driving me as a Jewish liberal New Yorker? Probably not. Some things, yes, some things, no.

SM (00:35:34):
The generation gap is a term we all know. It was defined as the disagreement between the older generation, the younger generation or between parent and child. And if you remember 1968, Life Magazine had that front cover with a guy with glasses on. It was kind of a black silhouette with the fathers pointing at the son and the son pointing at the father. So the Generation Gap was well known. But in the book, the Wounded Degeneration, which was a book that came out in 1980, there was a symposium that included James Fallows, Phil Caputo, Jack Wheeler, a young man then. Who else? Bobby Mueller and Jim White was an unbelievable symposium. And basically they were talking about a lot of different things, generation gap. And they brought up this very important thing.

MK (00:36:22):
All men are all white.

SM (00:36:24):
Yeah. And there was another writer that I cannot remember, he was a columnist though, not a vet. And the issue came up and said that the boomer generation has always been labeled as a service generation. That is not what your country can do for you. That Kennedy inspired so many people in the Peace Corps Vista. Well one of the gentlemen in the conversation said that this is a myth, that this generation is a service generation. The reason it is a myth is because they did not serve in the war in Vietnam. A service generation is one when your country calls, you go. And this was Jim Webb I believe, who was the at the time was... And so, he said when we start talking about the generational gap between parents and children, I think it is equally important to talk about the intra generational gap between those who went to Vietnam and those who did not.

MK (00:37:19):
And those were in the military, and those who did not. As you know, most people went in the military, did not actually go to Vietnam. And that chart, that was chance of circumstances, other charts since then, I always show my students because they have the sense of you in the army and you in combat. Not true. But obviously the idea of being in the military and making that decision when if you are from a certain background like my background, you could get out of it, which I did. That was a huge division as well. I always tell my students about when I had my physical in 1970, it was May 18th I think 1970 if I remember exactly, it was in the middle of the student strike after Ken State, after Jackson State, the biggest of student strike in American history. And I would come from Cambridge, I dropped out of Harvard, but I was a student anymore. But it was clear they did not want anybody from Cambridge like me. And I got out, I will not go into the details of how I got out, but it was not hard and walked out. There was this guy sitting there, short hair, looked pretty gloomy. And I believe that counselor, I said, "Hey, I just got out. You want me to help you get out?" I said, "Where are you from?" He said, "I am from South Boston." Irish, catholic kid probably, I am not sure. And I said, "Get out. Hell, I do not want to get out. If I do not pass this physical, my parents' going to kill me." Because everybody's family had had been in the military and he actually was afraid he would not pass, because he would bring disrespect on his family. So that was an important experience to me to have that interaction.

SM (00:38:57):
Did you have any conflicts with any of your fellow students in Harvard or Portland regarding over the war or any of the other issues? That would be the intergenerational battles. And then did you have battles within your family with your mom?

MK (00:39:10):
No, my mom was very-

SM (00:39:11):
And your dad.

MK (00:39:12):
My father was opposed to the war. By the time I was eligible for draft, it was (19)66. Because I had a two S for a while, then I burned my two S card. Actually, I am sure you will love this for the book, I actually rolled a joint in my two S card and smoked it.

SM (00:39:30):
Oh my gosh. That is a magic moment. You cannot go to jail.

MK (00:39:41):
Yeah, right. Well it was a party. It was party. I got pretty stoned in my dorm. But I mean I thought, again, it is a class thing that Fallis talked about in an essay. I thought the draft system was the cemetery against other class people, which it was. And so, I wrote to my draft board and said, I understand I am doing my draft, but I said, "I am giving up my two deferment and this is a terrible system." And of course the draft boards were all local. So they wrote to my mother or my father, I forget who in the state. "He is putting himself up eligible for draft." And I said, fine. So I went to physical but then failed. I purposely failed the physical. It is not that I wanted to go, it is just that I did not think it was fair for me to have a legal way out when a lot of other people did not. So where were we? So basically, yeah, so that was my experience with that par generation gap. And I went to a private high school in New Jersey, Englewood School for Boys, it was then called. Now it is called Dwight-Englewood School. And there was only one kid I knew who went to my high school, who went to the military and he enlisted, he became an officer. But clearly, I mean that itself shows, I mean this is a whole generation of people. When the draft was on, none of whom, as far as I know, were actually even drafted. He enlisted.

SM (00:41:01):
Wow. I got so many different angles here. I am coming with this interview. And in your opinion as a historian, a person who studied social movements, I was going to have you do comparisons here, but I am really going to concentrate on the movements of the late (19)60s and (19)70s. But the first question I want to ask, is there any link between McCarthyism of the (19)50s and the red baiting in the late (19)40s and (19)50s that we all know about? Because there is a lot of fear of speaking up. People sometimes felt they were being watched and many were reported and people that were all fear of being linked to somebody or something connected to being a communist. Is there something between what was happening in the (19)50s and what we call in the six (19)60s where we have seen more and more people speaking up and thus, we see these great movements because there is no McCarthyism happening now.

MK (00:41:56):
Well, there is an attempt. They did not fail.

SM (00:42:00):
Yeah, it is an attempt. We have seen precedence in, we know that there is prices that people pay for standing up for the beliefs. We know that. So many of the anti-war people that I have talked to believe that they are veterans as well as the people that served in Vietnam. Not in terms of military veterans, but in terms of the damages, broken noses. I have had a few people that-

MK (00:42:19):
Even though I am supportive of most of what I did then-

SM (00:42:22):
You are not going to go that far.

MK (00:42:25):
Got the stretch. I mean we purposefully put ourselves in danger. So whereas if you were drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam, you might not like it, but you had orders. Nothing.

SM (00:42:36):
Those movements really could not have happened in the (19)50s though. Could they? Even civil rights was happening and people were taking the risks and Dr. King and-

MK (00:42:46):
That is a different matter. That is a different matter. I am talking about people like me, white middle class kids who were in the [inaudible ]. That was a different matter? No, of course if you were a black person in Mississippi or Alabama and you took your left hand if you wanted to, wished to vote. I mean that was very different. That was very different. Well, I think that the impact of McCarthyism did not last really much since the (19)60s. As you know there was this famous demonstration, Francisco City Hall to protest The House Un-American Activities Committee hearing 1960. And the people who were supportive of the committee, made a film, Operation Abolition, which they thought would expose the communist threat trying to abolish this stolen, patriotic anti-communist committee. And the film was left at it, it felt completely flat. And more people saw the film, said, "Hey, that is a kind of cool kid protesting." And the police attacked them and so forth. So it was a backlash. Todd Gitlin has written his book on the 60s talk about this. Todd's a friend of mine. And so I think that certainly in the south, the civil rights movement with the COINTELPRO program, really with Hoover trying to tar... King with being a communist. So his aid, Stanley Levison having a communist of course has to basically get out of the inner circle and so forth. Under all that was going on, Hoover was still a powerful figure. But among people I worked with, sort of middle class whites, especially in places like New York City and the Bay Area in Chicago, college towns and Swarthmore and Wellesley, and even some places like Chapel Hill, Madison, Wisconsin, McCarthyism was not a cause. These were liberal places would never like McCarthy anyway, and never liked Hoover anyway. And so, the real division was between people who were supporting the Democratic administration and people like us who were denouncing it. So that conservative anti-communism did not really have a place there. I remember there was this guy, Joe Mulotmuraz, his name was, he was from Hungary and he had immigrated after the revolt of (19)56 have been put down by the Soviets and their allies. And he used to show up at every FDS meeting, every FDS rally at Harvard, anywhere in Boston home of the Hungarian Freedom Fighter. He is also an anti-Semite, which has a long history in Hungary. And he had a sign saying communism is Jewish and denounced this. And it was a joke. I mean no one took this guy seriously and he was not the antisemitic, he was like the crazy right wing anti-communist who always showed up. And after a while it became a sort of pat. It was like, "Hey Joe, we missed you last time." I mean he was so serious and he was not convincing anybody.

SM (00:46:06):
How important were the following events and shaping the times that boomers were alive? And what I am referring to here is, it is amazing how people book state the number of boomers there are, I think 79 million is the actual figure. I heard 74-

MK (00:46:22):
I think about the (19)60s as well as was active in it. That number, I do not know.

SM (00:46:26):
79 is, let us give or take a few amount. But what I am trying to get at here is we know that the new lesson, we know that the anti-war movement was a small number of people comparison to the entire generation. And basically, what I am trying to get at with this question is not so much that these particular events influence and created protests, but that it is subconsciously affected the entire generation in terms of their lives as young people and their lives since as the oldest Boomer turns 65 this year. So, I am listing these events and just simply say which ones are few that you feel really get all of a generation. Congresses Board of Education in (19)54, the Montgomery Bus Boy Act in the (19)50s, the lunch counter protest in (19)60, freedom Summer in (19)64, the Free Speech Movement in (19)64, (19)65. Kennedy's election and his inaugural speech in 1961, Sputnik in 1957, the Kennedy assassination in (19)63.

MK (00:47:36):
You want me to go each one?

SM (00:47:38):
Oh no, no, not each one. I am just saying which ones you feel really affected all. And some of them may not affect all, they might affect the new left more than the Civil Rights Act of (19)64, (19)65, the year 1968 when Nixon was elected and certainly Ken State and Jackson State in 1970. And the election or loss of George McGovern in (19)72. And certainly, the escalation of the Vietnam and Reagan's election in (19)80.

MK (00:48:04):
Well make course without doing research specifically about that, I am just going to speculate because again, it would be great research project to take and maybe someone is doing it to take a scientific cross section of the boomer generation, different cohorts chronologically, different regionally, racially, men and women, et cetera. Yeah, as far as I know, no one has done that. It would be interesting to do that. Someone should do it. Or maybe someone is doing it. Maybe someone has. I should know. But again, just speculating pretty wildly because I believe in research. Clearly the most important events that influenced everybody were ones that influenced all Americans, which is presidential elections. I mean, you forgot about things like the moon landing for (19)69, Woodstock, which probably more if people think about what they still think was important about the (19)60s, those things are more important than any of the things you mentioned except perhaps Kennedy's election. And so Kennedy's inaugural. But again, at the time, how many people actually watched it? Probably not that many. Well a lot did, but there was in American Divided at the end, I think we found a poll done late (19)90s. I think when the first edition of our book came out, people actually, Americans were asked which these things about the (19)60s are most influential to you. And it was the Beatles, Woodstock, and the moon landing, none of them specifically political events. And that is important to realize, partly because people like to remember things that made them feel good. And all the things made people feel good. I mean, human beings are like that. Our lives are fairly short. We rather think about the Beatles than think about Vietnam. And that is probably true of people in Vietnam too. So I mean clearly the war, everyone knew the war was going on. All young men, unless they had some easy out had to think about, do I want to go in or not? And the civil rights stuff you mentioned clearly was any black person, any African American, could not be influenced by those things in one way or another. They were all over the black class, all over. People knew people who were involved in them. Whites, again, I do not know for sure again the research project to figure that out. But if you were in Greensboro, North Carolina, then obviously, or around near any place, citizens were taking place in 1960 that mattered If you were involved in a school that was beginning to be desegregated sometime after Brown, as it took a while, yes. For that to happen, all the liver speed was meant really slow most places and so close cases to actually make it happen after that. I think I am always amazed. I have my students in my 1960s lecture course, which I am teaching right now. I have taught it many times, have them do oral histories. Someone like you are doing with someone from the (19)60s and they have to put in a more demo context. Really do it about race, and they do it with a white person and race is central to it. I am almost amazed how unaware most whites were about what was going on in these terms. I mean, again, most people are making their own lives. They do not feel themselves being involved in making history. Dick Flacks you might know is-

SM (00:51:54):
Oh yeah, I interviewed Dick.

MK (00:51:55):
Yeah. He wrote an essay called, Making History. And then he wrote about and read his book on the left, he read his book. And he talked about that. And it is obvious in ways, but somehow a lot of historians forget that, that people do not see themselves as part of this world, historical things. They think about their family, they think about maybe their ethnic group, they think about their church and their religion, but basically they neither have time nor interest in thinking about the larger world and politic people somehow forget that. After the Democrats lost the house in (19)94, I had lunch with Dick Gephardt who had been the majority leader and would have been the speaker of the house if they won. And with some other people, was not just me, in his spacious office, he was about to lose because Republican was taking over. And he said sort of tongue in cheek, he said, "We have polls which showed that 75 percent of the American people neither consume nor wish to consume politics." And that sort of stuck with me. And he was a pretty skillful politician and he understood that most people really, really, we just assume politicians go away and politics go away.

SM (00:53:12):
In your own words, can you describe... The boomers are reaching 65 this year, the front edge boomers, I think I read that 3,500 people a day are going to be turning 65 until the last Boomer turns 65 from the group from 64. And so, the question I am trying to ask you-

MK (00:53:39):
I just say, just one quick thing about that, again, the generation really 18 years, I always question that. Barack Obama is a boomer, but is his experience of the (19)60s is really, really much like that of yours and mine? I do not think so.

SM (00:53:54):
That is what Todd said. And many others besides Todd. Todd said he does not like generations period. He does not like the greatest generation, but Tom Brokaw kind of emphasized, did not like Generation X and you did not like anything. He was like, what you were saying, things within generation. I have learned from this project that the people that were born between 1937, (19)38 and 1945 are closer to the first 10-year boomers, the first front edge boomers than the last 10 years in the boomers.

MK (00:54:23):
No-

SM (00:54:26):
Because if you can remember as students, one of the first things you learned and I learned in grad school when I went to Ohio State is the Harry Edwards book where he breaks down the differences between the radicals, the activists, the anomic activists, the militants and so forth. And the revolutionary. And he talked about it and he said a lot of the young people in college, they were being led or inspired by graduate students, students who were in their mid to late twenties. Now those are people born between (19)40 and (19)45. And one thing I have learned from Missy Havens, Richie says, "I am a boomer. I was born in 1941, but I am a boomer and it is because of the spirit of the times that has nothing to do when I was born. It is the spirit." George Hower was born in 1916. He is part of the spirit of the time. So that is one thing I think you really hit the mark. And this is one thing I really learned by doing this book is-

MK (00:55:30):
Well, I think Mr. should be better sociologist often than, and one of the things sociologists teach is that who influence you the most in politics, as you say, people who are just a little bit older than you. It is peers and people who you see as leaders. And Todd, he is five years older than me, Tom Hayden is maybe six or seven years older than me. I am not sure. I mean, I was in FDS. The people who founded FDS were obviously going to be my mentors in a way. And they were all, as you say, were born before (19)46.

SM (00:55:59):
Yeah. Rennie Davis was the same. And that whole group is there. I would like your feelings though, in terms of, just as a historian, you teach the (19)60s. When you teach the (19)60s, you have to talk about the (19)50s and certainly the late (19)40s.

MK (00:56:15):
The first lecture I did was on the (19)50s.

SM (00:56:15):
And between (19)46 and (19)50 too. Cause when we started being born at that timeframe. Just in your own words, describe America in terms of whether it be culturally, politically activists wise between 46 and 60?

MK (00:56:33):
That is a good question. Well, it is a combination of clearly economic growth and shared economic prosperity. More shared than any other time and American history. Any other time in world history actually, we know now, given what is happening in Europe and Japan, even in the Soviet plot. Eric Hobsbawm, his book Age of Extremes, wonderful book, which is a world history of 1940, 1989. And he calls these years the golden age, late (19)40s, early (19)70s. It began after World War II, of course. But at the same time there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear that nuclear war had happened, that communists were gaining. There was a lot of racial tension in the cities in the north as much as south. My friend Tom Sugrue has written a book that sort of a very important book called, the Origins of the Urban Crisis. I do not know if you know that book.

SM (00:57:39):
I know Tom Sugrue, but... S-U-G-R-U-E, right?

MK (00:57:43):
S-U-G-R-U-E. Yeah. And he points out that about Detroit. Other people have written about this in other cities at the time. If black people tried to move into white neighborhood in late (19)40s, early (19)50s, they often would meet with mobs saying, forget about it. And even though civil rights laws were on the books and some of these states from late 1940s on, it was very hard to, if you are a black person, to get an apartment or a house in a white neighborhood, realtors and final council. And then if they decided, of course, famous block busting-

SM (00:58:19):
Got 30 minutes, I think we still got 30 minutes.

MK (00:58:23):
Yes.

SM (00:58:23):
Because I know that was the one order there.

MK (00:58:35):
That does not matter, but I am just looking at just ordinary black people wanted to move with the white neighborhoods who did not have any politics to speak of.

SM (00:58:43):
Yeah, we are okay.

MK (00:58:44):
Because of course that shows not just racism, but also insecurity on the part of white people in this neighborhood that they felt understandably, that if black people began to move in their house, which is what they had more money stock into than anything else, was going to go down at value, they were afraid their schools would be problems. Of course, they were afraid that their daughters and sons might get involved manically with black people. And so just on and on and on. So, the glory of (19)50s was glorious economically in the aggregate compared to other times in American history. And compared to recent times too. But it was clearly still a time of great insecurity and in great anxiety, many people who were doing better were not so sure that the better times was going to continue. It was a time when institutions were very strong. Labor unions. People forget, were stronger than ever before in American's history. And that had something to do with the prosperity. And obviously corporations are strong. People thought they could go to work for big corporations, GE or Westinghouse, or thrift meat packing or Ford, and you could work for the rest of your life until you retired. And then when you retired, you would have a pension. You would not have to put your money in the stock market like you do now. But at the same time, people would come out of the depression, come out of the war, and they did not know whether this could continue. They did not have great optimism that their kind of country would always be as prosperous as it was. And of course, with the Cold War there, in 1960 debates, when Kennedy talked about the missile gap, which was of course a complete lie, it was all on the other side. But nevertheless, people believed him enough because they said, well, Soviet Union seems to be gaining and all these countries are communists and communists are causing trouble around the world. And so there is this fear that, yeah, the United States are in pretty good shape now, but who knows what the future will bring. And of course, there was youth revolt in the (19)50s too. Rock and roll riots and Elvis, and juvenile delinquents and all this stuff.

SM (01:00:53):
Gangs.

MK (01:00:53):
Yeah, exactly. So comic books, there were congressional investigations into comic books.

SM (01:00:59):
James Dean.

MK (01:01:00):
It seems hilarious now that people be thinking comic books were a threat to the republic. But nevertheless, as in history, nothing is spontaneous, nothing comes from nowhere. And everything happened in the (19)60s, the seeds were sewn for that earlier. I mean, a lot of them before the (19)40s and (19)50s too. But certainly, in the (19)40s and (19)50s already, you have debates between my uncle Daniel Bell and C. Wright Mills about whether the United States is a plural society or is one run by a power elite? All that is taking place in the (19)50s already, a rather kind of debates between liberal and radicals that we think about in the (19)60s already happening, beginning to happen in the (19)50s.

SM (01:01:44):
How about the period 1961 and 1980?

MK (01:01:49):
What about it? How would you contrast it?

SM (01:01:50):
It is the same thing. Yeah. How would you contrast it with that whole period from John Kennedy's inaugural to Ronald Reagan's inaugural?

MK (01:01:57):
I think I am not a Marist anymore, but I am enough of a... I believe in important of economics lives enough to believe that when a boom ends, then a lot of other things are affected by it. And that happens in beginning in the late (19)60s, but really as in the early (19)70s with stagflation with the oral crisis. And so, I would, like most of historians and days, I would say the period is more (19)61 to (19)73 than it is (19)61 to (19)80. I mean, the rise of conservatives would be, of course, who knows kind of factually. But it can only be understood in the context of inflation, unemployment of fear that Keynesian remedies are not working anymore. That one of the reasons Americans were willing to elect liberal presidents from Roosevelt to Truman, to Kennedy to Johnson, and have not been willing to ever since, perhaps Obama's exception, but he did not run as a liberal, is because they saw liberals as whether they remember or not, as people who basically said the government will take care of you. The government will keep the economy afloat. And it did not. Even though Nixon was in power when the worst of it happened, the programs were basically the Keynesian programs. And Nixon was the first president, said he was a Keynesian. They are all Keynesian now. So I think that that was a key that you took a win. The (19)60s ended, it ended in the early (19)70s with the economic crisis, of course, with the end of the war.

SM (01:03:40):
Yeah. And I am the only person that said this. And that is that I knew in the fall of (19)73 that the (19)60s was beginning to end when streaking happened. And I am working on my first job at Ohio University, and I get a call from all my buddies that are still in graduate school there at Ohio State and Jones Graduate Tower. And they said, "You have got to get back here tonight." And I said, "What do you mean I got to get back there tonight?" "Oh, they are going to be doing the Rockettes behind the law library." And I said, "The Rockettes?" "Yeah, the girls are going to come out all naked and then the guys are going to file suit and then there is going to be a big streak across the oval tonight, and then they are going to streak the Olympics all weekend." And I did not believe it, but then I went, I said, "Oh my God, this is in the (19)50s where they just stuck themselves into-"

MK (01:04:35):
Telephone booths.

SM (01:04:35):
Telephone booths or in the laundromat. Oh I said, "Oh, boy."

MK (01:04:39):
Or a panty wave. Right. That is a good point.

SM (01:04:42):
So that particular period, so when you say the next period really is the onset of, I think the late (19)70s and the (19)80s is the era of Reagan and conservatism, would not you say?

MK (01:04:56):
Politically, yeah. We talked about this in America Divided, and I think culturally, people on my side continue to gain even, we did not have a movement per se, but feminism continues to percolate in various ways and continues to affect women. I mean, college students today, women, just think if you told them, well, what else we need, that you cannot really think about the engineer because that is a man's job. They would say, "What are you talking about?" The idea that is a man's job, a woman's job. But of course, we were growing up in the (19)50s, that was taken for granted. Ads in the papers said, help wanted, man. Help wanted, women. It was just expected. And I think race is lots a lot more complicated now because of immigration, partly, but also because I think people no longer, again, I mean the civil rights movement did not succeed in all the things he wanted to do. As king was an economic radical, not just a civil rights person. He really wanted a guaranteed annual wage health insurance. He was basically a democratic socialist. In fact, he said so in private. But clearly culturally you cannot be a public racist anymore in this country, and you cannot justify things on the base of race. Now you can still justify the basis of not like the immigrants, and that is partly racial, but that is more recent. And the whole thing about sexuality, which of course gays and lesbians have been able to more open sexuality and people thinking, if you love each other, why not have all the right to anybody else? That is a creature of the (19)60s, I think, too.

SM (01:06:39):
And the age crisis, which infuriated many of the gay lesbian leaders, because Reagan refused to even mention the word. And many believed that he cost thousands on thousands of people that dying because he could not even say the word.

MK (01:06:53):
Which is ironic, because as he was not anti-gay personally. I mean, Nancy had lots of friends who were gay and this whole Hollywood scene it was, and designers and stuff, he was hardly a fundamentalist on these issues. So in that sense, yeah, conservatives, I mean, we talked about this in American Divided, conservatives won for the most part politically. Though again, there is limits too. I mean, as you know, when they attack the healthcare bill last year, this year, they attacked it for jeopardizing Medicare, which of course Ronald Reagan said was socialism at the time. So there is a lot of these conflicts. I mean, America's never been as liberal as some people thought in the (19)60s. It was not as liberal then as its people thought, and it is not as conservative. And it was not as conservative in the (19)80s as people thought either. We have these conflicts in American history, which in many ways go way back and neither side wins a complete victory.

SM (01:07:47):
Would you say the culture was as ongoing with respect to even how they look at Bill Clinton and George Bush the second? Because here you have two boomers, one conservative, one liberal, and they are comparing them, and this guy is this way and this guy's that way. Is that just part of the culture- This guy is this way, and this guy is that way. Is that just part of the culture wars, the ongoing culture wars?

MK (01:08:05):
Well, the partnership was obviously very strong.

SM (01:08:07):
The Vietnam War.

MK (01:08:09):
If you look at it-it in the larger perspective, neither Clinton nor Bush... But both Clinton and Bush were, in many ways, Clinton was sort of center left. Bush was sort of center right. Neither was trying to roll back "New Deal", "Great Society" programs to any great degree. Bush was not a Tea Party person at all. We were not. And Clinton was certainly not a far-off liberal, either. And yet of course, both sides jumped on the other one, partly for Bush was because of the war, of course, in Iraq. But even before that, people saw him as illegitimate winning the presidency and everything else. And I think one of the results in the (19)60s is that people were politically active, which is not most Americans. People who are politically active really believe that the other side is evil. And I was saying before, earlier in the interview, that I think it is important to take a strong stance. But it does not mean that that Democrats and Republicans, as parties, are really ideologically bound parties. They are more than there used to be, certainly. But still most Americans who vote for Democrats, Republicans agree with some of the things the other party is for, too. Most Americans are not deeply ideological.

SM (01:09:33):
A major question I have been asking every person from the very first interview with Senator McCarthy is the issue of healing. Whether you feel that there is an issue within this generation of lack of healing for those who were... Support for the war, against the war, for the troops, against the troops, the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight. This question comes because a group of students came up with a question, they wanted to ask Senator Edmond Muskie when we took a group in 1995 to meet him in his office. And because they had seen the film on 1968 and they thought we were close to a second civil war. And they were not born yet, but they had seen the riots, some of the films in (19)60s, they had seen the riots. They saw two assassinations, King and Kennedy. They saw the Chicago Eight trial, they saw the terrible confrontation in Chicago that year. And they came up with a question and they thought Senator Muskie would talk about (19)68 and all the divisions. And I will give you his response after I hear from you. Do you think that part of the divisiveness that we have right now, that there is a link between what is happening today and what happened back then? The bitterness, the somewhat hatred between people with opposing points of view, that this is continuing, ongoing and that the generation itself, either consciously or subconsciously, because you cannot talk about 79 million, but it is something that I have brought up to everyone, and they have all had different answers to this. Do you think we have an issue with healing as a generation? And that many will go to their grave still bitter toward people who had opposing points of view, no matter the issue?

MK (01:11:26):
Again, it depends on who you are talking about. I think you have to separate people who were activists then and continue to think as activists now. People who were not much activists then, or they might have gone to a demonstration or they might have gone to a rock festival or something, but they were just sort of riding on the wave, whatever the wave happened to be. But those who actually started the waves and continued to want the waves to continue and not to break on the shore, that is the right metaphor. I think yes. I think on both sides, if you talk about two sides, continue to say that if you are on the left, that conservatives now are the same people who are wrong back in the Cold War in (19)64 and supported the war in Vietnam and liked the police cracking people's heads in Chicago and so forth. And of course, on the right, mirror image, "These crypto communists think America's not exceptional." I just wrote a piece. I have a column for the New Republic, and I just wrote a piece on American exceptionalism, how Obama can maybe take advantage of that concept. But as I said before, I think that if you look at issues though, there has actually been some healing. Or I would rather think of transcendence than healing. I am not sure it is healing. As often happens in history, after a while people no longer care to argue about certain issues. It is just not relevant anymore, either to their lives or to the society. It is not politically opportunistic to argue about it. I think we are approaching that with gay rights. Certainly already approached it with gay military. That is over. And I think we will approach with gay marriage in the next five to 10 years, as well. Already at the Conservative Convention downtown, the CPAC convention-

SM (01:13:27):
CPAC.

MK (01:13:27):
Happening now. No one. Did anybody talk about gay marriage? Not because they might not believe that it is wrong, but because they realize that most people do not care enough about that to vote on that basis. Abortion is still a very loud issue, and in fact, young people are probably more anti-abortion now than they were a few years ago. But again, it is not something that is central to the dialogue. And someone who is in favor, pro-choice and yet hopes that people do not have to have abortions, I think that in many ways that is where the center of Americans are. They do not want to make abortion illegal, but they would like it to as few abortions possible. So, there is ways in which people are transcendent to those debates. Foreign policy... Again, I will not go into all the issues, but yeah, I think that is basically where we are. That activists, core activists on both sides will not surrender. But the large majority of people from the boomer generation, I think, have transcended the idea that there are two sides. They have a more complicated position depending on the issue and depending on their experience.

SM (01:14:37):
Do you think the Vietnam Memorial, the wall... I want to ask you, when you went there for the first time, what did you first think in terms of... Were you having flashbacks of your youth?

MK (01:14:48):
No.

SM (01:14:48):
When you went to the wall for the first time? I am going to get back to this question of healing, but as part of it, Jan Scruggs wrote a book called "To Heal a Nation". And of course the goal of the wall was to heal the families of those who lost loved ones in Vietnam and also those who served the nation in Vietnam. And many are still going through unbelievable problems upon their return. Just your thoughts on whether Jan Scruggs's idealism of hoping that that wall would heal the generation, because we were so divided over the war, I do not know if there has been healing between Vietnam vets and anti-war people, but your thoughts on going to that wall and whether it will heal the nation anymore.

MK (01:15:34):
My first thought as someone who was spent important years of my life in the anti-war movement were that this was an anti-war memorial, because it is black, it is a gash in the earth.

SM (01:15:44):
Yeah.

MK (01:15:44):
It is right next to the Lincoln Memorial, which is a memorial to a war that was won. At least by the north, it was won. Great Greek temple, it is like a Parthenon. That one is also a war memorial. And I think it is a brilliant piece of public art. She is a brilliant architect, Maya Lin. But also, I was aware that people going there were able to have a mourning experience publicly and privately that they had not been able to have before. So I think it was wonderful in that sense. By the time it started, I forget when I first saw it, maybe two years after, three years after it was finished... (19)85, I think I came here first. I was living in California before then, so I had not been back there to see it. I was blown away by it. I really thought it was one of the most beautiful pieces of public art or architecture I have ever seen, because it allowed you... It made you think right away about the war. It did not tell you what to think the way I think the World War II Memorial does, which I hate. I hate that memorial because it just...

SM (01:16:57):
Ooh.

MK (01:16:59):
Oh, "All hail the concrete heroes." Wars are not that simple. People die in large numbers. And anyway, and the Vietnam, our memorial, I saw people there. I saw people crying. I went there at night, I think, the first time, and saw the candles there and people's faces reflected in the black marble, which is a brilliant effect. Now, clearly, this came out of a desire to heal those divisions, which even though those divisions were very raw, clearly enough people got on top of them, the Vietnam vets groups, scrubs, and others to realize that this was not a good thing. And it was not helping either side. Was not helping Vietnam vets, either. And of course, Vietnam vets themselves, we provided, as you know.

SM (01:17:48):
Oh, yes.

MK (01:17:49):
A lot of donors were Vietnam vets. We thought they had been betrayed by the country. So some folks, they were betrayed by the country for having sent them there in the first place. Some folks were betrayed by the country for not supporting them more once they were there. So, it is a mix. So, I thought, I still think it is a wonderful place, and partly because it allows all kinds of things to happen. Of course, a lot of people who go there and have petitions against Jane Fonda and people who were there and sold the flags of "Do not forget the MIAs, the POWs", even though there is hardly any evidence, there is still people there. It enabled a debate to take place on a more rational basis, which is very important.

SM (01:18:30):
But the bitterness towards Robert McNamara is still pretty evident, even though he wrote those two books. Because what he wrote, "In Retrospect"... I will never forget going to the wall. I went to the Vietnam Memorial, which I have been to the Vietnam Memorial, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, ever since I knew Lewis. And after he died, since (19)94. And the very first year I was there... "In Retrospect" was (19)95, I believe. And I have some unbelievable shots that I took there that because, so there were two "In Retrospect" books left at the center, and they had bullet holes in them. They had been taken to a firing range with bullets and left there. And I took about 25 pictures at different angles. Sure. Unbelievable. So the bitterness... But I interviewed Craig McNamara there in California. Craig's unbelievable. I do not know if you could ever get him into your class, if he is ever back in the east. He is a gem.

MK (01:19:24):
Has he written anything?

SM (01:19:25):
No, he does not write. No. But he runs a farm out in the North, up in the Napa Valley. It is a walnut farm. He has done very good. And I really respect him. He was an unbelievable person. He was anti-war.

MK (01:19:39):
I was friends with Bundy's son while in California. He married a friend of mine who was a radical sociologist. And Bundy came to... When I was in the freeze early (19)80s, he came to is this is McGeorge Bundy, [inaudible].

SM (01:19:59):
Oh yeah.

MK (01:20:00):
He came to a meeting and he was very impressive, partly because he was so guilty.

SM (01:20:05):
Of course, what is really amazing about McGeorge Bundy is McGeorge Bundy, just like Robert McNamara, knew very early we should have gotten out it.

MK (01:20:11):
Yep.

SM (01:20:11):
And I bet... And I know both of them went to their grave thinking that. It might have even helped.

MK (01:20:17):
Well, the fair fact, McNamara commissioned the Pentagon Papers.

SM (01:20:21):
Yes.

MK (01:20:22):
It showed historicalness, but also when he quit, it would have been a huge impact if he had said "This was a mistake." But of course, he did not do that.

SM (01:20:30):
In (19)70, he went to Ashton. I got him in trouble. Do you say one of the qualities that defined the entire generation, though, is their lack of trust? It is not a trusting generation. Again, I am talking about...

MK (01:20:42):
I think America in general, since Johnson escalated the war in (19)65 and sent American troops in large numbers that year. I think Americans, since then, have not been trusting of any generation. I am not sure... Again, like Todd, I am dubious about thinking about the generation as a whole. And polls showed that. Polls showed it. As you probably know, from World War II up to (19)64, Americans... As you know, Gallop Poll has this every year. "Do you trust this institution, the authorities to do the right thing? Government, church, military, universities, et cetera?" And since that point, government has never had majority. Sometimes it is low, it is like in the teens, like during Watergate. Sometimes it's a little higher, like right after 9/11. Universities are, I do not know, twenties and thirties. Churches are a little higher. Military's usually higher. But in general, Americans as a whole do not have huge amount of trust for any major institutions or authorities.

SM (01:21:51):
I know specifically, for me, as a young person going into I think sixth grade or something like that around the time, it is that Eisenhower lied at the U2. That is the first time I ever saw a President lie.

MK (01:22:03):
Yeah.

SM (01:22:03):
Because I think everybody was shocked that this grandfather figure had lied to us.

MK (01:22:12):
Of course. Absolutely. Famously, FDR, who I think was a great guy, he lied. He knew the US was going to get into World War II, but he was not going to say it.

SM (01:22:22):
I wanted to mention that the result of the response to Senator Muskie to that question. Senator Muskie did not even mention (19)68 and then did not mention anything that was happening in America. The students were totally shocked because they were all waiting for this great answer from the Vice-Presidential candidate in (19)68. And he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War in the area of race." And he went on to give a lecture and he said, "I have just seen the Ken Burns series in the hospital. We lost 430,000 people in that war. Almost an entire generation of Southern..."

MK (01:22:53):
Civil War?

SM (01:22:53):
Yeah, Civil War.

MK (01:22:53):
It was more than that. It was 600,000.

SM (01:22:53):
Yeah. Well, the thing is, he went on to talk about that and he showed his emotion too, by the tears. And actually witnessed what the news media had talked about. The guy had emotion, and there is nothing wrong with that.

(01:23:08):
One of the things here, too, is the violence. You were a member of SDS. I do not know if you know Larry Davidson.

MK (01:23:15):
I was living there for a short time, too.

SM (01:23:15):
Yeah, I am going to bring that in. Larry Davidson founded at Georgetown. He was the founder, he is a history professor at Westchester University., And he founded SDS at Georgetown.

MK (01:23:26):
I never-

SM (01:23:26):
Lawrence Davidson. And he was on the front newspapers, he got arrested. His parents were not too happy with him because his father was in the military. But the question is this: he quit SDS because it went to the weatherman in violence. And so many quit. Do not you think? And Mark's done a great job in "Underground". I have interviewed Mark and I was with him for a whole evening at the Kent State last year.

MK (01:23:53):
I saw him. It is funny, I do not know if you know this. We had lunch, he had not finished the book yet, maybe three years ago. And he had come to Washington and I said, "Why come to Washington?" He said, "Well, the FBI invited me to Quantico to talk about terrorism."

SM (01:24:06):
You are kidding me. He did not say that he was there.

MK (01:24:10):
That is hilarious. So, he stopped to Washington on his way out of Quantico.

SM (01:24:11):
Oh my God. Well, I really like Mark. I love Mark.

MK (01:24:16):
I liked him back then, too.

SM (01:24:18):
But he admitted the mistake that was made that he would not have supported violence. And he says about it in the "Underground" book, really, that he was against it. And I think that is where he has had different disagreements.

MK (01:24:29):
He was not against it soon enough. [inaudible] Right?

SM (01:24:31):
Bernardine. I am interviewing Bernardine in about two weeks. But your thoughts on, SDS going to the Weather Underground the biggest mistake ever made by SDS was that?

MK (01:24:41):
Well, no, I think it began before then. And the biggest mistake we ever made was to basically think that revolution was possible in the United States, and talk that way. And to support people like the Black Panthers. This is for Weather Man, who basically talked about revolution. We really thought that. We are so angry at this country... People who run this country, what they are doing, and also at a lot of Americans for supporting what the country's doing, that we basically are not going to identify with the country and not going to make an analysis that any political person should be making of what is possible, and whether what we are saying is jeopardizing what is possible. So, on the one hand, yes, we have built some important movements and the anti-war movement, most important of them, at least for people like me. Of course, the Black movement was also on before then. But I think we... I just finished a book on History of the American Left. I have been thinking about this a lot. It is coming out in August. But ever since the New Left collapsed, there has not been a mass radical movement in this country. There has been campaigns here and there. There has been things like Chomsky and Howard Zinn who speak for radical causes and radical ideas.

SM (01:25:58):
Right.

MK (01:25:59):
But basically I think we did not... And it is not just our fault. Context has changed, too. But basically, we did not think about the future. We just thought... Look, we were kids. That is part of it. My wife is always reminding me that when you are 20, 21 years old, you can do a lot of things, but reflecting soberly is not usually one of them. And that is part of all that falling apart. We did not have mentors. And so I think our mistake was an analytical mistake, which came out of our putting emotions ahead of thinking. And some of that was useful. Being angry was important, but we should have coupled our anger with a long-term strategy. And we did not. We thought somehow that everything was coming down around us and we would somehow be able to take advantage of that. And you probably know the history of Nazis a little bit. Famously, the German communists had these battles with German socialists in the streets of Berlin where the Nazis were gaining in votes. And when the German communists were asked why it was more important to eliminate their rivals on the left than it was to fight the Nazis, the slogan was, I forget the German, basically "After Hitler, us. Hitler will not make it. Germans will not follow this crazy guy. And then they will want communists to go in power." And in fact, we believe that. I remember in (19)68, there was a chance Reagan would run for president, even though he had just been elected governor of California. And George Wallace, of course, is running for president. And I thought, "What would it be like if the presidential election came down to Reagan against Wallace?" Two people who, from my point of view, were both crazy right-wingers. And I asked some friends of mine from SDS, and they said, "Great. Country deserves that. Country deserves to go to hell that way." And when I was a Weatherman, long story, but basically people who were in my collective had to give these very short speeches on the subway at one point. Like 30 minutes. And one of the guys in my collective was a working class kid from Northeastern University, from Southie, actually, Irish Catholic kid. Jimmy, I forget his last name. Jimmy O'Toole, I think. And he was reticent about speaking. He just was not used to public speaking. He had to come up with something. So, the subways stops and is quiet all of a sudden. And Jimmy said, " This country sucks." A lot of people thought we thought this country sucks. That is not a way to convince the majority of Americans.

SM (01:28:39):
Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power. Know your stuff.

MK (01:28:41):
Anyway, so the message that many Americans received from SDS was "This country sucks." And that that is not a message that a majority of Americans... You are not going to convince the majority of Americans to hate their country. You are just not going to.

SM (01:29:00):
Yeah.

MK (01:29:01):
And you should not, either. So that is why-

SM (01:29:03):
One thing-

MK (01:29:04):
The Weathermen came out of that. See, the Weathermen did not come out of nowhere, it came out of that. We basically said, "Yes, this country sucks. Let us bring it down."

SM (01:29:11):
You were not in the group that was hiding, were you?

MK (01:29:14):
No, I left before it went underground. I did not go underground.

SM (01:29:17):
How we doing time wise? We got five minutes?

MK (01:29:19):
Five, 10 minutes.

SM (01:29:20):
Okay. These are just very important terms that, again, the people that are going to be reading this, this is going to be geared to our college students, high school students, and the general public at large. But mostly I want this to be in the (19)60s courses. I have got some great interviews. Jack Wheeler interview, Mike [inaudible], you cannot believe that interview.

MK (01:29:36):
You are going to have to cut it. You are going to have to make it shorter, though, because college students-

SM (01:29:38):
No, I know that.

MK (01:29:42):
[inaudible] pages.

SM (01:29:43):
Yeah. Just your quick definition of these terms, if you can do it. "Counterculture". What does that mean?

MK (01:29:52):
It means a set of behaviors and ways of thinking. Stop a sec.

SM (01:30:00):
Yep.

MK (01:30:05):
Basically behaviors and attitudes opposed to what people perceive to be the dominant behaviors and attitudes about sex, about drugs, about a lot of things. Friendship, music. It was, I think, more of a youth culture than a counterculture, per se, because so many people were able to be part of what we think of the counterculture, who were just basically consuming differently. Not necessarily changing their minds. Some of them changed their minds. But for the most part, again, they were activists. Everyone with counterculture was not Abbie Hoffman.

SM (01:30:43):
Right. Participatory democracy, which we know about was part of what SDS's foundation was. And also I believe participatory democracy was very important in the Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement itself.

(01:30:56):
Bye. Nice meeting you. Take care.

(01:30:58):
Definition of participatory democracy.

MK (01:31:10):
Well, again, that is more easily defined because it was the New Left, White New Left, especially, but soon to be Black New Left's attempt to project a vision of the way they thought politics should work. As small scale as possible, as much based on ordinary peoples having a voice as possible, as opposed to representative democracy. It was utopian and impossible to run a society that way. But I think it gave rise to a lot of people joining groups. And in some ways it goes back to Tocqueville and goes back to the flowering of volunteer institutions, voluntary associations in various parts of American life. And I think it was important part of the New Left's appeal that people believe that everyone should be able to have... What was the SDS's slogan statement... Something like "Everyone should have a,..." I forget exactly. "Should be able to help decide, make the decisions that affect their lives." And that makes sense to me.

SM (01:32:35):
It is people as opposed to one specific leader. That was very important. Black Power.

MK (01:32:42):
Well again, Black Power had a specific definition at the time in the late (19)60s when it began to be talked about by Stokely Carmichael and others. Clearly was, in many ways, the latest phase of Black nationalist ideology. Black nationalism goes all the way back to Martin Delany and people like that, even before the Civil War. That Black people have to [inaudible] themselves to free themselves, and should also be proud of who they are culturally, how they look, how they dress, their history. So it was both connected to Jewish ethnic assertion, Italian assertion, Irish assertion and identity, and different from it because the history of African Americans in the United States is different from that of any other group for obvious reasons.

SM (01:33:35):
Why was Che Guevara so important to many people in the New Left? Mark mentioned, when we started having our conversation, he immediately started talking about Che Guevara and how important he was. And he was reading at Columbia. And even since then, why is Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse, why are they so important?

MK (01:33:56):
But they are very different.

SM (01:33:57):
Yeah, I know.

MK (01:34:11):
Che was much more important than Marcuse. You want about Che?

SM (01:34:11):
Yeah.

MK (01:34:11):
Well, it was not that important to me. Ho Chi Minh was more important to me. But he was... First of all, he was cool. He was beautiful-looking. He was international. He saw himself as a citizen of the world. He had been in different countries, Congo, and he was Argentinian, but he was in Cuba helping to make the revolution. He was a writer, an intellectual, as well as being an activist. And that was of course what people like me in the left wanted to be, as well. And he was a martyr, and martyrs are always important. We would not have Martin Luther King Jr. holiday if Martin Luther King was still alive.

SM (01:34:51):
He was a doctor too, if I am correct.

MK (01:34:55):
Yes, he was. That was less important to me. And he wrote Guerrilla Warfare, and of course people were beginning to have this romance with guerrilla warfare. And Cuba had a special place. You probably read some of that Van Gosse book, "Where the Boys Are" and so forth. Cuba had a special place in the minds of New Leftists. C. Wright Mills wrote a book before he died called "Listen, Yankee", supporting the Cuban Revolution. And it was in our hemisphere, a lot of Cubans had been in the United States. Of course, then, we tried to overthrow the government. So it was in the minds of people becoming leftists, people already were leftists. It was going to have a very important place. A lot of people have been there. My in-laws, Beth's parents who were in the Communist Party took their honeymoon in Cuba in 1953 or something.

SM (01:35:49):
You were part of that group called the Vencer...

MK (01:35:53):
[inaudible] Yeah. I went to Cuba.

SM (01:35:54):
Yeah, did that-

MK (01:35:55):
That was after Che died. That was (19)69, (19)70.

SM (01:35:57):
Did that get you in trouble in terms of the FBI looking at you?

MK (01:36:01):
Well, I was already in trouble after I was a Weatherman. I was already in trouble because I had been a Weatherman. But yeah, I think my name was mentioned at Senate hearings. I think Senator Eastland from Mississippi said we were "little capsules of revolution", some metaphor he used. "Little missiles of revolution."

SM (01:36:17):
Has that affected the rest of your career in any way?

MK (01:36:20):
No, not really. Academia is a pretty safe place for people.

SM (01:36:26):
This is very important because Tom Hayden, when he came to our campus, really had to almost give a lecture to students on this, the difference between power and empower. Your thoughts on the difference between them. Students sometimes feel they have power, and then you use the term "empower" and they look like this. And if you use this term to boomers who are my age, who are conservative, "Oh God, the (19)60s." So just your thoughts and difference between power and empower.

MK (01:36:59):
I do not use the term " empower" too much because it seems like jargon, but... Well, power is obvious. Power is you have the ability to get people to do things you want them to do, either because you control institutions or because you have people believe that you are their leader. And "empower" has a connotation more of ordinary people feel that they have the ability to get power and to influence people in power. That is what I think.

SM (01:37:35):
And then just the difference between the Old Left and the New Left.

MK (01:37:38):
Well, again, the Old Left was people who became radicalized, mostly 1930s, some earlier. Again, generationally, it is complicated. But people whose primary ideological paradigm was Marxist and was focused on the working class and on the labor movement. Not to say they [inaudible] other things. And people who thought the battle over whether the Soviet Union was a good place or not was absolutely crucial to everything else. The magazine I am co-editor of now, Dissent, was very much part of the Old Left when it got started. And Patton, Irving Howe and other editors battled with people in the New Left, in the late (19)50s, because they thought New Leftists were naive about communism because they were socialists. And for them, the Bolsheviks and then Lenin and Stalin and all those people in the American Communist Party and other communist parties had destroyed any real hope for socialism, because it had made socialism equated with tyranny. In retrospect, I think they were probably right. But at the time, I thought... At the time most of them... I was an anti-anti-communist. I thought anti-communism was just a way of saying "People in power in this country continue, are okay. They might be doing some things wrong, but at least they are not communist, so we cannot really oppose them any major way." And of course, War in Vietnam, a lot of the people, the anti-communists Old Left, were either supportive of the war in Vietnam at first, or very ambivalent about it. Because after all, this was a war against Stalinists, as they put it. And the New Left of course, were people like me, mostly Baby Boomers, not all, as we talked about before, who got radicalized in the late (19)50s and (19)60s, when the key issues were first Black freedom, inequality, then Cuba, and then the war in Vietnam. And the issue of... Marxism was influential, labor. They were pro-labor, but these are not their priorities anymore.

SM (01:39:48):
And also the difference between neocons and neoliberals.

MK (01:39:54):
Well, neoliberals means something very different in Europe than it does here. Neoliberalism, here, was a term that was coined I think in the late (19)70s, early (19)80s, by people who were Democrats, capital D, who understood liberalism was in decline and disrepute. And they wanted to move somewhere to the right, less regulation, dubious about affirmative action, try to win back majority. And people like Paul [inaudible] were neoliberals. I am trying to remember some of the names now. It did not last very long. In many ways, Bill Clinton could be argued was a neoliberal. The Democratic Leadership Council, which just went out of business this week, was-

SM (01:40:36):
Did it?

MK (01:40:37):
Yeah. Was very much a neoliberal bastion. The think tank called Progressive Politics Institute still exists, but that DLC does not exist anymore. And it also is a way to show businesses, which of course all is very powerful in the politics of this country, that we are not just anti-business; we are just anti-business going off on their own and opposing regulation. So with neoconservatives, the term was coined by, I think, Michael Harrington, who was of course a socialist, or maybe Peter Steinfels, who was a left-wing Catholic. There were people who had been liberal-driven radicals in their youth in the (19)60s, mostly Jewish, who began to move to the right because they opposed the New Left, they opposed Black Power, and they identified with Israel and opposed the Soviet Union. Part of the Soviet Union was, they thought, tyrannical, and part of the Soviet Union was anti-Israel. And they thought that supporting Israel, supporting what they saw as mainstream centrist government was being attacked more by the left and by the right. And of course, most of these people ended up just being conservative, like Billy Crystal. And then his son, Billy. But at the time, they continued to support the welfare state as they understood it. They just were opposed to---Continued to support the welfare state as they understood it. They just were opposed to what they saw as some people on the left, who were trying to move things beyond where they should go. Anyway...

SM (01:42:11):
Two final questions. What lessons had the institutes of higher education learned from the student protests of the (19)60s and (19)70s? Are they lessons learned, and lessons lost? I say this, because when you look at the Free Speech Movement in (19)64, (19)65, it really did not have to happen, although I think eventually it would have happened because the war was coming, and so forth. What really gets me is that when Mario Savio, the things that always stand out, and why I think he is a very important person in the history of activism in America, but also in terms of what happened in free speech and higher education, is the fact that ideas matter. I know your father, ideas matter. Universities are about ideas. All ideas should be presented, all points of view. Yet the universities were still were at that time being controlled by corporations.

MK (01:43:11):
Well ...

SM (01:43:12):
The reason why I bring this question up is when you look at universities today, and I have been in higher education for 30 years until I left two years ago, fundraising, scholarships, doing a program, everything seems to be linked to we got to raise money. We got to raise money, we got to have a corporate link to this, this, prove that this program has value because is it bringing money in?

MK (01:43:39):
I think I told you now that was then, actually.

SM (01:43:40):
Yeah. When I interviewed two great educators, Arthur Chickering who wrote Education and Identity. One of the things in higher education in masters and PhD programs you learn about is seven vectors of development. The ultimate for all students is that they have a sense of integrity. That is what we all shoot for, knowing who they are. Like you, you know who you are and what you stand for. Activists have lived a lifetime. They have integrity because they are genuine. When I interviewed Alexander Aston and Arthur Chickering, I asked them, "Is there one disappointment that both of you have in higher education today now that you are," well, one is retired, one is still there. Yeah, corporations have taken control again. They are running the universities.

MK (01:44:24):
I think it depends on the university. I think it is less true at wealthy universities because they can get money from wealthy people who went to school there. Harvard, I do not think is owned by corporations. I think it is certainly true. We have a new business school, and we only have it because corporations have financed that. It does make sense in some ways, you want people to learn how to work in corporations, corporations might as well pay them, help them do that.

SM (01:44:52):
Yeah.

MK (01:44:55):
Part of the whole context of the (19)60s as I was talking about, was this unprecedented prosperity. I mean, state university campuses were being founded Every year. I mean, Ohio had 78. Pennsylvania, California, New York, I mean places that did not exist before for World War II. I think in some ways, people who grew up in that period, and then went to higher education, I did get a sense that sense of entitlement, I guess is the best way to put it, that we should be supported for whatever we think, and whatever we want to do. Now, I believe in tenure, I believe in free speech, of course. At same time, there are some people, and I say this as person on the left, some people on the left in academia who feel like somehow whatever they want to do, whatever they want to say should be, is sort of immune from criticism from outside. I mean, the war Churchill is the worst example of that, of course. Because, he even lied about what he did, but who he was. I think that one of the good things, not corporate takeover isn't good, but I do think that there is a lot of programs in universities now, at least in mine, others which where people do go back and forth between the outside world and world university, they all have internships and so forth. I think that is really good because it is important for the university to be in the world. Of course, you cannot avoid being in the world to certain extent. The whole ivory tower thing I think was and is a little over over-hyped. I think the best professors, to me, the best professors I had in college, the best professors now that I know of, are people who are continually in dialogue with people outside. I see myself as doing that because I do a lot of journalism, and I am still active in various things. I think certainly everyone has got to do that. I think it is important to have an important cohort, people in universities who do that, who do not see themselves as just completely apart from everything else. Now, at the same time, if you are an Aristotle scholar, I would not expect you, or want you necessarily to be involved with having ... Politically in your town. You cannot be if you want. Cannot be, you are not. But, for political scientists, for example, who studies, let us say Congress, not to care at all about what people think of Congress outside is a mistake, I think.

SM (01:47:25):
Of course, David Horowitz and Phyllis Schlafly, when I interviewed both of them, they were pretty clear that they feel that the universities are now run by the troublemakers of the (19)60s.

MK (01:47:38):
Yeah. See that is also, take it the other way.

SM (01:47:41):
That is the culture wars. Again, the whole concept of PC, being politically correct and everything, that is all part of the...

MK (01:47:46):
Yeah-yeah. I mean, I always say about conservatives when I have been on lots of church committees in history departments, both in American University, and here at Georgetown, here in Georgetown. We never get conservatives applying. It is not that we will not hire conservatives, it is ridiculous. I mean, conservatives do not go into history, or philosophy, or for the most part, or English departments, or American studies, or anthropology, or sociology. They go into government some, and economics, of course, and business schools. In general, students have decided that universities are hostile to them, or they just want to make more money.

SM (01:48:29):
That is what they go, many of them to think tanks like the heritage organizations.

MK (01:48:31):
Well, local schools too. Yeah.

SM (01:48:34):
The last question is kind of a three-partner here and oh, you put it all into one. I do not like to use the term the boomer generation either, starting to feel the same way as you and Todd, but when the Best history book, you are a scholar, you have written books. Your book on the 1960s was written in (19)95, I believe?

MK (01:48:53):
The first edition came out in (19)99.

SM (01:48:54):
(19)99. I think.

MK (01:48:56):
The 4th edition comes out in a couple months, actually.

SM (01:49:02):
Yeah. Well, I like the first edition.

MK (01:49:02):
Okay.

SM (01:49:03):
Because, I actually given a couple first editions to my family.

MK (01:49:09):
Oh, great. Thank you.

SM (01:49:09):
I have the original.

MK (01:49:09):
We keep updating it.

SM (01:49:10):
Yeah, something about the first ... I like first editions. I like the hardbacks. I am a hardback guy. When the best history books are written, I remember Steven Ambrose saying before he passed away, that the best books on World War II are usually 50 to 75 years after the period has happened. I guess this question came about when I go to the Civil War battlefield every year, and I spend a lot of time over at Gettysburg. I go there five, six times a year. There is a statue there. The last person who was alive, who was around during the Civil War, and they had a name person who participated in the war. What will be the legacy? What will historians and sociologists be saying? Do you think, I know it is hard to say when the last boomer has passed away? For the last ... Yeah. That might be the, and also, what would be the, what is the legacy of the generation? What is the legacy of Vietnam, and the legacy of the movements? Because, some people think the movements have gone backwards.

MK (01:50:11):
Well, I mean, I guess we should look at the new conclusion, the latest conclusion of the fourth edition of our book. Because, I am responsible, we provide the chapters, Morrison, I am responsible for that, for the conclusion. I wrote that mostly. It is a huge question. Again, never know for sure. I think that, as I said before, two things are going to be essential. One is the framework of prosperity, and the assumption on the part of a lot of people that prosperity would continue. There is insecurity, but nothing like now. Two, obviously the cohort, and the way in which it shaped, it divided people, and it taught people that there is only two choices in the world, either freedom or capitalism, and freedom or communism, as in this country, or in Soviet Union, socialism, or exploitation. I think that sort of dualism in the world, even though, of course, it was more complicated than that, but that expectation that has be on one side or the other, is something which is no longer true. It was not true for the most part before then either. It is very rare when we have a two-power world. We do not have one now, and we did not have them before then either. That shaped possibilities in many ways. Part of what, even though we were not necessarily aware of at the time, I think part of what the new left was trying to do was to find space in between those two. Basically, we liked the individual freedoms America afforded, and we liked the idea of a more collectivist, more egalitarian society that socialism. We wanted to put those two together. We were not successful. I think that impulse of ... Ray Mills talked about this basically his, before he died, he was trying to put together a conference of ... I think he even called it the Third Way, E.P. Thompson, the great, British historian I interviewed back in the early (19)80s. He said Mills was trying to put together, he was trying to invite the Cubans, and the Yugoslavs, and Martin Luther King Jr, and all these folks. He died before he put it together. Maybe he would not have been able to put together even afterwards. But that I think was the impulse that was there among new leftists. It was a good impulse, I think, in retrospect, but we were not able to carry it into fruition for all kinds of reasons.

SM (01:52:46):
Any final thoughts on the boomer generation?

MK (01:52:49):
No-no.

SM (01:52:51):
The legacy of Vietnam?

MK (01:52:52):
I think we had better music.

SM (01:52:54):
Yeah.

MK (01:52:57):
I always tell my kids, I stopped doing this, but I say, "Tell me which group that you like now, people will still listen to in 50 years the way they are still listening to the Beatles, stones, Motown and so forth." They have a hard time because they say, "Well, a whole musical genre, we might listen to hip hop, yes, but anyone hip hop artist, I mean...", so that is what was fun.

SM (01:53:17):
That is a great legacy too.

MK (01:53:19):
Yeah.

SM (01:53:20):
I think one of the legacies of the boomer generation is all the progress that has been made in so many different areas in terms of women's rights, and stuff.

MK (01:53:29):
Yeah.

SM (01:53:30):
It is interesting. I constantly put on my Facebook (19)60s and (19)70s. I got, in fact, with the Valentine's Day coming up, I just put on the Beatles song, which I think they did one of the greatest love songs of all time. And they-

MK (01:53:44):
Words of Love, that one?

SM (01:53:46):
One. Yeah. All you need is love. What is interesting, if you go to the YouTube, if you can find it is just, it is a classic. It is ... they are all dressed up. They got flowers in their ears. I remember that.

MK (01:53:56):
Yeah.

SM (01:53:57):
Then in the audience is Jagger. I mean, things are just sitting there listening.

MK (01:54:01):
Yeah-yeah.

SM (01:54:03):
It is like, "Oh man, what a time." What it is like forever. I often wonder, somebody who complained against the boomer generation often said they never grew up. I have had a couple people tell me that.

MK (01:54:15):
But again, it is a danger of generalizing by this generation.

SM (01:54:16):
Yeah.

MK (01:54:16):
I mean, usually when people talk about their generation, they are thinking about two or three people they knew.

SM (01:54:16):
Yes. Well, we at Westchester University, we are done. But, close off, thank you very much.

(End of Interview)

2011-02-12

Stephen McKiernan

Michael Kazin, 1948-

1:54:16

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Historians; College teachers; Georgetown University; Social movements--United States--19th century; Social movements--United States--20th century; Kazin, Michael, 1948--Interviews

Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.